The order of chaos, the butterfly effect
Imagine having dinner with friends on a Sunday night and drinking one glass of wine too many. You planned to walk home in the pleasant summer heat, but your condition forces you to call a taxi. The next morning you wake up cranky with a headache, careless and unstable, so your hands are scalded with the morning coffee. You arrive late to work, and at the morning meeting the assignment that could have boosted your career is given to a colleague. It makes you feel tense all day and when you get home in the evening, you throw all your frustrations at your partner.
Now imagine that at the Sunday night dinner you drink just enough to make you feel comfortable and the following sequence is reversed.
This simple example shows that our actions not only affect our own lives, but can set a process in motion that can even change the course of history.
In simple terms, we call this the butterfly effect.
The butterfly effect has become synonymous with chaos theory from the title of a famous lecture (Does the flap of a butterfly’s wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas?) by American mathematician and meteorologist Edward Lorenz.
The question arises as to why we are dealing with chaos theory and the butterfly effect on a platform for the circular economy.
The answer is in the previous thesis. Your actions affect the course of history, that is, the series of events that take place in the present shape the future, thus influencing the fate of future generations.
The over-consumption of today’s people, the full exploitation of energy sources, the abandonment of food self-determination, the production of drastic amounts of waste, the extreme evisceration of the Earth sacrificed on the altar of profit and comfort, the destruction of species, the deterioration of the ecological balance are just a few of the examples that have been taken to illustrate what it means if we do not consciously manage our natural values, that is, if we drink more than a glass.
The past cannot be changed, at least not at this level of human development. In Eric Bress’ 2004 film, The Butterfly Effect, the protagonist is able to travel through time so he returns to the past to fix some mistakes that have had a negative impact on his friends’ lives. When he returns to the present, he realizes that his changes in the past did not improve the situation but caused much bigger problems.
The lesson for us may be that if we cannot change the mistakes we made in the past, let us try to make responsible and conscious decisions in the present that do not deprive the future generation of the opportunities available to us today.