THE MENTAL MAELSTROM
temperature) to politics (as in the way an “establishment” damps outdissent when it goes beyond an acceptable level). Negative feedback seemed to be at work all around us, reusing things to retain their equilibrium or stability.
By the early 1960’s, however, critics like Professor M.iruyama began to note that too much attention was being paid to stability and not enough to change. What was needed, he argued, was more research on “positive feedback”— processes that do not suppress change but amplify it, do not maintain stability but challenge it, sometimes even overwhelming it. Positive feedback, Maruyania emphasized, can lake a small deviation or “kick” in the system and magnify it into a giant structure-threatening shudder.
If the first kind of feedback was change-reducing or “nega-live,” here was a whole class of processes that were change-nmplifying or “positive,” and both needed equal attention. Positive feedback could illuminate causation in many previously puzzling processes.
Because positive feedback breaks stability and feeds on it-Nclf, it helps explain vicious circles—and virtuous ones. Imagine the thermostat again, but with its sensor or its trigger mechanism reversed. Every time the room got warm, the thermostat, instead of shutting off the furnace, would click it on, forcing the temperature to hotter and hotter levels. Or muj’ine the game of Monopoly (or, for that matter, the game of real-life economics) in which the more money a pl.iycr has, the more property he or she can buy, which means more rental income and therefore more money with which to buy property. Both are examples of positive feed-l-.irk at work.
Positive feedback helps explain any process that is self-ex-citntory— like the arms race, for example, in which every lime the U.S.S.R. builds a new weapon the U.S. builds a big-!'<-i one, which then motivates theU.S.S.R. to build yet another in-… to the point of global insanity.
And when we put negative and positive feedback together niul see how richly these two different processes interplay in ‘Miiplex organisms, from the human brain to an economy, «i.iriling insights emerge. Indeed, once we as a culture recog-ihat any-truly complex system—whether a biological or-r “>iMII, a city, or the international political order—is likely i” h:ive within it both change amplifiers and change reducers, i•<••.!live as well as negative feedback loops interacting with OM<- another, we begin to glimpse a whole new level of complexity in the world with which we are dealing. Our understanding of causation is advanced.
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