Catataxis

by John Brodie Donald

As things get bigger, it's not just the scale that changes. Something else fundamental changes too. Working for a small company is not the same as working in a big multinational; their whole way of doing things is different. Governments make decisions that seem nonsensical to individuals. The death of one person is a the death of a million is a statistic. When you change the scale of something, more of the same thing ends up being different. Paracelsus, the medieval alchemist, put it like 'Substances are not poisonous, dosages are.' Friedrich Engels put it more 'a quantitative change, sooner or later, becomes a qualitative one.' A popular bumper sticker makes the point more 'You are not stuck in traffic; you are traffic.' The anomie of the modern world is caused by massive changes in scale without the requisite changes in attitudes, institutions and social mechanisms. There is confusion between hierarchical levels. Perception has become reality. There has been no easy way to express these themes - these disorders of magnitude - in a single word. Until now, that is...Catataxis, a neologism from the Greek for 'level confusion', explains why many of today's problems are caused by using yesterday's tools in an inappropriately scaled modern context. Disparate issues such as celebrity culture, banking regulation, global warming, the war on terror, soaring CEO's salaries, internet security, unrepresentative democracy, spin doctors and political correctness can all be linked to a single underlying more of the same is different.

280 pages, Hardcover

First published October 1, 2011

Reviews

[Nigel Kotani · Rating 1 out of 5]

The blurb makes it sound excellent, and I certainly found it interesting for about 20 pages, but it soon descended into pseudo-scientific stream of consciousness. I can accept pseudo-scientific stream of consciousness which entertains, but this didn't even entertain me, so it quickly lost my interest and then lost my attention. I abandoned it about a quarter of the way through.

[AngusPearson · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am rather partial in writing this review, in that the author took a gamble on me and gave me my first ever job as an equity analyst, a career in which I have greatly enjoyed looking at things from different angles, and searching for explanations that offer predictive value in perpetually fluid financial markets. As a former head of equity research in banking, John Donald has spent much of his life driven by a curiosity of why things are the way they are, and how they can be explained in new and provocative ways. His book Catataxis pulls together numerous familiar scientific, socioeconomic and political concepts and views them with a lens that zooms between the micro and macro, drawing particular attention to the fascinating blind spots to which we are often oblivious because we are afflicted by 'catataxis' or 'level confusion'. This book is stimulating and entertaining in and of itself, but the notion of looking to understand phenomena at levels not usually identified by most of us is transferable to areas beyond the scope of this book.