Pit Called Because An Introduction to Wicked Problems

Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law.

Let’s get something out of the way first: I have no idea what I’m talking about here.

Well, that’s only partially true. I have some idea. But this isn’t my area of expertise. However, I have enough understanding (as a research psychologist) to make me dangerous enough to pass it along to you with enough confidence that I won’t fuck it up too badly, and well enough to get my point across as to why I think it’s important to even bring it up in the first place.

That said, I’ll repeat: this isn’t my area of expertise, so anyone wishing to correct any errors or contribute to furthering my/our knowledge in this area is welcome to do so.

Though I promise I’m going to make this all connect to Thelema. Eventually.

Wicked Problems

Let’s define wicked problems.

Wicked problems are complex, multifaceted problems that can be difficult to define and even harder to solve. The term was first introduced by system design theorists Horst Rittel and Melvin Webber in 1973 and describes problems with (a) no clear solution, (b) no definitive stopping point, and (c) no measurable success criteria.¹According to Jeffrey Conklin (quoting Rittel and Webber, 1973) [Conklin, Jeff and CogNexus Institute. 2005. “Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems.” Book-chapter. Dialogue Mapping: Building Shared Understanding of Wicked Problems. Wiley. https://cognexus.org/wpf/wickedproblems.pdf, 7-8.], wicked problems have the following “official” conditions: (1) You don’t understand the problem until you have developed a solution. (2) Wicked problems have no stopping rule. (3) Solutions to wicked problems are not right or wrong. (4) Every wicked problem is essentially unique and novel. (5) Every solution to a wicked problem is a “one-shot operation.” (6) Wicked problems have no given alternative solutions. Fabulous. Just the kind of problems we love! Especially that “no measurable success criteria,” right?

Wicked problems most often (always?) involve interconnected social, cultural, and political dimensions, making them resistant to straightforward resolutions.

Wicked problems are distinct from simpler, “tame” problems due to their unique characteristics:

1. Ill-defined and ambiguous: Wicked problems lack a clear problem statement. Different stakeholders [a term I hate to use; I’d rather use “problem-solvers,” but not all stakeholders are problem-solvers—“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”²Nolan, Christopher, dir. 2008. The Dark Knight. Warner Bros.—but stakeholders is more contextually appropriate] may perceive the problem differently, and these perceptions can evolve over time.

2. Interconnectedness: Addressing one aspect of a wicked problem often affects other components, oftentimes in unpredictable or counterproductive ways. And, frankly, this is really the most difficult aspect of wicked problems—you can’t just attack this problem because it affects this other problem, that problem, and six other problems on the sidelines, and that one problem no one has thought about yet until we start working on a solution and it pops up and screams, “hey, I’m a new problem!”

3. No definitive solution: There is no point at which a wicked problem can be considered conclusively solved. Instead, efforts to address these issues often lead to continuous iteration and adaptation. This can be frustrating for individuals and groups, especially those with a Conservative/Far-Right mentality, who are used to promises from their leaders of concrete and decisive solutions and answers to social, economic, and political problems. And it’s the lie of think-tanks (like The Heritage Foundation) and politicians (of any flavor) that they can solve all these problems—and they can do it once and for all “for the good of the country.”

4. Value-laden: Wicked problems are intrinsically tied to societal values, beliefs, and politics, which means stakeholders [there’s that word again, but it’s still the best word contextually] may disagree not only on solutions but also on what constitutes the problem. There has always been a tension between the worldviews of conservatives and liberals. However, I’m still not convinced they are all that far apart except in the finer details and, of course, the course of action for the solutions. It is the direct association of progressivism with liberalism over the last fifty years that has created this gulf rather than seeing progressivism as the Hegelian antithesis [the “negative”] to bothconservatism and liberalism [the “abstract(s)”]. And I believe we have a specific culprit that has created that illusion—I just don’t know that I’m smart enough to put it into a convincing argument yet. I’m working on it.

5. Irreversible consequences: Actions taken to address wicked problems often have lasting and sometimes unintended consequences, making trial-and-error approaches risky.

