More is Less

There are many “pairs” in the world, ranging from the human (Adam and Eve) to the natural world (night and day) to those cool little candies (M and M).

Way back in the mid-50’s, Sammy Cahn (lyrics) and Jimmy Van Heusen (music) wrote a song called Love And Marriage, recorded by Frank Sinatra. Part of the lyrics are:

Love and marriage, love and marriage
Go together like a horse and carriage
This I tell you, brother
You can’t have one without the other

Even if you beg to differ, the line “you can’t have one without the other” often applies to famous pairs. Romeo without Juliet? Tristan without Isolde? Beauty without the Beast? Of course those are all love stories, keeping with the sentiment of the song.

All kinds of pairs come to my mind, and probably to yours. Some of those pairs, when examined, can be separated. Some depend on each other. One of those pairs is “more” and “less.” Their interdependence is seen in the way we often find them together, not with an and but with an or.

I confess that when someone says “more or less,” I often think about a grave marker in a Tombstone, Arizona, cemetery. (Bet you didn’t see that coming!)

Now called Boot Hill Graveyard, though it wasn’t the first Boot Hill, it became the final resting place for three men killed in the shootout at the O. K. Corral.

It also became the final resting place for a man named Lester Moore. It is his grave marker I think of, and it reads,

Here lies
Lester Moore
Four slugs from a .44
No less — no more.

Is less really more?

The well-known phrase “less is more” is credited to poet Robert Browning, who has an artist speak it in the dramatic monologue Andrea del Sarto. Fifty years later, architect Mies van der Rohe had made the phrase famous. Coco Chanel added to that in a practical way, apparently saying, “Before you leave the house, look in the mirror and take at least one thing off.”

If the phrase is useful in art, architecture and fashion, is it useful everywhere?

For that matter, is it even true?

By definition, it cannot be literally true. Less is less. More is more.

What could be true is that “more” is “too much,” ruining the effect of the whole. But we’re talking about the arts.

What about starting a company — let’s say one that will be in the business of Artificial Intelligence? I just saw that SoftBank is considering an investment in the company OpenAI, makers of ChatGPT. The investment could be as much as $25,000,000,000. Should OpenAI say, “Twenty-five billion is too much, because less is more. So how about $2.5 billion instead?”

Even if the thought of “less is more” occurred to them, I’m here to guarantee you they aren’t turning down a single penny.

Interestingly, a rival company based in China has just turned Artificial Intelligence on its Artificial Ear. And they did it with fewer and less highly trained engineers, fewer and less robust computer chips, and in less time.

That company is called DeepSeek, and Pat Gelsinger (former CEO of Intel) said, “The Chinese engineers had limited resources, and they had to find creative solutions.”

What “less is more” often means

In this case, and in many instances, the phrase really means that less of one thing yields (or forces) more of another thing.

At DeepSeek, less resources led to more creativity.

Boy do I get that! And probably so do you.

Of course the quintessential illustration of that principle is McGyver. He was a fictional TV character, played from 1985 – 1992 by Richard Dean Anderson, and from 2016 – 2021 by Lucas Till.

It is McGyver’s very creative use of common items that makes him special. He has less, and he turns it into more. We watch those shows, and we want to be McGyver. At least we want to be creative like him, and maybe even a little heroic.

In fact you can find dozens of web sites or blog posts that will tell you how to do that. No, not turn a can of window cleaner into a smoke bomb, but how to put yourself in a mindset of reducing your resources.

“Reduce the amount of furniture you have” advises at least one site, and give yourself more space. They suggest you might use the newly open floor space for yoga, but I was thinking about an indoor driving range. Would that count as furniture?

One site advocated “less mopping for more achieving.” I’m pretty sure they meant less moping, but it works either way.

When more is less

To be fair, all of the less is more lists I found had some good suggestions. Less social media for more self-esteem, for instance, and less talking for more listening.

In all of our lives there are things we should have less of. With some of those, the benefit is all but automatic. Like the less social media suggestion, for instance. But often just getting rid of things is a benefit in itself. And if you give it away, maybe another person benefits as well.

But my title is not less is more, it is more is less, and the pair I think of often are not lovers, but “good and evil.”

“The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” This quote, usually attributed to Edmund Burke, is true no matter who said it.

The reason for the existence of Do Good U is to bring more good into the world. We are not trying to eradicate evil, though we’d love to, but we are certainly trying hard to keep it from any sort of triumph. It gets those far too often.

What can we do? We can do good, because more good is less evil. It is not even a one-for-one ratio, because good is powerful. But it is only powerful when wielded. You, my friend, can help us prove that more is less.

Do good. It’s in you.