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Creative Insight Writ Large 163

in particular that lasted from 1929, when the Soviet regime officially elevated
Lysenko to a leadership role, to 1964, when Lysenko died. Societies with
monolithic ideologies invent less than those in which the right to dissent is
recognized in principle and protected in practice, because creativity essentially
depends on being able to adopt another perspective, another representation of
the matter at hand.
Although centralized power structures are perhaps more often agents of
stagnation, they can also facilitate change. The historical analogue to the relax-
ation of constraints is the repeal of regulations and laws. Although lawmakers
are more prone to create laws than to cancel them, there are examples to the
contrary. During a short period in the middle 1980s, the government of New
Zealand overhauled an entire set of economic practices, institutions and regu-
lations, including deregulation of the labor market, elimination of agricultural
subsidies, privatization of state assets and revision of monetary policy to focus
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on preventing inflation. The triggering factor was a gross case of negative feed-
back: Economic indicators showed that the New Zealand economy was not
working and the situation became so dire that the government fell. Multiple
reforms were executed in quick succession by those who took over. Two decades
later, New Zealand’s economy was still changing rapidly as various economic
agents – banks, firms, individuals – expanded into the new possibility space.
In short, forward projection of past concepts, principles and practices can
cause unwarranted periods of stagnation in historical systems, and the relax-
ation of constraints in response to internal or external events can prepare the
way for a period of rapid change. But the explanatory power of these concepts
is limited at the historical level by the complexity of the mechanisms that pro-
duce and maintain the official stance of the historical entity.
The situation is parallel with respect to the scaling of insights. In principle,
if a single member of a historical system has an insight, that system is in posses-
sion of that insight. In some cases, an individual event punches through in the
manner of a butterfly effect, causing consequences that are larger than itself, as
when the loss of a shoe means the loss of a horse, which in turn means defeat
in battle and the loss of a kingdom. Examples are ready at hand. Consider once
again the idea that perhaps we can detect enemy airplanes at a distance by bounc-
ing radio waves off them. This insight initiated work on radar, and radar had
a decisive effect on the outcome of the Battle of Britain in particular and of
World War II in general, with worldwide consequences for the postwar world,
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as fine a butterfly effect as ever flitted through the pages of history. World
War II is a breeding ground for butterflies of this sort: the novel code-break-
ing techniques that allowed the Allied forces to listen in on German military