Simply Incomprehensible

I am redundant. You are redundant. The president, the world leader, is redundant in that he is, at best, a middle manager operating in a complex, global system that nobody fully controls. Mainstream voters may at times want to burn the place down yet politicians are unable to deliver as they too are trapped metaphorically in a car accelerating at full throttle with no one driving.

Such is the thrust of our focus article ( Our Incomprehensible World). We often speak in fancy terms about individual agency, about how the meaning of life is defined by that which we bring to it, about lives lived deliberately ( MM (4/1/19)/Solitude (Nature)). But maybe ponder this: how much of our daily life is actually characterized by reflex over reflection -- time spent before a screen passively absorbing images or, perhaps, tethered to the net like some sort of input/output node. We're small-time versions of the sea captain cited in the article ostensibly in command of a giant container ship yet in reality blindly responding to signals driven by unseen factors.

There is nothing here to suggest anything evil. There are those who speak in terms of a Deep State in which some sort of secret centralized intelligence is pulling levers in the background. No, rather, the vast and complex systems to which we are subject are the product of distributed intelligence that has naturally evolved out of a desire for greater and greater efficiency. We thus loop back to the opening sentiment and ask ourselves whether man becomes redundant in a perfectly efficient society.

Perhaps we all are comfortable with the bargain. After all, technology and JIT supply chains enable us to mainline into third-world sweatshops. Consumer goods can be ordered at the speed of light and delivered before you can say the word algorithm. You can execute a financial transaction while still in your slippers. The system takes care of itself. What's not to like.

What's not to like is that a system that takes care of itself no longer needs you or your ilk. You are superfluous. It begs the question about the meaning of a civilization largely populated by other like-redundant citizens. That breeds the kind of alienation Kafka used to write about.

Adding to the estrangement is the incomprehensibility of it all, the thrust of the article i.e. our lives rest precariously on autonomous systems so complex that no one can truly comprehend the totality of it all. The world seems incomprehensible because it is incomprehensible.

t's also vulnerable. We saw that recently when the Suez canal was temporarily constipated.

Democracy itself likewise becomes constipated. A gap in public comprehension invites chaos and conspiracies, tempting politicians to traffic in fear, uncertainty, and doubt over mature rational thought.

For that, Member Monday was invented.