152. The Problem of Complexity: or Why You Can't Just Do Things

0:00You are listening to Seeking the Hidden Thing with Cryptos. The problem of complexity or why you can't just do things. Ever since the phrase, you can just do things, hit the online ecosystem. It has troubled me. It's a large part because it gives the promise that fixing everything would be easy if we just had the will.

1:01Let's just begin this by acknowledging that I can be a bit of a pessimist. I'm often the guy in the meeting giving dozens of reasons why your plan or proposal will not work. I am a doomer. The end is coming. The only question is when. That said, this idea that you can just do things is dangerous if widely applied, mostly because it biases in temperate action over carefully conceived plans of action that are strategically and tactically sound and consider the multiple downstream effects of implementing a simple fix. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly, this handy little phrase gives the impression that solving the problems of our Western societies is as easy as having the will to act decisively. The solutions are simple. We just lack the will to execute these easy, straightforward fixes. In many instances it seems that if we only had the stomach to meet out violent strategically,

2:06that all our ills would be cured. This type of messaging makes for great propaganda as it simplifies the world and allows problems to be packaged as emotion. The answers are felt, not thought through. The problem is that we live within a complex civilization and the challenges we face are also complex. They defy easy answers. The truth is that many of the difficulties we face are so complex that we have largely given up trying to actually solve them. Peter Teal in his book Zero to One has an extended discussion of a schema that was put forward by none other than Ted Kaczynski to explain the malaise in our society. Kaczynski argued that we as human beings need hard but achievable things to do in order to maintain our well-being. If things are too easy, then all we will set in.

3:08The boredom of all things being rendered easy will consume us. If we face impossible challenges, we will give up and despair. He argued that technological process had solved most of our hard problems and that our society was now dying a slow death of boredom and despair. What was needed was to sweep away modernity and start over again, returning ourselves all of our hard tasks. What a simple solution. You can just do things. Now why bring this up at the outset of this piece? Well the idea of you can just do things is actually rooted in the same impulse that drove the building of our society in the first place. Wipe it all away and start over is a solution. One of the primary beliefs of modernity is our faith in the solution. We believe that if we apply the tools of science and reason, we can examine the world, understand it and then engineer a better future for ourselves.

4:16We can solve any and all problems that we face, even the problems created by our solutions. But this is the trap that technique-based answers put you in. Once you have introduced the solution, every response to that solution is itself another solution, even the suggestion that we should wipe it all away and start over. At its core, this idea of the solution is a rejection, at least in part, if not the whole of Christian teaching. One of the core ideas of the Christian faith is that human beings cannot save themselves. There is no solution to the human condition that comes from humans because we and our sin are the primary problem. Every artifact we produce, including solutions, are all tainted by this reality of human sinfulness. Modernity, on the other hand, says that people are born blank, neutral, or even good, and so it is possible for us to fix our environment.

5:17And in so doing once we have perfected our engineering of society, human beings will be able to enjoy a life free from the problems of evil. After several hundred years of concerted effort by moderns pursuing human progress, it was seen that Christian pessimism in regards to the human condition has demonstrated itself adequately as correct. Having said this, let us now look at complexity. When Joseph Tainter wrote the collapse of complex societies, he stayed away from making his critique about technology per se. Rather, he focused on the notion of social problem solving and the subsequent results of its introduction into a society. What he argued is that every society faces problems that must be overcome if it is going to continue over time. Often these problems will center around basic needs like food, shelter, safety, and so forth. For example, a society might transition from hunting and gathering to farming as a solution to the problem of consistently supplying food for the community.

