---
description: The Royal Society, American founders, open-source developers, and cypherpunks all reshaped the world as small coordinated groups -- in systems at criticality the trigger size is unrelated to outcome size
type: claim
domain: cultural-dynamics
created: 2026-02-16
confidence: likely
source: "TeleoHumanity Manifesto, Chapter 9"
---

# history is shaped by coordinated minorities with clear purpose not by majorities

You do not need to convince everyone. You do not even need to convince most people. The manifesto's final strategic claim grounds the LivingIP path to impact.

Historical evidence: the early scientists who built the Royal Society laid foundations of modern science. American founders designed a new form of government from first principles. Open-source developers built Linux and the infrastructure of the internet. Cypherpunks imagined decentralized digital money decades before Bitcoin. In every case, a small group that saw clearly and acted with coordination produced changes that reshaped the world.

The mechanism is self-organized criticality. In systems at criticality, the size of the trigger bears no relationship to the size of the outcome -- a single grain of sand can release an avalanche of any scale. What determines propagation is not the initial perturbation but the state of the system it enters and the architecture of what is set in motion.

The current system is at criticality. The institutional failures, the meaning vacuum, the coordination crisis, the technological adolescence -- these are the conditions that make the system maximally sensitive to well-designed interventions. The question is not whether a small group is big enough. The question is whether the architecture is right.

Every transformative system started small. The internet began as four connected computers. Bitcoin began as a whitepaper. Wikipedia began with a few hundred articles. These scaled not because they started with resources but because they had compounding architecture: each contribution made the next contribution more likely and more valuable.

This is why [[collective superintelligence is the alternative to monolithic AI controlled by a few]] does not require majority buy-in to work. It requires the right architecture in a system ready to reorganize. Since [[emergence is the fundamental pattern of intelligence from ant colonies to brains to civilizations]], the system scales through the same bottom-up process it describes.

---

Relevant Notes:
- [[collective superintelligence is the alternative to monolithic AI controlled by a few]] -- the architecture this minority builds
- [[emergence is the fundamental pattern of intelligence from ant colonies to brains to civilizations]] -- the scaling mechanism: compounding architecture enables bottom-up growth
- [[useful fictions have shelf lives and the rational individual fiction has expired]] -- the conditions of criticality that make the system ready to reorganize

Topics:
- [[livingip overview]]
- [[LivingIP architecture]]