Why Human Progress Needs Manageable Disorder
Nayef Al-Rodhan
Why do human beings learn most rapidly when confronted by the unexpected? Why have some of the greatest leaps in biological evolution, scientific discovery, and civilisational development emerged not from stability, but from disruption? Across biology, neuroscience, history, and politics, a striking pattern emerges: life does not merely endure uncertainty, competition, and disorder – it is shaped by them. DNA mutates. Brains revise their understanding of reality through prediction errors. Organisms adapt when familiar conditions are disrupted. From cells to societies, progress often begins when existing assumptions are challenged by forces that cannot be fully controlled or predicted.
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The human story reflects this same reality. It has never been a tale of linear, peaceful advancement, but one forged through recurring episodes of upheaval, rivalry, and uncertainty that compelled individuals and societies to adapt or decline. The turbulence of the present, from geopolitical fragmentation and technological disruption to economic volatility and ecological stress, is therefore less an historical anomaly than the latest expression of humanity’s enduring struggle to navigate a world of perpetual change. This has profound implications for global politics, suggesting that international stability depends less on eliminating uncertainty and rivalry than on developing institutions capable of managing them constructively.
It is tempting to view such pressures solely as threats. Yet to do so is to miss a central paradox of human progress. Evidence from evolutionary biology and neuroscience to psychology, economics, and political science suggests that disorder, uncertainty, and competition have repeatedly acted as catalysts for adaptation and renewal. They expose weaknesses, test resilience, challenge assumptions, and create incentives to innovate. Without uncertainty, there is little reason to learn or adapt. Without competition, the drive to improve and surpass existing limits can weaken.
This is not an argument for romanticising turbulence. Left unchecked, disorder can fracture societies, competition can become predatory, and uncertainty can harden into fear and miscalculation. The challenge, therefore, is not to eliminate these forces (an impossible task given that they are woven into nature, biology and human nature alike) but to understand how they can be channelled toward constructive rather than destructive ends.The task before us is to build resilient individuals, effective institutions, and adaptive societies capable of transforming turbulence into renewal, rivalry into innovation, and uncertainty into opportunities for learning, resilience, and sustainable progress.
On the Value of Chaos and Uncertainty
Chaos is often cast as progress’s enemy. However, biology suggests a more complex truth showing how life necessarily uses chaos as a creative tool for adapting to an uncertain world. Life itself is built on instability. To survive, living systems have evolved ways to contain this noise: enzymes repair genetic errors, immune systems repel invaders, and nervous systems build predictive models of the world. To see life only as a struggle against randomness misses a deeper truth. Across every level of biology, organisms do not merely suppress uncertainty; they also use it as a source of adaptation and problem-solving.
Evolutionary processes such as the Baldwin effect and cryptic variation show how environmental pressure can unlock hidden traits and widen the range of possible responses. Experiments with bacteria likewise suggest that changing conditions can increase genetic and transcriptional variation, raising the odds of useful adaptation. Organisms, in other words, do not simply resist uncertainty. They harness it to survive, innovate, and evolve.
Similarly, neuroscience increasingly suggests that uncertainty and surprise are not merely disruptions to cognition, but powerful engines of learning. Unexpected experiences can reshape memory systems, including through synaptic plasticity in the hippocampus, enabling the brain to revise prior assumptions and encode new information. Rather than acting solely as a source of anxiety, uncertainty drives adaptation. Prediction errors (i.e. the gaps between what the brain expects and what it actually encounters) are now recognised as fundamental mechanisms across perception and decision-making, forcing the mind to continuously update its model of the world.
While chronic stress is undeniably damaging, research on stress inoculation demonstrates that measured exposure to challenges helps the nervous system develop more adaptive responses to future adversity. Each successful navigation through uncertainty teaches the organism that disorder does not necessitate collapse. Over time, this builds resilience to cope with a crisis, adapt to adversity, and quickly rebound to a state of healthy functioning.
