I’ve sat on this review for quite some time. Perhaps I’ve mimicked the author and made everything way too complex than it has to be. Maybe I’ve successfully obfuscated myself. After a couple weeks giving my brain a rest from this exhaustive and frustrating piece of sh*t book, I’ve regained my mental balance and developed a desire to be done with this review and get this horrible thing out of my mind and off my plate. What this book has basically done is helped me relive all my intellectual nightmares from school. What I mean to say is that, I entered school, as most kids, intensely curious, passionate, and full of awe at the spectacle of learning so much about the wonderful and seemingly magical world I lived in. What happened instead was a grinding process, a process I call, manufactured obfuscation, mixed in equal parts with humiliation, manufactured stress, deadlines, exams, grades, records, red-marks, and the almost total annihilation of every ounce of curiosity, passion for learning, and inspiration. Learning became a hideous, humiliating, stressful chore. Likewise, reading this book became a hideous, stressful chore that sapped my interest in learning and reading for a couple weeks.
Why? This book is a joke. It feigns to argue that science has yet to invent an effective way to prove causality, the almighty ‘why’ of nature. We understand how nature works, what it produces, but for some reason, we have not (until now) developed the tools to understand why nature does what it does. This is all bullsh*t. What in fact the idiot-like author is saying is that the SOCIAL “sciences” have yet to prove any causality in social phenomena. What the author invented is not the first tool for science to use to prove causality. Real science, thank you very much, has the tools to prove causality. What the idiot-like author is saying is that he has invented a tool to make it look like, or make it look MORE like, the SOCIAL “sciences” can prove causality. Well, Einstein, it can’t, because social phenomena cannot be controlled and isolated like in the real sciences. Like quantum phenomena, the act of measuring it, inextricably alters it. In the case of social phenomena, when you extract one social variable, by this very act, you deactivate the emergent actuators of the phenomena. Okay, fancy talk for saying that social phenomena occur only when key social variables are mixed together, and when that occurs, they produce an emergent, new property that could not have occurred without that precise mix. Certainly, you can make causal inferences about social phenomena. If you release 100 serial killers into a community, murders will increase. But you can’t make more complex and nuanced inferences like, if you increase the number of police officers by 15%, murders will decrease by 7.5%. There are too many alternative factors and influences on murder than the number of police officers in the community. The book review ends here. What follows are just ideas that were spurred by this horrible book:
I’ve started to dwell a lot on manufactured complexity and purposeful obfuscation by social “scientists” and bureaucrats alike. I will therefore take this opportunity to digress on the matter.
Manufactured Complexities and Dangers
The modern world is becoming increasingly complex and dangerous. It is simply becoming too large for any one person or small group of people to handle and manage. For this reason, we need a strong, ubiquitous government to help protect people and manage the complexities of the modern world. Constitutional rights and freedoms worked in the age of agriculture, but in the age of industry, robber barons and industrialists have become too powerful and exploited factory labor. In exchange for rights and freedoms, a centralized powerful government can ensure that the masses are protected and coordinated in their efforts to create a just, egalitarian, and free society.
Do you believe all that crap? Evidently, this is the logic of the expansion of government since the dawn of the Industrial Age in America. The ruling class have always exploited people, from slavery to serfdom back to African slavery to exploitation of farm workers. Complex societies have always existed, especially in large ports and trading cities, and they never required a heavy-handed centralized bureaucracy to manage them. In fact, free agents and entrepreneurs were better equipped to manage the complexities of cultural diversity and trade. Large bureaucracies were actually poorly equipped to handle the complexities of diverse populations in diverse, dynamic markets. While complexities increase as more people interact and technology invents new inventions and tools, each individual is better at determining what is important to know, whom to interact with, and how to use and adapt these tools for their needs than distant, removed bureaucrats. Finally, if you wanted to control the exploitation and growth of robber barons and the ruling elite, you certainly wouldn’t construct an enormous and powerful bureaucracy that can be bought and controlled by them.
