The Solutions that can be Named are not the Solutions
Frankly #67
In this week’s Frankly, I’d like to address the common desire for solutions to the human predicament - and why the championing of “solutions” is less clear-cut than we might perceive. To this end, I offer a three-dimensional model for thinking about a framework for responses.
Effective responses greatly depend on the context of an individual - by highlighting specific ‘solutions’ we narrow the scope of the conversation and exclude creative and empowered humans with different interests and skills.
Additionally, much like nature, the human socio-economic system is adaptive, and rapidly self-adjusts to new information and threats, making novel strategies difficult to implement and disperse at larger scales. As such, simplistic answers that can be publicly shared with millions are probably not going to work. If we zoom out, we see that responses with the potential to shift our systems in a better direction are only possible through emergent processes and may not be able to be championed publicly for a variety of reasons.
How can we expect to steer towards more humane futures by approaching The Great Simplification with the same ‘quick-fix’ mindset enabled during the Carbon Pulse? What is the role of critical leadership and governance that will be needed in coming decades but is perceived as too radical today? How can we, as both individuals and communities, think about our distinct place within the larger world and how that might shape our unique responses?
In case you missed it…
Last week, Casey Camp-Horinek of the Ponca Nation joined me to recount her decades of work in Indigenous and environmental activism. Her stories shed light on the often-overlooked struggles and tragedies faced by Indigenous communities in their efforts to restore and safeguard their homelands. Casey also shared her current work advocating for The Rights of Nature - which legalizes the same rights of personhood to Earth’s ecosystems - of which the Ponca Nation was the first tribe in the US to implement.
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Appreciate your point number 3, "Specific solutions constrict audience." Processes delivering "optionality" (NN Taleb) -- through which people choose what options (solutions) fit them best -- might look like a work around to audiences' resistance to specific solutions.
Thank you Nate for this Frankly. I think the core is number 7 “Answers and responses will be emergent”. Evolutionary thinking is needed. Are we sensitive enough to the patterns that emerge? Can we tolerate processes that are emerging and not designed as a solution? Can we respect nature that emerges without human planning and design? A major problem is thinking in problems and solutions itself. It is the idea that we have to have interventions. It is the left hemisphere take on the world that we have to rationally understand and manipulate the world in order to make it “better”. While intervening in processes that are naturally emerging and evolving is a root cause of the human predicament. Especially when we have industrialised interventions on a global scale. Interventions always have unknown side effects. Interventions always cost energy to resist what is naturally emerging and to resist entropy. Interventions need to be permanent interventions otherwise entropy turns the structure accomplished by the interventions into “chaos” again. You clean and organise your room, but because of entropy it will become filthy and disorganised again, so you have to repeat the intervention of cleaning and organising to keep the room clean and organised. You can have an ice skating rink in the desert, but you need to permanently intervene to keep it there. Permanent interventions cost energy permanently. We intervene too much. Destroying a lot in the process.