The takeaway is not that disorder should be cultivated for its own sake, but that uncertainty is an inextricable condition of life. Indeed, human maturation fundamentally depends on such disruption. Adolescence serves as the primary example: a developmental stage defined by biological, emotional, and social turbulence, wherein youth are forced beyond the secure boundaries of childhood into volatile social spheres. This instability necessitates environmental exploration and identity synthesis. Without uncertainty, the passage to adulthood would be an incomplete transition, yielding physical maturity without the psychological resilience required to navigate the world. Ultimately, the objective is not to eliminate chaos and uncertainty, but rather to navigate them, extract their lessons and harness them for our own growth.
The lesson from biology and neuroscience is clear: uncertainty becomes a source of adaptation when organisms possess the mechanisms needed to process and respond to it. Without such mechanisms, the same uncertainty can become overwhelming and destructive. The same principle applies at higher levels of organisation, where societies, like organisms, flourish not by eliminating uncertainty but by developing institutions capable of absorbing and productively channelling it. This also applies internationally, where resilient global institutions and rules are better able to absorb geopolitical shocks, strategic competition, and systemic crises without descending into disorder or conflict.
Entropy as Transformation
Although the concept of entropy originates in physics and the second law of thermodynamics, it has since travelled across fields, from information theory to economics and politics. At its simplest, entropy reminds us that no system remains perfectly ordered indefinitely. Bodies age, inherited values lose their fit with new realities, institutions weaken, and political arrangements that once seemed stable can transform into new, more robust and resilient, realities. Disorder is therefore not an exception to the life of systems, it is part of their condition.
Yet entropy should not be understood only as decay. It also marks the point at which hidden weaknesses become visible, energy is redistributed, and transformation, repair, and empowerment become possible. Recognising this allows us to anticipate moments of dysfunction not merely as failures, but as openings through which systems can adapt, reorganise, and evolve. Whether entropy ultimately produces renewal or decline depends largely on the capacity of a system to absorb disruption, learn from it, and reorganise itself in response. As with living organisms, resilience lies not in preserving perfect order, but in developing the adaptive mechanisms that allow disorder to be converted into growth rather than collapse.
On the Benefits of Non-Conflictual Competition
Competition is often treated as a pathology of modern life; an expression of the darker side of human nature, an engine of geopolitical fragmentation, ruthless markets, the pursuit of dominance and greed, and the exhausting pressure to perform. This view is incomplete as competition can be destructive, but it has also been one of the central forces behind human adaptation, innovation, institutional, national, and civilisational progress.
A crucial distinction must be made between conflictual and non-conflictual competition. Conflictual competition seeks advantage through the weakening, exclusion, or harm of rivals and can become destructive and zero-sum. Non-conflictual competition, by contrast, seeks excellence, innovation, win-win, absolute gains and advancement without undermining others, generating outcomes that are often positive or multi-sum, and beneficial to society and the global system as a whole.
Evolutionary biology offers one explanation for why competition has been so formative. According to the Ecological Dominance-Social Competition model, once early humans became less vulnerable to external threats such as predators and climate, their most consequential pressures increasingly came from other humans. Competition within and between groups (over resources, status, and mates) helped select for more sophisticated cognitive, linguistic, and social capacities.
Psychology reaches a similar conclusion at the level of individual performance. In 1898, Norman Triplett observed that cyclists rode faster when racing others than when riding alone against the clock. His finding helped establish the theory of social facilitation: the presence of competitors can mobilise effort that individuals may not summon in isolation. Under the right conditions, competition generates not only stress but beneficial pressure that sharpens attention, increases effort, rewards merit, and accelerates learning.
Likewise, economics has long emphasised competition’s value. Competitive markets can lower prices, improve quality, expand choice, and spur innovation. Joseph Schumpeter’s idea of “creative destruction” captured this dynamic: competition displaces outdated technologies, firms, and habits, making room for new ones. It pushes societies from horses to cars, from telegraphs to smartphones, and from inherited routines to new capabilities. In labour markets, competition also encourages individuals to invest in education, language, and technical skills, raising the productive capacity of society as a whole.
