Complexity is not always the answer

Tom Murray [1] makes the point that complexity isn’t the answer to everything. It has it place and usefulness but to make it the keystone that holds together everything else creates problems. Following are some examples from the US political system, where for liberals complexity is indeed the Philosopher’s Stone.

Sirota [2] gives a history lesson on complexity and the Democrats. They went from a Party protecting labor with simple framing on fairness and universalism with programs like social security, Medicare and public education to fetishizing “best-and-brightest technocrats and business neoliberals whose obsession with hair-splitting precision and corporate fealty ended up fetishizing ever-more complex means testing while largely accepting tax inequity.” This resulted in a “byzantine maze of complexity, paperwork and bureaucracy” that threw universal fairness out the window and let white collar and corporate criminals off the hook. It’s a stark lesson that complexity is far from the answer to everything. And in many cases it makes real-life situations far worse when simple solutions could do the job equitably. It’s a lesson elite Democrats should learn but cannot given their obsessive worship of the ever spiraling shibboleth of complexity.

Thomas Frank [3] makes a similar point. He discusses the meritocracy of the professional class and why it has consistently failed the American people. Frank is not opposed to expertise per se, just the orthodox meritocracy that is defined by establishment standards. He compares them to some of the experts of FDR’s administration. While some of them did indeed have some more establishment credentials, many were mavericks that challenged the establishment’s policies as well as what the very term expertise meant. It was more an expertise of the streets rather than the ivory towers, one that came from living the life of the people rather than the privileged life of the professional class. So under the professional liberal meritocracy their social class always does quite well. The rest of us not so much.

In Frank’s Frank’s book Listen Liberal [4] it is interesting to note that the liberal shift to expertise and complexity with the McGovern Commission sets a sociological background for key elements of the AQAL movement. Complexity came to be valued for its own sake. But it was a complexity that dissociated from its foundations in that the highly educated professions came to look down on the working class as deserving of their fate because they weren’t educated or smart enough. It was a dissociation from its ‘base,’ so to speak.

This was further supported by the ideology backing the professional class, with language of superior states like absolute reason or the soul being elevated beyond the mortal coil of toil and degradation. E.g., false reason in Lakoff’s terms. We can see this same dynamic in AQALingus as well, a top-down cream of the crop leading us lower level humans to the promised land not by making our material conditions better (how crass) but by selling us an ideology that will transform how we perceive and interpret those conditions. Thing is, those conditions have only gotten worse since this ‘liberal enlightenment’ of the upper classes.

Bill Clinton was a significant player in this shift to the neoliberal center. Back then documents even proudly used the neoliberal label. It was a conscious acceptance that the status quo was just fine. And that what was necessary was for individuals to be educated in new skills for the new corporate/information economy. There was no questioning the inherent inequalities or corruption in that system. Consequently, if one didn’t pursue the requisite education then their lot was their own fault. There was no analysis of how the system was rigged against such attainment. Even back then in Clinton’s first administration Robert Reich signed on to this canard. Obviously Reich has since changed his tune.

Another key fact is that Clinton talked like he still supported the working class to get their votes. But his policies per the above ideological shift in the Party were quite to the contrary. We can reasonably assume his wife, Hillary, was privy to and in agreement with this shift, since she has a record in the Senate and as Secretary of State supporting this inference. And she too, like her husband, is spinning the worker rhetoric yet coming from the same neoliberal, corporate view that dominates the establishment Dems. As but one example, her cronies on the Dem platform committee refused to support a plank that would guarantee a rejection of the TPP.

In this [5] interview Frank starts by saying that the Democratic Party still will not accept his analysis of why they lost so many elections. He then discusses how media like the Washington Post, mouthpiece of the Party, refuses to even broach certain topics like what Sanders promoted: single-payer healthcare, free college, renegotiating the trade deals, questioning globalization etc. You know, routine progressive ideas that the majority of Americans support. The Party just won’t hear it. Hence their so-called Better Deal is the same rehashed corporatism with empty promises that throws a few meatless bones to the masses.

Like Tom advises, we need to use complexity where it is applicable and beware of using it where it is not. Like the obsessed Democrats above we can muck things up by imposing complex solutions where a simple screwdriver does the trick. The wisdom is in knowing the difference.

Notes

1. https://www.perspegrity.com/papers/MM_Reader_chap_Murray.pdf

2. https://www.dailyposter.com/p/reminder-this-never-ends-well 

3. https://www.youtube.com/watch?reload=9&v=a9reU6RdD_M&fbclid=IwAR3vzVSk2EbDXeX98xzG-H7Gev_P1LdMY7L-rTEWw1VSdgYq2fFUdVyfNEg 

4. Frank, T. (2017) Listen Liberal. Picador: New York.

5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqvpePm_yiI&fbclid=IwAR05F-4iC-vLBdTX6MxrTbOlax93YJa6xElwzd9VSk5X3eVxUQb96Io-8c0