The Law of REQUISITE VARIETY

Quite aside from the joylessness and misery of authoritarian contexts, they promote monoculture. Every ecologist knows that monoculture is the quickest path to extinction. The patter of xenophobic, nativist thinking affirms that we stay with our kind and they stay with their kind, supposedly the natural way of things. Nature works in a very different way, with an opulent play of variety. Variation is the raw material of evolution, both organic and cultural. The great renaissances of world civilization occurred in places and times of opulence, when, through trade and other forms of culture contact, alien ways could rub against each other. Play is the way of combinatorial flexibility – the ability to see things from many angles and to change our habits. Ross Ashby, one of the founders of cybernetics, discovered the Law of Requisite Variety – the principle that systems, to evolve and learn, or even to handle the normal traffic of everyday activity, require variety and generate variety. When variety is suppressed, a system becomes nonfunctional and eventually extinct.