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her paralysis, was always cheerful and ready to listen to other people’s troubles; a teenage camp counselor who, when a swimmer was missing and everybody else panicked, kept his head and organized a successful rescue effort; a female executive who, despite ridicule and sexist pressures, prevailed in a difficult working environment; and Ignaz Semmelweis, the Hungarian physician who in the last century insisted that the lives of many mothers could be saved at childbirth if obstetricians would only wash their hands, even though the rest of the doctors ignored and mocked him. These and the many hundreds of others mentioned were respected for the same reasons: They stood firm for what they believed in, and didn’t let opposition daunt them. They had courage, or what in earlier time was known simply as “virtue”—a term derived from the Latin word vir, or man.

It makes sense, of course, that people should look up to this one quality more than to any other. Of all the virtues we can learn no trait is more useful, more essential for survival, and more likely to improve the quality of life than the ability to transform adversity into an enjoyable challenge. To admire this quality means that we pay attention to those who embody it, and we thereby have a chance to emulate them if the need arises. Therefore admiring courage is in itself a positive adaptive trait; those who do so may be better prepared to ward off the blows of misfortune.

But simply calling the ability to cheat chaos “transformational coping,” and people who are good at it “courageous,” falls short of explaining this remarkable gift. Like the character in Moliere who said that sleep was caused by “dormitive power,” we fail to illuminate matters if we say that effective coping is caused by the virtue of courage. What we need is not only names and descriptions, but an understanding of how the process works. Unfortunately our ignorance in this matter is still very great.

THE POWER OF DISSIPATIVE STRUCTURES

One fact that does seem clear, however, is that the ability to make order out of chaos is not unique to psychological processes. In fact, according to some views of evolution, complex life forms depend for their existence on a capacity to extract energy out of entropy—to recycle waste into structured order. The Nobel prize-winning chemist Ilya Prigogine calls physical systems that harness energy which otherwise would be dispersed and lost in random motion “dissipative structures.” For example, the entire vegetable kingdom on our planet is a huge dissipative structure because it feeds on light, which normally would be a useless by-product of the sun’s combustion. Plants have found a way to transform this wasted energy into the building blocks out of which leaves, flowers, fruit, bark, and timber are fashioned. And because without plants there would be no animals, all life on earth is ultimately made possible by dissipative structures that capture chaos and shape it into a more complex order.

Human beings have also managed to utilize waste energy to serve their goals. The first major technological invention, that of fire, is a good example. In the beginning, fires started at random: volcanoes, lightning, and spontaneous combustion ignited fuel here and there, and the energy of the decomposing timber was dispersed without purpose. As they learned to take control over fire people used the dissipating energy to warm their caves, cook their food, and finally to smelt and forge objects made of metal. Engines run by steam, electricity, gasoline, and nuclear fusion are also based on the same principle: to take advantage of energy that otherwise would be lost, or opposed to our goals. Unless men learned various tricks for transforming the forces of disorder into something they could use, we would not have survived as successfully as we have.

The psyche, as we have seen, operates according to similar principles. The integrity of the self depends on the ability to take neutral or destructive events and turn them into positive ones. Getting fired could be a godsend, if one