Science Quote by David Bohm

Bohm is doing something slyly radical here: he takes the corporate org chart - the most familiar modern icon of fragmentation - and uses it to smuggle in a holistic worldview. By starting with departments that "don't have any meaning separately", he drains the usual glamour from specialization. A department isn’t a mini-kingdom; it’s an organ. Its purpose is relational, not self-contained. The example is strategically unromantic: not ecosystems or galaxies, but bureaucracy. He wants you to notice that even our most mechanized institutions only work by interdependence, then carry that insight into how you think about bodies and societies.

The subtext is a critique of the modern habit of mistaking parts for wholes: treating people as job titles, problems as discrete "issues", knowledge as siloed expertise. Bohm, a physicist associated with critiques of reductionism, is nudging listeners toward his larger preoccupation: the limits of analyzing reality by chopping it into pieces. "Society is a system in some sense" is deliberately cautious, but it’s also a dare. If you accept systems-thinking for the corporation and the body, why resist it when it implicates politics, economics, even identity?

Context matters: Bohm lived through an era when science, management, and the state all doubled down on compartmentalization - Cold War technocracy, assembly-line logic, academic specialization. His cadence ("and so on") signals that the list is infinite; the point is not any single system, but the pattern. The rhetoric works because it re-frames meaning as emergent: not located inside parts, but produced by their relationships.