Cascade of Errors

"Most problems stem from people's inability to think things through to their logical conclusion" - Dr. Alfred Herrhausen, CEO Deutsche Bank AG until his assassination by RAF terrorists in 1989.

“The dream arising from the breathtaking progress of physics during the last two centuries combined with the advances of modern high-speed computers — that everything can be understood from first principles — has been thoroughly shattered.”

Per Bak - How Nature Works (1996)

Photo: Blake Verdoorn / Unsplash

In her unputdownable book “Eco Fascists - How Radical Conservationists Are Destroying Our Natural Heritage”, Elizabeth Nickson ( author of Welcome to Absurdistan here on Substack) uses the term “error cascade” to refer to “bad science institutionalized by public policy, which then triggers more errors, more bad policy and so on to infinity.” The term is poignant, delivering a precise encapsulation of the myriad downstream consequences of any decision taken in dynamic complex systems without reference to that complexity. It points to the fundamental error of all activist policy initiatives in interventionist, bureaucratic societies in which some form of central planning attempts to impose managerial order on natural systems, mostly, actually always, with catastrophic consequences.

Elizabeth Nickson’s focus is on the appalling impact on rural life of decades of “bad policy” instigated by a political system captured by a neo-malthusian, humanity hating narrative which insists that we - our species - are the problem and that it is “their” - the enlightened, over-educated, luxury belief elites’ - job, to “save” the planet from us, by enforced de-population, de-agriculturalization and collective herding into cities, for the greater good.

You can pick your particular poison or area of interest: education, medicine (euphemistically referred top as health, as in Department of ..), finance, affirmative action, war on drugs, terrorism, climate, energy to follow the error cascade. Survey the scene, inspect the battlefield, document the carnage and review the outcomes - every single area of our public life is weakened to the point of terminal collapse with the unintended consequences of decades long pursuit of bad policies supported by bad science “which then triggers more errors, more bad policy and so on to infinity.”