The goals described so far are ambitious. Our imagined psychohistorian will build a grand theory—an entirely new worldview. Our eventual recommendations for action will derive from that vision. That raises the burning question: why should the reader trust the story?
If a skeptical reader doubts such ambitious goals are achievable with any kind of accuracy, he (or she) may doubt if the story is worth the effort to even read.
After all, I have none of the academic training or credentials which would normally give a reader confidence in my achieving goals of such breadth or ambition. To say nothing of the modern discipline of verification for these sorts of things. “Do you even FRED bro?” is the new favorite side-eye. Sadly, I don’t. So why believe I could be right?
“I am… self-taught!”
The insouciant answer to this question: the same way one should believe Moana could sail. Early on in her movie, the demigod whom she has just drawn into danger has a horrible revelation: “You can’t sail.” Of course, following the movie trope, he puts her through a lightning training montage. By the end, she is zipping around impressively. So we should believe she could pick it all up just like that?
For all her crazy-fast level-up, the movie doesn’t pretend Moana ever attains real competence. It is this fundamental honesty that gives it true children’s movie greatness. In the beginning of the movie we see her clinging helplessly to an overturned raft. In the middle, we see it again. And in the big final fight… there she is again, dead in the water. Helpless.
One wonders if any amount of leveling-up could have saved her from that fate. The canoe she stole from her island was built, like a kayak, to flip back over after capsizing. That move requires a crew with a certain collective heft. Moana is a petite sixteen-year-old girl: generously, a hundred pounds. She is fundamentally too lightweight to handle the boat she stole. No amount of crazy training can fix that sad fact.
So why did she win her fight? The story doesn’t pretend it was any kind of crazy level-up. Her new skill has entertainment value: it is fun to watch her zip around. But nobody claims that’s why she wins. This modesty is remarkable for a kid’s movie.
What does win the fight? As was inevitable from the beginning, she ends up helplessly dead in the water. But then Maui swoops in. He wouldn’t have intervened—or even been there—if she hadn’t gone in first. In other words, her fool’s errand, her inevitable ignominious failure, has only one goal: to get the fearful demigod off his island, out of his self-pitying helplessness, and into the fray.
Into the Fray
Our era is similarly equipped with demigods of intellect, historical understanding, and political skill. Their reaction to the challenges of a new economy inspires my casting. They bring to mind Maui’s fearful helplessness. They think they can’t.
Like Maui, they seem stuck on their butts on a desert island. Bereft by loss of boat and magic fish-hook, they can’t muster a fighting will. Even when the thing to be defended is American democracy, they sit out the fray. Like Moana, I am all but driven mad by impatient fury.
Conservatism has lost its heart. The driving force of this narrative is not a mere thesis about truth. That would be too wimpy for our team of heroines; too passive. Instead, it is a mad impatience: “Restore the heart!” It is a will to fight; a hunger for action.
Science’s Way
But why deprecate the search for truth? Science has a way of doing things. Why not just go along with it?
Because the full “scientific discipline” involves a long, long period of refusing to look. My dad pushed at me a model of scientific heroism: the scientists who fought for the theory of plate tectonics. The first suggestion that continents might drift was made in 1915. It sparked a many-decade war between the “fixers” and the “drifters.” It was only in 1965, when microscopic magnetic analysis of rocks made the drifters’ position undeniable, that the opposition finally rested their case.
The thought of such a protracted fight terrifies. There is a fundamental difference between physical sciences and social sciences. In geology, the volcano doesn’t listen to what you say about it. It won’t throw lava at you because your theory makes it mad. The fixers’ adamant refusal to look at the world doesn’t affect the world they gaze upon. The continents didn’t refuse to drift because scientists didn’t believe they could.
In the social sciences, it doesn’t work that way. As Nietzsche said: “when you gaze into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”
Gaze Into The Abyss…
At the eve of the last election, Tucker Carlson gave a speech. It explained why so many people voted for Donald Trump. He made it specific: he described a Midwest Pennsylvania town named Butler, site of a recent Trump rally. As Carlson put it: “Pictures of the rally site showed a sea of people obscuring the horizon, the kind of image you would see of a visit from the pope.” With surprising self-awareness, Carlson poses a puzzle:
The questions still hung in the air. Why did all those people come? They must have known that Donald Trump is the most evil man who has ever lived. They’ve heard that every day for five years… Only losers and freaks support Donald Trump. People in Butler knew all of that. But on Saturday, they went to the Donald Trump rally, anyway. Why exactly did they do that? We should be pondering that question deeply as we watch Tuesday night’s returns and as we live through the aftermath of them.
