Simplicity Complicity - Part 1
Toward a Developmental Meta-Narrative
This essay-in-parts is one in a series of essays about narratives and has a prelude:
If you haven’t already, consider starting there. Meta-narratives are precarious territory, and extra precautions are called for.
Introduction
Reality Is Complex
Reality. The Ground of Being. The Great Mystery. The All. Reality encompasses everything we know—and everything we don’t.
Reality is so complex that out of Her1 emerged a species capable of being awed and baffled by Her. We’re born into a Reality we cannot fully comprehend. This journey begins with a bow of humility before The Great Mystery of Existence.
If we want to make sense of Reality, the first step is acknowledging our human fallibility and limitations. Then, once we have accepted our limitless limitations and have sufficiently groveled in the dirt, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off, and find a way to live as limited, fallible beings navigating the boundless mysteries of existence.
Reality is infinite and infinitely complex, but humans are finite, limited beings. Therefore, we cannot experience objective Reality directly. Instead, we experience only a thin, subjective sliver. And we attempt to make sense of this sliver amongst ourselves.
Objectively, humans appear to exist in Reality. Subjectively, however, we inhabit stories—stories about Reality.
Stories Are Simple
Our perception of the hypercomplex Reality around us is simplified and framed in narrative form. We do not experience ‘raw’ objective Reality—that would overwhelm us. We tell subjective stories about objective Reality and navigate these stories instead.
We don’t need a complete understanding of the universe to drive a car or eat an apple. To function and maintain psychological coherence, humans only need an explanation—some justification for their actions. This reasoning takes place within narrative frames.
Different stories provide different reductions of Reality, granting humans unique degrees of freedom in how we relate to and navigate Reality. This is the price we pay for our capacity to think and talk—we must make sense of the thin sliver of Reality we experience. This presents a double-edged sword: on one side, freedom of choice; on the other, responsibility and consequences.
Postmodern thinkers recognized that humans live in sociocultural constructs—stories—not objective Reality. Some concluded that if we only inhabit stories, then objective Reality (or Truth) is either nonexistent or irrelevant to human experience. But this extreme conclusion is flawed. Stories are reductions of Reality and are thus connected, however loosely, to the Reality they describe. Additionally, they are undeniably a part of Reality. To claim that our subjectivity is completely detached from objective Reality is rash and obviously incorrect.
The extreme relativism that stems from a disconnect between stories and Reality leads to an evolutionary dead-end. Clearly, some stories maintain better contact with Reality than others.2 The complexity of Reality ensures that stories act only as approximations—crude maps of the territory. But the crudeness of our maps varies. One could concoct a story so detached from Reality that it becomes instantly fatal (e.g., “With this Superman cape on, I can fly off this skyscraper!”).
By losing contact with the ground of Reality, a story drifts into free-floating fantasy. Such disconnects lie at the root of our greatest challenges. It is senseless to say that there are ‘problems in Reality.’ There are no objective problems; problems are subjective. Arguing with Reality is not a bad definition of insanity. Problems are always a matter of perspective in one way or another. It all comes down to the stories we tell about Reality, as these define how we relate to what simply is.
This makes story-crafting and -telling heavy responsibilities. Thankfully, making sense of Reality is not the task of isolated individuals. Sense-making is a continuous cultural project, and humans are born into preexisting story-worlds—wider webs of meaning.
The Story-Worlds of Culture
The stories of individuals are embedded in and interwoven with the larger stories of their cultures.
In ‘prehistoric’ antiquity, our ancestors handled storytelling more gracefully, as their world and narratives evolved slowly over long eons. This allowed narratives to weave intergenerationally, harmonizing humanity’s relationship with Reality as nature.
But this changed in recent centuries (and, to a lesser extent, millennia) as our cultural narratives began to undergo rapid and unprecedented transformations, leading to—and being influenced by—massive technological and social upheavals.
Amid a narratival landscape undergoing accelerating flux, those alive today are experiencing the strangest moment in known history. We discussed this strange moment and the importance of piercing through sociocultural complacency to more clearly see its contingency in a previous essay:
The strangeness of our historical moment affords us a unique vantage point from which we may see ourselves more clearly. From this vantage point, we can learn much about ourselves, our stories, and Reality.
By understanding the nature of stories, we empower ourselves to shape them. Who controls the narrative controls the future.
Stories to Live and Die For
Human individuals inhabit personal story-worlds, but these stories are contextualized by larger sociocultural narratives. Conversely, the story of culture itself is carried by an intergenerational web of individuals, each holding a personal take on a common theme.
