Why We Hate Complexity

In my recent visit to the US this abhorrence of complexity really hit home. I saw everywhere a cult of leadership, a longing for authority and decisiveness. Most Americans seem to be aching for some super-human to take all the complex and difficult problems of the world and make them simple, and then fix them, quickly and painlessly. They believe this is possible, and that failure to do so is somehow an admission of the failure of the whole American belief system -- the "we can do anything if we set our minds and hearts to it and work hard" belief system. It appears unthinkable, unimaginable, unforgivable to admit that we don't have any answers for these problems. There must be a simple answer, they seem to be saying. Just try something, anything, until you hit on it. Even false bravado is better than humility.

• Religions have always attempted to reduce the complex to the simple. Some deity in human form created the universe in a few days, and he has all the answers. Just read this book -- it makes it easy for you. Everything you don't understand has a simple explanation -- it's his will. The simpler (more 'fundamental') the religion, the greater number and more fanatical its adherents.
• Our political systems try to reduce every choice of political action to a choice between Tweedledum and Tweedledee. We like it that way. The media pander to this oversimplification by reducing everything to sound bites and by simply not covering complex issues at all. "No need to worry your pretty little head about that." Big brother, or god, or the global corporate superstar CEO, or some other Authority will look after it.
• We love centralization because conceptually it seems simpler and therefore more efficient. We want one government, one culture, one economic system, one uniform educational system, one variety of corn for the whole planet. Alas, in complex systems, efficiency is enormously vulnerable to all the unforeseen and unknown forces -- an infinite number of them. It is inevitably unsustainable. That's why nature is effective, not efficient -- that's what works when you 'simply' can't predict what will happen.
• We love technologies that are simple, intuitive -- the telephone, the television, the gun. We hate technologies that are complicated -- such as every tool produced by corporate IT departments, and every tool that we have to be taught how to use.
• Most people love being told what to do and how to do it. It has taken me a lifetime to appreciate this, because it runs counter to everything I believe. But it's true, and the reason is that it's easy. Most people don't really like to think. They'd rather just do.
• We love solutions. That's what most businesses and politicians sell. A problem without a simple, neat answer vexes us. A game has to have a winner. A crime has to be solved, and the criminal must be punished, even if we have to keep him alive in order to exact it. A story has to have a resolution, one that ties things up simply and happily.
• We hate admitting we don't know. We don't know what to do about Afghanistan, Iraq, Darfur. About global poverty and global warming. About crime and terrorism. About how to create a health system, an educational system, a social security system, that actually works. We'll accept any answer as preferable to 'we don't know', even if it's proferred by an ideological psychopath. Or an economist.
• We set up simple things and then refuse to accept that they don't work in a complex world. The Corporation is deliberately designed to be acquisitive, ruthless, amoral. But when this produces rampant corporate crime and corporate disdain for social and environmental responsibility, we refuse to acknowledge that the model just doesn't do the job, that it's utterly dysfunctional. We wait for someone to come up with another simplistic model. 3:58:07 PM trackback [trackbackCounter (1560)0] comment [commentCounter (1560)4]