A Philosopher Attacks Fox News

You may not believe it, but I appreciate the New York Times for showing us what the other side is thinking. Ten or so days ago it offered a column by Rutgers philosophy professor Jason Stanley.

This highly credentialed philosopher screwed up his wisdom and declared that Fox News was responsible for destroying rational debate because it had turned political discourse into propaganda.

Given the ill-disguised leftist mania about shutting down Fox News, you have to give Stanley some credit for offering a novel reason, one that no one has suggested before. Instead of joining those who say that Fox News is purveying hate speech, he is arguing that Fox News is silencing all rational political debate.

I will give Stanley credit for originality, but let’s keep in mind that some thoughts are original because no one else has been dumb enough to take them seriously.

If this is the state of academic philosophy today, I would advise college students to avoid it like the proverbial plague.

If anything, Jason Stanley demonstrates that one can become a professor of philosophy in an important American university without knowing the difference between philosophy and sophistry.

Jason Stanley is practicing pure sophistry.He is trotting out a bunch of specious arguments, making them look like philosophy, luring people into taking them seriously, and arriving at an absurd conclusion.

Today’s Americans are so impressed with credentials that they tend to give credence to this kind of mental swill.

Stanley is not the only sophist out there. The academy seems to have been minting them.

Here’s the thinking of Jennifer Hornsby, summarized by Stanley: “Suppose that men are led to believe that when women refuse a sexual advance they don’t mean it. Women, then, will not be understood to be refusing, even when they are. If certain kinds of pornography lead men to think that women are not sincere when they utter the word 'no,' and women are aware that men think this, those kinds of pornography would rob women of the ability to refuse.”

The conclusion would be that pornography facilitates rape.

Let’s examine the premises behind this argument.

First, the authors assume that rape occurs because a man believes that when a woman says No she does not mean it.

In truth, I would be hard put to say that every time a woman says No she means the same thing, because otherwise we would be saying that the word No always means the same thing, regardless of context or tone of voice or intonation.

But that is not the salient point. Rapists understand perfectly well that No means No. There is no real ambiguity about the fact that she does not want to be raped. The real problem is that a sexual psychopath does not respond to language the way a normal man does. For him her No produces arousal. It functions as a fetish. Sometimes it becomes a more powerful fetish if she seems more sincere.

Second, why do the authors think that pornography is filled with images of women saying No and not meaning it. I am hardly an expert in the field, but most pornography shows women saying Yes, again and again and again.

Pornography portrays women as fully in touch with their sexual desires and willing to give them free expression again and again.

Third, while it is fairly common for sex offenders (and feminists) to blame pornography for their psychopathic behavior, we should understand that they are simply gaming the system, indulging the trendiest excuse, and evading responsibility for their crimes. Why would anyone take the word of a psychopath as face value?

Fourth,  if the sophists are correct, then the massive increase of the amount of pornography available over the internet should have produced a correlated increase in the amount of rape and other sex crimes.

In fact, just the opposite has occurred. According to a Chapman University study, since 1993 there have been 72% fewer rapes in the United States.

So far, this argument is not so good.

Undeterred, Jason Stanley continues: “Using ‘no’ to refuse a sexual advance is what is known as a speech act — a way of doing something by using words.”

Let’s be charitable and assume that today’s sophists have redefined the term, “speech act.” Normally, it refers to any verbal utterance, not just those that do something.

I hope that Stanley and his colleagues know that the proper philosophical term for doing things with words is: performative utterance. The term was coined by the eminent British philosopher, J. L. Austin in his book: How to Do Things With Words.

Classical examples of performative utterances are: I take this woman to be my wedded wife; I now pronounce you man and wife; I christen this ship Queen Elizabeth; I bet you five dollars.

Each of these sentences is, in itself, an action.

If that is the correct definition of a performative utterance, when a woman refuses a sexual advance by saying No, she is not using a performative utterance.

