It’s The Holidays, Let’s Remember Six Degrees of Separation

There’s war in Ukraine, and war in the Middle East. It is also currently the high holiday season for several religions. How does the Six Degrees of Separation theory fit into this?

I don’t know who formulated the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon theory, but aside from being genius, it’s also a microcosm of the Six Degrees of Separation theory.

In the late 1920s, Hungarian writer Frigyes Karinthy identified the “small world paradox“, when he proposed that there are up to six degrees, or six people separating any two people on the planet.

In the 1960’s, the six degrees of separation theory was highlighted in research by social psychologist Stanley Milgram. In his experiments, a few hundred people from Boston and Omaha tried to get a letter to a complete stranger in Boston. Within the constraints of the experiment they were only allowed send the letter to a personal friend who they thought might be connected closer to the target stranger than they were. At the end of the experiment Milgram found that they had changed hands only about six times. Hence the notion that everyone can be connected by a chain of acquaintances six links or less.

Now, in 2023 the scientific types are postulating that thanks to social networks, it should now be called the  “The 3.57 degrees of separation“. As opposed to a few decades ago, every person on Earth is now only a four people apart.

Here’s how ridiculously close we are to so many people by the Six (or Four) Degrees of Separation. Using only two degrees of separation, I might be the only person on the planet through which you can connect 5 time Grammy winning singer Drake and former/currently deceased Cuban dictator Fidel Castro. That’s how small our world is.

In 2020 we all learned a lesson in connectedness by how quickly Covid spread through families, communities and workplaces. So here is my point, when people are separated by rancorous political rhetoric, when countries go to war, when people fight in the name of religion, you’re fighting with people who are friends of friends or family members of someone who is only a couple connections away from you. Would you in good conscience advocate waging war on the friend of a friend, or even against a co-workers cousin? I know I wouldn’t.

We are all not that different. It’s the holidays, let’s try forgiving people for being just a little bit different from us and hope that they will do the same.

Happy holidays to you and everyone connected to you! And if you agree, feel free to share on social media.

Thanks for reading, Phil