An individual can live within a story that veers far from Reality and, through sheer luck (and obtuse determination), die with their oblivious bliss undisturbed. Societies, however, contend with a different ruleset, as the mistakes of one generation accumulate for the next to face. This creates persistent intergenerational narratival debt. By avoiding difficult questions about our societal stories, we kick the narratival can down the road, deferring worsening challenges to future generations.
As humanity’s power reaches unprecedented heights due to the industrial, scientific, and digital revolutions, and somewhere around the peak of the “carbon pulse,”3 a significant enough mismatch between our narratives and Reality poses an existential risk to our species and all life on Earth simply because the levers of power are too great for us to mishandle.
Highlighting the disconcerting gap between humanity’s increasing power and its lagging wisdom presents the critical question our generation must contend with: “Can we get our stories straight?” That is, both among ourselves and with Reality.
In our coming essays, starting with this one, we aim to take decisive steps toward answering this question with the only desirable answer: Yes. We will also outline the “critical path” toward this aspiration.
Toward Post-Postmodern Horizons
Over the past century, modern culture confronted the holes in its own narrative, leading to postmodernity and a growing awareness of humanity’s ‘narratival existential layer.’ However, postmodern thought responded to this realization with overwhelm and paralysis, leading to relativist skepticism, nihilism, alienation, and apathy.
While postmodernism exposed the limitations of modern narratives, it failed to offer alternatives or the ground for an alternative to arise. By severing stories from Reality, postmodernism left us floating in fragmented, ungrounded narratives.
In this essay, foundational to our fledgling publication, we navigate beyond the postmodern quagmire by framing the relationship between stories and Reality as a dialectic between simplicity and complexity.
Understanding the indispensable and non-arbitrary role stories play for human beings results in a new meta-narrative. With this meta-narrative, we can see through (post)modern culture’s confusion and disentangle ourselves from it. This is not merely an intellectual exercise but a proactive stance against the existential risks posed by our civilization’s narratival crises.
All past civilizations collapsed under the weight of mismanaged complexity,4 relating to Reality through oversimplistic narratives and models of their own economies, ecology, human nature, and so on. Our civilization, Global-Modernism, the materialistic world-system that sprouted from the modern narrative, follows their footsteps, mismanaging complexity through oversimplification and steadily moving through its own (slow-motion) collapse. The stakes are unprecedented—the taller the climb, the bigger the crash.
Quick Overview
We began this exploration with a prelude, Back to the Storyboard, where we foregrounded the ongoing cultural discourse about stories—the meta-narratival discourse—which accelerated and became explicit in postmodernity. We framed the meta-narratival discourse as the starting point for one who wishes to be effective in today’s historical moment, and argued that humanity needs a new meta-narrative to untangle the Gordian Knot of conflicting stories that defines our current predicament.
Now, in Simplicity Complicity, we will present the case for an evolutionary meta-narrative as the only way to steer humanity’s plotline away from epic tragedy.
In Part 1, we explore simplicity and complexity, story and Reality, and their dialectic dynamics.
In Part 2, we examine how this dialectic culminated in our recent, modern history, leading to our bizarre postmodern moment of confusion and crisis.
In Part 3, we set the stage for synthesizing these dialectical opposites by exploring the developmental imperatives they present.
In Part 4, we present the resultant synthesis—an evolutionary meta-narrative—a mature stance toward stories and the Reality they aim to capture—the Grand-Meta-Narrative.
The Grand-Meta-Narrative can disentangle us from cultural confusion, empower us as individuals, and widen the narrow window of opportunity for humanity’s maturation and survival.
This ambitious essay is foundational to High Resolution. Throughout this publication’s lifecycle, we will make bold moves and statements. For better or worse, no experts or institutions can adjudicate in the waters we will venture into. We, therefore, ground ourselves in the balanced and mature approach to complexity the Grand-Meta-Narrative affords us, instead.
Our publication strives toward nothing less than the rapid maturation of humanity—a sentient species that has not yet come to grips with its own evolutionary process. Our future depends on the stories we tell. To navigate this situation, to survive, we must go beyond modern and postmodern thought to establish an effective stance toward narratives and Reality. Let’s begin.
Simplicity and Complexity
Consider complexity. Systems thinking, complexity theory, and chaos theory reveal complexity as an observable quality of phenomena, as opposed to a hypothetical notion.
As a technical term, we can refer to almost anything as a system—a nation-state, a cat, or Earth’s climate. The more complex a system is, the harder it is to comprehend, predict, and control; we cannot control what we do not understand.
This makes complexity intimidating. At its extreme, it approaches indiscriminate chaos. It corresponds to the unknown. Complexity is the worst nightmare of the control freak.
