Complex Systems Are Changing Rapidly

The Rhythms Of Revolution

 The Zman

People who work with large complex systems understand that you don’t always know what will result from even the smallest change in the system. Usually this lesson is learned the hard way, by making some small change that seems simple, only to find out it caused serious downstream problems. Large complex systems are often highly dependent on initial conditions. Those small changes to the initial state, after they branch through the system, can have a huge impact.

Something similar may be happening with the culture. Up until this year, the sports entertainment complex was the great distraction. Every type of sporting event enjoyed wide following on television and on-line. It’s always hard to know, given how our ruling class lies about everything, but television ratings for the professional sports leagues were strong enough to keep raising ad rates. The revenues of the sports leagues kept growing, despite decades of growth.

That brings us to now, when the ratings for sports entertainment have suddenly collapsed, even for the marquee events. The NBA, which is the blackest of black sports, cannot draw flies. Keep in mind that the television industry routinely inflates their ratings in their press releases used by the media. The endless celebration of all things black for the last five months seems to not have had the effect they expected. All of the other sports have also seen their ratings collapse.

It is tempting to blame this on the anti-white pogrom that has been foolishly embraced by all the sports leagues. There is certainly part of it. That said, the NFL has tried very hard to minimize this in their presentation. Even the players have realized that it is bad for business. The NHL made the required gestures, but otherwise just operated their business as usual and their ratings were immeasurably small. In other words, it’s not just the anti-white pogrom killing the circus.

The problems facing sports entertainment all of a sudden are an example of the large complex system problem. It turns out that the audience for sport is not just about interest in the product and the quality of the performance. Sports operates within the larger culture, which is a highly complex system. There are rhythms to the culture, which carry things like entertainment through the culture. The lock downs and resulting insanity have broken those rhythms.

What seems to have happened is the Covid panic and now the color revolution has broken that system. People are not paying as much attention to these things as they did just a year ago. That means they are not being pulled along by the rhythms of that old system. Think about how many apolitical people that have suddenly been made aware of the reality of race and ethnicity. Put another way, the revolution of 2020 has changed the initial state of the American system.

How this ripples through the system is unknown. The current chaos may not be random at all, but determined by the evolving initial state of white America. In other words, this pogrom we are experiencing may, in fact, be a reaction to the changing attitudes sensed by the ruling class. The woke revolution is about restoring the old initial state, but has instead accelerated the evolution of it. The lock downs provided a better medium in which this evolution can occur.

At this point, the one safe conclusion we can draw is we have passed through a strange chaotic barrier on our way to a new normal. The old order, those old rhythms, are gone for good. That means the social controls that nudged people along toward the results desired by the ruling class are no longer working. All the make-believe excitement the media can generate is not getting people to watch the NBA finals, because it was never about the hype. It was the social structures, those rhythms.

In a complex system like a large human society, when the initial conditions change sufficiently, a new dynamic ensues. The unexpected downstream effects loop back and inform the evolution of those initial conditions. The feedback loop between downstream effects and those evolving initial conditions becomes fuel for the changing state of those initial conditions. This is the revolutionary dynamic. Change fuels more change, until the system collapses in on itself.

When the rulers broke the old rhythms with their lock downs, they started a revolution in the minds of the people over whom they rule. As those minds now evolve, seeing the reality of the world created by their betters, the ruling class is desperately trying to contain the process. Like all radicals, they remain supremely confident they will be the vanguard of this revolution. Like all revolutionaries, they will end up swinging from trees as that is the rhythm of every revolution.