Koestler was a master of analogies. He talked about magnetic storms, where everyone's "moral compass" swerves from "True North" without us realizing it. The visual image of this led me to think of humanity as a bunch of iron filings around a magnet.  One of the striking things in this image is the fibers of filings - the way they bunch up and line up head to toe under the influence of the magnetic field. Looking closely, you see that each fiber has its own little magnetic field, resulting in the textured pattern. I've given a lot of thought to the way humans "click" together, usually in "pseudo-persons" like corporations. This image invited me to consider another kind of alignment, the 'head to toe" relationship being the way people are connected, especially "transactional". A special case is a network of "perverse incentives" created by the social environment itself. Here's an example: We don'...