You've probably heard of the Butterfly Effect, but if you haven't, it's basically the idea that one small thing can lead to a whole cascading chain of events and this is usually talked about in the context of a person's life to sound profound, or play with concepts of time travel, or ruminate on regret, or celebrate how amazing it is that one little thing made such a big thing happen.
This way of thinking tends to make a person's life trajectory sound extremely brittle and I'm going to attempt to show a bit what's wrong with it and how it hides behind Great Man Theory - the idea that history is primarily defined by the movements of "great people", usually men (side eye at patriarchy), who had some kind of dramatic impact that changed the course of history.
So what do these do have to do with each other? What they have in common is that they attribute outsized influence to things that don't deserve it and they reduce lots of complex dynamics (such as gradual transition from one state to another, quantitative to qualitative; negation, how the caterpillar negates itself to become a cocoon and the cocoon negates itself to become a butterfly and so on) and turn it into a laser focusing on a singular factor or decision.
I'm far from an expert on dialectical materialism, but I feel confident in saying that neither Great Man Theory nor the Butterfly Effect (at least in its colloquial use) hold up to it.
Let's consider an example, first we'll look at it the way the butterfly effect narrative might write it.
A person, we'll call him John Butterfly, graduates high school and he is deciding where to go to university. A chance conversation with a stranger steers him toward studying abroad and he goes with this idea. In this other country, he meets a person who he becomes romantically entangled with. This person knows an expert in the field that John Butterfly is planning to study in. The expert helps him learn better and has a great opportunity for him after he graduates university. He eventually gets married to the person he hit it off with, gets a great job due to the connection, and goes on to win awards and have many babies. And look at that, baby of John Butterfly. You only exist because John Butterfly just happened to talk to that stranger and just happened to decide to go study abroad. Everything after that sort of just fell into place, like it was pre-determined. Isn't life profound and strange.
Now let's look at it with another lens.
John Butterfly graduates high school and is deciding where to go to university. He is socially positioned such that he was able to go to high school and graduate, and there are options when it comes to university. He lives in a place where studying abroad is something people talk about and tends to be an option, at least to some degree, and stacking factors up to that point, ones he may not consciously be paying attention to, lead to him feeling more interested in getting far away from home than sticking around. Maybe he has a shitty family life or he has an especially adventurous spirit and developed an interest in other cultures as he grew. Anyway, he's already open to the idea when it's brought up to him because of factors in progress at that stage. For some reason, we decided to mark history as beginning when he met a stranger and decided to study abroad. Not sure why. He's been around for over eighteen years. Civilization has been around for much longer than that, though western civilization has yet to appear.
Anyway, the class/caste of capitalism and modern programs of cultural exchange have already set the stage for him to do something like this. It's expected that some people will study abroad. Further, some people will meet a person who goes on to be their sweetheart in university. Some will also divorce them later, or meet many who they go through and never settle down. These are normal but also not inevitable. Some of it's luck, which is a thing capitalism sorta brings with it. Capitalism has big casino vibes and like a casino, it's the house who wins in the end. John Butterfly is less a profound story about little decisions and more of a success story for capitalism to hold up and say "See, it works! But how does it work? It's a mystery. Life is so mysterious, wow."
It's not so mysterious. He got some nepotism style help from the connection. I forgot to mention he's actually an alcoholic at the end of this and the awards are something he displays in his overpriced house at dinner parties. Most of his kids haven't called him in a while.
You see after it was going so well, he tripped on a banana peel and got hooked on opioids. Then he turned to alcohol. He near went bankrupt from the medical bills, in spite of having more money than a lot of people do. Must be the butterfly effect again. Not the medical system that is squeezing him or the doctors who prescribed him addicting medicine because of capitalist pressures behind it. Not the companies that spend millions or billions on alcohol ads and stores. And the banana peel, well that was an unexplainable weather event. It was actually blown in by a hurricane, so not humanity's fault. I mean, the hurricane was happening this particular time because of climate change, but that's not real anyway, right.
