It seems we are creating a “thumbs up or thumbs down” world. Tribes, which often drive this type of thinking, give the illusion of helping us know our standing in the chaos of modern life. But when everything is presented as an either/or decision, we often look at our choices and feel hopeless.

In his Garden of Forking Paths newsletter, Brian Klaas wrote on this tyranny of binary choice in an essay entitled The Lost Art of the Ideal and the Cycle of Futility. Klaas suggests that our daily despair and feelings of hopelessness result, in part, from the loss of expansive, creative, pie-in-the-sky thinking. To make his point, Klaas asks a simple question.

When did you last consider what utopia looks like?

I have been thinking about utopia in recent months but through much of my life I was pragmatic. Too pragmatic, I suspect. What’s possible in a narrow sense is often the first — and perhaps only — question I’d ask in any given situation. While often appropriate it can also become a crutch.

Millions, I fear, have decided that simply navigating what is given to us is easier than considering the type of lives and society we want. We become afflicted by the curse of knowingness as we see the challenges involved with moving toward our ideals.

By giving in to simply knowing that things are difficult and perhaps impossible, we succumb, in Klaas’s words, to the self-fulfilling delusion of powerlessness.

It strikes me that one way out of the curse of knowingness is to embrace life’s mystery and become more comfortable with uncertainty. At the very least we can banish the thought that everything is either/or and up-or-down. What if, by assuming that we are not all-wise in the ways the world works, we first consider the kind of ideal outcome we want and then ask ourselves what is needed to move toward that goal, given the constraints we face?

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Leaders in Pennsylvania and Washington recently encountered a situation where “knowing” what was politically or technically “possible” could have stopped all creative thinking in its tracks.

On Sunday, June 11, an 8,500-gallon tanker truck on an off-ramp in Philadelphia flipped onto its side and crashed into a wall at a curve. The crash ignited the gasoline in the tank; the driver died and a stretch of I-95 over which an average of 160,000 vehicles a day travel collapsed.

Most immediately began to think about the hardships resulting from the months or years needed for the highway to be repaired.

Yet setting aside the world’s assessment of how difficult it would be, Pennsylvania Governor Josh Shapiro immediately announced what in this situation was an ideal outcome: that six lanes of road, three in each direction, would reopen less than two weeks after the crash.

Imagine being in the meeting where the talk is focused on the ideal of reopening the road in two weeks. That pie-in-the-sky scenario then leads the engineers to come up with an unpredictable and perhaps unprecedented solution. All of a sudden, everyone comes together and says, “let’s do this!”

Crews working around the clock “constructed a temporary road resting on a bed of aggregate made of recycled glass bottles. The fix will stay in place until a full reconstruction is complete. The governor had a camera set up to livestream the construction and has turned it into a source of pride.” 

And they continued with innovative solutions to ensure that they would beat the deadline.

To rebuild I-95 on time, we need 12 hours of dry weather to complete the paving and striping process,” Pennsylvania’s Democratic governor Josh Shapiro tweeted. “With rain in the forecast, we reached out [to Pocono Raceway] for help — and they’re bringing their jet dryer to Philly to help dry this section of I-95 and keep us on schedule.” 

President Joe Biden’s administration played a key role in funding and coordinating the federal response. The President announced after the highway reopened, “We are proving that when we work together, there is nothing we cannot do.”

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Klaas suggests that binary choice it is like “following Google Maps without thinking about where you want to go . . . We drive forward, but always toward a flawed destination that nobody really wants.” In thinking this through, I returned to a book I read when it was first published.

Rethink: The Surprising History of New Ideas (2016) by Steven Poole is an insightful work that tells the story of how many of our new and seemingly innovative ideas are actually based on old ideas that were mocked or ignored for decades if not centuries. Pie-in-the-sky stuff, in other words. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes said that “many ideas grow better when transplanted into another mind than in the one where they sprang up.” For instance, all those electric vehicles you see on the road these days are based on technology that came from the first electric car . . . which was built in 1837.

Poole writes there are many ways of thinking about ideas, but all depend on “maintaining the suspension of belief” — doing away with the “curse of knowingness.” This gives us time to look at an idea from other, potentially more fruitful angles.

Many innovative ideas come from rediscovering old ideas or reviving them in a different context. Want that road open in two weeks? Call on recycled glass that’s been around for decades along with jet dryers designed to keep racetracks safe and then use them in different ways.

Suspension of belief is living into a life of awe and wonder where we can move beyond the sense of powerlessness that comes from seeing everything as black-and-white. Nature and life are full of complexity and possibilities. Our world is not either/or. We live with many things at once.

We know in our bones that things are harder than they have to be. But let’s push back against the delusion of powerlessness and think expansively about the type of world we want instead of just bickering over the directions.

More to come…

DJB

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The Weekly Reader links to written works I’ve enjoyed. I hope you find something that makes you laugh, think, or cry. 

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Image by Tumisu from Pixabay