The bright side of the current systemic breakdown

From Robert Anton Wilson's Prometheus Rising:

"...Instability is not always bad: in fact, it is absolutely necessary for evolution to occur. Insect societies are highly stable and have not evolved at all in several million years. Human societies are highly unstable and are in continuous evolution.

Prigogine demonstrates the evolutionary value of instability by his concept of the "dissipative structure."

A dissipative structure is highly complex and therefore highly unstable. The more complex it is, the more unstable it is, mathematically, certainly; and the more unstable, the more likely it is to change — to evolve.

All dissipative structures are teetering, perpetually, between self-destruction and re-organization on a higher level of information (coherence).

If that sounds grim, it isn't really. Prigogine's math is highly optimistic, He shows that the more complex structures — such as our world-round human society today, midway between Second Wave indust-reality and the emerging Third Wave — are mathematically more likely, much more likely, to "dissipate" into higher coherence than into self-destruction.

In other words, in the intellectual conflict between Utopians and Dystopians, the mathematical odds actually are on the side of Utopians. Our human world is so information-rich (coherent) that it is almost certain to "collapse" into even higher coherence, not into chaos and self-destruction.

Prigogine is the mathematical demonstration of McLuhan's intuition that many seeming symptoms of breakdown are actually harbingers of breakthrough..."


Ilya Prigogine: Science, Religion and the new Utopia




Ilya Prigogine - Caos concept