More on the disintegration of The Monolith

In case you hadn't noticed, the French and the
Dutch said 'no' to the EU Constitution.

Here's what Butler Shaffer says about it. This
will go far beyond the EU.

I can't disagree with a thing.

"In times of change, learners inherit the earth,
while the learned find themselves beautifully
equipped to deal with a world that no longer
exists." -- Eric Hoffer
Quote via Bill St. Clair

The top-down, command-and-control machinery of
state power has run head-on into the forces of
spontaneity and autonomy that are life’s
processes. Vertical systems of centralized power
are being replaced by horizontal patterns of
interconnectedness. Coercion is giving way to
cooperation; the pyramid is collapsing into
networks; Ozymandias’ rigid structures are
eroding into formless but flexible systems, with
names such as "Google," "Yahoo," "WebCrawler" and
"Mozilla," that mock the solemnity we once gave
to the dying forms.

Efforts to understand the dynamics underlying
transformations in our world have produced the
studies known as "chaos" and "complexity." Along
with earlier theories of quantum mechanics, the
mechanistic and reductionist model of society as
a "giant clockwork" to be directed by state
authorities toward desired and predictable ends,
has been dealt a fatal blow. We now have ideas to
help us enunciate what we earlier knew
intuitively, namely, that a complex world is too
unpredictable to become subject to state
planning; that social conflict and disorder are
the necessary consequences of interfering with
spontaneous systems of order.
...
Our biological history should have informed us
of the allometric principle that the appropriate
size of any body is relative to the nature of the
organism. A fifty-foot tall woman may make for
amusing science fiction, but an eight foot,
eleven inch Robert Wadlow was unable to live
beyond his twenty-second year. Likewise, the
massive size of the dinosaurs did not provide
them sufficient resiliency to adapt to the
environmental changes brought about, presumably,
by the earth’s collision with a comet. In Kohr’s
words, "[o]nly relatively small bodies . . . have
stability. Below a certain size, everything
fuses, joins, or accumulates. But beyond a
certain size, everything collapses or explodes."
...
Europeans, like the rest of the world, will
learn to organize themselves along horizontal
lines of networked relationships, wherein "tops"
and "bottoms" no longer have meaning. The
vertical power structures will continue to waste
away, the shrill voices of their occupants
becoming more and more distant from the lives of
ordinary people. Their antiquated forms may
remain as tourist attractions in much the same
way that monarchies or the palace at Versailles
have become museum pieces from a past that no
longer commands allegiance.

Read.