Self-organizing systems of vast complexity are the way of the world
We get in trouble when we try to impose external, hierarchical order on ourselves—much like how monoculture fails to thrive, and instead entangled ecosystems are key.
If you think chaos is the only result of a non-hierarchal system, your own body disproves it. Try to get your mind to tell your lungs to breathe, your heart to beat, your stomach to digest, your skin to sweat, your colon to poop. Even if it were possible, functioning that way is chaos. We’ve got it flipped around. From microbes to millions of acres of forests, (eco)systems of vast complexity are self-organizing all around us.
If something as complex as a human body is a self-organizing system, could you not scale it up and infer that all of humanity is a self-organizing system as much as mycelia are? And on and on, ad infinitum?
- see also: the limits of the individual are porous — “protocooperative” behavior emerges naturally from physical interactive principles as opposed to ones driven by human competitive, sociological or economic motivations
- see also: diversity provides stability — the more diverse an ecosystem is, the more robust it is
- see also: rhizomatic thinking is non-hierarchal and relational — we have the idea that the more complex a system is, the more it requires hierarchal structure, but the opposite is true
- related: individuality is inseparable from community and the principle of mutual arising