Cooling centralizes systems, while warming decentralizes them. The modern Little Ice Age centralized social systems, but contemporary global warming decentralizes them. In this chapter, I will divide social systems into informational, political, and economic systems according to three exchange media and examine modern centralization and contemporary decentralization.

A scapegoat is, in the original Hebrew sense, a goat symbolically burdened with the sins of the ancient Jewish people. By extension, it has come to mean any group or individual that innocently bears the blame of others. What kind of beings are candidates of scapegoats?

The distinction of center/periphery is based on the stratified structure of ancient cities, where the Court or a temple is located in the center, residencies of bureaucrats or noblemen in the semi-periphery and merchants, craftsmen or farmers in the periphery. But sociologists usually use it non-geographically as the dichotomy that indicates the uneven distribution of capital as power in social systems.

A social system is not just a gathering of people. It does not consist in the interaction between people either. You can find a mere causal interaction between things.