Life today is complicated. There are regulations about everything under the sun. Parliaments pass more laws every year – yet more powers for governments and official administration. In the United States, however, there is now hope that the Supreme Court will rein in the inordinate reach of central government and its various agencies.
Law is just one area, of course. Technology is another, and that technology is beginning to re-determine how we look at life and how we react to the world. Technical advances are assumed to be “good” with woefully inadequate concern for the general implications or for the psychological impact upon young minds.
I believe we need to remind ourselves that complexity must always serve SIMPLICITY. This has become urgent because experts are telling the rest of us what to do and how to live. In reality such experts are simple frauds: such frauds exploit their understanding of complexity as the pretext by which to oblige the rest of us to accept and conform to their self serving ends.
On this page, I want therefore to reflect on
- simplicity and complexity – where each figures in the scheme of things
- the abuse of simplicity – the accentuation of complexity to divert from Original Simple Purpose to a False Simple Purpose serving elitist ends
- the answer to False Purpose is the application of Original Simple Purpose – the vital subordination of the complex to time-honoured, simple essentials
1. Simplicity and complexity
As with all things, we should start at the very beginning which – as Julie Andrews reminded us – is a very good place to start. I would add that it is also a very good place to end up, as well as a very good place to refer to constantly – ie to monitor what we do against the requirements of essential simplicity – or Original Simple Purpose.
Let’s go to that traditionally trusted source of definition, the OED and specifically the Concise version and edition of 2011.
Simplicity = “the quality or condition of being simple”, so we must refer to “simple” which means:
- “easily understood or done”
- “plain and uncomplicated in form, nature, or design”
Excellent. And now “complex”
- “consisting of many different and connected parts”
- “not easy to understand; complicated”
Now, let’s take a concrete example to which we can all relate and understand.
Language. We all speak, and can usually read and write, in at least one language – our “mother tongue”. That’s the one to which to which we are exposed from birth and which we begin to imbibe and use at some point later.
Now we all know from our school days that language gets very complicated, and yet we use it every day to do what we need to do. Some people are very clever: they can define all the parts of speech and they can use a more extensive vocabulary than the average person. They may even know other languages. But at the end of the day, we all use language. The average person can live their life just as meaningfully as the person with an extensive awareness of the complexity of language.
The Original Simple Purpose of language is to communicate our thoughts to other human beings. And while there are complicated thoughts which may require complicated language, the most important needs and wants of life are by no means undermined by any lack of understanding and use of the complicated. If anything, experience demonstrates that the complex can lose touch with simple essentials …
Let’s take another example from our every day lives: travelling in a vehicle. A vehicle – especially these days – is a very complex machine with some very advanced computerised technology. But the essential use of a vehicle is straightforward – providing you avoid using the GPS ! You start the engine; engage gears; turn the wheel; look where you are going and drive the machine in the desired direction.
You use a vehicle for one Original Simple Purpose: to get from A to B … The rest is of interest to experts and geeks, but the fundamental purpose is simple. To get from here to there. The complex machinery of the vehicle has a very simple purpose: to enable human beings to transport themselves from one place to another.
The complex is subordinate to the simple – to the Original Simple Purpose. It serves the ordinary everyday purposes which we as human beings choose. It simply does not matter whether we are clever or powerful or whatever.
The ordinary need of human beings is paramount. Indeed to view things in any other way would be to challenge the fundamental norms of what we are and how we operate as human beings. It would be to invert and thereby pervert the most basic way in which we express our humanity; in which we behave as human beings with the ability to make our own independent choices, taking responsibility for what we do and how we do it.
To explain this more concretely, let me ask this question. What would you think if the manufacturers of vehicles not only supplied you with a vehicle, but also told you when, how and why to use that vehicle ?
What would you think if the linguistic expert told us that we have no right to speak or communicate unless we communicate solely in the terms and conditions which the said linguist sets us ? That because we do not know, or necessarily even understand, what the expert linguist knows, we are necessarily disqualified from passing judgment on the linguist’s superior knowledge ? Indeed because the linguist is an expert, and the average person is not, the linguist is the only person now qualified to use language ?
Absurd, and unbelievably totalitarian. A complete perversion of the norms of our human interactions. Clearly in such a scenario the person with the expertise no longer submits that expertise to the benefit of all – the Original Simple Purpose of expertise. Instead, experts in a particular domain of complexity claim mastery not only of their speciality but over other human beings too.
Utter nonsense, of course. Or is it ?
