Since President Donald Trump took office a few weeks ago, the Frenetic Activity of the Administration, which has involved withdrawal from global agreements and reducing federal affairs and funds, has left many people to recover. However, others seem to be enjoying chaos. According to political scientists, at least some of this behavior that require chaos may be related to the sense of people to lose their basis in society. And that meaning, on the other hand, has to do with increasing inequality and globalization.
“Chaos is a strategy that some people use to account for a perceived loss of status,” says political scientist Kevin Arceneaux of the Research University of the Sciences in Paris, France. “Their reaction to this is then that they start to create trouble as a way to turn the carriage into her head and try to recover their place.”
Most people prefer the order, says Arceneaux. But about 15 percent of the US population gravitates to chaos, or “a desire for a new beginning through the destruction of order and established structures”, Arceneaux and his team reported in 2021 in Philosophical transactions of royal society B. The team came to that conclusion after developing a ladder to measure people’s desire for chaos. About 5,000 Americans praised their level of deal with statements such as, “I think society should burn on earth”, “I get a blow when natural disasters strike foreign countries” and “sometimes we just feel like destroying things Beautiful. “
The highest in what Arceneaux calls the conduct of chaos-5 percent of the 5,000 Americans surveyed-they are inclined to generate precise for the sake of refurbishment without worrying about who hurts in the process, found the team. Meanwhile, approximately 10 percent of people surveyed from the chaos, but have no bad intention, says Arceneaux. They simply think that society is too broken to fix. “These people want society to start, but they don’t want to hurt people,” Arceneaux says.
Scientific news He spoke with Arceneaux to understand the role that individual desires for chaos could play at the moment in the US and global history. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Sn: Seed pushed your team to start studying the chaos?
Arceneaux: It was probably in early 2017. We had decided to start this research project to study misinformation. What was on the news at the time was that social media had been used to circulate many false narratives. This was really the thing we were interested in studying. And we conceived this concept [as] “Need for chaos.”
We started digging in academic literature on social marginalization [and] Status searching. The idea here is that there are some individuals who feel like they are losing their status. And this is a perception. These do not need to be people who are really poor. They can actually be, in an absolute, good sense. These individuals’ reaction to that perceived loss is then to try to create trouble.
Then we developed … the ladder and we did a host of pilot studies. And then what we showed through a series of studies is that these individuals, clearly, their motivation for dividing misinformation is simply to promote problems, and they do not care whether it is true or not.
Thankfully, it is not a large group of people. At the same time, you do not need a large group of people to create chaos.
Sn: You have analyzed how the need for chaos relates to certain personality traits. According to your work, what characterizes chaos researchers?
Arceneaux: There are two types of people who are high in chaos. A small group of people mark the highest on the scale. They want both society to burn on earth and destroy beautiful things. It is another group that is a little bigger we called “reconstructive”. They tend to say about the burning institutions on Earth. But they don’t love malice. They do not take a blow from the natural disasters that hit the places and such things.
Chaos researchers seem to be run by the ego. They feel like they are not respected as much as they think they should. But the need for chaos is not a personality trait, where in every single context people will seek chaos. On the contrary, it is something that psychologists call an adaptation of the character. These adaptations help people respond to a particular context. For now, factors such as increasing inequality and globalization are making life feel more unsafe. So people with many dark personality traits can respond by calling the chaos.
No group [of chaos-seekers] is driven by a political ideology. In 2016 and 2020, the high -ranking note was not linked to Voting for Donald Trump. We have preliminary findings showing that people who scored high in the scale in 2024 are more likely to vote for Donald Trump. We don’t know what changed.
Sn: Your research also suggests that chaos researchers pass white and male. Why do you think it is?
Arceneaux: If you look at the black individuals in our sample, they are much more likely to worry about the group against the individual than the white individuals. Historically there has been much more emphasis on this notion of related fate that what happens to the group affects the individual.
Among black men and black women – and looks like white women – if they feel like their group is lost, this is negatively linked to the need for chaos. And that seems to fit what we know from the literature of “fate tied” … You are a minority in a place where you feel like you are losing. Creating chaos will not help you. It makes you a target.
White men as a demographic show the strongest link between the loss of status and the need for chaos. This fits our theory. Loss is the loss of personal status that motivates people. White men [more often] The care they are individually losing.
Sn: Can this theory shed light on the current US situation?
Arceneaux: There is no letter yet. But with [political scientist] Roy Truex, who is in Princeton [University]We did a study throughout the 2024 elections. Starting in late July 2024, we surveyed 500 people across the United States every week until the day of inauguration. Just before and after the elections, I think we have surveyed every day.
We have included the degree of chaos in those surveys, questions to measure feelings of loss of status and questions about people’s perception of their absolute status. We found people who feel like low status are more likely to be needed for chaos, which is in accordance with theory.
There is an old literature in social psychology about a concept called relative deprivation. She gets with this idea that when people think about how they are acting, they think about it about other people. If you are my boss and you say, “I will give you a 5 percent increase”, that would be fine, wouldn’t it? But then if I find out that you have given my office a 10 percent increase, I feel like I’m getting drunk. This is classic relative deprivation. What is interesting, however, are the people who believe that they are high in status also mark the most need for chaos. Their concern seems to be losing that advantage.
This is what happens when you have high levels of inequality. In the end, it creates a widespread sense of relative deprivation, of loss … but it also means that people at the top can also worry a lot about the loss of those things. Because the alternative to inequality is division. Think about the arguments about Dei in the United States. People at the top may ask: Do you mean creating a more comprehensive space for me?
When I looked at this data, I thought, this is a really great explanation why we have a marriage of two forces all over the world. On the one hand, there are a group of people who think the deck is accumulated against them. And for them, starting again or getting rid of the system as it makes sense. But Elon Musk is the richest man in the world and Donald Trump is not weak. In Europe, many of the people who are leading the populist charge are not even bad. One of the things is possible is that these people admit that they have benefited and they want to keep it. This is created for strange beds.
Sn: In your opinion, is there anything that people can do to soften the chaos?
Arceneaux: I think we should hear some of these people. Easy is easy to rest from work when people say, “Look, I’m getting drunk”, and say as an answer, “You look like you are doing very well.”
Many people … are wondering, “What are these liberal democratic institutions doing for me?” What you get is a preference for a strong leader who will enter and clean things. And we see it on the left and right. In Venezuela, when Hugo Chavez entered, he was not on the right.
I think we often think about this from the notion that there is nothing wrong with our democratic institutions. But I think we need to draw a little attention to understand why people are unhappy.
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