A World With No One In Control « how to save the world.
Filed under: How the World Really Works — Dave Pollard
“There’s an implicit presumption, in everything the media reports on, in our whining about governments and elites and bosses, that as civilization culture has grown ever larger and more global, the power and control of those at the top of the pyramid has grown correspondingly larger, and that they’re still in control, still worthy of praise and re-election and multimillion dollar bonuses when things go right, and still worthy of blame and overthrow and opprobrium when things go wrong.
“But there’s plenty of evidence that if that ever was the case, it isn’t the case now. One of the key attributes of complex systems is that, unlike merely complicated ones, because of the huge number of variables and moving parts and interactions and effects between and among them, we can never hope to understand what’s really going on in them, or predict or significantly influence what happens in them. They become larger and larger black boxes, ever more mysterious, until suddenly they produce great depressions, peak oil and runaway climate change, and no one knows how, or why, or how to mitigate or change them. Like Charles Barsotti’s cartoon above says, in complex systems nobody knows anything. And no one is in control.” Read the rest…
[I agree with most of Dave’s epiphany about complexity, but another aspect of reality is proximity–we do know a little about a little, and we can predict or control a little about a little. So there is a place for small hopes and puny efforts, even in the context of the grand complexity and absurdity which Dave Pollard portrays most eloquently. The ego that wants to control or save the whole world is the same one that wants to renounce the world and absolve itself of all duty and responsibility. –PR]
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October 4, 2018 at 11:04 pm
Thank you for an intelligent article. The underlying convictions about what must not be changed, are the very foundations of thought, from which no further progress can take place. This article challenges the oldest and most powerful of these baseline convictions; “that someone or someone(s) must be in a position of significant power”. Our societies worldwide replicate culturally and socially in ways that support and orient around the attainment to and perpetuation of these power centers. What caused the formation of large groups like nation states? Look into it. What holds them together? Look into it. Do they favor the human species or do they favor their own survival over the species? This is a domain logic failure in human thought. Nuclear weapons provide all the clarity that’s needed on how these power dynamics play out in our world both within the nations and between them. The origin and perpetuation of the many kinds of beliefs, cultures, and living conditions that are generated from this social orientation is much easier to understand from this higher mental vantage point. These large prevailing conditions create the foundational thought forms that perpetuate and sustain them, while also preventing insight into this phenomena of the mind, thereby trapping the mind inside their domain so that no solution can be found. The solutions exist but those inside the system are unable to think of them because they are being filtered out as viable options due to the underlying convictions about what must not be changed.