“If an emerging system is born complex, there is neither leeway to abandon it when it fails, nor the means to join another, successful one. Such a system would be caught in an immovable grip, congested at the top, and prevented, by a set of confusing but locked–in precepts, from changing.”
Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 191
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L. K. Samuels76
American writer 1951Related quotes
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