By Dee Smith
My attempts to analyze what is transpiring in as objective and unbiased way as possible apparently come across to some as a counsel of despair. That is certainly not what I intend.
But I get paid to face and analyze facts, as far as facts can be discerned. Before and after the U.S. elections, I appeared on several webinars, podcasts and in-person talks. These were to various groups with attendees ranging across the political spectrum. I observed that most Republicans clearly believed that “if only Trump is elected things will be much better” (and they now believe they will), and Democrats similarly believed “if only Harris is elected things will be much better.” The desire for relief was palpable.
Unfortunately, it is not that simple. Let me explain why.
The amount of agency any of us has is much less than we believe—even if you are president of the United States. I mean this is a very specific way: the ability to produce the outcomes you intend and expect.
Many of the problems we face are deep and structural, which is bad enough, but the real rub is that the hyper-complex social, political, geopolitical, economic and environmental situation in which the problems exist is unpredictable as a fundamental property of its nature.
First of all, it can be extraordinarily difficult to instigate actual change. Some time ago, I was doing a project directly for the CEO of a Fortune 100 company. In a meeting, he expressed his intense frustration that “getting this company to do anything — to change anything — is like turning the Queen Mary . . . and I’m the CEO!”
Large systems, whether companies or countries, become highly resistant to efforts to nudge them to change. For example, for all his attempts to do so, over a decade and multiple terms in office, Victor Orban has actually changed the trajectory of Hungary as a country very little.
People who take a disruptive approach can initiate change better than those working within the guardrails of a system. Trump is such a disruptor, so he will be able to instigate many changes. But the nature of the world we live in means that neither he nor anyone else can actually predict and control the effects of such change for long.
And sometimes intended changes are just impossible within a certain situation. For example, both Trump and Harris promised to revive the American industrial working class. But this is almost certainly doomed to failure. Within a decade or two, automation, robotics, 3D printing and other technologies will produce nearly all factory goods. Automation — not offshoring — already accounts for more than 80 percent of job losses in the past 2 decades. Promising a job-rich manufacturing renaissance is meaningless and unfulfillable.
Rigorous analysis of how complex systems behave is one of the triumphs of 20th century science. The study of complexity has explained why, when change occurs, it is often abrupt and unpredictable. Complex systems are full of hidden links. The 2008 financial crisis offered many examples. Even small changes can produce enormous effects downstream. Many actions have unintended consequences: unanticipated knock-on effects (2nd-order, 3rd-order, etc.). Complex systems are full of tipping points. If you add grains of sand to a sandpile, it builds up until the pile reaches criticality — and then experiences a small avalanche. Such systems also exhibit cascading phenomena and non-intuitive inverse relationships.
We have created the most complex human civilization ever. The insuperable interconnectedness and complexity of the world have raised such unintended consequences and related effects to an immense level.
The 18th-century European Enlightenment formalized a belief system proposing that the world was generally linear, logical and predictively manipulable — that certain inputs would reliably produce certain outputs. That is of course what modern science and technology are based on. If you isolate phenomena — a smooth ball rolling down a smooth incline, or a closed electrical circuit — that view is generally true. But in the real world, the balls are seldom smooth, nor are the inclines.
A good example is in the practice of “pro-forma” financial analysis. The rise of spreadsheets like Excel has led people to believe that they represent the real world and can predict real-world outcomes. But they are abstractions and seldom forecast what actually transpires, because there are too many variables and exogenous elements. The use of such spreadsheets and the illusion of comprehensibility and predictability they engendered were deeply involved in causing the 2008 financial crisis.
There is a term that originated in the cyber security world called “security theater.” It involves putting in place measures that look like they will increase security but actually offer little protection, if any. They are there simply to make people feel better and to offer legal protection to the entities that deploy them.
Much of politics is analogous. As a species, we seem to most want from our leaders promises that make us feel better. That the promises are impossible to keep seems to matter little or not at all. But, as those promises are broken, we become very angry, and, if we are living in a democracy, “kick the bums out” only to vote more in to make and break more promises. Over and over and over.
Where does all that leave us? How do we move forward?