David Peat

From Clockwork to Chaos 139with any smooth-running machine, they function efficiently as replaceableunits. Officers are trained both to obey and to give orders and, incertain situations, to show initiative.Each person entering the army fits neatly into a particular slot, sothat during battles and campaigns the army machine continues tofunction despite a turnover in personnel. This also means that, withthe exception of the highest ranks or individual acts of heroism, theskills and personalities of any particular individual have little significance.Soldiers fit into the army, rather than the army accommodatingthem.Compare this with the village of Pari, Italy, where I now live. Here,while everyone has skills in common, idiosyncrasies of personality areimportant. Although there is a village association, often plans and decisionsare made in the evening as people sit together chatting in thesquare, or as they stop and gossip while walking around the village.Sometimes a village meeting is called and resolutions are voted on. Inother situations people simply turn up to help when assistance isneeded. Over hundreds of years, and out of necessity, the village haslearned to organize itself in a way that maintains its traditions andrespects people for the particular skills they bring.Whereas, in the army, soldiers are forced to sacrifice a measure oftheir personal freedom so as to fit in and obey, within the village a widerange of behavior, even verging on the eccentric, can be tolerated. Theformer type of structure is a metaphor for mechanical, hierarchicalorganization; the latter stands for the self-organization seen in manynatural and social systems.It is even possible to see such behavior in physics, as in the case ofplasma vibrations in a metal. Back in the 1940s the physicist DavidBohm was working on the theories of the plasmas, that curious “fourthstate of matter” as distinct from a solid, liquid, or gas. Plasmas occur inthe upper atmosphere and the corona of the sun as well as within metals.They are composed of electrically charged particles—positivelycharged nuclei and negatively charged electrons—and their mutual attractionand repulsion give the plasma its special properties.When he was working on plasmas, Bohm was struck by the waythey formed an electrical shield almost as if to protect themselves when