I don’t know if you heard the news… but there was a kerfuffle in Washington, DC yesterday.
A bunch of men and women dressed like muppets took off-piste selfies all around the Capitol building, in spite of the meek protests of Capitol building security.
What gets me is that this kind of thing can happen in 2021.
We have a large state built around national security.
We have billions of cameras blanketing every inch of our nation…
We have tens of millions of authorized and unauthorized wire taps to get secret info while it’s still secret…
And we have millions of highly trained men and women sitting in dark offices, all around the country, who are supposed to detect and predict this kind of thing and stop it before the muppets even take their first step towards a riot.
And yet, it doesn’t work. That’s why we still get spectacular and unpredictable kerfuffles like the one yesterday.
One useful thing I learned in college is that there are systems that are so complex that their behavior is pretty much impossible to predict. The only way to know what these systems will do is to let them run. Large groups of autonomous agents, such as humans, often fall into this category.
So if we can’t predict or prevent massive events like this, what can we do? Well, all we can do is run with them when they happen, and try to end up on the surface when it’s all over. As marketer and copywriter Gene Schwartz put it:
“The scientist did not create the energy of the sun; hut he can direct that energy into the explosion of an atom bomb. The speculator did not create the enormous growth of the electronics industry after the war: but he can ride that growth to produce a fifty times increase in his capital. And the copy writer does not create the desire of millions of muppets all over America to storm the Capitol; but he can channel that desire onto a particular product, and make its owner a millionaire.”
You might think that’s a callous and cynical thing to say. You’re right. But it’s also true. If that’s something you can stomach, then you might like unpleasant truths I write about regularly. You can get these bitter pills when you subscribe to my email newsletter.