1. It’s no news that policy analysts can and do confront not so much discrete events with discrete consequences as unpredictable contingencies coupled (loosely?) with uncontrollable aftermaths, about which there is little causal understanding. One mighty obstacle to identifying root causes of any event is the inability to uncover what counterfactual accidents and disasters had been avoided by those contingencies that happened instead. These conditions mean appeals to anything like prolonged stability in the midst of collectively-evident turbulence should be read symptomatically, namely, as escapism.
But not all escapes are escapism. An example helps.
2. The Precautionary Principle insists on avoiding positions that may have extreme consequences in favor of a more cautious approach. The immediate question arises: Where does the control come from to achieve the avoidance of contingencies and/or aftermaths? You can legislate the Principle, but that doesn’t mean you can control its implementation. To think otherwise is escapist.
And anyway, aren’t critical infrastructures the only real-time large-scale mechanism we have to manage for avoiding or otherwise responding to the dreaded events? Here disaster-averted is one you’ve escaped (that is, avoided).
3. So what? The next step is to historicize and particularize all this.
It was once common to understand socio-political polarization and fragmentation in both negative and positive senses. Yes, fragmentation can represent negative segmentation of authority, but it can also reflect positive functional specialization. Yes, polarization can represent the inability to speak with one voice, but it can also reflect transparency of issues and keeping trade-offs public. Yes, conflict can be bad, but conflict can also be good. . .and so on down the list of putative negatives in American society that in specific contexts, situations and events can be net-positive.
But “on net” makes little sense in static terms of pros versus cons. “On net” has become fuzzier because of complexities that are inescapable when context, situation and event cannot account for or assimilate all that matters for policy and management in real time. But this complexity doesn’t annihilate life; it is life. With that recognition comes no workaround for the improvisation–and revisions–ahead. Is it any wonder that “repair” looms large in all this?
NB. For a different recasting of many of these points, see Adam Phillips (2026). “Escapism,” chapter 2 in The Life You Want, Farrar, Straus and Giroux: New York.
WHEN COMPLEX IS AS SIMPLE AS IT GETS 