Coronawar: Conscientious Objectors

Marton Bukovi, the Hungarian manager of Gradanski Zagreb during WW2, did not fight in the war. He just sat around, and revolutionized football strategy. “What did you do in the war, Mr Bukovi?” “I invented the false 9. What did you do?”

The only thing more amazing than this episode where Bukovi presumably knows how he’s kept his eye on the literal ball while everyone else was looking away, is the fact that this never happened. It’s just something Jonathon Wilson made up, and I find this even more beautiful, that we have such a complex ability to souse out the invisible noble motivations of another human being when there is overwhelming evidence and pressure to focus on the clear and present sin of commission (did not fight).

The Coronavirus has become the dominant mental model to process reality, like the Great Depression, WW2, and Game Of Thrones. Everyone is talking about it, everyone has an opinion, and it’s large enough that everything can eventually be connected back to its spacetime-bending size. Unlike typical mental models and actual spacetime, this one gets more poignant and impressive the farther away we travel from its sphere of influence. It’s obvious that Covid is the lens through which we analyze emergency healthcare responses, pandemic logistics and synchronized initiative capabilities. That’s a 0-degree of separation, and we can quite reasonably discard every other disease or epidemic or even pandemic from history without the risk of losing too much information.

But as the degrees of separation rise, we continue to access reality through the mental model of Corona. If my spaceship is 1000km from Jupiter but my computer charts my trajectory and propulsion based on the gravitational pull of the Sun, I’m going to make a bit of a mess adding some mass to the great Jovian Red Spot. The first degree of separation has already been subsumed into the 0-degree, for instance the healthcare industry, insurance, vaccine development. The second degree of separation is getting there, FDA regulations, the expanded scope of what is considered a public good or a utility or a government responsibility. Each day the degrees of separation rise. Fiscal policy, not just in terms of temporary bailouts or stimuli as a one-time defibrillation, but as a guiding metaphor for financial instability in general and the keystone of a brand new fiscal policy, think Bretton-Woods after WW2. That master of X¹⁰⁰th degree of separation, Yuval Harari, on cue, lays out a radically new future of globalization and immigration distilled exclusively through the Corona mental model.

Not to dump on Yuval Harari, this isn’t the forum, I have my 2-star book reviews for that. This is obviously the most important event at the moment, and potentially the most important moment of the past 5 decades, and unless you believe it’s the harbinger of the apocalypse it’s likely to be the most important moment of the next few decades as well. So obviously, it’s the dominant force in the solar system of mental models. Jupiter is more important than the sun right now, and if we had to devise a general rule for the computer’s calculations with the likely scenario that we might never leave Jupiter’s orbit, we’d rather base it on him than the Sun. But here’s the problem. Most of us have no existing mental models at all. This is the first time a huge number of people will listen to a conversation containing words like stagflation, quantitative easing, and sovereign debt leverage without fatal boredom that necessitates checking for a pulse and reaching for a ventilator, except, well, anyway.

The experts know about Jupiter and its moons, they know about proximal and distal causes, they know when the computer algorithms approximating the solar system as a Jupiter are no longer relevant, like when we’ve left the Jovian orbit. But we don’t. All of us living through this great event of our age will use the Coronavirus as a mental model to access every single complicated concept we’ve been exposed to under no other circumstances. Global supply chains and logistics, the intricate balance of a highly networked economic and social machinery, the concept of work, leisure and travel. There are literally dozens of us who have never thought of this before, until now, and Covid will be the monopolistic mental model for these issues. Yuval Harari might be able to write about the dominant gravity of pandemics while maintaining the nuanced belief that pandemics aren’t the dominant gravitational force influencing immigration and globalization, but we sure won’t.

That’s not great, but still arguably preferable for an event to capture the popular imagination and guide it towards more awareness, a culture of seeking and absorbing information, than to have an oblivious, docile and ignorant populace. What’s not great though is if we leave the entire half of the solar system behind the sun unexplored. What’s in the shadow of the Coronavirus? What happens if in the original analogy, we’re 1000km from Jupiter, realize its dominant gravitational force and recalibrate our computers to ignore the sun altogether forever. Once we’re free of Jupiter’s field, we’re likely to make a mess while adding mass to the sun. Do the mental models created anew in this period take into account universal gravitational fields like the flow of labor and capital towards high-return ventures, the power and amoral morality of free markets, and the inefficiency of barriers placed in the way of people, goods, and ideas?