And he gives a devastating answer:
Millions of Americans sincerely love Donald Trump. They love him in spite of everything they’ve heard.… They’re not deluded. They know exactly who Trump is. They love him anyway… Whatever Donald Trump’s faults, he is better than the rest of the people in charge. At least he doesn’t hate them for their weakness. Trump rose because they failed. It’s as simple as that.… If the people in charge had done a halfway decent job with the country they inherited, if they cared about anything other than themselves, even for just a moment, Donald Trump would still be hosting “Celebrity Apprentice.” But they didn’t. Instead, they were incompetent and narcissistic and cruel and relentlessly dishonest. They wrecked what they didn’t build, and they lied about it. They hurt anyone who told the truth about what they were doing. That’s all true. We all watched. America is still a great country, the best in the world. But our ruling class is disgusting. A vote for Trump is a vote against them.
Suppose I undertake to play the part of a 1915 geologist drifter: a brave challenger to the scientific orthodoxy. Suppose I propose a scientific hypothesis about the suffering of the “large numbers of people in Butler [who] started killing themselves with narcotics.” Suppose I then brace for a fifty-year fight against the curmudgeonly cabal of fixers who defend their scientific orthodoxy. Observing the debate, what would Tucker Carlson say?
And The Abyss Gazes…
He will say, as he has already said: “they hurt anyone who told the truth about what they were doing… we all watched. [They are] disgusting.”
The problem isn’t that I can’t handle a good, old-fashioned, disciplined 50-year scientific debate. It’s that they can’t. Nor should anyone who honestly observes the world expect that they would. Social science just isn’t like physical science. It can’t rely on the indefinite forbearance of the boiling lava of rage some social scientists might refuse to observe. It can’t wait forever until forced by overwhelming peer-reviewed evidence.
Now, I’m not claiming it is completely different. I’m not rejecting everything about the “discipline of science.” Thinking clearly, articulating and examining our assumptions, daring to follow our logic where it leads and as far as it leads—that applies to social science just as well as to physics. Being someone whose early personality was shaped by the discussions at Tjalling Koopman’s dining table, I could never countenance such a rejection.
Also Into You.
The convention from hard science that we can’t follow is the burden of proof. An established geologist might say “that’s a nice hunch you have there, but I’m not going to pay attention until you find compelling empirical evidence.” That’s good intellectual discipline. An economist saying the same thing now is a terrible public stance. We aren’t looking at an unknowing geological formation. We are staring into an abyss of human misery tinged with bitter humiliation. We are looking at the feelings, as Kristof recently memorably chronicled, of a mother who has lost all five (!) of her children to the ravages of a collapsing economic base. And such devastation is multiplied many times over. It has coalesced into rage so deep that rage becomes a force unto itself.
Looking into such an abyss of despair, the question to answer is not merely “what is truth?” One can’t forget that such an abyss looks back into you. And it demands an answer to a more painful, more peremptory question. That is: “why should we believe that you care?”
In other words, the “truth”, in an exacting, scientific sense, is necessary. But it is not sufficient. In perilous times, a more exacting discipline is required. We have to be aware of the momentum of history. We have to feel—and show—an urgency of understanding. We must know the topology of a train track so we can set a switch properly before a train barrels past the decision point.
Our urgency must be driven by an awareness of a gaze that looks back upon us. If we fail, they will be carried forward helplessly to a terrible fate. And they will look back at our failure to set the switch correctly, and their eyes will show only bitterness and reproach. That they don’t know exactly how to articulate the nature of that failure doesn’t make it better. It makes it worse.
Articulating isn’t their job. Understanding isn’t their job. It is ours. Lack of explanation merely heightens the betrayal. A question hangs in the air. It isn’t “what is truth?” The time for languidly debating that question is past. That time should have been before we even arrived at the switch. Not now that we are upon it.
The question now is: “why should we believe you care?” And the further question: “if you could fail us so bitterly in driving this train, why should we allow you to continue to direct it?”
