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permissions, and (national) governments through lobbying for or
against regulation with its downward causation.

The Reality of Nested Systems

Most systems are nested within other systems and many systems are
systems of smaller systems. If we take the example of a food shop. The

shop is itself a system with its staff, customers, suppliers, and
neighbors. It also belongs the food system of that town and the larger
food system of that country. It belongs to the retail system locally and
nationally and the economy system locally and nationally, and

probably many more. Therefore it is part of many different systems
most of which are themselves part of other systems. The individuals
that compose the system may or may not be aware of the nested reality,

but aware or not, the effect of their local actions is a (pretty much)
constant availability of two weeks food supply in towns across the
developed Western world.

Understanding the Context: The Problem of Rational
Decisions

All the above implies that the ever-shifting context can be very difficult
to 'wrap your mind around'. The constantly shifting process of

Emergence makes data collection and forecasting to the necessary
degree to support fully rational decisions very difficult and costly, if
not impossible. Additionally, the context in which economic decisions

are made is pervaded by social relations of friendship, kinship, and
networks of personal interactions, these inevitably color otherwise
rational decisions. In fact, we can virtually guarantee that 'rational'
decisions involving context are to a considerable degree inaccurate.

Western thought, dominated by a linear thinking perspective on cause

and effect, has tended to treat problems as if they can be fragmented,
isolated, and solved using rational thinking (the process of
reductionism). Hence, we have such simplifying ideas as ceteris

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