Rethinking Healthcare as a Complex System (Knowledge Areas Book 3)

The purpose of this research is to trace the development of complexity thinking, as it has emerged in the physical, biological, and social sciences. The modern concept of complexity emerged in late 19th and early 20th Century social science even as the Cartesian/Newtonian paradigm was being destroyed in physics by new thinking about new experimental evidence. Beginning with Fritjof Capra (Capra, 1999), who started out as a physicist, I show how his encounter with Eastern Philosophy led to a new concept of relationship, causation and function that forms the basis for thinking about complex systems. He projected that civilization would reach a turning point, which Jay Forrester’s research shows we have passed and missed. Humanity is now descending into the chaos of overshoot, even as our leaders consider mild-mannered espousal of the Sustainability Initiative as part of corporate propaganda for human relations as narrowly defined by the immediate bottom line. Yaneer Bar-Yam analyzes the differences between implicit expressions of a biological organism, which can enable us to create a General Will while fully celebrating human rights, expressed as a democratic mentality, or explicit reification of such an organism, with its ensuing fascist mentality, as expressed by Hitler’s abuse of Social Darwinism. Although we are now floundering in our efforts to create a sustainable social order, one mentality or the other will emerge as the mind of the new social organism. We have a stark choice between New Jerusalem and Hell, and we are pretty far down the wide road to the latter.

The purpose of the following analysis is to examine the scope and impact of the work of Capra, Forrester, and Bar-Yam within the context of the modern complexity thinking. Capra saw the limitations of the Cartesian/Newtonian paradigm in the very physics it had founded, and found the model of wu-wei in Chinese philosophy providing illumination between field and quantum physics. He expanded these insights into biology and sociology, never wavering from a new vision of complexity thinking that now informs all of the sciences. He saw the current system reaching its turning point. Jay Forrester showed the consequences of overshooting that turning point. His students developed the World3 mathematical model, finding as of October of 2012 that we are dangerously near a point where our social order cascades into chaos. Bar-Yam picks up where the Social Darwinists left off, showing the way to a democratic rather than fascist mentality for our new social organism. These theorists have generated much discussion, culminating in the proposal to create a Learning Society through the process of public education, which means educating all members of the public to their highest capacities. The ideas of each of these thinkers are still generating rich new research questions and providing us with the means to use our own eyes to see what is going on in spite of all of the apparent complexity of today’s world, and will continue to generate research, action and discussion throughout the 21st Century, providing fresh humus for robust new research into the foreseeable future.
From the standpoint of the wretched of the Earth, the Sustainability Initiative spells only human disaster because it is being applied by way of the explicit fascism Bar-Yam warns us against. The discredited “trickle down” theories of the University of Chicago economists that are now being imposed on what Mao Zedong designated as the Third World can never cause all boats to rise because they are entirely grounded in negative feedback, equilibrium economic models that cannot reflect the complexity of today’s world. However, such theories can support some lifeboats while all of the Irish in steerage drown (Cameron, 1997) . America is intractably stuck in the two-tier world social order that is emerging, and can only retain her position, for the select few, by waging permanent warfare against her own people.