Solutions bring with them the next set of problems. Often the single biggest problem in this set is our inability or unwillingness to suss out what problems might result from our decisions and applied solutions. There's a lot of this kind of thinking - or lack thereof - in the world today. Truth of the matter is, a lot of willful avoidance of the work needed to think through potential consequences.
Thirty years ago I might have lamented at how often people stopped at first order consequences. Fast-forward through the invention of the WWW, the dot com frenzy and subsequent implosion, smartphones, sub-prime mortgages, the rise of asocial media and we arrive at today's hyper-stimulated and pathologically defensive culture of identity. The task of cogently sorting out first order consequences and thinking beyond them has become too painful. The hard truth is the first-order consequences are almost always uncomfortable or undesirable. Want to own a home? For most people that means taking on debt and working a job for many years (first-order consequences) before actually owning the property (second-order consequence.) Want to be physically fit? There are some first-order consequences to be dealt with - exercise, pain, exhaustion, sweat, and time.
Like alcoholics who effortlessly convince themselves the answer to what ails them is certain to be found at the bottom of the next bottle, most people respond to the problems a cruelly indifferent world throws at them by doing what they did before, only more of it and with greater aggression. Worse, but only marginally, they invent an entire reality around what they want to be true and then proceed to act as if everyone around them understands their invented reality perfectly. When the inevitable mismatch occurs, it's the world that's broken.
Crikey, the economy is jacked up...again...and an elite collection of fucked up nuts are rattling the nuclear weapons sword. Again! Unexpectedly! It's of limited reassurance to know they're getting the pronouns right along the way to Armageddon.
Thirty years ago, this type of behavior frustrated my Germanic sense of precision and order. Today it's the source of wonder and awe that fuels my curiosity and, yes, optimism. Not for the world as a whole. The only "solution" to systemic malfunctions at the scale we're seeing today is implosion. f(x)=(Consequences)3 I have every confidence Gaia will adapt without us and move on to whatever's next. We're just a phase and time is on her side, not ours.
More locally - and closer to first, second, and third order thinking - I've optimism for people who understand systems AND how they can best work for change within them. My optimism positively glows when I find teens and twenty-somethings with this ability. The glad news is there are a lot of them. It's what inspires me to stay in the game instead of kicking back, strapping on a second set VR blinders over the ones I was born with, and enjoy the decline.
You can't teach multi-order thinking. Not in a way that sinks in and stays. It takes experience. Actual lived experience and not the counterfeit "lived experience" that serves as a gussied up proxy for someone's opinion.
But we can teach and learn the skills that make multi-order thinking possible. Skills like listening and focused attention. These were easier to acquire and mature when the world didn't have such modern destructive forces like industrial processed food, academia, asocial media, smartphones, and the always on-line attention economy. Thirty and more years ago, these skills came easier. Living in today's world, there is a whole new layer of effort required just to carve out a place where we can actually have quality time for enjoying the pleasures that come from listening to the world around us and devoting our attention to meaningful accomplishment.
It’s harder. But still very much worth the effort. In fact, putting in the effort to overcome the first-order consequences make the subsequent consequences all the more valuable and rewarding.
Photo by Leio McLaren on Unsplash