Chaos theory begets Donald Trump

The news media, professional political pundits, and woolly-brained academics appear to be stumbling through some sort of soporific trance wondering how The Donald rocketed to political primacy, feeling cuckolded by their linear, deterministic, predictive certainty of what happened before always happens again.

The fact is, Trump is a political aberration. He is what in physics and chaos theory is called a “strange attractor.” A strange attractor, according to the Random House dictionary, is …”a stable, nonperiodic state or behavior exhibited by some dynamic systems, especially turbulent ones, that can be represented as a non-repeating pattern…” In physics a strange attractor is seen as a solution to a nonlinear equation, dynamic or chaotic system.

Trump is the political version of a strange attractor. He is indeed very strange. And he sure is one powerful attractor. The phenomena of Trump is as natural as the emergence of any strange attractor in times of chaos and uncertainly. America by many definitions is in a state of social, economic, and military chaos. These conditions invite the presence of strange attractors.

It’s important to note that strange attractors (at least in physics) lead to what’s called “self-organization.” At first things swirl around in what appears to be a state of chaos, but from that chaos emerges order and a new/different way of doing things. There are many parallels to the tone and topics of Trump’s campaign that is promising order from disorder and calm from chaos.

This all means that Hillary Clinton has the odds stacked against her entering the presidential debates with Donald Trump. Expect a 4 to 6 percentage point bump in the ratings for The Donald after the first debate this coming Monday, September 26.

I don’t predict this because of any love for Trump. The calculus predicting a Trump video victory is based on the principles of chaos theory (strange attractors) fueled by how we make conscious and chiefly unconscious decisions based on emotions, and how our brain retains information that is more visual than verbal, and more survivalist than cerebral.

Clinton, I expect, will present a future offering deterministic and linear solutions building upon what happened before. I expect she will present logic, facts, and analysis. Trump will offer emotion, a magnification of the perceived chaos fueling his supporters and the promise of emergence from chaos. Just what the fearful and the angry, the disenfranchised and the desperate want.