Navigating Chaos

The focus article (click: The Forces Of Chance) recounts an example of that capricious, unknowable, yet all-powerful force known as chance – the way a casual tourist visit to Kyoto led to the eventual sparing of that city from its incineration almost twenty years later in August 1945, or the way a momentary cloud clearing led to the destruction of Nagasaki a few days later (sparing “lucky Kokura”). As Melville wrote, “chance . . . has the last featuring blow at events.”

There seems to be an ongoing hubristic notion of man’s ability to tame, even domesticate, this world of contingency and probability. Perhaps impossible, it is submitted, in that we produce too many models that are often wrong and rarely useful. When we try to explain our social world, we foolishly ignore the flukes. Confidence in a predictable future “is the province of charlatans and fools.”

We’d last discussed man’s reach for probabilistic certainty in our MM 11/20/23 Free Will discussion, with the surface appeal of causality, and thus god-like foresight, by simply knowing the positions, direction, and velocity of every particle in Newton’s deterministic universe. Whoops. Confidence in that so-called Laplace predictive model went out with the introduction of quantum mechanics which shifted our world from determinism to indeterminism (cue, again, the charlatan quote).

It turns out the world works not in terms of linear equations. Maybe go back to eighth grade algebra and recall the impossibility of solving for three unknowns with only two simultaneous equations. Add to that the virtual impossibility of even ascertaining the value of any so-called constant (thereby making it a virtual unknown) and, with it, the collapse of any simplistic linear world certainty. As such, any of those would-be linear regression models – whether applied to the weather, molecular, pandemic, or the social world – are woefully deficient, misleading.

As applied to eight billion people (not to mention all the non-human factors) we now embrace the world of complexity theory sometimes referred to as chaos theory (often labeled as the “butterfly effect” i.e. the flap of butterfly wings ultimately produces a typhoon half-way around the world). This is the world in which seemingly insignificant, random events drive massive changes. Flukes matter.

We might discuss the phenomenon at the macro level, such as the oft-cited example in which the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand was the proximate cause of WWI and forty million dead. That example cries out for its obvious contemporary antithesis with the failure of the Trump assassination attempt, perhaps with it even a contributing factor in his fight, fight, fight appeal and subsequent election (note that the article was written after the attempt but before the election). How a one millimeter difference in the bullet’s trajectory might have made in the course of history, still in its early stages, of course.

Maybe we can then share examples at the retail level in the way a personal fluke translated into some existential hurricane. We are thereby left to consider whether Heraclitus was correct when he wrote “Character is destiny,” or are we, in the final accounting, shaped as the residue of outside, random forces. The same question applies to entire countries.