“I would not give a fig for the simplicity this side of complexity, but I would give my life for the simplicity on the other side of complexity.” — Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
“Life is so complex that government efforts to regulate and control it are doomed to fail, just as the Austrians say. And life is simple in the principles we use to guide us.” — Paul Bonneau
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Now we’re at the final installment, and reading Paul Bonneau’s comment above, I wonder if maybe I should just leave it at what he said and shut up. He summed up the political and philosophical aspects very well.
But … there’s more. Of course. And (no surprise) it’s both simple and complex.
When simplicity strikes
You’ve probably heard the account of mathematician Henri Poincare’s sudden insight. As he stepped onto a bus, in the midst of a conversation with a companion, he was struck by a Great Truth about a subject he’d been pondering. He went right on with his conversation as if nothing had happened, but his whole life was changed. A complex problem had become simple.
Not many people remember the subject of Poincare’s insight (non-Euclidian geometry), but lots of people know the story. It has a universal appeal.
Similar experiences abound. After years of dogged effort by some of the world’s most brilliant minds to discover the structure of DNA, young James Watson has a sudden flash of clarity: DNA is like a spiral staircase with two rails.
Saint Francis of Assisi struggled for years, trying and largely failing to accomplish heroic works for God. Then one day, sitting in a dilapidated church, he heard the voice of Christ (so he perceived) telling him, “Francis, Francis, go and repair My house which, as you can see, is falling into ruins.” And he began at last to comprehend his life’s work.
How many times have you had similar, if less saintly, experiences? You wrestle with some seemingly insolvable problem. For ages you get nowhere and feel as if you never will. Then one day you wake up — or you hear the lyric of a song — or you’re washing dishes — and suddenly, everything is clear. The solution is so obvious you wonder how you could have missed it.
Mathematicians call the the truest solutions “elegant.” That’s just another way of saying that the best solutions take a complex reality and reduce it to simple lucidity. “E=mc2.” Classic example.
The truest insights have a history of striking in the same way:
- You struggle and ponder and work.
- You come to feel as if you’re beating your head on a wall.
- You let go (go to sleep, listen to music, take a walk, have a drink or a smoke, etc.)
- And in some moment of unawareness — wham. Simplicity strikes.
That’s what Oliver Wendell Holmes meant by his elegant quote at the top of this article. Simplicity achieved after thoughtful effort nearly always yields high truth. It may not be universal truth, as in a mathematical principle, but it’s truth for the seeker: “What is the right course for me to take?”
It’s a reward — and a glorious one — for brain-bending labor.
Conversely, Holmes’s “simplicity this side of complexity” is mere illusion. Cheap. Easy. Sleazy. It’s a false simplicity pasted over complex truth. Its sole purpose (as Kevin Wilmeth pointed out) is to enable people to quit thinking and take comfort in a slogan or a fixed perception.
“They hate us for our freedom.”
“Global warming is settled science.”
“Respect the office, if not the man.”
“Our leaders have better information than we do.”
“My country, right or wrong.”
“Drugs are bad.”
“Cops and soldiers are all heroes.”
“All cops are pigs.”
“Change you can believe in.”
Government supremacists argue: “The world is too complex to allow millions of individuals to make their own haphazard decisions about things; only by [national] [global] coordination can we save [the world] [the economy] [the children] [etc.]”
But those who argue that kind of complexity are actually advocating simplicity — of the wrong kind: “Don’t think. We’ll take care of you.”
That’s the “simplicity this side of complexity.”
And then to act
The simplicity on the other side of complexity — the simplicity that strikes so cleanly after honest struggle — is a blessing. Not only because it brings clarity to troubled thoughts and relief to troubled spirits. Not only because it so amazingly often yields real truths. But because it spurs us to action.
Simplicity after complexity is a gift — but one that comes with a price: We now have to do something with our new insight. Conduct further research. Reform our habits. Change our job. Admit that our opinions have altered. Confront a skeptical world with a new truth — but do something. (Which may also mean ceasing to do something: quit drinking, stop voting for the lesser of two evils, take more time off work, leave a cult, stop advocating something we once believed in, cease putting up with abuse, etc.)
In the immediate aftermath of a “simplicity strike” we might be eager to plunge ahead. But eventually, we’re going to discover further complexities, not in our new concept, but in the execution. And sometimes we might discover that, great as the simple insight was, the insight itself or our interpretation of it might be faulty.
Which means we need to plunge into complexity once again and hope to come out with new simplicity on some further shore. Sigh.
Poor St. Francis, for example. When he heard Jesus tell him to “repair My house,” he really thought he was supposed to go around repairing crumbling buildings. That’s what he did, at first. And he would have liked to spend the rest of his life in such simple labors. But his labors and his simple goodness eventually brought him brothers, and later brought a young lady named Clare, who brought sisters. All those brothers and sisters finally led Francis to his real mission, which wasn’t to “re-form” church buildings, but to reform the Church.
And that got complicated. And wasn’t notably successful.
And so it goes. Yet if Francis hadn’t sought his saintly clarities — had he taken the easy course and remained wealthy playboy Francesco Bernardone — history would merely have eaten his bones. Instead, he’s revered 800 years later by people of many religions or no religion at all. Not for what he did, but for who he became.
And so it goes today with people seeking freedom in an unfree world. We may fail, but each time we confront a complexity and rise to a new simplicity, we gain. Even if the outside world gets worse, we become our better selves.
The older I get, the more I see that all of life (by which I mean the real guts of life, the Big Things) is a series of complexities, solved by simplicities, which lead to further complexities, which lead — if we give our full hearts and minds to them — to further simplicities.
