The Oversimplification Epidemic
Why do we present ourselves with false choices?
On COVID: Draconian lockdown vs. allow the virus to run rampant; get vaccinated or lose one’s ability to be a part of society. On Afghanistan: Stay in an “endless war” or run for the hills. On Climate: Be good to the environment or destroy the world. On Ukraine: No boots on the ground or escalate to World War III.
What happened to subtlety? What happened to creative or critical thinking? Did social media kill them? Were we ever capable of more than the most simplistic interpretations of events?
We need to stand up. We need to speak up. We need to defend Ukraine as our own. Planes, boots, whatever. This is another moment, another test. An opportunity to break free of the infantilized, simple approach we seem to take to every problem.
From the very beginning it was clear that COVID presented wildly different risks to easily defined segments of the population. Yet we refused to tailor our approach to each population to maximize their welfare, and the overall greater good to our society.
From the beginning it was clear that refusing to vaccinate at worst might expose the individual making that choice to incremental risk. Yet we refused to allow people to make that choice, even though they posed no meaningful risk to the vaccinated - if the story we were being told about the vaccine was true.
In Afghanistan, a few thousand people who were not in harm’s way maintained a fragile status quo that protected the lives of tens of millions of people from untold tyranny and cruelty. Yet, somehow, we concocted a false urgency to protect Americans and unleashed barbarism on a mass scale.
In a very complex system where most countries continue to contribute to climate change without any remorse, the West has decided to flagellate ourselves out of some sort of twisted guilt and reduce our capacity to produce energy. The worst people on earth, the most twisted and evil regimes, somehow seem to be the ones that produce oil and gas. Every time we allow the price of oil to rise, we enrich the most illiberal governments on earth. Why could we not figure out that giving them leverage over the rest of us might be a cost that we could not bear?
We screamed from the rooftops, we and Europe, that we would not put “boots on the ground” in a foreign war. So, Putin took advantage of our weakness and put his boots on the necks of women and children. Now we stand proud of our “unity”, our unity in cowardice? We had SO many choices and still have choices, yet we refuse to engage in creative or critical thinking. It will take us weeks to approve and send aid to Ukraine? Weeks?
Jon Haidt’s book “The Coddling of the American Mind” observed that our younger generations, partly from helicopter parenting and partly from the influence of social media, have decreased capacity to deal with risk and adversity. Perhaps that disease has infected us all. Fewer Americans have been killed in combat since the end of the Vietnam War than the number of Russians killed by the brave, outgunned Ukrainians in the last ten days, according to a number of estimates. Yet the Russians press ahead, and we have lost our nerve. We have lost our ability to deal with adversity, to measure and take risk.
You don’t get World War II if you fight with Hitler in the Sudetenland, you get World War II because you don’t. Every talking head says we are entering World War III if we engage Putin by imposing a humanitarian no-fly zone in Ukraine. No, we enter World War III if we don’t. He will rightly test us again. The Chinese will test us next. From Obama’s imaginary Red Line to this moment Putin has accurately judged the West as paper tigers who don’t have the guts to stand up for what they say they believe.
In poker, the easiest player to beat is the conservative one who doesn’t exert pressure using his chips as a weapon. The hardest one to beat is the aggressive one who is willing to lose a big pot. He always beats the conservative player. Not hard to figure out who will win the game being played on the world stage today. When the Chinese move on Taiwan or Putin moves on the Baltics, will we raise or fold?