Fluke: Power, Perception and Paying Attention

I sit down with Dr Brian Klaas, Associate Professor of Global Politics at University College London, and author of "FLUKE: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters"

👋🏼 Hey, I’m Joanna! I’m a communications consultant sharing insights and ideas relating to democracy, wellbeing, AI, culture, spiritualism and the human condition…read on if this has piqued your interest.

When I joined Substack a year ago I did so because I had a huge hunger to experiment, explore and write creatively beyond the lines of what I had been writing about as a constitutional law academic at Cambridge University. After all, how can we fully understand and engage with what’s going on in a given topic and assess its wider implications if we don’t peer over the wall and see what others are doing? How can we truly connect the dots of events and interpret their meaning if we don’t do that?

This method of analysing events and issues has been fundamental to the direction of my Substack, The Breakout Room, because I believe there greater value, enjoyment and learning by writing and reading through this lens. It’s one of the reasons why one of the first Substacks I began reading was Brian Klaas’ The Garden of Forking Paths which draws on multiple realms of human knowledge. From pieces on why We are different from all other humans in history to How the World Sped Up, Brian’s exploratory perspective is something that I admire, and it enhances and expands his academic work as an Associate Professor in Global Politics at University College London.

As someone very intrigued by connecting the dots of events, particularly within history, politics, the evolution of humanity and our value systems, I was fascinated by Brian’s latest book Fluke: Chance, Chaos, and Why Everything We Do Matters which takes a deep-dive into the phenomenon of randomness, the significance of small decisions and how our actions can have big consequences (both for good and bad). We discuss this and much more in the Q&A below. Enjoy!

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Joanna: Hi Brian! As a fellow academic with intersecting academic focus (global politics in your case, constitutional law in mine) on Substack with a curiosity in questions and issues beyond my academic niche, I’m fascinated by the diversity of ideas on your Substack and how you embrace completely different topic areas, from the evolution of stupidity to the history of medieval service magicians.

I believe that exploring issues from a broader perspective and through different lens’ broadens our understanding of them, something which your book Fluke touches on. I’d love to know when and why you made this leap into exploring broader issues and ideas beyond your academic niche?

Brian: The most interesting ideas come from the intersection of other ideas. I’ve learned that through my own research, as I started off with a pretty narrow focus—on the political science of authoritarian regimes. My doctoral research looked at how rigged elections make political violence more likely (particularly in the forms of coups and civil wars). That required a mixture of quantitative and qualitative methods, so I was doing computer modelling at the same time that I went and lived in five different authoritarian countries for a few months at a time and interviewed coup plotters, rebels, generals, former heads of state, politicians, diplomats, dissidents, etc. And what I learned was important: the world is really complex and messy.

Once I had figured out that relatively niche topic, I began to ponder bigger questions that were related to those ideas. First came the questions I had about the nature of power – who gets it, why are some people more drawn to it than others, and how does it change people? That led to my fourth book, Corruptible, which was the first time that I ventured well beyond the boundaries of my own discipline. I realized that tons of smart people were thinking about similar questions but from totally different backgrounds and assumptions. There were neuroscientists studying how power affected the brain; evolutionary biologists studying how power and hierarchy emerged in the long stretches of human history; and psychologists trying to figure out why some people thirst for power while others can’t be bothered. Each perspective added something important to the mix, but I had been oblivious because academic research exists in arbitrary silos, which is both stupid and counterproductive.

That experience was a revelation for me in a lasting way: I realized that it had been quite a long time since I had read something in political science that had fundamentally changed how I viewed the world, because I wasn’t getting exposed to entirely new frameworks of thinking. Once I started reading widely in the natural sciences, for example, I was suddenly seeing political processes through a different lens. It was exhilarating; all of the sudden, old problems felt new. I decided then that I would never again confine myself to my own discipline. I’m still a social scientist, but I’m far more open to exploring other perspectives. And I realized that evolutionary biology is both fascinating and extremely useful as a lens to understand social change (evolutionary change and social/political change are both historical; you’re trying to figure out why something of interest shifted over time).

That led me to Fluke, which, if I didn’t care about creating a book with a catchy title would more accurately be titled as “Why things happen.” It’s a book about change and causality, arguing that the accidental and the arbitrary play a far bigger role than we imagine. And to understand those ideas, I couldn’t just read political science. Instead, I read about physics, geology, neuroscience, biology, history, and lots of philosophy. It was the most rewarding work I’ve ever done—and it fundamentally changed how I see the world. No political science conference ever did that for me.

Joanna: Speaking of Fluke, I admire how it emphasises the importance of small details and the interconnectedness of everything, especially your observation that “The noise of one person’s life is the signal for another, even if we can’t detect it.”

Writing history as an academic in recent years has made me a bit obsessed with the minor details of history as it’s clear from research that a slightly different alternative course of action, in many instances, could have significantly changed the outcome of current events.