Politics, too, depends on competition. It forces leaders and parties to respond to citizens, adapt to changing demands and challenges, and justify their hold on power. Where challenging competitive pressures weaken, power tends to harden into monopoly, and monopoly into mediocrity and stagnation. At the social level, competition with an external group can also strengthen internal cohesion, encouraging individuals to subordinate private disputes to collective goals.
The evidence across disciplines points to a simple conclusion that competition is beneficial when it is structured as multi/positive-sum. When individuals, firms, parties, or states compete to solve pan-human frontier risks, cure diseases, build better technologies, improve institutions, or solve public problems, the rewards do not belong only to the winner. Society and the global system inherit the benefits of the contest itself.
The question is therefore not how to eliminate competition, but how to channel it in ways that its gains are widely shared and its costs contained. Like uncertainty itself, competition is neither inherently constructive nor destructive. Its effects depend on the institutional, social, and normative environments within which it operates. When channelled effectively, competition stimulates innovation, resilience, and excellence. When poorly managed, it can degenerate into predation, domination, and conflict. This insight is highly relevant to international politics, where the objective should be to channel strategic competition into innovation, scientific leadership, and the provision of global public goods, rather than military confrontation or zero-sum geopolitical rivalry.
Competition is Wired into Biology and Human Nature
As I have argued in my theory of Emotional Amoral Egoism, competition is not an incidental feature of politics or markets, but an expression of the deeper architecture of human nature. Human beings are profoundly emotional, morally malleable, and driven above all by perceived self-interest and motivated by five potent sources of primordial neurochemical gratification (mediated by the brain’s mesolimbic reward centre and its neurobiological architecture). Together, they form what I call the NeuroP5: power, profit, pleasure, pride, and permanency (in the form of survival, longevity, and legacy).
Crucially, the pursuit of these drives is inherently relational. The neurochemical reward is magnified by comparing ourselves to others and by striving to gain, defend, or elevate our power, profit, or standing. Competition, then, emerges not merely from our institutions, but from our innate neurobiology, and is therefore rooted in powerful pro-survival substrates. The connection between biology and global politics is not merely metaphorical but causal. States do not possess brains, yet every strategic decision is ultimately made by human beings whose judgments are shaped by the same evolved neurobiology. Perceptions of fear, status, insecurity, reward, and recognition profoundly influence political decision-making, and when these neurobiological responses are aggregated through institutions and governments, they shape state behaviour, international competition, and cooperation.
Once competition is understood as an expression of our evolved neurobiology, it becomes naïve to assume it can simply be minimised or wished away. The challenge is to channel it toward constructive rather than destructive ends. The central question is not whether competition exists, but whether the environments in which it unfolds encourage innovation and mutual benefit or fear, domination, and conflict. Human nature may supply the competitive impulse, but social and political institutions play a decisive role in determining whether that impulse contributes to collective flourishing or collective harm.
Dignity-Based Governance as the Way Forward
When does competition channel human ambition toward excellence, and when does it devolve into chronic, debilitating stress and widespread instability and conflict? Similarly, when can chaos and uncertainty be harnessed productively, and when do they cross a threshold that unlocks the darker dimensions of human nature?
The answer lies less in the existence of these forces themselves than in the social, political, and institutional environments (nationally, transnationally and transculturally) through which they are experienced. Disorder, uncertainty, and competition are enduring features of human existence. What varies is whether individuals encounter them within systems that promote adaptation and resilience, or within environments that amplify fear, insecurity, and destructive behaviour.
