Doth our knowledge increaseth and our sorrow with it?
When information is open, leaders entering negotiations can’t afford to compromise — it scares off their support base. This pushes them to become more radical. Now, their opponents see them as increasingly hostile, which radicalizes both sides and regular people. With each cycle, everyone becomes less willing to budge and demands more transparency to make sure their leaders aren’t betraying them. That, in turn, fuels the demand for even more radical positions to counter the other side’s radicalism.
So the whole “lesser evil” choice keeps getting worse. If it looks bad now, it’ll surely look worse tomorrow.
That’s the price of transparency.
When someone passionately pushes for something, remember: everything has a cost. There are no solutions — only trade-offs. And if you (or they) don’t see the cost of the consequences, and by the way the cost is always huge, then you simply don’t understand what’s going on. Which means you’ll pay for it deerly, because you didn’t prepare for the fallout.
Rejecting transparency is bad too, which is why it was demanded in the first place. But people have never lived in an age of abundant, accessible information before, and thus we didn’t see the downsides coming.
If you thought I was talking about politics — yes, all this applies perfectly to politics. Take the upcoming U.S. elections, for example. But it’s not just about that. It applies to business, company leadership, how investors and employees back their leaders, to negotiations. Even on a smaller scale stuff like teachers, social media interactions, and so on. Even in our own heads, when we consider conflicting ideas. And that, of course, leads to paralysis in the face of too many choices.
But this will also force us to confront a lot of hard questions we’ve never thought about before. There will be a crisis, ideological at first, and as a consequence, economic. We’ll get through it and level up. Political systems will change. So will election mechanisms, voting models, acceptable levels of trust and negotiation freedom. The radicalism will recede. But we still have to get there, and the future is path demendend.