Pronouncing the word No is not intended and does not function as an action. Its purpose is to elicit a specific action, or better, a cessation of  action.

Either Stanley and his colleagues do not understand performative utterances or they are engaging in a specious argument.

From there Stanley moves to slander and character assassination. Here he is on firmer ground. He claims that when people say that Barack Obama is a “secret Islamist agent, born in Kenya,” they are trying to cast aspersion on his motives.

In Stanley’s words: “The function of disseminating such claims about the president is not to object to his specific arguments or agenda. It is to undermine the public’s trust in him, so that nothing he says can be taken at face value.”

Ignore the fact that these sentences are poorly written. And let’s ignore the fact that one may say that Obama is a secret Islamist to draw attention to some of his policy decisions.

The real issue is, aside from the fact that Stanley idolizes Obama, this is nothing other than politics as usual.

How many times were George Bush and Dick Cheney maligned, slandered and excoriated as stooges of the oil industry or the military industrial complex? How many times was George Bush called a liar? Didn’t liberal Democrats keep repeating these charges because they were trying to undermine the public trust in George Bush, the better to ensure that nothing he said could be taken at face value?

Of course, they were. It’s called American politics. But given the nature of our free market in ideas-- the very one that Jason Stanley wants to shut down-- people who are subject to this kind of vilification have recourse. They can fight back; they can answer the charges; they can defend their integrity.

A public figure has recourse to the media. A private figure has recourse to litigation.

Next, Stanley resorts to the common liberal technique for silencing conservatives: the argumentum ad Hitlerum.  Thereby, he suggests that American conservatives are just Nazis in disguise, because they are mimicking the propaganda techniques used by the Third Reich.

Stanley compares the way the Nazis used the word “heroisch” to the way Republicans use the word “freedom.” He writes: “Whatever one thinks of the wisdom of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, it is difficult to have a reasoned debate about its costs and benefits when the invasion itself is called ‘Operation Iraqi Freedom’.”

In truth, America did have a reasoned debate over the invasion of Iraq. It had an extensive Congressional debate. In the end the people’s representatives voted to approve the invasion. And that did not stop the debate.

As for the assertion that the people who thought up the name, Operation Iraqi Freedom, were cynical operators who were misusing the word freedom, one can make the argument that Saddam Hussein was a tyrant and that his overthrow might lead to the formation of a freer, more democratic society. What is wrong with using the word freedom in that context?

As for Stanley’s next claim, regarding the debate about Obamacare and taxes, it does not hold up any better. In his words: “It is difficult to have a reasoned debate about the costs and benefits of a policy when one side has seized control of the linguistic means to express all the positive claims.”

How absurd is this? Do you really imagine that the president has been silenced, that he has lost control of his discourse, that he can no longer present a cogent argument defending his health care proposal because Sarah Palin coined the phrase: death panels?

That makes Sarah Palin very powerful, don’t you think?

You would have thought that with all the brain power on the American left, with all of the media organs they control, that they could have prevented right thinking people from seizing control of the language.

Let’s call this argument by its proper name: it’s whining.

But, Stanley is not finished. He has been preparing us for his assault on Fox News.Unfortunately, Stanley seems himself to be a stranger to rational debate. He is certainly out of touch with reality. 

He explains: “The Fox channel engages in silencing when it describes itself as ‘fair and balanced’ to an audience that is perfectly aware that it is neither. The effect is to suggest that there is no such thing as fair and balanced — that there is no possibility of balanced news, only propaganda. The result is the silencing of every news organ, by suggesting a generalized gross insincerity.”

How, pray tell, does Jason Stanley know what the Fox News audience thinks? Does he know that the viewership of Fox News is about equally divided between Republicans, Democrats, and Independents? Probably not.

Does Stanley know that recent polling has shown that the American public considers Fox News to be fair and balanced in its presentation of the news? Does he think that Americans are just a nation of dupes? If so, why did they vote for Barack Obama in 2008?