2. The abuse of simplicity and complexity.
I have just attempted to identify a fundamental given of our humanity: of how we must and should operate; of how we need to operate if we are to remain human and not become automata programmed by an expert elite.
Let me take a powerful and contemporary example of the abuse of the norm which I have identified in the first part of this essay.
Covid 19 vaccination. Experts are telling us that they know best; indeed that we are to accept their expertise and not bother to consider the evidence of our own eyes. They are basically taking the attitude that because they are experts in epidemics and how to handle them, that we really must accept their judgement regardless. This abuse of complexity and its elevation over the simple outlook of the average human being illustrates the problem. It illustrates the fallacy that complexity must take priority over simplicity, and that simplicity must be sacrificed. In fact on inspection we find that the expert is adopting a simple view and deploying complexity as camouflage for the expert’s perversion of the principle of simplicity.
The real reason that certain experts – and by no means all – tell us that we must be vaccinated is that they are looking to maximise the profits of the pharmaceutical industry with which said experts invariably have mutually advantageous links.
As at July 2022, I know not one single person who has died from Covid 19. Not one ! But I know more than one person who has been fully vaccinated and yet again caught Covid 19 after being vaccinated.
I know too, that all Covid 19 vaccines were given emergency approval by various medical authorities around the world, despite the fact that such vaccines could only be classed as experimental according to traditional, tried and proven criteria.
I am being required by the expert in the complicated to suspend my normal, simple everyday assessment of life just because they tell me to. And they tell me to on the sole basis that they know better than I do what concerns my welfare and the welfare of my family.
Such omniscient experts demand obedience even though they themselves have rebelled against and overturned their own professional and legal constraints when it came to tackling the Covid crisis.
All the indications tell me that a false simplicity is being substituted for the normal, genuine simplicity common to us all. Those indications include: the mindset deployed by said experts; the single, unquestioning and unsustainable line adopted in main stream media – media notoriously given to simplistic hype and to condemning disagreement as “extremist”; the serious contrary evidence from many other experts; my own simple assessment of what I see.
When an “expert” persuades the government to instruct me when I can and cannot exit my own front door for a health scare which I do not see in my own extensive network of acquaintance over two plus years, then I know a false and perverse simplicity is being substituted for the genuine Original Simple Purpose. I am being reduced to the status of automaton; I have ceased to be treated as a human being. By complying, I am in fact allowing myself to be mastered by a false simplicity masquerading in the guise of a complexity to which I can never be privy or allowed to second guess.
The fruit of their perverted simplicity is evident in the massive profits made by the pharmaceutical industry and in the unquestionable and unprecedented invasion of my most fundamental rights as a human being. It is a simple observation of life that the consequences of any measure or action reveal the true nature of said measure of action – by their fruits shall ye know them …
But let’s look at another domain in which the experts have now gained the upper hand, and are calling the shots to their own advantage, and to the manifest disadvantage of everyone else. The realm of law.
In the 19th century, the writer Charles Dickens identified a fundamental failing of the legal profession when he wrote a fictional case he called Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. In identifying the fundamental tempation in the legal profession to abuse its position as expert, Dickens also highlights to us what amounts to being axiomatic, ie the overwhelming temptation for experts in any domain to abuse their position and exploit it for their own ends.
Again, when such abusive experts are at work, we see the classic perversion of the Original Simple Purpose for a complex substitute which – on examination – we find to be but a cover: a camouflage for an alternative, a false and a perverse Simple. The symptoms of this disease which attacks the norms of our simplicity are, for example:
- we are all required to put our entire trust in the expert because they are expert and tell us they know best
- we are required to censor all questions and alternative evidence from our minds
- we are to pay the price of the expert’s substition of their false simple purpose for our common sense norm
- said experts always make significant gains in this process – gains which benefit their narrow interest but which undermine the general, common interest and welfare of us all
In his famous work, Bleak House, Dickens illustrates this with the case of Jarndyce vs Jarndyce. The case goes on and on until all the property which is in dispute in the legal action has instead been absorbed in legal costs….
Note well that Dickens is expressing the very simple view of the intelligent layman looking on at the experts doings. Dickens identifies straightforwardly and truthfully the simple, everyday benefits for the experts themselves and the simple disaster for the simple human beings reliant on those experts.
But I want to take a contemporary 21st century example which impacts us all. This example illustrates that the idea that the expert must be right and therefore we are wrong is false, perverse and costly – and a denial of Original Simple Purpose.