6. Unique context: Each wicked problem exists within a specific cultural, temporal, and situational context, making generalizing solutions impossible. This is the insidious part of wicked problems, in my opinion, in that think tanks like the Heritage Foundation have generalized solutions to the masses in deceptive ways to the point that wicked problems look like memefied culture wars instead of serious issues to be faced.

Jeffrey Conklin—director of CogNexus Institute, a think tank that studies wicked problems—gives the following as examples of wicked problems:³Conklin, “Dialogue Mapping,” 8.

• How to deal with crime and violence in our schools?

• What to do when oil resources run out?

Framing is important when dealing with wicked problems, as the way an issue is conceptualized influences the strategies and policies used to address it. Those individuals and special interest groups and corporations and governments with different values or interests may deliberately frame wicked problems in ways that align with their agendas, sometimes oversimplifying or misrepresenting the underlying complexity to affect support or deflect scrutiny. Even my own characterizations here may be framed in a way that belies my own biases in these areas. None of this is straightforward, even if you perceive it to be in your own mind.

Let me offer another set of examples for wicked problems with a bit more detail:

• Climate change
  We can argue all we want about the nature and cause of climate change, but anyone who has been alive for more than a decade can see its escalating effects on our environment. Yet there is no single solution, just as there is no single cause. Doing nothing isn’t an option, but pointing fingers at specifics only creates havoc when attempting to find solutions. A more holistic approach is needed—but that doesn’t serve special interest groups very well.

• Education
  Variable goals, socioeconomic factors, political pressures, and even funding make education a difficult problem to define or even resolve with a universal solution. As an educator, I have lots to say about this area, but I’ll refrain in an effort to save time and space here.

• Poverty
  The factors contributing to poverty are so immense that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t cover them in a single essay. Leaving people in poverty and then attributing a moral quality to poverty is absurd. It’s pure Calvinism, one of the primary sources of Max Weber’s ‘Protestant Work Ethic,’ which has infected and rotted Western society.

  Likewise, it is grotesque for any individual to hoard an amount of wealth in a single lifetime that they are unable to spend so much in a day that they and their progeny could not reduce that wealth to zero in multiple generations. Yet it is equally absurd to attribute a moral quality to wealth.⁴I understand this is also a just-world fallacy; however, the conditions of dealing with wealth/income inequality are the wicked problem aspect of the issue here.

• Food insecurity
  This one hits close to home for me, as I just finished Food & Faith: A Theology of Eating in January’s Conversation, Coffee & Communion. Our approach to food and food industrialization is screwed up, for sure, and that contributes to the whole issue of food insecurity. Poverty, and the wicked problem that it presents, contributes to and is also affected by the issue of food insecurity. Yet again, there is no one good answer here. As our population grows, reducing to small farming increases our food insecurity at a large scale, but an increase in industrial farming increases other world problems exponentially (including the abovementioned climate change), including the disassociation from our food and food culture itself.

• Systemic Racism
  Racism is another ‘many causes, many solutions’ problem. Some of this stems back to an evolutionary cause that isn’t so easily deprogrammed from our brains, even though it is mostly an inefficient response in the modern world. Would the world be better with an ‘everybody kumbaya it out around the campfire’ approach? Certainly. Is that ever going to happen? Did you see who the United States just elected as president? I think you have your answer. Does this mean that we just throw up our hands and give up? Of course not.

• Sustainability
  The reductionist approach to pointing fingers and suggesting—for instance—that recycling alone will save our environment is laughable. Yet brushing off recycling because alone it’s not enough lacks self-awareness of one’s participation in the health of the larger ecosystem itself.

What’s The Point?

Why bring up wicked problems at all? What’s the point? And is there any relation to Thelema?

Around election time, I subtly hinted that I felt part of the Heritage Foundation’s success was its focus on wicked problems rather than specifically attacking real-world problems. And that’s not to say that any of those wicked problems aren’t serious real-world problems. But the Heritage Foundation let the conservatives and the liberals huff on the progressive agenda, and each overdose on their respective ‘perspective-outrage’ over one thing or another about that agenda. Neither side really stopped to determine who had the most to gain from being at the other’s throat.

