Understanding moments of crisis through Isaac Asimov's Foundation

OK, time to tackle a classic.  I have been doing science fiction posts for much of this blog, but mostly, I have steered clear of the classics, favoring modern authors.  However, I think it is time to deal with a classic, or perhaps, the classic of the genre.  When Isaac Asimov wrote the original Foundation novels, one might have forgiven people for thinking of science fiction as nothing more than silly, childish drivel, although Asimov himself did no favors for the genre with his robot series.  And alas, he eventually wrote some prequels to the Foundation novels in which he decided to connect his robot universe to the Foundation universe, and made R. Daneel Olivaw-- a ubiquitous character-- show up as a sort of mentor/guide for Hari Seldon.  I'll get to him.  I'm getting off-track anyway.

My point is that being a literate person means reading the original Foundation trilogy:  Foundation, Foundation & Empire, and Second Foundation.  Skip the rest.  These books have a lot to say, I think, about where we are today.  So this morning, with a particularly fine and large cup of coffee, we dig into one of the most important books ever written in science fiction-- Foundation.

The basic premise is that a mathematician named Hari Seldon develops a system called "psychohistory," which allows him to predict the future.  Over the long haul.  Using a combination of statistics, history and the social sciences, including especially... [cough, cough] psychology,* he can predict the behavior and choices of the people in the galactic empire around him, but more importantly, he can predict social trends going forward for thousands of years.

Foundation is a science fiction metaphor for the fall of the Roman Empire, and the rebuilding of Europe after its fall.  Asimov tells a tale of the so-called "dark ages" that followed the fall of Rome, and the process of rebuilding an interconnected civilization.  Historians will have a lot to say about how simplistic the "dark ages" story of post-Rome Europe is, but one of the interesting things about Foundation is that it actually works with more modern understandings of history anyway, in my opinion.  There are actual historians who argue about this, and that's not me, and that's not my point for today.  So let's move on.

The point is that Seldon crunches the numbers in his models of psychohistory and sees that the galactic empire is collapsing.  It's... doomed.  Buh-bye.  We're done now.  Where's that fiddle?  Gonna play me some tunes like Scotty Stoneman!  Yes, I'm mixing historical eras, but c'mon.  Scotty Stoneman!

Anywho, Seldon sees that the fall of the galactic empire is inevitable.  Dark ages are comin', and they're a-gonna suck.  What can he do?  Well, there's what he tells the emperor, and there's the truth.  He tells the emperor that he's going to set up a library out on the edges of galactic civilization, and have it be a repository of knowledge, but that's just the lie he tells the emperor.

The real thing he's doing is setting up the Foundation.  The Foundation is his organization that will operate as the new seed of civilization and metaphorical center of everything after the empire collapses, and by setting up the Foundation, he doesn't prevent the fall of anything, but he can drastically shorten the dark ages to follow.

I wrote a bit about this yesterday, when I mused about the role of the scholar.  This is a conception of the scholar's role that breaks from the mere truth-seeker.  Seldon wanted to intervene.  He believed it was his job, though he could not stop many of the events to follow.  Yet, he also lied.

Why did he lie?  Because according to his models, full awareness of the predictions of psychohistory would affect outcomes, and his attempts to influence outcomes would be diminished.  This is rather the opposite of the non-ideological component of Marx's ideas, which I addressed yesterday.  Marx wrote based on the notion that his attempt to write "truthfully," full of it though he was, would create a self-fulfilling prophesy, whereas Seldon believed that were he fully truthful, his attempts to intervene would fail.

Consequently, nobody on First Foundation was allowed to know how psychohistory worked!  (Second Foundation... that's another matter, but I'm only addressing Book 1 today.  Read the original three books.)  They weren't even supposed to study psychology because supposedly it was this uber-powerful discipline of insight!  [Excuse me while I wipe the coffee off of my keyboard.]

Seldon believed in intervention, and being... less than fully truthful.  Interesting.

So this played out over the long haul throughout a series of "Seldon Crises."  Every once in a while, there would come a moment forecast by Seldon, where a hologram would pop up, describing some moment of decision.  Some turning point.  Some frightening thing with which Foundation needed to deal, which could make or break the project.