6:24But now that they are farming, the trade is more vulnerable, and so perhaps the solution to this problem is to build walls around the village and have some of the men assigned to protect the people in farms from attack. These walls will need to be maintained and the fighting men fed. But the grains that came from farming were more than sufficient to sustain these solutions. But let's say that there were a few dry seasons and now you need to come up with a solution for watering the crops. So you develop a canal system to bring water to the farms for irrigation. But these two need to be maintained, thus taking more people and resources away from farming, and you get the idea. At the beginning of this long civilizational path, the benefits outweigh the costs of introducing and maintaining complexity. Eventually, though, these costs will overwhelm the benefits, ensuring that some form of civilizational collapse will happen. This is a variation of the Malthusian trap.

7:24Ted Kaczynski's solution was just to hit the reset button and start over. This was also Elon Musk's solution when he took over Twitter. He let go something like 90% maybe more of the workforce. It was a hard reset for the company that he deemed to bloated. The cost of maintaining all of the systems within the company could not be justified when it was not profitable. So he hit the hard reset. Often you see this in business when companies break themselves up or spin off subsidiaries into independent business unit. The idea is that you reset the organizational clock, forcing it into a simpler, earlier form, where it can take better advantage of solutions. By breaking up a company into smaller units, you hope to reap the benefits of being a startup, or at least start up adjacent. Let's give one more example. The problems associated with the interactions between men and women these days. The dating discourse is but one aspect.

8:24How would you fix the relationship between the sexes? You might point the finger at feminism as the root of the problem, but is it really that simple? If you begin to trace the history of feminism, you could go back at least as far as industrialization. Prior to that, the basic social unit in the West was generally the household. Those who were not part of the upper class, the landed nobility or the upper gentry, or the underclass, for the most part were farmers, tradesmen, and shopkeepers, whose family life revolved around the household enterprise, and would often include members who were not born into the family, but were taken on by them. A successful household could range from 10 to 20 members with a patriarch and matriarch sitting at the top of the social hierarchy of the household, each with their own traditional roles. In England, beginning with the enclosure movement, 1750 to 1860, many of these farming households were displaced.

9:24As industrialization began to take off during the same period in England, many of the displaced ended up working in the factories. For the more prosperous of the emerging bourgeoisie, their previous roles having been disrupted, women, many of whom were quite capable and whose role in the house had been greatly reduced from what it was prior to industrial society, began looking for ways to occupy themselves. By the end of the 1700s, women were beginning to foreign clubs, societies, and maternal organizations to address the problems created by the social dislocation and disruption of industrialization. While fulfilling for a time, women soon looked to their male counterparts and the roles they had in society, and make them thinking to themselves, I could do that. It turns out that they were correct. They did well in university when given the opportunities. And during the period of the world wars, women found themselves taking up many very fulfilling roles in the work world while men were off fighting.

10:24And it turns out that women, who at one time managed bustling households, were also adept and capable in the emerging managerial business world. Now with their own careers, their own money, their own status, why would the accept the role of stay at home mum when that involves merely being a housekeeper and an Annie? Add into this the birth control pill and with it the sexual revolution? And here we are. So you claim that we can just do things. What do we do to fix this? Do we take up Ted Kaczynski's idea and sweep away modernity and start over? Revolutionary or reactionary take your pick of labels, but the end result is much the same, societal devastation. It is a form of utopian thinking. If we just sweep away the current order, it will magically usher in a better reality. Hitting the hard reset works when you break up a company and lay off hundreds perhaps thousands in a society made up of tens of thousands and other companies and hundreds of millions of other people.

11:31There is hopefully enough slack and excess in the system to successfully absorb the disruption caused by you laying off 90% of your workforce in an attempt to make your business lean and profitable. But when you hit the hard reset on society, you end up causing civilizational collapse in the US 20 million people work in government jobs of one sort another, just under 12% of the whole 171 million person workforce, shrink the government by 50%, put 10 million people out of work, can society absorb that many unemployed people? Right, you can just do things. Correct? Socialism as a phenomenon was a response to the societal dislocation caused by industrial capitalism. Everything from charity and aid societies morphing into government welfare to the industrialization of medicine and schooling are all downstream from the breakup of the household as the dominant building block of society.

