David Peat

From Clockwork to Chaos 151from which they take their values. People may be good or bad, stupidor creative, ignorant, uneducated, traumatized, or in some cases simplyevil. We can never place ourselves outside the system as observers;our behavior, goals, and values are always set within that matrix ofmeaning that emerges out of the multilayering of family, group, society,global economics, and so on. Any policy or plan, any action taken,unfolds out of this matrix and its accompanying values and meanings.In turn it acts back upon it. Going to “the heart of the problem” may beimportant, yet it can also mean ignoring all the factors that gave rise tothat situation in the first place, or to those factors that are amelioratingthe situation at the present moment and causing it to persist. When welook at the world as object, or “problem,” we forget that we too are anessential part of the pattern we see around us.If we have an overly rigid approach to life we treat the world in amechanical way. If a clock, or any other mechanical system, malfunctionswe take it apart and look for the cause. Such a system is composedof parts connected together. When it doesn’t work we suspectthat one of those parts has failed or come loose. And so we take themechanism apart and look for the bits that don’t function.This approach works perfectly with clocks, toys, car engines, andother mechanisms. But how well does it apply to a city, a society, ahuman being, a polluted lake, or the stock market? When we view theworld as a machine, we think of it and act toward it in a mechanicalway. When we deal with a machine we believe that every malfunctioncan be analyzed and reduced to a problem associated with some defectin a component. Such problems always have easy solutions becausecomponents can be repaired or replaced. And so we end up respondingto the world in mechanical ways because we see it as no more thana particularly elaborate machine.To build a clock or a car you take parts off the shelf and assemblethem together. But in the case of self-organized and open systems the“parts” are expressions of the entire system. A river isn’t composed ofsmooth water and vortices glued together. Rather, the vortex, whileremaining stable and identifiable, is an aspect of the entire river. Likewise,the volunteer groups in a community are expressions of the cohesionand meaning of that town or city.