This question may be utterly nihilist. Carlson’s followers threaten to replace the hand on the switch with a candidate who couldn’t possibly be an improvement. They choose an obvious psychopath. Such a choice doesn’t make anything better for anyone.
The abyss doesn’t care. Talking to it about the wrongness of its self-destructive impulses doesn’t help either. It only further convinces them that the hand on the switch must be replaced at any cost. Why? Because legitimate leadership would know to ask a better question.
Describing Without Doing…
Like an angry toddler, an angry public isn’t interested in theory. One can’t explain to a hangry toddler that a drink and a snack would make them happy again. On the contrary, such an explanation is likely to make them more angry. It only underlines the dereliction of duty if one explains to them their deprivation while also being pathetically empty-handed. There is nothing for it but to have the snack and sippy cup, easily on hand and ready to ply. Nothing less than that is good enough.
We return to the image of Moana paddling around helplessly under the lava monster’s baleful gaze. This book is about “restoring the heart.” In other words, giving this incarnation of fury the thing it needs to be whole again.
I’ve already sketched the idea: it is the digital economy’s analog of Konrad Adenauer’s feat. He created a new political framework which rebalanced the social contract. Also—critically—his party created a new emotional symbol: the Trümmerfrauen. They built a new mythology. They rebranded a status that would previously have been considered the depth of humiliation and resold it as a source of pride—and unity.
This book will slowly and carefully build out an analogy from which we can read what a similar effort would look like in our own time. We will read off both the dry institutional business of it. Even more critically, we will also look for the emotional core. One depends on the other; but it is the latter which more anxiously concerns me. That rebranding is what it means to “restore the heart.”
It is something I can describe. But I cannot do it. Describing is not doing. Explaining to a kid the effects of their thirst is not handing them a sippy cup. Only the actual cup is good enough. The explanation risks making everything worse.
… Is Dangerous.
Describing without doing is dangerous. It will not mollify the lava monster. It will only make it more angry. If Tucker Carlson reads my story, it won’t change his mind that “the ruling class is disgusting.” It will only give him language to detail even more brutally how we are “incompetent and narcissistic and cruel and relentlessly dishonest.” No matter how well we rise to a challenge, for someone like Carlson the glass will always be half-empty. Even if we explain that it is the most difficult problem in human history, Carlson will not relent. Or, as I will quote “wise old Alexis” later:1
Only a great genius can save a prince who undertakes to relieve his subjects after a long oppression. The evil, which was suffered patiently as inevitable, seems unendurable as soon as the idea of escaping from it is conceived.
This is often summarized pithily: “revolutions happen not when things are bad, but when things are getting better—but not fast enough.” That makes it perilous to try to make things better. The only way to do it safely is to ensure one also does it fast enough.
That’s why I need swooping and saving. I can’t, by myself, ensure that any kind of happening happens at any kind of speed. It would take many, many lifetimes of expertise to just have everything to mollify this lava monster. Not to mention having it on hand and ready to go. I don’t have it, not even close. I “alone” can’t fix it. No way. Not a chance. I need help.
A Limited Goal
The goal of this book is call in the help I need. It is also to refrain from doing anything else. Even that goal alone makes for a seriously unwieldy tome. Adding in a concern for perfection in argumentation would make it even less accessible.
“Restore the heart” is a simple image. But when I unpack my concept of it, it will become apparent that doing it involves creativity informed by massive expertise in many different areas simultaneously. It needs fearless confidence in technology, economics, law, politics and journalism. Also, even more, branding and marketing. All at the same time.
Tucker Carlson may not admit it, but the problem with the our ruling classes is not that we are “disgusting.” It is that we are specialized. We have confident experts in all these areas. But no one is confident in them all at the same time. And mollifying his rage requires coordination of expertise. For all our myriad impressive expertise, that is a skill we collectively lack. I understand that the populace that funds our impressive collection of expertise is furious that we end up so collectively helpless. But coordinating is another skill entirely.
So this book wishes to motivate and coordinate experts. But it only seeks to motivate and coordinate. Other than that, it doesn’t wish to assert expertise in anything at all.
