Catastrophe Theory

Every so often, a metaphor supremely descriptive of the current Zeitgeist unexpectedly bubbles up from divers sources all at once. The current one is the concept of the tipping point, popularized by a book of that title published in 2000 by Malcolm Gladwell. Gladwell defined a tipping point as "the moment of critical mass, the threshold, the boiling point."

Conservative commentators such as Glenn Beck and Bill O'Reilly have applied the metaphor to the recent 2010 elections. A cogent article by James Gannon summarized this idea nicely in The American Spectator. It is probably only a matter of time before it is applied as well to the unexpectedly nascent Tunisian and Egyptian popular uprisings.

There might be a larger scope to the concept, though. I've been giving a lot of thought to the broad sweep of change that has occurred in our society in the past few years. While not as sever as the Great Depression, we call it the Great Recession--but it is no more limited to economic machinations, as it is limited to the vagaries of political football.

I confess I haven't gotten my head around it yet. I can only speak to my poor singleton's perception of it. A few surrealistic motifs of my youth come to mind. The rapid, precipitous changes in social economic and political structures I call the Wave of Mutilation.

As to causes and mechanics of the tectonic changes we've seen, I can't help going back to a memory from graduate school, when in the engineering library I found a curiously titled book: Catastrophe Theory. In short, this is the study of how built structures fail. The most interesting thing I discovered about such failures is that almost always, the integrity of the structure holds within normal variances until stress brings it to a catastrophic and irreversible failure point.

In other words, things look peachy until they suddenly go pear-shaped.