How Chaos Theory Explains Trump’s Rise To Power

CHRISTIANE AMANPOUR, CHIEF INTERNATIONAL ANCHOR: Next, how does randomness shape our lives from the personal to the geopolitical? Brian Klaas, a political scientist and professor at University College London, is the author of the new book, “Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.” Walter Isaacson speaks with him on what chaos theory can teach us about the way the world really works.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

WALTER ISAACSON, CO-HOST, AMANPOUR AND CO.: Thank you, Christiane. And Brian Klaas, welcome to the show.

BRIAN KLAAS, AUTHOR, “FLUKE “: Thanks for having me here.

ISAACSON: Your new book is called “Fluke.” The subtitle is “Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters.” Let’s start by just explaining, what is a fluke?

KLAAS: A fluke is a highly consequential event that happens by chance or is arbitrary or random. And so, I argue in the book that our world is shaped by these and our lives are shaped by these much more than we imagine, but we just pretend otherwise because it’s much nicer to imagine that we have neat and tidy stories to make sense of our world and our own lives.

ISAACSON: Well, one example I think you use is the Arab Spring, a Tunisian vendor. Explain how that does that.

KLAAS: Yes, so you’ve got a sort of moment in the Middle East in late 2010, where there’s a lot of people who are pretty angry at their dictatorships. And all of a sudden, one of those angry people decides to light himself on fire in Central Tunisia, Mohamed Bouazizi. And this spark creates a conflagration that basically consumes the entire Middle East, leads to several regimes collapsing, and then also, the Syrian civil war, which hundreds of thousands of people died in. And so, when you think about this, you think about, you know, would this have happened but for this trigger in Tunisia? And I think this is the sort of way that our world works, is partly between order and disorder, where you have these trends and these sorts of aspects where you get towards what’s called the tipping point or the edge of chaos, and then a single thing can tip you over that edge and create an extremely consequential event that shifts how the world works.

ISAACSON: Well, let me push back on talk about things which you address in the book, which is — and let’s take the Arab Spring. The world seemed ready for that. As you said, there was all the kindling was there for it. Had that one Tunisian event not have happened, isn’t it likely that there still would have been an Arab Spring and that these random events actually don’t cause things? They’re just like the tiny spark and there’d be other sparks?

KLAAS: Well, I don’t think so. And I think the nature of the spark matters as well, right? So, the visceral nature of this protest did create protest movements in Tunisia, and then those spread further, right? Now, what you are right about, and this is something I do explain in “Fluke,” is that there’s this thing called self-organized criticality or the sand pile model, which I’m borrowing from physics, which helps make sense of how these triggers or avalanches can be produced. So, if you imagine sort of adding a grain of sand to a pile over and over and over, eventually, that pile of sand gets so tall that a single grain can cause an avalanche. And what I’m arguing is that in the Arab Spring case, for example, the grain of sand, the sand pile was really, really tall. So, it just took that one extra person to cause the collapse. Now, I think there’s a problem here because I think that we have designed a world that is particularly prone to these avalanches because the sand pile is extremely high by design. And what I mean by that is that you have this sort of system that operates with optimization and efficiency as its main priorities. And this means that we have no slack in the system. So, you know, a couple of years ago, a gust of wind hit a boat in the Suez Canal and twisted it sideways. And it caused over $50 billion of economic damage, which was never possible for one boat to do in the past. And so, you know, I think what we’re doing is we’re basically creating a world in which those avalanches, those sparks, as I put them before, are more consequential and more likely to upend our social lives.

ISAACSON: So, is the problem the sand piles that have become precarious, or is the problem the one grain of sand that happens to come in?

KLAAS: So, it’s both. And they couldn’t exist without each other. Because, you know, if you have somebody like themselves on fire in Norway tomorrow, it’s not going to cause a revolution, because the system has slack and people are happy, right? Now, in the Middle East, there are people who are unhappy with their dictatorships for a very long time, and there weren’t mass protests and there weren’t large-scale civil wars, and then all of a sudden, they happened all at once. I go through an example in the book of something similar to explain this dynamic of the onset of World War 1, which many historians have debated. And I talk about the sort of, you know, the standard story is the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, where he sputters to a stop right next to his assassin. And that’s the fluke that triggers the war. Now, of course, you had to have all sorts of other things in place for that to actually happen. This series of alliances that made it more likely that a single death could actually create a world conflict. But I also talk about in the book how he almost died in a hunting accident many months before that when he was in England. And if that had happened, I don’t know if World War I would have started. But I certainly know that it would not have happened in the same way. And I think what we often do is we have this sort of binary categories. The war starts or it doesn’t. And actually, what I’m arguing through chaos theory is that the way the war starts is also important. So, if it’s triggered by an assassination or if the guy gets killed in an accident, in a hunting accident, that will affect world history. And I think instead what we try to do is impose these really, you know, sort of storybook narratives on how the world works. And they write out this noise that I actually think is highly consequential in how the world works.

