Most systems have the potential to be self organising. With the right feedback and thoughtful, aware, tolerant, adaptive individual cells it is amazing what is possible. Just look at nature and the incredible complexity, and adaptability, that it achieves. Look at what our unbelievably sophisticated bodies achieve every day, often in spite of our attempts to derail them!
So why do we get it so wrong? We don't trust our natural, emergent systems, we impose ideologies, we put small groups of people in charge of large groups of "others", we impose rules based on partial (in both senses of the word) understanding, and then we meddle constantly.
No wonder things go so horribly wrong.
The Obvious? 