Are We Losing Control?
A nitpick and a fable about the world getting more complex than ever
Marco Giancotti,
Marco Giancotti,
Cover image:
Two Bunches of Grapes, Andrew John Henry Way
You might have heard this argument before: "The world we live in is more complex, fast-changing, and interconnected than ever, and to avoid losing control in this harsh new world, we urgently need new solutions."
I'm sure you have, because it's everywhere:
The world is changing at an ever-increasing pace... primarily because it has become more connected and interdependent than in our entire history. ... However, a paradigm shift in the way we are creating and managing these systems could solve our problems.
Today, we live in a vastly different world. The person more qualified to lead is not the physically stronger person. It is the more intelligent, the more knowledgeable, the more creative, more innovative.
The world is more interconnected than ever before, and it's becoming more connected every day. Building walls won't change that... If we want to close loopholes that allow large corporations and wealthy individuals to avoid paying their fair share of taxes, we've got to have the cooperation of other countries ... .
We live in an interconnected world, in an interconnected time, and we need holistic solutions.
Globalization seems ungovernable … only a cosmopolitan perspective can reunite humanity with nature.
It's a narrative that we hear over and over, and I've generally grown numb to it. I just let it slide without a second thought. But recently, while working on a project with my father, I realized just how much I disagree with it. When the time came to introduce our approach to designing effective organizations, my father instinctively reached for this same opening, that our "new world" needs new solutions—and I couldn't help nitpicking.
I understand where the people who make these kinds of arguments are coming from. We have technologies today that would have been unthinkable even a few decades ago. Especially since the industrial revolution, new inventions and discoveries have profoundly changed every aspect of our lives. The internet has upended our traditional ways of communicating—and it's much faster than anything we had before.
Even to me—someone trying to argue that the above statements are faulty—it feels intuitively true that the world is now more complex than ever, that we risk losing control, or that we already lost control in 2016, or 2001. That intuitive feeling doesn't make it logical, though.
My father and I quickly agreed on a change of wording because it wasn't important to the core of our arguments, and the problem is happily resolved. But I think I owe him a clearer explanation of my thought process in pushing back on such arguments. Here is my brief attempt, for anyone to read and react to.
(For new readers of this blog, who might be unfamiliar with what I'm usually interested in: my nitpick is about the logic behind that kind of statement, not the intentions or conclusions!)
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My rebuttal to the "New World, New Solutions" mindset is simple. Yes, the world is very different today compared to the past. Yes, the rate at which such changes happen is consistently faster now overall. But no, we're not losing control, because we were never in control.
If we need new solutions today, it's not primarily because the world is more complex, but because the solutions we've tried before have never worked in creating the world we want today.
Take climate change, a topic where this kind of flawed reasoning is often applied. You'll often see a narrative like this: 1) global climate is changing faster than ever, which is a problem, 2) so countries need to come together, change how they consume, reduce waste, and scale the technologies that counter that change.
I agree with 1, and I agree with 2: both are entirely true. But I disagree that linking them with "so" in that way is the obvious or preferable way to think about the issue.
An argument along these lines was made by Kamala Harris at a summit in 2021:
As a global community, it is imperative that we act quickly and together to confront this crisis. And this will require innovation and collaboration around the world. It will require the use of renewable energy and new technologies.
Here I have no problems with the message. Let's do those things! But I take issue with her framing, based on having to confront "this crisis," i.e., a problem that has come up recently.
If today we have this huge issue of human-induced, rapidly changing climate, it is because people 50, 100, and 150 years ago didn't do what was necessary to avoid it. Climate change was a global problem already on the day when Jesse Fell successfully managed to burn anthracite on an open-air grate in 1808—people simply didn't realize it yet.
Human-induced climate change is certainly more urgent now, but it is not a new problem, nor is it more important now than before. Claiming otherwise, and saying that we need to act based on urgency, would mean that all the important but non-urgent problems we have today can be postponed until they become both important and urgent. The worst kind of procrastination, on a global scale.
Nor do I believe that the problem of climate change would have been easier to solve earlier on. It was definitely harder to detect, for many reasons, but even with a successful detection, humanity would have required the same kind of international cooperation, regulations, and grassroots efforts that we are advocating for today. And good luck achieving those things in 1890!
The point is similar for most other topics. If you're tempted to think that today's problems are more treacherous than ever before, that the stakes are higher, and the necessary level of cooperation has gotten harder to realize, just open a history book. We have horrible wars today, but we had horrible wars before—arguably much more horrible. People died like flies from epidemics, starvation, and tyranny. Of those that lived, the vast majority spent their whole lives in abject poverty, subject to abuse and very hard limits on their freedom.
If our ancestors had to go through all that misery, all that carnage and pain, it was because they didn't know better. They had no clue how to make things better, and the few who had the means to improve things didn't care.
My point is: the world was always out of our hands, and we were always tossed around by the complexity which we participated in creating. If thousands of animal and plant species have gone extinct from human causes, if countless human cultures, languages, and traditions have been lost to oblivion in the past few thousand years, it is not (primarily) because people wanted things to go that way: they were helpless to avoid them. We were never in control.
Even the justification that the world has "gotten too fast" in recent years, that we "risk falling behind" with terrible consequences, sounds suspicious.
