The lower-order effects of bad policies tend to be both obvious and frustrating. Mass unemployment is a lower-order effect with complex higher causes. Part of the business of democratic politics is providing pat, limited explanations for those pernicious and painful effects that makes the issues less messy and comprehensible in as simple a model as is possible for the average person to understand. Once that person comes to believe that they understand both cause and effect, they can be militated in favor of some political cause or another.

The truth content of the entire exercise doesn’t really matter — the lower-order effects might only exist in the media, and the causes identified might be entirely irrelevant to the purported effects.

Here’s a fictional one:

C0₂ emissions caused by humans/livestock → Melting polar icecaps & glaciers → Arctic polar bears must flee south → Polar bears die tragically fleeing climate change → You have a moral obligation to reduce emissions to save the innocent polar bears.

None of this needs to be true for it to be effective as a political narrative. In fact, the less verifiable that it is, the better, and so long as it seems compelling and urgent, the masses will rush to support a story which is emotionally compelling but false than they will be willing to support a story which is emotionally inert but true.

The challenge with addressing real root causes of real problems is that in the political realm, the causes are likely to be fractal rather than something that can be easily reduced to a soundbite. Unlike in the laboratory environment, in which the complexity of nature can be reduced and controlled, chaos is the rule outside the lab, and establishing a clear causal chain is extremely challenging or impossible.

That doesn’t mean that it’s impossible to establish causality or to bring order to nature. Specialized knowledge and specialization in labor is how civilization tames different natural spheres. Transforming coal into usable electricity is possible thanks to the engineering discipline, and extracting that coal is feasible thanks to the discipline of mining. Specialized financial knowledge is necessary to coordinate those disparate stages of production. Political knowledge is necessary to keep the miners from slaughtering their bosses and vice-versa. This complexity is what Hayek wrote about in “The Use of Knowledge in Society.”

While the title is about knowledge, knowledge isn’t necessarily what people have trouble with — it’s the acknowledgment of ignorance which is more challenging, as is the admission that some mysteries are unsolvable. But leaving some areas mysterious is uncomfortable — we want to convince ourselves that we know what’s going on with the world, that we understand more than we do, that we can predict more than can be predicted. It’s a source of consolation. The danger of this innate human tendency tends to become more severe when we attempt to simplify the impossibly complex in human affairs to generate that palliative effect. We create entire sky-castles of breezy causal reasoning chains which rely on models of things that can’t be modeled, attempting to rationalize things that reason tells us can’t be subjected to that sort of rationalization.

The 20th century approach to liberal arts education has mostly been a creation of head-stuffing — encouraging students to memorize these sorts of pat reasoning chains so that they can buttress more political interventions and the growth of bureaucratic management. These stories are often supported by emotionally powerful tales that lend them some shrill urgency. Professors test for ideological conformity and passion, because knowing the party line and truly believing it generates a reliable sense of legitimacy for the state. This method is common to all rationalist politics regardless of what position the ideology has on the ‘spectrum.’

This differs from the classical liberal arts, which were heavy on the transmission of cultural experience from thousands of years of Western history. Rather than the reduction of history to the pat reasoning of a small number of liberals thinking over a short period of time, it was more about 1,000s of years of history recorded to the best of our ability. Students would then go on to further studies in their specialization. And those students were not the bulk of society — not even the bulk of the intelligent — but a tiny fraction of the elite.

Egalitarian political systems — like the United States after Andrew Jackson expanded the franchise — tend to be uncomfortable with gross disparities in knowledge, especially the kind which is supposed to elevate the student politically over others which the ideology considers politically equal. Simplifying the incredibly complex makes it easier for people who aren’t equal to see one another as equals, to maintain a pretense of egalitarianism, and the ability of an ordinary person to grasp the whole of human experience rather than only a tiny portion of it.

Effete technicians and tech-bubble speculators everywhere are angry that a Muslim teenager in Texas was arrested for bringing a circuit board to school.

Ahmed Mohamed is a maker in the making. A young genius if you ask his cousin. Mohamed builds his own radios and Bluetooth speakers and likes to tinker on his go-kart because he wants to be an inventor when he grows up. So, the 9th-grader brought a clock he made to his new Texas school with the hope of impressing his teachers. Instead, the Muslim boy was arrested by Texas police after teachers worried that his clock was actually a bomb.

The arrest came 14 years and four days after the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center. This is the America in which the 14-year-old Mohamed lives. Where the most common images of Muslims on television depict them wearing orange jumpsuits when not being viewed through the targeting sight of a drone. A country where young men with brown skin and odd-sounding names are potential terrorists lest “real Americans” be diligent.

Mohamed’s America is the same country that’s struggling with STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics). The most recent PISA results, which measure the competencies of 15-year-olds, ranked the US a sad 35th out of 64 countries in math, and 27th in science. A Pew study published in February with a focus on K-12 STEM education showed little progress.

Blah blah blah.

The Verge is supposedly a trade magazine for the technology industry, but it can’t help but put forth a whole lot of corrosive criticism of America and the core American population.