(Perhaps we should make an exception for the original observation about technology which starts it all. But, as we will see, it is an almost crazily simple observation. The only expertise involved is in the confidence to assert something so simple. But in the spirit of Krugman’s adage “dare to be silly,” perhaps that is key. I’m an engineer who dared to be silly. That’s all, my only actual expertise. The rest is Moana-style level-up fakery, which following Disney’s laudable example, we don’t pretend is by itself enough to save the day.)
There is one problem with such a strategy: how can I motivate the experts who do “truth” while avoiding any assertion of expertise in “truth?” Such a mission has an inherent absurdity. One can’t simultaneously assert a story is true and also assert one doesn’t want to be hassled about being “good at truth.” It is the one area of expertise impossible to delegate.
Impossible To Delegate?
“Truth” is impossible to delegate. Or is it? When asked to defend why my story is true, I am tempted to reply: “of course it isn’t. So what?” Such a reply might stagger someone steeped in worship of academic discipline. How can you challenge the academic consensus about truth with a story you don’t assert is even true? Doesn’t the legitimacy of that consensus rest on the assertion that it is the most carefully checked and tested expression of truth out there? And the only way to dethrone it is to offer a challenge which matches or exceeds its level of care and testing?
Or does it? Tucker Carlson complains not just that we are “incompetent and narcissistic and cruel.” He also calls us “relentlessly dishonest.” How can he say that of academic truth that is so tested and honed?
We may observe that the discipline of science is useful for testing a hypothesis’s truth. And for clarifying it. But it is not good for finding the true hypothesis in the first place. For that purpose, it is not only less than helpful—it can also be actively harmful. Krugman explained this difficulty in “The Evolution of Ignorance,” a beautiful essay we will describe in more depth later. He says: “during the process of model-building, there is a narrowing of vision imposed by the limitations of one’s framework and tools.”
In other words, scientific expertise doesn’t allow people to see the truth more clearly. Sometimes it makes them blind. And not just passively blind, but actively so. Notably, Krugman says that “narrowing that can only be ended definitively by making those tools good enough to transcend those limitations.”
That points to an action that would help scientists find their truth. It is quite distinct from asserting one knows that truth. A person with an intimacy with the word-on-the-street, paired with a “sense of sense,” may find the expert’s “truth” shockingly blinkered. In such a situation, we could look at that “narrowing of vision” and ask: “what limitations of their framework and tools” are causing it? What is needed to make “those tools good enough” to transcended the limitations? Suggesting an improvement of tools allows one to point in the direction those improved tools dictate. That way, it is possible to point toward truth. But one can stop short of actually finding it.
Challenging the Crab
I am anxious not to fight about truth. In particular, I don’t want to do it while The Abyss is watching. Why? Expertise is challenged by “sense.” And people’s “sense” of our expert-tested truth is that it feels dishonest. It feels like the looted hook that the crab Tamatoa had stolen away to Lalotai, the realm of monsters. As far as his monstrous purposes were concerned, it was just another trophy to display on his shell. He had no interest in its magic. It was just shiny. Tamatoa used it to lure fish for his dinner. For this reason, he guarded it jealously—even keeping it from its natural owner who wanted to reclaim its magic power.
With such a feeling in the air, Carlson’s bitter depredations find a willing audience. Of course he shades everything too dark—or even black. But the tar wouldn’t stick if there wasn’t something to hold it. This crab-style hoarding of truth as a shiny object is, if not monstrous, at least wrenchingly embarrassing.
Science Shell-Shock
Scientists may be shocked. Since when is science embarrassing? Something went wrong, way too quickly. Like Maui, whose reaction to losing his magic hook was a bad case of desert island PTSD, scientists seem shell-shocked by a calamity that seemingly came out of nowhere. They were winning, and winning, and winning… and then “Whammo!” As Krugman wrote in an essay “How Did Economists Get It So Wrong?”
It’s hard to believe now, but not long ago economists were congratulating themselves over the success of their field… The battles of yesteryear, he said, were over, and there had been a “broad convergence of vision.” And in the real world, economists believed they had things under control… [Then] everything came apart.
Krugman struggles in this essay to say what went wrong and why. But I think it is quite simple—just like Maui’s story. He stole the heart. And lost it in the ocean. Technologists tried to tell him something important. But instead of listening, he rejected it violently. And like children who are ignored, having tried once they never tried again. The key was lost in the dark. We will tell this story in extravagant detail later.