And then, does Stanley think that Fox News is less fair and balanced than, say, NPR? Wasn’t it NPR that tried to silence Juan Williams? Didn’t Fox News give him a prominent position on all of their newscasts? Who was really trying to silence a liberal voice? And Juan Williams is hardly the only liberal who appears often on Fox News. How many conservatives appear regularly on NPR or on MSNBC? 

And isn't Stanley giving Fox News far too much credit? Does any intelligent person believe that the way Fox uses the slogan "fair and balanced" makes it impossible for the New York Times to report the news objectively? Is Stanley really trying to tell us that the Times is just another propaganda organ, but one that is not responsible for the way it reports the news? So, Rupert Murdoch and Roger Ailes control the New York Times and NPR... who knew?

Feminists Against Beautiful Women

Feminism has produced a new wave of repressed women.

Faced with the difficult task of knowing what to say to a friend’s five year old daughter, Lisa Bloom got in touch with her inner feminist and repressed her first impulse.

In her words: “I squelched myself. As I always bite my tongue when I meet little girls, restraining myself from my first impulse, which is to tell them how darn cute/ pretty/ beautiful/ well-dressed/ well-manicured/ well-coiffed they are.”

Why does she repress her normal impulse? Bloom explains that American women are obsessed about their looks, to the detriment of their self-esteem. She proposes to solve the problem by leading a crusade against telling girls that they are beautiful. To her mind this will allow women to give more value to their mental prowess.

Bloom feels that she is striking a blow against the beauty industry. But this blow is anything but original.

The feminist assault against femininity and female beauty has been going on for decades now. So much so that I suspect that feminism has caused women to suffer an unhealthy obsession with beauty because it has forbid them to be normally concerned with how they look?

It’s been twenty years since Naomi Wolf’s The Beauty Myth launched a full frontal attack on the fashion and beauty industries. After twenty years of Naomi Wolf and forty years of contemporary feminism, lo and behold, many young woman are obsessed with their looks.

To me it feels more like a backlash against feminist repression and tyranny than anything else.

Feminists should stop being so modest. They should give themselves some credit for creating the situation that they are railing about.

Bloom is writing as though feminism did not exist and did not influence the way people bring up girls. In that she is surely mistaken.

Picture the scene: a little girl is beaming because she is wearing a new dress or has gotten a new hairdo. What kind of ideological perversity would prevent you from acknowledging the fact? Doesn’t that strike you as gratuitous cruelty?

Why does Bloom believe that telling a girl how good she looks will somehow cause her brain to atrophy? Do you really think that it’s an either/or proposition?

Perhaps feminists do think it’s either/or. Perhaps that’s why they are horrified at the prospect of a Sarah Palin or a Michele Bachmann or even a Nikki Haley... beautiful women who are also successful and accomplished.

Why wouldn’t feminists see these women as apt role models for girls who might want to grow up to be both professionally successful and beautiful?

Doesn’t Bloom’s reasoning tell us that the feminist cult demands strict ideological conformity? Is it possible that feminists see themselves as the unbeautiful girls and that they are jealous of the pretty girls who get the best guys?

Lisa Bloom seems trapped in either/or thinking: a girl can either be beautiful or she can be a published author? Will a compliment about her looks undermine her career or will it make it more difficult for feminists to draw her into their cult?

Feminism notwithstanding, every adult male knows, if he is involved in a relationship with a woman, that he bears a sacred duty to tell her, often and unambiguously, that she is beautiful.

It may be an offense against feminism, but the vast majority of women invest considerable time and effort into presenting an aesthetically pleasing appearance. A man who fails to recognize the work that went into the appearance is going to have problems. A man who allows his wife or girlfriend to believe that he does not find her attractive and that he is not proud to be out in public with her is going to have problems. No man passes through adolescent without learning this.

An interesting sidelight: while it is perfectly normal to tell women and girls that they look beautiful, one never says that a man looks beautiful.

We say that women and children are beautiful, that art works are beautiful, and that nature can be beautiful. We never say that a man is beautiful.