Answering these questions requires a transdisciplinary approach, as their implications extend across states, politics, society, culture, and interpersonal life. As I have argued elsewhere, research across fields suggests that human beings can thrive amid uncertainty and competition only when their core timeless and universal human dignity needs are protected through what I call Dignity-Based Governance. Dignity in this context is not just the absence of humiliation but the presence of recognition and equitable respect, fairness, safety, security and prosperity. It is also much more than a critical moral ideal but also a pivotal strategic stability and prosperity lever.
Dignity-Based Governance treats dignity not as an abstract ideal but as the fulfilment of nine interdependent human needs: reason, security, human rights, accountability, transparency, justice, opportunity, innovation, and inclusiveness. Together, these act as balancing mechanisms for the three core attributes of human nature identified in Emotional Amoral Egoism. Emotionality is moderated through reason, security, and human rights; amorality is constrained through accountability, transparency, and justice; and egoism (understood as rational self-interest) is channelled productively through opportunity, innovation, and inclusiveness. Together, they create the conditions under which individuals feel secure, respected, empowered, and able to contribute meaningfully to society. Such governance therefore extends beyond accountable institutions alone to encompass physical and psychological security, social inclusion, socioeconomic justice, critical inquiry, and opportunities for participation and innovation.
Only under these conditions can individuals and groups develop the healthy self-esteem, rational deliberative capacities, and social support networks needed to confront uncertainty constructively and develop new capacities in response to unprecedented challenges. They are also more likely to feel a sense of allegiance to the societies in which they live. Their self-interest thus becomes interwoven with collective well-being, and competition can be channelled into focus, energy, and innovation that benefit society.
Not all individuals will flourish equally, even under Dignity-Based Governance, but this will be acceptable to all because of the intrinsic fairness and merit embodied in the nine dignity needs. The likelihood that many will do so is significantly higher when dignity is treated not as an abstract ideal, but as a governing principle. In this sense, Dignity-Based Governance performs at the societal level a function analogous to those adaptive mechanisms found throughout biology: it provides the conditions under which disruption can be transformed into learning, resilience, and progress rather than fear and breakdown.
By contrast, where dignity needs are systematically violated, individuals often lack the psychological and social reserves required to engage uncertainty constructively. Survival-oriented impulses begin to dominate. The mind shifts away from reflection, problem-solving, and long-term thinking toward fear-driven reaction. Morality becomes overwhelmed by survival instincts that rationalise self-serving behaviour. When dignity needs are denied, fair competition ceases to be a spur to excellence and becomes a zero-sum struggle for security and, oftentimes, domination.
At the domestic level, Dignity-Based Governance provides the conditions under which uncertainty and competition can be transformed into resilience, innovation and social cohesion. A similar logic applies internationally. At the global level, Dignity-Based Governance does not imply the creation of a world government or the elimination of geopolitical competition. Instead, it seeks to embed international relations within institutions and norms that systematically safeguard the dignity needs of states and peoples alike. In practice, this means ensuring more equitable representation in global governance, strengthening adherence to international law, improving accountability and transparency in multilateral institutions, and creating measurable indicators of dignity to assess whether policies enhance or undermine security, justice, inclusion, opportunity, and human flourishing. Such a framework would encourage states to pursue influence and national advantage through innovation, scientific achievement, economic competitiveness, and contributions to global public goods, rather than through coercion or exclusion. Competition would therefore remain an enduring feature of international politics, but one increasingly channelled into non-conflictual, multi-sum forms of rivalry that reinforce, rather than erode, long-term strategic stability and collective civilisational progress.
Managing Enduring Disorder in Global Politics: Symbiotic Realism
The argument developed throughout this article has implications that extend beyond individuals and societies to the international system itself. If uncertainty, competition, and manageable disorder are enduring features of biology and human nature, they will inevitably remain enduring features of global politics. Symbiotic Realism therefore provides the geopolitical framework for managing these forces, seeking not to abolish interstate rivalry but to channel it towards innovation, resilience, and the provision of global public goods in ways that advance both national interests and collective civilisational progress.
