Is the answer social science?

Populist waves keep recurring. 1890s America, 1930s Europe, almost everywhere since the 2010s. The form changes — leader, slogan, enemy — but the wave itself isn’t new. Historians have read it this way for a long time.

And yet every time, we do the same thing: we find a person. A leader’s personality, a party’s strategy, an electoral mistake. We pin the responsibility to one spot. “Get rid of them, it’ll sort itself out.” Then the wave comes back and we say the same sentence again.

I find this interesting. If a dynamic has been repeating for a hundred and fifty years, the single-person story stops holding water at some point. The individuals change, the wave stays. So the real question isn’t a person — it’s: what conditions keep producing this wave over and over?

That’s a shared question across economics, sociology, history, psychology. Not my field — I’m a computational biologist, my contact with these waves is mostly living inside them. But looking from outside, I’ve noticed a link: how little the fields that study these questions are funded, and how we keep repeating the same reflex, seem connected. We’ve narrowed what counts as “real science” — and what didn’t make it in is causal understanding of a phenomenon that’s been repeating for a hundred and fifty years. It didn’t make it in, so every new wave gets the same sentence.

Then I started thinking about something else. Why is looking for a single person to blame so attractive? Maybe the brain works by parsimony — a preference for explaining the most with the fewest causes. Systemic, interactional explanations are expensive. Many parameters, uncertain, not catchable in one go. If the brain can say “this guy did it,” it relaxes. A shortcut for meaning-making.

And there’s a small irony here. The moment I take the question why do we keep looking for a single person? seriously, the answer pulls me through social psychology, into cognitive science, down into basic brain function. A thought that starts with “let’s take social science seriously” ends in a place where the boundary between social and biological is already very faint. Understanding one phenomenon isn’t enough for a single discipline — even the word “field” starts to feel too sharp.

I suppose, for now, my takeaway is this: to stop repeating the same reflex in the face of repeating social dynamics, we have to wonder why that reflex is there in the first place.