Tesla, Rothko and the misinterpretation of "Less is More".

My experience has been that people tend to simplify things to a degree that they cannot be understood or solved any more. Contexts and history are left out because they are not visible to the bodily eye.

Especially in politics we see this happen but it happens in many fields.

Mechanisms of obtaining a real and definitive solution are replaced with one-liners and opinions not germane to the problem, without paying much attention to the particulars of the actual problem at hand.

You can make millions with it, even billions, or become president of the USA with it, but it won't solve anything and only complicates matters further because a false solution has been added to the problem which already was full of confusing elements.

The apparent simplicity of the iPhone in 2007 was a breathtaking achievement not incomparable with getting a man on the moon in 1969. But the iPhone was an end-result of the integration of thousands of technological breakthroughs that started way back in the 1950's. Simplicity that works is extremely hard to achieve and only absolute mastery of a subject enables one to attain it.  Simplicity is used to sell you something because you tend to trust people who are able to make it look simple.

For instance, the expression "less is more" comes from the world of art where minimalism was discovered as a new way of expression during the first half of the 20th century. But to be able to apply it to any form of communication presupposes a tremendous bedrock of context that both the communicator and the recipient of the communication have to hold in common, otherwise the communication will fail. Why less can be more needs quite a lot of insight. If you don't believe it, which is your good right, try to explain sometime to a sceptical layman why a colour field painting by Mark Rothko or a drip painting by Jackson Pollock is so special that it commands tens of millions of dollars at an art auction. The layman thinks "My little kid can do that, too." But he doesn't for he can't. When Britney Spears was launched as an unexpected supertalent, she had been educated for more than ten years in Walt Disney's musical school. You need lots of context before the value of their genius becomes clear to the sceptic layman who wonders why "a dull painting" by Rothko is worth dozens of millions.

"Orange, Red, Yellow" by Marc Rothko,
sold at Christies on May 8, 2012 for US$86.9 million.

A definite solution often has a simple appearance. For instance, the advent of "EV's", electric motor cars ('vehicles'), would not have been possible without tremendous advances in battery technology, the invention of the microchip, software, materials, and automated production techniques. Yet, none of these immense advances are visible to the eye. If you look under the hood of a traditional supercar, you see a seemingly incomprehensibly complex combustion engine that will accelerate the car from 0 to 100 kilometres per hour in less than 3.5 seconds. It is obvious to the naked eye that a lot of stuff is going on there, stuff that you would never be able to replicate in any way whatsoever. And so you gladly pay over a million euros for that complexity, especially when it is made to look beautiful. The supercar is a much coveted article of status. By contrast, if you look under the hood of an EV, i.e. one that has been designed as an EV not a combustion engine car where an electric motor has been put in, like GM did, you see an empty space. Electric motors are small and simple, in principle they have only one moving part, viz. the rotating axis. When run, it runs in almost complete silence. There are no explosions that need be dampened.

The Koenigsegg Jesko supercar (see illustration) is one of the most fantastic supercars in the world. It is the fastest production car available. Its speed tops at 482 kmph (310.68 US mph). It is beautiful and very sophisticated for a combustion engine car. It accelerates 0 - 100 kmph (1-60 US mph) in 2.5 seconds and costs US$2.8 million without options. The Tesla Cybertruck (see picture above) has no feline lines and has a top speed of 'just' 210 kmph (130 US mph), accelerates from 0 to 100 kmph (US 60 mph) in 2.9 seconds (when empty), tows over 6000 kg (14,000 US lb), has a range of  more than 800 km (over 500 US miles) and costs for this speedy acceleration version US$70.000 or just 2.5% of the Koenigsegg.

It means a multi-million supercar gets beaten by a simple truck that costs less than a rounding error in the price of the supercar. That is progress toward less is more.

The new Tesla Roadster does not have the pretention of being a supercar but it is put on the market by way of competition to them, just for fun. I think Tesla wants to make a statement, thumbing its nose at all that pretence. Be it as it may, the Tesla Roadster costs just $200.000, yet it accelerates from 0 to 100 kmph (60 US mph) in 1.9 seconds, faster than any multimillion dollar supercar. That is the power of simplicity.

But for simplicity to work it needs a deep, solid bedrock of knowhow, technology and contexts, built up through the course of time, sometimes centuries, and all that is invisible to the body's eye, which misleads materialist people for only the mind's eye can perceive the totality of it. Indeed, the colourfield painters of the nineteenfifties cannot be understood without centuries of context in art and the discoveries in the field of the mind.

It is this concept of "simplicity can only exist on a bedrock of other things" that is the real meaning of  "less is more".

Note. This fell out of a manuscript for a book that I am working on, "On the competition of nations", as a sideline.

Amsterdam, May 14, 2020

Charles van der Hoog,
philosopher of culture