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No organization is organic

Updated Mar 22 2025

No organization, in the political and commercial sense of the word, is organic. Organizations, in this sense, are based on the following of linear rules and laws imposed from above—that is, of strung-out, serial, one-thing-at-a-time sequences of words and signs which can never grasp the complexity of nature, although nature is only “complex” in relation to the impossible task of translating it into these linear signs. Outside the human world, the order of nature goes along without consulting books—but our human fear is that the Tao which cannot be described, the order which cannot be put into books, is chaos. —Alan Watts, Tao: The Watercourse Way