The Big Lie

A helpful recasting of an Einstein quotation holds that “everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler”.

When it comes to national issues, the really Big Lie – we hear it every day – is that they are so simple that they can be addressed in useful ways by slogans or by adherence to an ideology.  In reality, complexity enters into even the simplest national debates because our goals, interests, backgrounds, beliefs, interpretations of data, and circumstances differ.  For example, should we reduce defense spending? If you are a politician seeking an answer to the debt crisis, it is hard to answer “no”. If you are an employee of one of the thousands of companies whose survival depends on an expanding defense budget, it is hard to answer “yes”.  Our awareness that a number of costly defense programs are unrelated to any Pentagon requests adds a layer of complexity to the discussion. Still more complexity is piled on by asking what indispensable American goals are served by spending, in 2009, seven times as much on defense as our nearest rival.

If  general agreement can be reached on the need to cut, then we encounter issues of greater complexity, such as what programs should be cut and when. What are the associated national security risks? How are our allies affected? Are the reductions politically feasible? How will cuts affect unemployment and communities? How do we mitigate adverse economic effects? What are experts saying about the cut, etc. 

But I’m talking here about the Big Lie, not about the Pentagon’s budget. The processes required to successfully manage a wholesale hardware business reflect a similar level of complexity. Bee colonies, weather reports, public schools, family reunions, science projects, sports management, churches, and beauty contests must all get the timing right, along with a myriad of large and small details, in order to succeed.

Complexity involves more details than we can comfortably get our minds around.  It involves nuances of cause and effect that defy detection.  And it often involves dynamic interactions that occur too quickly or too slowly to detect or to analyze and control easily.  When businesses fail, it is often because they misinterpreted some of the complex interactions of their enterprise. But feedback systems and other tools are available to deal with complexity. Peter Senge and others have written books about how to do it. Winning WWII and flying to the moon prove it is achievable.

To entertain the notion that great issues can be usefully addressed by the trivial thinking promoted in slogans and ideologies, then, is clearly unsupportable.  If complexity gives you a headache, that is the price of living in a democracy. But don’t fall victim to those who want you to believe that you are not up to analyzing difficult issues.  They knowingly promote the Big Lie because they assume you want smarter people to do your thinking for you. They harbor this condescending view because it serves their selfish  purposes, not your interests nor the interests of the country we want to provide unlimited opportunity for our children. Worse, they preach simplicity despite understanding the reality of complexity.  We call such people hypocrites. Their Big Lies shackle America’s progress because they encourage us to think superficially about our national problems. Patriotism, fighting for what is best for America, requires us to confront, deal with, and overcome complexity to arrive at intelligent, analytically driven decisions that work for a majority of our citizens. Vacuous slogans and ancient ideologies are irrelevant.