ISAACSON: One of the other examples you use is Donald Trump being at the White House correspondent’s dinner and being the subject of a Barack Obama scathing comic routine. And so, he decides to run for president. Using that type of, OK, that was a fluke that had lots of consequences, doesn’t that have a bit of a danger of people like me, who was covering things at the time, we miss something big in this country, which was a deep resentment that was going to lead to somebody like Donald Trump, and for that matter, Donald Trump was somehow or another going to get in this race one way or the other? Don’t we miss the importance of the big forces when we look for the flukes?

KLAAS: Yes. So, I agree with your highlighting there, because I think that one of the things that we do need to be aware of is how high the sand pile is, to go back to the previous analogy, right? So, we have an obligation to explain our world with what I think are two things. One is that sometimes there is much more arbitrary and accidental forces that do matter, right? And we’re constantly told to focus on the signal and ignore the noise. And the argument I’m making is that the noise actually has some pretty profound consequences for the way the world works. But it’s also thinking about why are we more prone to flukes than we are in the past, right? I think we’ve upended the way the situation in in sort of global affairs has used to work compared to how it works today. So, for example, when you think about, like, the vast stretch of human history, most people dealt with uncertainty in their daily life. They had to deal with the question of, you know, how you find food, or whether you’re going to be eaten by a saber-tooth tiger, but the world didn’t change that much year to year. And what we have now is we have a world where, you know, Starbucks is always the same, but democracies are collapsing and rivers are drying up. And I think that to your point — to your question is suggesting that we’ve created a world with less slack So that you have these long-term trends that create worlds in which flukes can actually have high, high consequences. So, if we had dealt with the problem of the lingering resentment in the American public, then Trump might have had a joke told about him. He might have run for office and he would have gotten 0 percent of the vote. So, I think that the combination of order and disorder or flukes on these long- term trends, they’re the way that the world actually works. And I think what we do instead is we tend to focus on the sort of big explanations, the long-term explanations for social change, and I think these pivot points that can start with a joke do actually change the world.

ISAACSON: You say that one of the mistakes we make in looking at history or looking at our times is that we impose — I’m not sure you use the word imposed, but we have a narrative arc that we tend to believe in, and that leads us to believe in conspiracy theories. Explain that to me.

KLAAS: Yes. So, humans are basically pattern detection machines, right? We’ve evolved to have brains that latch on to patterns. And that’s because having a false positive, where you think there might be a saber-toothed tiger lurking in the grass when you see it, you know, rustling, that’s not going to lead to your death. But if you have a false negative where there is a pattern and you don’t detect it, so you see rustling in the grass and you don’t think there’s a tiger there, you will die. So, evolution has basically overengineered our brains to be sensitive to patterns. Now, this relates to conspiracy theories because sometimes random events happen, and also sometimes small changes can have really big impacts, and our brains are basically allergic to that line of thinking. So, when you look at something like Princess Diana’s death, which was a big moment in British history, there is this sort of resistance to the idea that you have, you know, a small, banal car accident causing these major events in geopolitics or in world affairs. And the same is true for QAnon. When you think about, you know, conspiracy theories like QAnon, it’s a story that makes sense of this sort of hidden truth, of a hidden pattern that you can be inducted into. And the debunkers, the people who tell you facts about the conspiracy theory, they’re telling you there is no story, right? And so, our brains are much more likely to gravitate towards not just a story, but a really good story. I mean, the story is a thriller if it were fictionalized. And so, I think this is the danger about conspiracy theories is that we tend to make sense of these sort of seemingly unrelated data points with a stitching together that ends up being a really seductive conspiracy theory, and it’s one of the reasons why they’re so sticky. I mean, one of the problems we have is it’s so hard to debunk them because you’re telling the storytelling animal, which is what humans are. Ignore the story. There is no story. And I think that’s one of the ways that is most useful to think about the persistence of these theories that sway our politics and unfortunately, creates real world action based on the lie.

ISAACSON: When it comes to the reach of conspiracy theories, how does the U.S. compare to the rest of the world?

KLAAS: The U.S. has more of a problem with conspiracy theories than other peer countries. And that’s because politicians have popularized them more than in other peer countries. So, I live in the U.K. I’m from the U.S. and you see a mainstreaming of conspiracy theories within political parties more in the United States than in the rest of Europe and so on. And so, I think this is a danger that does exacerbate the problem when elites or people who are in politics start to peddle conspiracy theories as a way to win votes, and that is a uniquely American phenomenon. Not that is — that’s a phenomenon that’s much more prominent in the United States than in other peer democracies.

ISAACSON: And has it gotten worse in terms of conspiracy theories? Or is it no worse than it was during the Salem witch trials?

KLAAS: So, we’ve always been pattern detection machines. The difference is how we get information. So, when you think about the internet, I think there’s a really profound shift that the internet has produced, which has never happened before. So, every other form of technological revolution around information has expanded the number of people who can consume information, right? So, the printing press, the radio, the television, et cetera, all of that created a larger audience. But the people who could produce information and theories about the way the world works was still pretty small. And you had to actually seek out conspiracism in — you know, in the distant past. It was harder to get. Whereas now, because anyone can produce information and it can spread really, really fast on the internet, you have the proliferation of conspiracy theories that were exposed to more often, and algorithms that often amplify them. So, a person who would not have sought out a conspiracy theory in the past is now being shown one by design from, you know, tech algorithms and so on. And so, I don’t think it’s that we’ve changed, I think it’s the way that our information pipelines operate has shifted. And that’s made them more influential in modern politics.

