AP: Tell me some other people who strongly influenced your life.
GS: You will find most of them in the back of Uncommon Sense, under Credits and Big Butterflies. Obviously my parents were a great influence giving me truly good advice and feeding me the real food that enabled me to connect with the world. My brother and I have always shared our discoveries with each other, and his introduction of macrobiotics was quite seminal. Other major influences have been Lao Tsu, Charles Fort, Aldous Huxley, Georges Ohsawa, Timothy Leary, Professor Galambos and my teachers in school and my friends in life.
I am deeply shaped by the world itself, absorbing energies from the stars, the Sun and moon, as well as from the waters and winds of the planet, from the mountains and the flowers. There are a few mountains in Colorado whom I count as close friends, and a cow in Goa who is my good mate.
AP: How did you come to write your first book, Uncommon Sense?
GS: I didn't really think I would need to write it, since the message of chaos theory for society seemed so obvious to me that I figured just opening up the Strange Attractions shop would do the trick. After a couple of years running that shop I realized that I would have to put pen to paper to properly express the message that seemed clear to me. I set to it over the next few years, often scribbling ideas down in the middle of a steaming dance floor or shouting concepts into my little dictating machine, to be unraveled and expanded in the following days or sometimes months.
AP: I have read the book and enjoyed it thoroughly – it is certainly original – but please give our readers a general synopsis on what it is about.
GS: Uncommon Sense – the State is Out of Date: The book is about freedom and the incredible power of letting it work its magic. Conversely, it is also about the dangers and consequences of constricting that freedom and substituting coercively enforced plans and controls instead. It makes sense to readers of that which they already know, putting it into a big picture that they may never have seen before. Though it is an extremely radical book, most readers, whether taxi drivers, nurses or hippies, seem to agree with everything that they read within it.
AP: The idea that human society can spontaneously order itself just as nature can out of chaos is an interesting concept. And there are certainly instances whereby this happens. Please tell me more about it.
GS: We live in a well-ordered Universe in which everything from the galaxy in which we live, to the clouds in the sky, to the bacteria in the soil have developed order out of the chaos. In our own society just about everything we value and rely upon has arisen naturally from the chaos, without forward planning. Amongst much else, this includes our means of clothing ourselves, communicating with each other, traveling around or entertaining ourselves. No king, emperor or state planning department ever invented shoes, telephones, bicycles, planes or iPods. Just try and think of something that you treasure in life which initially did not emerge from the chaos of society.
Everything else in the Universe finds its own order and I can see no reason to believe that human beings are an exception to this rule. Where we do see regulation trying to impose order we usually end up with fuck-ups such as the Common Agricultural Policy which pollutes our food and destroys our environment; the control of medicines which plays to the hands of pharmaceutical companies; or the proposed ID cards scheme which will make us all easy victims of identity theft.
AP: One criticism about applying chaos theory to human society might be that order can appear out of chaos precisely because the reality is rule based. But human society, being self-conscious, is not rule-based so it would not be able to organize order out of chaos.
GS: It's a big Universe, and however you rationalize the human situation I still cannot see it as qualifying for special exemption from the overall rules that guide everything else that is.
AP: Interestingly, your theory of self-organization was recently backed up by physicist Donah Zohar (as reported in The Ecologist) in which she says that the main reason environmentalism has failed in transforming society is that it has an incorrect view of society, either treating them as free milling individuals (right-wing view) or a disciplined army (left-wing view). She argues that society is more a "free-form dance company" in which people move in creative harmony with each other. In this way, the rigid controls of the left-wing movements are not needed, only a fair foundation is needed and then society organizes itself.
GS: I agree completely with that viewpoint, and love the image of a free-form dance company. A fair foundation is one that is grounded in freedom. With freedom in place, everything else takes care of itself.
AP: Where has Chaos Theory gone now? I know that "Complexity" is now becoming a common term in that field.
GS: Chaos Theory used to be the only heading there was for this weird new field, and we had a hard time finding a dozen books on the subject for the Strange Attractions shop. As the subject has expanded, it has branched into several areas which have acquired new terms and headings such as complexity theory, dynamical systems theory, non-linear dynamics, etc. I lose count.
AP: You are unusual in that you don't read many books… you prefer to get the information straight from the horse's mouth, and I remember years ago many very interesting people used to come to your house. Who are some of the people you have met and who impressed you?
GS: There does indeed seem to be an interesting flow of people through my house, which I cannot really explain except to say that I am good at letting things happen. Most of them have something that will add to my understanding of life and they all impress me, though impressions can be negative as well as positive.
AP: Tell me your view on genetically modified food.
GS: I see GM foods as another dangerous beast being let loose that could have as many negative long-term and irreversible ramifications as nuclear power. There is no means to stop modified genes from escaping into the wild gene pool and there is no understanding of how this can affect the delicate balances of nature.
Geneticists really have no idea of the side-effects of consuming these products and when we are told that citizens of the USA have been munching away on GM foods for the past 15 years I think we have sufficient grounds to be very very cautious about their ingestion. Nowhere on earth has there been such an increase in allergies and obesity as in the USA over the past 15 years.
AP: Do you think there is any place for genetic modification of any kind?
GS: Tradition selective plant breeding has brought us a wonderful array of vegetables and flowers manifesting a multitude of textures, tastes and colours. I certainly see no place for genetic modification within the food chain. Our bodies share many of their genes with the plant world and we have evolved to recognize and absorb various plant foods over millennia. It is a delicate process and the slightest accidental tweaking of a food nutrient might render it toxic to the human body for reasons we do not even understand. Many of the independent trials feeding GM crops to animals have produced alarming findings, and in some cases these findings were suppressed (see Seeds of Deception, by Jeffrey M. Smith). In the artificial and crude insertion of genes, there is no consideration of the damage done to the so-called 'junk DNA,' which makes up some 98% of most DNA. It is like assuming that because we are thought to be using only 10% of our brains, we can mess randomly with the other 90% and not risk any ill-effects.
AP: I hear you are writing another book. Is this finished yet?
GS: Yes, and I am now looking for an agent and publisher. It's a very exciting work and a very digestible one too, even though it deals with very far-out concepts. You can see the preface to it at www.chaos-works.com.
AP: I presume your concept of "God" is a super-organizing principle?
GS: Who said anything about my concept of God? Actually, my concept of this comes across as a sub-organizing principle, coming from the bottom up rather than the top down. It makes a lot of sense and bridges the gap between the equally preposterous positions of the creationists and the evolutionists.
AP: What do you think happens after we die? (Do you believe we become implicit order rather than explicit order… using terms of Chaos theory?)
GS: I expect that we'll all eventually find out the answer to that one. For now, though, we might as well be molecules of water in a pond, wondering about existence after evaporation, or what it was like before the mountain ice melted which formed us in the first place.
AP: What are your plans for the future? Do you have anything you have been yearning to do or do you just live life day to day?
GS: Biggest plan it to get my new book published and out there. Once that is done I am free to do whatever is desired or required and trust that my life will continue to be filled with interesting and uplifting events and people.
AP: If there was one piece of advice you would like to pass on to our readers about life, the universe and everything, what would that be?
Gregory Sams: Enjoy and appreciate it. That's the point of it.
Andrew P. is the editor of the on-line political magazine EnergyGrid, from which this article is a reprint.