12:36Just get the government out of the way you say, okay, but know that each of these solutions was put in place as a response to a problem that preceded it and with each new solution came a growing societal cost and a new set of problems generated by the solutions just implemented. And the problems created by societal complexity don't go away just because you cut the services meant to address them. As the cost mount up eventually the society's in danger of some form of collapse. The problem is that every answer is now another solution, including the solution of just doing things. Every one of those brings benefits, but they also exact certain costs that then have to be absorbed by the society as a whole. Over time the costs of every layer of solution accumulate and in some sense to simplify tainters analysis every civilization is a Ponzi scheme. Indulge me with one more example to drive the point home.

13:38Let's say you are the Lord presiding over a small city. You have a crime problem and you address this problem by training, equipping and employing a city watch. Let's also assume you are successful in your solution. The city watch works fabulously, virtually eliminating crime, rendering the streets safe for all. So what do you do? Do you release the city watch? Well, typically what happens to men who are trained in violence and find themselves suddenly unemployed is that they often turn to banditry. This was unfortunate. So now you have to train up a new group of armed men to patrol the roadways to keep them safe from the bandits. Being a smart ruler though, you will likely not release your city watch. Now you find yourself with a crime-free city paying a city watch to walk around and, quote unquote, maintain order. And this will be paid for with taxes. This leads us into another challenge that comes with solutions.

14:40Generally, when people's livelihood, position, prestige and power comes from being tasked with solving a problem, how motivated is one to then actually solve the problem? To a certain degree, one must be seen doing something, otherwise one risks having the whole project shut down or handed over to someone else. But do you really want to eliminate the entirety of the problem? If you would admit to wanting to keep the problem going because it's good for them that it is never quite solved. Does the city watch want to eliminate all the crime? Or is there an acceptable level of crime, a balanced point where the criminals get some benefit from crime, and the city watch keeps their position and the vast majority of the city also feel safe from crime? So now you have the cost of a city watch combined with a certain level of crime. In today's context, our welfare agencies tasked with eliminating poverty or managing it.

15:42Those TSA officers and airports are they actually keeping you safe from terrorism? Could you get rid of all of them? And if you do, would that create its own downstream set of problems? Do pharmaceutical companies want to cure diseases or manage them with ongoing expensive medical treatments? What is the societal cost to the medical systems, welfare systems? These are just the low-hanging fruit. What was the cost of building limited access highways to small towns? What was the cost of putting air conditioning systems in people's homes? Television? What were the downstream effects of a global production shipping and distribution network? At each stage, new layers of complexity were added to society bringing certain benefits. Those benefits also came with costs, even if that cost is as simple as increasing the overall overhead costs of doing business as a society. What happens when you reach a point where there are no more advances?

16:45Joseph Tainter argued that we reached that point sometime in the 1970s. This was right around the time that our society began shifting from solving hard but realistic technical problems to trying to solve impossible tasks. We would end racism, we would usher inequality, we would save the environment. And now, in response to the growing sense that these efforts have failed, New Zealand seems to have swung back in the other direction and we are told that fixing all of our problems is easy. We can just do things, just end diversity, equity and inclusion policies and everything will go back to normal. Except for those people who now are included in the nation's ever more precarious prosperity, who will then find themselves excluded. But what about those who are excluded now? Someone is going to be excluded, therein lies the problem. Do you want to create a highwayman's problem? When you have excluded an identifiable segment of the population after several generations of telling them they are entitled to full participation,

17:49your solution will be creating a problem. Not proposing a solution also creates a problem. What if the pie is no longer growing or growing at a rate where everyone can feel like they are getting a slice? Add this to the problem of 35 to 50 million illegal aliens, undocumented immigrants. Do you round them up forcibly and deport them? Does doing so set off an existential crisis, a fight to the death over their future participation in the pie? You have an easy solution, impose e-verify. No one works anywhere for anyone without having e-verify documentation. Will the citizenry want the indignity of having to present their papers to participate in the economy? You know the mark of the beast and all that? But what about the downstream effects to the economy? There is a lot of prosperity, a significant portion of the pie that is dependent upon paying low wages

