Not Everything Can Be KISS’d

I have Type 2 diabetes. It didn’t happen overnight.

It began quietly: elevated liver enzymes, then cholesterol. Each problem had a fix. A pill. A specialist. Statins brought the cholesterol down—but, I later discovered, at the cost of insulin sensitivity. No one was managing the whole system. Each intervention made sense in isolation. But taken together?

Eventually stress and sugar overwhelmed an already compromised system. My body’s ability to respond to insulin collapsed. Now when insulin knocks, the cells act like no one’s at home.

My body lost the ability to respond to its own signals. The feedback loops broke down.

That’s where we are with climate. And not just climate—energy, agriculture, inequality, infrastructure, resource depletion. The entire metabolic system of civilization is out of whack.

But instead of systems thinking, we get headlines. Straws banned. EVs subsidized. Carbon credits traded like indulgences.
Every intervention is designed for optics, not integration. We reduce, recycle, offset, and declare victory while the deeper mechanisms degrade.

This isn’t a new realization. People have been mapping the system for decades. Thinkers like Fritjof Capra explained the interconnected nature of ecological, biological, and social systems. Donella Meadows, in Limits to Growth, warned us that ignoring feedback loops and delays lead to environmental collapse.

Their work hasn’t gained traction because, well, it’s complicated.

And we are living in an age that is increasingly falling under the spell of KISS thinking—Keep It Simple, Stupid.

But not everything can be simplified.
Some things demand depth. Some truths are complex. And just because something is too tangled for a soundbite doesn’t mean it’s fake news.

This is where we need to talk—uncomfortably—about the democratization of everything.
We have built a culture where everyone thinks they’re entitled to an equal opinion on every topic. Where the voter must be flattered at all costs. Where complexity is seen as condescension.

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”

— Thomas Jefferson

We’ve even KISS’d this quote into “an informed citizenry is essential to democracy”. But information is inert. Democracy requires cognitive bandwidth.

Most people simply don’t have the processing power for the big issues with which a planet of 9 Billion people must contend.

This isn’t arrogance. It’s neurology.

We are facing systemic threats. But we’ve built a culture that treats every policy question like a dinner poll. New administration? New focus. New party? New plan. But this isn’t a dinner party. These are 30- to 50-year infrastructure arcs.

Nowhere is this more obvious than in how we treat climate change and, consequently, the fossil fuel industry.

It’s been vilified and politicized, but never governed with strategic clarity.

We issue contradictory mandates. One administration pushes drilling. The next punishes it. We declare war on carbon, then panic at the pump and beg for more supply. We set climate targets like flipping switches—net zero by 2030, 2040, 2050—without understanding what is required to build the infrastructure to support the transition.

This isn’t planning. It’s performance.

And meanwhile, the people who actually understand the system—big oil engineers, planners, project heads—are left trying to steer a supertanker through a policy fogbank. They aren’t the enemy. Many of them want the same thing the rest of us do: clean air, long-term stability, a livable future for them and their children.

But you can’t bring about long-term change in complex systems with short-term action born of simplistic thinking. You can’t KISS everything.

Until we evolve more robust cognitive bandwidth across the species—or at least, until those unequipped to deal with complexity learn to stay in their lane—we will remain doomed.

There’s a paradox here. You know it. The Dunning–Kruger effect:
The less you know, the more confident you are in what little you do know.

And if we can’t convince the most ignorant to recognize their ignorance—and to be humble in the face of it—we lose the plot.

Trump is the Dunning–Kruger presidency.
Everything he touches reveals an inability—or unwillingness—to think systemically.

Defunding climate research. Imposing tariffs with no sense of supply chain feedback.
Stripping away due process as if it were red tape, not bedrock.

This is not about left or right.
It’s about consequences.
The planet isn’t left or right.
Feedback loops aren’t partisan.
And complexity doesn’t go away because you’ve conceptually broken it down so you can comprehend it.

KISS thinking may feel good. But it won’t save us.

We need to Weigh Interdependencies in Systems and their Effects. We need WISE thinking to survive.

Any benevolent despot billionaires listening?