Systems science and world order Book

I'll never do this book justice without writing something longer that it is itself. The mechanistic, reductionist view of the world we got from the classical sciences (from Newton if not before) is inadequate to explain the world. It had already failed in physics, and we're seeing it fail now in our economy and ecology. If you have any curiosity about how our world works as a set of increasingly complex and differentiated, yet interdependent, systems, you owe it to yourself to read this. (I just can't say what and how much background knowledge is needed to frame it.)