Master disclaimer: If I manage to cover all disclaimers in this piece, I will get to the core of my argument today. Otherwise, perhaps I will rename it Disclaimers and leave it at that. But you will appreciate these disclaimers are necessary.

First disclaimer: The phrase "order out of chaos" ("ordo ab chao" in Latin) is often attributed to the 33rd Scottish Rite Masonry. This piece has nothing to do with them. I use the phrase because it resonates with my message, as you will see.

Second disclaimer: There is a beautiful quote attributed to Elizabeth Holmes, the disgraced founder of Theranos, a privately owned corporation once touted as a breakthrough health-tech company. It goes like this: "First they think you're crazy, then they fight you, and then all of a sudden you change the world." Upon closer inspection, it seems to be a paraphrase of the following statement, commonly misattributed to Mahatma Gandhi: "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win."

In reality, this too is a rewording of a statement by Nicholas Klein, an American trade union activist speaking in 1918. Consider the statement: "First they ignore you. Then they ridicule you. And then they attack you and want to burn you. And then they build monuments to you." I like all three versions because they correspond with my lived experience.

The third disclaimer relates to one of my own recent positions. In my piece titled "Why states fear complexity", dated 14 September 2024, I pointed out that two forces — complexity and acceleration — were making societies too complicated to be governed by any state, resulting in the state's woefully inadequate responses like........

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