Learning From Complexity
Many of today’s leaders, ranging from Donald Trump of the United States to Theresa May of Britain, Viktor Orban of Hungary, and Vladimir Putin of Russia, liken those who oppose their nation-centric views to “losers” and those who support them to patriotic “winners.” This harks back to the comforts of the zero-sum game, where for every winner, there is a commensurate loser, or in mathematical terms, 1-1=0. Put more succinctly, “to the extent I win, you lose.”
This comforting dichotomy describes a finite two-player game/conflict in which a victor, clutching a trophy, places an unwelcome boot on the neck of his opponent.
If only disputes were this simple. In the world we live in, aptly described by complexity theory, political movements and institutions emerge in interdependent networked forms that cannot be disentangled. Much as Donald Trump would like to reimagine the United States of the 1940s and 1950s as an entity that can be duplicated today and erect a moat around American commerce, and, in similar fashion, Theresa May would like to excise Britain from the European Union while enjoying all the benefits of Continental trade, these feats cannot be accomplished.
Just as you can’t disassemble a brain into its component neurons and then reconstruct it, you can’t substitute 19th-century nationalism for 21st-century globalization. Once networked forms emerge, they can’t be deconstructed, no matter how powerful the instrument used to destroy them. The sum is already greater than the parts. In mathematical terms, 1+1=3.
What is complexity theory and why does it matter? Drawing from many disciplines ranging from computer science to sociology, from engineering to earth science, complexity theory seeks to describe nonlinear (noncausal) relationships between parts of a system that perform a collective function. The interaction of the interconnected, yet independent, elements of the system produce “emergent properties.” An example of an emergent property includes human consciousness, which emerged through the evolutionary process that led to Homo sapiens.
Complex systems, because they are so heterogeneous, are extremely delicate. Think of the effects of one errant cancerous cell in a body or a hate-filled meme on social media. This effect, called the butterfly effect when describing the devastating impact of tiny perturbations on global weather patterns, demonstrates the harm that can be perpetrated on terrifyingly complex systems, whether physical or social.
But conversely, great good can also come about. Consider the nascent resistance that led to social movements such as the civil rights movement in the United States, or, in a biological context, the remarkable coordination of the human body’s immune system.
How can an understanding of complexity theory come to the aid of today’s leaders? As Americans watch the complete paralysis of the federal government and British citizens consider the possibilities of food shortages and the future loss of Scotland and Northern Ireland in a worst-case no-deal Brexit, it is clear that tampering with the body politic must be approached with surgical sensitivity.
A great focus must be placed on achieving desirable outcomes by observing the actual functioning of the body politic. These systems are “black boxes” that can be understood only by monitoring how they behave.
Toxic assumptions, largely fear-based, must be avoided. An assumption of scarcity leads to the hoarding of global resources and scapegoating of people deemed “other.” An adversarial presumption creates distortions when applied systemically — witness the disruption of global trade brought about by tariffs or the fraying of diplomatic relations between former allies.
Political relationships are just that, relationships, and it trivializes them to deem them a game with a finite binary outcome. Just as a prospective spouse would object to entering a marriage characterized as a game, so politicians must endeavor to treat their constituents and their global neighbors as stakeholders in the complex system that is the world.
Celia Josephson is an attorney who also teaches E.S.L. and high school equivalence classes at the East Hampton Library. She studied quantitative methods at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.