ABSTRACT
A handful of modern societies figured a way to harness human activity in a manner that mixed human purpose, order, and freedom in a historically unprecedented manner. Circular causation can be best understood as a pattern. It is like a color wheel, a set of contrasting colors that are complementary. Modern societies are built around five key systems: markets, industries, cities, publics, and households. Successful modernity has a strongly functional character. It generates interacting self-organizing systems. These, when combined, generate prosperity. The systems that dominate modern life are functional. The opposing twin of function is hierarchy. The complement of autonomous systems is the institution of creation. Creation is small in the way that systems are large. The smallness of the numbers of those who participate in the institution of creation makes it considerably less anonymous. The world’s most prosperous economies and societies think and act paradoxically. Buried deep in their core are enigmatic, puzzle-like belief systems.