Sometimes it feels like going round and round, up and down, on the same old merry-go-round. Without a doubt, the “simplicity this side of complexity” is a lot easier, for those who can stomach its comforting falsehoods.
Yet the eventual result of complexities honestly faced and simplicities gratefully received and acted upon is … well, it’s something Oliver Wendell Holmes also expressed pretty well: “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.”
Each simplicity achieved is higher and greater than the last. We grow until we die.
And if life has any point at all, that is it.
“Each simplicity achieved is higher and greater than the last. We grow until we die. And if life has any point at all, that is it.”
You’ve nailed it, luv.
I’ve often referred to “burning my bridges behind me” over the years, and others say, “No, you can’t do that, you have to keep a handle on the past. Don’t give up who you know, who you are, where you came from.”
But… “Every now and then a man’s mind is stretched by a new idea or sensation, and never shrinks back to its former dimensions.” That is what I mean. We CAN’T go back because we’ve stretched too far. This is what happens when knowledge of the Right Way To Live——such as libertarianism——enters one’s life.
Finding a new simplicity often leads to burning our bridges behind us.
Thoreau said, “The man who goes alone can start today; but he who travels with another must wait till that other is ready.”
That doesn’t mean necessarily living (or “traveling”) alone——but it does mean THINKING alone. And thinking alone often means leaving others behind… or parting from them in a different direction, down “the road least traveled.”
Libertarianism is a road least traveled. As such it often leads us to isolate or separate ourselves from certain complexities of society. As you said, Claire: “The wrong kind of simplicity.”
How we handle that separation often leads to other complexities which we alone, as individuals, must work out for ourselves——whether a gulch… becoming a “mole”, a “ghost”, an “activist”… whether a part of the world, or apart from the world.
Thanks for this mini-series.
That was beautiful and elegant.
Thanks.
Excellent and thought provoking articles, Claire! And a great segue from The Qualities of a Free Man series. Problem is, so few of us want to follow the path of thinking for ourselves and even seeing the complexities, let alone working through them.
“How absurd men are! They never use the liberties they have, they demand those they do not have. They have freedom of thought, they demand freedom of speech.”
Soren Kierkegaard
Society today, as you noted, wants sound bytes and memes that they can parrot. They want a dogma to hold dear. They want boogie men to blame and heros to blindly follow. Black and white – cut and dried. Mostly they want to abdicate any and all personal responsibility. It’s the fault of the schools or the government or big corporations or insurance companies or homeowners associations. That simplicity before the complexity thing.
‘We the People’ have exactly the society that’s been demanded, if not by actual demand, then by laziness, irresponsibility and apathy. Even on the freedom and self sufficiency forums, most want to be told what to believe and how to proceed. Those few who have chosen to think for themselves and find their own paths are the exception to the rule.
“It’s a reward — and a glorious one — for brain-bending labor.”
I am very fortunate to have been involved with Guitar Craft, even if only tangentially and at a considerable distance. The attitude taken in Guitar Craft is right up the alley you’re speaking of here; for example the purpose of building technique is not to be able to “strut your chops”; rather it is to enable you to let go and let the muse guide you, without worrying about the “am I capable of doing this?” question.
It was from Robert Fripp that I first heard, “Being helpful is being in the way. Being supportive is getting out of the way.” That has to be one of the most important concepts I have ever heard from anyone.
At a week-long course I took in Spain (Los Molinos) in 2003, one of those “capital-M Moments” occurred, that can change a person’s life. (Did.)
Some eighty-odd of us (from beginner to virtuoso) were arranged in a giant circle with acoustic guitars, and Robert divided us into quadrants, with the following assignment: quadrant 1 was to play these two notes on the one and the four of five…quadrant 2 was to play these three notes on the one, four, and six of seven…quadrant 3 was to play on the one, four, seven and ten of eleven…and quadrant 4 was to play on the thirteen of thirteen. He set the pulse and just said, “go”.
We played for at least half an hour and it was probably more. In the beginning, we were all desperately trying not to lose count, to stick with it. The sound of crackling, superheated concentration was louder than anything resembling music…for a while.
At some point, I was able to internalize the count (I was among the elevens), and focused more on actually playing my notes rather than honking them. And then, at some later point, all of a sudden and out of nowhere, I actually heard the sound of the whole ensemble–the sum total of eighty-odd of us who had individually adapted, bit by bit, to the ridiculously complex challenge.
It was the most beautiful “piece” of music I have ever heard.
Poetically, at some point, Robert had even left the room, turning the lights off when he went. I have no idea when that was.
Eventually it broke down–when it did, it did so very quickly–and then eighty-odd people were visited by an absolutely thunderous Silence. (“Silence is not the absence of sound. Silence is the presence of Silence.”) Even after that visit, the impact still lingered. The looks on others’ faces, the inability to find words, and numerous burstings into tears made it really clear that it wasn’t just me.
I don’t know if any of us were truly “comfortable” with that complexity (well…except maybe Robert, who probably is capable of counting it all), but the “exercise” made a point that will stick with me forever. (I don’t think I could forget about that if I tried.)
Kevin … BEAUTIFUL! And mysterious. (I watch people like Jeff Beck or Eric Clapton play guitar and it’s like a form of magic to me — because they’ve achieved “simplicity beyond complexity” in an area where complexity is all I can see.)
Bravo Claire.
Nice Kevin.
Any mention of Fripp in a mind and spirit thread is bound to be good.