BY JOSE PALU-AY DACUDAO
IF WE truly believe in the wonderful Creation laid before our eyes, we have the obligation to preserve its complexity and diversity, without which we would be back to uniform formlessness and darkness. This seems to be a kind of religious thinking, but so be it. There is something sacred in helping preserve Creation.
The Genesis story is often taken by centralists as a sign that the Creator desires that the Universe ought to ordered, and rightly so. From formless dark chaos, an ordered lighted Universe was created. The Big Bang theory above says what is fundamentally the same thing. The Russian physicist who proposed the Inflationary Theory of the Big Bang, Andrei Linde, realized that at the Planck time of 10 to the negative 43 seconds, any formless vacuum could only be described as a chaotic mess of interacting quantum fields, because of the quantum uncertainty principle (discovered by German physicist Werner Heisenberg). From such primeval chaos, an ordered Universe suddenly emerged. Miracle of miracles!
The gross perversity of centralist thinking is this: That in order to have order, uniformity has to be imposed.
What follows are thought control, rigid social structures not amenable to democratic changes, one language, one ideology, centralized economies, totalitarianism of the state from one colonial center. Such is the recipe for a massive catastrophe too. It is well known to scientists familiar with chaos, complexity, and catastrophe theories that a massive uniform system tends to catastrophically collapse as it either eats itself up, or is unable to respond efficiently to any outside challenge or internal problem. Ecosystems that have lost much of their biodiversity are more prone to disasters than ecosystems that are biologically diverse. Dictatorships have a way of suddenly ending violently. Blame the woes of centralized Unitarian states to decision overload, blueprint solutions, or plain dictatorial tyranny, but the basic principle for such catastrophes of highly centralized states is the same. Order based on uniformity is not order at all, and in fact promotes catastrophes.
How many dictators have risen claiming that the states must have centralized emergency powers in order to ensure peace and prosperity?
What are we placing in order anyway but the diverse and complex phenomena of the world? To say that we must do away with diverse and complex phenomena for the sake of order is a non-sequitur. It is like saying that in order to promote health, we must kill off sick patients, and then we would not have to worry about health.
On the other hand, scientists familiar with chaos, complexity, and catastrophe theories know that a system partitioned into smaller harmoniously interacting component systems tends to be stable, and quickly responds and adjusts to any internal problem or outside challenges.
When the Universe evolved from uniformity and darkness, one force of nature split into four; atoms, elements, molecules, stars, galaxies, and planets formed; life began. Always, order has been accompanied by diversity and complexity. One could say that diversity and complexity are necessary for order. So-called order based on uniformity and the destruction of diversity and complexity is plain nihilism.
For the advocates of Federalism and the preservation of our diverse peoples and languages: Do not be ashamed in our advocacy. It is what is meant to be.
(Main source about the origin of the Universe: John Gribbin in his book In Search of the Big Bang and in the Encyclopedia Encarta.)/PN
