During the season four double episode “Pandora/Linchpin” of the television detective drama Castle, New York City Police Detective Kate Beckett and her mystery-writing consulting partner Richard Castle become embroiled in a CIA effort to prevent “a catastrophic event which poses an imminent threat to the country.” Instead of a terrorist attack, however, the pending incident is the assassination of a ten-year-old Chinese girl that would lead to World War III and “the end of our country as we know it.”
While such a scenario may seem far-fetched, the “linchpin” theory of Dr. Nelson Blakely used to forecast such an outcome on Castle has a counterpart within the real-world. Often referred to as “extreme events,” renowned systems theorist John L. Casti prefers the moniker X-Events instead – unforeseen occurrences that rapidly change the political, financial, and geographic stability in a dramatic and devastating fashion.
“The X-Events region is one that has been far less scientifically investigated, just because its elements, ranging from asteroid impacts to financial market meltdowns to nuclear attacks, are by their very nature rare and surprising,” Casti writes in the opening pages of his 2012 book X-Events: The Collapse of Everything. “Science is mostly about the study of repeatable phenomena. X-Events fall outside that category, which is a major reason why at present we have no decent theory for when, how, and why they occur.”
Like John Casti, the fictitious Nelson Blakely on Castle has dedicated a large portion of his life to understanding such occurrences. “Blakely designed math-based predictive models for us, models to help create geopolitical change,” a CIA official explains to Kate Beckett and Richard Castle. “The agency would bring him a problem. How can we prevent country A from getting the bomb, or cause regime change in country B? Blakely found solutions using what he called ‘linchpin theory.’ His approach was to find a small event that could trigger a large event. He once said you only needed to knock over one domino, but if it was the right domino, the rest would fall.”
Richard Castle immediately seizes upon the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and how it directly led to World War I as an example of linchpin theory in action. Nelson Blakely’s supposed first linchpin for the CIA is yet another example. “We asked him to develop a non-nuclear military strategy that would bring down the Soviet Union,” it is explained on Castle. “It turns out all we had to do was outspend them.”
The plot of “Pandora/Linchpin” likewise revolves around an economic catalyst designed to bring a contemporary superpower to ruins. During the course of their investigation, Kate Beckett and Richard Castle discover a room in Blakely’s apartment that is filled with pictures and index cards on all four walls, as well as colored string connecting them together.
The brief notes mention “tax riots,” “European economic collapse,” and “Iran invades Iraq,” with the end result reading, “August 2017 – U.S. Surrenders (Est. 27 million casualties).” The starting point of this interconnecting web-of-doom is the picture of a young Chinese girl, the linchpin for events that will bring about “the end of our country as we know it.”
The girl in question is the daughter of a Chinese businessman named Xiang Ganghong. “Xiang is a kingmaker,” CIA operative Sophia Turner explains. “He’s extremely influential in shaping his country’s economic policy. He made his first fortune selling Chinese military hardware, sometimes to our enemies but we let him alone because he was supportive of Chinese purchase of U.S. debt. Now if someone were to take out Xiang, not that much would change. But if his daughter were killed in a botched assassination attempt and the Chinese were able to trace it back to the U.S. government? It’s conceivable that Xiang could use his considerable influence to singlehandedly end China’s purchase of the U.S. debt.”
From there, Kate Beckett and Richard Castle are quickly able to deduce the chain of events that were foretold by Nelson Blakely and his linchpin theory. An inability to borrow money by a deficit-running federal government would lead to austerity measures, disrupting the military’s ability to meet its international obligations as a result.
Without a U.S. presence in various regions of the world, other countries with conflicting agendas would essentially be free to pursue their own interests. This would inevitably lead to war, and with the United States hampered by a financial crisis, it would quite likely be an unwinnable war from a U.S. perspective.
How does this example of linchpin theory relate to the X-Events that John Casti explores in X-Events: The Collapse of Everything? “X-Events of the human – rather than nature-caused – variety are the result of too little understanding chasing too much complexity in our human systems,” he writes. “The X-Event, be it a political revolution, a crash of the Internet, or the collapse of a civilization, is human nature’s way of reducing a complexity overload that has become unsustainable.”
In the scenario outlined on Castle, the financial burden of both domestic and foreign policies has resulted in an overload on the nation’s budget requirements and the necessity of borrowing funds from China to cover the deficit. Take away the ability to borrow money, and the United States collapses under the weight of its complex system of overspending, which contains few options and less freedom to maneuver.
While John Casti would no doubt agree that Nelson Blakely’s scenario on Castle was plausible, he would not concur that the end result was inevitable. “I do not believe that there is any person or method, living, dead, or yet to be born, that can reliably and consistently forecast specific X-Events,” he writes in X-Events: The Collapse of Everything. The major reason is a lack of information for accurately predicting X-Events. By definition, after all, an X-Event is a rare occasion, and theoretical models are ultimately based on an abundance of readily available data.
“While probability theorists and statisticians have developed an ingenious array of tools ranging from subjective probability theory to Bayesian analysis to extreme-event statistics to try to circumvent this obstacle, the fact remains that nailing down a probability you can believe in for a rare event to occur is just not possible,” Casti emphatically insists.
In addition to discussing the field of X-Events in his book, John Casti offers his own “linchpin theories” in regards to potential catastrophic events that could reshape the landscape of modern day society. Internet failure, food supply shortages, the collapse of globalization, disease pandemics, and even the overthrowing of humanity by intelligent robots are all outlined within the pages of X-Events: The Collapse of Everything. Casti didn’t write his book as a prediction of world-wide doom, however, but instead to show that a continual reliance on complex systems could potentially lead to Earth-shattering events.
The “Pandora/Linchpin” double episode of Castle ultimately embraces simplicity over complexity as well. At the end of the installment, Richard Castle asks, “Do you think Dr. Blakely was right about the linchpin? Do you think we actually saved the world?” Kate Beckett simply replies, “I think that we saved a little girl’s life, and that’s enough for me.”
Anthony Letizia