Like Moana, we want to give the lost heart back to him, so he can return it to the place it belongs. He has lost not only the heart, but also his confidence. We want that back too. Part of the reason we are so blasé about truth is that we aren’t trying to take authority from him. No: we are trying to give it back.
In other words, I don’t want to write cute little New York Times columns to explain why Krugman is wrong. Do you think I could write a 750 word column? Not likely.2
No, I want him to write the columns. I just want them to be right. Or at least if they are to be a bit wrong, I want them to only be a small bit wrong. Its only the heart-stopping heart-lost-in-the-ocean level of wrongness that gets my attention. Nothing less than that would move me to produce a response like this.
Wayfinding
Now, the reader may still be upset about my blasé attitude about academic “truth.” After all, if I have a vision and I ask people help me make it come true, they need to know it is right, don’t they? But this is talking about a different notion of truth than the academic insistence on models, data and analysis.
We might remember Maui’s takedown of Moana: “It’s called wayfinding, princess. It’s not just sails and knots, it’s seeing where you’re going in your mind. Knowing where you are by knowing where you’ve been.”
About this we are deeply serious. When it comes to “knowing where we are by knowing where we’ve been,” we do not skimp on effort. As we explained, we are terrified of a failure to understand the topology of the track ahead. We might be forever remembered as the ones who stupidly stood by the track as the train blasted by. Or who even set the switch wrong. The only hope we have to understand the topology of the track ahead is to look at the topology of the track behind. We seek to fold over the layers of history and pin the correspondences. That way we read the future from the past.
We care so much about this business of folding and pinning that we do it twice. We fold once to pin together the difficulties of engineers in two different eras. And we fold again to pin together political dissolution that results from a changing economy.
Because we fold and pin twice, we can check our work. The goal is to get an image with light shining through three layers. Everything corresponds in one coherent picture.
The first time I tried this trick, I failed horribly. One fold gave me a story set around 1790. The other gave me one around 1910. The two pictures were off by more than century!
Fussing with Folds
After much fussing with folds and correspondences, the program finally worked. The two folded stories fit together. The program I had set myself had the quality of a jigsaw puzzle: it checked itself.3
It is easy to know when one hasn’t solved a puzzle. The pictures don’t match up, there are loose pieces scattered everywhere, large sections don’t fit. This business of “Knowing where you are by knowing where you’ve been” and “seeing where you’re going in your mind” has a similar quality.
The Question Demanding
There is a crucial question to which I needed an answer: “why does an New Economy improve the lives of the common man?” You’d think the answer is obvious. But it really isn’t. The prevailing narrative absurdly glosses over the difficulty of this question. That’s my principal problem with it. Now, I have lots and lots of problems with it. But that’s the big one.
The whole first half of this book could be characterized as a diatribe about the overlooked difficulty of this problem. This first chapter is the starkest: it is a reminder that transformative new technology creates a new criminality. Technology does not bestow change, it demands it.
When we return to a historical narrative in the third and fourth chapter, we remind the reader that the early benefits of a new economy flow entirely to the elites. We soften the criminality story by explaining the idea of “a different time.”
But it is still there in the background. The fifth chapter, Pandora’s box, is all about the ills and afflictions released by a New Economy. The criminality story comes roaring back. And we start a new thread about the threat of fragility, combined with a force of insanity: a notion Sweetness and Honor that drives the world to its destruction. An insane drive propels society to tear itself apart on the teeth of the fragility it does not yet understand.
But where is it all going? Seventeen years in, I had all this written. And I knew it wasn’t enough. It might be enough to impress intellectuals. But the opinions of intellectuals weren’t the ones I was worried about. Think about a common person: a fan of Tucker Carlson. What is the only question they will care about?
They want to know: what’s in it for me? Why shouldn’t I believe that this whole New Economy thing is just a big scam to enrich the elites? That question must be answered. It isn’t OK to leave my story in a state where it could be picked up and twisted into a “pure scam” narrative.
We’re Dead Soon
Because it is absolutely certain that Tucker Carlson will do just that. Absolutely certain. Lava Monster. That’s what Lava Monster means. We saw Maui with his broken hook singing “We’re dead soon. Hey, it’s okay, it’s okay, we’re dead soon.” That’s what he’s talking about. My biggest fear about my audience is that they are too naïve to be afraid. Or if they afraid, they aren’t enough afraid.
