For years, people have been talking about the VUCA nature of the world we’ve come to live in. It describes our environment as volatile, uncertain, complex, and ambiguous.

The pandemic and the war in Ukraine brought the message home. From understanding the idea, people have come to experience it directly. Much of the predictability people have been used, suddenly had disappeared.

For a human being, this experience is not unique. It is similar to how infants experience the world, for them, it starts out as terrifying chaos that needs to be tamed. The fear of it is too large for them to hold and they find a solution in their parents. They transfer the ability to tame the chaos to their parents by endowing them with power. The awe children have for their parents also results from the parents’ ability to create order and safety for their children. It correlates with the power the children endow on their parents. Power, then simply is, the sense that the person holding the power can tame the chaos and release others from their anxiety in dealing with the chaos.

That anxiety never disappears.

What people learn, however, is to deal with situations and thus to tame at least some chaos. The VUCA world, the pandemic, the Ukraine war are outside of what people routinely can tame and brought a sense of helplessness. However, they are also extremes impacting large groups and making the need for power visible. It is a reaction to the sense of helplessness. A sense that can appear in many situations of our daily lives.

To deal with them, people look for ways to empower themselves. Some step into action, others step into avoidance, and in general, they will look out for those who seem to have the power or whom they can endow with power. It is a natural approach to feeling safe and experiencing a sense of order or predictability.

None of this guarantees power, but it allows one to feel some power and remediate anxiety.