Complexity is confronted daily in human lives. Indeed, complexity is omnipresent in existence. Focusing on the ground for a moment will incur a list of many things, not one, and, once atomic structure is taken into account, one can assume complexity is ubiquitous. What people perceive themselves are objects composed of many smaller things, and the universe is immensely vast with interlocking parts. To deal with the universe is to deal with complexity. Where does simplicity lie, then? Simplicity lies in the human attempt to solve the universe or something in it. It occurs when there is a reduction of elements necessary for a human being to act or think. The universe is complex, but human beings make it simple. Simplicity is a requirement for human existence. Humans need simplicity in order to properly deal with the complexity of existence. The restricted qualities of a human being require simplicity to function. There’s a drive to simplicity, from which maladies like stupidity and evil shortly follow, because of human beings’ conceptual faculty and means of living.
Simplification for a human starts at the basest level. In the formation of our concepts, there’s a structure of simplicity. According to Rand, human concepts are formed through measurement omission; the qualities of the object are focused on while the measures of the object are ignored. Human concepts capture the essence of a thing for all numbers of that thing. I only need one concept of “chair” in order to be able to identify all chairs. Just in identifying something through concepts, I have removed any need to come up with new identifiers for new chairs. Each chair is a chair, not something conceptually new. When you create a concept, you take the many, potentially infinite, and reduce it down into one essential thing (e.g. all chairs into the concept chair), so you no longer deal with the complexity of the many. This simplicity allows our limited minds to do more things, as well as giving us a great capacity of thought. Concepts provide a unit economy, which allows our minds to do more.
Life and its mortality is a key reason for a drive towards simplicity. The limited span of time necessitates a limited number of actions and makes a reduction of things handled necessary to carry out the actions needed for life. Death looms over life and avoidance of it requires action. The finality of death means that for any action to continue to take place it must satisfy the requirement of continued life. This means the number of possible actions to a person is to be reduced to those that allow for continued life, or a person is to strive to reduce life-ending actions if they are to continue living and acting (The speed by which simplicity allows one to act aiding in this endeavor). Threat of death requires a simplification of one’s life in order to properly manage avoidance of it, particularly since death comes from many places.
Observing human behavior will quickly suggest that there are different types of simplification. Not all reduction is created equal. The ideal is a simplicity that makes one’s life better. Making one’s life better creates a consonance where the state and agent that works improves and is better off to work more. This creates a recurring reduction of elements. As well, it is best to work in terms of principles. Principles are an efficient means to grasp existence, sometimes the totality of it, in terms of broad, fundamental assumptions. They are broad concepts that hold many entities, e.g. living with integrity is a habit that solves many issues. A principle takes work to be created, inferring a basic truth that is used for recurring issues. The best simplicity is a structure that allows one to grasp the truth of reality effectively and efficiently.
A human being is meant to create simplicity, and evil can create a seeming simplicity. If a man makes you angry, you killing him is a seeming simplification of the world. It creates a seeming unit economy by reducing the entities that one deals with. This would be a seeming simplicity that ignores the greater context around the person. Attempting to solve problems through death and destruction quickly reveals the complexity that the action wrought. Destruction, of which death is one of the ultimate examples of, reduces elements dealt with on a surface level, while ignoring the greater complexity of the universe.
Stupidity is another thing that creates seeming simplicity. I mean stupidity as hindering or dulling acts that can be avoided. An example of this is the person who tries to take only one point out of a particular event in order to stop having to think about the rest of the elements of the event. They try to create stupidity in the event in order to stop putting effort into the event or to protect a certain ethic or way of thought. This creates a “plug” for the person, so they don’t have to deal with any more entities. The person who pushes stupidity attempts to dull their mind in order to not have to deal with things. However, a cruel backlog can build up. Only their mind is dulled; the complexity of the world keeps moving.
Without a reduction in handled entities, the world would be too complicated for the human mind. In order for a person to exist in this world, they need simplicity. It would be required just in order for them to take an action or have a thought. Simplicity comes in our basic form of understanding the world, i.e. concepts, and it is driven by the nature of our lives and mortality. Through proper reduction, one can live a better life. Yet, the drive towards simplicity, which is inherent in human life, can lead to evil and stupidity. These are seeming shortcuts in our lives that actually lead to damage and greater complexity. They are to be avoided and replaced by principles, which organize the world in terms of fundamentals.