The July/August 2022 issue of ‘The American Conservative’ magazine publishes a fascinating article by Tim Reichart. In the course of his essay, Reichart makes an observation which could be made accurately about the condition of law in any of the western democracies. With particular reference to company and commercial law, Reichart says:
“Measured by the number of pages found in the Code of Federal regulations – currently around 200,000 – one can see that the burden has increased substantially to the point that it is probably impossible for anyone, even lawyers, to have a reasonable understanding of all the rules that apply to them.“
Well, we live in a complicated world today, don’t we. After all, this is the 21st century with all the complexities of the modern world – witness technology and the state of society etc. It may be regrettable, but it is also unavoidable.
Yes, life is complex today. But no, complexity does not displace or supercede Original Simple Purpose. Complexity has become the pretext t impose the expert’s false simple purpose.
Reichart explains the situation. He does so by telling us about his own, SIMPLE experience of this complexity. In the same essay he states:
“I know from my career as a consulting economist that large portions of the Code of Federal Regulations are actually written or edited by the legal advisors and legal departments of large corporations.“
l know that this same practice happens in the European Union, too. As a result of big business lobbying, agreements are concluded behind closed doors with no public scrutiny allowed.
We are witnessing here the use of complexity as the excuse for advancing a false simplicity which serves a very small minority at the expense of Original Simple Purpose serving the common welfare.
The consequence is corruption and breakdown of the sytem. In reality, lawyers themselves are no longer able to fathom the complexity which they have created. By creating a false simple purpose, they not only deny the proper Original Simpe Purpose, they also transform legitimate complexity into a horrendous and incomprehensible nightmare of impenetrable, tangled regulations.
Complexity is no longer harnessed to serve the Original Simple Purpose of law and judiciary, namely to provide a framework to facilitate the normal, dependable, trustworthy flow of commercial activity.
In becoming a pretext for a narrow, self interested purpose, Complexity becomes corrupted and self defeating. In losing the proper, Original Simple Purpose as the operating guideline, complexity defaults to chaos.
All complexity must serve its Original Simple Purpose to have proper function and meaning. All complexity has a normal Simple proper to its intended purpose. A website home page has introduction and menu bars. It’s the ‘high level view’ which links all the complicated lower views together, meaningfully. But if a virus or bug intervenes, the complex becomes meaningless for its normal and intended purpose. Instead that purpose is hijacked and perverted by a False Simple – the agenda of the virus transmitter.
All complexity has purpose – and that purpose must be Simple. But is the applied Simple original, or deviant ?
3. the application of simplicity to subordinate errant complexity to its proper purpose
Let’s continue to take communications technology and the widespread, daily use of personal computers to illustrate the solution to the abuse of complexity a false Simple purpose displaces the Original Simple Purpose.
Firstly, let’s reiterate the problem. Consider the technology you use to access this essay on my website. Do you understand the complexity of this technology ? Do you need to understand the complexity of this technology ? Is such technology there for your convenience only ? Or, does it serve some other purpose ? Should it serve any other purpose ?
According to the principle of Original Simple Purpose, your computer is merely a tool to enable you, the individual, to access information and to manipulate information in accordance with your personal agenda. So, you use it to find out all sorts of things on the internet; watch movies; write emails; do the household accounts; draft documents for work; etc etc etc.
The technology you are using is indeed incredibly complex. But it has meaning for every person on the planet because they can use it to do the everyday things they wish to do for their own purposes in their own lives, as outlined above with emails etc. Of course many people now use their ‘smartphones’ – that is just another type of personal computer.
The reason that the personal computer became so popular, transforming our everyday lives, is Simple. It served a purpose – it served our purpose. We can send an email rather than write out a letter on paper, put it in an envelope which we have to buy in a shop, take it to the Post Office, buy a stamp, and send the paper ensemble of letter, envelope, stamp via the time consuming process of the postal system which will physically transfer the paper document to a physical address. The PC dispenses with all that. Once typed, the document is sent instantaneously; it is available to be read by the recipient within seconds after pressing the send button.
That’s original simple purpose. But the tech companies have contrived their own false simple purpose. Having made their money and success from observing and providing for the simple, normal purpose of communications by human beings, they have then gone on to do what the lawyers and other experts have done before them.
They abuse their position as experts over the complex world of communications technology, and impose their covert but dominant false simple and turn the tables. It makes them the masters and primary beneficiaries while the users become the servants.
Previously, tech companies did business by simply supplying the hardware and software people freely chose to buy because they recognised a benefit. But now, tech companies are fast becoming the dictators of what we do.
