When you exclaim, “that’s the last straw!” you express a fundamental principle we all know but mostly ignore. In science it’s called “nonlinearity.” If you load the back of a camel, you can add load after load and the camel will adjust and cope—until the load reaches the limit of the camel’s carrying capacity. Then, as the expression has it, just one more straw will break its back. A stepwise process that proceeded smoothly, “linearly” becomes suddenly abrupt, “nonlinear.”
This is what happens throughout nature. A living species can cope with changes in its environment—up to a point. When those changes accumulate, the stress reaches a critical point and the species dies out. Unless, of course, it mutates. In relatively simple systems critical points lead to breakdown. In more complex systems these critical points are tipping points: they can go one way or another. They do not lead inevitably to breakdown, they can also lead to breakthrough.
In 1989 a group of East German refugees received permission to cross the iron curtain to Austria. This was the small but critical shock to the system that broke its back—it was “the last straw.” In a matter of weeks the Communist-dominated East European states seceded from the Soviet Union, and less than a year later the Soviet Union ceased to exist. The Soviet Communist Party, the most powerful political party in the world, not just lost power, it was actually outlawed. The States that comprised the Soviet Union did not disappear: after a period of chaos and near-breakdown, they managed to transform into more open societies.
In the last ten thousand years many societies, entire civilizations, reached critical tipping points. Once flowering cultures vanished—the Babylonians, the Sumerians, the Mayans, the Easter Islanders are examples. But others met the challenge: they transformed and survived. History testifies that the transformations were often profound. And in the course of time, they became more and more “abrupt.” The profound change that first took millennia later took only centuries. Then it took but decades—now it’s taking just years.
