When I first read about feedback loops and how they work, it got me thinking about it as a metaphor for how culture works. Negative feedback in a system causes homeostasis or equilibrium to be maintained. Positive feedback causes an increase in energy in a system, and evolves it towards a higher level. It definitely seems like there are groups and individual people who operate in each of those ways. I don’t necessarily mean to equate groups with it politically, but perhaps you could use the word “conservative” to describe people who function in the culture as negative feedback loops, ie maintaining equilibrium. And you could use a word like “progressive” to understand people whose attitudes and actions are more in line with the evolutionary principles of positive feedback loops.

Seems like you could make good arguments to support that metaphor. But this whole thing about the arousal and quiescent systems in the human body has got me thinking in a different direction. The common link between the two metaphors is that the quiescent system seeks to maintain equilibrium in the body and conserve energy. But instead of having a system or force which seeks upwards evolution, you have the arousal system which instead expends energy, downgrading the system - entropy.

This causes me to question which people in the culture are actually the ones who are maintaining equilibrium. Before, I was more inclined to think that it was the “average person” who was basically trying to keep things as they are, in their familiar shapes. And that it was the spiritual and creatively inclined who served the revolutionary & evolutionary function to impel the culture onward and upward. But what if creative/spiritual people are actually functioning more like the quiescent system in the body, and they are the ones actually providing the equilibrium. And the other people in the culture are more like the arousal system, where they spend or consume energy.

This is more or less the opposite of how I’ve always thought about it. But it opens some interesting avenues for further consideration…