Tag Archives: Complex systems

Waiting Upon Structures to Crack, by Alastair Crooke

If Russia and China are hell-bent on taking over the US, perhaps all they’ll have to do is wait. From Alastair Crooke at strategic-culture.org:

It seems that Russia and China will remain aloof and patient – waiting upon structures to crack, Alastair Crooke writes.

Jeffrey Tucker, in a piece entitled How Close Is Total Social and Economic Collapse?, writes, “Economies and societies fall apart slowly, then a bit more, then all at once. We seem to be in the middle period of this trajectory [in the U.S.]. The slow part began March 2020 when politicians around the world imagined that it would be no big deal to shut down the economy and restart it once the virus went away”. What a beautiful display of the power of ‘science-driven’ government it would be – Technocracy on a war-footing.

But, “[n]one of it worked. You cannot turn off an economy and normal social functioning and then turn them back on like a light switch. The attempt alone will necessarily cause unpredictable amounts of long-term breakage, not only of economic structures but also of the spirit of a people. Everything going on now reflects the disastrous presumption that doing that would be possible – and not cause dramatic and lasting damage. It was the greatest failure of politics in a century”.

Everything works until suddenly, it doesn’t. As Minsky said, stability breeds instability. The problem is that complex systems are inherently fragile. The optimization that makes them cost-effective also removes the redundancies that make them resilient. Things can fall apart quickly when some unforeseen event occurs. Not only things; the collective public psyche is a fragile complex system too – it cannot be restored to what it was simply by jabbing the re-set button.

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