Because we tend to delude ourselves that we understand the complex systems around us better than we actually do, we are often less prudent than we should be when we deal with them. “The system works,” we say to each other after a crisis, in relief and self-congratulation, and continue doing things as we always have. We introduce changes not to reform but only to refine our institutions, practices, and technologies, to increase their performance and efficiency; and these refinements (like the ever greater speed of international currency transactions) often make the systems affecting us even more replete with unknown unknowns.
Progress in the social sciences is especially slow, for reasons we don’t yet fully understand; but we desperately need better social scientific knowledge to build the sophisticated institutions today’s world demands.
And modern financial systems powerfully amplified the ability of money to transform fear into suffering. Financial markets and stock exchanges had enabled disparate individuals to pool their resources and knowledge to support enterprises that had been inconceivable only a century or so before.
[Hannah] Arendt “repeatedly called attention to a very particular kind of lying that she associated with the authoritarian governments of mid-twentieth-century Europe,” writes the historian Sophia Rosenfeld. “This was a form of dissembling that was so brazen and comprehensive, so far from standard political fibbing and selective spin, that it left a population essentially impotent.” As Arendt famously wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction (i.e., the reality of experience) and the distinction between true and false (i.e., the standards of thought) no longer exist.”
“Scientists check one another’s numbers,” Lee McIntyre writes in The Scientific Attitude. “They do not wait to find an error; they go out and look for one.” Although individual scientists can be as irrational and stubborn as anyone else, “science has made a community-wide effort to … make corrections” (McIntyre’s italics).
German conservatives were beginning to play by the rules of liberal modernity. They had to argue for policies and interests, not simply issue directives. Playing by the rules allowed, as elsewhere, for electoral manipulation, suborning the press, and, generally, gaming the system. To picture Wilhelmine conservatives as top-down string-pullers, however, is as distorting as the Junker caricature.
The two antagonistic forces of past and future are both indefinite as to their origin; seen from the viewpoint of the present in the middle, the one comes from an infinite past and the other from an infinite future. But though they have no known beginning, they have a terminal ending, the point at which they meet and clash, which is the present. The diagonal force, on the contrary, has a definite origin, its starting-point being the clash of the two other forces, but it would be infinite with respect to its ending since it has resulted from the concerted action of two forces whose origin is infinity. This diagonal force, whose origin is known, whose direction is determined by past and future, but which exerts its force toward an undetermined end as though it could reach out into infinity, seems to me a perfect metaphor for the activity of thought.
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