Dirty Hands

Your hands are dirty and greasy, so you wash them.

Both hands are dirty, but oddly enough, each is the tool by which the other gets cleaned. You start by gooping a little hand soap in there, so you also have to wash the hand soap container. All three things are dirty and greasy, and without any non-dirty, non-greasy outside tools, the whole system just ends up clean in the end.

Strange, no? Clean seems to emerge from a system with no clean parts.

The entire system is dirty, but there is a process by which it can become clean. This cleanliness is a byproduct of this process, so a clean system emerges from the mess.

This word—emergence—makes a great metaphor to describe any time when some unexpected complexity crops up. The key thing that defines emergence is that the component parts don’t seem to add up to all this complexity.

You start with a dirty system, add an ingredient, and the system becomes cleaner as soap molecules work their magic:

When you wash your hands, soap works by emulsifying the grease, allowing it to be carried away by water. Something called a micelle is created—this is a bubble of soap molecules with grease trapped inside. These micelles are washed away by water, leaving behind a pair of clean hands.

You don’t have a designated clean hand when this whole process begins, but it feels a bit like you should have one. Of course, you’re thinking about the added ingredient—the soap, thinking this cleanliness did not come out of nowhere.

Fair enough! Here’s a better example for you.

Ever hear the phrase fight fire with fire? This probably sounds pretty silly upon first hearing it, but sometimes you need to do a controlled burn in order to prevent a forest fire from engulfing your town.

Here, you start with a dirty system—a burning fire—and you add in the very ingredient that would make the system more dirty—fire. Burned out areas prevent fire from spreading, so getting ahead of a fire in this way is the right move.

Vaccines, too, fight fire with fire, but this time the rules are inverted. You start with a clean system—clean of the virus or disease you want to introduce, anyway—and you add something dirty in there.

When you’re exposed to, say, measles, your body’s immune system has the ability to fight back now that it has been exposed to a tiny amount of the disease, defeated it, and kept those defenses around just in case.