The butterfly effect

Hey guys, how are you doing…?… so… I have always heard about the “butterfly effect” but never really knew what it meant, from the name I thought it was. So I met someone who thought I was good at writing and so, he asked me to write about it. After a little bit of research I felt so smart lol, so I decided to share my article with y’all and I’d appreciate an honest review on it.

The butterfly effect is an often misused and misunderstood phenomenon, it is the idea that small things can have a non linear impact on a complex system. The concept is imagined with a butterfly flapping its wings in Uganda and possibly causing an earthquake in turkey or a flood in Asia. Obviously, in literal terms, a single act of a butterfly flapping its wings cannot cause so much of a disarray as an earthquake or a flood. However, small events can serve as a stimulant that acts on starting conditions.

Sometime in 1961, Edward Lorenz, a meteorology professor at Massachusetts institute of technology (MIT) entered some numbers into a computer program made to predict the weather and left his office while the machine worked. On his arrival, he got a result that opposed everything the world thought it knew. While entering the numbers, Edward Lorenz rounded off one variable. Amazingly, that little modification he made had a rigorous effect on the results of over two months of already predicted weather. This unexpected result led Lorenz to a powerful realization on how nature works. The butterfly effect challenged the classical understanding of nature.

Benjamin Franklin made a poetic view that relates with the phenomenon;

For want of a nail the shoe was lost

For want of a shoe the horse was lost

For want of a horse the rider was lost

For want of a rider the battle was lost

For want of a battle the kingdom was lost

And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.

Basically a whole kingdom was lost because something as small as a horseshoe nail was lost.

Exactly 50 years after the realization, a 26-year old Mohammed Bouazizi, a Tunisian, set himself ablaze on the 17th of December 2010 after his fruit cart was seized by the authorities. With this incident, the people of Tunisia took to the streets to protest against high unemployment, food inflation, corruption, a lack of political freedom (such as freedom of speech) and poor living conditions. This revolution was called the “jasmine revolution”, and this revolution extended to other countries like Libya, Egypt, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain where the ruler was deposed or major uprisings and social violence occurred including riots, civil wars, or insurgencies and these events are popularly known as the “Arab Spring”. It took one man setting himself on fire to cause something as big as an Arab Spring, these occurrences were unexpected, that is the butterfly effect.

The current coronavirus pandemic to an extent can be considered an example of the butterfly effect. I tell people that a disaster doesn’t just happen, it always has a genesis. The Coronavirus pandemic is a crisis that started from Wuhan China that was allegedly gotten from eating bats. A virus in China has led to a global collapse in crude oil prices due to low demand which relatively led to the devaluation of Naira to Dollars. This virus also disrupted companies and businesses, and many people were laid off. Prices of commodities have spiked, with little or no income to purchase these commodities thereby causing inflation. The chain of events is beginning to unfold, and an economic crisis is surfacing.

Basically whatever you do, no matter how little it is will always have an unpredictable consequences either good or bad. “It is important to remember that the butterfly effect is not a small event that can have a large impact which can eventually be driven to the desired end but it is in fact a small event in a complex universe that can either have a very large impact or no impact at all. It is virtually impossible for us to identify or predict which one will occur”. Imagine if Eve had not eaten the apple, or if Nigerians see themselves as one entity, no ethnic groups and no religion. So be mindful of what you do.

Xoxo Coco