*Note:* I wrote this draft a few months ago. I intend to write a series synthesizing all the information I’d collected for a book about how the 2020s would be an “interregnum” in which many of our fundamental assumptions would be undermined. The shock that exposes many underlying tensions has come unexpectedly early and suddenly, so I’ll just do this more informally.
In the concluding paragraph of the famous book The Complacent Class, Tyler Cowen wrote: “There is the distinct possibility that, in the next twenty years, we are going to find out far more about how the world really works than we ever wanted to know.”
This casual admission that—in an age that prides itself on its knowledge and technology—our entire society is out of touch with reality, /and that we don’t want to address this/, seems more than complacent. He’s not talking about the conspiracy theorists, but the people at the very top. And looking around, he’s undeniably right. But hey. We’re always screaming about facts and truth. If we don’t need to invent a new way of life — if all we have to do is learn about how the world really works, that’s quite a relief! Our tools have never been better. We just need to take an inventory first. A trip through our history, with a focus on various cycles, seems the most promising way. We have to get our bearings. What do I mean by that?
Mike Meyer has a good analogy for dealing with our disorientation: “We are in a situation much like a parent, late Christmas Eve, finally opening the box with the new bicycle and discovering the absence of any instructions.” Naturally, the parent thinks “well, I know what a bicycle looks like, what the hell.” Meyer reveals he was that parent, and that it wasn’t so easy, especially pre-Internet. He now knows he must “science the shit out of this thing,” or do “a rethink of what the parts are that we have, particularly those didn’t go anywhere, and determining their purpose based on form.” He had to “deconstruct the bicycle and then carefully study the parts” to see how they would fit together, which was successful.
His wisdom: “We have been and are making assumptions based on irrelevant, old information, have begun screwing things together haphazardly, and have hit problems that mean what we are doing won’t work. And there are all of these parts still laying on the floor. The answer is not a hammer,” but questioning our assumptions. “We obviously put things together in a way that wasn’t correct and we kept doing it when we should have stopped. Now we are going to spend a long, uncomfortable time undoing things we that had done.” Time to deconstruct everything and figure out what we’re working with. We need to know what the hell is going on.
Contrary to common belief, government by expert turned out not to be very great at this. Mainly because the elite class did just about everything but using the actual pieces as intended. More on that, later.
Here’s the deal: the founding fathers of this country “entertained no hopes of suppressing factions and educating a united or homogenous citizenry. Instead, they constructed an elaborate machinery to contain factions in a way that they would cancel one another and allow for the pursuit of the common good.” Putting it even more starkly, a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln declared, it was his ability “to use the frailties of others against each other for the common good, that make him stand out alone not only in this age, but in any other in history.” By the late 1980s, Allan Bloom could comment, “All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.”
There was a great decoupling between the parts of our world and their functions. We crippled our collective understanding on every level by rewiring things without ever updating the user’s manual. One could go into the root causes of this for volumes, but a lot of it has to do with our belief that the solution is always “sciencing the shit” out of things.
While this book is trying to diagnose the problem more than fix it, my conclusion suggests surveying the pieces, deciding what everything does and whether or not to throw it out or install it in its proper place.
*Note*: This is all very creepy, because I was going to point out next how modern medicine is miraculous in the areas more amenable to human control, but that it probably wouldn’t be able to make a massive difference with something like the 1918 flu, and that modern achievements can actually drive superbugs. I had noticed people seemed to be using tech/medical advances to offset any pandemic concerns when it came to visions of frictionless, hyper-efficient globalization. This seemed weird to me—I expected to see something like this in my lifetime, and the ineradicable risk of pandemics seemed like one reason for valuing a certain level of self-sufficiency and sovereignty over maximal efficiency and lack of friction.
*Note:* I wrote this draft a few months ago. I intend to write a series synthesizing all the information I’d collected for a book about how the 2020s would be an “interregnum” in which many of our fundamental assumptions would be undermined. The shock that exposes many underlying tensions has come unexpectedly early and suddenly, so I’ll just do this more informally.
In the concluding paragraph of the famous book The Complacent Class, Tyler Cowen wrote: “There is the distinct possibility that, in the next twenty years, we are going to find out far more about how the world really works than we ever wanted to know.”
This casual admission that—in an age that prides itself on its knowledge and technology—our entire society is out of touch with reality, /and that we don’t want to address this/, seems more than complacent. He’s not talking about the conspiracy theorists, but the people at the very top. And looking around, he’s undeniably right.
But hey. We’re always screaming about facts and truth. If we don’t need to invent a new way of life — if all we have to do is learn about how the world really works, that’s quite a relief! Our tools have never been better. We just need to take an inventory first. A trip through our history, with a focus on various cycles, seems the most promising way. We have to get our bearings. What do I mean by that?
Mike Meyer has a good analogy for dealing with our disorientation: “We are in a situation much like a parent, late Christmas Eve, finally opening the box with the new bicycle and discovering the absence of any instructions.” Naturally, the parent thinks “well, I know what a bicycle looks like, what the hell.” Meyer reveals he was that parent, and that it wasn’t so easy, especially pre-Internet. He now knows he must “science the shit out of this thing,” or do “a rethink of what the parts are that we have, particularly those didn’t go anywhere, and determining their purpose based on form.” He had to “deconstruct the bicycle and then carefully study the parts” to see how they would fit together, which was successful.
His wisdom: “We have been and are making assumptions based on irrelevant, old information, have begun screwing things together haphazardly, and have hit problems that mean what we are doing won’t work. And there are all of these parts still laying on the floor. The answer is not a hammer,” but questioning our assumptions. “We obviously put things together in a way that wasn’t correct and we kept doing it when we should have stopped. Now we are going to spend a long, uncomfortable time undoing things we that had done.” Time to deconstruct everything and figure out what we’re working with. We need to know what the hell is going on.
Contrary to common belief, government by expert turned out not to be very great at this. Mainly because the elite class did just about everything but using the actual pieces as intended. More on that, later.
Here’s the deal: the founding fathers of this country “entertained no hopes of suppressing factions and educating a united or homogenous citizenry. Instead, they constructed an elaborate machinery to contain factions in a way that they would cancel one another and allow for the pursuit of the common good.” Putting it even more starkly, a contemporary of Abraham Lincoln declared, it was his ability “to use the frailties of others against each other for the common good, that make him stand out alone not only in this age, but in any other in history.” By the late 1980s, Allan Bloom could comment, “All of our reforms have helped strip the teeth of our gears, which can therefore no longer mesh. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.”
There was a great decoupling between the parts of our world and their functions. We crippled our collective understanding on every level by rewiring things without ever updating the user’s manual. One could go into the root causes of this for volumes, but a lot of it has to do with our belief that the solution is always “sciencing the shit” out of things.
While this book is trying to diagnose the problem more than fix it, my conclusion suggests surveying the pieces, deciding what everything does and whether or not to throw it out or install it in its proper place.
*Note*: This is all very creepy, because I was going to point out next how modern medicine is miraculous in the areas more amenable to human control, but that it probably wouldn’t be able to make a massive difference with something like the 1918 flu, and that modern achievements can actually drive superbugs. I had noticed people seemed to be using tech/medical advances to offset any pandemic concerns when it came to visions of frictionless, hyper-efficient globalization. This seemed weird to me—I expected to see something like this in my lifetime, and the ineradicable risk of pandemics seemed like one reason for valuing a certain level of self-sufficiency and sovereignty over maximal efficiency and lack of friction.