ientists find themselves abandoning a theory of
ant hill organisation that depends on commands from the queen, and
replacing it with a bottom-up model of emergent organisation that
depends on the free flow of information between every member of the
colony.

More importantly, however, these flashes of insight and radical
reappraisal of formerly sacrosanct ideas are followed not by a
retrenchment but by a new openness to reflection, collaboration and
change. The greatest benefit of a shift in operating model appears to
be the recollection that we are working with a mere model.

11 September 2001: Coping by retreat into a world view

More than any particular map or narrative we might develop, we need to
retain the crucial awareness that any and all of these narratives are
mere models for behavioural, social, economic or political success.
Though provisionally functional, none of them are absolutely true. To
mistake any of them for reality would be to mistake the map for the
territory. This, more than anything, is the terrible lesson of the
20th century. Many people, institutions and nations have yet to adopt
strategies that take this lesson into account.

The oil industry and its representatives (some now elected in
government) are, for example, incapable of understanding a profit
model that does not involve the exploitation of a fixed and limited
resources. They continue to push the rest of the industrialised world
toward the unnecessary bolstering of cooperative, if oppressive
dictatorships, as well as the wars these policies invariably produce.
The chemical and agriculture industries, incapable of envisioning a
particular crop as anything but a drug-addicted, genetically altered
species, cannot conceive of the impact of their innovations on the
planet's topsoil or ecosystems. In more readily appreciated examples,
the Church of England is still consumed with its defence of the
literal interpretation of Biblical events and many fundamentalists
sects in the United States still fight, quite successfully, to prevent
the theory of evolution from being taught in State schools.

Although the terrorist attacks on the United States can find their
roots, at least partially, in a legacy of misguided American foreign
and energy policy decisions, they have also increased our awareness of
a great chasm between peoples with seemingly irreconcilable stories
about the world and humankind's role within it. And the lines between
th