Gordian Knots Overview

A Blog to Challenge the Oversimplification of Complicated Problems

A Gordian Knot is defined as an “extremely difficult or involved problem. The phrase is derived from a myth summarized in Wikipedia describes as follows:

The Phrygians were without a king, but an oracle at Telmissus (the ancient capital of Lycia) decreed that the next man to enter the city driving an ox-cart should become their king. A peasant farmer named Gordias drove into town on an ox-cart and was immediately declared king.[a] Out of gratitude, his son Midas dedicated the ox-cart[1] to the Phrygian god Sabazios (whom the Greeks identified with Zeus) and tied it to a post with an intricate knot of cornelbark (Cornus mas). The knot was later described by Roman historian Quintus Curtius Rufus as comprising "several knots all so tightly entangled that it was impossible to see how they were fastened".[2]

The ox-cart still stood in the palace of the former kings of Phrygia at Gordium in the fourth century BC when Alexander the Great arrived, at which point Phrygia had been reduced to a satrapy, or province, of the Persian Empire. An oracle had declared that any man who could unravel its elaborate knots was destined to become ruler of all of Asia.[2] Alexander the Great wanted to untie the knot but struggled to do so. He then reasoned that it would make no difference how the knot was loosed, so he drew his sword and sliced it in half with a single stroke.[2] In an alternative version of the story, Alexander the Great loosed the knot by pulling the linchpin from the yoke.[2]

Sources from antiquity agree that Alexander the Great was confronted with the challenge of the knot, but his solution is disputed. Both Plutarch and Arrian relate that, according to Aristobulus,[b] Alexander the Great pulled the linchpin from the pole to which the yoke was fastened, exposing the two ends of the cord and allowing him to untie the knot without having to cut through it.[3][4] Some classical scholars regard this as more plausible than the popular account.[5] Literary sources of the story include Arrian (Anabasis Alexandri 2.3), Quintus Curtius (3.1.14), Justin's epitome of Pompeius Trogus (11.7.3), and Aelian's De Natura Animalium 13.1.[6]

Alexander the Great later went on to conquer Asia as far as the Indus and the Oxus, thus fulfilling the prophecy.

Wikipedia notes that the term “Gordian Knot” is “often used as a metaphor for an intractable problem (untying an impossibly tangled knot) solved easily by finding an approach to the problem that renders the perceived constraints of the problem moot.”  

This blog is premised on the assertion that my generation, the Baby Boomers, are the last to witness the national unity that can be achieved when big problems are solved by the government through the application of expertise and the development of new technology.

The race to put a man on the moon before the USSR is an example of such a big problem. Solving this fundamentally technical problem required that the government provided enough money to pay for the research and development required and the resources needed to bring that research to life. In the 1960s, the public had sufficient faith in the government, in science, in technology, and in our country’s military to support this effort. Moreover, we were motivated to to win the competition between our nation and the USSR.   

Today, there are few if any big problems that can be solved solely by expertise and funding and the faith in our government, in science, and technology is diminishing. To make matters even more complicated, the big problems we face now all have ethical dilemmas embedded in them. They involve situations “…in which a difficult choice has to be made between two courses of action, either of which entails transgressing a moral principle.”

Here is a partial list of the kinds of big problems that we face today that require more than expertise:

·       Climate change

·       Wealth and income inequality

·       Affordable health care for all

·       Improving Public Schools

·       Affordable Housing

·       Public health issues (i.e. “War on Drugs”; “War on Cancer”; COVID)

·       Race issues (i.e. exclusionary zoning; school desegregation; Affirmative Action)

·       Underfunding of government at all levels

·       Artificial Intelligence

·       Law Enforcement

The posts in this blog will flag the oversimplification of big problems in which a difficult choice has to be made between two courses of action, flagging those “moral principles” that make it challenging to maintain a democratic form of government.

I invite you to challenge my thinking as I explore these ideas, and hope I will challenge your thinking as well.