Controlled Complexity is the Spice of Life
Or a reference to my friend Tim's "Controlled Chaos" hairstyle in the 80s...
A recent headline of this article in The Overhead Wire stated, “Complex Urban Streets Encourage Safer Driving.” Similar to putting a stream into a culvert. The energy of the water draining faster creates tremendous erosion at its outfall. It serves nothing but to move water quickly from one place to another, efficiently. The complexity of a natural water system keeps its energy stored in its system, network, or place. This is the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics, as described by James Howard Kunstler in his non-fiction book, “The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century,”
“... ordered flows drain entropy at a faster rate than complex disordered flows. Hence, the creation of ever more efficient ordered flows in American society, the removal of constraints, has accelerated the winding down of American potential, which is exactly why a Wal-Mart economy will bring us to grief more rapidly than a national agglomeration of diverse independent small-town economies. Efficiency is the straightest path to hell. (p.191)”
Yes, the more complex a river, a street, an economy, and our lives are, then the more energy we have within them to savor, enjoy, and experience them. It’s when we’re shopping in a Wal*Mart, walking along a box culvert creek, driving on a freeway, and being isolated do we more quickly entropy and lose our energy. Now, that doesn’t mean we thrive in chaos and disorder, we need both. But not just one or the other.
In places of great chaos, more order achieves thermodynamic balance. In other places of great order, more chaos helps it achieve its equilibrium. This achieving equilibrium, between complexity and simplicity / chaos and order, is the basis of my economic, environmental, and social equity philosophy
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