One of my favorite sci-fi series is The Foundation Trilogy by Isaac Asimov. The book was first published in 1951 and is a grand “space opera” that takes place in the distant future. At the heart of the series (and what makes it so interesting) is the fictional philosophy of “psychohistory”.
Psychohistory is a blend between mass crowd psychology and probability theory. It’s founded on the principle that while it’s impossible to predict actions at the singular individual level, you can still successfully apply statistical probability theory at the group level to predict the general flow of future events.
Asimov discusses how he came up with the idea of psychohistory in the following interview:
At the time I started these stories, I was taking physical chemistry at school, and I knew that because the individual molecules of a gas move quite erratically and randomly, nobody can predict the direction of motion of a single molecule at any particular time. The randomness of their motion works out to the point where you can predict the total behavior of the gas very accurately, using the gas laws. I knew that if you decrease the volume, the pressure goes up; if you raise the temperature, the pressure goes up, and the volume expands. We know these things even though we don’t know how individual molecules behave.
It seemed to me that if we did have a galactic empire, there would be so many human beings—quintillions of them—that perhaps you might be able to predict very accurately how societies would behave, even though you couldn’t predict how individuals composing those societies would behave.
So, against the background of the Roman Empire written large, I invented the science of psychohistory. Throughout the entire trilogy, then, there are the opposing forces of individual desire and that dead hand of social inevitability.
Like Asimov, we view people at the individual level similar to gas molecules; unpredictable and seemingly random.
But if we pull back and view large groups of people such as societies and nations, we find that their collective decisions under certain conditions are not only explainable but completely foreseeable.
In a sense, the broad strokes of history are predictable while the details are not.
And just as we need to understand the “gas laws” to predict the behavior of gas on a macro level, so too do we need to understand the “laws of social history” if we want to anticipate the grand tide of human affairs.
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