A simple picture of the world can be experienced as sufficient and clear. To understand its stability, we need to examine what simplification gives a person and how it is sustained by the environment.
Clarity and Control
Simplification operates as a psychological mechanism: a simple model reduces anxiety and provides a sense of control. The loss of depth may, in this process, be experienced as a gain in clarity.
That is why it is not enough to point out to a person the complexity of the subject. Simplicity itself already performs a particular function for that person.
Speed of Decisions and Depth of Understanding
A binary model allows decisions to be made more quickly because it holds thought up less with questions about underlying grounds. Such speed yields socially visible effectiveness.
Multilayered thinking requires relating a decision to the long-term architecture of causes and consequences. This imposes an additional burden: the decision is made more slowly, but it is considered within a broader context.
Here we distinguish two modes in which consciousness operates:
- rapid local certainty;
- multilayered distinction-making and examination.
The first has the advantage in speed, the second in resilience under complex and unstable conditions.
The Absence of a Signal of One’s Own Limitations
The problem arises not only when a person fails to see part of reality. The main risk is the absence of an internal signal: “Perhaps I am not seeing everything.”
The model then does not merely simplify its subject: it ceases to notice its own incompleteness.
The Confirmation Cycle
A simplified model can sustain itself in the following way:
- A person adopts a simple picture of the world.
- They choose an environment in which that picture is confirmed.
- They avoid situations that could disrupt it.
- They take the absence of encounters with limitations as confirmation of the model.
The erroneous nature of such a picture may remain undetected for a long time. The social environment further sustains the cycle: simple schemes are convenient, predictable, and manageable, and are therefore frequently rewarded.
Encountering a Crisis
Simplification usually reveals its limitations in a crisis, when the familiar scheme ceases to provide orientation.
Two directions are possible: expanding the model or radicalizing the previous simplification. The breakdown itself does not yet guarantee deeper thinking.
The Question of Changing the Model
Two questions remain:
- Is there a type of thinking that, by its very nature, does not close itself within a simplified scheme?
- What facilitates expansion: encountering a failure of the old model, or conditions that allow it to change gradually?
