The Tyranny of "We"

Why "We Are All One Humanity" Is the Most Dangerous Idea on Earth

There is a very prevalent theory out there that a multipolar world is necessarily more warlike, and that some of the conflicts we’re seeing - Ukraine, the Iran war - are but the opening salvos of the chaos to come.

In fact, it’s more than a prevalent theory: it’s fair to say it’s very much the orthodoxy taught in International Relations courses across the world. Take Kenneth Waltz’s Theory of International Politics for instance, on the reading list of virtually every IR program in the West: it argues that bipolar systems are more stable than multipolar ones, because uncertainty is lower, deterrence is clearer, and there are fewer relationships in which miscalculation can metastasize into war.

In essence, the theory goes: more poles, more problems.

And it’s not just conventional wisdom in the Western tradition, you just need to read Romance of the Three Kingdoms (三国演义, Sānguó Yǎnyì) - one of the "Four Great Classical Novels" of Chinese literature describing the endless wars and treachery of a China divided into separate poles of power - to understand that this is an idea that is widely held across time, cultures and civilizations. As a matter of fact the novel’s famous opening line is "话说天下大势，分久必合，合久必分" - “the empire long divided must unite; long united, must divide” - which pretty much says it all.

Even approaching the matter through instinctive logic, it makes sense. I wrote an article last year in Horizons magazine on geopolitical gravity - the idea that poles of powers are akin to celestial bodies, exerting pull on everything around them. You’d think, therefore, that celestial laws of physics also apply poles of power. In a system with one dominant body, orbits are stable and predictable. Add a second and you get a binary star system, surprisingly common in the universe, and eminently predictable. But add a third, a fourth, a fifth - and you get what physicists call the n-body problem: a system where trajectories become inherently chaotic, where small perturbations cascade into wildly unpredictable outcomes.

The math of multipolarity, in other words, is the math of chaos.

Or so we assume.