The beauty of chaos

THE BEAUTY OF CHAOS

Mario D’Couto

            We all strive for order in our day to day lives and yet we find ourselves in the most bizarre, muddled up situation where we just don’t know what to do about. For those of you who have read my article on “Acceptance”, you will see that this acceptance is not something that is passive but rather it s about owning the situation and doing something about it.

            I guess one thing we need to realize is that the rules of the world are not cut and dry as though out to be. Einstein’s discoveries about what was really going at the most basic level led us to believe that there must be something beyond the physical. The basis of this thought process lies on the fact that the particles that make up our universe do not just move in a straight line and react in a perfectly predictable way. In fact, if you get down to the most basic components of your body molecules, you will find that the world acts quite improbably.  Particles suddenly disappear and then reappear far from where they started. Little particles blink in and out of being without shape or reason, yet their totality leads to your stable and organized existence. The world’s substance is constantly being re – created over and over again in entirely unique and creative ways. Like snowflakes, no two moments in time are ever the same and yet time moves forward, forever uninterrupted.

            Life is not like a wound-up clock that is left to go on its own with its own path. Rather, even with all the unevenness that is present, there is a spiritual force that is guiding it. As a Christian, I believe it is God who guides everything, leading it to its fulfilment or to put it in the words of the French Jesuit priest and scientist, Teilhard de Chardin, it is the “Cosmo Theandric Vision”.

            Applying this in the context of business and the corporate world and given that the laws of nature is never cut and dry but rather very dynamic in nature, if we were to continue to base organizational ideas according to the laws of nature, it would become apparent that change and flexibility are far more important than certainty.

            When business is treated like a machine, fresh ideas are often considered to be flaws rather than improvements. If the system is designed to stay the same in perpetuity, then it is far too inflexible to change. Recessions occur without any real way of wriggling out because the business practices that lead to them are stagnant. New organizations with better products create unimaginable competition for even the most successful firms, because the old dogs just cannot change quickly enough to keep up. Yet, when the system is set up to embrace change, suddenly innovation does not have to fight its way into prominence the way it always has.

            In his book, “Messy”, author Tim Harford speaks about how diversity leads to innovation or for that matter: messiness. He gives us three examples to explain this point, namely, a diverse economy, the microbes present in the human body and population. Actually, the diverse economy and population are in some sense interconnected. This kind of reminds me of ancient Greece, the birth place of western philosophy, which came about as a fusion of ideas from people from different walks of life. Today, more than ever, we are witnessing a tightening of immigration policies in the developed countries and yet it is so easy to forget that these so – called developed countries are, actually, a result of fusion and colonisation. I wouldn’t want to go further but I guess what I have said says a lot. If, though, I may add one more example to this, was what happened during World War II. Thanks to Hitler, Germany had lost a depth of talent when so many Jewish academics and scientists were expelled and were forced to migrate to other countries like the UK and the US and how life has changed in those countries. Would it be a similar case with the present-day US and other countries such as Australia where migration policies are tightened? Only time will tell.

            With that being said, let us now shift our focus to the human body. Certain microbes and bacteria, contrary to popular belief, are actually necessary for the human body. For example, it was discovered that stomach ulcers were caused not so much by stress but by a cork screw – shaped bacteria called “Helicobacter Pylori” by Barry Marshall and his colleague, J. Robin Warren. However, later, it was further discovered by Martin Blaser, a microbiologist at the New York University School of Medicine that actually “Helicobacter pylori” might be doing some good rather than harm.

            Blaser found that Americans who had helicobacter pylori in their guts were far less likely to suffer from asthma. A laboratory study on mice demonstrated that deliberately infecting them with helicobacter pylori guaranteed that they would not develop asthmatic symptoms. Blaser and his colleagues also stated that helicobacter pylori help prevent obesity by regulating a stomach enzyme called ghrelin. This idea comes from observational studies of humans and controlled experiments in mice. When mice are dosed with antibiotics, the helicobacter pylori are scoured from the stomach system and the mice get fat. This also explains why livestock are sometimes dosed with antibiotics so that they fatten up. Why, recently there was in the news that the poultry industry in Japan was using antibiotics to fatten up chickens. And while this be said, it also turns out that if you transfer microbes from thin mice to fat ones, the fat ones lose weight.

            All in all, we may always look for order in and around us, but life is never like that. It has its ups and down and that is something we must learn to live with. It is like a bicycle. As long as you keep riding it, you will continue to move on. The moment you stop, you will fall. With that said, may we always learn to appreciate the beauty of chaos.