Complexity

By Greg -
We think that civilization has made the world more complex, and that we, as individuals, long for simpler times. Complexity is a word we use in place of drudgery, the labor we are obliged to do, the pointless decisions and ridiculous choices we have to make before we are allowed to rest quietly. And we relax by doing real work, by putting ourselves in a situation of real complexity, where every decision can mean physical discomfort, serious injury, or even death. We make ourselves vulnerable so that our labor and our choices mean something. We go camping. We play video games. We invest our happiness in outcomes ruled by chance. In the daily drudge of daily life, everything we do, for many if not most of us, is entirely artificial, and is made urgent and necessary by artificial forces whose real purpose is to keep us perpetually busy, with little or no time for quiet reflection or conscious attention.

The world we've made is anything but complex. It is in fact absurdly simple, but that simplicity is hidden behind layers of, abstraction obscured by protocol, scholastic argument, and specialized methodologies. George Orwell reduced this false complexity to the word, "power", an insight that left most of us, at the end of 1984, dissatisfied. We understand power as a tool, a means to an end, a magic ring which enables its wearer to re-make the world and control its forces. We couldn't comprehend power as an end independent of its means, entirely unconcerned with its effects. Such mindless power, neither good nor evil, is what we've come to believe is behind natural disasters, but the State, surely, is mindful in its artificiality. We believe in a God who cares for us, and the State is God's representative.

But we've got it turned around. Nature, responsive to our choices and consistent in its responses, is mindful, as is any sufficiently complex ecosystem. It is God and the State that is mindless, and we are machines of its madness.

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