April 2025

Written By Paul Fleming

Collective intelligence of ants

Dear friends, 

YouTube is known for many things, but on one tiny slice of the video platform, you’ll find videos of ants working in groups to carry snack foods—cheetos, cheerios, cheez-its—back to their nest to feed and sustain their whole colony. While these videos are fascinating, we can also learn from them. 

Ants understand that they depend on each other for survival, there is interdependence within the colony that demands that individual ants work together on ensuring that their basic needs are met.  They possess something called collective intelligence that allows them to work in tandem to solve challenging problems. Within a group of ants carrying a large object, different ants play different roles. Some are scouting out upcoming obstacles and charting an ideal path, while others are simply carrying the load. But over the course of the journey, ants will swap roles as they get tired. Together, working in unison, with some trial and error included, they navigate past tree roots or other blockades on their path back to the nest. Their collective intelligence helps them solve the monumental challenges that lay before them, making them much more capable as a team than any individual ant. 

Another species with collective intelligence? Humans. We are much stronger and more capable when we engage in collective strategizing. At this current moment, we are facing huge obstacles to a world where everyone can thrive. Before us is a gigantic metaphorical tree root that we must navigate around on our path towards a better world. Like the ants, individually we have neither the strength nor the intelligence to navigate past it. Instead, we have to lean into our interdependence and use our collective intelligence to chart our path. 

This is why I’m turning to YOU to ask how we respond in this moment. I want to use the collective intelligence of the hundreds of people in the Making a Better World Possible community (or should I call us a colony?) to help us identify how to move forward. In that vein, please email (makingabetterworldpossible@gmail.com) or fill out this google form to share your ideas on how we navigate the obstacles in front of us, including: 

  • How are you taking care of yourself to sustain yourself for the long term? How are you taking care of others? 

  • What are small actions (if any) you are taking right now to make a better world possible? 

  • What is one thing you wish people in your communities would do to help us get through the next few years and get closer to a better world? 

I look forward to seeing our collective intelligence come together and I hope to report back on what I heard in a future edition of this newsletter. 

Take care and lean into our interdependence,

Paul

Today’s Key Point: Making a better world possible requires us to lean on our interdependence and use our collective intelligence to chart a path forward when we face obstacles that seem insurmountable.

Today’s Reflection Questions:

  • How are you taking care of yourself to sustain yourself for the long term? How are you taking care of others?

  • What are small actions (if any) you are taking right now to make a better world possible?

  • What is one thing you wish people in your communities would do to help us get through the next few years and get closer to a better world?

Quote of the Month:

“There is a power that can be created out of pent-up indignation, courage, and the inspiration of a common cause, and that if enough people put their minds and bodies into that cause, they can win. It is a phenomenon recorded again and again in the history of popular movements against injustice all over the world.”

― Howard Zinn

Inspired reading/listening/viewing:

Paul Fleming
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