The impetus for this discussion is an essay by the Russian‑American thinker and essayist Mikhail Epstein, published on the Radio Svoboda website, in which he outlines a line of thought about the role of chaos in the contemporary world.

If the previous century was marked by a struggle over grand ideas, the current one has brought to the fore what Epstein calls chaos-based governance — or power that promises no bright future, but seeks to guide society and influence others by spreading permanent uncertainty and total indeterminacy.

If communism promised a classless society and a realm of justice, and fascism promised the triumph of nation and race and total order, a new political phenomenon has now taken shape. It promises no radiant future and does not appeal to freedom or equality. In fact, it promises nothing except permanent unrest. This is the politics of chaos, or chaos-based power.

This is not chaos in the everyday sense — not disorder or utter confusion. Chaos-based governance is the use of unpredictability as an instrument of power. It rules through chronic uncertainty about tomorrow. Sociologist Zygmunt Bauman has called this "liquid fear." In Russia, attempts have been made to provide a theoretical foundation for chaos-based governance as well. This includes the work of the Valdai Club, which shapes the intellectual underpinnings of the Russian regime, particularly its writings on applying chaos theory to international relations — a topic I have addressed before.

While in mathematics chaos is a special form of order, and in physics chaotic systems are deterministic, in politics chaos-based governance seeks to make the system inherently unpredictable.

In answering the question of why chaos-based governance has emerged now and not earlier, Epstein offers several reasons. First, the information revolution, in which the speed of information dissemination exceeds the speed of its comprehension. Consistent ideology is too slow under these conditions; victory goes to whoever can generate events. Chaos-based governance is the ideology of the Twitter age: what matters is not meaning, but effect. The second reason is the crisis of grand narratives — postmodernism proclaimed the end of the age of metanarratives.

Chaos-based governance is postmodernism that has become power. If there is no truth, one can say anything. If there are no shared values, force prevails. If there is no future, there is only the present moment.

The best contemporary example of chaos-based governance is Russia. The goals of the war in Ukraine have changed repeatedly: denazification, demilitarization, defending Donbas, fighting NATO, a historic mission, and so on. But in reality there is no goal, and the absence of one has become a method. Nuclear threats have turned into a ritual; laws are adopted and enforced arbitrarily.

At the same time, chaos-based governance directed outward is coupled with rigidity directed at one's own population. This is a structural inevitability of chaos-based power: external unpredictability must be compensated by an internal monopoly on the use of force. Chaos outward, iron order inward. Disorder is an export commodity; order is a domestic prison. Practitioners of chaos-based governance cannot afford chaos at home, or they would lose their only remaining resource — a compliant population.

In terms of unpredictability, the current U.S. administration has also drawn attention. Donald Trump has made it a central element of his foreign-policy rhetoric. Until the end of last year, Trump's transactional approach appeared to be tough but limited bargaining — tariffs, pressure on allies, unpredictable diplomacy. This year, however, a mutation occurred: the abduction of Venezuelan dictator Nicolás Maduro was already labeled a dangerous precedent by the UN secretary-general. If that was merely a forceful move, then attacking Iran is something more, as the war was initiated without congressional approval and has global consequences. Yet unlike chaos-based politics, Trump still negotiates. Vladimir Putin, by contrast, has no stop button.

If chaos-based governance shatters institutions, Trump's transactionalism bypasses them. Transactionalism is a tactic; chaos-based governance is an ontology — a doctrine of being. Still, both Trump and Putin can be called international masters of chaos. But if Putin is a developer of turbulence, Trump is a beneficiary of it.

Chaos-based governance also manifests itself in warfare. Contemporary war is a war of drones, and this is not only a technological shift but also a symptom of conflict becoming chaos-based. The tank is a weapon of order—massive, linear, dependent on logistics and hierarchy. Air force power is a state weapon, a complex system requiring infrastructure, training, and coordination. A drone, however, is a weapon of chaos — cheap, usable in swarms or in dispersed fashion, autonomous. In drone warfare, the classical hierarchy breaks down; decisions are made at lower levels faster than high command can respond. And tactics change every day.

If the political science of chaos describes a regime, then the anthropology of chaos describes its victim — the person living in an environment with constantly shifting parameters. The modern individual lived in a world where it was clear where things came from and where they led. The postmodern individual lived in a world of interpretations, where the same events could be understood in different ways.

The individual of the chaos-based era lives in a world of irritation. They respond not to meaning but to stimuli; they do not understand, but they twitch. Hence contemporary psychological phenomena such as anxiety disorders, inability to concentrate, and chronic news fatigue. These are systemic effects of chaos-based governance, which destroy a person's capacity for long-term action.

The traumas of chaos have an unexpected side effect. Where chaos-based governance is most intense, forms of social self-organization arise. In Ukraine, for example, within days of the start of the large-scale aggression, volunteer networks emerged that filled critical gaps in army supply. The response to chaos arises within chaos itself — not as a return to lost order, but as a new, higher-level mode of organization.

In these processes, artificial intelligence may play a major and still largely unrecognized role — not as an instrument of chaos, but as a new tool of organization. It makes it possible to structure information flows, distribute information verification in real time, and assist decision-making in conditions where people are drowning in data.

The longer a society lives under the pressure of chaos, the stronger the demand will become for new forms of coordination, new ways of thinking, and the ability to act quickly. Out of chaos emerges not only fear, but also a new capacity for self-organization.

Recommended reading

• Торжество хаосизма. Михаил Эпштейн – об энтропии как политике
• Свидетели Хаоса — Riddle Russia
• The Price of Unpredictability: How Trump's Foreign Policy Is Ruining American Credibility
• Виктор Каган: Метапсихология неопределённости XXI | СЕМЬ ИСКУССТВ

--

Follow ERR News on Facebook and X and never miss an update!