We like to believe that everything happens for a reason. But what if that belief is a comforting illusion? Political scientist Brian Klaas argues that randomness, not reason, drives much of human life.
The stories we tell ourselves about cause and effect aren’t reflections of truth, rather, they’re coping mechanisms to make chaos feel like order.
Timestamps
0:00 The limits of control
0:30 Does everything happen for a reason?
2:20 Religion and the scientific revolution
4:15 Making sense of patterns
6:56 “The delusion of individualism”
Transcript
The below is a true verbatim transcript taken directly from the video. It captures the conversation exactly as it happened.
The limits of control
One of the key ideas here is that when you start to accept that you have profound influence on the world, but very limited control, you start to see the world differently. You start to behave differently, and you start to accept the limits of what you can and cannot do.
So when we imagine that everything happens for a reason, it causes us to make cognitive mistakes and it also causes us to inscribe ideas behind the events of our lives that are fundamentally wrong.
Does everything happen for a reason?
Through our lives? We are told that we’re in control of our path through life, that we have this idea of we’re the main character, and as long as we sort of make wise decisions, then everything will turn out all right. And when things don’t turn out all right. The saying that we always hear is that everything happens for a reason.
Now, both of those things are untrue. It is not true that we’re in control. And in fact, I think one of the key arguments in my book “Fluke”, is that we control nothing, but we influence everything. At the same time, this illusion of control that we have and the stitching together of this clear narrative where everything has a reason behind it, causes us to misunderstand the world and make mistakes.
A lot of things just happen. When you look at the causal chain of events that produce outcomes, it is not neat and tidy. It’s messy. We’re told to ignore the noise and focus on the signal. It’s a huge mistake. The noise is where many of the most important and consequential events in life take place.
One of the key ideas here is that when you start to accept that you have profound influence on the world, but very limited control, you start to see the world differently. You start to behave differently, and you start to accept the limits of what you can and cannot do.
When we imagine that everything happens for a reason, it causes us to make cognitive mistakes, and it also causes us to inscribe ideas behind the events of our lives that are fundamentally wrong. The scientific evidence shows us that everything does not happen for a reason. And therefore you need to have a philosophical change in how you think about the world. If some things just happen arbitrarily, randomly, or as the byproduct of chaos theory that create the puppets that we all are of random events.
Religion and the scientific revolution
The history of ideas in the world, in my view, is basically a history of trying to cram the complexity and messiness of the world into a really neat and tidy story for why things happen. This is partly derived from religion, where people wanted to have elegant order from God. The idea that there’s a sort of accidental nature to reality is completely at odds with the notion that everything is planned by a higher being.
Throughout religious history, there’s always this neat and tidy story. The everything happens for a reason aspect that’s tied to the divine. As science unfolded and the scientific revolution, you know, developed and so on. You have another shift. It’s not necessarily that it’s all about God. It’s all about these sort of clockwork models of physics. And they’re very, very elegant. This is the kind of stuff where you have to eliminate the noise. You have to eliminate the accidents, because everything is supposed to be an equation that is really beautiful.
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Whether it’s Adam Smith talking about the hand that guides our economies, or the ways that Isaac Newton presented change in these unbelievably powerful equations to explain the world. We have always tried to find the explanation that fits everything into an explanation that seems ordered and rational.
This is why I think there’s so much resistance to this notion of contingent convergence, because it is irrational sometimes. The fact that I can look at my own life and understand that I’m the byproduct of a mass murder, or that hundreds of thousands of people will die in one city because of a random vacation a couple took 19 years earlier. These things are not neat and tidy. They’re not ordered, they’re not elegant, but they’re true.
And I think one of the things about science is that a lot of really strange things exist, and it’s better for us to just accept them and sort of stare into the face of this uncertainty, this complexity and this randomness than to simply pretend it doesn’t work this way because it’s somehow comforting to our pattern obsessed brains.
Making sense of patterns
When you look at the intellectual history of the world, the randomness has systematically been written out. And I think it’s a mistake.
When we try to understand why stuff has happened to us in our lives. Our brains have evolved to make sense of patterns, and that’s because it’s advantageous to survive to over detect patterns. If you can imagine that you’re a prehistoric hunter gatherer and you see a little bit of rustling in the grass, or you hear a sound. Now maybe there’s nothing there, or maybe there’s a saber toothed tiger that’s waiting to eat you. If you imagine there’s nothing there and it turns out to be a saber tooth tiger, you die. But if you over interpret the pattern and you say, okay, I think that might be something that I need to watch out for. Even if there’s nothing there, then you’ll still survive.
