David Brooks On Emergent System

"When you think of an idea like apple, it’s not in any one neuron in the brain; it’s in the interplay of many different neurons.  A culture is an emergent system.  There’s no one person who exemplifies American culture, but the interaction of all of us Americans creates this thing called American culture.  And once
that thing exists, then it has an influence on the rest of us, it shapes our behavior.


So we’re surrounded by these patterns of interaction, these emergent systems.  And so a corporate culture is an emergent system, team spirit is an emergent system, poverty is an emergent system.  So what are the things that contribute to poverty? Well some
of it is just sheer lack of money, but some of it is certain habits, some of it is racism, there’s a whole bunch of fake things that factor in.  And so one of the problems that we have as a culture is we take clouds and we pretend they’re clocks.  We take problems that are emergent and we pretend we can solve them through deductive reasoning, but just picking them apart.  And we always want to find the one thing that will lead to that, so we always want to find “X” leads to “Z”. The problem with an emergent system, you don’t have those kinds of straight causal relationships.  Everything, it’s all about the interplay.  It’s all about the dance."

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