There
is a fixed amount of time any of us can do something. We also have a
limited range of abilities, partly innate and partly determined by
experience. Knowledge is often incomplete, and not always accurate.
Even if we have the knowledge and abilities, we may not have the
opportunity to do it, depending upon conditions that aren’t under
our control. If we are successful in doing that “something,” it
will almost certainly cause other things to happen, which we may or
may not be able to anticipate, fully understand, or control: things
that could either support or get in the way of meeting the goals that
govern what we’re doing in the first place. In short, we’re
pretty much stuck with the fact that our decisions will be
imperfectly conceived and executed, and have unintended
consequences.
In
a complex system like a business, a government, a society, or a
natural ecological community (“ecosystem”), there is a lot of
activity with a lot of consequences, intended and unintended. The
system survives if, on average, the healthy consequences are greater
than the harmful ones; and it dies if the reverse is true.
Nature
deals with the problem of survival by spreading out risk. In a
healthy ecosystem, no individual or species has too much power over
the others; so that if something happens to it, something else can
pick up the slack. There are also many interactions, but none that
will have such a large impact on the entire community that everyone
will suffer if its consequences are unhealthy. Because each
individual is both a consumer and a resource, the amount of life in
the system increases to a maximum; and because there are many types
of resources (species), the longevity of the system is also
increased.
For
most of humanity’s existence, hunter-gatherers lived in small
groups that used what they found, and limited their populations
accordingly, resulting in a trade of population for longevity. Since
the beginning of civilization, perhaps out of necessity stemming from
changing conditions, and aided by improvements in technology, we
reversed that trade by enlisting more people to find resources and
then used them to create artificial environments increasingly
tailored to the wants and needs of individuals. Today’s
organizations (such as governments and business) are the latest
innovation in “cultural technology,” systems that have enabled
this dynamic to proceed exponentially.
The
complexity of our organizations (indeed, civilization as a whole), is
exactly what we need it to be, as long as we can count on getting
more people and more resources to help make up the difference between
what we’ve actually got and what we want to get.
What’s causing
pain now, is that we’ve hit a limit in resources and people, and
the unhealthy consequences of our actions (especially those of a few
people who have a large amount of power) are not being entirely
offset by healthy ones.
