Why all processes do not create life

Even death and destruction, as they occur in nature, are still structure-preserving processes. Although they destroy particular configurations, they most often preserve and continue and extend the whole.

Humans guide their actions according to a mental “picture” of the situation, according to schemata, rules, images, and ideas. Because people make things according to such conceptual pictures of what we wish to do, each moment in the unfolding of a given place, the next step-in the unfolding of the world at any given locus, is now governed by those images.

What is made, what is built now, what develops in the world, is governed by images and rules. It is no longer automatically governed by the existing wholeness. It is now governed by what we decide.

#book/The Nature of Order/2 The process of creating life/4 Structure-destroying transformations in modern society - the failure of unfolding#