your comment above on the inability of political conservatives to accept, understand, or even perceive the concept of emergent phenomena in social dynamics triggered some long-dormant thoughts i've been nurturing on that subject, and precipitated, upon reflection, some new insights. since these observations do have some relevance to our previous discussion, i hope you'll forgive my including these comments here in "current events", as a response to your own remarks on my alluding to them earlier. hopefully, they will not be banished to "flame" as being unnecessarily provocative. as always, my goal is merely to promote understanding.

it has lately become obvious to those in the physical sciences that natural systems that may be fully described by simple mathematics often exhibit totally unanticipated and highly complex behavior. dynamic phenomena of saturn's rings, for example, and of other solar system gravitational resonances can be fully understood (in retrospect!) as simple newtonian interactions, but they were totally unexpected, even startling, when first observed in nature.

these observations, along with related discoveries in chaos theory and fractal geometry, have received much attention lately in the new field of "emergent phenomena". it is, it appears, not necessary to invoke quantum or relativistic effects to explain some of the truly bizarre things we see in nature. many appear to arise quite spontaneously, even inevitably, from classical mechanics.

if resonances of this type can be observed in gravitational dynamics, then it must surely be no surprise that they might also be generated in the much more complex and subtle social and psychological universe. the question arises, as you point out, why should ideological prejudices tend to favor or dismiss these patterns out of hand? as you pointed out, the conservative mind may be perfectly comfortable accepting spokes in saturn's rings, but they seem totally incapable of understanding the unintended consequences of policies they favor, or the unexpected success of those they don't. they must rely on conspiracies and sinister agents actively working in the background to make sense of the world. when this proves too cumbersome, they simply rewrite history to fit their preconceptions. recent political and military events in the middle east have certainly born this out in spades. reality simply refuses to behave as expected, so therefore, some evil force must be in the background manipulating events, whether it be soros, the press, the hollywood establishment, or the french. in the interest of brevity, i will not continue the list of potential conspirators, but i'm sure you can extend it well enough for yourself, they are legion. the possibility of "shit happening" always seems overlooked, and the idea that just because there is an observable pattern of no obvious origin does not necessarily mean it must be the result of the activities of a ruthless hidden enemy. to paraphrase bohr, not only does shit happen, sometimes the dog leaves it where you least expect it.

in my opinion, the inability to recognize the role of unanticipated stochastic interactions in generating unexpected negative results is mistaken by the conservative mentality as a violation of cause-and-effect, and it can be devastating to a mindset that claims to have sole mastery of both and which bases its own conviction of infallibility on the perceived helplessness, indecision, and lack of rigour of its ideological opponents. to admit they could not anticipate a problem would be, for conservatives, tantamount to admitting they did not understand the situation in which it arose. that sort of insight is simply impossible for those who see their infallibility as a result of strict adherence to self-evident principle.

this is not to say that liberals can't be at times (i will be charitable) flakes. they do have a tendency to see the world through rose-coloured glasses. but at least they see a roseate, perhaps distorted reality, instead of one totally obscured by blinders.