Judge a woman by her looks and she will be flattered. Judge a man by his looks and he will be insulted.

Until they repeal human nature, that’s how it is.

To feminists this means that the language is sexist. Of course, any feminist can strike a blow for equality by telling men that they look beautiful. Let’s see how that works out.

If language is not a vast right-wing conspiracy, then the way we normally speak reflects the history of language usage. Language was not created by a group of elders or wise women. It’s as close to a truly free market as we will ever get. And it’s an instance of the free market giving us a glimpse of a truth.

Whatever the ideologues think, the marketplace tells us that men and women are not the same thing.

What does it mean? It means that a man’s value does not lie in his beauty, but that a goodly part of a woman’s value does. It means that if you tell a woman she is beautiful she will glow. If you tell a man that he is beautiful he will feel insulted. .

Of course, we commonly say that men are handsome-- anything but beautiful-- but somehow this description does not bear as much power as the attribution of beauty to a woman.

Forget to tell a woman she looks beautiful and she will not forget it. Forget to tell a man that he is handsome and he will barely notice it.

Worse yet, from the feminist perspective, a good part of a woman’s confidence depends on her perception of herself as beautiful. Said perception is based on how many of the people who matter to her give her compliments about her appearance.

If you’ve never done it, one day you should turn on a television make-over show... the ones that are dedicated to beautifying women, the ones that show that any woman can be beautiful.

They all have a climax when the woman who has been subjected to the ministrations of an army of stylists and cosmeticians walks out onto the stage looking like a radiant, resplendent beauty. When hostess asks her how she feels, she invariably says that she now feels more confident. The boost in her beauty quotient has boosted her confidence.

Ironically, increased confidence in her looks often translates directly into increased her confidence on the job. No woman is going to do a good job if she goes to work thinking that she is ugly.

With men it’s slightly different. To feel confident in his ability, a man also has to adopt the right look. For him that involves conforming to a dress code and wearing the right corporate uniform.

But, what happens to little girls when the women, and men, around them repress their normal impulse to tell them that they are beautiful?

If you don’t tell your daughter that she’s beautiful she will conclude that she isn’t beautiful. And she will act accordingly.

If you don’t tell her that she’s beautiful but you do tell her that she must have a career, she will conclude that no one will ever want to take care of her, and that she will always have to take care of herself. And she will act accordingly.

If a girl is not told she is beautiful, she will think that she isn’t. This might lead her to neglect her appearance, but it might also lead her to exaggerate the importance of her appearance. Looking good will then feel unnatural and forced.

If you have ever seen a make-over show on television, you know that the subjects of these Cinderella-like metamorphoses have often let themselves go, as though they have been telling the world: don’t waste your time looking at me; look elsewhere.

If a girl has not been told that she is pretty, you know what can happen once she enters the world of dating and mating. She might mistrust any man who tells her she is beautiful. She might believe that she has little intrinsic value, and therefore must accept men who have little value themselves, who treat her badly, or who disrespect her.

Lacking confidence she will act as though she is desperate. She will be more willing to accept a hook-up because she feels that she must choose between random, anonymous sexual encounters and nothing at all.

If a woman feels that she is beautiful, if she has always been told that she is beautiful, she will have more confidence in her ability to attract a worthy man. She will be more judicious about how she conducts her dating life and more willing to allow her relationships to develop slowly.

On the other side, a woman who receives the feminist message might have a high level of career success coupled with a low level of relationship success.

The failure to have a satisfying relationship will often make her career success feel like consolation prize, afforded to those women who are not sufficiently beautiful to attract a worthy man.

This will often cause her to resent beautiful women who have both satisfying relationships and careers. Given her prominence in the workplace, she will set out to undermine the careers of her more beautiful “step-sisters.”

Unpresident Obama

The reviews are in and they aren’t good. A normally supportive Mark Halperin called President Obama a “dick.”

