One of the best things I took away from David Brooks’ The Social Animal is his thinking on emergent systems. His definition:

Emergent systems exist when different elements come together and produce something that is greater than the sum of their parts. Or, to put it differently, the pieces of a system interact, and out of their interaction something entirely new emerges.

In The Social Animal, Brooks calls poverty an emergent system because “the difficult thing about emergence is that it is very hard . . . to find the “root cause” of any problem” because there are multiple roots entwined.

Brooks calls marriage an emergent system. Culture is one, too. I think you can add institutions like churches and schools into the mix as well. I’ve spent years trying to figure out why students are tired all of the time. The problem could be homework, it could be social media, it could be sports, it could be some learning disability, it could be perfectionism, it could be online gaming. “Solving the problem” in one area doesn’t guarantee any kind of success because the problem is bigger than its “constituent parts.”

Brook’s solution? You “surround the person with a new culture . . . an immersive environment” that tells a different and better story. I think the early church got this right: an old world reordered around the real truth of the resurrected and ascended Jesus. And way too many people suffer unnecessarily because we can’t see bad things inadvertently caused by supposedly good systems.