There’s nothing especially objectionable about a Muslim boy who tinkers with electronics. It’s also a typical funny illustration of the way that school teachers are terrified of any display of initiative on the part of one of their inmate-students.

But this system that places bureaucratic administrators in charge of students is the very system built and maintained by progressives. The results on science-tests that this writer decries are the results of progressive policies, yet he ascribes the failures of these policies on the evil thoughts of the core population. We should add that modern science exists entirely because of the Western tradition — nothing like it was developed in the Arab world or Asia, and the English speaking people came to dominate the world in large part because the English, specifically, kicked off the revolution in the arts and sciences through the institution of the Royal Society.

The reason why the school sent Ahmed into detention over a circuit board is because civil society has broken down to the level to which behavior which deviates from lockstep conformity expected by governing institutions tends to be regarded with the most severe suspicion. Common culture has been diluted to nothing, as peoples from all over the globe have been imported to live together in close proximity without common moral or cultural beliefs & practices to bind them together.

Ahmed can learn how to build all the bombs — or clocks — that his heart desires if he goes back to his homeland, without any of the nasty and oppressive Texan school administrators to bother him about it.

It’s natural for people from Texas to be paranoid about people coming in from strange lands dominated by religious leaders who support the killing of infidels with a reputation for constructing shoddy bombs. It’s also reasonable to be paranoid about attacks from that group because Texas has been subjected to such attacks repeatedly from Muslims, as recently as last March. The 2009 rampage at Ft. Hood in Texas was also conducted by a Muslim. It’s entirely reasonable to deny would-be terrorists a domestic population that’s more likely to be friendly to them. This sort of pluralism, while making people feel good as a high expression of the never-quite-fully-realized ideals of religious toleration is destructive to social order.

Ahmed might be a good boy, but not of such enormous value that we need to alter the rest of society and condemn the inclinations of the majority in order to accommodate the Ahmeds while enduring the occasional Tsarnaev bombing. Multiculturalism eliminates any shared sense of rules beyond an ever increasing tangle of bureaucratic doctrines. The administrators who sent him to a detention center were almost certainly following strict rules about how to respond to students bringing unidentifiable electronic devices into school — those rules having been created by hysterical liberals terrified by the acts of terror committed by youths addled by prescription drugs and seeking a glorious death with huge media attention.

In order to make room for Ahmed, Jamal, J’miriquoi, Running Bear, Jorge, and Moonbeam, we subject all of them — including lil’ Johnny the racist cracker — to the same set of regulations, because we see all of them as potential malefactors to be treated uniformly by a blind system.

Drawing support from the great masses of the people, a popular politician needs to be continually in the public eye. One of the ways that he does this is by passing legislation, implementing projects, and making speeches about this thing and that thing.

Under monarchy and other forms of private government, the sovereign and his agents are also omnipresent — but there is no illusion that he’s a public servant. The people serve the sovereign rather than the other way around.

In practice, people even under popular government do serve elected officials. The projects that politicians work on tend to be either wasteful or re-distributive. But the spectacle that they need to maintain their support requires that they be always introducing something new and creating a mythology around the policy. For example, the governor of New York — the latest member of the Cuomo clan — is trying to raise the state’s minimum wage to $15/hour.

The minimum wage is an interesting case of a policy that has relatively little support among economists, but near universal support among non-economist textbook writers. The logical argument against the minimum wage is airtight, but the sophistic argument for the minimum wage is very persuasive. Under democracy, sophistic arguments for projects will almost always defeat logical arguments against those projects.

When the better course of action is to do nothing, people reigning over a popular government will almost never take that option. Inactivity would take them out of the public eye, and give an opportunity to other ambitious people within the political system to displace them. Bad law piles upon bad law while useless public projects pile up to flatter the reputations of demagogues and faceless state bureaucracies.

Reversals of failed policies also provide some essential push and pull within the system. It’s often possible to win popularity with the mob by reversing policies that never should have been implemented int he first place. This makes it much more difficult for the civilization to accumulate the trappings of a long-lived culture — popular government tends to construct ramshackle buildings which look impressive in the first years, but then rapidly decays afterward.

As the Revolution ages, many of its old policies, much like its physical representations on Earth, need new coats of paint and renovations to maintain the pretense that this time, they’ll get it right. The failures of public education transform into new redemptive pushes through new slogans and testing regimes along with new infusions of treasure. The opposition gins up enthusiasm by resisting the new push while rarely questioning the larger systemic failure. The Revolution finds nothing to revolt against except itself, and in the process, it lays waste to everything around it.

While older forms of government have their faults, what they don’t entirely rest on is ginning up popular enthusiasm in perpetuity. The public venerates the king for being more than they venerate him for doing. He can also expect to suffer from mistakes — namely, that he’ll be deposed by a foreign potentate, his own aristocracy, or a member of his own family. He carries downside risk, which makes him relatively less cautious and ambitious to change the fundamental nature of mankind. Kings never believed that they could end war or poverty in the way that presidents have. Their concerns were, at once, more worldly and more spiritual at the same time.