Lee Siegel felt compelled to offer a lesson in elementary leadership: if you belittle your opponents by comparing them to petulant children they are not going to be able to negotiate with you.

Strip someone of his dignity by demeaning him and his normal human pride will prevent him from negotiating with you.

Now, John Hinderaker of the Powerline blog offers the most damning analysis.

Hinderaker calls it a failure to lead, and that is surely true. He also calls it a failure to take responsibility, and that feels closer to the truth.

Yet, there is more to it. There is a strange disconnect, between Obama’s words and his actions. Hinderaker shows clearly that the man who was conducting the press conference was acting as though someone else had been president for these last 30 months. It doesn't inspire confidence.

Either Obama does not know that he is the president or else he believes that he can trick you into forgetting that he is in charge.

When there is no correlation between words and deeds, when someone’s words pretend that his deeds are not his, we are facing a strange disconnect.

A president who acts as though he is not the president sows confusion and undermines confidence in his leadership abilities.

We know that Obama has attracted a band of media enablers to help him out, but still, the more you think about it, the more he looks like an outright fraud. Or better, since Obama does not act like he is the president, perhaps we can call him Unpresident Obama.

The evidence, as Hinderaker lays it out, is clear and compelling, almost frighteningly so.

In his press conference Obama declared that his administration is working to ease the burden of business-killing regulation.

This while his administration has been handing down more and more onerous regulations. An administration that signed the Dodd-Frank financial reform bill and that is about to hit the health care industry with an avalanche of regulations should not, if it has a modicum of dignity, talk about how it wants to ease the burden of regulation.

Obama also presented himself as a champion of free trade agreements.

As it happens, these same agreements were negotiated years ago, by the Bush administration. They have been languishing because Congressional Democrats are beholden to union bosses who oppose them.

It’s not just that Obama has been absent on free trade, but his absence counts as active obstruction.

And then, Obama proclaimed that both political parties should immediately go to work on reducing the deficit. Given that House Republicans have already passed a budget, Obama held them up for special derision.

As Hineraker adds, if you consider how much Obama’s administration, in conjunction with Congressional Democrats, has added to the national debt-- over $4 trillion and counting-- a president with a sliver of modesty would recognize that he cannot claim to be the champion of deficit reduction.

As for budget proposal that Obama offered, it was so dishonest that not one United States senator, Republican or Democrat, voted for it.

And then there was Obama’s effort to pass off class warfare as fiscal policy. After explaining how he is the champion of business, Obama recommended that we balance the budget by increasing taxes on corporate jets, the rich, oil companies, and hedge fund managers.

Yet, Hinderaker points out, Obama’s the 2009 stimulus bill reduced the taxes on corporate jets... the better to stimulate airplane manufacturing.

We could continue, but we would arrive at Hinderaker’s conclusion: Obama simply does not know what he is talking about. He makes it up as he goes along.

Hinderaker calls it a “typical exercise in evasion of responsibility,” and he is surely correct. I assume that he means that this is “typical” for Obama. Among real leaders it is anything but typical.

Perhaps Obama does not know who he is, to the point that he cannot even pretend to be in charge. Otherwise, he is betting his political future on the chance that he can fool the American public again.

"The Greatest Book of All Time"

If any book qualifies as “the greatest book of all time” it is surely Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. (For the record, Aristotle wrote it for his son Nicomacheas-- thus the title).

To celebrate the appearance of a new translation, by Robert Bartlett and Susan Collins, the New York Times has published a review of the book and the translation by Prof. Harry Jaffa.

What makes Aristotle’s opus the greatest book of all time? In this one book Aristotle invented ethics and said everything that needed to be said about it. A staggering achievement. Aristotle set out the basic principles of good conduct in society and offered a primer in character building. (FYI-- the Greek word ethos means “character.”)

The book also stands as a corrective to the greatest flaws in modern psychotherapy-- the obsessive concern with what went wrong and the willful blindness toward knowing how to get things right.