Our government, however, has perpetuated the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to run their own affairs by making everything more complex, obscure, secretive, confusing, and convoluted than it has to be. Most government workers are not actually involved in doing anything useful to help people but rather do nothing but learn, interpret, and manage the unbelievable manufactured complexities of countless laws, regulations, guidelines, and rules invented to perpetuate the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to run their own affairs. Certainly if you pass enough laws and rules and purposefully make them exceptionally dense, convoluted, and obscure, then individuals would need to hire lawyers to run their own affairs, and that is exactly what they do if they can afford it. If they can’t afford it, they suffer the consequences of breaking countless laws, rules, and regulations resulting in lost freedoms and privileges and impoverishment from fines, liens, or incarceration. Instead of creating a world kinder and safer for the masses, the peasants, the poor and reeling in the rich and forcing them to redistribute their wealth to the masses, bureaucratism AKA progressivism actually makes the world a lot more brutal and unsafe for the peasants who lack lawyers to protect them and helps to redistribute wealth from everyone to the rich who can afford lawyers to navigate the manufactured complexities of the modern world.
To that end, the bureaucrat has embarked on a rather impressive journey of manufacturing complexity via widespread obfuscation, disinformation, misinformation, and data and sensory overload. They have achieved this through inventing new fields of social “science” like Political Science, Economics, Urban Planning, Psychology, and Sociology. In order to give them the same kind of credentials as the hard, real sciences, they have loaded these fields with advanced math, statistics, charts, formulas, studies, papers, and enough misdirecting babble and obscure jargon and acronyms to kid any ordinary citizen into believing they 1. Know what they’re talking about 2. Seem scientific enough, and 3. Deserve to run their lives for them.
Of course, in any con, the goal is not to shed light but rather to confuse, distract, lie, deceive, distort, overwhelm, and control. If you have ever suffered a presentation by a bureaucrat or anyone with a degree in these social “sciences,” you will be immediately put to sleep, and that is exactly the point. They are hypnotists. Their dry, monotone, verbose, overly complex and obscure style is designed to turn off your frontal lobes where you would otherwise judge and criticize what they are saying. Like Adolf Hitler, they then build up to an orgasmic climax of what must be done as a result of the comprehensive and exhaustive research conducted, “Yes, we must then build more roads to alleviate traffic and reduce traffic accidents!” The audience swoons and opens their checkbooks for another incremental, boiling the frog 1/8th-of-a-percent tax to fund more road construction.
Even worse, America has truly transformed from a society where elected officials run government to a society where bureaucrats run government, and elected officials give bureaucrats general direction or simple veto power but little else. No elected official can ever go through all the material that bureaucrats give them to make intelligent decisions about policy, practices, and procedures. Elected officials are inundated with information that is disorganized, lack prioritization, lack any form of structure or logic, and is specifically designed to overwhelm and confuse them (obfuscate). Hidden deep within the overload of information are important policy and procedural changes that make huge impacts on society.
Elected officials often feel inadequate and incompetent for questioning the deluge of information and lack a sophisticated enough staff to disseminate and dissect the information or even given the time to do so. Fact is, bureaucrats are more than capable of organizing information properly, prioritizing lists, putting important things in front and trivial administrative things in back, but what use is that to them? Bureaucrats want to control (or gently guide) the decisions made by elected officials to benefit them, their longevity, society’s dependence on them, their very existence. They have every incentive to obfuscate, confuse, and overwhelm elected officials so in despair and laziness, the officials endow the bureaucrats with an irresponsible level of trust and power. On top of all this, bureaucrats intimately know how to threaten elected officials with policies and procedures that inflame and outrage the public. For instance, when elected officials threaten to shut down government if they don’t cut spending, bureaucrats are all too happy to shut down programs that incite and outrage the public like access to parks and government buildings. They threaten to cut off pension and social security checks first well before they even consider cutting off their own salaries and benefits. Their funding gives bureaucrats a huge unfair advantage over elected officials with their limited staff and limited terms. One or two-term elected officials are no competition for lifelong bureaucrats.
Meanwhile, public education does the exact same thing with children. They overwhelm them with manufactured complexity in the most dull and monotone manner possible to put children to sleep. Is it any wonder they need to get amped on amphetamines to stay alert? Then when most children fail to regurgitate faithfully everything they have read and heard, they are convinced that they are simply too stupid to understand complex concepts. The horrifying tragedy is that most children grow up believing that they are too stupid to understand the complexities of the modern world, and they are better off leaving all the details and difficult social decisions to bureaucrats who do understand everything. Most children graduate from high school never reading another nonfiction book in their lives, and believe everything they’re fed on mainstream media which collaborates with government. Every two or four years, they’re given a simple test to determine who will run their city, state, or country. Brainwashed into thinking that they are too stupid to make their own minds up about complex social issues, they split the odds by picking one of two most popular candidates. Think about it. If the answer is A or B and never C or D, why not put down A for all your answers? At least you’ll get 50% as opposed to 0% for C or D.
