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Ervin Laszlo
 I’ve known about the work of Ervin Laszlo for many years. He was twice nominated
for the Nobel Peace Prize, is editor of the international periodical World Futures:
The Journal of General Evolution and founder and president of the international
think tanks the Club of Budapest, the World Wisdom Council, and the General
Evolution Research group. He is the author of 85 books, including WorldShift 2012:
Making Green Business, New Politics & Higher Consciousness Work Together.

You can follow his most recent writings on his new blog:

http://ervinlaszlo.com/

The change, when it comes, will be

“abrupt”
by Ervin Laszlo on February 2, 2010

When you exclaim, “that’s the last straw!” you express a

fundamental principle we all know but mostly ignore. In science it’s called
“nonlinearity.” If you load the back of a camel, you can add load after load and the
camel will adjust and cope—until the load reaches the limit of the camel’s carrying
capacity. Then, as the expression has it, just one more straw will break its back. A
stepwise process that proceeded smoothly, “linearly” becomes suddenly abrupt,
“nonlinear.”

This is what happens throughout nature. A living species can cope with changes in its
environment—up to a point. When those changes accumulate, the stress reaches a
critical point and the species dies out. Unless, of course, it mutates. In relatively simple
systems critical points lead to breakdown. In more complex systems these critical points
are tipping points: they can go one way or another. They do not lead inevitably to
breakdown, they can also lead to breakthrough.

In 1989 a group of East German refugees received permission to cross the iron curtain to
Austria. This was the small but critical shock to the system that broke its back—it was
“the last straw.” In a matter of weeks the Communist-dominated East European states
seceded from the Soviet Union, and less than a year later the Soviet Union ceased to
exist. The Soviet Communist Party, the most powerful political party in the world, not
just lost power, it was actually outlawed. The States that comprised the Soviet Union did
not disappear: after a period of chaos and near-breakdown, they managed to transform
into more open societies.

In the last ten thousand years many societies, entire civilizations, reached critical tipping
points. Once flowering cultures vanished—the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Mayans,
the Easter Islanders are examples. But others met the challenge: they transformed and
survived. History testifies that the transformations were often profound. And in the
course of time, they became more and more “abrupt.” The profound change that first
took millennia later took only centuries. Then it took but decades—now it’s taking just
years.

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