Liberal Policies: A Road to Ruin?

Today Victor Davis Hanson has an excellent article on the failure of contemporary liberalism. Entitled “Liberal Frankensteins”  it shows how liberal policies are not just failing in America, but how they are causing Europe to unravel.

Here are a couple of choice paragraphs about what liberal policies have done to the American educational system. Among the causes of educational decline is the trendy leftist notion that education should be a therapeutic experience:

“Back home, we have suffered through decades of declining test scores and rising teachers’ salaries, and we now have a trillion dollars in college loan debt, more remediation for incoming college freshmen, weaker skills apparent in graduating college seniors, an omnipresent -studies curriculum, and a new national dialogue over whether college is even worth it — not just in terms of whether college degrees raise salaries sufficiently to justify huge loans, but whether the new therapeutic race, class, and gender curriculum is antithetical to classical liberal arts with their emphasis on reading, written expression, math, and science.

“Modern university education has achieved the dubious result of turning out a self-described sensitive, caring mind that has never been more ignorant of the past and the present. The modern therapeutic university has managed all at once, with its various “centers,” reduced teaching loads, empty faculty research, and legions of new administrators, to put tuition costs beyond the reach of most Americans, to spark an entire new competing industry of no-frills, private, for-profit certificate-granting trade schools, and to end the old idea that a student’s B.A. degree was synonymous with competency or a faculty member’s Ph.D. with wisdom.”

Feminist Amorality

Her article is so long it becomes agonizing. I am happy to link Zoe Williams’ screed about feminism in the Guardian, but I will spare you the details.

I prefer to examine two basic principles that Williams presents as self-evident, and unarguable, truths.

In her second paragraph Williams offers a definition of feminism: “Feminism is just equality. Would a man be allowed to do it? Then so should you. Would a man feel bad about it? No? Then nor should you.”

Evidently, Williams does not know the difference between equal and same. Nor does she seem to understand that if women are being told to model themselves on men, they are being induced to become ersatz men.

Doesn’t this make male behavior and male emotion the gold standard? Does anyone really believe that a woman should be doing anything a man does and should be feeling whatever a man feels?

In a strange way this makes men the superior sex, the ultimate role model for all womanly behavior.

Am I the only one who finds that to be profoundly misogynistic?

But, that isn’t all. Williams also offers us a sample of her moral thinking. On its face her principle is so ignorant and appalling that one must needs counter it.

She says: “It ought to be obvious, beyond remarking, that a woman should be able to sleep with whom she wants, when she wants, as often as she wants, without danger and without shame.”

Beyond remarking? One does well to remark and question this principle. When one does, one discovers that it is very bad advice, indeed.

In conjunction with Williams’ definition of feminism, it assumes that men do what they want when they want, that they are never in danger and never feel responsible for their actions.

One wonders how a feminist would react if her man decided that he had the right to have as much sex as he wanted when he wanted with whom he wanted... commitments and consequences be damned?

I will grant that Williams probably does not know what she is saying, but still, she is saying that both women and men should do whatever they want regardless of their duties, responsibilities, commitments, and relationships.

It’s as though she has defined human beings as pleasure-seeking organisms, as creatures that fulfill themselves by the reckless pursuit of pleasure. If that were true, humans would not be social beings and would not have responsibilities toward other people.

If a woman is married or committed to a relationship, should she will follow her desires wherever they lead her? Should she be having sex with children or dogs? And should her behavior in that or other cases be “beyond remarking?”

According to this principle, neither a man nor a woman should ever feel any sense of personal responsibility. And neither of them should ever concern him or herself with the consequences of his or her behavior.

As moral principles go, this is pure nihilism, and profoundly misguided. For those who believe that Williams did not mean what she said, I would reply that she should have followed the ancient moral principle and said what she meant.

"Stop Trusting Your Instincts"

I have sometimes warned about the danger of following your instincts, thus, of going with your gut.

Great executives and investors have happily told the world that they became tycoons by going with their gut.

