Can participants save a system?

A system, such as human society, can be defined as a group of individuals interacting with others. The question, whether participants in a system can save it from destruction in the presence of a shock, is an interesting one. Since each participant can have only a finite number of interactions with others, the influence of a participant is necessarily localized. Conditioned against no-shock regimes, each participant should settle down to predictable interactions with others in proximity, with some error. These errors are likely normally distributed and should not lead to systematic departures from predictions.

A system experiencing a shock can be modeled as a large perturbation with non-linear effects, unknown to its participants. The shock will likely affect the participants non-uniformly. Normal regimes with predictable interactions would have resulted in a hierarchical structure with distinct classes. In the presence of a shock, these localized clumps may reduce normal level of interactions or delay such interactions because of uncertainty. A shock will then necessarily reduce the number of interactions, and more importantly such interactions will likely concentrate within classes. The survival of a system is a function of flexibility it can extract and the reduction in interactions and the tendency to clump necessarily make the system less flexible.

Imagine a ball with structural features that allows it to roll on smooth surfaces. If the material used to construct the ball is such that it will render the ball brittle in the presence of a fall, it will crash and break apart if that happens. Such a system will always be intact in normal regimes (smooth surfaces) and will always fail in a shock (fall). So, any system that is designed to lose flexibility in discontinuities will necessarily be self-destructing in a shock.

Human societies that show declining flexibility and interactions are highly susceptible to shocks. The participants in such a system will not be able to save the system from a shock. They are sitting ducks, waiting for the moment of a severe enough shock to self-destruct.