On a quiet afternoon, without warning, two of Europe’s most advanced societies slipped into darkness. The blackouts that swept across Spain and Portugal were not isolated technical failures. They were symptoms of a deeper, global disease — the silent fragility of the modern world. We have built civilizations so ruthlessly optimized for efficiency that a single fluke can ripple across continents and bring entire nations to a standstill. This is not an accident. It’s the product of a system doing exactly what it’s designed to do.

Watching the darkness spread across Iberia, I thought immediately of Brian Klaas’s recent book, Fluke. In it, Klaas argues that chance, more than foresight or planning, has been the real driver of human history. Empires rise, cities fall, lives are shattered or saved —not because of genius or evil, but usually because of sheer, dumb randomness.

We control almost nothing. Yet everything we do ripples outward, shaping realities far beyond our comprehension.

This is not philosophy; it is physics. Human civilization is not a neat machine. It is a complex system — a vast, interconnected web of eight billion souls, each jostling against the others, creating patterns no one can predict or control.

And like all complex systems, humanity lives between order and chaos.

The Sandpile and the Avalanche

One of the central metaphors for complex systems is simple enough for a child to understand: the sandpile.

You begin with a single grain of sand. You add another, and another, and the pile grows steadily. But as it rises, it becomes increasingly unstable. At some point, a single additional grain will cause an avalanche — a sudden, catastrophic collapse.

And crucially, it’s not necessarily the biggest grain or the most perfectly placed one that does it. Sometimes, the tiniest, most innocuous addition unleashes disaster.

This is the alarming majesty of nonlinear dynamics. Cause and effect are not proportional. A tiny push can topple a mountain. A minor delay can wreck a civilization.

Modern societies have engineered themselves into sandpiles stretched to their absolute limit. We call it “efficiency”. We maximize every drop of energy, squeeze every last cent of profit, optimize supply chains down to the minute.

Factories receive parts "just in time". Hospitals run on paper-thin budgets. Power grids operate at maximum load, day after day. A delay of one hour in one link of the chain — a storm in one region, a strike in one port — can ripple outward and paralyze entire continents.

It feels like we are designing for strength. We are, in truth, designing for catastrophe.

The Invisible Basins of Attraction

Complex systems tend to evolve toward what physicists call “basins of attraction” — states where the system stabilizes itself, not because it’s planned, but because of the accumulated behaviors of its parts.

Picture a highway. The speed limit is 100 km/h. Not everyone obeys exactly, but most cars hover somewhere around that figure. The collective behavior forms an invisible equilibrium. The highway system thus has a stable basin of attraction.

Now imagine the highway keeps adding cars, pushing capacity closer and closer to the breaking point. At first, traffic flows. Then, one small mistake — a single brake tap, a single missed signal — triggers a chain reaction. Suddenly, a 20-minute jaunt becomes a three-hour nightmare.

This is where modern civilization exists at the moment: permanently on the brink of collapse, optimized for maximum throughput, utterly unprepared for even minor disruptions.

And yet when catastrophe strikes — a pandemic, a financial meltdown, a massive blackout — we call them “black swans,” random freak events. We tell ourselves that normality will return soon, that the system just needs a reboot.

We are wrong.

These disasters are not accidents. They are features of the system we have built. The sandpile will fall. It was always going to fall. It was engineered to fall.

Lebanon: A Masterclass in Tragic Resilience

To understand the alternative, look to Lebanon.

Lebanon, on paper, is a failed state. No drinkable tap water. No functioning electricity grid. A banking system so broken it eats its own citizens’ savings. Politicians absent or actively malevolent. Infrastructure rotting before your eyes.

Yet — Lebanon does not collapse.

It survives, in a brutal, improvised, duct-taped way that would confound the comfortable citizens of more "advanced" nations.

In Lebanon, almost every service the state was supposed to provide has been replaced by private improvisation. Homes run on diesel generators. Water is hoarded in rooftop tanks. Doctors operate in semi-dark clinics with battery backups. Supermarkets double as banks. Neighborhoods create their own security systems.

Lebanon is not resilient because it is strong. It is resilient because it has been broken so thoroughly, for so long, that redundancy is built into everyday life.

Every family is a micro-state. Every apartment block a fortress. Every citizen a systems engineer of their own survival.

If tomorrow the national power grid finally gave up and collapsed for good, the average Lebanese would sigh, curse, make a joke, and call the local black-market energy supplier[MA1]  to make up the difference.

If the same shock hit Paris or Toronto — if water, electricity, banking, and policing all failed simultaneously — the social order would disintegrate within days. Riots, looting, martial law.

In Lebanon, they adjust and keep going. It’s not a paradise. It’s hell made functional.

But it reveals an uncomfortable truth: societies that build redundancy — even if through failure — survive shocks better than those that optimize for efficiency at the edge of chaos.

Western societies, obsessed with squeezing the last 2% of productivity from every system, have made themselves fantastically vulnerable. One unexpected grain of sand — a cyberattack, a pandemic mutation, a natural disaster — and the whole shimmering edifice can crumble overnight.

The Future: More Chaos, or Smarter Complexity?

If we want our societies to survive the storms of the 21st century, we must rethink the very principles that built the modern world.

Efficiency must no longer be our highest god.

Instead, we must design for robustness: systems with slack, with backups, with alternative pathways when — not if — the main highways are blocked.

Hospitals should have excess capacity, not just barely enough. Grids should be decentralized. Supply chains should be made more redundant, not merely streamlined. Citizens should be empowered to solve problems locally, not wait helplessly for a central authority to reboot the machine.

This will cost more. It will be less “efficient”. But it’s the difference between collapse and survival.

Civilization itself is a complex system. It does not fail gracefully. It fails suddenly, spectacularly, and irrevocably, like a sandpile swept away by a single grain too many.

The lesson of Spain and Portugal’s darkness — and of Lebanon’s ragged endurance — is simple: we are not exempt from the laws of complexity.

Chance will continue to batter us. Systems will fail. Sandpiles will fall.

The only question is whether we will be standing when the dust clears — or buried beneath the sandpile, wondering how it all went wrong.

The real blackouts are still ahead — and when the last lights go out, it will not be by accident, but by design.