THE LONG VIEW

Every time a society’s rule-book grows thicker than a human can carry, people start flipping coins again. In sixth-century BC China the written laws cast on iron cauldrons provoked sages to champion the unwritten ‘li’; in Enlightenment Europe the clog of statutory codes sent Romantic poets back to oracles; in the 1960s the super-computer’s promise of perfect causality drove Watts to yarrow stalks. Today, when GitHub’s terms of service exceed the length of the Dao De Jing and no mortal can audit a neural net’s billion weights, the smartest kids download I Ching bots and ask GPT to cast their hexagram. The pattern is not that we abandon reason—it is that reason, when over-codified, always summons its opposite out of the collective unconscious. The coin is still spinning; the only question is whether we remember that the flip itself is the lesson, not the answer it lands on.