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We have thus far defined this division of Reality primarily in terms of space—as in “I am over here and you are over there.” Consciousness splits the Whole, immediately creating an ego—an identity—that then sees all other things in opposition to it.

To put it simply: we know (and can see) what’s going on; we just can’t conceptualize it. We need to learn to be at ease with inconceivability.

We want a Real World, to be sure, but we’d prefer to have it with handles on it. We think that there’s no other possible way we can “get it,” in fact. Yet, as we can see, if only we’d look, whatever we “get” is never It. It’s never the Real Thing we long to have.

Clear-cut lines, though necessary for our conceptual packaging, are simply not the way Reality is drawn.

Most of us live out our lives with little awareness of the blatant contradictions that abound within our “knowledge” and beliefs (i.e., our concepts). Because we omit the what aspect, we make absolutes out of what would otherwise be understood as relative. Then we reify our concepts and sink ever deeper into contradictions.

if we put the world into concepts, we’ve necessarily got paradox. Our problem is that we’re neither very good at seeing how we box up Reality, nor very good at getting down to the contradictions that our packages—our concepts—necessarily hold.

Evils are thus the holes in the Swiss cheese of the universe. They are not things in their own right that the divine causes have brought into being. Rather, they are precisely cases where the divine causes have not brought something into being, or rather, have brought less into being than we might have hoped.

Our commonsense beliefs are never too far from paradox. Hence our reluctance to scrutinize them, for encountering paradox would leave us with the impression that we’ve taken a wrong turn. And if our commonsense beliefs are wrong—if our security blanket were suddenly seen not to offer security—then what?

We’re not just ignorant, we’re strategically ignorant.

What matters most is not the world as it appears to our senses. Rather, the enjoyment we get from something derives from what we think that thing is.

Iranians from all walks of life, well-educated elites and wild-eyed radicals alike, thought the CIA was an omnipotent force with immense power over their lives. They could not have believed the truth: in the summer of 1979, the CIA station was a four-man operation, and all four were newly arrived in Iran.

In this slightly parodic picture of a big decision-making system, we have a compromised set of communication channels between black boxes, which is compensated for by adding resources in the shape of middle managers, who provide the capacity to translate the skewed signals from the financial reporting system into more or less accurate and actionable information.

We’ve emphasised at every stage that management is about variety engineering: making sure that every management function is matched, in terms of its information-handling capability, to the kinds of shocks and variety that might affect it.

The way that you deal with massively complex systems, according to the cyberneticians, is to split them up into black boxes with a manageable set of inputs and outputs. The combinations of those inputs and outputs will still be unmanageable, but that might not matter…
The important point is to get the description right in terms of black boxes, and to try to understand the relations between them.

The science fiction writer Charlie Stross, for example, described corporations as ‘very old, very slow AIs’ in 2017. A computer science professor called Ben Kuipers wrote a paper for a conference in 2012, in which he made the case that corporations met all the criteria necessary to be called independent beings, and that as such, they were artificial, intelligent and surprisingly successful in evolutionary terms.

The purpose of the pet hotel at Schiphol Airport was to shred squirrels; everyone involved may have cared about animal welfare, but the system had been set up to ensure compliance with import regulation at the lowest cost possible, so that’s what it did.

there is nothing to be gained by opening the black box. If you are trying to understand a system, all you can do is observe its behaviour, and whatever you can learn from doing so is all there is to know about it.

The principle of diminishing accountability: Unless conscious steps are taken to prevent it from doing so, any organisation in a modern industrial society will tend to restructure itself so as to reduce the amount of personal responsibility attributable to its actions. This tendency will continue until crisis results.

The people are brought into the story because that’s the only way to sensibly describe the systems they were part of. If it hadn’t been them, it would have been someone else. If this book had a real villain, we might identify it as ‘the regrettable tendency of complex systems to have opaque and volatile dynamics’.

As usual, it is quite impossible to cover every case that could conceivably arise; but we maintain that the decision on the main objective will, with few exceptions, carry the minor ones as well. That is the principle on which action should invariably be based unless there are obvious reasons to the contrary.

It is of course easier to reach a nearby object than a more distant one. But if the first does not suit our purpose, a pause, a suspension of activity, will not necessarily make the second half of the journey any easier to complete. A short jump is certainly easier than a long one: but no one wanting to get across a wide ditch would begin by jumping half-way.

It is even possible that the attacker, reinforced by the psychological forces peculiar to attack, will in spite of his exhaustion find it less difficult to go on than to stop—like a horse pulling a load uphill…this demonstrates without inconsistency how an attacker can overshoot the point at which, if he stopped and assumed the defensive, there would still be a chance of success—that is, of equilibrium.

the attacker is bound in carrying it out to meet a number of awkward little obstacles and accidents, things no theorist ever took into account, which will be to his disadvantage simply because he is taking the initiative and they therefore happen to him first. Let us only think how often the streams of Lombardy, insignificant in themselves, have been successfully defended