The soothing voices of experts - the sound that always made sense of a chaotic world and reassured us that all would be well - first turned into clanging and then a whimper by the end of 2008.

When things were good, there was no end of optimistic advice. Suddenly, though, between market crashes and political turmoil and a massive alleged Ponzi scheme, when most everyone was looking for some explanation about how everything could seemingly unravel so quickly, no one had any real answers. And apparently none of the experts had seen the disaster coming or could say with any certainty what's coming next.

Thomas Homer-Dixon, a teacher and author whose research has focused on how societies adapt to complex social change, said the bleak truth is no one really knows what is going on.

"The experts with real insight and integrity will simply admit they don't know what's happening at this point," he said. "Whether we're talking about the global economy or climate or any one of the other challenges we're facing right now -- any kind of prediction is pointless.

"What's been damaged here is confidence in a really profound way. Every time these experts shift, or jettison some policy that they announced as the sure-fire fix, it gets worse."

Lehman Brothers was allowed to fail because of a refusal to offer bailouts and then Washington reversed itself by giving American International Group US$85-billion to stay afloat. U.S. Treasury secretary Henry Paulson helped put together a US$700-billion bailout to help the dying credit market and then one day decided it was not such a good idea after all. Parliament, when it should have been working to figure a way out of the economic mess, decided to hold a brawl. All those reassurances that the economy was fundamentally sound became so much smoke.

As a New York Times editorial put it on Dec. 15: "[T]he Fed and the Treasury have changed their story about how the calamity unfolded. No one expects a perfect performance in the thick of a crisis. But an after-the-fact revision of what happened at best raises questions and worse, looks like an attempt to dodge accountability."

But it may also be that everything has become so complex that it is beyond any one person or even government to understand all the links, let alone come up with workable solutions.

Rome collapsed under the weight of its own complexity but what the ancients faced then was nothing compared to what we going through now, said Prof. Homer-Dixon, who teaches at the University of Waterloo.

Just think about how sub-prime mortgages, the kind of things being sold out of suburban strip malls and industrial parks, managed to freeze the world's entire credit system.

"In many cases our complex institutions and technologies and arrangements and events within our society exceed human cognitive ability. There are so many unknown connections within the system that are really opaque to us," Prof. Homer-Dixon said.

"A lot of people who are at the centre of the storm, who are supposed leaders and senior decision-makers did not understand major financial innovations and could not anticipate the connections that developed within the system. So that's a kind of consequence of complexity that in many respects is new."

For Paul Ritvo, a research scientist at the University Health Network in Toronto, the problem may be that there are not competent leaders who have a bold enough strategy to get us through this mess.

"It is wrong to say that no one seems capable of fixing the big problems," Dr. Ritvo said. "It is right, however, to say the solutions needed are bigger than ever before. That is where some leaders fade out and fog out. They get anxious about staking their future on a big idea -- not because they think the big idea is wrong -- but because they keep worrying that people are not ready for such a big change."

Earlier this month, George W. Bush, the U.S. President, was on television explaining the complexity of the world's financial systems by linking the fingers of both his hands. He used the same gesture when the banks began tumbling earlier in the fall. As far as expressions go, it did not suggest mastery of the economic file.

That kind of apparent chaos and institutional paralysis has a real psychological impact on society, said William Koch, who teaches clinical psychology at the University of British Columbia.

It can turn into a nasty spiral, he said, in which people will either begin behaving "maladaptively," because no one is sure what the right course is, or we just throw up our hands or say the hell with it all.

Dr. Ritvo said he is not so sure that people feel that let down by their leaders, because they never gave them that much credit to begin with.

But what is disturbing, he said, is even when we suspect those in charge are incompetent we react with "passivity."

"That is a major concern," he said.

No ordinary person could have been expected to see the massive shocks to the system that sent markets tumbling an astounding 40%. Yet, the impact may be worse, especially in Canada, because of such unhealthy dependency on others to direct our lives.

"Canadian tolerance mixes with Canadian passivity," Dr. Ritvo said. "We must sustain the tolerance while shedding passivity."

"What should I have learned about all of this?" Prof. Homer-Dixon said. "One of the lessons is that next time we should not trust the experts so much. I think people too readily hand over their fate to others. You have to take some responsibility for your own wellbeing and learn about the world. Take part in the democratic conversation and not just depend on experts. Don't assume other people will take care of you."

National Post

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