It’s hard to see the forest for the trees. But then, it’s also hard to see the trees for the forest. It’s hard to see your environment at more than one level of detail.
Everywhere we look, we can see things in many ways. We can look at different aspects, and we can look with different attitudes.
Fundamentally, everything simply is. The universe is all one.
But here we are, with our notions of individuality and separateness. The universe is one thing made of smaller things. Or there are small things which are composed into bigger things.
If you treat a composition as a single unit, sometimes you can understand it well enough to predict how it will behave. If it is not too big or too small, you may even be able to manipulate it, in order to make it behave in a way you want. Maybe you can make its behaviour more useful to you. Or maybe you are just curious to see what happens.
But then there are all the really big things-made-of-small-things. And then there are the really complex things-made-of-things, where the small things all interact in vast networks that produce feedback loops and cascading patterns. Like we see in weather, biology, markets, and politics.
The big picture of these complex systems is usually some kind of seething mass. Or maybe just a big blob, if we zoom out too far, and the detail is too small for the resolution of our instruments.
I’d like to think that some day we will find a way to tame the complexity. But that might be a contradiction or a paradox. We can at best replace a complex system with a simplified and mechanistic one. But the latter will not be able to reproduce the features and qualities of the former. It is a categorical impossibility.
Unfortunately, few people bother to learn the difference between complex and trivial mechanical systems. They see something complicated, and assume it is complex, or vice versa. This is a truth about human nature that seems unlikely to change in the near future, or perhaps ever.
As such, it is nearly impossible to have a meaningful conversation between two people, about a complex system, if they don’t both understand what a complex system even is, let alone the implications.
As a result, most people’s opinions about complex systems are worse than useless. But this doesn’t stop them from having such opinions, or using them as the basis for their ineffective or counter-effective actions.