Compare a tree to a wooden table. A tree may seem simple enough, but is actually an incredibly complex organism. Humans cannot ‘construct’ natural organisms as complex as trees. A wooden table, however, made by chopping down this complex organism into simple bits, is straightforward to both comprehend and build.
At first glance, simplicity and complexity appear to be opposites. But a phenomenon that seems simple from one perspective can be complex from another. A tree may be approached as simply as a child’s drawing, but it is an intricate organism to a biologist. Simplicity and complexity are matters of perspective.
If simplicity and complexity depend on perspective, can one be inherently superior? Can either be universally favored?
Simplicity and Complexity Dance Together
Simplicity is a human construct—a seemingly stable island in an ocean of ‘raw’ complexity. It reduces Reality’s infinite complexity into something navigable and communicable. Simplicity structures our experience, enabling psychological stability and agency.
Simplifications, therefore, serve an indispensable role for us humans. But where does this leave the remainder—the complexity outside the simplification? By oversimplifying, we may act in ways that do not correspond to the Reality we aim to describe, leading to undesirable consequences. Yet, there is no universal ‘algorithm’ to distinguish simplification from oversimplification. We must ongoingly, contextually, and carefully refine the complexity we face into effective, though tentative, simplifications.
Developmentally speaking, we humans are fully capable of leaving outdated stories and oversimplifications behind. But first, we must notice them fraying at the seams. Then, unmoored from one story, we must navigate some chaos and complexity, metabolizing these to weave a more robust story. Through this natural process, human understanding of Reality evolves and matures.
Because stories can never fully capture the Reality they aim to describe, we are fated to repeat this process indefinitely. We must learn to navigate the pulsation between simplicity and complexity—confronting complexity that challenges our narratives and integrating it into more refined, accurate, robust stories that better match the Reality they aim to describe.
Neither side of this dynamic back-and-forth is dispensable. It is an art form we can strive to master, effectively learning how to learn by leaning into the dynamic rhythm of maturation. This pulsation corresponds with:
Dialectics
The dialectical dynamic, as discovered by the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, comprises an ongoing movement from thesis through antithesis and toward synthesis.
A thesis is a story we hold. Because the story is an imperfect simplification of Reality, it inherently leaves room for an antithesis to challenge it. However, an antithesis is not a stable self-standing position; it is a purely destructive move. It leaves us hanging. This creates a tension that drives the movement toward synthesis: a new thesis that integrates the valid aspects of both the thesis and its antithesis.
This process repeats indefinitely as human understanding evolves, moving from one narratival reduction of Reality to the next. This dialectical rhythm outlines nothing less than the human maturation process toward growing degrees of understanding.
Dialectics of Transformation
Like the archetypal heroes Bilbo (or Frodo) Baggins, Neo, Alice, and Luke Skywalker, our naive understanding of life and the universe can be upended at any moment, hurling us into a quest to confront a larger Reality and be transformed in the process.
This encapsulates a well-documented process of personal transformation. If approached proactively, it follows the arc of Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey. Those who cling to the familiar risk succumbing to stagnation and obsolescence, while those who heroically face the unknown and metabolize novel complexity evolve into more mature versions of themselves.
This dialectic of transformation is not limited to individuals. Cultures, too, have stories. What appear as conflicting drives within the individual—seeking safety, comfort, and stability versus aspiring toward Truth and wisdom—expand into polarized camps in the collective dynamics at play in culture.
The Narratival Landscape
Cultural camps coalesce around shared narratives. These narratives often contradict one another, each holding antitheses of the others’ assumptions. When these antitheses are rejected, and camps cling to their stories, cultural discourse polarizes and becomes dysfunctional.
Our cultural discourse today is highly polarized, pressuring onlookers to choose between simplistic camps that define themselves in opposition to one another. The U.S. political landscape, devolved as it has from bicameral congress to bipolar schizophrenia, serves as a potent example.
In such dysfunctional, polarized discourse, exposure to antithesis and contradictions paradoxically serves to further entrench camp-dwellers in their positions by simplifying through their own lens and thereby rejecting the critique of the other. These dysfunctional cultural dynamics and unresolved social issues have more to do with the form of discourse than its contents. Consider—which makes for a better definition of progress, elevating the maturity of discourse or achieving a one-sided triumph of one partial perspective over another?
Any cultural camp offers comforting senses of stability and belonging that stem from sharing a story-world in common with other nodding heads. But these narratives are partial, and their tenuous comforts prove ephemeral to the weary traveler, who is pressured to march out into the cold night again and again in search of a brighter flame—a more honest and comprehensive story. Coming to terms with the ephemerality of these limited positions loosens their hold on us.
