Everything is a mess
Accepting the chaos of truth when the simple story always sells better
The challenge of communicating anything to anyone is that eventually you’ve got to stop.
And, like, sure, we’ve all been on a terrible date or stuck in some interminable conversation with a friend or a colleague or a relative and it definitely seemed like they didn’t stop. Ever. So why should I?
There is just really no need to restate the same banal grievance over and over but this is also sort of what life is about — patiently enduring the gripes of others in exchange for some future attention span.
But and so putting a bow on anything is a necessary condition of being human. Time is finite for carbon-decaying organisms and we ought to use ours wisely.
And I think the lesson philosophy is really trying to teach us is that even if you spend your whole life trying to figure it all out you’ll be miserable anyway. And so.
Yet like everything in the post-neoliberal world, this necessary condition of communication — that it must end, eventually, and so better to have a punchy takeaway even if this lesson is wrong — has been exploited for profit. In the last few decades, a distinct brand of nonfiction book has reigned supreme on the shelves of bookstores everywhere. You know the type: a pop history/business thinkfluencer tale with wide margins and running to around 320 pages that offers an a-ha conclusion to concepts which seemed previously inaccessible for a lay audience. Or better yet, was previously unknown by actual experts. This is the biggest slice of the pie known as airport literature.
This week, in a review of the new Klein/Pettis book “Trade Wars are Class Wars,” Alex Williams highlights that what is so good about the Klein/Pettis book is that while it maintains all the readability of this type of consultant-class economics book, it is decidedly not that.
Readers already invested in international macroeconomics will recognize many of the names and arguments in the book, which functions as a brilliant primer on the field. It’s almost like a reverse Freakonomics. Instead of claiming that a couple of economics papers provide the only valid method for answering every question, and that every human activity is simply a veil for econ 101-style supply and demand, Pettis and Klein pull in insights from a variety of nearby disciplines—corporate finance, tax accounting, supply chain management—to actually explain the economy. The arguments, citations, and allusions here—Brad Setser, Hyun Song Shin, Marc Levinson, a past-life Paul Krugman—provide a great starting point for a deep and flexible understanding of the global economy.
And while the main swipe Williams really takes here is focused on an economics community that has crawled so far up its own hole that the field’s entire Serious Discourse was revealed as a regressive lie in like two weeks this spring, the point stands more broadly.
Williams is here gesturing towards the Gladwellian worldview that pundits in so many areas have inappropriately adopted — Gladwell included — which offers readers and “thinkers” answers to life’s big mysteries if only the solutions are contrarian enough.
Why do people get divorced? Why are star talents star talents? Why does my brain work at all? These are some of the questions answered in Gladwell’s work.
None of these questions, of course, have book-length answers, let alone essay-length ones. These things are the stuff of life, the unanswerable messes that keep us going day in and day out. Instead of this genre’s books offering incisive new ways of thinking, readers are left — as Van Lathan famously said to Kanye West — not thinking anything at all.
And, well, yes, I am guilty of working in this genre. In most ways, it is kind of the conceit of this newsletter. Is that bad? I don’t know. I had a hard time working out this week whether writing about there being no pat explanations to anything invalidates not only this newsletter but everything I’ve done professionally. Which is, in short: take official announcements and weave a simple story through them. I do not have an answer.
Though being unable to answer the question is also the point of this newsletter. Because at this moment in politicosocioeconomic history in which we’re confronted daily by our collective multitude of unanswerable questions, I think there’s value and necessity in accepting that everything is a mess rather than pushing towards something like resolution.
A running theme in this newsletter is that everyone knows everything, which is of course more or less the same as arguing no one knows anything. If knowledge is a commodity, it matters not whether one possesses it or not: it is readily available to the learned and the naïve just the same.
In a pandemic, the arc bends towards no one knowing anything. An unacceptable state of affairs for many, perhaps, but a clear state nonetheless.
But coming off a several-decade binge on thought leadership that maps a faux structure onto our lived reality it’s hard to go back and hard to see this as true. The incentives are too heavily weighted in favor of oversimplified TED-thought.
And it’s little wonder that conspiracies have gained so much traction today, that the messy business of dealing with the current pandemic is viewed by too many as a hoax rather than the plain truth. The structure of public intellectual discourse over the last generation and your friendly internet-powered conspiracy is essentially the same — That complicated thing you don’t understand? It’s actually quite simple. Here, let me tell you, even though They don’t want you to know this.
And while I am under no disillusions about the pervasiveness of the storytelling tradition into which the global citizens of the 21st century have been launched, the first step to fixing any problem is admitting there is one.
Then we might just start getting it.
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