26 quotes
Every system that has existed emerged somehow, from somewhere, at some point. Complexity science emphasizes the study of how systems evolve through their disorganized parts into an organized whole.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Paradoxes often arise because theory routinely refuses to be subordinate to reality.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
When it comes right down to physical war and bloodshed, governments don’t protect people; people protect governments.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Money and generous benefits can easily alter a person’s political outlook. Ideology follows the money.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Decentralized systems are the quintessential patrons of simplicity. They allow complexity to rise to a level at which it is sustainable, and no higher.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Simplicity in a system tends to increase that system’s efficiency. Because less can go wrong with fewer parts, less will.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Government succeeds by failing: the more incompetence, the greater the potential reward in the arena of the public sector.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
True change is evolutionary, not revolutionary. It is futile for political systems to force human beings to cooperate or construct social bonding structures. People already do that, naturally; it is evident in our evolutionary history.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Under complexity science, the more interacting factors, the more unpredictable and irregular the outcome. To be succinct, the greater the complexity, the greater the unpredictability.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
The inherent nature of complexity is to doubt certainty and any pretense to finite and flawless data. Put another way, under uncertainty principles, any attempt by political systems to ‘impose order’ has an equal chance to instead ‘impose disorder.’
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Complexity has the propensity to overload systems, making the relevance of a particular piece of information not statistically significant. And when an array of mind-numbing factors is added into the equation, theory and models rarely conform to reality.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Complexity has always been difficult to resolve and to understand. Evolutionary biologists were among the first scientists to recognize this problem, when they dug their way toward new theories about evolution. They discovered that matter does not lack purpose.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
The hallmark of evolution is its ability to process situations and generate order without relying on the crutch of a conscious designer. Most complex systems grow organically, solutions evolving through unguided and mindless forces, never reaching any final state.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
A self–organizing system acts autonomously, as if the interconnecting components had a single mind. And as these components spontaneously march to the beat of their own drummer, they organize, adapt, and evolve toward a greater complexity than one would ever expect by just looking at the parts by themselves.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Various sociopolitical movements are oriented to the nostrums of ‘social justice,’ favoring entitlements for all those with economic disparity. They struggle for what is scientifically impossible: equality of outcome. They want everyone to end up with the same amount of wealth—billions of people all possessing the same numerical affluence.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
To the political elite, statecraft is predicated on the notion that society is theirs to put into some type of hegemonic order. It is immaterial whether this institutionalized order actually helps society or instead puts it into a chokehold that slowly squeezes the air out of life. To the authorities, supremacy is always the primary objective.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Order is not universal. In fact, many chaologists and physicists posit that universal laws are more flexible than first realized, and less rigid—operating in spurts, jumps, and leaps, instead of like clockwork. Chaos prevails over rules and systems because it has the freedom of infinite complexity over the known, unknown, and the unknowable.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Game theory brings to the chaos–theory table the idea that generally, societies are not designed, and that most situations don’t come with a rulebook. Instead, people have their own plans and designs on how things should fit together. They want to determine how the game is played, and they see societal designers as myopic busybodies who would imprison them with their theories.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Without precise predictability, control is impotent and almost meaningless. In other words, the lesser the predictability, the harder the entity or system is to control, and vice versa. If our universe actually operated on linear causality, with no surprises, uncertainty, or abrupt changes, all future events would be absolutely predictable in a sort of waveless orderliness.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)
Disorder is more exacting, arising when coercion is substituted for coordination—preventing members in a system from determining their own destiny. History is littered with examples of excluded parts rising up to confront those exclusive few who claim they are representing the whole.
In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action (2013)