CHAPTER THREE
The Problem with Problems
Important problems go unsolved for long periods of time for three basic reasons:

(1) Nobody wants to solve them.
(2) Somebody in particular doesn't want them solved by anybody.
(3) The problems are really solutions in disguise.

QUESTION: Why would nobody want to solve an important problem?

ANSWER: Because everybody is afraid of making things worse. Take an example: Every government that remains in power for any length of time becomes an enormous problem for the people it is supposed to serve. Since everybody knows that, they also know that if they change governments the new government will become a new problem-and they are afraid the new one might be worse than the old one. Efforts to improve government a little bit at a time are just as unpredictable and discouraging as radical solutions: Install a new Leader and he turns out to be Newt Gingrich or Manuel Noriega; change the electoral system and you merely shift the advantage from one lobby to another-for instance, from the manufacturers to the media or the Mafia. And as our Founding Fathers knew, true democracy (which they called "government by the people as a whole") is a surefire formula for adding chaos to tyranny.

QUESTION: Why would somebody in particular want a problem not to be solved by anybody, and how could a mere somebody prevent everybody else from solving it?

ANSWER: If just one person or a small class of persons want a problem to remain unsolved it may be, as just explained, because they are afraid of making matters worse for themselves, or it may be because they happen to know that the problem is really a solution. To illustrate the first possibility: If a dictator is undermining the freedom of his countrymen, he knows that he will be worse off if the problem he has created is solved. An example of the second possibility is the following: Because the U.S. prison system does not accomplish what we would like it to, many Americans think of it as a very expensive problem, but the towns in which prisons are located and the people who work in the prisons know that nothing could be further from the truth. The system is a solution to their local unemployment problems.

As those examples illustrate, the somebody who doesn't want a problem to be solved by anybody might be a dictator who derails attempted solutions by gassing a few million of his own subjects, or the somebody might be hundreds of thousands of ordinary people who get their representatives to tell the rest of us that we'll be sodomized in our sleep unless we have more and more prisons.

QUESTION: Is that last one an example of a solution disguised as a problem?

ANSWER: I can't believe you asked that! If it were disguised, would hundreds of thousands of people know about it? No, for an example of a solution disguised as a problem we might look at the sorry state of our public educational system.

You may have noticed that people just love to talk about how terrible our schools are compared to those of the Japanese and other infidels, but nobody ever lifts a pencil or spends a shekel to do anything about it.

The reason for this is that the sluggish pace at which our schools proceed in the so-called enlightenment of our children actually solves many problems: It helps to guarantee a supply of incompetent workers who are insecure and compliant, and therefore eager to accept whatever crumbs management feeds them. It reduces the likelihood of people becoming smart enough to turn against the multimillionaires who exploit their labor, the churches that exploit their guilty consciences, or the governments that use them to test defoliants and new sources of lethal radiation.

Most important, and least understood of all, is the fact that by minimizing the intellectual gap between one generation and the next, we moderate the contempt that children feel toward their parents. This allows the parents to feel they still have something to offer.

Standardized and unimaginative education (which, of course, is mandated by the people) serves to reduce everyone's anxiety level by preventing the society's belief systems from changing too rapidly or too radically.

John Doe's confidence that he knows everything he needs to know tends to tranquilize him, and the knowledge that the John Does are tranquil is music to the ears of the rich and powerful and to the forces of our political and clerical establishments.

And you can take that to the bank!