While positions are superficially differentiated by stories and values, they follow similar underlying logic. Within the simplicity of any narratival bubble’s echo chamber, one brand of simplicity reigns. The threatening complexity outside is shunned to maintain the shaky stability of the protective bubble for one more cold night. But the complexities of Reality loom over every such bubble, threatening to pop its unexamined assumptions. This background presence of Reality manifests as anxiety around any threatening contradiction to one’s narrative.
This forms the fundamental dialectic tension: the desire for the comfort of simplicity—a temporary island of order in an ocean of chaos—versus the aspiration for closer contact with Reality and psychological stability on firmer foundations. Closer contact with Reality demands a sacrifice—our immature story and its temporary comforts.
While one may lean toward simplicity on one issue and complexity on another, we can examine the archetypal biases that emerge from these competing psychological drives. When polarized, they reveal their mutual opposition to one another: On one side are those who cling to the simple safety of the campfire they know. On the other are those who, recognizing that the night is long and the firewood dwindling, refuse to compromise and choose to roam the darkness indefinitely, lost in complexity.
Simplicity Bias
For one who is biased toward simplicity, everything is expected to fit neatly into their familiar narrative. When looking at a tree, this person sees ‘just a tree’ and questions no further. Black and white. Good or bad. ‘Us’ versus ‘them.’ The world is made simple and kept that way in spite of any opposition or contradiction.
From this perspective, those who engage with complexity are seen as overcomplicating things, creating problems where none exist, and are dismissed as impractical or (ironically enough) as ‘unrealistic.’ Perhaps they’re too much ‘in their heads,’ or they may harbor intellectual superiority.
It’s not necessarily that the simplicity-biased are unintelligent or incapable of complex thought—their minds are ingeniously contorting facts to fit their assumptions without breaking a sweat. More generously then, they have not had their assumptions and narratives sufficiently challenged to recognize the ephemeral nature of stories. Their perception became rigid, conforming to a simplistic mold.
This archetype is exemplified by the hobbits living peacefully in the Shire. Content within a stable and uncomplicated world, they avoid venturing beyond its boundaries. As we will explore in Part 3, this bias corresponds to a certain developmental stagnation through resistance to facing the uncertainties and discomforts of complexity.
Such an archetypal caricature person would probably perceive this essay, perhaps this entire publication, as overcomplicating matters that are actually simple. Why overthink things? We confront them with matters they are underequipped to handle but fully capable of dismissing.
No person is as simple as a caricature (even in the extreme case where they identify with one). It is more common to find oneself in this position contextually than as a general attitude toward life. Especially when one is inundated by the endless day-to-day obligations and tasks their stories generate. Yet, as an archetype, it captures a general resistance to complexity, novelty, and the unknown. This resistance forms a dialectic tension with its counterpart:
Complexity Bias
Because so much cultural critique targets conservatism, ‘obsolete dogmas,’ and the naivety of our culture’s simplistic stories, simplicity bias should be familiar and recognizable. Complexity bias, however, is less explored. Yet, it stands in dialectical opposition to its simplistic counterpart, and its characteristics should be familiar to most readers.
Those with complexity bias perceive Reality as overwhelmingly complex and are allergic to any and all imperfect simplification. They almost seem to define themselves in contrast to the oversimplicity of their cultural surroundings. To them, Reality is irreducibly complex. For example, they look at the same tree as those on the simplicity side but perceive it very differently—as an organism so intricate as to make it incomprehensible. Interconnected with countless other complex systems, the tree cannot be examined in isolation without disembedding it from its original context, which would change it into something else—the tree as a self-standing object is an illusion!
This perspective questions the validity of simplified narratives, viewing them as crude symbolic representations pointing to something far more complex—something Real (in the Lacanian sense) beyond any concept.
This person recognizes that the simplicity-biased does not see the tree itself but some simplified concept the word “tree” points to, instead. The word merely symbolizes something Real, which forever lies beyond the concept’s grasp. Reality lies forever beyond the reach of our concepts. This outlines a radically different way of perceiving.
Complexity-biased individuals perceive the simplicity-biased as naive and unsophisticated, lacking nuance and depth. From the complexity-biased perspective, ‘simpletons’ avoid facing Reality and its overwhelming complexity by reducing it to a childish cartoon.
Are the complexity-biased indeed more sophisticated and mature? They have their own faults to confront. They drown in correlations, interactions, and details, stifling the emergence of organizing narratives that must, by definition, simplify Reality. Without a story—without an organizing simplification—no agency can arise, leaving the complexity-biased paralyzed, free-floating in a Reality they cannot navigate. Whenever they move, act, or speak, they are self-contradicting the purity of their convictions.
