"How honeybees ventilate their nests is an emergent system.
Over time, the air in a nest can get really warm, which, if not managed, can cause significant harm to the developing brood. Honeybees are constantly going in and out of the nest opening. They fly off, gather resources, and bring them back. Guard bees linger at the entrance, looking for predators and defending the nest. If the temperature somewhere along the nest entrance rises above some threshold specific to the bee there, the bee will point its abdomen away from the nest and flap its wings.
One would think that flapping its wings would lower the air temperature, but that's not true. The bee is drawing air out of the nest and this warm, stale air from inside the nest actually warms the neighboring air. This is very important. Other bees will feel that heat and begin to flap their wings, not likely because they're paying attention to what the other bees are doing but because their temperature threshold is being triggered by local warming. One bee becomes five bees. Five become fifty.
Elsewhere, cool, fresh air will enter the nest, filling the vacuum. The bees at that entrance are less likely to flap their wings. Positive feedback where the bees are fanning. Negative feedback where there are fewer fanning bees. Spatial patterns emerge where certain regions have bees that are more effective at drawing out air. Over time, this process creates larger and larger clusters of bees that are fanning their wings until there's just one dominant group.
It is a trick: a marriage of evolution, emergence, and the physics of airflow.
The intermediary between an orchestrated event and chaos is manipulation. Bees are manipulators. They don't even have to know why they do what they're doing. No single actor has the whole picture of how everything works.
And that's the thing. No one can completely control the outcome of events. But any organism can learn a few tricks. Positive feedback where a trick works. Negative feedback where it doesn't.
Harry is too serious a researcher to consciously admit how deeply connected his interest in emergent patterns is with his interest in secret societies. He hates bee analogies. He hates even more the idea that his interests are anything more than academic. But no one's interests are ever strictly academic.
Here's the real point: Paranoia has a physics to it, and even with something as insubstantial as paranoia, over time it gains substance, has weight. Secret societies are a result of paranoia, not the cause. Someone else somewhere knows what's going on, anyone might think. I should too. Conspiracies are also a result, a sensing of heat. There is no way of knowing how many world changing events were precipitated by the phantom cause of paranoia, but the number is sure to be vast.
Anything with substance can be manipulated. One becomes ten, then a hundred. And pretty soon, the whole world flaps its wings."
- Cadwell Turnbull, from No Gods, No Monsters, 2021.
