The Asymmetry of Truth

Strength in numbers considered.

"Hear for yourself how it sounds: 500 million Europeans begging 300 million Americans to defend them from 140 million Russians. If you can count, count on yourself. Not in isolation, but with full awareness of your potential. Today, in Europe, we do not lack economic strength, people, but the belief that we are a global power.” — Donald Tusk

Poland’s Prime Minister Tusk

I’m thinking about and overthinking aegis. Eric Weinstein provoked some thought in me today with this tweet:

https://x.com/EricRWeinstein/status/1921200831531249667

I responded:

You mentioned the odd confluence of brilliance of Brookhaven and Stonybrook before. I wonder about this asymmetry. It suggests to me that like universities and other major institutions, most organizations are overstaffed. An innumerable amount of boats can be lifted by open-sourcing only the most powerful tools, but the rest, because of the agency problem, are doomed to mediocrity. So what, indeed, is the optimal size of an organization? Levee en masse is always vulnerable to special operations forces, or marginally intelligent swarms overwhelm?

I'm thinking the former, quite actually.

And of course that got me thinking about the optimum size for an organization dedicated to some higher dimensional propositions. Could that long endure? What indeed is the optimum size for intellectual endeavors and how many boats can actually be lifted with integrity?

Box 88
The book of the week is Box 88 by Charles Cumming. These past few weeks, as readers know, I have been fascinated by obsession and betrayal as themes worthy of observation. As time goes by in my sojourn of the underemployed but thankfully not dispossessed, I consider both my own obsessions in choosing what things I’ve decided to master and what betrayals I have suffered at the hands of the market’s devaluation of such skills. It makes something of a dog’s breakfast of loyalty and expertise. Still my depression is leavened by the fact that brains are a cheap commodity. The history of human conflict is perfect testament.

This book is the first of a series I will inevitably consume as the rest of the world catches up with my recent unmentioned devouring of Martha Wells Murderbot series coming soon to an Apple TV near you. The crazy thing is that my psyche has turned on me in a fascinating way. I’m starting to think of myself as a sad victim caught up in a hidden game rather than a clever operator inside of The game. Kind of like the cool kid who is now considered too weird to be cool, now forced to hum tunes in 4/4 time.

If any of you are based and retired, take another look at George C. Scott in Patton. What a brilliant movie. What a tragic tale. Patton was a warrior’s warrior in synch with every prior generation who could divine the strategic future, but kneecapped by the trivial past. Here we all sit at our lemonade stands witness to calamity we cannot forestall.

You want meritocracy? You don’t get it. Nobody gets it. You get conflict. You get clashes of titans. You get to be a blind monkey at ground zero where elephants are stomping and kicking up a blizzard of dust. How then does one become a mahout among the mangled? Box 88 is the story of a bright young man who, under the best of circumstances imaginable is tapped for service into a secret agency within a secret agency. He conveniently is chums with persons of interest and get suckered into an aristocracy of deception. But aren’t we all? Damn. I’m going to have to read Foucault.

At the very beginnings of my formation of the Peasant Theory, one of my hedges for wanting to think through it was the perception that we in America were losing respect for the public sphere. The more insightful of you may have sensed that my theory is rather feudal. Yes. It goes back to the idea placed in my head by Stephen Pinker that we either have the rule of law (and thus the responsibilities of citizenship) or we had the rule of men. Legality or honor codes. It thus stands to reason that reasonable people are getting more and more uncomfortable over the increased demand and fealty for honor codes in our society. What is DEI other than honoring the lived experience of the oppressed against the very idea of social privilege? What is the Woke Right other than the abandonment of Republicanism (if that exists) for the cult of executive power? Why are we Red and Blue? Because we’re all on some idiot spectrum.

Except for us. Me and my subscribers. You and I are above all that.

The Asymmetry of Truth
If I could put truth in a bottle
The first thing that I’d like to see
Is the things that we say we would know right away
Would be true and it sets us all free

But there never seems to be enough truth
To do the things that are right when you know it
I’ve seen enough in history
That people will fear the truth that they know and they’ll blow it.

---

If postmodernism is closer to the reality we are forced to live in, we Peasants, then are outdone by the asymmetry of those few Geniuses who corner the markets. They have figured how to navigate into the eddies of the mainstream rapids that bleach our bones and wash us out to sea. Who indeed leadeth us beside the still waters when we all will drown if we don’t go with the flow?

Enough with metaphors. What does this practically mean? If indeed levee en masse as with conscripted giant armies like Napoleon’s or Russia’s are outdone by strategic resistance under the cover of diversion, then we should organize like the Hun’s tactical horse cavalry units. Something smaller than national political parties would be less corruptible. Something like sects of Christianity or variant post-Marxist ideology that subvert with subtlety. To act like something other than a tribe is to subject us to mass hysteria. There’s no way to take it all down with Blitzkreig overwhelming force. Shock and awe doesn’t work. Individuality doesn’t aggregate. The commons can only grow so large. It’s always tragic for those who try to expand the commons indefinitely. You’d have to pave over too much.

Promises of Y2K
What immediately comes to mind is the scale of the companies hoovering up VC money for the promise of AGI, which I think is something eventually to be an empty promise. The first of two promises of this scale was ‘the last mile’ meaning fiber to the home and the brief settop box wars. Once upon a time companies like Scientific Atlanta was a chief contender against Motorola. Scientific Atlanta was sold to Cisco for over $6 billion. Ten years later Cisco sold that business for $600 million. Today every other television at Costco is made by Samsung and has a settop box built in. We have our 1000 channels. Feel empowered?