States, like individuals, are emotional, amoral, and egoistic. They possess dignity needs for recognition, inclusion, security, justice, and respect. When these needs are denied, when states feel humiliated, excluded, or permanently vulnerable, they can enter a form of survival mode. Rivalry then ceases to be a contest for excellence and becomes a destructive antagonism, even a perceived struggle against annihilation. As with individuals, the decisive variable is not competition itself, but whether political conditions allow it to remain bounded, constructive, and compatible with long-term security, prosperity and strategic stability.
Symbiotic Realism offers a transdisciplinary framework for understanding international relations. It begins from a sober premise: the international system remains anarchic, and states are self-interested actors driven by survival, influence, status, and advantage. In this respect, it shares several of realism’s core assumptions, recognising that power matters, insecurity persists, and uncertainty about others’ intentions remains a central source of conflict.
Where Symbiotic Realism departs from traditional realism is in recognising the self-defeating nature of many zero-sum strategies in an instantly connected and deeply interdependent world. A state may weaken a rival in the short term, only to inherit a more unstable, dangerous, and impoverished international environment as a consequence. National interest, therefore, cannot be defined solely in terms of power and survival, it must also account for the structural interdependence that underpins long-term stability and prosperity.
At the same time, Symbiotic Realism rejects the liberal assumption that competition can be transcended through cooperation alone. Competition is both inevitable and often beneficial, provided it is bounded by norms, international law, and respect for the dignity needs of other states. States that feel sufficiently secure, recognised, and included are more likely to compete in productive ways, pursuing innovation, influence, and status through non-conflictual and multi-sum forms of rivalry rather than coercion or escalation.
The lesson mirrors that found throughout biology and psychology in that progress does not emerge from eliminating uncertainty and competition, but from creating frameworks that channel them toward constructive ends. When states compete to cure diseases, develop trusted artificial intelligence, advance safe and secure space exploration, or mitigate climate change, they satisfy traditional ambitions for influence and prestige while simultaneously strengthening the foundations of collective human progress.
Forging Peaceful Progress from Persistent Disorder
Ultimately, if we accept that disorder, uncertainty, and competition are inescapable features of the human condition – and indeed of living systems more broadly – then the decisive question is not whether these forces can be eliminated, but how they are channelled.
History, biology, neuroscience, psychology, economics, and politics all point toward the same conclusion: the forces that drive adaptation and progress are often the very same forces that can generate decline and destruction. The difference lies in our capacity to harness them constructively and non-conflictually. Uncertainty can stimulate learning or provoke paralysis. Competition can inspire innovation or fuel domination. Disorder can reveal new possibilities or accelerate collapse.
The challenge, therefore, is not to seek a world free from turbulence. Such a world has never existed, and it never will. The challenge is to cultivate the resilience, wisdom, and institutions necessary to transform inevitable disruption into collective renewal rather than fracture. Throughout nature, growth emerges through adaptation to challenge. Muscles strengthen under stress. Brains learn through surprise. Species evolve through environmental pressures. Human societies are no different. Time and again, progress has been born not from the absence of adversity, but from the capacity to confront it, learn from it, and emerge stronger.
Rather than fearing uncertainty, we should recognise it as a condition of discovery. Rather than seeking to abolish competition, we should strive to direct it toward shared advancement. And rather than viewing disorder solely as a threat, we should understand that it often reveals opportunities that stability alone cannot provide. Progress has rarely been forged in certainty. More often, it has emerged from the creative transformation of turbulence into opportunity, adversity into resilience, and rivalry into innovation. The future will be no different. (ends)
Professor Nayef Al-Rodhan is a philosopher, neuroscientist, geostrategist and futurologist. He is the Head of the Geopolitics and Global Futures Department, and head of the Outer Space Security Cluster, at the Geneva Centre for Security Policy in Switzerland, and a Member of the Global Future Council on Complex Risks at the World Economic Forum. He is also an Honorary Fellow at Oxford University’s St. Antony’s College and a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute of Philosophy at the University of London.