From Story to Setting

tl;dr: When the new becomes the given. The next phase of Covid-19.

I’ve known of Venkatesh Rao for over 10 years now.

He used to live in the DC area and we’ve had coffee/dinner a few times over the years.

On more than one occasion, I’ve said, “I think Venkat may be the smartest person I know.”

Venkat has a tremendous ability to distill ideas and concepts down to pure form (on the one hand) and that is combined with an equally strong ability to go very broad and very deep.

You can see this most clearly in the variety of content offered through the Breaking Smart brand that he has built.

His recent episode, From Story to Setting, was on target in more ways than even he realized.

Mostly because it was prophetic.

Remember Covid?

The point of Venkat’s podcast was that we have moved into a new phase of Coronavirus.

It used to be “the story.”

Now, given the unrest across the US, it’s “the setting.”

Back in December and January, we heard about a “new virus in China.”

In March, April, and May, it was all coronavirus and lockdowns.

However, with the death of George Floyd, coronavirus began to fade into the background.

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Venkat’s podcast was recorded on Saturday, May 30th, the day after the first night of unrest in Minneapolis.

He had no idea what was to follow in other cities the next week, but he basically predicted it.

The Black Death

The basis for his prediction was inspired by his reading of Barbara Tuchman’s A Distant Mirror about the Black Death in Europe, a period which he, sadly, thinks is the most relevant to the one in which we find ourselves now.

As a history major/fan/buff, I certainly appreciate the “history doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme” doctrine.

Whether he’s right or not doesn’t matter. I certainly hope he’s wrong, given how he described the near-term consequences of the Black Death

But the point he was making is that the Black Death, which peaked over a 2 year period from 1348-1350, was a catalytic agent added to a solution that had been brewing for many years prior.

Social dissatisfaction, economic inequality, etc.

You get the picture.

What the Black Death pandemic did was to accelerate the reaction in society, like massive unemployment, mental stress, increasing uncertainty, and a feeling of imminent death which prevents far-future thinking and optimism.

The consequences were not pretty:

25/ Historians apparently call this collapsed period the Crisis of the Late Middle Ages, which had 3 external triggers: a famine in 1315-16 as the prequel, the Black Death as the main event, and the start of what’s called the Little Ice Age towards the end. Socially and politically, this period was marked by the 100 years war, which was a straggling period of nearly continuous warfare rather than a single war.

26/ If you map it to today, you get a similar Crisis of Late Modernity. Our 3 events are probably the Global Financial Crisis of 2008, Covid19, and climate change coming up. If the Black Death is a good precedent, we can expect at least a few decades of a broken world that doesn’t work for anybody in it, and can’t sustain itself either. That’s the worst case scenario. Hopefully we can do better than that.

https://breakingsmart.substack.com/p/from-story-to-setting

The Great Fracture

Whether you agree or not, there are many people around the world who believe that the “system is not working for them.”

Many have legitimate grievances. Others probably are overly influenced by a hyper-personalized, social media-driven culture of increasing awareness of the wealth/power of others.

But, as they say, “perception beats reality.”

When enough people believe that the system isn’t working, it actually makes the system less likely to work. None of us exist in a vacuum, we are a series of reactions to events around us, which further changes the macro environment.

If you think the system isn’t working and you hear of George Floyd’s death, you might feel frustrated and go protest. Then, you are tear gassed by police, which reinforces the notion that the system isn’t working.

And so on.

Given the size, scale, and speed of how emotions can travel over mobile phones, it can get combustible very quickly.

A phrase I keep using is “High VUCA environments.”

And this is where Venkat ends up.

We can hope for positive outcomes. We can and should work for them.

We also have to recognize that, while there are many things in our favor that are very different than the time of the Black Death (Internet, for example), that there are many things against us (nuclear weapons).

I don’t like it either, but his conclusion is similar to mine.

We have to be prepared for increasing amounts of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

The Great Healing?

In the midst of all of this, however, I think there may be a positive externality in the return of a slightly less data-driven world.

It’s the quote that is usually misattributed to Einstein instead of William Bruce Cameron:

Not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts.

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Perhaps, Covid19 as setting also forms the backdrop for many of us to look at the parts of the “system” (whichever one of many in which we participate) and think about how they are broken.

Then, to go about the process of building a new one.

It brings to mine the title of a book by the former Chief Rabbi of the United Kingdom, Lord Jonathan Sacks.

It’s called To Heal a Fractured World: The Ethics of Responsibility.

Today, in a world of fracture, with so much pain, and systems that are breaking or broken, perhaps Sacks’ reminder is that, when all is said and done, as humans we each have our own individual responsibilities.

We can’t fix everything.

But we can continue to fix ourselves.