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Do systems that are "too complex" really collapse?
Posted by Tony on 7th April 2010 at 12:04:44
There is a meme out and about that the only/natural resolution to strangulation by complexity is whole system collapse. Before it proves as virulent as other fear-based memes might be a good time to shout out "Show me the evidence!"

It is easy to parrot a list of seemingly complex systems which appear to have collapsed spontaneously, at least when viewed from a distance: Roman Empire, Angkor Wat, Easter Island, Soviet Union would make most such lists. Over the broad sweep of history such under-explained collapses still look very rare, especially when set out alongside those which were clearly due to specific external or internal disruptors.

While such histories are unavoidably contentious lets retreat to the safer (scientifically) field of natural systems, while first noting that an avalanche is not a whole system collapse but rather a scale-free mechanism for releasing instability. Given suitable space, life tries to expand into it, but such space mostly waxes and wanes at the margins so simpler, opportunistic systems become well adapted to boom and bust cycles which are anything but complex system collapse. Think Lake Eyre. In more consistent environments where natural complexity reaches its highs, coral reefs and tropical rain forests show zero evidence of a propensity for system collapse without disturbance by external forces of the potency of human industry.

Returning more broadly to human systems, do we yet have an example of a major city truly collapsing? If we think about London after the fire, San Francisco after the quake, Germany after the war or New Orleans after Katrina, a strong case can me made that the systems of the cities somehow manage to survive physical devastation in ways antithetic to the collapse meme. (Why is a topic for another day, but I'd suggest documentation has a role.) And are there human systems any more complex than megacities?

Yet "too big to fail" has been regularly invoked through the recent round of tithes to the rich. So we do have a problem, at least in our thinking processes. Certainly there is an even bigger problem with those who place unshakable faith in an invisible hand that even with those who place similar faith in an invisible master. Even worse are those who cannot find more value in winding back excesses than in growth for the sake of growth. But none of that directly demands wholesale disentanglement.

"Sustainability" seems to be the word of the millennium to date. We just need to locate it alongside resilience, diversity and devolution, all of which require the countering of authoritarian assumptions which even pervade Obama's Hope. Yet for now, such thoughts guarantee exclusion from the prevailing fearplex.

Over geological time, Darwinian selection trims away the least efficient of the variants that our chaotic planetary systems continually experiment with. Human control freaks insist on quarterly strip mining everything that might leave space for variation and renewal. Blair was the most dangerous European since Hitler because his rare good idea deflated those who might oppose his natural tendency to fascism. But we now need to more than forgive devolution its association with him and start the inevitably excruciating process of selling Scotland and Wales to the giants of the new millennium, a process for now seemingly far beyond the intellectual capacity of the crossroads country that might otherwise be best located by history and location to trial such bridges. Meanwhile, instead of anything remotely clever, we continue to export them policing, bureaucracy and training.

Systems do not collapse from increasing complexity alone, but they can collapse from a lack of sustainability, resilience, diversity or devolution.

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