One of the most important physicists who ever lived, Isaac Newton, told us, that “Truth is ever to be found in simplicity, and not in the multiplicity and confusion of things.” After him, Albert Einstein wrote, “Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler.”
Physics is a very complicated subject. Newton and Einstein are two of the smartest people who ever lived, and yet, they both emphasized the importance of simplicity. And any person can see why. If you discover a complicated fact about reality and you want to communicate it to people, so that they may benefit from your insight, you should try to explain it in the simplest way possible.
When a child asks you a question, you don’t use the biggest words you can find, but the simplest words. When Jesus wanted to communicate his message to people, he didn’t use obscure references that only he and a few others knew about, he used parables. Moses used ten commandments, not a hundred aphorisms.
The virtue of keeping thing straight to the point is a key to good business writing. When the stakes are high, you don’t want to get misunderstood. Where do we see complicated language? When someone is trying to hide something., like “terms and conditions”, or a college essay written by a student who doesn’t have anything important to say. As W.C Fields said, “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit.”
In Understanding Power, Chomsky had a very simple criticism of Marxism, you don’t see “isms” in the sciences. No one subscribes to “Einsteinianism” or “Planckianism” or anything like that. People aren’t gods. They get some things right. They get some things wrong. And next time, they try to improve. While “Darwinism” and “Newtonianism” exist, people don’t think that these are doctrines you should be loyal to. A more rational way of assessing Marx’s ideas is to learn from the insightful things he had to say, and ignore the things he got wrong.
Biologists and physicists don’t accept any ideas as dogma but try to improve, or even replace previous theories with better ones. Chomsky concludes that these “isms” only show up in irrational domains. So any psychologist who is a Freudian or a Jungian is, on some level, spewing bullshit. In philosophy, people who claim to be specialists in post-structuralism or post-modernism, or in the theories of Derida or Lacan are also suspect.
Chomsky isn’t saying that none of these theories in the social sciences or philosophy have anything important to say, but the fact that they use obscure words and have “followers” who treat their “masters” like gods are not encouraging signs. Obscurity is often mistaken for depth.