A naïve observer might think it fine to tell a story only about the elitist phase of a New Economy. After all, Tucker Carlson will be reasonable, won’t he? He’ll admit that the tendency to initially inspire and enrich only the elites is a natural property of a new economy. Right? He won’t spin it into a conspiracy of “them” against “us,” will he? After all, I lay out all the reasons so clearly. So he’ll understand and be forgiving, right? Right? Right?
And he’d understand why I might write a book that only discussed the problems of the elites, wouldn’t he? In the logical development of the argument, those problems come first. And second. And third. At some point, I’m eager to cut off the unspooling of the argument. After all, academics expect a LPU: least publishable unit. Cramming too much is a bad publication strategy.
Carlson gets that, doesn’t he? If I don’t get to the problems of the common man, that’s not because I don’t care. It is just because they don’t fit. After seventeen years of generating new ideas, I naturally want a wrap. I want it done. I did’t want to think about the common man and his problems. Not because I didn’t care. Simply because seventeen years of thinking leaves one… tired of thinking. Carlson would understand, wouldn’t he?
Lack Of Historical Models
That, and my method of reading problems and solutions off of history was failing. We remember the Industrial Revolution improving the life of the common man. And it certainly did—after more than a century. Early on—in the 1830s, say—the common man had it pretty bad for a while. And the political response was… zippo.
Tucker Carlson may complain we are dishonest and uncaring and cruel. He has some real cause for complaint. But historical models of engaged leadership that beat us for honesty and care and benevolence toward the common man are… hard to find. The historical models are all awful too.
There are historical models of the elites dealing with the problems of the elites much better than we are doing. But nobody dealt with the problems of the common man. In 1830? You have got to be kidding. There wasn’t the expectation that leaders Feel The People’s Pain. So the people’s pain went unfelt.
Some of that pain was pretty terrible. In short: a few generations lived and died in unrelenting misery and humiliation with no hope of deliverance. We forget: transitions can be hard. Sometimes really hard.
Things got better for their kids—or maybe their kids’ kids—or maybe their kids’ kids’ kids. Much better. Sometimes much, much better. That we remember, and for that we congratulate ourselves. For the problem of their ancestors’ abject misery? We have no answer. For the most part, we have forgotten about it completely.
No Partial Credit
In other words, Tucker Carlson is expecting us to solve a problem that has never been solved—not in all of human history. So he’ll give us credit for it being hard, right? He’ll admit that even the “basic” problems of understanding and dealing with a New Economy are up there with the hardest problems ever. Add on top a problem whose solution has never before been demanded… one gets to cry uncle, right? He’ll give us credit for the unprecedented difficulty? Right? Right? Right?
Nope, nope, nope and nope. That’s what’s so terrifying about an Abyss. It doesn’t care about your difficulties. Like a hungry baby, it doesn’t care what you have to go through to make it feel better. It hurts; it demands you address that hurt. Not naming the hurt, it has no name for the difficulty of obtaining a salve to soothe it. And it doesn’t care. There is no partial credit, no “A” for effort. Like Yoda says: “Do, or do not. There is no try.”
The Abyss accepts the legitimacy of your leadership only if you can care about its problems. Pointing out the unprecedented difficulty of those problems doesn’t get you off the hook. It only makes it worse. Observing this, Tucker Carlson says: “you hate them for their weakness.” It only underlines how painfully you don’t understand: dealing with difficulties are not the Abyss’ problem. They are yours.
Engineer’s Empowerment Promise
The professor who most influenced my pedagogical strategy taught that every book should start with an empowerment promise. It should tell the reader what new power they would possess if they struggled through it. Of course, he was a computer science professor: this is quintessentially an engineer’s attitude. Engineers don’t promise ease in the journey; they only promise power at the end.
Now this book has only one idea about engineering it, and that one absurdly simple. Yet in that sense it is culturally an engineering text, not a social science one. We won’t make it easy.
Krugman’s Rules for Research cautioned “it is also crucial to express your ideas in a way that other people, who have not spent the last few years wrestling with your problems and are not eager to spend the next few years wrestling with your answers, can understand without too much effort.” Thumbing our nose at this advice, we will demand wrestling. As we explain later, we demand it because we are representing the interests of a community that has itself spent years wrestling with practical problems. They were surprised that engineering generated political ideas as well. We will insist they are not to be ignored. So we can’t avoid the requirement of wrestling. We would not be properly defending our community if we did.
