Societal Complexity Quotes

The idea that experts should manage society has ancient roots, going back to Plato’s philosopher kings in his Republic. To Plato, this meant a ruling class trained from birth to properly manage the state. To Rousseau, it meant the general will set out in his Social Contract. To Hegel, it meant a state responsible for the moral development of citizens. To Rawls, it meant a society that structures its basic rules to fairly distribute liberties and opportunities. To Lippmann, it meant an elite managing complex modern societies on behalf of a public he believed lacked the capacity for rational decision-making. To Sunstein, it meant experts pushing citizens to make wise choices through a series of “nudges.” All these ideas believe in empowering wise and virtuous experts to chart the nation’s course, manage society, make national plans, and sometimes restrain individuals so the greater system thrives.

Life in a great society, or for that matter in a small, is a web of tangled relations of all sorts, whose adjustment so that it may be endurable is an extraordinarily troublesome matter.

The extreme scarcity of political leaders of any caliber is owing to the fact that they are called upon to decide at any moment, and in detail, problems which the increased size of societies may well have rendered insoluble.

India is a complex country.

We are approaching a time when human intelligence alone will be incapable of managing a highly advanced society. Existing technologies are rapidly exceeding the human capacity to absorb and process information.

The numbers of distinct human societies or nations, when our race is twice its present age, may be far greater than the total number of all the men who have ever lived up to the present time.

Perhaps the inevitable tragedy of our complex civilization is that we must be specialists in our fields - and our fields have become increasingly difficult, so that communication is nearly impossible.

Given the complexity of interpersonal relationships and institutions and the complexity of co-ordination of the actions of many people, it is enormously unlikely that, even if there were one ideal pattern for society, it could be arrived at in an a priori fashion. And even supposing that some great genius did come along with a blueprint, who could have the confidence that it could work

There is an unlucky tendency ... to allow every new invention to add to life's complications, and every new power to increase life's hustling; so that, unless we can dominate the mischief, we are really the worse off instead of the better.

In history as it comes to be written, there is usually some Spirit of the Age which historians can define, but the shape of things is seldom so clear to those who live them. To most thoughtful men it has generally seemed that theirs was an Age of Confusion.

Simply to pit "society" against "nature," "humanity" against the "biosphere," and "reason," "technology," and "science" against less developed, often primitive forms of human interaction with the natural world, prevents us from examining the highly complex differences and divisions within society so necessary to define our problems and their solutions.

The man who lives in a small community lives in a much larger world. He knows much more of the fierce variety and uncompromising divergences of men…In a large community, we can choose our companions. In a small community, our companions are chosen for us. Thus in all extensive and highly civilized society groups come into existence founded upon sympathy, and shut out the real world more sharply than the gates of a monastery. There is nothing really narrow about the clan; the thing which is really narrow is the clique.

People are difficult to rule, because of their knowledge.

IQ in general has improved since tests first began. Psychologists think that this is because modern life becomes ever more complicated.

My own take on it is that government will never adequately represent every person in the country. It can't. It's not possible. It's a multicultural, multifaceted society in which we live. The country, I think, thrives because it's willing to embrace many ideas at the same time, but once a decision is made you will be unpopular with many people. The business of our political leaders is to go ahead and make a decision and let the chips fall where they may. That's a very hard thing to do.

The word civilization to my mind is coupled with death. When I use the word, I see civilization as a crippling, thwarting thing, a stultifying thing. For me it was always so. I don't believe in the golden ages, you see... civilization is the arteriosclerosis of culture.

I think that the Greeks were extremely ambivalent about the stories of Amazons: they found them both thrilling and rather daunting at the same time.

Modern civilisation is complicated and artificial. Simple folk live in a world of love and peace. Let no one hate another or harm another.

[Cannery Row's] inhabitants are, as the man once said, 'whores, pimps, gamblers, and sons of bitches,' by which he meant everybody. Had the man looked through another peephole he might have said, 'saints and angels and martyrs and holy men,' and he would have meant the same thing.

The growing complexity of science, technology, and organization does not imply either a growing knowledge or a growing need for knowledge in the general population. On the contrary, the increasingly complex processes tend to lead to increasingly simple and easily understood products. The genius of mass production is precisely in its making more products more accessible, both economically and intellectually to more people.

The modern world... has no notion except that of simplifying something by destroying nearly everything.

The price we pay for the complexity of life is too high. When you think of all the effort you have to put in -telephonic, technological and relational -to alter even the slightest bit of behavior in this strange world we call social life, you are left pining for the straightforwardness of primitive peoples and their physical work.

What civilization is, is 6 billion people trying to make themselves happy by standing on each other's shoulders and kicking each other's teeth in. It's not a pleasant situation.

Society is a more level surface than we imagine. Wise men or absolute fools are hard to be met with, as there are few giants or dwarfs.

When we came to Iraq, we didn't understand the complexity - what it meant for a society to live under a brutal dictatorship with ethnic and sectarian divisions. When we first got here, we made a lot of mistakes. We were like a blind man, trying to do the right thing but breaking a lot of things.