Why does it feel like the world is falling apart? | Brian Klaas

“We've engineered a volatile world where Starbucks is completely unchanging from year to year, but democracies are collapsing and rivers are drying up.”

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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 volatility
1:20: Complex systems theory
6:06: The sandpile model
6:47: Basins of attraction
7:49: Black swan events

Read the video transcript ► https://bigthink.com/series/explain-i...

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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 (2024) and Corruptible: Who Gets Power and How It Changes Us (2021). 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 (Hurst & Co, 2017); The Despot's Accomplice: How the West is Aiding & Abetting the Decline of Democracy, (Oxford University Press, 2016) and How to Rig an Election (Yale University Press, co-authored with Professor Nic Cheeseman; 2018).