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As soon as it was feasible, we had no choice but to follow our desires and hang the consequences. In loftiest terms, we aimed to escape our mortality, confront or even replace the Godhead with a perfect self.
The future kept arriving. Our bright new toys began to rust before we could get them home, and life went on much as before.
The present is the frailest of improbable constructs. It could have been different. Any part of it, or all of it, could be otherwise. True of the smallest and largest concerns.
‘From a certain point of view, the only solution to suffering would be the complete extinction of humankind.’
Various forms of crises blossomed like tropical flowers: in childhood poverty, in children’s teeth, in obesity, house and hospital building, police numbers, in teacher recruitment, in the sexual abuse of children.
In an age of advanced mechanisation and artificial intelligence, he told the crowd, jobs could no longer be protected. Not in a dynamic, inventive, globalised economy. Jobs-for-life was old hat.
We even raised a toast to ‘the future’, though his version of it, private mental space drowned by new technology in an ocean of collective thought, repelled us both.
But life, where we apply our intelligence, is an open system. Messy, full of tricks and feints and ambiguities and false friends. So is language – not a problem to be solved or a device for solving problems. It’s more like a mirror, no, a billion mirrors in a cluster like a fly’s eye, reflecting, distorting and constructing our world at different focal lengths. Simple statements need external information to be understood because language is as open a system as life.
Devised along generally rational lines, well disposed to others, such a mind soon finds itself in a hurricane of contradictions. We’ve lived with them and the list wearies us. Millions dying of diseases we know how to cure. Millions living in poverty when there’s enough to go around. We degrade the biosphere when we know it’s our only home. We threaten each other with nuclear weapons when we know where it could lead. We love living things but we permit a mass extinction of species. And all the rest – genocide, torture, enslavement, domestic murder, child abuse, school shootings, rape and
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In it, we’ll see a familiar monster through the fresh eyes that we ourselves designed.
‘There are … no masses, only ways of seeing people as masses.’
‘Quite. Equality, liberty, a spectrum. More of one, less of the other. Once in power, you’ll have your hand on the sliding scale. Best not to promise too much in advance.’
Public administration was a special corner of hell, irresistible to certain personalities.
I think the A-and-Es were ill equipped to understand human decision-making, the way our principles are warped in the force field of our emotions, our peculiar biases, our self-delusion and all the other well-charted defects of our cognition. Soon, these Adams and Eves were in despair. They couldn’t understand us, because we couldn’t understand ourselves. Their learning programs couldn’t accommodate us. If we didn’t know our own minds, how could we design theirs and expect them to be happy alongside us? But that’s just my hypothesis.’
