the modern city

A modern city is an almost incredibly helpless and delicate organism. It has lost its power to produce the actual essentials of life. In spite of its transportation systems, it cannot move as they found out in the evacuation of London. It is like an overgrown idiot baby in an incubator. It is completely helpless without the aid of the many servants that succor it. It cannot even think except in a slow ponderous collective fashion and it cannot think at all in an emergency. Its individuals can think, but a city is an organism in itself and must have a directing brain and nervous system. Destroy its waterworks, it dies. Stop its food supply. It dies. Remove its directing intelligence, it commits suicide.

~ Robert A. Heinlein (1939) For Us, The Living

"random" and "determinate"

Do not be fooled by the dichotomy "random" vs. "law-governed." Randomness is not a property of events, it is not correlated with a particular type of cause or lack thereof. Randomness is a property of data. Consider three bodies moving in accordance with the laws of Newtonian gravity, with no additional forces acting upon them. Suppose two are rotating mutually in a plane while the third crosses this plane (between the other two) repeatedly in the course of its movement. Now, examine the system at suitably coarse, but regular intervals, marking a 1 in one's logbook if the third body is on this side of the other two and a 0 in one's logbook if it is on that side. The sequence of 0's and 1's you are left with is data about the system. As it turns out, this sequence of 0's and 1's will be indistinguishable from one which has been generated by tossing a "fair coin." In other words, there will be no discernible pattern in the data, in this sense it is random. Yet the three body system is completely determinate, every development is predictable with an arbitrary degree of precision given a precise enough knowledge of the initial conditions. Suppose one stumbles across such a system in nature, and observes it for many many years, generating a long string of data. No amount of knowledge of the laws which govern the system can allow one to precisely predict the next piece of data. This is because there exists an infinite number of solutions to the problem posed by the data one has collected, each corresponding to a different set of initial conditions and, mutatis mutandis, to a different subsequent development of the three-body system. We call a complex system with this characteristic chaotic. Most natural systems are chaotic in this sense.

the escape artist

Listen to the instruction of the escape artist: "The straight jacket is designed to hold a madman. It binds such that the chaotic and irrational movements of madmen cannot escape it. To liberate oneself from the straight jacket, one must carefully perform the correct sequence of movements. Only rational, methodical, and, above all, level-headed action can extricate one from the straight jacket." Heed the words of the escape artist, for so it is with all bonds!

the experts

The common man hides his impotence behind delusions of power. He says: my personal actions affect the entire globe! What is the source of such hubris? The common man has been led astray by the experts. The experts know they depend upon the common man for their existence; without an audience to venerate them, the experts are no longer experts, merely reluctant scholars. Only in the face of ignorance, then, can one become an expert. So the experts feed the ignorant on candied sweets and strong liqueur, they tell him "only you can make a difference!" and "unless you act there will come catastrophe!" But the common man is overwhelmed with this responsibility; like a bee trapped between two panes of glass he imitates St. Vitus until his expiration; floundering and struggling, pounding his skull against the invisible walls around him, when all along, the exit lay above his head. Better to ignore the experts and follow the example of the escape artist: seek calmly and methodically for the exit, for it is your very floundering in the face of imagined future threat which itself creates catastrophe.