The societies that we form in this world can no longer be viewed as if they were giant and very complicated machines that need a control structure of ever increasing complexity in order to be successfully managed. The secret of nature's most complex structures is in the simple techniques by which they are built and managed, combining a simple repetitive act with the strangely helpful chaos of unpredictability, in order to make their growth and evolution in this world successful. The networks of nature consist of an infinite number of components acting as feedback loops into the whole. Each component is constantly feeding information and activity into the system and modulating its own behaviour according to the whole system's activity. The capacity of the world to create harmony on its own, to create a pattern within a multitude of events, is one that has been glimpsed by mystics, artists and assorted individuals from time immemorial.
Scientists now recognise it too.
One of the other great discoveries of chaos theory is that called 'sensitive dependence on initial conditions'. This is commonly known as the Butterfly Effect, the recognition by Edward Lorenz that something as insignificant as a butterfly flapping its wings in Ecuador could make the difference between a rainstorm or a hurricane many months later and thousands of miles away. The butterfly of chaos theory has made a nonsense of all the linear projections of politicians, economists and their ilk. In today's ever more complex world, that which changes history is rarely predicted - the great crash of 1929, the collapse of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, Mad Cow Disease. Even in the aftermath of these events, there is rarely any perception of the eventual changes and consequences of the event.