But following the engineer’s advice, instead we lure our reader into the effort with an empowerment promise. We don’t promise scholarly correctness; we don’t promise statistical support; we do not FRED.
But we promise instead a certain political completeness: an story that travels all the way to the necessary end. That necessary end is an answer to the burning question of our age: the question which is not “why are you right?” Instead, it is Tucker Carlson’s implicit question to the elites “why do you care?” Returning to our Moana story, we will both goad and accompany our intellectual demigod in a journey to get him back his power, his confidence, and his hook.
Maui’s Hook
The reader might be bemused to hear us claim impatience, let alone impatience driven by mad fury. Open this book at random, and you almost certainly won’t light on anything that looks like impatience. Instead, it’s likely to seem a leisurely unfolding of ideas. All but absurdly leisurely. As I mentioned, reviewers are likely to call the book overstuffed. So what gives?
Moana’s confident impatience was met by an opposing force. Being an experienced superhero, Maui knew the hazards. After all, the last encounter with the lava monster had knocked him out of the sky. He lost him the fish-hook which was the source of his power. While in full possession of his magic, he had lost the battle horribly. So he had no confidence to face the monster without that magic. “I’m not going on a suicide mission with some… mortal. You can’t restore the heart without me, and me says no.” He firmly insisted on a new goal: “I’m getting my hook, end of discussion.”
Similarly our interest in truth arises from such a reset. A character will narrates our search for mathematical understanding: the Psychohistorian. Like Maui, he firmly rejects entrance into the fray. He knows this fight would be hard to win with full possession of his power. And he feels far from in possession. He judges it impossibly unsafe to get into an all-out attack on a problem he doesn’t understand. He defends the diffidence of the elites.
Just as Maui insists on redirecting Moana to a search for his hook, our Psychohistorian will insist on redirecting our narrators to a search for truth. We aren’t scientists doing proper science. But our narrative is controlled by the character of a serious scientist: someone who insists on understanding first. He acts only when his feels his understanding is solid. We aren’t going to achieve that solidity of understanding. But we are going to depict what he needs to do to get it for himself.
“You’ll Be A Hero…”
That said, the narrative won’t entirely consent to the Psychohistorian’s intellectual redirection. Hearing Maui say “… and me says no,” Moana looked around, searching for a strategy to motivate the recalcitrant demigod. Her eyes lit upon his tattoo of adoring masses cheering his past feats. She sidled up to him, saying in a sing-song voice: “You’ll be a hero.” He replied “Little girl, I am a hero.” In the same light-hearted sing-song, she continues: “Maybe you were, but now… Now you’re just the guy who stole the heart of Te Fiti. The guy who cursed the world. You’re no one’s hero.” Her sing-song goes on: “But, put this back. Save the world. You’d be everyone’s hero. Maui… Maui… Maui… You’re so amaziiiiing!”
What I love most about this scene is the banana. While Maui says “me says no,” he casually fishes for a snack. When he raises a banana to his mouth, its size relative to him reminds us of his status as an otherworldly demigod. It looks comically tiny. “I am a hero” is voiced with a mouth full.
Mouthful of Banana
However, Moana calmly plucks the half-eaten banana out of his hand. She says “you’re nobody’s hero” with her mouth also full of banana. She’s that calm about it. The banana swipe underlines how utterly she refuses to be intimidated. It isn’t a stiff, scared “actually intimidated but pretending not to be” gesture. The quality of her insouciance is utterly, truly, to the depths of her being not even in the slightest bit intimidated. This quality is conveyed by a takedown uttered with a mouth half full.
As we said earlier, we want a better Clara Immerwahr. The real Clara, the engineer feeling vague and inexpressible premonitions of disaster, was too easily bullied. When charged with treason, she shot herself. We want to do better this time around.
Our Clara power-up will make our heroines a team. We will give her support: a modern woman in Moana’s mold. This character is so unintimidated by the intellectual demigods of our age that she can deliver her takedown with her mouth full of the banana she just swiped from the god’s over-sized hand.
