(Der Standard, Vienna, 16 April 2011)

Patterns of Social Unrest

Complexity, Conflict, and Catastrophe
John L. Casti

Social Unrest

On February 24, 2010 Greek police fired tear-gas and clashed with
demonstrators in central Athens after a march organized by unions to oppose the
government’s program to cut the European Union’s biggest budget deficit. The
president of a large union stated, “People on the street will send a strong
message to the government but mainly to the European Union, the markets and
our partners in Europe that people and their needs must be above the demands
of markets. We didn’t create the crisis.” Later, air-traffic controllers, customs
and tax officials, train drivers, doctors at state-run hospitals and school teachers
walked off the job to protest government spending cuts. Journalists joined into
the strikes as well, creating a media blackout.

Fast forwarding a year, we’ve recently seen long-standing regimes in both

Tunisia and Egypt sent packing literally overnight, with Libya now being
torched by the very same revolutionary flames as rebels battle the entrenched
Qaddafi government in an attempt to overturn forty years of oppression.

On the surface, these types of civil disturbances give the appearance of arising
out of the public’s discontent with their government over high unemployment,
rising food prices, lack of housing, and other such necessities of everyday life.
But such explanations are facile and superficial, failing to address the “root”
cause of the societal collapse. The real culprit resides much deeper in the social
system. It is a widening “complexity gap” between the government and its
citizens, revolution breaking out when that gap can no longer be bridged.

Complexity Mismatches

Some years back, American archaeologist Joseph Tainter put forth the idea that
societies respond to crises by adding complexity in order to solve problems they
encounter. But each unit of resource the society adds―energy or money,
usually―yields less return than the previous unit. So the additional layers of
complexity bought by this expenditure consume resources with no
corresponding return until the marginal return on investment in social
complexity turns negative. But since the society knows how to solve problems
only by adding complexity, it then begins to collapse under its own weight.

In Egypt (and now Libya) the added complexity is not just any sort of
complexity, but as noted by futurist Ramez Naam it is a very special type:
parasitism. This is one of the worst forms of complexity, as it consumes more
and more of society’s resources without producing any value at all.

For example, Egypt had a state-controlled economy that was wildly

mismanaged for decades. Even the noticeable improvement in recent years has
been a case of too little, too late. Moreover the country is monumentally
corrupt, as crony capitalism runs rampant throughout the entire social structure.
Such a system of corruption relies upon bribes to officials to get contracts,
obtain jobs or to find adequate housing. One rumor had it that in Egypt the drug
Viagra was kept off the market because its manufacturer, Pfizer, failed to pay a
large enough bribe to the Egyptian Minister of Health for its approval.

This type of parasitic mismanagement and corruption doesn’t really add

constructive complexity to the government, but simply works to freeze in place
an already low-complexity system.

But modern communication and social networking services like Twitter and
Facebook do act to dramatically increase the social complexity―but the
increase is in the complexity of the population, at-large, not an increase in the
complexity of the government. This is why governments routinely act to shut
off these services when they’re under attack, as more voices are heard and more
and more highly-connected social networks are formed.

At some point the complexity gap between the stagnant level of government
complexity and the growing level of general-public complexity becomes too
great to be sustained. Result: Ouster of the Mubarak regime, and the likely
downfall of the Qaddafi government as well.

A complex system theorist recognizes immediately the principle at work here in

narrowing the complexity gap. It’s is called the Law of Requisite Variety
(Complexity). The Principle states that in order to fully regulate/control a
system, the complexity of the regulating system has to be at least as great as the
complexity of the system to be controlled. An obvious corollary is that if the
gap is too big (in either direction) you’re going to have trouble. And in the
world of politics, “trouble” is often spelled “r-e-v-o-l-u-t-i-o-n”!
Examples of such mismatches abound: ancient Rome is one case that always
comes to mind, where the ruling classes used political and military power to
control the lower classes and to conquer neighbors in order to extract tax
revenues. Ultimately, the entire resources of the society were being used to
maintain an ever-growing, far-flung empire that had grown too complex to be
sustained. The ancient Mayan civilization is another good case in point. Some
scholars, like historian Paul Kennedy, have argued that the American Empire is
in the process of coming undone for much the same reasons.

This type of complexity gap is not confined just to the political and
governmental domains either, as evidenced by the ongoing social unrest in
Japan arising out of the radiation spewing forth from the reactors damaged by
the March 11 earthquake. The ultimate cause of this unrest is a “design basis
accident,” in which the tsunami overflowed retaining walls designed to keep the
water out. The overflow then damaged backup electrical generators intended to
supply emergency power for pumping water to cool the reactor’s nuclear fuel
rods. This is a two-fold problem: First, the designer’s planned the height of the
walls for a magnitude 8.3 quake, the largest that Japan had previously
experienced, not considering that a quake might someday exceed that level, and
what’s even worse, (2) they placed the generators on low ground where any
overflow would short them out. So everything ultimately depended on the
retaining walls doing their job―which they didn’t! This is a case of too little
complexity in the control system (the combination of the height of the wall and
the generator location) being overwhelmed by too much complexity in the
system to be controlled (the magnitude of the tsunami).

