By DON NEEPER
Formerly of Los Alamos
In our society, each new law or regulation is intended to fix a previous problem. Sure enough, it seems each new written legal rule generates at least one new problem. Why is that?
The new problem often occurs because most legal solutions address symptoms rather than the underlying social rules that generate the problem. President Johnson’s war on poverty did not end poverty, but urban renewal moved some poor people out of their own neighborhoods into more crowded areas. Federal flood insurance encouraged the construction of more flood-prone houses after storms. The formal rules often overlook the complexity of society.
Complex system
A complex system is a network of many independent actors who influence each other and respond (speak, listen, push, or change) according to nonlinear rules. The behavior of a complex system is different from the behavior of its individual components. “Actors” are decision-makers, such as people, animals, chemicals, or the components of weather.
Nonlinear rules
Nonlinear means that doubling an apparent cause does not necessarily double the result. Doubling the morphine might kill the patient rather than halving the pain. Raising a teakettle’s temperature just a little can boil the water into steam.
Emergent behavior
Complex systems often have “emergent” behaviors, like the swarming of bees, the schooling of fish, the fluctuations of the stock market, or the weather of the climate.
A political party or a neighborhood might form a complex system. My body is a complex system. It has trillions of cells and bacteria, all of which interact and respond through nonlinear chemical and electrical signals. In my case, one bite of chocolate generates a demand for more. That’s called a positive feedback.
So what’s the point?
Society itself is a complex system. Like the school of fish, its existence is the unified whole, not a fish. The people are the actors in a society, but the nature of the society, the way of living, the behavior of the whole, is different from the behavior of an individual. The rules of interaction are not only the written laws and regulations, but also the unwritten customs of daily life. How we meet, how we greet, whether prices are fixed (grocery store) or bargained (used car lot), the society is governed by nonlinear rules, right down to how we set silverware on the dinner table. Set it wrong at a banquet and you create an offense. Set it perfectly at a picnic and they’ll think you are nuts. The only society without rules is a hermit living alone.
We’ll deal with aspects–sometimes humorous aspects–of social complexity in future columns.
Editor’s note: Don Neeper worked on weapon theory, solar buildings and environmental restoration at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Visit his website at www.neeper.net.