Following Moana’s example, our search for truth is interleaved with stories of heroism. A series of essays profiles “Heroes of the Old New Economy.” They are arranged like parables. Whenever we uncover a problem, we profile the hero of the past who rose to the challenge of the earlier edition of that problem. In this way we suggest an analogous exploit could be attempted in the present. In other words, we assume a sing-song tone: “You’ll be everyone’s hero… you’ll be amaziiiiing!”
Movie Scientist Soft-Focus
One should realize that the bits that look like academic investigations exist merely to set up the ensuing paean to heroic effort. Uncovering the statement of a problem is a lead-in to the praise for the heroism that rises to the challenge it represents.
Or sometimes it leads to a heart-to-heart about the fear which is holding our Psychohistorian back. Or both. In any case, the big question under discussion is “why are you holding back from the fight?” Consistently, the Psychohistorian answers “because I don’t know what is true.” So we help him search for truth. But truth is his goal. Not ours.
That strategy has a problem, however. How can we lead into either heroic praise or examination of fear without first stating the problem that demands heroics or paralyzes with anxiety? And how can we state the problem without bringing on a fight about the correctness of the statement? We are impersonating a scientist without a license. It is problematic.
That said, our Psychohistorian character will be envisioned, not embodied. One should understand his interludes of search for truth as soft-focus movie training montages. The goal is to depict a character who starts out insecure and uncertain because of an intellectual difficulty. At the end he emerges confident and certain the difficulty can be overcome.
What happens between the uncertain beginning and the confident end? The middle should be understood as an impressionistic movie-mode “scientist does work” soft-focus scene. We are no more interested in the exact details of that work than we are in the details of how “graviton pulses could neutralize tetryon emissions from a tertiary subspace manifold.”
Now, that might be an exaggeration. We do care. We try our best. It isn’t entirely brazen science fiction. But only one assertion matters. We assert the uncertain, insecure scientist can transform to confident pundit who feels fully empowered to tackle a problem he’s sure he understands. Most importantly, for our central purpose of stealing Tucker Carlson’s thunder: fully empowered to express to the masses how much he cares about their suffering. That goal is the only one, ultimately, for which this work aims. As a result it is unscholarly and strange. But its deficiencies are by design.
Our demigod’s transformation happens somehow. We sketch a means. Sketch. A sketchy sketch. We acknowledge the reality of such an actual transformation would be entirely different. It would involve a lot more formalism of statement, gathering of data, analysis, convincing with the aid of evidence… the works. All the FREDing by people who, unlike us, are so utterly steeped in the art that they will be shocked to the core by its ommission.
Yet it is an art we don’t even attempt. We no more try than a Hollywood director would attempt to depict actual scientific work. It would take too long. Our story is already way long as it is. So why accept further delay? Despite appearances, we are impatient. The heart must be returned. For that, our demigod must be coaxed into the fray. We must restore his confidence to fight. Ultimately, that is the only goal.
- Pop quiz: who am I quoting? Which revolution was he discussing? ↩︎
- Besides, if I wanted a job with the Times, it would be in the digital department. I’m an engineer! An amazing new programming language, Svelte, came out of the engineering efforts of a newspaper. Seriously, forget Google, forget Facebook, forget Amazon; instead, The New York Times is the hot stuff in the employment department, the place to be! Admittedly, I have a particular interest in visualization, web technology, and the application of programming languages to those areas. And I like the idea of a boss who might show more interest in the tragedy of history than those aforementioned behemoths loudly protesting the rumors of evil gathering around them. So the Times might not be every engineer’s idea of the epitome of hot job prospects. But they are certainly mine. Sadly, I no longer have the programming language skills to compete for a job like that. But geez… what a dream. ↩︎
- More or less: a critical reader may note that one story is set around 1790, or at least not much after 1800. And the other is in the 1830s. What’s a few decades between friends? We can fuss some more. But I still have a decade or two gap. My correspondences still have some concerning problems. But I’m worrying about topology more than time. As a mathematician might say, we don’t have a metric. I’m pretending we do when I say the layers are stiff. But we really don’t. Everything is a bit rubbery, like sheets that are stiff but still stretchy. When I had a century gap, it indicated a fundamental problem in my conception of topology. With a decade or two gap, stretchiness takes over. I think. I hope. ↩︎
