Thoughts while I'm walking the dogs

Almost every day I take our two dogs, Sierra and Leone, out for a walk in our neighborhood in Lebanon, NH.  It used to be that I'd find some music on Pandora that would help me relax or focus or whatever I needed at the time but these days I just walk sans earbuds and think.

These days with President Obama reelected there are lots of things to think about.  He has a fresh outlook on how the world works that was unfortunately obscured by having to deal with a Republican Party unwilling to consider non-dogmatic approaches - by which I mean that he seems to get that our lives are surrounded by and enmeshed in all kinds of systems.  So when he proposed changes in, say, healthcare, he was  able to articulate a vision of how the reduction in the cost of healthcare, the improvement in the quality of healthcare and improvements in the economy are all connected, though again the message definitely got garbled by his willingness to consider other means of obtaining the same goal. Having said that, it is still so easy for some to focus on single issues because they don't have to think thoughts about how that issue may be affected by or may affect other issues.  People are sometimes so desperate for a single answer to their problems that they just want to hide everything else from their view. Granted, healthcare is an extremely complex and complicated system of systems and it can be difficult to see how to make headway.

This reminds me of how I was taught to solve problems in my physics and engineering training: since the real world is horrendously complicated, take away the parts that you deem to be either irrelevant or have a negligible effect on the solution to the problem.  Classic reductionism.  And sometimes in order to understand how a system of interacting components works you need to be very reductive. But you can't forgo the next step of synthesizing your new knowledge about the component all by itself with how you observe it to behave in the presence of other components. If you don't synthesize, you arrive at a solution that ignores those important interactions and you become blind to aspects of the your that don't fit.  Some people become so focused on a particular approach in science that they fail to see when throwing away the parts of the system that don't fit their solution causes their "solution" to no longer be of any real value. New solutions arise out of new frameworks and approaches that allow for these other parts of the system.

There are groups of people, for instance, that seem to believe that if we just had a flat tax that would be the answer to our problems.  There are others, the 912-ers, who fervently believe that if you just follow the 9 principles and the 12 Values everything will be solved. These are generally very black and white perspectives on the world.  Either you are with me or you are with "them".  It seems that there is this deep and desperate desire to find the One Solution and never anymore have to think or make decisions, except about whether what one is doing is being done according to the One Solution or not.

Yet in my experience there has not so far been a "One Solution" that has been able to answer all questions in a way that makes sense perfectly for all time.