Self-necessitating problems

Closing on my new house today, I lost myself in piles of papers and details, which I let my wife inspect more closely and question as appropriate. And I was appreciative of my being married to a detail-oriented person, because I am a big-picture guy who is easily annoyed by detail people, occasionally including my wife.

This thinking brought my mind to the topic of armies. The only reason one country needs an army is because another country has one. So, there are two types of armies: the actor, or offensive army, which was formed to go out and do harm, and the reactor, or defensive army, which is then formed to solve the problems created by the former. The same theory holds true to a lot of concepts, like lawyers. You only need a lawyer because, in our complicated legal framework, your opponent will hire one. If you both went in and argued for yourselves, everyone would save many dollars.

Detail people are exactly the same way. We only need our detail people because there are evil ones roaming the countryside like Barbary pirates just looking to take advantage of a high concept man like myself.

Think of how much better the world would be if it were entirely populated by easy-going big-picture thinkers who didn't get bogged down in minutia. Nobody would care if your socks matched at business meetings, they would only care about business. Contracts could be one page. No one would try to confuse you with technical jargon, they would just supply service. We'd probably have a flat-tax, too.

Would quality suffer? Maybe somewhat. But we'd all be prepared for it, and understanding when problems occured. Fixing mistakes may happen more often, but would be much more relaxed, less combative, more satisfying, and generally less frustrating.

I think we'd all live longer.