13. Outperformance and Survival as a Matter of Self-Organization

I am grateful to my dear Swiss friends—Frank Bodin, Jürg Marquard, Luka and Thomas Müller, Marcel Peter, Christoph Tonini, and Marc Walder—for the enriching conversations allowing me to understand from within Switzerland as a uniquely ‘self-organizing construct’. Each one of you—in very distinct ways—represents the uniqueness of Swissness. At the time of finalizing this book manuscript, an upcoming direct democracy-initiated vote on COVID-related regulations is dividing Swiss society in unprecedented ways. I have all the confidence that the generative and open discourse integral to self-organizing generative models (i.e., direct democracy)—no matter how divisive the debate—will continue strengthening the organism’s resilience. This was equally true for the 1992 vote when Swiss people rejected closer European integration. In contrast, other democracies’ top-down blitz enforcements of COVID-related restrictions (often grossly intruding on fundamental freedoms, thus, bordering upon constitutional unlawfulness) are equally dividing society. But in the void of self-organizing generative mechanisms, societal psychopathology is cultivated and will further disenfranchise and fragment the very foundation of democracy and society, potentially leading to entropic dissipation. In a world that is less classical but more quantum, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century constructs of governance—such as the nation-state as well as democracy—are no less in need to be fundamentally challenged and reinterpreted. In the absence of self-organizing mechanisms, entropy is rising, and revolt is, eventually, looming.