18:52under the table to people who accept these terms of employment because they are afraid of being deported. What happens to this prosperity once you can no longer hire someone under the table? Sure you can implement simple solutions, you can just do things, but those things you do will have downstream effects. Some good, some bad, some catastrophic. Many will be unforeseen and thus the potential problems cannot be planned for in advance and mitigated ahead of time. Some goods will just come with a price tag. Maybe you can pay it? Maybe you can't. And maybe you can pass the cost onto your grandchildren and you will be fine. I mean this worked once. But what must be recognized is that you cannot just wind back the clock on an organization, a nation, or a civilization to an earlier period. The world before the civil rights era is not coming back.

19:53The world before industrialization is not coming back. Even the world before the internet is not coming back. You can take the internet away, you could de-industrialize, you could end civil rights, you can deport all of the immigrants. But none of these things will recreate the world, the society that existed before their introduction. Eliminating these things will produce a new context with new rewards and new problems. The more radical and extreme that the simple fix is, the more likely is that it will create massive amounts of social devastation. This is part of why so many of our elites cast the aura that they no longer know what to do in order to fix things. Many of them understand or at least sense this. They've had such a belief in progress that if they are engaged in the right processes that naturally things will work out. Our managerial elites believe this, but so do most of the free market libertarians who oppose them.

20:57If we just get rid of government and get it out of the way, the free market will find solutions. This is also a belief that the right process that is the unfettered market left to its own devices will produce the best solution. Free market thinking is just as utopian as progressive managerialism. And this is why we must understand that you can just do things propaganda as a form of magical thinking. If we do this one thing, it will magically fix everything. Just like you learned at Hogwarts, you wave your wand and say, Reparo, it's utopian thinking, and it's a big part of how we arrived at the present moment in the first place. Is it all hopeless? Well, for Western civilization, including America, it is. All civilizations come to an end. This is also why most civilizations have generally been conservative, adapting slowly and only changing when forced by circumstances to do so.

22:01Once the trade-offs for an imperfect solution are known and accepted in society, you can often go a long time before needing to adapt again. But in the end, the problems will mount for every society. In the last, we have chose a path of creative destruction brought about by relentless desire to perfect society systems. Eventually, the cost of all these solutions adds up, and they outstripped the inputs, even in a society that had been able to increase productivity and production, to keep ahead of the mounting price for modernity. The Malthusian trap is real, and it is now nipping at our heels. The fertility crisis might be the one problem that we will not be able to fix through technique. Remember, though, all solutions are solutions. Can we do anything? Of course, but the things we can do are not really solutions.

23:02They are not likely the kind of things that will enable us to save the entirety of the West, or even America, all in one piece, as it is constituted now. We certainly can't bring back a previous era. In this publication, we talk a lot about parallelism. What is this exactly? In large part, it is not unlike a big company spinning off a subsidiary. You and your community, your people, instead of working to save America, or save Canada, or save Britain, you work to prepare your church or your network of churches, your town, you get the idea for what comes next. You build resiliency. You claim sovereignty for yourself in areas such as education, food supply, employment, and most importantly in your faith and religious life. The idea is that instead of trying to save 100% of society, you save 5%, maybe less, and that 5% becomes your 100%.

24:03We do sell a little wiser, not so enamored by the shiny bling of solutions. We know they come with costs, so we consider them carefully and integrate them cautiously. Maybe we reject them at a point when it's not too late, rather than repeating the ubers of the West. We know that the bill will come due, so we are careful about how quickly we run up the tab and for what reasons. We don't shy away from technology, we know it cannot save us, but in the right circumstances the benefits are such that we can accept the trade-offs.