To control, is knowledge alone enough? It is certain that we cannot control without knowledge, but can we substitute knowledge for action? This is a well-worn debate in which many try to argue the principle that technology will eventually allow us to validate Condorcet, Laplace and Einstein’s hypothesis–that all is contained in a single, universal law and that knowledge of this law will allow us to see into the future and to control mankind. We should not forget that this very principle has been behind the success of the West in the sense that its industrial and war-making capabilities have enabled it to dominate a world seen in its own image. This is the only approach that is recognised by American culture and remains the standard borne by the well-known RAND Corporation. Yet this approach is coming to the end of the road, as has been shown most significantly by the defeat in Iraq—the more so since, beyond the failure of military management and the heavy price paid for excessive reliance on technology, the defeat reveals a disastrous taking of sides within the deterministic principles upon which the approach depends.

Quantum Strategy

Any attempt to build management or decision-taking models presupposes a certain rationality which renders action-reaction cycles understandable, and also a set of fundamental laws which determine individual action. This approach excludes all free-thinking arbiters, and nothing can be modelled outside the chosen framework, since ‘In breaking away from universal determinism, even on a single point, we would upset the entire scientific conception of the world’ (Freud). It is an ideological concept fully taken on board by psychoanalysis, Einsteinian physics and the economy, and one without which they would not exist, but is at the same time a totalitarian thought process which can only operate in isolation and excludes all analytical thought, particularly since freedom would introduce an unacceptable principle of uncertainty.

          Thus it is that European thought has always been divided between determinism and free-thinking, and debate on the issue, which has taken many forms over the centuries, was rekindled in the 1920s at a time when the West seemed to be leaning towards the idea of a scientifically understood and philosophically determined world.