Sultan Knish
The problem with our problems is usually their solution. If we were to
take a closer look at many of our problems, it would turn out that many
of them are actually solutions that were meant to solve those very
problems. Our War on Poverty has spread poverty. Our attempts at
fighting racism have perpetuated it. Our campaigns for energy efficiency
invariably waste more energy than they save.
We
tried promoting populism to solve terrorism in the Middle East and got
even more terrorism for our troubles. The more resources we put into
education, the more the educational system runs backward. Every attempt
at creating jobs seems to vaporize more jobs than it creates.
Solving problems isn't a bad thing, but the place to start is at the problem, not the solution.
Listen
to enough celebrities at fundraisers, politicians thumping podiums with
manicured fingernails and thought leaders spinning their little grey
wheels and you notice that they assume that the solution is obvious,
self-evident and will work. And that's where problems come from.
The
more problems we have, the more addicted to solutions we become. But
progressives forget what the pre-moderns knew, that many problems have
no solutions. Other problems can be ameliorated, but not solved. Life is
still tragic. Bad things will happen to good people. Sometimes we can
wipe a disease off the map, but more often our solutions trade simple
problems for more complex ones.
Human nature, unlike a virus, has
no solution. It's hard enough to keep up with a mutating cellular
organism, but trying to outpace shifting human motivations is a
totalitarian loser's game. It's why social problems have the fewest
solutions except distributing more time, more wealth and more resources
wholesale through a general step forward and waiting for people to make
use of them.
Social solutions are all about social engineering
masses of people on the assumption that they will behave in a
predictable way over extended periods of time even when they are aware
of what is being done to them and even when the conditions of the
experiment come apart as your $600 million website not only doesn't lure
in the cool kids to sign up, but works about as well as a plugging your
toaster into hope and change and waiting for it to magically do
something.
None of these gimmicks work really well which is why
most aspiring progressive social engineers settle down to a humbler
rackets of six-figure salaries at a non-profit that's there to solve a
problem that won't be solved or a consulting gig manipulating
billionaires who want to solve a social problem like gun violence or
obesity before they die and think that it can be done by manipulating
the masses.
For sincere problem solvers, the place to start is
by examining the problem. That means setting aside the claims that
science has already proven X, Y and Z. Science actually proves
surprisingly few things outside of an episode of CSI. What science does
is tie together working assumptions into a productive workflow. This is
much more useful when it comes to producing a smartphone using science,
than using a bunch of unduplicated studies with more statistical
gimmickry than a political consultant's poll to tackle overeating, drug
abuse or risky behavior by teenagers.
Bacteria is a lot less
self-aware and less complex than teenagers. It isn't going to change its
worldview tomorrow because of a new trend sweeping the nation. It also
isn't going to be primed to give the answers that get you the grant by
your research assistant who never learned to spell ethics.
Some
problems are unsolvable. Others shouldn't be solved. Think about that
bookcase you want to move to the other side of the room. What are the
odds that the thin pasteboard is finally going to give way and spill all
those medical journals all over your rug if you try to do it? A lot of
problems are like that. Tackling them sounds good at a fundraiser, but
then it breaks your furniture.
Tackling
the social problems of low income families broke up those families and
made them much more dependent on the social tacklers. A few generations
later, the broken family and dependency had made all the original
problems even worse and much more unsolvable. It shouldn't have been
that surprising an outcome. Taking animals out of the wild and breaking
their chain of life strategy transmission leaves them unable to survive.
It works that way with people too.
Solving problems generates
new problems. People are complex and their complexity generates
problems. Even actual solutions create new problems. What makes these
solutions actual is that the new problems are several degrees of
severity less than the original problem. Plentiful food means childhood
obesity. Cures for diseases lead to increased longevity and strain on
the social system.
Thinking ahead can head off solution problems.
The problem is that solutioneers rarely like to think of problems. They
like to skip ahead to practicing their Nobel Prize acceptance speeches.
The
progressive mindset treats solutions as a matter of faith. If you
assume that society is always on an upward track like a roller coaster
that never stops climbing into the sky, then you don't worry that your
solutions will general future problems. Thinking that way is blasphemy
against progress. And if you aren't a 1920s progressive with shiny hair
and a great deal of confidence in a future where radio pills are an
entire meal and a vast government bureaucracy will end poverty for good,
but a 1970s progressive with a necklace of Made in China tribal beads
and a misplaced confidence that the only reason that problems don't get
solved is that people don't care enough to solve them, then you can't
even process the idea that hugging a problem to death might not be the
solution that is needed.
The 1920s progressive was the product of
a rational culture. His modern descendants confuse being rational with
being obtuse, snarky, outraged and any of the other phases of the
progressive moon. That leaves them completely unable to solve anything
and utterly unaware of their own inability to do anything more complex
than edit a Republican politician's Wikipedia entry to reflect a gaffe
distributed by a Think Progress' mailing list and call it a day for the
progressive movement.
Instead of solving anything, they declare
social problems solved. Then when the social problems have gotten so bad
that the voters turn to a Republican to solve them, the progressives
begin churning out articles, books and documentaries about how the
Republican deregulation of whatever messy system they set up to solve
old problems by creating more of them wrecked everything.
Crime
was solved, until the Republicans came in and began fighting it. Poverty
was solved, until Reagan got in. Race relations were great, until
Nixon. Every disease was cured until Bush failed to increase NHS funding
in line with the growth curve of the economy. This comforting hateful
nonsense frees progressives from ever questioning the progress that they
have made.
Progressives are forever fixing things and
conservatives are forever breaking them because they hate progress. The
only way to make progress is by eliminating all opposition. It worked in
the USSR where the authorities spent three generations blaming every
one of their failures on a vast army of saboteurs working for Great
Britain, Leon Trotsky and the remnants of the Czarist regime.
Ask
a modern progressive to name what his politicians did wrong and the
usual answer is that they weren't radical enough. ObamaCare was bad
because it wasn't Single Payer. If it had been Single Payer, it would
have been bad because of medical tourism. If a giant barbed wire fence
had been set up and all the doctors rounded up into it, the complaint
would be that the fence wasn't electrified.
Like the guy trying
to fix a television set with a hammer and twelve beers, the progressive
review board's conclusion is always that he didn't hit the broken pieces
of the television hard enough.
This
same solutionist mindset doomed the USSR to wallowing in its own
economic filth because it could rarely work its way backward from its
latest mess. Instead it found a few scapegoats to shoot and went on
marching forward over a cliff until everyone got tired of the whole
thing and decided to go back to an oligarchy with fewer rules and better
movies.
Those who believe in the solution can never accept that
they are the problem. That they aren't smart enough to outsmart the rest
of the population and that they should stop trying before they make
their problematic solutions unsolvable. The solution is more than just
something they do, it's an act of faith in a rational future. But there
is nothing rational about problem solving as a progressive act of faith.
Solutions and problems aren't polar opposites like heaven and
hell or Beethoven and the sound a broken fax machine makes when you try
to call it; they're entangled bits of each other like a Rubik's Cube.
The solution is present in a problem and the problem in a solution. That
is all the truer when the problem is people, rather than the alignment
of colored squares.
Solving a human problem isn't a
transformation, but a realignment, and there is rarely more than a thin
line between the problem state and the solution state. We are never far
from the problems of the last century or the last millennium. Like
yesterday's hunger pangs, we may have forgotten the raw experience of
living that way, but there is very little objectively that separates the
solutions we live from the problems that they solved. It is best to
remember that the problems of human nature today were the problems of
human nature yesterday and will be the problems of human nature
tomorrow.
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