It appears that the free market is a confidence game, and that when confidence falters, chaos can run wild. So here is the view of one confident chaopsychologist...

Chemistry emerges from physics, biology emerges from chemistry, psychology emerges from biology, sociology emerges from psychology, and so on, with various emergent branches within and across each of the different disciplines. At SCTPLS, we have the tradition of passing nested Russian dolls on to each new society president as a symbol of this outlook. Parts interact to create new irreducible wholes, which serve as parts for new irreducible wholes and so on. Apparently, this occurs not only across scales from small to large - parts of an inseparable whole, but also across great distances of apparent space - where the here is connected to there; and finally across time, where one finds that future and past are also inseparable.

Let's turn to the universal experience of "BAD APPLES" - as in "One bad apple spoils the bunch." Bad apples are those acquaintances, family members and co-workers whose mere presence can suck the life right out of you. They also kill the ‘good energy' of the larger group.

And now for the third and final installment of our introduction to chaos, complexity and randomness as portrayed by the primary characters in the movie Batman....

Okay, so where we left off in part I: we now know the basics of what chaos is, from "chaos theory," and we are wondering if this really relates to the character Joker, from the new Batman film. And on a broader level, I want to explore whether or not this type of chaos is bad, as people (Westerners at least) do typically think that chaos is bad. Is ‘deterministic chaos' like the force of the evil Joker, the bad Anarchist (there are good anarchists by the way - like Noam Chomsky)?

Anyone who knows the comic will know about the characters and what they represent: 1) The Joker = chaos, 2) The Batman = order; 3) Two Face = pure chance. There are many lines in the film which "spank your face" with these metaphors, and if the acting was not so good, the joker's lines could have easily been over the top in making the deeper, existential questions within the film too obvious and contrived for most moviegoers.

Many of you will have heard of the concepts of: "Chaos Theory" "The Butterfly Effect" or maybe even "Emergence" "Fractals" "Complexity" or "Catastrophe" theories. Each of these is an example of a nonlinear dynamic. My challenge in this blog will be to make nonlinear dynamics understandable and interesting to you. My experience thus far has been that everything in psychology is a part of a nonlinear system. So we will be able to talk about nearly any topic here. That will help to keep things interesting.