Why does it feel like the world is falling apart? | Brian Klaas
Big Think
Navigating the Edge of Chaos: The Sand Pile Model and Systemic Instability
This chapter delves into the sand pile model to explain self-organized criticality, highlighting how small changes can result in large-scale collapses. It emphasizes the dangers of over-reliance on efficiency in modern society and the importance of being prepared for unpredictable black swan events.
**The Hidden Fragility of Modern Life: Why the Future Is More Unpredictable Than Ever**
We live in a world unlike any before—**safe, stable, predictable... Or so it seems.** But beneath the surface, we’ve built a system so **delicately balanced** that a single grain of sand can send everything crashing down.
Hunter-gatherers faced **local chaos but global stability**—their daily lives were unpredictable, but the world itself changed slowly. Today, we’ve flipped that equation: **our lives feel stable, but the world is more volatile than ever.** Democracies are crumbling. Rivers are drying up. A random event—one war, one market crash, one algorithm shift—can send shockwaves across the planet.
The problem? We still think in **linear terms**: small causes lead to small effects. But the real world is **nonlinear**—a butterfly’s wing can unleash a hurricane. Complex systems don’t just break; they **adapt, shift, and collapse in ways we never see coming.**
From the **Arab Spring** to the **2020 pandemic**, history proves that **our predictions fail when the world itself changes beneath our feet.** And yet, we trust AI, markets, and governments to guide us using outdated models, blind to the hidden tipping points that could rewrite everything overnight.
Are we living on the edge of **a global sandpile**, where the next black swan event is not just possible but inevitable? And if so—**what happens when it finally topples?**
🔮 **This episode is a wake-up call.** The future is coming faster than we think—and it won’t wait for us to catch up.
“We've engineered a volatile world where Starbucks is completely unchanging from year to year, but democracies are collapsing and rivers are drying up.”
As modern humans we experience a different world and experience than anyone who has ever come before us. This is because we've inverted the dynamics of how our lives unfold. We live on a planet defined by local stability, but global instability. The hunter-gatherers that came before us lived in a world that was defined by local instability, but global stability, says political scientist Dr. Brian Klaas.As hunter-gatherers, their day-to-day lives in their local environment was unpredictable. Now we have flipped that world. We experience local stability, but global instability. We have extreme regularity in our daily lives. We can order products online and expect exactly when they're going to arrive. We can go to Starbucks anywhere in the world and it's going to taste roughly the same. But our world is changing faster than it ever has before. Consequentially, when things do go wrong, the ripple effects are much more profound and much more immediate. This is where that sort of aspect of global instability becomes very dangerous.Timestamps: 0:00: Modern volatility1:20: Complex systems theory6:06: The sandpile model6:47: Basins of attraction7:49: Black swan events
About Brian Klaas:Dr. Brian Klaas is an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London, an affiliate researcher at the University of Oxford, and a contributing writer for The Atlantic. He is also the author five books, including Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters and Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us. Klaas writes the popular The Garden of Forking Paths Substack and created the award-winning Power Corrupts podcast, which has been downloaded roughly three million times.Klaas is an expert on democracy, authoritarianism, American politics, political violence, elections, and the nature of power. Additionally, his research interests include contingency, chaos theory, evolutionary biology, the philosophy of science and social science, and complex systems. In addition to Fluke and Corruptible, Klaas authored three earlier books: The Despot's Apprentice: Donald Trump's Attack on Democracy; The Despot's Accomplice: How the West is Aiding & Abetting the Decline of Democracy, and How to Rig an Election
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