Over the last dozen years, while the liberals were handwringing over the progressive demands for a dozen pronouns on the internet that no one uses in real life and MAGA was flailing around about non-existent transgender surgeries in schools that weren’t really happening, the Heritage Foundation waltzed right past them both and undermined a century of both conservative and liberal policies that have run this country for two hundred years under generally stable democratic principles (even if those principles weren’t always consistently applied).

How?

By wrapping wicked problems in a language that the common individual could understand—and then telling them there was a solution if only they would vote a certain way—in order to change the fabric of our society.

What did Crowley tell us about how to handle the Law of Thelema in the world?

He wrote to C. S. Jones in 1916, a mere twelve years after the reception of the Book of the Law,

I may say that I have been working away from the Tarot and astrology. What we have to do is to conquer the world and the way we have to do it is to talk in a language that everybody can understand; ethics, education, and the labour problem are our strong cards.⁵Aleister Crowley, personal correspondence to C. S. Jones, February 1916 (emphasis mine).

Again to Jones twenty years later,

Our sole business should be to use the Law to reconstruct the world from the chaos into which it is already half tumbled. That formula is a simple one, and requires no specialised training. The work requires the cooperation of tens of thousands of people who have never heard of the Qabalah, and they have to be addressed in language which they can understand.⁶Aleister Crowley, personal correspondence to C. S. Jones, August 28, 1936 (emphasis mine).

He may have been shooting for the stars with “tens of thousands of people,” but no one listened to him then, and no one has listened to him in the nearly 80 years since his death, either. Of course, the Heritage Foundation started in 1973 with three men in a room. I would say in the fifty years since then, they have “tens of thousands of people” now!⁷For comparison: the Heritage Foundation started in 1974 with three men. O.T.O. (re)started in (technically, it was incorporated in California in) 1979 by McMurtry and more than just two other people. That’s only five years later. And which one has changed the face of the United States? So it ispossible when you address people “in language which they can understand.”

Thelemites, on the whole, are merely cowards.

But look at Crowley’s three targets in the first quote: “ethics, education, and the labour problem.” Notice any similarity to the list I offered above?⁸Notice any similarity to the Republican talking points for Trump’s 2024 campaign? The accusation has always been tossed around that the Harris camp lost because they ran on specifically transgender care/rights and other related progressive hot buttons. Yet analysis shows that she rarely brought it up, but Trump and allies brought it up constantly. Trump’s campaign was far more vocal about transgender issues as a talking point. Ethics, at least in their mind, was a core issue of the campaign. Education? It was a huge point for MAGA voters—still is, with the whole private/religious school issues. And labor? Trump may not have been labor-friendly in the union sense, but his gains among the blue-collar white male population is undeniable. That’s the labor-class. He spoke their language even as he was stabbing them in the back. His list was written long before the concept of wicked problems was even conceived in the 1960s (it was formalized by Rittel and Webber in 1973). And yet he thought just talking about these problems in light of the Law of Thelema was going to be enough to not only resolve them but draw people toward the Law?

Now do you see where I’m going with this?

The Law of Thelema is the universal solution to universal problems in application. You can choose not to believe me. That’s fine. This post isn’t about the solutions to wicked problems. It’s to introduce you to wicked problems.

Why?

Because wrapping wicked problems in a language that the common individual can understand in order to change the fabric of our society is the way we change the world.⁹Yes, I’m aware that I left out a clause here from the original sentence I’m mirroring. I’m still struggling with the ideas of influence, persuasion, and coercion when it comes to politics and social construction. Part of the larger political field is convincing people that a specific policy is the better solution to vote for than some other policy. I just have a personal struggle getting there; hence, while the Heritage Foundation had no problems convincing people their way was “right” with falsehoods and warped information, I do struggle with it. Sue me.

You were listening up there, right?

But before I can convince you of a solution—which I am not here to do today—I have to convince you there is a problem and how to frame the problem in a way that makes sense …

“in a language that [you] can understand.”

I’m a theologian. I’m a psychologist. I’m a professor. You can put all those together and figure out that I’m not a very good bullshitter (despite the Far Right’s slanderous attempt to portray two of the three fields as filthy liberal strongholds).¹⁰If you want that kind of bullshit, go listen to a couple of Frater Entelecheia’s 19th-century New Thought updated to New Age poorly masquerading as Thelema videos over on YouTube. I can talk theology and psychology and several other very specific fields of study—and I will—until I’m blue in the face. Because that’s what I’m good at. And I’ve made my career in a couple of those fields.

