Environmental Engineering Reference
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to the people characterised as terrorists and barbarians outside it as were the
excesses of Marie Antoinette's court to the French peasants.
A more thoughtful path to understand and to investigate the root causes
of terrorism seemed briefly possible. At the World Economic Forum, held
in sympathy in New York soon after 11 September 2001, a wide array of
commentators, from Bill Clinton to the managing director of the Interna-
tional Monetary Fund, argued that global inequality was a key factor in the
emergence of global terrorism. Financier George Soros said '… the asym-
metric threat from people who find the world in which they live in to be
unacceptable means that terrorism and anti-globalisation violence can
become manifestations of this frustration'. Bill Gates said '… people who
feel the world is tilted against them will spawn the kind of hatred that is
very dangerous for all of us'.
Today, only occasional rays of light penetrate this draped window. Con-
servative commentators and governments generally ignore the link between
terrorism and inequality, or, if pressed, dispute it, pointing out, for example
that Osama Bin Laden is very wealthy, and that most of the hijackers on Sep-
tember 11 were comfortably off. This interpretation reveals both a lack of
historical understanding of previous revolutions, and little insight into how
complex systems operate (Waldrop 1992).
Complex systems, inequality and emergence
Complex systems theory is a recently developed field of study that examines
the interactions between the myriad elements of many systems, in ways
which lead to self-organisation. In other words, complexity theory suggests
that fairly simple rules of thumb can sometimes lead to phenomena that
would appear, to the naïve observer, as unbelievably complicated and
implausible. A classic example is a bee or ant's nest. Obviously, no single
insect, including the queen, possesses the neural capacity to plan, construct
and maintain a hive, yet the collective behaviour of millions of individuals
leads, effortlessly, to a functioning, self-organised system. Some have sug-
gested that life itself may be a self-organising phenomenon, inevitable when
sufficient precursor molecules exist. Lovelock has famously suggested that
the biosphere may also self-regulate (Lovelock 1988).
Complexity theory has, as yet, been little explored by social theorists,
although recent work has analysed phenomena such as standing ovations,
Mexican waves, job finding, and some fads and fashions as resulting from
'information cascades' which lead to either the fading or emergence of
