Big Problems Don’t Fit in Small Boxes

Many of the critically defining problems of our time resist piecemeal treatment. Understanding consciousness, curing cancer, alleviating poverty, managing environmental sustainability, mitigating climate change without triggering new failures, securing digital infrastructure, managing geopolitical instability, slowing social decay, and containing the adverse effects of runaway technological growth are not separate challenges but tightly coupled dynamical processes. Climate change in particular exhibits this interdependence because every attempted intervention feeds back into economics, energy, politics, ecology, and social trust. Part of the difficulty lies in how communication itself works, requiring us to carve experience into discrete statements and manageable units even when the phenomena we are dealing with are continuous, distributed, and analog in character. This makes fragmented understanding feel sufficient, favouring local precision over global coherence, even though coherence is the precondition for meaningful thought, action, and communication.

It is within this cognitive and linguistic terrain that institutional hierarchy becomes decisive. Institutions are under strain not only from external pressures and populist hostility, but from their own internal dynamics, where status, incentive, and accumulated advantage bind decision-making to self-preservation. What presents as prudence often functions as justification, a moral vocabulary that stabilises existing arrangements rather than tests them. As hierarchies seek stability under uncertainty, they act as filtering systems that progressively discretise people, ideas, and problems, narrowing what can be seen, said, or pursued, fragmenting issues that must remain continuous to be understood, and mistaking institutional continuity for legitimacy. In doing so, they become their own worst enemies, generating risk through the very mechanisms meant to manage it, and converting the pursuit of understanding into the maintenance of advantage by other means.