What is your biggest takeaway for readers reading Fluke? What lessons can we apply to our own lives? What would you like a public figure, such as a politician, to take away from reading Fluke?

Brian: There is an enormous fragility to existence, because but for a few tiny tweaks, none of us would be here. One of the opening stories in Fluke is about the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. If it had been delayed by a second, it’s unlikely that it would have wiped out the dinosaurs, which means mammals wouldn’t have taken over, and humans almost certainly wouldn’t exist. We all owe our existence to that consequential, arbitrary second 66 million years ago.

What’s astonishing is that those little milliseconds matter constantly. Our lives are constantly being diverted by the seemingly meaningless choices that we make—but also the seemingly meaningless choices that 8 billion other people are making, all the time. A lot of people find this bewildering to contemplate. I find it uplifting. The takeaway message of Fluke philosophically is two-fold. First, that we control nothing but influence everything; and second, that because of that, every second of our lives counts. Even if we can’t detect it, every moment is redirecting the possible paths we will take through life, but also affecting the future trajectory of the world across generations. I find that idea not only scientifically accurate but profoundly uplifting.

There are also takeaways for how we should change our perspective on the world—and our governance of it. Specifically, I worry that we have engineered a world that is more prone to being upended by arbitrary and accidental flukes than ever before, in which a single boat stuck in the Suez Canal can create $50 billion of economic damage, or in which a messed up AI algorithm can destroy lives in an instant. It’s a world where, as I say in Fluke, the mundane is resilient, while the important is often volatile—where Starbucks never changes, but rivers dry up and democracies collapse. That’s the inverse of what we should want. We should crave and demand spontaneity and change in our daily lives, but try to create resilient stability in the superstructure of the world. And I worry that we’re careening toward a truly disastrous moment created by a single fluke.

Joanna: You reference Edward Norton Lorenz and his chaos theory in Fluke. You point out that “Even in a clockwork universe with controlled conditions, minuscule changes can make an enormous difference…so sensitive to the minutiae of their initial conditions, that, even if they follow a clockwork logic, they’re impossible to predict.” For readers who are unaware, because of this theory it’s still difficult to make accurate predictions when it comes to the weather with our weather forecasts still being unreliable, despite advances in technology.

I found this point very interesting. To me, it suggests that perhaps the Universe, God, The Creator—whatever you want to call it – doesn’t want us to lean too heavily into logic to solve the riddles and ways of the world and why things happen the way they do at specific times. What are your thoughts on this, and the relationship between intuition versus logic?

Brian: Chaos theory has a formal definition – and part of it is a system that is “sensitive to initial conditions.” In normal language, this means that the system will unfold in a dramatically different way if it starts from an even tiny bit different beginning. The small details matter in a big way.

That doesn’t really tell us much about intuition or logic, but it does tell us that there are some systems that are fundamentally unpredictable. I believe in a deterministic universe, which means I believe that everything that happens has specific causes, all stretching back, in an unbroken chain, to the Big Bang. But even if there are definite causes for everything that happens, that doesn’t mean we can know what those causes are, because an infinite number of causes produce every moment. Right now, for example, I’m typing this in a coffee shop, at 11:04 am, on a Monday, in a lovely little town in England. How did I get here at this exact moment? Well, when you think about it, this moment wouldn’t have happened but for an infinite chain of causes of and events, stretching back not just to my immediate ancestors, but to prehistoric primates, back and back, because if that chain of organisms didn’t exist and reproduce in just the right way, I wouldn’t be here. And to try to explain how I ended up in this coffee shop, at this moment, answering your questions—and not someone else’s—the number of causal factors would be unfathomably large.

What does that all mean? It means we can’t fully control our lives and that trying to do so is counterproductive. It’s a losing game. Instead, every action we take, every thought we have, influences the world. We don’t know how, but we should accept that there is not a single thing we do that has zero effect—and then live accordingly.

One thing I’ve found interesting in the reception to Fluke is that religious people have been receptive to it, even though I don’t personally believe in God. They see providence where I see chaos theory. In both belief systems, one religious, the other scientific, control is impossible but our actions matter.

Joanna: You often discuss political language in your writing and how it’s used to describe events and facts. What do you think of Aristotle’s Rhetoric on the art of persuasion, and his rules on the (êthos) of the speaker, the emotional state (pathos) of the hearer, or the argument (logos) itself. Is Rhetoric still relevant today?

Brian: Humans make sense of the world through narratives. Narratives include emotions, villains, heroes, and story arcs that lead toward a conclusion. In pure science, you can try to convince other scientists that something is true using only hard data and equations. But if you want to create memorable ideas that resonate with people long after they heard them, you need storytelling. It’s how our brains are wired. That’s why my writing is laced with stories; I only have a human brain and so do you, and we are—to borrow the phrase from Jonathan Gottschall—storytelling animals.

