We are at an evolutionary crossroads at which our own ingenuity and productivity hold both the greatest promise and unspeakable peril. The situation demands that we train up on complexity because being complexity-intolerant means we can't even start to understand the world we've created for ourselves1. We have perhaps become "addicted" to oversimplification, leading to misunderstanding and discord.

The premise is we are at a tipping point. On one hand, the lot of humanity has been improving over centuries, as laws and humanitarian consensus meet the potential of technological development to provide resources for all.

However, as humanity has developed, the same factors that have made us stronger have escalated the risk: Technological advancements, population growth, rich cultural exchange, conflict psychology, and related factors mean that one misstep could lead to massive, potentially unrecoverable destruction to our species—possibly even the planet upon which we depend. Our own psychology and emotional maturity have not developed in step with our technology and culture. We can, in principle, rise to the occasion.

Complexity theory—nonlinear science—is a branch of mathematics that encompasses chaos theory, network theory, the theory of complex adaptive systems, evolutionary models, fractal math, and related models (e.g. information theory, thermodynamics) that not only drive understanding but also increase our power to influence and design complicated........

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