Fortunately, a group of independent thinkers and iconoclasts are doing their best to present information in the most straightforward, entertaining, simple, and clear manner possible in the form of books. Whether they are doing this for profit, celebrity, or altruism, the effect is huge. Those who read their books start to realize that everything they’ve been taught in public schools is obfuscation and distraction with the truth hidden here and there to establish an air of credibility. As importantly, the way they have been taught has been inefficient, ineffective, and purposefully overwhelming, taxing and boring. The only possible way to get straight A’s is simply to turn off your critical thinking mind and just memorize and accept everything as god’s word along with gobbling obscene amounts of amphetamines. Straight-A students are not smarter than you and me; they’re either more gullible or more determined to do as they are told to make the most amount of money in life. Of course, by middle age, they have an existential crisis and wonder what they’ve done with their lives, only to snap out of it by falling back on empty mass consumerism, materialism, and status-chasing.
Once you free yourself of the yoke of “the world is too complex to understand without bureaucratic supervision,” you no longer feel inadequate and intimidated by the complexities that are thrown at you by bureaucrats or academics who pride themselves in inventing obscure jargon and acronyms to make themselves feel superior. You realize the gimmick and the con. You are not stupid for not being able to understand what they are saying. You simply know that they are being dishonestly and purposefully dense and obfuscating, manufacturing complexities to hide things just like a Collateralized Debt Obligation salesperson. You then simply ignore them and pursue knowledge from more honest sources who can better convey their knowledge concisely, colorfully, and clearly. These are the people who are excited about knowledge and truly interested in spreading it with everyone freely (or at least for the cost of a book). Bureaucrats are guarded with what little they know, because they are afraid of revealing what little they know, so they bombard you with copious misdirecting data, facts, figures, formulas, charts, diagrams, citations, notes, appendices, papers, words, and numbers. Keep in mind, the stupidest person in the room says the most, an overcompensation for knowing the least. Remember English class? The clear, concise essay that addresses one of the book’s themes creatively and intelligently, but does not necessarily prove that you read the entire book always gets a B while the rambling, nonsensical bullsh*t essay that throws in dozens of quotes from the book supposedly proving that you read and comprehended it, gets the A. Schools create regurgitating automatons not creative thinkers.
In a bureaucracy, if you believe that the goal is to provide a service and help the public, nothing makes sense and nothings gets done. Resistance will accumulate everywhere, and you will find yourself labeled a rabble-rouser or trouble-maker. However, if you simply relent to the idea that the goal is to obfuscate, misdirect, and perpetuate the idea that the world is too complex for individuals to manage without government, then everything starts to make sense and everything is achieved to these ends. You embark on adding to the volumes of regulations and restrictions, increasing the complexity and obscurity of reports and procedures, and you are rewarded by your superiors who have no idea what you’re talking about but know that if it confused the hell out of them, it will confuse the hell out of the public.
The world has truly become a dangerous and dark place, but not because of industrialism or urbanization but rather the proliferation of large, powerful, centralized bureaucracies that peddle in lies, deception, self-preservation, and manufactured complexity and crises. Their whole premise is that we need them, because the world is dangerous and dark and complex, so what better way to ensure your existence and relevance than making the world increasingly dangerous, dark, and complex? Fortunately, the Information Age is all about uncovering information and in a sort of natural selection sort of way, using the most clear, concise, and simple way to convey or understand that information. What we are slowly discovering is the biggest con ever perpetrated in human history, the notion that we need a special ruling class empowered with a powerful bureaucracy to run our lives, because we are too stupid or evil to run our lives on our own.
An insidious byproduct of manufacturing complexity is the realization that you can actually better understand people and social dynamics if you take away their freedom and independence, if you basically treat them like objects and control them as you would objects in a truly scientific experiment. In fact, government-sponsored and controlled social “science” research does exactly this by inflicting incarcerated people with horrific experiments. What better way to control an experiment than use imprisoned people who have much more limited interfering variables in their lives. In fact, this is exactly where government is herding us, into pigeonhole corrals so that it may better control us. It does this by labeling us and dividing us but also by simply taking away our freedoms and independence which are the source of our complexities, unpredictability, and individual ingenuity and creativity. In a world of mindless, brainwashed automatons, government has a much easier job of controlling, managing, and predicting social behavior. Instead of reality driving research and then social policy, social policy drives the research and then the reality.
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