Chaotic on the long timescale, but pretty stable given the much shorter timescale of known human history.
At one scale, it's chaos. 1 or 2 scales up or down (in time or in space) it's stable. It's like that all the way up and all the way down.
Oh, and not only are the scale levels not just spacial or temporal but both, but the number of levels is itself non integer.
But the point is that even chaotic systems often display order if you find the right place or perspective to stand and look.
You can't say "it's not stable". Not ever. Rocks aren't stable over aeons. Galaxies aren't. Protons aren't if you wait long enough.
But it is often possible to measure the rates of change and of complexity and say, look, given greater levels of complexity, then lower rates of change will probably hold...
Even given a famine or a plague that's currently devastating one region.
One way you can play with a real chaotic system is to build one of the circuits in jc sprott’s papers and vary the control variable. You’ll see at some values of your control an “orderly” progression of the response variables, and at others a difficult to predict progression.
https://scholar.google.com/citations?view_op=view_citation&h...
A lot of the series is about the belief that we could, with technologies predictive powers & neoliberal market ethos... And how it doesn't pan out. We have "New Economies" greatly bloom in the world. And about how instead we got the 1997 Asian financial crisis. We thought we were taming market complexity (via in part neoliberalism weirdly) but turns out not so much. We have the rise of cybernetic thinking & Limits of Growth (& it's limitations in assuming we cannot change human behavior).
"Sure everything is trending towards shit, but we're humans, we can definitely go create some genius machine that will fix this, right"
Curtis rarely comes out and makes broad conclusions, but the watcher is definitely left with impression of absurd hubris & folly & chaos-triumphant, in AWOBMOLG and in much else of Curtis's excellent excellent catalog of contemporary history documentaries.
Indeed; his films (and their titles!) are oblique and suggestive. They are about politics, but it's very hard to discern his own political posture clearly. I wonder what kind of a man he would be to meet.
Just my take, but I think the core concept is really that there is no one actually genuinely leading, no one left with a compelling believable vision in any position of power, and that total power vacuum keeps letting mad scenes play out across history.
The need for hope, to show a willingness to go in authentically good direction at scale, is a fuel that powers the public spirit, and we keep suffering long eras where it's simply unavailable.