I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail.”
— Abraham Maslow, 1966
He meant something simple but 100% true:
If you only have one frame, you only see one cause.
Not because the world is that simple,
but because your own toolkit is that simple.
If you put on one dominant lens — one enemy image, one central problem, one all-explaining narrative — then everything automatically gets pinned on it, even when it doesn’t fit.
The first hammer: the climate story
Today almost every phenomenon — storm, fire, traffic jam, too much rain, too little rain, rising prices, falling prices, rising migration, falling biodiversity — is automatically framed as evidence of “the climate crisis”.
It doesn’t matter what actually happens,
it doesn’t even matter whether it has gotten worse.
The problem is not that climate change isn’t an issue.
The single hammer prevents nuance and critical thinking and stops us from looking at all the real causes of a lot of problems.
The second hammer: Russia
If a problem doesn’t fit into the climate story, there is always the other universal explanation: “The Russians”.
Cyber incident? Russians.
Unidentified drone? Russians.
Rising energy prices? Russians.
It is the same scenario:
one hammer that conveniently reduces every problem to one narrative that happens to be politically very useful.
When a state that structurally functions poorly — with failing infrastructure, runaway budgets, backward justice, failed migration policy, etc., etc. — needs a simple enemy,
then it really helps a lot.
Because if all the blame lies with CO₂ or Putin, nobody has to ask why our own governments are failing, why money disappears, why infrastructure is rotting, why crime is exploding, or why trust is evaporating.
That is the great advantage of the single hammer: it makes you understand everything without having to solve anything.
Maslow’s warning is more relevant today than ever:
A society that only has two hammers ends up with a world full of artificial nails.
We need debate about multiple causes, multiple perspectives.
As long as we keep allowing every crisis to be reduced to one cliché cause,
we are giving politicians exactly what they need most: an excuse not to govern.