Butterfly Effect

Every small change in one life ultimately changes the futures of countless others. Everything said or done, by anyone, ripples through time and eventually affects millions of people. There are an infinite variety of butterflies, including the following negative kinds:

Competency Trap The tendency of individuals, government and businesses to stagnate by sticking to habits or procedures just because “that’s how we’ve always done things” or “It worked before”.

Habituation Something becomes numbing the more you are exposed to it.

Institutionalized Psychological habituation to oppressive conditions. Characterized by a loss of ambition, resignation to a continuation or worsening of the conditions and even behavior that accepts current conditions as “deserved” punishment for some real or imagined deficiency in themselves.

The Camelot Axiom
All cities, throughout history, evolve in predictable and controllable ways.

Camelot Corollaries Numbers 1 and 2: All cities are comprised of three main parts: A Palace District (Government, education, hospital and wealthy individuals),  A Castle District (Clean industry, management and skilled worker residences) and a Shanty District (Low income residents, underground industries). Each district contains a small range of economic levels.

Camelot Corollary Number 3: Districts begin in concentric circles around the initial Palace District. As the city grows in population and importance, scattered, mixed neighborhoods develop around the Palace District, with about half of the Castle District residents moving into more rural regions surrounding the urban regions.

Camelot Corollary Number 4: Suburbs evolve into two primary districts, with neighborhood boundaries that are less well-defined than within the city whose metropolitan area they share. However, in most suburbs, the neighborhoods closely resemble each other and vary primarily in the relatively similar economic levels of their respective residents.

Camelot Corollary Number 5: After two to three generations, most Shanty residents become “institutionalized” to poverty.

Camelot Corollary Number 6: After an industrialized period, urban areas attempt to trade up to a  "headquarters economy" that will be used to replace manufacturing with financial and other more profitable and prestigious enterprises.

Degrees of Separation
What became popular as a game about a local actor (Kevin Bacon) has been proven to apply to everyone.  Every person is seven degrees or less removed from every other person. (Determined by Microsoft with 30 billion messages in 2008)

Generation Effect
Information is better remembered if it is generated from one’s own mind or experience, rather than simply read or taught.

K.E.Y. “Kindness Empowers You"
Some butterflies go beyond just being “fair” and add intrinsic values of their own. Heart-felt kindness is the ultimate display of power.  It plants “Shining Seeds” in history.

Lost Opportunity Costs
The result of failing to leverage the potential of property, skills, or human resources into their maximum value.

Multiplier Effect
Every dollar added to an economy creates up to $6 in purchases

Paradoxical Cognition
Considering thoughts that seem opposite to each other can find hidden connections between diverse ideas and result in creative problem resolution. Example: Listening and trying to understand someone else’s opinions.

Political Correctness Trap
Increasing levels of simplistic sensitivity to real or imagined instances of disrespect that become distractions to correcting whatever the underlying problem is.

Purgatory Axiom / Survivor’s Guilt
Self punishment, usually subconscious, that follows a bad event in which the sufferer has escaped a misfortune that has befallen others who seemed equally worthy of escape.

R.A.W. Power  (Roots And Wings emPowerment)
The interaction of a person’s “roots” and the “wings” of the butterfly effect. The “power” is positive or negative, “seeding” or “ceding”.

Respect / Disrespect
A value judgement on the impact of deeds, words or thoughts. Respect improves. Disrespect damages.

Schadenfreude
Feeling pleasure or relief when others are suffering. A form of sadism that is the root cause of most observed racism. It is a sign of weakness.

Shanty
A residence for poor people, repaired and maintained with inferior materials and workmanship. In the U.S., we call them “slums” and their owners "slum lords".