Morin continues inviting all human beings to contemplate another vital dimension: the reality of runaway positive feedback, an acceleration that is currently "overtaking all sectors of life... The rate of change is itself accelerating. The question now becomes whether we have crossed a critical threshold in the process of acceleration/amplification that could lead to an explosion or implosion involving any number of deadly global threats."
Morin's work does not come from an ivory-tower attempt to escape life, or to control it through intricate theoretical frameworks and maps, but rather to enable us to immerse ourselves in it more deeply, and to provide the sciences with tools to account more adequately for the lived complexity of life.
He describes his work as developing a method that does not "mutilate," does not fragment and abstract, does not do violence to life, and is not unidimensional, anemic, or antiseptic.
Further Implications of Complex and Simplistic Thinking
Morin's complex thought does not provide a "quick fix'. A quick fix is precisely what is not needed at this point, although it is very tempting to opt for it. The problems humanity is facing are themselves the result of a kind of thinking that is reductive and disjunctive - of a machine-like thinking that simplifies, assuming that problems should be neatly framed, answers should look rational, and results should be quantifiable.
But this knowledge is limited and limiting. It eliminates the complex - and eliminating complexity is precisely what we cannot afford to do in this moment. Complex thought leads us to metacognition - it is not about an identification with our thoughts and their content, but rather observing how we think and why.
We are living in a time when many, if not all, of our concepts seem to be failing, a time of conceptual emergency. This can be called a "post-normal" time of great change and uncertainty exacerbated by "fake news" and a "post-truth" condition.
Hyperspecialization
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