In December 2010 a young street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set fire to himself in a Tunisian street to protest the confiscation of his vegetable cart. This sparked off a revolutionary wave, known popularly as the Arab Spring. In the next two years, rulers had been forced from power in Tunisia, Egypt (twice), Libya, and Yemen; civil uprisings had erupted in Bahrain and Syria; major protests had broken out in Algeria, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Morocco, Israel and Sudan. Minor protests had occurred in Mauritania, Oman, Saudi Arabia, Djibouti, Western Sahara and Palestine.

There are many instances in history of the “power of the powerless”. Gavio Princip’s sandwich  inexorably led to World War Ⅰ and the loss of 15 million lives; and in turn set the stage for WWⅡ, which directly  involved over 100 million people. After a long day, a tired seamstress in Montgomery, Alabama refused to give up her seat on a bus, and this started a new era in the quest for freedom and equality. (Did it eventually lead to the election of Barack Obama sixty years later?)

According to conventional wisdom (and classical physics) only large causes have large outcomes. So are these just coincidences? Brought about by a random universe and unpredictable human behaviour?

Not so, according to the Butterfly Effect. Small, seemingly inconsequential occurrences cause large, unpredictable effects on unrelated events. “The flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Beijing, causes a tornado in Texas”.

This metaphor is a key feature of Chaos Theory, a mathematical sub-discipline that emerged about fifty years ago with Edward Lorenz, a meteorologist who was developing mathematical models to predict weather. Once, when re-checking earlier results, he used the same parameters; except this time he input values only up to three decimal places instead of the earlier six. This tiny little difference threw the results totally out of whack!

Just like this 14th century proverb on cause and effect explains:

For want of a nail the shoe was lost;

For want of a shoe the horse was lost;

For want of a horse the battle was lost;

For the failure of battle the kingdom was lost—

All for the want of a horse-shoe nail.

Science fiction too predates the scientific articulation of Chaos Theory. Ray Bradbury published a short story in 1952, A Sound of Thunder in which a hunter travels back in time with a guided safari to kill a Tyrannosaurus Rex. Despite strict instructions, he inadvertently steps on and kills a butterfly. When he returns to his present, he discovers that the insect’s untimely death has changed the course of nature and of history. This fascination with alternate history has often been depicted in film, television and literature.

Chaos Theory is as important a scientific breakthrough as quantum mechanics and relativity. Medical science  is beginning to see human beings as Chaos Systems and chaos models may someday help prevent heart attacks. These ideas have also found applications in finance, economics, ecology, population dynamics, sociology, organisational behaviour, management and geopolitics.

Philosophers and psychologists adapt the insights and apply them to our daily lives. An excellent book is Seven Life Lessons of Chaos: Spiritual Wisdom from the Science of Change by John Briggs and F. David Peat.

Just as science finds underlying patterns in apparently random events, we too can appreciate the interconnectedness of things and learn to go with the flow of events. Creatively engage with chaos to find imaginative new solutions, use it to work inter-connectedly with others, use butterfly power to grow our individual efforts to bring about larger change. Look deeper, discover the world’s rich textures and subtleties and appreciate the beauty of life’s chaos. Live in the moment, celebrate ambiguity, and do not reject what we think is too small, nor judge as trivial.

Importantly with the insights of Chaos Theory, do not dismiss anything as “inconsequential”.

Related Links:

http://www.abarim-publications.com/ChaosTheoryIntroduction.html#.VJ4L68ChcA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6NnCOs20GQ

http://fractal.org/Life-Science-Technology/Publications/Human-beings-as-fractal-systems.pdf

http://www.referenceforbusiness.com/management/Bun-Comp/Chaos-Theory.html

http://www.tiplady.org.uk/pdfs/lettinggo.pdf

http://www.ccsr.illinois.edu/web/Techreports/1990-94/CCSR-92-15.pdf