The Fight Against Child Mutilation Makes It To The Supreme Court

Maybe you’ve heard the saying, “The purpose of a system is what it does.” It’s a phrase that was coined by a professor named Stafford Beer as a way of helping people understand complex systems. It was originally about cybernetics, but it’s increasingly being used in the context of American politics.

That’s because you’ll often hear convoluted explanations to justify various policies, when all you really have to do is look at the end result that those policies are producing. The benefit of Beer’s approach is that, at the risk of maybe oversimplifying some things, it short-circuits all the rationalization and B.S. that we’re all used to hearing. And if there’s one skill that the politicians and academics have perfected — whether they’re talking about immigration or criminal justice reform or anything else — it’s drowning us in doublespeak so that we don’t look at the obviously evil and destructive results of their policies. Sometimes things really aren’t that complicated. Sometimes you don’t need experts and studies to decide on a course of action.