But what I want to convince you here is that Thelema demands more than that in the real world.

Armchair occultists—no matter how intelligent, how prolific, how published—have zero impact in the real world.¹¹And this is despite my defense of the ‘armchair magician’ elsewhere. I have a specific defense somewhere in my archives for the academic and the activist, but it doesn’t cover the dilettante.

Also, by “real world,” I mean the world in which we live rather than the purely intellectual world of armchair theories and online maybes.

Thelemites, on the other hand, hold the key to change in their hands if they will just wake up and engage with the real world outside their faux leather special edition money grabs.

But I also want to convince you that you can affect the real world by taking action.

Magick is the Science and Art of causing Change to occur in conformity with Will.¹²Crowley, Aleister, Mary Desti, and Leila Waddell. 1997. Magick: Liber ABA. Edited by Hymenaeus Beta. Weiser Books, 126.

I don’t think people really pay attention to these instructions anymore. They read them, listen to other people dismiss them as just a set of theorems that Crowley wrote in his “scientism phase,” and put them aside.

ANY required change may be effected by the application of the proper kind and degree of Force in the proper manner, through the proper medium to the proper object.¹³Crowley, Magick, 126.

Changing the world (ANY required change) starts with changing the fabric of our own society (application of the proper kind and degree of Force) by using language (through the proper medium) that can be understood (in the proper manner) by the common individual (to the proper object).

I’m afraid I can’t apologize if this isn’t woo-woo enough. Practical magick—magick that adheres to precisely what Crowley taught magick to be—isn’t about waving your damn wand in the air like you just don’t care. Magick about living in the trenches of life and what we do about it.

But here’s the thing: you can’t do it alone. No matter what those Neo-Nietzschean knuckle-draggers are trying to convince you, you aren’t going to change the world by your little ol’lonesome.

It’s going to take more of us.

Addressing Wicked Problems

Given their complexity, wicked problems cannot be solved by traditional top-down approaches. Effective responses require (a) collaboration, (b) adaptive management, and (c) innovative thinking. People and groups have to work across disciplines and ideological boundaries to co-create solutions, accepting that their efforts will likely be iterative and ongoing.

I think it is important to reiterate that efforts to solve wicked problems can be multi-generational, it’s an “iterative and ongoing” aspect of the solution process. If we take the Strauss–Howe generational theory and use their definition of a generation (approximately 21 years¹⁴I would round this off to 22 years just to make it in line with a Thelemic docosade because I like the irony, nothing more—while noting that in the list of Strauss-Howe’s generations, they are erratic in length and span anywhere from 17 to 30 years.), then some of our wicked problems have been ongoing for six or seven generations already.

My goal in even breaching the subject is to show that such problems have been, and still are, a catalyst for other groups to mobilize, politically, in shaping the future of this country (and the world) through policy endeavors that are framed as social concerns, whether out of religious fervor or policy outrage, but are vaporware in reality. They have no actual ability to solve such issues but use them, simplified, as scare tactics to affect social perception.

But also I want to show that these are problems to consider in the first place. Crowley was already considering them. And they are topics that everyday people want to hear about. That’s evident that they are still flash topics that move people to vote and get angry on social media.

The Heritage Foundation and Wicked Problems

The Heritage Foundation has significantly shaped the politics and policy of the United States. With its strategic focus on advancing conservative values, the organization has often reframed complex, wicked problems into more narrowly defined cultural or ideological conflicts. This reframing consolidates its political agenda while mobilizing support among its base.

In recent years, the Heritage Foundation has been accused of using social progressive memes—or, rather, attacking social progressive issues by exaggerating them to the level of memes—to distract public attention from its broader objectives of consolidating institutional power.

The Heritage Foundation’s approach to wicked problems often involves reframing them as issues of morality, personal responsibility, or cultural identity.

