Beyond Leadership: Balancing Economics, Ethics and Ecology, Revised Edition

Out of Chaos, Order

Douglas Hofstadler, the American physicist and pioneer in the theory of artificial intelligence, noted: “It turns out that an eerie type of chaos can lurk just behind a façade of order – and yet, deep inside the chaos lurks an even eerier type of order.” Can one find that eerie order lurking within the global chaos? If so, where? Who will be its discoverers? One reads nothing of it in the press, academic journals, or books by the experts. Is the cause then hopeless? Is the world doomed to repeat the sins of its past (where there has been no lack of cataclysmic conflict) or experience the eruptions that have tarnished other civilizations? The analyses of political scientists, sociologists, and economists so far give few answers. There is a sterility, a sense of fatalism in the debate, little that is innovative. Politicians across the spectrum seem to be making yesterday's speeches, addressing yesterday's issues. One searches the sermons of the moralists and the commentaries of the pundits in vain for anything that is fresh and hopeful. The entire globe appears all too often to be in gridlock – witness Bosnia Herzegovina in the 1990s.

Or is there a key by which the people of the world can discover a common language for an escape from the confusion of this Tower of Babel? Perhaps Albert Einstein gives us a clue: “The world that we have made as a result of the level of thinking we have done thus far creates problems that we cannot solve at the same level as they ...