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, in large part because it gives the promise that "fixing" everything would be easy if we just had the will.

Let’s just begin this by acknowledging that I can be a bit of a pessimist. I am 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 applied widely, mostly because it biases intemperate 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 only we had the stomach to mete out violence strategically, that all of 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 Thiel, 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 wellbeing. If things are too easy, then ennui will set in. The boredom of all things being rendered easy will consume us. If we face impossible challenges, we will give up in despair. He argued that technological progress had solved most of our hard problems and our society was now dying a slow death of boredom and despair. What was needed what to sweep away modernity and start over again, returning to ourselves all of our hard tasks. What a simple solution. You can just do things.

Why bring this up at the outset of this piece? Well, this 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. We 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. And in so doing, once we have perfected our engineering of society, human beings will be able to enjoy a life free from problems and evil. After several hundred years of concerted effort by moderns pursuing “human progress,” it would seem that Christian pessimism in regards to the human condition has demonstrated itself adequately as correct.

Having said this, lets 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 centre around basic needs like food, shelter, safety and so forth. For example, a society might transition from hunting and gathering to farming as solution to the problem of consistently supplying food for the community. But now that they are farming, the tribe 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 protecting the people and farms from attack. These walls will need to be maintained and the fighting men fed. But the gains that came from farming were more than sufficient to sustain these solutions. 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 too need to be maintained, thus taking more people and resources away from farming. You get the idea. At the beginning of this long civilizational path, the benefits outweigh the costs of introducing and maintaining complexity. Eventually those costs will overwhelm the benefits, ensuring some form of civilizational collapse. This is a variation of the Malthusian Trap. Ted 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 of 90%, maybe more, of the work force. It was a hard reset for the company that he deemed too bloated. The costs of maintaining all of the systems within the company could not be justified when it was not profitable. So he hit the hard reset. You often see this in business when companies break themselves up or spin of subsidiaries into independent business units. 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 start up 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. How would you fix the relationships 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 a 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 included members who were not born into the the family but were taken on by them. A successful household could range from 10-20 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—1860), many of these farming households were displaced. As industrialization began to take off during this 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 1700’s women were beginning to found clubs, societies and maternal organizations to address the problems created by the social dislocation and disruption of industrialization. While fulfilling for time, women soon looked to their male counterparts and the roles they had in society and began thinking to themselves, “I could do that.” It turns out they were correct. They did do well in university, when given the opportunities. During the period of the World Wars, women found themselves taking up many very fulfilling roles in the work world while the men were off fighting. And 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 they accept the role of “stay at home mom” when that involves merely being a housekeeper and nanny? 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 and 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 of other companies and hundreds of millions of other people. There 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 sort or another, just under 12% of the whole 171 million person workforce. Shrink the government by 50%? Put ten million people out of work? Can society absorb that many unemployed people? “You can just do things.” Right?

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. Just get the government out of the way, you say? Ok. But know that each of these “solutions” were 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 costs mount up, eventually the society is 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 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. In some sense, to simplify Tainter’s analysis, every civilization is a Ponzi scheme.

Indulge me with one more example to drive the point home. Let’s say you are the lord presiding over a small city. You have a crime problem. 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? 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. You now find yourself with a crime free city, paying a city watch to walk around and “maintain order.” This will be paid for with taxes.

This leads us into another challenge that comes with “solutions.” Generally, 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 to be doing something, otherwise one risks having the whole project shut down or handed over to someone else. But do you want to eliminate the entirety of the problem? Few would admit to wanting to keep the problem going because it is 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 balance point where the criminals get some benefit from crime, the city watch keeps their position and the vast majority of city also feels safe from crime. So, now you have the cost of the city watch combined with a certain level of crime.

In today’s context, are welfare agencies tasked with eliminating poverty or managing it? Those TSA officers in airports, are they actually keeping you safe from terrorism? Could you get rid of all of them? 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 of 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? Televisions? 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 over all overhead costs of doing business as a society. What happens when you reach a point where there are no more “advances"? Joseph Tainter argued that we reached that point sometime in the 1970’s.

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 in “equality.” We would “save the environment.” And now, in response to the growing sense that these efforts have failed, a pendulum seems to have now 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 now included in the nation’s ever more precarious prosperity who will 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” problem? When you have excluded an identifiable segment of the population after several generations of telling them they are entitled to full participation, your “solution” will be creating a problem. Not proposing a solution also potentially 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 to this the problem of 35-50 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 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. 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 under 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 costs onto your grandchildren and you will be fine. 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. The 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 it 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 have had such a belief in process, that if they are engaged in the right processes, that naturally things will all work out. Our managerial elites believe this, but so too do most of the free market libertarians who oppose them. If we just get government out of the way and free the market, the 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. This is why we must understand the “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 is a big part of how we arrived in the present moment in the first place.

Is it all hopeless? 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. Once the tradeoffs 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 west, we chose the path of creative destruction brought about by a relentless desire to prefect society’s systems. Eventually the cost of all these solutions adds up and they outstrip the inputs, even in a society that has been able to increase productivity and production to keep ahead of the mounting price for modernity. The Mathusian Trap is real and 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.” And they are not likely the kinds 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%. We do so a little wiser, not so enamoured 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 its not too late rather than repeating the hubris of the west. We know that the bill will come due. So we are careful about how quickly we run up that 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.

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