Joanna: Before becoming an academic you worked on US political campaigns. Over the last 15 years, what has, in your opinion, been the most significant shift in political communications?

Brian: Political arguments have gotten even dumber, which I didn’t think was possible. And social media makes everything worse.

Joanna: I agree with you that understanding how schemas work is crucial for making sense of modern politics with the abundance of information out there, but I think more importance will gradually be placed on the role of energy behind political language as we tire of engaging with politics through fast scrolling and loudmouth soundbites. People are looking for someone real and relatable to engage with and trust in, especially as AI and misinformation become more prevalent.

As a “statriotic” Minnesotan, what do you make of Tim Walz’s* comment (or schema) that Trump and Vance are “Weird”?

*Tim Walz is Governor of Minnesota and the Democrat nominee for Vice President in the US Presidential election.

Brian: Everyone uses schemas—mental shortcuts—to make sense of the world, and politics is no different. The “weird” label for Trump and JD Vance works because it highlights an obvious truth: most people have never met anyone like either of them. They are highly unusual. When you go to drop your kids off at school, or you’re chatting to someone at the grocery store, they’re nothing like Donald Trump. Walz, by contrast, is a recognizable kind of person: the good neighbor, the homegrown guy who just wants to serve his community. I’m not discounting the idea that he’s ambitious, or wants power, or whatever—that’s quite clearly true—but it’s so much easier for people to identify with him than with someone who quite literally had a golden toilet.

I would love for American politics to go back to a relatively normal period, in which people spent more time arguing about what to do to solve problems. Right now, the system is utterly broken because much of the argument happens in a political space where a significant number of voters live in a fake reality—in which Donald Trump secretly won the 2020 election, for example. Democracy requires a shared sense of reality. That has been obliterated and it’s at the root of all the other problems the United States faces.

Joanna: From a UK political perspective, one of the reasons the public grew increasingly weary of the Conservative government was because the language they used was negative, artificially constructed and felt meaningless because of their poor standard of ethics and conduct. This in turn reflected how the public felt and engaged with them (note to reader: the Conservatives recently suffered their worst electoral result in history). Equally, many people voted for the Labour Party because it was the better option, not because they were vividly receptive or excited about a new Labour government.

How do we move beyond the point of grabbing someone’s political attention for the short-term and make them actively excited and engaged in a political party’s long-term future, especially in a country such as the UK where political party membership is at an all-time low?

Brian: People need a vision for a more hopeful future. Successful political movements aren’t about building support to maintain the status quo. I worry that the Labour government, while laudable for being honest about what it can reasonably pay for, is lacking any sort of grand vision. It often sounds like if everything goes according to plan, the major struggles that many people face will still be there, but they’ll be marginally better. That’s not bold enough. In democracies, citizens are willing to work toward ambitious goals—and to sacrifice and pay taxes in pursuit of those goals—but they have to believe that something significantly better awaits them if they go for it.

My advice to all responsible political parties is to be honest with voters, but accept that preserving the status quo—of unaffordable housing, grotesque inequality, and general stagnation simply isn’t good enough.

Joanna: In your piece The Death of Serious Politics you make the following point:

“The scale of the problem demands not just a radical restructuring of our media ecosystem and the norms within it, but also a change in ourselves—such that we, collectively, consume news that covers policy and problem solving, not just political intrigue. In the meantime, we can all do our part by voting with our clicks and being stubborn about where we focus our coveted eyeballs, rewarding outlets that inform, educate, and debate solutions.”

When we think of political communications, most people tend to think about it from the political party’s perspective i.e., what communications advice would improve a political party to make them more appealing to voters. Yet we strangely don’t have a system or roadmap to inform the public on what they should take note of to ensure that they make educated and informed political choices, whether that be on how to analyse political news or the factual basis of the information they trust to decide how to vote.

If such a roadmap were created, what advice would you provide to voters?

Brian: One of the things I often direct my students to do is to come up with their proposed solution for a problem, not just argue about what makes them angry. Voters should do the same. So much political discourse is just a divide between people who are complaining about different problems and saying that their political opponents are terrible. So much more should be oriented towards solutions. Being forced to articulate solutions is where common ground gets found. But so much of this requires better political literacy. Many people just don’t have the tools to make an informed argument about the complexities of economic policy or immigration protocols or whatever issue is affecting their life.

I also favor the use of more citizen assemblies, in which ordinary citizens are randomly selected, and asked to come up with solutions to a series of policy challenges in a consensus- driven way. Those assemblies can be used to guide politicians because they are both public-driven and also are geared toward problem solving.

There are better ways to engineer a better society. We often feel that it’s not up to us. But it is. And the unifying message of my two most recent book, Fluke and Corruptible, is that who ends up in power matters, but so does everything we do. The ripple effects of good small decisions will quite literally change the world.

Thank you for reading!

If you enjoyed it, let me know with a heart ❤️ above or below. I would also love to hear what you think in the comments below!