The rise of solutionism. Part 2

By Gonzalo López Martí / Creative director, etc / LMMIAMI.COM

” Beware of false knowledge; it is more dangerous than ignorance.”
George Bernard Shaw

• To spot the solutionist in the room, look for the dude or dudette who’s stealthily trying to play the team like a guitar, confounding the audience with esoteric BS while doing away with its hard-earned marketing & advertising budget.
• Solutionists, aka solutionistas, tend to be pathological meddlers and micromanagers.
• Their stock in trade is muddying the waters to make them seem deeper than they actually are.
• If it suits their arguments and their agenda, the solutionist will claim he or she is just crusading to bring simplicity to a problem.
• If simplicity makes the solutionist lose leverage and power, he or she will do everything at his or her reach to drown the issue at hand in complexity.
• Solutionists just loooove to coin contrived euphemisms and neologisms.
• When challenged or called into question, solutionists resort to abstruse locution and perplexing technobabble.
• Their last resort is to accuse opponents of immobility, complacency, backwardness, laziness, luddism or recalcitrance.
• It is not uncommon for solutionists to go all Moneyball on their adversaries, pitching their supposedly flawless data analytics against the other person’s flawed truisms.
• Solutionists are incapable of delegating or letting go.
• They are control freaks, nitpickers, sticklers.
• With them the tail always wags the dog.
• Solutionists firmly believe there’s a little switch somewhere that could make everything right just by turning it on or off.
• Ultimately, solutionists just want to be loved.
• They are insecure, they crave approval, they have too much to prove.
• This doesn’t make them less dangerous.
• When China implemented its so-called One Child Policy in the late 70s (devised by a group of, literally, rocket scientists who had been in charge of China’s ballistic missile program) the math seemed brilliant on paper.
• The regime wanted to reduce poverty and increase its country’s per capita income.
• Lower population = higher per capita income, right?
• It looked great on the friggin’ spreadsheet.
• Quintessential solutionism passing for infallible math.
• (Not sure they had Excel or PowerPoint at the time, maybe they used a Casio calculator or an abacus).
• Almost 40 years later, the results are a disaster.
• An immense gender gap fueled by massive abortion of female offspring.
• Legions of unmarried men.
• Rampant sex trade and exploitation.
• Alcoholism, depression, loneliness.
• To quote the New York Times: “… only-children supporting aging parents and grandparents on their own, villages teeming with ineligible bachelors, and an ungoverned adoption market stretching across the globe with major implications for China’s future: whether its “Little Emperor” cohort will make for an entitled or risk-averse generation; how China will manage to support itself when one in every four people is over sixty-five years old; and above all, how much the one-child policy may end up hindering China’s growth.”
• Even the anecdotal footnotes are wretchedly amusing: China has a prosperous cottage industry dedicated to the manufacture of female sex dolls and contraptions for male masturbation.
• In business, we tend to associate solutionism with bespectacled number-crunching nerds.
• In politics, with bookish technocrats wearing baggy off-the-rack suits with dandruff on their lapels.
• Some solutionists, nevertheless, come in the form of charismatic sociopaths.
• Hugo Chávez was a solutionist.
• Ditto Fidel Castro.
• Donald Trump.
• Adolph Hitler was a solutionist.
• In Nazi Germany, the plan to exterminate the Jewish community was ominously called “the final solution”.
• Mind you, I am not advocating for that oh-so Latin Catholic trait of operating on impulse, hearsay and superstition.
• I’m not defending negligence, indifference or apathy in the face of life’s problems.
• I am not saying we should make a habit of diving into the pool before checking whether it is full.
• Let’s not forget, however, that famous line uttered by former secretary of defense Donald Rumsfeld: “…. there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns – the ones we don’t know we don’t know.”
• Coming from one of the most notorious solutionists of the last quarter century, it was obviously a gaffe, a prodigious slip of the tongue.
• Still, deliberately or not, he nailed it in the head.
• Should you want to know more about the solutionist phenomenon, refer to the book “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism” by Evgeny Morozov.