So through survival of the fittest and evolutionary patterns, our brains are hyper attuned to pattern detection. This means that when random or seemingly random things happen to us, we’re allergic to the explanation that it was just arbitrary. So we stitch together a neat and tidy story from A to B.
Now that’s a problem, because when stuff happens to you that you don’t have control over, and you ascribe this sort of intentionality to it, you’ve mis learned the lesson. I think one of the things that’s also very striking is that we understand this when we think about the past, but we don’t understand this when we think about the present.
When we watch sci fi films, for example, that imagine time travel, the warning that is always issued, which people fundamentally accept is you shouldn’t touch anything, you shouldn’t talk to anyone because you might accidentally delete yourself from the future or fundamentally change the patterns that you will then go back to when you return to your present time. So don’t squish a bug. Don’t talk to the wrong person.
The problem is that when we think in the present, we never think that way. We never imagined that if we squish a bug or if we talk to someone, we’re reshaping the future. But of course, cause and effect patterns don’t change whether they’re in the past or the present. They operate the same all the time.
I think the mentality we have towards the past is the correct one, that we are constantly reshaping the future, that what we do is important. And that idea is something that I think we are also somewhat allergic to, because it’s so overwhelming to imagine that every single act that we have has unforeseen ripple effects that will change the world and reshape our futures is bewildering. But it’s also true.
And one of the things that I think happens when you look closely at the nature of causality, reality and existence, is that things that are bewildering are happening all the time, and we just ignore them. When you peer into them, you start to see a very different world, and one that can be more fulfilling if you actually accept that some things don’t happen for a reason. And in fact, that we have a life and a society that is diverted by chaos theory.
“The delusion of individualism”
Western modernity has an obsession with what I call the delusion of individualism, and it is comforting to a lot of people to think that they’re in control of their own lives, so that they are the ones who are driving change, and that it’s not really up to other people. But your life unfolds the way you want it to. Or if you’re a politician, that you can control the way the economy is going to work out or the way the election is going to turn out.
Now, the problem with this is that there’s a lot of different ways about thinking of the world, and one of them is eastern philosophy. Which thinks a lot more about the intersections between people and the relational idea of how we’re all connected. Now, I think this is scientific fact. I think we are all connected and we pretend otherwise.
There’s a story that’s sort of a strange story that I saw in the in the press while I was researching “Fluke” about a person who went swimming off the coast of Greece, a man named Ivan. And Ivan goes out into the sea, and he’s not the best swimmer. Resulting in a riptide basically sucks him out into the ocean.
His friends are pretty upset about this because he disappears from sight and they can’t find him. And there’s about 24 hours where Ivan is missing at sea. We all know how these stories turn out when someone is missing at sea for 24 hours. Except for in this story, right as Ivan is about to slip beneath the waves and drown, he spots a soccer ball bobbing on the surface of the ocean.
That’s already extraordinary enough. You have this moment where he just is saved by this passing soccer ball that’s floating, and he clings to it and is eventually rescued. But the more extraordinary part of the story is that when this news made the Greek television reports, there was a woman who was watching the news. I imagined her dropping her cup of coffee or whatever as they see the soccer ball on the screen. Because she recognized the ball, and she knew that her children had been playing with that exact same ball and had accidentally kicked it off a cliff 80 miles away from where Ivan eventually intersected with the trajectory of that ball bobbing on the sea ten days later.
The point is that, the kids would look at this and they would think, oh no, we kicked the ball off the cliff. Let’s buy another ball. They would have no idea. But it turned out that that kick is what saved the life of another person who was about to drown.
Now, when you think that way, it’s extremely obvious that there’s an interconnection between those lives. The problem is that there’s not some magic that Ivan had. It’s that everybody is actually unfolding in this way, where we’re constantly being affected by the actions of people we will never see and never meet.
The extremely obvious way that we can understand this is the pandemic. From the coronavirus outbreak in 2020, where you have a single person get infected with the virus in Wuhan, China, and the lives of 8 billion people changed for many, many years and the trajectories of our lives are irrevocably changed. All of us are different because of this pandemic, and it’s from one virus infecting one person potentially thousands of miles away from where you live. And Everything in the world became different.
So this is the nature of reality, and I think it’s something that’s a coping mechanism effectively for us to just ignore the science, ignore the physics, and imagine that we are in charge. And this is where that saying that I come back to throughout “Fluke” arises, which is we control nothing, but we influence everything. And for Ivan and the soccer ball, the influence that he experienced was from a couple of kids you will never have met who saved his life.
