A few days ago, at home in Ardèche, a book confronted me with a question I’ve been exploring for years: the link between chaos and emergence. I put down my iPad and sat still for a few minutes.
I had just finished A Paradise Built in Hell, by Rebecca Solnit. And one sentence stopped me cold:
“Disasters are extraordinarily generative… those circumstances are far richer and stranger than has ever been accounted for.”
I read it three times. Not because it was hard to understand. Because it went straight against the dominant story about human nature in times of crisis.
The Story Hobbes Told Us
In the 17th century, Thomas Hobbes laid the groundwork for an idea that still dominates Western thinking: left to themselves, without authority or rules, humans go to war. “The war of all against all.” Man is a wolf to man.
This vision has crossed the centuries. It feeds disaster movies, post-apocalyptic series, political speeches on security. It has become our default interpretive reflex the moment a crisis hits.
And the media keeps it alive: the moment a catastrophe strikes, everyone scans for the slightest sign of looting, panic, violence. When they find it (which happens, but rarely), it makes headlines. When they don’t (which is the norm), nobody cares.
The result: we all carry in our heads an image of humanity in crisis that simply doesn’t match what the facts actually document.
What the Facts Say
Rebecca Solnit did something remarkable: she went to look. Not theorizing. Investigating on the ground, in the archives, with the survivors.
San Francisco earthquake, 1906. Halifax explosion, 1917 (the largest explosion before Hiroshima). Mexico City earthquake, 1985. 9/11 in New York. Katrina in New Orleans, 2005.
In every single one of these disasters, she documents the same thing: the dominant human response is not panic or looting. It’s spontaneous solidarity. People who didn’t know each other start cooking together, sharing resources, looking after each other’s children. Entire communities organize within hours, with no leader, no plan, no central authority.
She calls these “disaster utopias”: moments when something better than ordinary life emerges, precisely because ordinary life has collapsed.
Pablo Servigne arrives at the same conclusion from a different direction: solidarity isn’t a moral ideal or naïve wishful thinking. It’s an evolutionary strategy encoded in our biology. “Mutual aid is the other law of the jungle.”
Solnit and Servigne converge on the same essential point: Hobbes was describing elites panicking at the thought of losing their power, not ordinary people in ordinary communities.
Chaos and Emergence: What Prigogine Demonstrated
What Solnit documents on the ground, chaos theory explains mathematically.
When a system comes under enough pressure that it can no longer return to its previous state, two things can happen. The system can collapse. Or a new equilibrium emerges, often more complex and sometimes richer than the old one. This is what Ilya Prigogine demonstrated: in systems far from equilibrium, order can spontaneously arise from disorder. Not a metaphor — a physical law. (I explore this further in my article on emergence or collapse.)
What Solnit observes in disasters is exactly this: social systems under extreme pressure that, instead of collapsing into chaos, generate a new order spontaneously. A collective direction that appears on its own. A collective strange attractor, in a way.
The Condition: A Different Narrative and a Clear Direction
But Solnit notes something important: these disaster utopias don’t last everywhere. In some cases, panicked authorities reimpose the narrative of fear and “every man for himself”, and that’s enough to crush what was beginning to emerge. Katrina is the most painful example: while survivors were spontaneously organizing, authorities deployed military forces against their own citizens, convinced they were going to loot and fight.
What I take from this for us today: the narrative we choose to adopt literally changes what emerges.
If we enter a crisis with the Hobbesian narrative (save yourself, others will fight over resources), we create the conditions for collapse. If we enter a crisis with a different narrative (crises are generative, solidarity is our natural response), we create the conditions for emergence.
And for that second narrative to hold under pressure, we need something more than a vague positive intention. We need a clear direction. A strange attractor: precise enough to hold the course when everything shifts, flexible enough to leave room for the unexpected.
Not a plan. Not an objective. A direction. An answer to the question: where do I want things to go?
And then repeat it. To yourself. To your team. To your loved ones. Not once, but regularly. It’s that patient repetition that allows direction to act like a magnet on everything that emerges around you.
In Practice
If you’re going through a difficult period right now (personally, in your organization, in your sector), or just want to improve things, here is what I suggest:
Take ten minutes this week to formulate your direction. Not what you want to avoid, but where you want to go. One or two sentences, in the present tense, as if it were already taking shape.
Then share it. With someone you trust first. Then with your team if you have one.
That’s it. It’s not more complicated than that. But it’s that small gesture that makes the difference between being swept along by chaos and beginning to orient it.
You may never have had more power over what emerges around you. The question is: where do you want it to go?
And you — what is your direction right now? Share it in the comments.
Further reading
References cited in this article:
- Rebecca Solnit, A Paradise Built in Hell, Viking, 2009
- Pablo Servigne & Gauthier Chapelle, Mutual Aid: The Other Law of the Jungle, Chelsea Green Publishing, 2021
- Ilya Prigogine & Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos, Bantam Books, 1984
Bruno Marion, known as “The Futurist Monk,” is an international keynote speaker, author and consultant. For over 30 years he has helped individuals and organizations leverage the extraordinary chaotic transition we are living through, in order to avoid a major collapse of our civilization and create a better world for our children. He is the author of Chaos, mode d’emploi and On ne va pas forcément tous finir avec une hache au fond de la forêt.
