Spontaneous Order
See also: Spontaneous order and Self-organizationGroups of human beings, left free to each regulate themselves, tend to produce spontaneous order, rather than the meaningless chaos often feared. This has been observed in society at least since Chuang Tzu in ancient China. A classic traffic roundabout is a good example, with cars moving in and out with such effective organization that some modern cities have begun replacing stoplights at problem intersections with traffic circles, and getting better results.
Emergent processes or behaviours can be seen in many places, such as traffic patterns, cities, political systems of governance, cabal and market-dominant minority phenomena in politics and economics, organizational phenomena in computer simulations and cellular automata. Whenever you have a multitude of individuals interacting with one another, there often comes a moment when disorder gives way to order and something new emerges: a pattern, a decision, a structure, or a change in direction (Miller 2010, 29).
Read more about this topic: Strong Emergence, Emergence in Humanity
Famous quotes containing the words spontaneous and/or order:
“I sometimes feel a great ennui, profound emptiness, doubts which sneer in my face in the midst of the most spontaneous satisfactions. Well, I would not exchange all that for anything, because it seems to me, in my conscience, that I am doing my duty, that I am obeying a superior fatality, that I am following the Good and that I am in the Right.”
—Gustave Flaubert (1821–1880)
“Woman ... cannot be content with health and agility: she must make exorbitant efforts to appear something that never could exist without a diligent perversion of nature. Is it too much to ask that women be spared the daily struggle for superhuman beauty in order to offer it to the caresses of a subhumanly ugly mate?”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)