To this complexity-biased archetype, this essay, even the project of this entire publication, would be perceived as a crude oversimplification. From this perspective, striving for practical syntheses and actionable narratives is seen as a shallow compromise and betrayal of Reality’s overflowing complexity, which language can not do justice to. At this extreme, objective Reality cannot be navigated. It is simply overwhelming.
Note how this same essay, which attempts to navigate something real, is perceived as its polar opposite from either extreme. Note, too, how neither extreme can effectively navigate complexity with agency. Unsurprisingly, neither of these extremes suffices, and a middle way must be discovered.
These biases form a dialectic tension that underlies our cultural stagnation. Understanding this tension is crucial for grasping our historical moment and developing a mature stance toward stories and Reality as individuals and societies. We must mind the pitfalls of oversimplifying or overcomplicating. We must have simplifying narratives but simultaneously face complexity adequately.
A nuanced synthesis is needed, but our culture is polarized between these two biases. With the theoretical foundation of the dialectic laid, we are ready to explore how it played out historically in…
Part 2—Coming Soon…
Understanding the dialectical tension between simplicity and complexity will empower us to see ourselves and our culture more clearly. It also permits us to move toward a synthesis of simplicity and complexity instead of falling into a problematic bias toward either. Through this synthesis, we can free ourselves from cultural stagnation and actively participate in the maturation of humanity as a whole.
As we will continue to emphasize, the technological revolutions of the past few centuries have made humanity's maturation more urgent than ever. Collectively, our maturation is now a prerequisite for our survival—and, perhaps, that of all life on Earth. We form the generation that must effectively confront these issues on behalf of both our ancestors and descendants.
Through this essay, we aim to mature our relationships with simplicity and complexity, stories and Reality. We are developing the capacities needed to navigate this delicate dance and our precarious historical moment with agency and wisdom.
In Part 2, we will demonstrate how the dialectic between simplicity and complexity played out over the last few centuries, grounding this abstract discussion in modern history. We will explore why our civilization’s narratival dissonance is steering us toward self-extinction and why viable alternatives are absent from the cultural discourse. In the exploration, glimpses of a viable, critical path forward will shine through the cracks.
Look forward to this and more in Simplicity Complicity - Part 2: The Modern Story and its Fallout.
We’re making the stylistic and value call to relate to Reality as a She, using capitalized Her/She pronouns for aesthetic, symbolic, and other reasons. Personified as such, Reality is The Goddess. Why She rather than He? Is this some kind of a theo-feminist statement? Not really. We are simply referring to the Great Mother of all that is, the womb of existence. In Hebrew, the word for Reality is a feminine noun and is related to as such. Why personify Reality at all? A legitimate question that we will simply sidestep as it is too vast, and will take us too far afield. It’s a bit ‘mystical,’ but Reality is infinitely mysterious, so it’s appropriate.
Some may object: “How we define ‘better’ depends on the particular story we inhabit.” This seems to create a logical loop, with each story defining its own conception of what is “good” or “better," leaving us without an objective value system to arbitrate between different stories. This valid objection, taken to its logical conclusion, leads to a relativist postmodern position where everyone inhabits their own isolated reality bubble. This essay responds to this objection from the pragmatic angle of complexity—some stories are more accurate in their description of Reality. But is that ‘better?’ We will address value system differences directly in the essay following Simplicity Complicity.
We use this term the same way Nate Hagens does, referring to the ongoing historical period that began in the late 18th century, when we discovered that we could dig fossil fuels out of the ground and burn them for massive energy-on-demand at arbitrary scales—and continuing until the inevitable point in the not-too-distant future when we will stop doing so, by choice or otherwise.
See Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies. Broadly speaking, a society rests on certain simplifications of Reality. As it grows, the complexity involved in maintaining it rises, and the disparities between its assumptions and Reality widen until its management apparatuses fail catastrophically. Some argue that our current civilization has distributed intelligence built into its market logic, enabling it to manage higher complexity levels than the centralized empires of old. It is largely due to this distributed nature that our society’s complexity has reached unprecedented heights. Glimpses of the mismatch between our social control mechanisms and societal complexity were exposed to public scrutiny in various COVID-19 management crises until public attention was swept away to the following hot topic.
Nymrod, I like where you are coming from and I agree with you. I don't know if this style of writing is the best way to download what you're saying into culture. I think it needs more story and more character, whether that is your own personal story or a writing style which invites the reader to see this as part of their own story. More story! More mythic potency! More right-hemispheric activation! Just my thoughts. Keep doing what you're doing!