It started with the abuse of their position of trust. They took our data but they did not ask our permission; they did not even tell us. They took – and still take – highly personal data about us in order to profile us and our demographic type. They use the data to make money.
They are in our homes, observing all we say and do. In effect they have continuous access to our personal files across the board: from financial to health to personal beliefs like politics and religion. They can effectively follow us into every room and note everything we do or say. They have usurped the right to invade our personal lives and copy our profile for marketing purposes.
But even while governments were still trying to catch up with privacy laws, the tech companies moved on from simply marketing our personal and most private data. They did that, of course, to secure their market; to guarantee future profits.
Having done that immorally and secretly – having introduced their own false purpose in place of the true and simple purpose for a Personal Computer, they have gone even further.
They have not only farmed our data for commercial purposes; they now routinely pass our data to government agencies concerned with domestic and with foreign security.
When I first used a personal computer, you had to deliberately choose to use the internet. Internet access was merely one function among many available to you to use. It was one of a number which included wordprocessing documents and spread sheets, as well as computer games.
But with Chrome type technology, you are connected automatically to the internet, and the content of your computer is no longer on your hard drive, but on a server supplied and controlled by big tech. The notion of “the cloud” has been sold to us as serving our interests. That is a patent misrepresentation. It is not in some innocuous cloud. It is on a very terrestrial physical server sitting in a warehouse of servers located on terra firma within the jurisdiction of States. Those States see themselves as justified in surveilling, recording and assessing – ie judging – what we do and say and spend.
Big tech companies now have routine agreements with Big State governments which have Big State agendas and mentalities.
Prior to the personal computer, the State and big business had little access to my private life beyond specific particulars about a purchase or records about, say, taxation. Records were confined to a locked office in a particular place. Now, everything is available, across the board. My personal life is totally exposed – as is yours ! Literally everything about us can be reported at the click of a button.
Previously such access required a warrant from a judge, who wanted evidence of dubious behaviour sufficient to invite official concern. No longer. The once extraordinary and rare, confined to problem people, has become routine and comprehensive, accessing the complete profiles of everyone – even though the average person is completely innocent of being a threat to others, or a threat to the State.
In reality we witness here the total destruction of our ancient liberties as inscribed by our ancestors in documents like the English Magna Carta of the 13th century; the English Bill of Rights of 1689; and the trule vital first Ten Amendments of the Constitution of the United States of America.
Those documents imposed restraints on Government which was obliged to operate according to ancient custom and explicit law. Power was required at all times to respect those over whom it had power. Power was to be accountable to the general interest; it was forbidden to be arbitrary and to abuse its position for narrow self interest.
These fundamental, Constitutional documents of the English speaking world’s tradition of liberty made clear very specific, very practical provisions in order to implement the essential, overall strategic Simple Principle that power is accountable to the general interest; that power has a responsibility to serve the common welfare.
But now that essential Original Simple Purpose is being deliberately and persistently undermined and overturned by Big Business in league with Big State. Instead we are witnessing the implementation of the perverse and false Simple that we individuals who constitute society at large exist merely to serve the narrow interests of the elite.
They may now do as they wish – and they have done so.
To take the American Constitution by way of illustrating the fundamental immorality and illegality of modern big business and big State today in their use – their ABUSE – of modern communications technology.
The 4th Amendment of the 1789 Constitution states explicitly:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The 4th Amendment of the constitution of the United States of America has been unilaterally dismissed from the Constitution in complete defiance and denial of the provisions in that Constitution about its amendment, let alone Cancellation !
Big State and Big Tech have conspired to overturn the most fundamental human rights on the basis of at least two false and perverse Simple Principles:
- because they are able to
- because they claim to be acting to safeguard our security against internal and external threats
But they themselves are the enemies of our liberty and of our traditional way of life. They claim to protect us from the enemy; they may even believe that ! In reality, the enemy is already within the walls and in control – namely the immoral, unconstitutional, illegal conduct of elites.
The reality is that we need protection from Big State and Big Business… and that protection lies in the assertion of the traditional and true Simple Principles which were elaborated in the constitutional documents which I have cited above.
The covert agreements between Big State and Big Tech – and indeed other Big business, especially Big Pharma – are illegal. Those who agreed to them and those who operate them are manifestly guilty. At minimum, they must be removed from their positions and barred from any position of any authority ever again; but they really ought to be criminally prosecuted and sent to prison where found guilty.
