Local actions have potential to become global because of the property of emergence.
Since actions are local, their effects take time to influence those that are not nearby. Like the stones thrown into the pond mentioned in a previous post, a kind of propagation goes on from person to person, each person influencing a neighbouring person or people, and so on, through connections formed by all of us and our relationships.
As we are all different, and have different motives, the same action will have different effects on us and therefore different parts of society. We can either put energy into the propagation or take energy out of it. This would be akin to some action amplifying or attenuating the propagated wave in our pond. (Remember Dad in the example where the child dropped the corn-flakes).
This makes society intrinsically non-linear, meaning that an individual has limited ability to predict long term cause and effect. Small local changes may cause large global effects by positive feedback. When there is feedback, those of us who might not be local will feed back into the conditions that started it all.
An example of this feedback from the world of politics might be when an idea promoted by someone reaches the ear of a person of influence and he sees some advantage for himself in it – thereby reinforcing the popularity of the idea until it becomes flavour of the month. And we are all familiar with the world of marketing, where a product becomes something that everyone must have not because of necessity – like food – but because of fashion.
Edward Lorenz, a scientist in the 1970’s, called this the butterfly effect. He used the analogy of the harmless flap of a butterfly’s wings causing a tiny disturbance in the atmosphere which causes another disturbance nearby. This disturbance is amplified by other disturbances and the size and extent of the disturbances grow and grow until half a world away, there is a destructive storm.
Equally, feedback can be negative, so that large changes are made smaller, possibly resulting in stabilisation of something going out of control. (Once again, remember Dad being sympathetic and understanding of the situation of the unexpected event).
As a human, societal example of the butterfly effect, I have already mentioned the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in 1914 as the initial flap which set in train the sequence of events that led to the destructive storm of the First World War and thereafter the Second.
In this example it is worth noting that (as I stated in the third paragraph above) humans can put energy into a disturbance or take it out. Unfortunately, in 1914 the belligerent countries that participated in the First World War put energy into the crisis that arose after the assassination of the Archduke. We will never know what might have happened if energy had been taken out of it by meaningful negotiation, respect for human rights or even genuine democratic dialogue.