Were the lower classes in 1800 prepared for the changes the industrial revolution would bring by 1860? Were people in 1500 CE South America prepared for the changes the Europeans would bring by 1600 CE? Were middle-eastern populations in 400 BCE prepared for the changes Alexander the Great would bring by 300 BCE? I doubt it, otherwise they might have prevented those changes. And I think they would have loved to be granted a bit more time to prepare. The world was "too fast" even for them, even while being much slower than today. It was too fast for all humans in history, at least since the days we moved away from our ancestral hunter-gatherer lifestyle.
If I were to speculate, I would say that our awareness of our helplessness has increased in the past century, thanks to advancements in science, education, and access to information. Perhaps the spread of democracy has a role, too, because now many more people are allowed to participate in the decisions that affect them, and to learn and reflect about the largest-scale problems—luxuries unavailable to most of our ancestors. This is good news.
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Not everyone makes the mistake of believing the world is significantly more human-averse than ever before. For instance, Kevin R. Lowell, CEO of UScellular, reminds us that “the world we live in today is complex. The world yesterday, to the people who lived yesterday, was also complex. Tomorrow will be complex, and so will the day after that. ... Our challenges are as vexing to us as the challenges of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries were to the people who lived and worked and died in those days gone by.”
Librarian Philip Williams even makes some compelling points for the opposite argument: the world is getting less complex! Globalization has increased interconnectedness, sure, but it has also removed many of the enormous differences we had between cultures. Mass production and standardization have simplified things in many ways, reducing the world's variety and making many things more predictable. In many ways, we live in a culturally impoverished world, although the way mass and social media work hides that fact.
I don't know if the factors brought up by Williams are enough to claim that the world is overall less complex today than before. The answer probably depends on how you define the word "complexity." Whichever it may be, though, doesn't change the fact that the complexity has been too much for us to handle for thousands, perhaps even tens of thousands of years already. If anything, we have gotten better at handling it.
The reason for the logical mistake I'm pointing out seems simple enough: humans have a natural tendency to consider past events as more inevitable and predictable than they were—something called hindsight bias. This happens during one's lifetime, like when you blurt out "I knew they wouldn't last" about a relationship that just ended, even though you had been supportive until then.
But this innate bias also happens on historical time scales, in which case it is often called the historian's fallacy. We tend to judge past actors as if they had access to the same information and foresight that are available now to us, who already know how things turned out. The "old times" seem so simple and quaint now only because we don't actually have to live through them.
I said that I'm only nitpicking on the logical soundness of those arguments, not with the actual messages they're trying to convey. How might one rephrase them better?
It is quite simple, really: don't make any appeal to the differences between the past and the present, new worlds and old worlds, and instead focus on the kind of problem faced today. For example:
In a world in which all problems are global, there is no way countries can handle issues by themselves; we need global responses.
Sounds good! And here's another one from the evergreen Dana Meadows. She focuses on the perennial thinking weaknesses we carry as humans, such as our biases:
The world is a complex, interconnected, finite, ecological - social - psychological - economic system. We treat it as if it were not, as if it were divisible, separable, simple, and infinite. Our persistent, intractable global problems arise directly from this mismatch.
— Donella Meadows, Whole Earth Models and Systems
Flawless and timeless.
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I will conclude with a sequel to Aesop's fable of the Sour Grapes.
After the disgruntled fox leaves the vineyard with an empty belly, a group of ants sees the same bunch of grapes hanging high above their heads. To them, it looks as if it were attached directly to the sky.
Being more honest and methodical than the fox, they hold a council.
"The grapes are way too high for us to reach, even if we all stand on each other's bodies," observes one ant.
"We survived on grapes during all past years. Now we can only find a few rotten scraps on the ground. If we don't find a way to reach up to those intact grapes now, the whole nest will be at risk!" cries another.
"My sisters, this is a new crisis, and we need to come together to find a new solution," concludes a third.
At that point, a young entrepreneurial ant comes forth with a new idea: split up and explore the surrounding area, as there might be a trunk or structure that will let them climb up to the grapes. Some ants are enticed by the novelty of this indirect approach, but most are not. They don't see why walking left and right would get them any closer to the grapes. A long debate ensues, and no action is taken.
A grasshopper, who overhears the ants' arguments, chimes in to remind them of something they had all forgotten.
"Congratulations on your 'discovery'," scoffs the grasshopper. "You called it a 'new crisis': don't make me laugh. And now you're surprised that those grapes are out of reach? Ridiculous."
"What do you mean?" ask the ants. "You seem to know something important. We will share some of the grapes with you if you tell us."
"Very well," says the grasshopper with an air of importance. "You ants are always so engrossed in your work that you forget everything. I, instead, sit around, always alert, so I have time to remember things.
"In the past years you survived on grapes, yes, but barely. Many of you starved and suffered every year. You never managed to get the good ones hanging from up there. I don't think you ever even saw them, so high they were! You were always satisfied with the half-rotten grapes that are found lying on the ground in this season. Good thing, for you, that this year's grapes were hanging lower than ever, so that you could notice them.
"You were missing out on the good grapes this whole time, and yet you cried when you saw them today, and called this a new crisis! You could have been climbing up this whole time, and instead you scraped by on rotten food every year!"
The ants sprang into action and eventually found a way to reach the grapes. The nest was saved, and they even had some excess grapes left over. As for the grasshopper, for some reason he was not invited to the feast. ●
Cover image:
Two Bunches of Grapes, Andrew John Henry Way