Entangled

Kozinski the Unabomber died this week. The WSJ had a strange piece nearly praising his manifesto as mostly correct in its complaints about the world. Almost admitting that the only way he could get those views widely noticed was to become a terrorist.

Cassandra is always with us, of course, because there are always things going wrong in the world. The peculiar fallacy of all these prophets is the belief that if people just recognize the problems, things can be fixed.

It’s a common binary thinking fantasy, that simply doing something different will make things right. If there is one underlying strength to wisdom it is that the world and its ills are all extremely complicated, contradictory, and entangled. Like an ecology, not a math problem. Change one thing and all kinds of unpredictable results will occur. 

Manifestos are also a way of becoming crazy in another way. That is to believe that there is some single fulcrum of power that will change things. Magical “if only” daydreams. In practical terms, it almost always evolves into a belief that one person or group controls society, and that simply converting or killing that conspiracy will fix everything. 

All that is pretty obvious to students of history, or for that matter to anyone with a fair amount of life experience. It’s the young who are easily seduced by apparent simplicity.

But a respected publication should really know better. Alas.