ISAACSON: One of the ways people think about how history changes is partly grand forces, it’s partly the role of people, it’s partly as you do in this book, the role of flukes. But there’s also, as you’ve described in the book, the role of technology. That suddenly movable type printing comes along and you can have a reformation way in Europe. Tell me how your book fits into the role of what technology is doing to change our lives.

KLAAS: Yes. So, technology is a huge driver of change in the human experience, but I think that one of the things that we don’t appreciate is how timing of technology also matters, right? So, I do use this example in the book where I talk about the printing press and how it locked in the English language of this specific snapshot in time, and the language has changed a lot less since then, because the technology solidified how the written word had to be printed, right? It became standardized. Now, I think about this a little bit with the pandemic right now, right? So, let’s imagine that the exact same virus mutated in Wuhan in 1985. The economy would have been radically different compared to how it unfolded in the 2020 pandemic, because working from home on Zoom was impossible in 1985, right? So, technology is one of these things that has these grand forces. And yes, there’s going to be innovation. Some of them are going to happen regardless, because it’s just going to work. And I think that, you know, some innovations are inevitable. Fire was always going to be discovered by humans. The timing might have been a little bit different. But the moment of the discovery, I think, is really important, as is the person who discovers it. And I think, for example, smartphones would have unfolded a little bit differently if Steve Jobs had not been one of the people who was behind their innovation and popularization. So, you know, I think there’s a sort of interplay between these grand forces, these individuals, these accidents, and the moments, or the eras in which the technology emerges. And all of the matter. I think if you just hold one of them constant, you don’t actually have the exact same world unfold.

ISAACSON: One of the great technological forces that’s about to hit us, or has already hit us, is artificial intelligence, especially personal A.I., where everything can be personalized. I can use chatbots, and news organizations can, or people who are trying to run political campaigns can. How is that going to fit into your theory?

KLAAS: Yes. So, I think it’s a danger. And the reason I think it’s a danger is, you know, you go back to the philosopher David Hume several 100 years ago. He basically raised this problem of how can you know that the past — the patterns of the past are going to be predictive of the patterns of the future? And that was already something people were worried about with reason in the past. Now, I think they have even more reason to be worried about it because our world is changing so quickly. And yet, A.I. is still trained on past patterns, right? I mean, this is the kind of stuff where machine learning is derived from training data and it says, this is how the world works. The problem is, you can start to get into trouble, A, if you think that you have certainty in an uncertain world, which I think we do, and A.I. doesn’t solve that problem. And B, if you think that the past patterns will be predictive of the future, and then the world shifts, right? And all of us understand this idea intuitively because, you know, meteorologists will tell us, oh, there was 100-year flood. And we say, OK, why is there 100-year flood every three years now? It’s because the underlying cause and effect patterns have shifted. And so, if A.I., you know, development is not careful to this problem, I think we can engineer a world of false certainty of hubris around these new tools that gets us into serious danger that’s avoidable. So, I’m — I think A.I. is going to be exceptionally good at solving problems in what I call closed systems. You know, medical diagnoses, for example. But it might have some dangers embedded in it with open systems where the past and the future are not aligned. And the training data of the past is actually very misaligned with the underlying cause and effect dynamics in a different world that’s unfolding as we speak.

ISAACSON: How can an understanding of the role of flukes lead us to have a more resilient society, and let me even add a more resilient personal life?

KLAAS: Yes, I like this question because, you know, I think differently about the world and my own life having written this book. I was not the same person three years ago. And the reason for that is because I think I – – you know, I grew up in the U.S. where I was sort of told you have to sort of just make your own path. This sort of individualist mindset, the American dream and so on. And it’s a culture that is extremely focused on control, right? And I describe in the book how I was living, you know, what I described as a checklist existence. And I think when you start to think about the role of these forces that are sometimes arbitrary, accidental, and random, and also the chaos theory, the ripple effects of our decisions, it starts to liberate you a little bit, right? It starts to make you feel like, you know what, it’s maybe OK if I don’t have so much top-down control. And that’s what I’ve internalized as a lesson from the book. In terms of society, I think the main lesson is resilience. I think that we have the tools to give us the illusion of control more than ever before. Because we have so much predictability and stability in our daily lives that we start to think that our world is also stable. And in fact, it’s the opposite. The stability in our daily lives is happening at the same time as the world is changing faster and more profoundly than ever before in human history. So, in my view, this is something where politicians, economists, et cetera, need to understand that they are creating a world without slack, and the flukes are always going to be there. So, instead of imagining that we can have this top-down control, I think we have to have a little bit less hubris and also accept the limits of what humans can and cannot control. And I think that’s true for ordinary citizens as well as for politicians who are calling the shots.

ISAACSON: Brian Klaas, thank you so much.

KLAAS: Thanks for having me on the show.