Solving Big Problems

We live in a time where there are many "big" problems that seemingly have no clear, easy, efficient, cost-effective solutions. The problems are deeply complex, requires multiple sectors of industry positions just to understand, and gives us unease as to what the future may hold. Problems such as our inability to understand our political opposite, our failing health and education systems, our inability to stop vast biodiversity loss, an ever widening gap between the wealthy and poor, etc.

Nora Bateson on The Entangled World podcast addresses these big, unsolvable problems by saying that "the thinking that we're using to address the problems is the same thinking that's creating them". It is solving problems from one narrow avenue and not thinking how this solution could possibly effect other contexts. We are so used to using this mechanistic, logo-centric, linear, reductionist way of solving our problems when we need to realize we are not a machine. We have parts within ourselves that simply cannot be altered in the way we wish to alter them. Nora then gives the example of taking a drug for depression which decreases your sex drive which then partly leads to your marriage falling apart. It's not that the drug didn't help with the depression but that the solution fails to see other contexts down the line. Perhaps the psychiatrist would say that that is a separate issue. But I would argue that all complex living things are entangled with each other and have entangled parts to them. The mere process of attempting to untangle something that is inherently tangled is part of the problem and most importantly, it is a surefire way to lose invaluable insight, wisdom, and characteristics about the problem at large.

Perhaps a rebuttal would be that it is simply too difficult to solve for so many things at once in a short amount of time since the psychiatrist is limited by how long they spend with their patients and the pharmacologist making the drug is limited by the timeline of the drug going to trials. But to not venture to think of other contexts that this thing touches, you will inevitably be trying to put out another fire in someone else's life, a fire that was created partly because of the solution you gave them. It is understandable that certainly we cannot think of every single one of these contexts but the exercise of at least opening ourselves up to different contexts and accounting for them would lead to more efficient problem solving and better lives overall.

Another example would be conservation efforts for animal poaching in Asia and Africa. Animal activists would protest and seek to get legislation passed to stop the poaching of tigers for example. There would be strong international pressure and national enforcement and indeed the incidents of tiger poaching were markedly decreased. Everyone was ecstatic that their efforts worked but after a few months, they would see that seizures of leopard parts were on the rise. This is a kind of conservation substitution effect where stopping the poaching of one animal would unintentionally lead to the increased poaching of another. This is a classic case of not understanding second or third order consequences where activists are not looking at the poverty in that country, not looking at the culture, and not aware of the overarching systemic problems.

Some Things that May Help

Esther Perel in "Where Should We Begin?" talks to a mom who is stuck between her husband and her daughter. She is trying to keep the peace between the two of them and seemingly can't get through to them because they both respond by saying that she's not on their side and she's always taking the other person's side. In the beginning, it was about the triangular dynamic between the mom, the dad, and their youngest daughter. The fights would happen often around the dinner table. But towards the end, we figure out, alongside Esther and the mother, that there is a subtler underpinning of a husband and a wife that have let their relationship fall by the wayside. Their two daughters were actually in between their relationship with one playing the part of the mediator and the other expressing the feelings of her mom and herself. The emotional part of their relationship was sorely lacking. Esther then said:

It's about changing the social, the emotional, and the physical configurations. It's not in that order, but it involves all levels because you've made a beautiful distinction. We can be very sexual and we are intimate there, but there is a level of connection between the two of you, a level of emotional threading that has leaked out of the relationship. And we are brought together in our worry or our arguments with our daughter.

Prior to the above, Esther also gave the mother a number of options she could try like filming the two having an argument and showing them or eating dinner with just her daughter and then having another bite with her husband in his woodshop or writing a letter to her husband. I love that because this is someone who is very aware of different contexts. She gives the mother so many different textures to choose from that would help get her family unstuck. She addresses the social, the emotional, and the physical aspects. That is how you solve a relational problem, a problem that is tangled up, a problem that is too big to handle.

Another recent article that sheds light onto this topic is Perspecteeva's "Our Prior Literacy (1/3)" written by a former Zen Monk, Ivo Mensch. He discusses that there is a depth to us and that "different transformational approaches work at particular depths". Something like talk therapy perhaps works on the surface level but something like EMDR (eye movement desensitization and reprocessing) where the therapy is more somatic targets unconsciously held beliefs deeper in the stack. Mensch's mention of this type of depth ontology made me think of Steve March's work in Alethia and also Cynthia Bourgeault's three-centered awareness. Three-centered awareness is a concept that posits that "consciousness does not reside merely in the mental faculty alone but rests on a tripod of three distinct systems of perception": the intellectual center, the moving center, and the emotional center, which is somewhat similar to what Esther had said in her podcast. All of that to say, these examples clearly show that there are so many different facets to us. The intellectual (head) center obviously holds our logical, thinking, and verbal processing side. The emotional (heart) center holds a deep knowing, intuition, compassion, and resonance. The moving center (body) operates through sensation, movement, and kinesthetic awareness. It is deeply rooted in the present moment. And not one of them is "better" than the other, at least it shouldn't be. When used together and when we create solutions that satisfy all three, who knows how utterly comprehensive and fulfilling the solution can be! It also goes to show how many different ways we can come at a problem. If we have all these ways of knowing, how can we possibly expect that solutions coming from the thinking center will be able to satisfy something in the body or in the heart.

Of course, these therapies are services for the individual but Mensch says:

We can apply the same first-person scrutiny to our social reality, its structures and mechanisms, with equal curiosity, discernment and intensity as spiritual practice has directed in towards the self.

We can use what we know about ourselves as individuals to help understand our sticky macro problems. How can we tackle problems from many contexts? How can we become more comprehensive?

Lastly, I wanted to end with another thing that Nora Bateson discussed on the Entangled World podcast. She wanted us to picture the image of the Sustainable Development Goals which has these colorful little boxes and each of the boxes says something like no poverty, zero hunger, good health and well-being, etc. Then she said to imagine a mother nursing her baby. She said that in order to feed the baby, we needed to have people not dying from poverty, not dying from hunger, who had clean water and sanitation, etc. In the end, she said that the image of a mother nursing her baby is every one of those sustainable development goals. What I found so interesting in addition to what Nora expressed about the juxtaposition of those two things is that breastfeeding has an unimaginable amount of benefits for baby as well as mother. (Note: I steadfastly believe in fed is best, so don't come at me.) It's nutrition for the baby, there's a reduced risk of illness, there's a stronger immune system, and there's an emotional bonding happened. It is also regulating both their nervous systems. Nature gives us this holistic approach when it comes to the problem of feeding a newborn. It is not just "here's milk to grow your baby". It is helpful physically, emotionally, and spiritually. The solutions for the world's biggest problems need this type of attentiveness and delicate action.