Michael Jochum

Michael Jochum on the randomness of life.

The Butterfly Effect Wears Combat Boots

Riders of Justice snuck up on me this afternoon. I took a little time away from the relentless churn of the world and landed in a film I somehow missed, despite the fact that Mads Mikkelsen is one of my favorite actors working today. I’ve seen damn near everything he’s done. The man has that rare ability to say more with silence than most actors can with three pages of dialogue. Riders of Justice appears, on the surface, to be a revenge film. A soldier loses his wife in what appears to be a random train bombing, and the machinery of vengeance begins to turn. But like all worthwhile art, it’s not actually about what it first appears to be about.

It’s about grief, coincidence, fate, trauma, and the stories we tell ourselves so the chaos makes sense. What struck me most was not the violence, though there’s plenty of that, nor even the dark humor, which is beautifully Danish in its deadpan brutality. It was the strange, accidental therapy taking place between these fully realized, broken human beings. None of them set out to heal one another. None of them would describe what they’re doing as healing. And yet, that’s exactly what unfolds. A soldier shattered by loss. A statistician obsessed with patterns. Damaged men trying to make mathematical sense out of emotional catastrophe. Human beings doing what human beings do when reality becomes unbearable: trying to impose order on disorder.

And isn’t that what we all do? The film toys with the idea that nothing is random. That every event is preceded by another event, and another before that, a vast interconnected web of causality stretching backward into infinity. A dropped sandwich. A changed seat. A delayed train. A conversation. A decision. One microscopic shift, and an entirely different life emerges. The butterfly effect wearing combat boots.

As someone who has spent years studying yogic philosophy, consciousness, and the strange dance between ego and awareness, that landed hard with me. Not because I think life is pre-written in some rigid cosmic screenplay where free will is merely decorative, but because the film asks a far more interesting question: how much control do we really have, and what do we do when we realize it may be less than we imagined? The ego hates that question. The ego wants authorship. Control. Blame. Credit. Villains. Heroes. Certainty. But life rarely offers certainty. It offers circumstance.

Which, naturally, dragged me right back to where my mind so often goes these days: America. Because if you look at our current political reality through that same lens, Donald Trump stops being the entire story and becomes merely one grotesque expression of a much longer chain reaction. A symptom, not the disease. A consequence, not the cause. The billionaire class didn’t accidentally discover Donald Trump like archaeologists unearthing some golden orange relic. They recognized utility. A television personality with no ideology beyond self-worship. A man infinitely malleable because he believes in nothing except his own reflection. Perfect clay for oligarchic hands.

But if it hadn’t been Trump? It would have been someone else. That’s the unsettling part. Because this didn’t begin on an escalator in 2015. It began decades earlier, in boardrooms and think tanks, in deregulation schemes, media consolidation, union busting, religious extremism fused with political opportunism, and a long, patient cultivation of grievance as political fuel. Trump is not the architect. He’s the loudest billboard.

And yet, that doesn’t mean surrender. Because if life takes us in strange and often brutal directions, the one variable still left to us is response. We may not control the storm, but we absolutely control whether we become monsters inside it. That’s what Riders of Justice ultimately got right. Life will hand us absurdity. Tragedy. Coincidence. Apparent injustice. Loss so random it feels cosmically insulting. The question is never whether suffering arrives. It will. The question is what story we build around it. Do we weaponize our pain? Do we invent enemies? Do we retreat deeper into ego, certainty, vengeance? Or do we allow even the strangest companions along the road to help us become something less broken?

That’s the real work. Not avoiding life’s peculiar detours. Learning how to travel them without losing our humanity.

—Michael Jochum, Not Just a Drummer: Reflections on Art, Politics, Dogs, and the Human Condition.