The second promise was digital music, integrated once and for all by the mighty Steve Jobs. Streaming therefore was the next big thing. Before a million people around the globe even knew what ‘streaming’ was, Mark Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for about $6 billion. Yahoo itself became worth about $100 billion, but then died a quiet death delisted from public trading into private equity for $5 billion.

Small companies have been trying over and over, ever since to promise something big. For the Genius insiders, it’s everything. The whole trick to fishing of this sort is to know where to cast. Hook a fish, then immediately sell your pole to the next guy in the boat. It becomes his job to feed the masses. That generally takes a miracle.

At the end of these tunnels we have the interwebz, where a lot of intelligence comes cheap. I never did want to believe that the medium is the message, it’s the materiality of how people behave as they learn. There is no more truth than there ever was, but billions more are cranking through search engines and getting 1000s of channels and radio stations streamed. We remain downstream of the firewall.

If you haven’t read Ted Gioia talk about the failure of our markets to support quality in the arts, it’s both depressing and enlightening. The good news is that he has long had a lifetime reading plan.

WHAT YOU LEARN IN CLASSROOMS IS IRRELEVANT, AND SOMETIMES EVEN WORTHLESS—YOU MUST TAKE RESPONSIBILITY FOR YOUR OWN EDUCATION

I got the best formal education that money could buy—or in my case, student loans, because my family didn’t have the cash to pay for my education. I eventually earned several degrees that hang on my wall, each from an impressive institution.

But more than 90% of my education came on my own.

And Harold Bloom reminds us:
The true use of Shakespeare or of Cervantes, of Homer or of Dante, of Chaucer or of Rabelais, is to augment one's own growing inner self. . . . The mind's dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one's own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one's confrontation with one's own mortality.

So this brings me to the preliminary conclusion that individual minds are individual creations. They may aggregate spontaneously or deliberately, yet always temporarily into organizational unity. These organizations will for a time have some grasp of a necessary truth, but its value is fleeting.

There is always that asymmetry. The truth is always available but it is unevenly distributed. Free markets and open societies do not guarantee proper collaboration. Necessary, but insufficient.

—

Decentralized Enclaves
I think this is what I believe in. I believe we all have to find our own lifeboats. This something is certainly world-wise and cosmopolitan - small enough to survive mainstream systemic failure yet large enough to remain independent of any tribe of wackos or idiots. Something different than a city-state, but not too different. The only fitting thing that comes to mind is the State of Utah or Los Angeles County in 1970. Something between 3 and 10 million for a society.

I know that I believe that the bigger they are, the harder they fall. So there’s a big difference between the authoritarian nature of an HOA, a highschool, and that of a state government. There’s only so much failure we can tolerate when the authorities give us no wiggle room.

The US Army tells us:

A corps includes two to five divisions with anywhere between 20,000 and 45,000 soldiers. A lieutenant general is in command. The corps is the highest level of command that can provide operational direction for actual combat. Higher levels are concerned with administration rather than operations. The current active corps are I Corps at Fort Lewis, Washington; III Corps at Fort Hood, Texas; and XVIII Airborne Corps at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.

The USA does a damn good job of E Pluribus Unum. So much so that I’m surprised we hang together. But our society is too needy and not reconciled individually the way Harold Bloom understands we could be. We forget how many tens of millions we are, and we forget that we’re all not on the brink of dissolution and catastrophe. Unfortunately we have bigger, more agitated clumps of outcasts whose personal dissolution gives us vibe cascades of stupidity.

What we need to remember is not to let the glue of the HOA or the motto of the highschool fall to ruin. We cannot disrespect our basic citizenship, and we cannot allow others to. The asymmetric warfare of the smallest groups are victims, martyrs and suicide bombers. All they can do is make a spectacle of themselves and pursue the tyranny of the inflexible minority. This is inherently anti-social and destructive.

From me, 13 years ago:

In 'The Better Angels', Pinker describes that in societies whose governments have not yet reached a stable level of reliable provision of justice based on law and jurisprudence or in areas where such provision has broken down, there arises a phenomenon of justice based on 'honor codes'. It very much does stand to reason that if I don't believe that the police are going to protect and serve, then I need to take the law into my own hands. And if my loyalties are to families rather than law, then the integrity of that family is more important than any sacrifice for the sake of the legal commons. In other words, the rules of dating my sister substitute for municipal law, and don't you dare talk about my mama.

I take this as the single most useful observation of Pinker's book as it dovetails with Hobbes and is in synch with my critique of the overreach of organic politics - aka 'Who is Your Leviathan?' Nonviolent social protest and all such questions of 'social justice' are an attempt to move multicultural honor systems into national law here in the United States. They weren't in the case of the Civil Rights Movement, because King's SCLC was nationalist and his dream was firmly rooted in the American Dream. That was the Negro position. But the Black Nationalist movement that followed on the heels of Civil Rights successes required international links and Marxist connections. It sought to change the direction of justice coming from an honor established outside of the Pledge of Allegiance, as do its multicultural follow-on movements.

-- this above paragraph is my first clearly articulated idea about what exactly people mean by 'social justice', which is to say that it seeks to elevate particular and provincial honor codes to national standing by privileging the victimhood of favored groups according to social definitions. I oppose this because it is anti-modern, and devolves common law towards interest-group law.

What I will continue to do is consider the proper aegis for organizations and populations. How much truth needs be managed? How much information and disinformation should we be sensitive and vulnerable to? How tribal and individual can we afford to be? How much conformity is a good bargain?

Much to think about. Probably too much for a peasant like me.