The brilliant haze we see around the black circle during an eclipse is called the Corona. An eclipse is a temporary thing that will go away, but while it’s happening, it’s both dangerous and irresistible to take a peak. It overshadows everything, and remains only in the memories and wallets of people who have eye damage. Looking away is hard, the proverbial ‘don’t think of an elephant’ Jedi mindtrick. Despite knowing how fatal an inadvertent glance might be, I couldn’t look away from 100 hours of ‘They’re taking the hobbits to Isengard’, 200 hours of Saw movies, and 1.5 seconds of 2 girls 1 cup, so it sure is unreasonable to expect me to look away now. Reenter Marton Bukovi, who didn’t just look away from WW2, he actively invented the false 9. What if we reframed the Covid metaphor from an eclipse to the Eye of Sauron, which gets pulled away by a diversion so there is the opportunity to solve some of the world’s most important problems while enjoying a nice peaceful hike up Amon Amarth with your best bud. When the eclipse is over, I’m most interested in what this has thrown up in other fields that are at large degrees of separation from Corona, where experts have learned all the right lessons and made serendipitous breakthroughs.

Brian Eno, the record producer of U2, Genesis, Coldplay, Bowie, popularized a technique of creation called Oblique Strategies, famously used in the making of Bowie’s Berlin trilogy. Everytime you get stuck, you consult a randomly picked card from a deck containing options like ‘ask your body’ and ‘what would your closest friend do’ and ‘the error is the hidden intention’. This is very much like the randomized hill-climbing algorithm I discussed here. A randomizer is a great tool for uncovering concealed insights and sparking new connections. But if an insight falls in the forest and there’s no one around, it makes no sound.

I gave up halfway through a wiki-surf quest that hoped to yield the result that World War 2 not only saw a host of innovation in science and technology thanks to the war effort, but also advances that had absolutely nothing to do with war just because it was such a seismic randomizer. I’m hoping to find a book on this, but in the meantime, it appears as if the direct war effort gave us Information Theory, Relays, Turing Machines, Computers, Nuclear tech, Penicillin, Cancer radiation therapy, Chemo, Malarial parasite, Jet aircraft, Radio astronomy, Aerosols etc. But in oblique ways, or at least oblique enough that the connection is not apparent to me, we also got Black holes, Neutron stars, and the theory of scientific revolutions. What I found most rewarding to my confirmation bias was advances in the concepts of psychology, especially personality and motivations. It seems eminently defensible to claim that an event of such proportion as WW2, catastrophic or not, suddenly shines a revealing light on human behavior, giving us MBTI, Maslow’s pyramid of human motivation, game theory, and autism. A week of social isolation might shake free personal insight on work and pleasure and quality of life, in either direction. A few months or years? This is the space I’d be most interested in watching, far more than macroeconomics, geopolitics, and public policy.

But for that, we need conscientious objectors who refuse to participate in the Coronawar. The concept of a Conscientious Objector is still not legal in most countries, and still practically synonymous with treason, ‘Conchies’ whose lives and livelihoods were ruined by their decisions. It’s an awkward problem. A democratic country can’t possibly wage a legal war unless they propose that the costs to the country are less than the benefits that will accrue to each and every citizen compared to if the war were not waged at all. Then it’s a legitimate fear that a Conchie accepts all the benefits that accrue later but none of the costs of fighting. Either you ban the idea, and hoist a terrible injustice onto those people who hate war from the bottom of their hearts and have actively worked against it all their lives only to be forced to go to war now? Or you maintain the public stigma against it, such that the costs of being a Conchie are so high it would disincentivize freeloaders and only attract those who feel so strongly about the war that they would accept the costs of ostracism? It’s a perverse sort of trade-off between two evils. I wish we had option C: contribute in other ways, invent the false 9, the radio telescope, and game theory. Option D: be treated as if war never happened, so you pay more taxes (no windfall from victory or averting conquest), where we can all have our cake and eat it too. If everyone chooses Option D, it doesn’t compromise the war-effort it just proves that it was undemocratic and illegal. Of course all these options are great only if you have money, education, skills, and a safety net, but that’s a more primal injustice which I suppose makes all philosophy irrelevant as principles of public policy until Maslow’s first two layers are a foregone conclusion for everybody.