Just a couple of examples:

1. Climate Change: Instead of engaging with the systemic and scientific complexities of climate change, the Heritage Foundation has often framed the issue as an economic threat, emphasizing both the real and perceived costs of environmental regulation rather than the long-term risks of inaction. This reframing shifts the debate from global environmental stewardship to perceived individual freedoms and market dynamics. Rather than seeing the complexity of a both/and wicked problem, the Heritage Foundation has played the either/or scenario and utilized an emotional position rather than a rational position to sway Conservative voters into illogical and environmentally disastrous positions while taunting Liberal voters into even more extreme (and equally illogical and emotional) positions as a counterbalance.

2. Systemic Racism: The Heritage Foundation has frequently contested the idea that systemic racism is a pervasive structural issue, instead portraying discussions of racial inequality as divisive or anti-American. This narrative reframes a wicked problem requiring systemic change into a cultural grievance over “critical race theory” or “wokeness.” One of the most successful social campaigns was changing the cultural definition of “woke,” a specifically African-American English term related to political and social issues directly related to African Americans. It had been around since the 1930s. Changing it to mean nearly the opposite of its original intent was a coup of epic proportions. The original meaning is toast. Its association with ‘performative online outrage’ and performative activism is solidified in the cultural consciousness of both Conservative and Liberal voters, especially after the 2024 election cycle. There is no putting that genie back in the bottle. While I can’t put this directly on the front steps of the Heritage Foundation, there are enough tentacles that lead to their backdoor and suggest many of their policies revolved around encouraging and redirecting how language was used in policy documents, government speeches, and conservative academia in order to start affecting that change, including using “woke” out of original context and as a pejorative.

3. Public Health: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Heritage Foundation resisted broad public health measures like mask mandates and vaccination requirements. It framed these policies as infringements on (again) perceived individual liberty, sidelining the broader systemic challenges of managing a global health crisis. Whatever we may think of the government response to COVID-19, what we do know is the Far-Right response was absurd and overblown. Even if we concede the global response went too far out of an abundance of caution, a desire to be a “nanny state,” or even a totalitarian streak to play God with people’s lives, the screeching from the Far-Right was abysmal and based on faulty logic, disastrous error, and unscientific bullshit. [Frankly, we lost far more “rights” under Bush Jr in the aftermath of 9/11 than we did under Trump/Biden with COVID-19.¹⁵And the Far-Right needs to keep in mind the whole initial COVID-19 fumble was under Trump’s policies. Suck it.] But it was this Heritage Foundation framing of perceived rights and government overreach that caused more panic, more deaths, and more challenge to finding solutions than COVID-19 itself.

Generally, I don’t want to focus on the Heritage Foundation any more than to point out what they did and how they did it. And then move on. The point is: look at what they accomplished. They created chaos in society. But the point wasn’t to create chaos. That was the cover. The point was to distract the body of society so we wouldn’t notice while they put into place functionaries who would interpret the laws by which our society is held together and change those laws they deemed incompatible with their moral vision of a United States under theocratic dominionism.

And then they did it.

They are quite open about this too.

That’s what galls me. They didn’t hide their intentions. But they were so good at creating change according to their Will that it was like watching … magick.

The Heritage Foundation’s reframing tactics illustrate the challenges of addressing wicked problems in a polarized political environment. When complex issues are reduced to ideological soundbites, opportunities for collaboration and innovative problem-solving are diminished. This dynamic not only perpetuates wicked problems but can also exacerbate them by fostering division and inaction. Then nothing is accomplished but the partisan undertow that carries away any sense of rational politics ahead of us.

Conclusion—For Now

Wicked problems require nuanced, collaborative approaches. However, organizations like the Heritage Foundation have demonstrated the power of reframing these challenges as cultural conflicts to distract from their broader political objectives that are at odds with a functioning and stable society.

As an introduction, I’m not proposing solutions or even actionable processes here. My goal was to introduce wicked problems overall to show what I feel are the larger stakes in social, economic, and political concerns while also showing that focusing on wicked problems can be an advantage—even in the hands of those we may not want to have that advantage.

Yet I will say I think it’s time to propose our own think-tank, and then work it as legitimately as any other out there. Stop cosplaying wizards and start shaping reality.

It’s nifty to talk about Enochian Watchtowers and “call upon angels” in your living room or your mommy’s basement.

It’s an entirely different level of magician who advises Queens and changes the world.

Love is the law, love under will.