There is much to be said in favor of creative systems-oriented thinking. Many problems can be solved by breaking them down into sets of mutually influential factors, many occurrences can be understood by tracing the thread of causality from one point to the next, many insights can be gained by inferring systemic behavior based on motive and impulse. For every one of these benefits, though, there is a worrying shadow as well: Just because something can be interpreted into a systemic model doesn’t mean that that model is correct.
This is something I think about a lot every time I see some luminary in the space of technology or game development start buying into debunked conspiracy theories or weird paranoia. The games and technology space is one that tends to attract a lot of Libertarian sorts who reflexively and categorically distrust any government authority in the first place – often while being absurdly credulous to non-government authority. Even aside from these cultural factors, though, I fear it has something to do with the work itself: In any profession that involves creating an internally consistent model of thought, the people who have trained that ability and try to apply it outwards are made uniquely vulnerable to delusion. Just because a model of thought is internally consistent doesn’t mean it actually means anything – but, if you’re used to working from unshifting artificially-constructed axioms, baked into hardware, and are not prepared to question your antecedents when they’re flawed, you can quickly find yourself taking some pretty absurd rhetorical positions. For any given problem, one can imagine an infinite number of plausible causalities: That doesn’t make any of them true.
At the same time, I understand why this happens. A dispassionate mention of many well-documented historical events will often be decried as though it were recitation of conspiracy theory; any discussion of whether corporate sponsors might distort reported facts to benefit themselves is called conspiracy theory; any suggestion that state actors well known for destabilizing other countries may be destabilizing other countries is called conspiracy theory. Meanwhile, it’s suggested that Cuba may have a directed energy weapon which they use exclusively to slightly inconvenience government employees. Living in the context of this sort of high-grade idiocy makes reliable axioms suitable for building logic off of hard to come by – so it’s no surprise when many of us become unmoored and drift away, accountable to no truths except those we have constructed for ourselves.
I don’t know if this is uniquely a problem with the most successful luminaries at the intersection of tech and art or if it’s simply that much more visible in those cases – I’m still not sure whether being successful makes many people incapable of scrutinizing their ideas or it’s simply a more interesting story when someone noteworthy says something ridiculous and horrible; probably some of each. The influence of success on a human mind, reinforcing every choice with so much positive affirmation, must surely wither and atrophy ones ability to question ones own assumptions. Fortunately, I needn’t worry about being sabotaged by my own success for the time being.
Nevertheless, I worry about losing my grounding sometimes. There is simply too much to know to be able to construct an air-tight theory of history and the world around us – at least, I suppose, without making it one’s full-time job, and there probably aren’t many people capable of doing that either in terms of skills or of free time. I try as best as I can to understand, and accept that sometimes I’m going to get it wrong – and always I try to reject the most obvious and comfortable answers, because those are usually superficial and self-serving. Go where the pain is to find the truth – perhaps not a reliable method, but a necessary one to counterbalance the force of the tides going the other way.