Culture is Complex
Culture is a container word. It describes something without actually describing anything in particular. We use it to gesture at something vast and real, but the word itself gives us no purchase on what's actually going on. It names the surface without capturing what's underneath.
The metaphor I find most useful is a pond. When you sit beside one, you just see the surface – it reflects the sky, changes colour with the light, looks calm or choppy depending on the weather. But the pond isn't the surface. The pond is the ecosystem underneath: plants producing oxygen, predators and prey, nutrients cycling through waste and back into life. None of that is visible from where you're sitting. Maintaining a pond means constantly balancing competing systems you mostly can't see, and a change in one part ripples through all the others in ways that aren't always predictable.
That's how culture actually works. The media we consume, the outrage engine of social media, decades of entrenched norms around violence, the bifurcation of politics into increasingly hostile camps – none of these is the singular cause of anything. But they interact. They feed each other. They are the ecosystem beneath the surface.
Take the assassination of Charlie Kirk in 2025 as an example. In the immediate aftermath, the commentary fractured instantly into competing singular explanations – it was political violence, it was mental illness, it was a hate crime, it was inevitable, it was incomprehensible. Everyone reached for the one cause that confirmed what they already believed. But the more honest response is that multitudes can be true simultaneously. It's tragic that someone with a wife and two kids is dead. It's also true that when you make a career out of speaking hate, you are adding something to the ecosystem – and ecosystems produce outcomes that no single actor controls or intends. That's not a contradiction. That's just how complex systems behave. Separate parts can produce entirely contradictory results without ceasing to be part of the same system.
The instinct to find a silver bullet – one cause, one fix – is understandable, but it's the wrong frame. Quite often our interventions in complex systems produce the opposite effect to what we intended, because we're pushing on the surface without understanding what's underneath. That doesn't mean we do nothing. It means we stop expecting any single intervention to solve everything, and start thinking about changing conditions rather than controlling outcomes. Making certain things less likely. Adjusting incrementally. Watching how the ecosystem responds and adapting accordingly.
The pond didn't become what it is overnight. It won't become something different overnight either. But you can change what grows in it – if you're willing to work at the level of the ecosystem rather than the surface.