Robert---then as a realist you might recognize the similarities between the quoted article and this comment.
Especially if you look at his definition of Realism.
There is a movement among some analysts to look at this comment below again in trying to understand internal dynamics of a population as they shift in the face of their day to day reality and how that dynamic plays out then between the state that represents the population with other state represented populations. Basically it shuts out institutions and focuses on the population creativity in the face of reality.
What it takes though are analysts that can see and understand the spontaneous, the adaptive and the alive elements---not analysts stuck in institutions forced to avoid addressing these items as it does not match the status quo.
Right now a perfect example of this edge of chaos is Egypt where the status quo is no longer, but what comes out is an unknown quantity because of the large number of components in play.
Personally think this is where Kilcullen was initially going in his ecosystem concept as a way to explain the chaos being seen but then he went no further.
“ The balance point -- often called the edge of chaos -- is where the components of a system never quite lock into place, and yet never quite dissolve into turbulence either. . . The edge of chaos is where life has enough stability to sustain itself and enough creativity to deserve the name of life. The edge of chaos is where new idea and innovative genotypes are forever nibbling away at the edges of the status quo, and where even the most entrenched old guard will eventually be overthrown. The edge of chaos is where centuries of slavery and segregation suddenly give way to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s; where seventy years of Soviet communism suddenly give way to political turmoil and ferment; where eons of evolutionary stability suddenly give way to wholesale species transformation.
The edge is the constantly shifting battle zone between stagnation and anarchy, the one place where a complex system can be spontaneous, adaptive and alive.”
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