Who’s Next?

When a society collapses, be it ancient Rome, the United State tomorrow or

Egypt and Tunisia yesterday, it quickly loses complexity. All institutions, laws
and technologies become simpler, a lot simpler. Moreover, the range of social
roles and behaviors open to the population of such a society dramatically shrink.
These factors lead to a rapid reduction in living standards, since without
complex institutions, infrastructures, technologies and social roles, large
populations cannot be sustained at their previous standard of living.
Consequently, people consume far less, stay at home, turn inward, and die much
sooner.

What can we expect to over the next year or two? A good guess is that as people
lose confidence in the ability of their governments to solve the financial crises
and experience other social stresses that increase the government-public
complexity gap, they’ll break out into violent protests and/or assaults on those
they see as responsible for their misery. This group will certainly encompass
government officials and bankers, but may well also include immigrants, ethnic
and religious minorities, landlords, and even corporate managers and bosses.
If you want to be grimly impressed, start putting pins on a map where such
violence has already broken out. Cities like Athens, Sofia (Bulgaria), Port-au-
Prince, Riga (Latvia) and Vilnius (Lithuania) are on the map, and even much
larger cities like Moscow, Rome, Paris and Dublin have seen huge protests over
rising unemployment and declining wages. But security police in these cities
have managed to keep the protests orderly, if not peaceful (so far). While it’s
very likely such societal disruptions will be confined to specific locales, we
cannot entirely discount the possibility that as the global economic situation
worsens, some of these localized incidents will overrun national borders and
become far more widespread and long-lasting events. Armed rebellions, military
coups, and even wars between states over access to resources cannot be
excluded.

Early-Warning Indicators
All civil disturbances have the same general two-part structure: a lack of
confidence in the ability of established institutions to solve the problems at
hand, and fear of the future. So any methodology purporting to provide early-
warning signals of social unrest will have to embrace these two factors. It turns
out that a theoretical foundation for just such a theory was put forth by
American political scientist James C. Davies more than fifty years ago.
Like all great insights, Davies big idea is simple: Social unrest takes place
when a society’s rising expectations are suddenly dashed. In other words, a
society’s mood, how they regard the future, grows increasingly positive as the
society gets richer. But when the rug is pulled out from under citizen’s hopes for
a brighter future, things turn ugly―fast. And as the gap between expectations
and reality widens, the mood of the population moves deeper into negative
territory until it finally erupts into violence and revolution.
To illustrate Davies thesis, let’s take an item from the “It Can’t Happen Here”
department. In a recent article in Vanity Fair magazine, Nobel-winning
economist Joseph Stiglitz noted that in terms of income inequality, the United
States today lags behind every country in Europe, ranking down with Russia
and its oligarchs and Iran in the category of countries where the top 1% of the
population control 40 percent or more of the nation’s wealth. As with the
situations in the North African and Arab lands today, there are again two
systems in conflict. But in the developed countries like the USA, the systems
are not the government and the public; rather, they are the “haves” and the
“have nots.”
In a society like the USA that is sharply divided in terms of wealth, the rich lead
a high-complexity style of life that doesn’t rely on government to supply
common needs like parks, education, security or medical care. The “haves” can
supply all these things for themselves. In fact, this high-complexity life-style
strata of society is one that worries a lot about strong government, especially a
government that would reduce its complexity by doing things like raising taxes.
This attitude ultimately leads the have-nots to see the already low complexity of
their lives become even lower, as a sense of living in an unjust system with
shrinking opportunities creates feelings of alienation. Does this sound familiar?
Rising food prices, growing youth unemployment and lack of adequate housing
and education are exactly the surface causes of the revolutions taking place
today in Africa and the Middle East. Question: When will it come to America?
We’d like to be able to develop procedures for anticipating when that gap
between the rich (read: high complexity lifestyles) and the not-so-rich (low
complexity lives) will widen to an unsustainable level. How to do that?
The first step in identifying the “danger zone” where the gap between
expectations and reality is reaching a critical level is to measure the society’s
expectations, what we might term its “social mood”. This is the view the society
holds about its future, optimistic (positive) or pessimistic (negative) on various
time scales, weeks, months, years, or more. We then look for the turning points
in this mood as an indicator of where society will move from one overall
psychological mindset to another. Of course, the danger zone is the point at
which the social mood begins to roll over from positive to negative, since that’s
the point at which the society can “tip” from hope to despair. This is precisely
where Davies’ theory suggests a civil disturbance becomes much more likely
than not.

John L. Casti (casti@iiasa.ac.at) is a Senior Research Scholar at the International Institute

for Applied Systems Analysis in Laxenburg bei Wien, und Founder of the Kenos Circle, a
Vienna-based society for exploration of the future. His most recent book is Mood Matters:
From Rising Skirt Lengths to the Collapse of World Powers (Copernicus Books, New York,
2010).