How Embracing Complexity Could Foster Enduring Peace

We are at an evolutionary crossroads at which our own ingenuity and productivity hold both the greatest promise and unspeakable peril. The situation demands that we train up on complexity because being complexity-intolerant means we can't even start to understand the world we've created for ourselves¹. We have perhaps become "addicted" to oversimplification, leading to misunderstanding and discord.

The premise is we are at a tipping point. On one hand, the lot of humanity has been improving over centuries, as laws and humanitarian consensus meet the potential of technological development to provide resources for all.

However, as humanity has developed, the same factors that have made us stronger have escalated the risk: Technological advancements, population growth, rich cultural exchange, conflict psychology, and related factors mean that one misstep could lead to massive, potentially unrecoverable destruction to our species—possibly even the planet upon which we depend. Our own psychology and emotional maturity have not developed in step with our technology and culture. We can, in principle, rise to the occasion.

What Is Complexity?

Complexity theory—nonlinear science—is a branch of mathematics that encompasses chaos theory, network theory, the theory of complex adaptive systems, evolutionary models, fractal math, and related models (e.g. information theory, thermodynamics) that not only drive understanding but also increase our power to influence and design complicated processes².

The concept of “complex adaptive systems” (CAS) is foundational. The systems we live in, while sometimes designed linearly, often have chaotic, even random elements and are self-organizing, developing by autopoiesis (self-making). Natural systems, ecologies, groups of animals, and the like, and human systems from small groups to economic and commercial systems, to information networks and transportation and energy systems, and nation states on the global stage, have emergent, complex features.

Three features define a CAS:

1. Any given system is made of a large number of smaller parts, each of which makes decisions about how to behave. Collectively, those decisions change or evolve over time, building information, intelligence, and complexity until reaching equilibrium.
2. Each of the smaller parts, or “agents”, interacts with the others according to often only a few simple rules.
3. Out of the interactions among many simple agents arise properties or features that could not easily be predicted from looking at their few simple rules. This phenomenon is called “emergence” (e.g. a school of fish emerges from individual fishes following a few basic rules, such as, stay near your neighbor, but not too close), and is observed throughout the natural world and human systems.

Joe Graham, Wikimedia Commons

Complexity Intolerance and the "Admission of Complexity"

Of the tragic and divisive Israel-Hamas war, former President Obama remarked:

“If there’s any chance of us being able to act constructively to do something, it will require an admission of complexity and maintaining what on the surface may seem contradictory ideas…”.

He then outlined multiple different perspectives on the conflict in a simple way: This is true and that is true, and this is also true... rather than holding one view alone. Holding many views is key to conflict resolution, creating a common ground. But it's particularly difficult when positions are polarized and people are complexity-intolerant. We'll take a deeper look into what factors are at play in pushing the world potentially toward a crisis of understanding, requiring we cool down the destructiveness further, and work through what we need to adapt. Having a complexity-based framework is one lens through which we can contextualize the system we are within.

Framing a Complex Global System

There are several key high-level factors at play, accelerated by the collective arc of the COVID-19 pandemic, which made us aware of global liabilities on a scale too vast to grasp easily.

1. Industrial Development and Technology. In a general sense, technology has catapulted us forward at a breakneck pace, far faster than natural selection has done prior to this time. Technology and science have done much good and will do more but have also created terrible destructive potential and generally raised the stakes.
2. Population Growth. With earth's population. surpassing 8 billion people, it’s hard to conceptualize what that even means for the individual contemplating their role in the “human family” or even trying to get one’s head around what that number means. It's very crowded, raising fears about safety and resource sharing and perhaps triggering evolutionary responses to cull the herd. Higher population also increases the chances of human displacement, itself a crisis.
3. Cultural Mixing. Different cultures, groups, and religions have increasingly been placed in front of one another over the last century as travel and communications improve, leading to both enrichment and conflict. This includes clashing and at times mutually exclusive influences, such as those surrounding religion and other cultural practices, and has been accelerated by social media and information technology.
4. Social Media and Information Explosion. This particular technology emerges from our natural inclination to communication—we invented language, after all—along with advances in computers and information technology. IT (information technology) has knit that 8+ billion of us together in a way we’ve never seen before. It's simply overwhelming for human bandwidth. Tuning out the massive amount of data that is actually there is required for ordinary functioning.
5. Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (AI). With all the information tech comes big data. Computational power has also led to increasingly sophisticated machine learning, and the recently realized notion of AI. Machine learning allows us to understand systemic factors, using complex methods to figure out which levers actually drive change. Machine intelligence has already shaped our world more than most realize, for example, shaping our online browsing and shopping habits, our very attitudes and identities.
6. Multilayered Existential Threat. Technology has driven climate change, along with population increases and greater consumption. Beyond climate change, we have terrible weapons, from conventional to biological and chemical to nuclear, fears about AI and a host of extinction-level possibilities. Secondary consequences from war, climate change, and the like also lead to mass human displacement, disease, and failure to. meet such basic needs as healthcare, creating huge logistical problems and widespread abject suffering.

Grant H Brenner

Planet ADHD

Focusing on the parts we already believe in and missing the whole endangers us. Simple perspectives don’t work for complex problems. We omit (rather than admit) a large amount of information because we haven't learned to make sense of it. In our ADHD world, where our baseline capacities are routinely overloaded, many people have shifted into chronic survival/conservation mode, where taking shortcuts may get us through the day. We risk misinterpreting things all the time and are convinced our view is correct. This drives fake news, mis- and disinformation, political manipulation, gaslighting, cancel culture, and a host of other modern-day scourges.

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Where does this leave us? With more questions than answers. The massive complexity we face today challenges us to learn new ways of relating to one another, making decisions together about the future, and managing the often dysregulated emotions that get in the way of clear thinking. It's entirely possible to think clearly though the roughest waters and learn to make use of uncertainty and ambiguity to establish stable, winning, long-term cooperative strategies.