It simply takes the willingness to see this issue for what it really is; and the courage to execute the necessary steps to remove these people from positions of power and responsibility.
This is now critical because such people have gone even further down their immoral and illegal route pursuing their false Simple.
The design of computers has always required us to adjust our thinking to the paradigm of the technology. That is evident from pressing the start button to close the machine down through to talking about ‘cookies’ as innocent programming which enables your browser to interact with their server effectively. Partial truth camouflaging what is really illegal; cookies are often spyware presented as something normal to be enjoyed and swallowed whole ! An excellent illustration of the dystopian world which the “experts” are creating for us to live in. Zuckerberg’s Metaverse is a horrifying symptom of this insanity and departure from reality.
Such misrepresentations constitute a new normal…
What we witness is the deliberate manipulation of normal human psychological processes to cause us to reprogramme our brains according to big Tech design. And those ends reflect the same mindset and purposes which we see evident across Big Business today: to reduce human beings to mere units of production and consumption.
Big Pharma has also been trying to reinvent our thought processes in the marketing of their products. Because the ‘Flu Jab was not getting the sort of universal market penetration that the likes of Fauci and his ilk wanted, they were on the lookout for a suitable crisis to exploit. Covid 19 provided just the excuse. This is not fable or misinterpretation. The above was stated at a big pharma meeting attended by CDC director Dr Fauci in 2017.
Vaccination had become a routine health matter. It had an original simple purpose: our physical welfare. Vaccination has proved effective in combatting real health scourges like TB, Smallpox, Poliomyelitis etc.
But off the back of that proven success, the modern pharmaceutical industry has fallen prey to the same temptation as the lawyers and other experts: divert a legitimate practice into a profit generating norm regardless of morals and original, true purpose. So we see today an experimental vaccine against Covid 19 being passed off as tried, tested and reliable even though there is evidence judged against traditional professional criteria that such vaccines can do harm to young people [who are not even under great threat from Covid]. Even though it is manifest nonsense to continue to peddle a product which is so inadequate [if not actively causing problems] as a vaccine which requires 2nd or even 3rd booster shots [ie a 3rd or 4th dose] – when Covid 19 is not yet 3 years old !
In face of which reality, the disgustingly disingenuous narrative is peddled by Big Pharma and their partners in governments that their experimental vaccine has saved X million lives; that it prevents vaccinated people who have contracted Covid 19 suffering a worse illness than if they had not been vaccinated …
And what is also deeply disturbing is the mantra like repetition in the main stream media that anyone who disagrees with the Big Pharma line is a dangerous extremist whose views must be discounted and dismissed…
Meantime, they tell us we live in a free society, even as they trample the most fundamental right of free expression – as if exercising our liberty threatened our freedoms.
The perverse, false Simple displaces the true Simple derived from the proper, original purpose.
The abuse practised against the true Simple, in the name of a Complexity we are told we cannot understand, does however highlight the antidote.
In the real world, real issues have to be decided on a real basis. In the courtroom in any country, the facts of the matter have to be brought before the court; the evidence weighed and assessed; the truth of the matter determined; the verdict or the ruling pronounced in order to make a decision to settle the dispute finally. This affects real people on real matters.
This is another Simple – an Original Simple Purpose. A process by which we determine the truth according to the evidence brought before the Tribunal. A real world decision is made affecting real people in real ways.
The law and the evidence involved may indeed be complex, but their complexity must be reduced to the original purpose and serve a Simple outcome – a Simple outcome which is the time-honoured practice everywhere. It’s real and it’s effective. Someone goes to prison or not. Someone gains money or property, or not. It is that simple. The complexity must be made to serve the Original Simple Purpose for this world to function properly and justly. The complexity of the legal case is subordinate and subsidiary to this over-riding and essential Truth. Simple Truth.
And the Courtroom paradigm supplies us with the essential components of our Simple solution.
- to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth
- to exonerate the innocent and to identify the guilty
- to apply the law and procedure to original, simple purpose
- to identify those who would pervert the Original Simple Purpose of the general interest and welfare to make, instead, a narrow and self-interested gain. Such deviation from original purpose corrupts both purpose and the perpetrators
- to punish the guilty and recompense the innocent
The solution is Simple: apply truth and justice ! Apply the original simple purpose behind having laws and courts.
Which is: To defeat deviance and corruption and safeguard the integrity of Society.
We must be vigilant against recurring threats from those who tell us they know better because they are experts in Complexity.
Copyright Graham R. Catlin 2022
Graham R. Catlin 