I don't know quite how I got into extreme sarcasm mode, but hopefully I am making the point, a little bit. Our lives are complicated, the systems going on around us are even more complicated, and the butterfly effect trivializes and ignores all of that so it can individualize and create an arbitrary snapshot of when history began and ended. Much like John Great Man's contributions to history. How he invented the windmill by staring at branches moving in the wind for thousands of hours and sustaining himself on pettiness, while ignoring pleading insistence that he feed himself.
Dialectical (and historical) materialism shows this to be folly. Many things considered random or weird can instead be traced back to long-running material factors, combined with the superstructure society side of things, and the inner world factor of individuals acting upon it.
I think a good question in the face of a fantastical butterfly effect chain is, "Why was this possible in the first place? What was going on in the larger world that made this possible? This story that is made up of such seemingly profound change, where 'one action' could dramatically change the course of events?"
Cause damn, if changing the course of events was that simple, I'd just find the right hat to put on and set off the end of colonialism, ya know.
I'm not a great man theorist, obviously, but I'm not sure I agree with your criticism of the butterfly effect [I am also insanely hot rn though so maybe that's impeding my understanding].
Firstly your example is a bit...singular? You're creating and defeating your own straw man that isn't exactly helpful for actually analyzing the thing we are discussing.
Secondly, I fail to see how it's great man-ish. The point is not great man makes history, it's that tiny little things can decide great big things. Maybe it's not exactly dialectical, but I dont think it's in the same realm as great man theory.
Thirdly, I feel like there's actual examples of the butterfly effect that should be debunked instead of a strawman.
For instance, what would have occurred if Persia had conquered Palmyra, or the Palmyran empire survived [however unlikely that second one is, depending on specifics]. Could the 2nd and 3rd Abraham's relgions have appeared ever in that case? Or would christianity have spread west? What of Rome itself?
Or what if Indonesia had a socialist revolution in the 20th century? Sure in the short term that is still pretty big, but even 50-100 years would probably have made the world unrecognizable to us.
There are other examples, but I feel like the general philosophy wasn't exactly disproved by this post
That's fair criticism, that it's by no means a thorough deconstruction. However, I would push back on calling the example a strawman. The idea was to illustrate how the butterfly effect tends to get used in practice. I am not taking aim at scientists analyzing weather patterns, but people in colloquial use talking about the course of lives or the movements of history.
Like I said:
I could have worded this better, but basically what I'm trying to say here, especially with the first part, is that they are arbitrarily picking out an element and saying "this is the one that makes the difference." While ignoring many other things.
I cannot speak for you, but the way I see the butterfly effect get used, it's not saying "tiny things build up to big things," it's saying "flipping this switch from on to off has a huge domino effect". It doesn't try to explain why X point is a switch that has a domino effect and why others don't. It doesn't try to explain what led up to X being significant or why it was a decision in the first place. What it does do, which is similar to the use of great man theory, is it actually takes away a whole lot of agency. Great man theory does this by ignoring 99% of the people and other factors that exist in the world and defining the important parts of agency as largely deriving from what the great men did and how they impacted people. The butterfly effect does much the same; the implication is that the switch flip is not something you just flip again, but instead you have become locked onto a whole cascading trajectory.
A great example of this in colloquial storytelling is time travel stories, where one change results in a dramatically different future. This is outsized influence. Thus the sarcastic comment about my choice of hat determining whether colonialism ends. I believe a more grounded understanding of the world is that though things definitely do change and can seem to be changed by small things, they can also be pulled back by other small things, in the jockeying push and pull of contradictions. Leading us to things like "we make far more of a difference together than we do trying to individually change the world in a disjointed way."
Or to put it in one way, if I open a door and then you immediately close it, what cascading impact can be had there? But this kind of push and pull of forces in one direction or another is going on all the time.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but I don't see this as an example of the butterfly effect. I just see this as entertaining an alternate historical path on a large scale. Which does not require trivializing anything. I'm not opposed to learning from history, considering alternate historical paths, or even from making movies and books out of it. What I am meaning to push back on here is misrepresenting something as outsized influence, especially in the individualist context, which is one of the ways in which capitalism gets people either backpatting or blaming themselves for things that are far beyond their individual power.
Does that make sense?
Also, hope you can cool down from the heat soon.