The most poignant exemplar of this addictive behaviour today is the social response to climate change, in which enormous scientific, intellectual, political, diplomatic, and emotional resources have been mobilized to violate all our precepts on a magnificent scale in a top-down, knowledge-based control fantasy aimed at modifying the evolution of the coupled human-Earth system in particular ways.

It is a widely held notion that we are a disillusioned people living in a disenchanted age. Indeed, a belief that scientific advance inevitably leads to the demystification of the world - an eventuality that is sometimes celebrated and sometimes deplored - is so prevalent that is virtually a modern axiom.
But to interpret mystery so passively - to think of it as being merely the effect of ignorance - is to neglect the implications of the active verb form: to mystify. Mystification does not, exclusively, happen: it can also be enacted. To mystify and to demystify are valid alternatives which humans can, if they choose, use in the pursuit of their individual or collective purposes.

Why is wicked complexity so difficult to manage? Well, to begin with, the systems giving rise to the problem cannot be definitively described or defined. Drawing boundaries around such systems is necessarily arbitrary; any effort to define the system thus oversimplifies other aspects of it, and downplays or ignores critical couplings between what you have defined and other, external factors.