There’s a well regarded pizza maker we know, Ronnie, who is a totally old school, Rhode-Island-style pie man. People literally drive for hours to try out his pies.
When you go into his place, he’ll gladly make you just about anything you want, but he has one Golden Rule: Not including cheese and sauce, he won’t put more than three toppings on your pizza, because he believes anything more turns his pies into gastronomic mush.
It turns out what is true for pizzas is also true for civilizations.
Citing Joseph Tainter’s 1988 book, “The Collapse of Complex Societies”, NYU professor Clay Shirky, talked about how once a civilization reaches a critical mass of complexity, in spite of all its wealth, power, tech, and education, it starts to collapse. Like the pizza, it turns to mush.
Talking about the Romans, the Lowland Mayans, and the Chaco canyon, Shirky wrote, “Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond.”
Ask any Government bureaucrat: It’s a heck of a lot easier to add an entitlement, than to remove it.
Eventually the civilization suffers from “Complexity Fatigue” and order starts turning into chaos really fast.
Now, if pizza makers and ancient civilizations had their troubles, imagine what the President has to put up with.
How do they cope? Two famous ones did so by eliminating the middleman.
Franklin Roosevelt and Donald Trump both realized that: A) The usual media channels were a fat, bloated, highly partisan den of vipers and B) Though the usual channels carried influence, especially among elites, their own Presidential power ultimately came from the American people, not the gatekeepers.
So why bother with the usual channels? Why not just go directly to the people? Exactly.
Roosevelt achieved this through radio (still a pretty disruptive technology in the early 1930s) with his famous “Fireside Chats,” and Trump did/does the same with X (formerly Twitter).
Both basically said, “If you want to know what I think, it won’t be in the New York Times, it’ll come from me directly, via my preferred channel THAT. I. CONTROL.”
Did they upset the status quo? Of course. Nothing makes an elite gatekeeper wince harder than discovering they’re no longer essential.
Complex problems are not solved by more complexity, complex problems are solved by human beings, acting human to other humans. If a humble Rhode Island pie man gets it, what’s your excuse?
