There's probably a lot of things in my childhood that have planted those seeds...I'm generally enamoured with the idea of decay, failure, and explosive growth. I like to keep a balance, but I seem to keep a balance by dabbling in the extremes lol.
Speaking of which, I've been reading the recent book by Nassim Taleb about
antifragility, after getting interested in his ideas from an interview he did on a podcast I listen to:
http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2012/01/taleb_on_antifr.html
It's a tremendously powerful idea; that attempts to predict and smooth over risk are counter productive, because they allow systemic problems to build up unseen until one giant 'black swan' event wipes out the entire field. He points out that nature tends to use volatility to improve and grow, and in particular use small damages and setbacks as information about the environment.
ie:
Bones and muscles compensate for occasional stress by getting stronger. Letting the bones relax in a space station makes them atrophy. People tend to get health problems after entering retirement because they sit around and do nothing all day after one 'round the world' holiday. Catastrophic forest fires can be avoided by having smaller scale fires to prevent the brush from building up.
The more controversial aspects of his thesis are therefore that centralised government and top down economics tend to be like firemen running around putting out all the fires before they start, which means that regulated societies tend to be exposed to risks of very large events that cannot be forseen by looking at precedents (ie: Fukushima, GFC).
There are more nuances to his arguments than I am making here, but it's a really interesting framework to look at things in terms of risk / redundancy as opposed to efficiency / growth. And Taleb is an interesting academic, considering that he is also a former financier who put his own skin in the game and made good money during events like the financial crisis.
