Photo from “Occupy Democrats” Facebook page.
Solving the problem that confronts you at the moment is not always the best idea. Let’s take an example.
You have a sore on your leg that doesn’t heal. You go to a medical professional who is overworked and in a hurry, and say, “fix my leg.” He says “Sure,” and prescribes a powerful antibiotic. It might work, but the sore will reappear. A more careful doctor might say, “Poor healing is a result of bad circulation caused by diabetes. We deal with the diabetes; the sores will go away.” Treating the sore alone is a pointy end solution. Treating the root cause is the holistic solution. Treat the disease, not the symptom.
Parole
This week, CBC’s The Current was discussing the problem of people committing crimes while on parole. The solution from the police? Keep more of them in jail.
But the police see this problem from the pointy end, and they have a pointy end solution. The data is suspicious for two reasons. The first one is a psychological term called Confirmation Bias. When our beliefs are challenged by some of the facts, we emphasize the value of the data that support our belief and ignore data that disagree. So, police who are affected the most by parole violators are looking for evidence of parole mistakes, and find them. Bad data collection.
Second, the police officers who perceive a “revolving door” policy have a biased view because they see all the worst offenders. They don’t see the bulk of parolees who are following the rules. Of course they think it’s a problem, and their pointy end solution is to keep more people in jail.
When the police chief being interviewed was asked if he had any data to support his contention that the problem was with the parole system, he had none. Either there is no data, or there is data, but it doesn’t support his contention. Neither situation demands legislative change.
The Holistic Solution
One of the others being interviewed on CBC had an interesting statistic; 75% of people in jail right now are on remand. They have not been to trial yet. Some of them may be innocent. It’s pretty obvious that the holistic solution lies in the inability of the legal system to give people a fair trial in a reasonable amount of time. Fix that, and there will be a lot less people on parole.
Pointy End People
Members of society who end up at the pointy end of crime — the victims and the members of the legal system — perform a necessary function. They point out the flaws in the system; lawmakers must listen to them. But politicians should not and cannot take their advice on solutions. These people will tell us what they feel would solve their specific problem. The man in the picture at the top of this article is using the pointy end solution. Yet, to someone with an objective point of view, he’s the most dangerous person in the room.
Pointy End in Government
When governments are creating legislation, they have to ignore the pointy end evidence for all the reasons shown in this article. Legislation must be holistic: designed to provide the best results for the largest number of people. It can never protect everybody, for one simple reason. A criminal must commit a crime in order to be convicted. So, for every criminal brought to justice, there must be at least one victim. To ensure a conviction, the more the merrier. The law cannot protect those people, because by definition, the criminal works outside the law. Once the law is broken, the legal system can react.
Politicians who focus on pointy end problems and push for pointy end solutions are not doing their jobs properly. It’s easy (and great for getting votes) to look at a pointy end problem and scream loudly, “The system is broken. Why don’t you fix it?”
This is a great way to gain power, but people like this, should they actually win an election, don’t have any idea how to fix our problems, because they’re still looking for superficial solutions.
A Case in Point
It’s simple to understand that more guns in a community equals more gun violence. But the victims at the pointy end feel that if they can have a gun, they will be safe. Thus the pointy end solution is to give everyone a gun. The “greatest good for the greatest number” people believe that the holistic solution is to remove as many guns as possible from the community, because that will reduce gun violence.
Active and Reactive Solutions
Police are society’s reactive solution to crime. As is mentioned above, this actually creates more victims than criminals. Pointy end solutions are reactive. The first reaction is to fix the immediate problem without regard to wider consequences, and they often cause more problems than they solve. Proactive, holistic solutions follow the scientific method. They collect data, interpret it, and discover what’s really going on before they suggest a solution.
I have written recently that stealing medical staff from other jurisdictions is no solution to our medical problems. This is because it’s a pointy end solution, and doesn’t address the real problems: lack of training positions and motivation to enter the field.
The Bottom Line
Until our government starts to focus on the holistic, long-term solutions to our social problems, we are doomed to short-term reactive solutions to pointy end symptoms.