Systems substitute internal ordering for environmental complexity

Evidence

The fact is that all internal processes – and it is precisely here that the meaning of the difference between ‘inner’ and ‘outer’ is to be found – work at a lower level of complexity and hence exhibit fewer possibilities, or more order, than their environment. They work selectively; relationships between data in their environment are taken in and operated upon as information relevant to the system. Thus they substitute the internal ordering of data-processing for the original amorphous complexity of the environment, and the problems of this internal order are fed into the system as the normal working basis for adapting to the environment. — Niklas Luhmann, Trust and Power, 153

Categorization

• XREF: The substitution of internal ordering for raw environment is the mechanism by which Stevens’s professional world orders an otherwise morally amorphous political reality.