A series of flukes

The social world, we are led to believe, is a structured, ordered system. There are rules and patterns. The economy runs on supply and demand curves. Politics is a science. Even human beliefs can be charted, plotted, graphed, and with the right regression, we can tame even the most baffling elements of the human condition. Within that paradigm of social science, our world is one that apparently can be predicted and controlled. 

My life’s work has convinced me that this viewpoint—one that is dominant in my field of research—is a myth. 

My first proper job was with an American political campaign. I was hired as the driver for a candidate for governor of my home state, whisking him around every part of Minnesota as he competed for votes. But I was in the right place at the right time—a lucky fluke—and I soon rose the ranks, first to policy director, and later as a 24-year-old deputy campaign manager, overseeing a campaign to govern five million people. We won the election by a statistical whisker, meaning that any one of a million decisions could have decided the race. 

But rather than join the governor’s office, I moved across the pond, to complete my DPhil at the University of Oxford. I studied authoritarian regimes, peering behind the opaque curtain of dictatorships to see what made despots—and their ruthless henchmen—tick. To understand them, I used duelling tools of social research, the quantitative regressions that turned raw data into discernible trends and the qualitative, on-the-ground research that revealed the humans who comprised those data points.  

Chaos over simplicity

For months, I would live within a new authoritarian regime, interviewing generals, rebels, coup plotters, torture victims, even former despots. I began to understand how these regimes function—and how democracy can fall apart, sometimes gradually, other times in a single tragic bolt of political violence. (The research from my field scholarship founded much of the basis of three of my books on authoritarianism and the nature of power: The Despot’s Accomplice; How to Rig an Election; and Corruptible).  

But in those dark places, from Madagascar to Thailand and from Tunisia to Côte d’Ivoire, Belarus, and Zambia, I also discovered a series of astonishingly idiosyncratic regimes, governed by volatile individuals who were complex, swayed by intense emotions and irrational impulses. With every day on the ground, the datasets seemed more detached from reality.  

In particular, one story from my field research kept nagging at me. I had studied a failed coup plot in Zambia, in which the soldiers tried to kidnap the army commander in the middle of the night. The idea was simple: if they forced the top general to announce the coup plot at gunpoint, the other soldiers would rally behind their leader, and the government would be deposed through an ingenious act of deception. But when I interviewed the soldiers, they told me that the army commander ran out of his house, tried to clamber over the compound wall, and they grabbed his trouser leg. They pulled down. He pulled up. Their fingers slipped, the commander escaped, and he alerted the authorities. The coup plot fell apart. But if the soldiers had been a split second faster, the army commander a split second slower in waking up, Zambia’s democracy may have fallen. Where was that consequential nuance captured in the ones and zeroes of numerical data? 

Embracing chaos

A little over a decade later, I finally gave into the nagging and wrote my most challenging book—Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters (2024)—which articulates a blasphemous perspective in social science. I argue that simplistic, straightforward cause and effect explanations, which are often treated as the Holy Grail of social research, misunderstand the complexity of our world. Rather than trying to cram a disordered, messy world into the neat and tidy boxes of linear regressions and grossly simplified data analysis, I suggest that we need to take chaos theory seriously and adopt tools from a field of research known as “complex systems". By drawing on the tools of historical sciences—particularly the research paradigms of adaptive ecology and evolutionary biology—we can better understand ourselves. Rather than pretending the chaos doesn’t exist, we need to take it seriously. 

We haven’t learned that lesson. Consequently, the 21st century has been one giant warning to humanity. Since 2000, we’ve been walloped, over and over, by unforeseen calamities: 9/11, the financial crisis, the Arab Spring, Brexit, the rise of Trump, a catastrophic pandemic, accelerating climate change, and wars spiralling out of control in Ukraine and the Middle East. Moreover, the hubris of viewing social systems as controllable has prompted modern social systems to worship at the altar of optimisation, in which we squeeze out every drop of inefficiency, and in the process, jettison the flexibility and slack that produces systemic resilience.  

A few years ago, for example, you may remember that a single gust of wind turned a ship sideways in the Suez Canal. That gust of wind caused an estimated $50 billion of economic damage. That calamity was human-made, engineered by the hubris that comes with imagining that we can tame the forces of chaos so effectively that we can optimise trade routes to the absolute limit, with no wiggle room for error. We are courting disaster.

Avoiding catastrophe

The synthesis of the three main strands of my research—chaos, authoritarianism, and power—have been depressingly good preparation for studying the modern world. But research isn’t an abstraction; we don’t scratch our chins in the Ivory Tower for the intellectual enjoyment of it. Our world is facing a perilous moment. My hope is that these seemingly endless calamities will provoke a rethink, in which we finally abandon the myth of a predictable, ordered social system and instead start grappling more seriously with how to minimise disaster and maximise prosperity by recognising the limits of what we can understand and control.  

Long ago, my grandfather gave me two words of good advice for how to live a successful life: “Avoid catastrophe.” My research suggests that our leaders would be wise to heed those two words as a mantra for the 21^st century, too.