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.”

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

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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).

[nine-dogs]

Watching this, I realized reducing the sand pile works on a personal level as well. By avoiding 24/7 news & social media, I'm regaining my edge in the fight to keep my mental health from falling into chaos. A person can only take so many grains, but our society keeps trying to pile it on.

[Wontoofree-kn]

I intensely diagree with the use of the word "we" here. The majority of people in the world have little to no power or control over it. And they most certainly did not impose too much "efficiency and optimization" that they suddenly have to stop prioritising. The message of the video reminds me of how so often individuals are told to do more to help the environment when, in fact, it is large scale industry and organisations that cause 99 per cent of the problems and need to change their behaviour. This message needs to taken to the corporate and political leaders of the world. All we can achieve here is watch adverts to fund the slow motion B-roll that are generally used on this channel.

[boas]

"The avalanche will absolutely happen... [So] we should prioritize efficiency and optimization slightly less... for a more stable system" That is astoundingly insightful and impossible suggestion. How can we explain that to Wall Street?

[gizzad]

I'm from the 80s, 90s and we never had these conversations. It was a blessing. The world felt big, now it feels small and polluted.

[themachine]

The mirage of regularity puts into words something I’ve been thinking about with modern comforts as you discuss in this video.
We are so blinded to the exploitation it took of the earth, animals and other people to get most of even the simplest modern conveniences. But this contributes so much to what you describe of the inversion of local vs global chaos. If we can pick up a slab of beef all nice and cleaned wrapped in plastic without having to deal directly with the struggle and emotion of raising and slaughtering an animal, that struggle and chaos will simply be funneled somewhere else ( it can’t just sublimate) and it will go places we can ever expect, whether that’s climate change or human exploitation etc.

We watch nature video of a lion killing an antelope and think wow nature is brutal but we delude ourselves into thinking that our need for food, shelter, energy etc doesn’t not play out the same violence somewhere unknowingly in our complex system

[AnymMusic]

I'd also argue that our connectedness to everything plays a big role in the perception that the world's going to hell. chances are that in the early 1000s there were wars in the middle-east or in the Americas, but we didn't know about it cause news travelled slower, if at all for sure long distances. Nowadays we have every bit of news at our fingertips, and this connected way of life only REALLY took off in the early 2010s (a mere 15 years ago).

We went from "oh look what's in the newspaper, honey", to "haha my friends are so dumb sometimes posting this on MySpace", to "I can effectively see every single second pass in every part of the world with the swipe of a finger. I know what's going on in the world but have no immediate power to stop it." Our direct connection to society has gone up so exponentially and so radically. Is it then any wonder that, to some, it feels like it's all falling apart?

(EDIT: just wanna mention that I don't think this access to knowledge and info 24/7 is bad persé. It's just that, due to the speed at which we gained this info, we generally haven't been able to adapt to the life that comes with it yet.)

[rickemmet]

Brian, what you are describing with the sandpile and black swans reminds me of the difference between a monoculture in agriculture and a regenerative agricultural approach. Monoculture achieves "efficiency" by simplifying the environment (plus massive inputs) and regenerative systems mimic nature with a complex system of interdependencies. The latter is a far more resilient system and can handle shocks much better than the former. You're right that we need to make the sandpile a little smaller and have fewer shocks. Also, as we go forward, the entire biosphere is becoming far more unstable and we will find that black swan events will really rain on our parade.

[JasonHissong]

Yes, this is exactly what I have been doing. My social media consumption has shifted away from news and sensationalism, to videos that educate or adds to my well-being (such as videos from Big Think). I feel much better now.

[blueshattrick]

Friction is a requirement for healthy living, both physically (using our muscles) and mentally (limitations are what create value).
And yet EVERYTHING our modern world promotes is about "convenience".. removing friction

[BlueSilvertone]

This is probably the richest, most thought provoking post I’ve seen here. Brilliant, absolutely brilliant.

[KootFloris]

In 2001 one I was a member of the Chaosforum conference in the Netherlands where we talked about exactly this kind of things. Sadly many managers joined up with the question, "How can we use Chaos and Complexity Theory to control what we want?" Basically they asked "Can you help us build new mirages?" The powers that be organise for their preferred interests, not for the whole system. Hence they are all like drivers glued to the road, prohibiting others to go off road, even when that would help alleviate things.

[stingerau]

Theres just one problem.

The elites would much prefer profit over stabilty. They also benefit from instability.

While capitalism runs the show it will NEVER get better for the majority

[mrcsrkcrz]

I'd also say that we constantly seek stability while I noticed in my life that whenever I had "local instability" I was the happiest. It seems stressful, but if there is no live threat with it, it's I believe exactly what we need not to feel boredom and end up finding all kinds of stuff we have to do ends up being enough to be happy. Life itself then is enough, where simple stuff gives you more pleasure than all the fancy stuff that’s available to us today. And you have your own life to worry about without feeling the need or wish to know and stress about the rest of the world.

[ncedwards]

In South Carolina we had "once in a century" flooding a few years in a row. Our state government is continuing to not properly prepare for these predictable events despite the fact that preventing is far cheaper than reaction AND it would allow thousands of people to avoid being uprooted from their demolished homes in the midst of government negligence.

"Why is trust eroding?"

Because lies are prevailing. Why is it taking so long for trust to collapse is what i wonder.

[carpo]

I used to think of it as end times, but the older I get the more I compare it to the life of a human. We were growing up, then puberty hit. If we can make it through, we have a lot of potential for a better future, but we have to DEMAND it, which means we have to know what we want.

[shetouchthesky]

I really want to have a conversation with Brian Klaas. This is like the 3rd video he's given a name to things I think about ALL THE TIME!

[jessieg]

Grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.

[yass]

I have a physics degree and I can tell you that his description of world dynamics using concepts from complex systems is very accurate. These ideas are very important and should be taken seriously.

[redryan]

Super easy to explain this:

1. The assumption/expectation of stability is baked into our psychology
2. The information landscape is saturated and we know every little thing that's happening around the world
3. The world (and humans) are naturally chaotic, and we like to order things (see point #1)

[Staoicism]

This is such a fascinating exploration of how our modern world flips stability on its head. The concept of local stability but global instability feels so true—our predictable routines give a false sense of control while massive, interconnected systems teeter on the edge of chaos.

The sandpile model really stuck with me. It’s such a vivid way to illustrate how small actions can lead to massive, unpredictable outcomes. Makes me wonder—how can we, as individuals, build resilience in a world engineered for volatility? What small shifts might help us reduce the height of our own ‘sand piles’?