Raymond G. Plum on Why Simple Things Are Difficult: An Alternative Look at Society

About a decade ago, my grandparents got into a minor car accident while on holiday in the New Forest when a bull ran into their car. The bull was unharmed, the car less so, so they called their insurance company to make a claim for the repairs. This resulted in an absurd half hour during which the person taking their call repeatedly asked for the name and address of the other party involved in the accident, until my grandpa relented with, “Mr. Bull, New Forest.”

“They couldn’t step out of the process and say, ‘What’s the solution here? Because, quite blatantly, this bull does not have an address,’” laughs Raymond G. Plum when I tell him this story. “They didn’t think, or they weren’t independent enough to realise, that they were talking to a person about a situation that had no answer to this computer question. So how do you work around it?”

Plum is the author of Why Simple Things Are Difficult: An Alternative Look at Society, a new book that explores ‘the frustrations and flaws of our supposedly affluent, efficient, caring modern society’ – and not only imagines how things might be better, but puts this imagination into practice by donating all proceeds to a selection of charities, including the Big Issue North Trust.

Since my grandparents’ incident, things have gone from mad to worse, with artificial intelligence chatbot systems increasing the difficulty of getting through to a human being to solve what should be a simple problem. Such issues, along with meaningless language, an unviable obsession with ‘improvement’ and a capitalist financial and political system that is fundamentally at odds with a fair and caring society sit at the heart of Plum’s book.

“Initially, there was no intention to write a book,” he says, “I just started to question why I was finding things more frustrating now than a decade ago. Was it me just getting old and grumpy or were things really getting more difficult?

“The book covers a wide range of themes, including language, feedback, information, people, finance, business, technology, and democracy, but the original concept of the book was just to moan about some of the modern-day problems and frustrations, the things that I and many others moan about a lot of the time.

“The book is my attempt at understanding why things are as they are, asking whether it is me, other people, technology, money or our society. Naturally, it is a mixture of all, and so this began to expand the scope and theme of the book to cover different aspect of society.”

Throughout the book, Plum stresses the particularity of his perspective – he is an engineer, and uses tables, graphs and formulas to elucidate his analytical approach to his subject matter. But his conclusions chime with those of more abstract thinkers. In his 2009 monograph, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative?, the late great cultural critic Mark Fisher noted a ‘persistence of bureaucracy in late capitalism’ and that ‘organizations are so fixated on making profits that they can’t actually sell you anything’ – both issues that Plum highlights. In his influential work on semiotics, Symbolic Exchange and Death, meanwhile, philosopher Jean Baudrillard described a process by which ‘serial repetition’ produces a cultural state in which signifiers – such as words or currencies – refer not to actual objects, but to previous signifiers, and so become increasingly emptied of their original meanings.

Plum likewise notes both a proliferation of meaningless language in the workplace in particular, such as the superfluous phrase ‘in a timely manner’, and of money, which began as a means of lubricating transactions (so that, for instance, a vegetable farmer would not have to carry carrots with them at all times to exchange for other goods and services) and now exists as numbers on screens essentially plucked from thin air that govern every aspect of our lives.

“Once the scope of the book had evolved and expanded, it started to explore many of the wider issues of society – why education, hospitals and prisons are underfunded and why our society really struggles to support, fund and care for the homeless, elderly and terminally ill. This naturally led to the topics of money, tax and economy, et cetera,” Plum says.

This complements Big Issue North’s work. “Without focusing on homelessness specifically, the book does highlight and examine these types of problems and flaws within our current society. In this respect, the book does attempt to highlight similar social problems to Big Issue North and other charities, and by donating the profits from sales, the books tries to help those who suffer as a consequence.”

As well as raising funds that will help us to support current and future vendors to earn an independent income and transform their lives, Plum hopes that his book will open people’s eyes to the snags – and glaring holes – in our social fabric, and help them to consider how things might work differently. “What I wanted the book to achieve was a allow people to see society from a different angle – to see it for what it really is, rather than just accept it.

“Because we’re all deep in it, we all just accept what’s around us and that that’s the way it is and there is no alternative. We’re kind of blind to it, really. I just wanted people to see the blindness – to see the fact that they don’t see, like the person on the phone asking for the address of a bull. They don’t see the reality – don’t see that there is no address for a bull!”

Why Simple Things Are Difficult: An Alternative Look at Society is available from Waterstones and Amazon.