In this week's Outside the Box we have a unique diagnosis of Europe's ills from … a medical doctor. The author is Dr. Luc De Keyser, who currently serves as the chief medical information officer at Xperthis, the largest provider of hospital information systems solutions in Belgium. He has done pioneering work in multicenter clinical trials, medical ontologies, paleonutrition, and examining human conflict from an evolutionary perspective.

Dr. De Keyser (writing for Stratfor) is not sanguine about Europe's future. There are times, he reminds us, when a doctor has to make the tough call and conclude that the patient's case is simply without hope. It's a painful diagnosis and not one that the doctor enjoys sharing with the patient. But at some point the patient must be told.

The fundamental obstacle to solving Europe's problems, he asserts, is that Europe is simply too complex to fix in any straightforward or dependable way:

For such problems, there are no simple solutions. There aren't even complicated solutions. There are only best-guess measures with no guarantees of success. The currency union's underlying flaws, like so many other modern problems, are far too intricate and perplexing for our minds and institutions to cope with. Failing to admit to our own overconfidence in dealing with the bloc's problems will only perpetuate the crisis playing out across Europe.

Our poor human brains, the good doctor says, simply aren't built to cope with a sociopolitical entity as big and complex as Europe. One thing we not-so-evolved apes like to do is interpret information in a way that confirms our preconceived notions. This is called confirmation bias, and in simpler times it kept us out of harm's way by encouraging preferences for things we knew to be safe. This is a limitation that afflicts economists right along with the rest of us. And so we see, for example, Wolfgang Schäuble, finance minister of Germany, and Yanis Varofakis, former finance minister of Greece, obstinately pushing diametrically opposed economic programs. Which is OK, says Dr. De Keyser, until people on both sides start to claim that adherence to the other guy's economic school of thought is going to ruin the livelihoods of millions of people.