Rory Sutherland Rory Sutherland

Complexity is too simple

Pojoaque, near Santa Fe,
New Mexico

This is a magical part of the world — and it’s easy to see why D.H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley and Douglas Adams were tempted to hang around for a while. When James Delingpole finally gets his act together and leads 10,000 Spectator subscribers into the desert to form a libertarian commune, northern New Mexico should be the first place he tries. He’ll have the blessing of a former two-term governor here, triathlete and Everest mountaineer Gary Johnson, now the Libertarian party’s presidential candidate.

As Republican governor, Johnson spent part of his second term campaigning for the decriminalisation of marijuana: when asked of his past drug use, ‘Did you inhale?’, Johnson replied, ‘I barely exhaled.’

Truthful politicians? What other surprises are there? Well, just where you wouldn’t expect it, there is a spectacular 2,000-seat opera house north of Santa Fe. It’s Glyndebourne in the desert, with the auditorium open on three sides to the wide skies and evening breezes. A performance of The Pearl Fishers (our tickets cost $27) was made even better by an unpaid chorus of cicadas.

What else might you do in a desert town of 68,000 other than go to the opera? Well, perhaps a talk by the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, Murray Gell-Mann, accompanied by Lord Renfrew, Sir Christopher Llewellyn Smith, David C. Krakauer and computer scientist Melanie Mitchell.

Santa Fe is home to the Santa Fe Institute, an eccentric, private, non-profit academic entity dedicated to multidisciplinary research into complex adaptive systems, which was hosting this free talk. Almost everything claims to be ‘multidisciplinary’ nowadays, but when you consider that the panel included two physicists, a biologist, a computer scientist and an archaeologist, it’s clear the Institute takes its mission seriously.

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