As advice goes, it’s misleading, largely because it oversimplifies.

Now, Ted Cadsby explains why this is so in his column: “Stop Trusting Your Instincts.”

Cadsby offers a compelling analogy. A pilot can trust his instincts and his perceptions if he is flying on a clear day. What he sees out of the cockpit will be identical with what his instruments tell him.

But, if he is flying at night, his perceptions will be telling him one thing and his instruments will be telling him something else.

In Cadsby’s words: “But piloting at night is completely different: you are flying blind so you are entirely dependent on the instrument readings. In fact, you should rely exclusively on the instruments because your internal instincts will lead you astray. Without visual cues, our brains try to makes sense of position and direction by relying on a sense of balance created by mechanisms in our inner ears. But our inner ears can be easily fooled: in the darkness, a plane can feel as though it's ascending or descending when it's doing the opposite.”

He continues: “The inner sense of balance is such a strong instinct that a pilot will be tempted to disbelieve the instruments when they contradict gut feelings. Experienced pilots know to over-ride their instincts, but new pilots can succumb to the strong pull of their intuitions — sometimes with tragic consequences.”

Cadsby tells us that this is probably what happened to John F. Kennedy, Jr., an insufficiently experienced night-time pilot, when he tried to land in Martha’s Vineyard in 1999.

In most everyday situations, Cadsby explains, we can trust our instincts. Mostly we confront simple situations involving a single cause. Since our instincts are attuned to respond as though there is a single cause for a problem, we can deal with “straightforward” challenges by following our gut.

But  sometimes we face complex challenges. We can no longer see where we are; we are flying in the dark.

As an executive moves up the corporate ladder or a military officer moves up the chain of command, he will be facing more and more complexity. The problems will no longer be simple. They will have multiple causes. Each solution will have multiple possible outcomes.

Yet, our intuition, our instinct, our gut will want to respond as though the problem is simple, as though there is a simple cause. Or, as though there is a simple explanation.

Cadsby writes: “Of the many ways our intuitions are mismatched with complexity, the most profound is the basic cause-effect model that underpins all of our thinking: our brains are always automatically searching for simple, single causes to explain all manner of things. Our intuition that every effect has a single cause is a survival-enhancing mental model that is well-suited to a world of straightforward problems. But applying this simple explanatory model to complexity can be just as misleading as relying on your inner ear to tell you where you are. Complex problems are characterized by multiple causal factors, all interacting with each other through intricate feedback loops. The only way to assess complexity is to look for multiple causes and assess how they influence one another (through, for example, system thinking).”

Some executives have extensive experience dealing with complexity. Their experience will allow them to grasp complexity more fully and more surely than will someone who is just starting out.

The experienced executive might feel as though he is just following his gut. But, the knowledge contained in his gut differs radically from the knowledge contained in the junior associate’s gut.

The same applies to politics. In Cadsby’s words: “So we insist that our politicians provide us with simple cause-effect explanations and implement simple cause-effect solutions. And we expect leaders of all kinds to have quick, easy solutions for all problems.”

He applies his principle to the financial crisis of 2008: “The financial meltdown of 2008 is a quintessential example of how oversimplified our assessment of a complex problem can be. We gravitate to blaming single individuals (Greenspan, Bernanke, Bush) or institutions (investment banks, mortgage lenders, rating agencies). But the shrewd financiers who avoided, even profited from, the crash were not focused on single elements. They analyzed the whole system — the web of interacting causes that collectively constituted an economic situation that was not sustainable. Likewise, the fix lies in addressing multiple elements within the system.”

Glib executives and investors who tell you to follow your gut are doing you a disservice. They should be telling you that until you reach their level of preeminence, you should work hard to master complex situations, and that the only way to do so is to trust your analysis more than your instincts.

When faced with difficult and complicated situations, it is often right to seek advice. And it is good to follow that advice, even, and especially, when it seems to be counter-intuitive.