Systemic Complexity Quotes

In human affairs the solution to every problem contains within it the seeds of a new problem.

It is hard to feel individually responsible with respect to the invisible processes of a huge and distant government.

The tax code was so complicated that it took so long to master it that one lost the will to reform it.

As the society has gotten larger and more complex, individuals have lost their ability to influence any of the institutions that affect their lives.

Common sense tells us that the government's attempts to solve large problems more often create new ones. Common sense also tells us that a top-down, one-size-fits-all plan will not improve the workings of a nationwide health-care system that accounts for one-sixth of our economy.

There is a point of complexity beyond which a business is no longer manageable.

We have a system in the hands of bureaucracy. Everything is difficult. Everything is complicated. And my idea is simply give simplicity to Italy.

If everything in the universe depends upon everything else in a fundamental way, it might be impossible to get close to a full solution by investigating parts of the problem in isolation.

Life itself is exponential.

I am probably not alone in sensing above me the huge corporations and monstrous banks, science, politics and technologies, spy satellites and stock markets, military systems and massive wealth - forces and dynamics I don't understand or can hardly imagine.

Huge institutions producing costly services dominate the horizons of our inventiveness.

Let us keep the discoveries and indisputable measurements of physics. But ... A more complete study of the movements of the world will oblige us, little by little, to turn it upside down; in other words, to discover that if things hold and hold together, it is only by reason of complexity, from above.

The machinery of the world is far too complex for the simplicity of men.

It is also in despair of being able to understand or make any productive contribution to the highly organised chaos of our politico-economic system that large numbers of people simply abandon political and social committments. They just let society be taken over by a pattern of organisation which is as self-proliferative as a weed, and whose ends and values are neither human nor instinctive but mechanical.

The causes we know everything about depend on causes we know very little about, which depend on causes we know absolutely nothing about.

Mankind is now caught up, as though in a train of gears, at the heart of a continually accelerating vortex of self-totalisation.