Emergency is social complexity

Emergency is social complexity. Emergency is social complexity, a type of complexity that eludes any algorithm and/or statistic or probabilistic model. It is, in fact a constitutive dimension of complex (adaptive) systems. Only a systemic approach to society can hope to integrate elements of emergency into the life-worlds by inhabiting complexity, without disrupting civilization each time a new and unexpected crisis raises its head, as though it were a wrench thrown into otherwise perfectly controlled works. It is the idea that society can be effectively controlled, and that future events will become more and more predictable, with the occasional exception of emergency situations that we have agreed to consider unavoidable “black swans”, which is at the crux of this misleading perspective. In reality, these so-called black swans, which are likewise intrinsic to social systems, serve as all-too-easy justifications of the glitches in the systems we otherwise consider perfect. It is a reassuring perspective, in some ways fatalistic, with which we rationalize our inadequacies, our shortcomings, our incapacities to function in a non-reductionist, non-deterministic fashion, by telling ourselves that for certain events, certain perfect storms, there is nothing to be done, rather than learning how to encompass emergency, coping with it, as a natural occurrence within the complex interacting phenomena that make up our life systems, our ecosystems, and our hyperconnected civilizations.