And Seldon, cryptic jackass that he was, wouldn't tell them what to do.  Remember that thing about foreknowledge causing the whole system to break down?  Yeah.  That again.  So, his hologram would pop up, say, "hey!  Seldon Crisis!  Do the right thing, and I can't tell you what it is, but yadda, yadda, save galactic civilization!"

Oy.  No pressure, right?

So here was the basic deal with these Seldon Crises.  They were turning points at which the basic structure of the returning galactic civilization was in the process of changing.  Remember that Seldon could predict individual behavior and choices, but he had no way of knowing who any one person would be a century hence, nor two, nor whatever.  So, he didn't have any way to know who the hell Hober Mallow would be.  Who the hell is Hober Mallow?  If you haven't read the books, you don't know, and that's actually kind of my point.  To you, and to Hari Seldon, it would be a semi-random sequence of letters if written, or phonemes if spoken.  How do you predict the individual behavior of Hober Mallow when you can't predict Hober Mallow's specific existence?

You can't.  So, if you predict a crisis in the future between Foundation and Korell, the crisis can't turn on Hober Bloody Mallow because you can't see him.  It has to turn on bigger social trends.  And that's the point of psychohistory.  In the grand scheme of things, individuals don't matter.  Big trends matter.  Religion, and the use of religion.  That matters.  Trade.  That matters.  These things matter, and they follow predictable patterns which, in the first novel, trace out the general outlines of post-Rome Europe.  That's the point.

So if you find yourself in an interstellar conflict, the solution lies not in the individual strategic inclinations of the individual who finds himself at the center of the conflict, but in understanding the broad social trends of the time.  That's psychohistory.

It is very much not an individualistic understanding of history.  You don't matter.  No individual matters.  Broad trends occur regardless of any one person.  An astute reader may ask, so... what about Seldon?  Did he matter?  Is he affecting the broad trends?  If we dig back into the prequels, which I told you not to do, what about Olivaw?  Robot though he was.  Did he matter?  Arguably so.  Does that change anything?  Actually, you don't have to dig that far back.  Asimov handles this kind of thing in two ways.  First, you have an individual who is powerful enough to affect the psychohistoric trends in Foundation & Empire, without any spoilers, and... without further spoilers, Seldon has other people out there making sure things stay on track.  Asimov was a good writer, and the fun of a good book is that it invites this kind of thought and debate.  So have at it.  What else are you gonna do with your time?  Seriously, you aren't an edumacated person until you have read the original three Foundation novels.

And they keep threatening to make some tv adaption, but... it'll suck.  You know it'll suck.

Anyway, though, let's now think about what insights we can glean.  Let's begin with the basic observation that it has become trite for people to say that the US is approaching a situation akin to Rome near its fall.  That alone should beg the question of the applicability of Foundation.  And if we are Rome near the fall, then those of us thinking about Foundation are in the position of Hari Seldon trying to think out what's next.  Could the fall have been stopped?  Or, do you work towards shortening the interregnum?  And how much can you say?  This is the kind of thing that I asked yesterday, and that I have been asking for a while.

I have been pretty clear for a while that I think American democracy is dead.  When you have a president threatening the Insurrection Act to put down protests, and gassing peaceful protesters so that he can create that creepy photo-op, while the vast majority of his party in Congress follows along out of fear of his personality-cult followers amid an unstable economy and pandemic...

... amid all of that, I repeat a question that I have asked many times.  Can anyone seriously imagine the following:  Trump loses in November, and voluntarily steps down?  If not, then we are no longer in a country in which an orderly transition of power can occur in response to an orderly election.

No more democracy.  General John Allen was wrong.  This is not the beginning of the end of the American project.  This is at least the middle of the end.

So I will return to the metaphor of wave forms and superposition.  Trump may very well win in November, or at least cheat in such a way as to make the true result unknowable.  If so, then we continue to exist in a wave form, with universes superimposed on each other-- universes in which Trump invokes the Insurrection Act, or otherwise goes full authoritarian in the open, and universes in which that simply remains a sword of Damocles hanging over our collective throats such that people pretend isn't there because it hasn't done anything yet.  If Trump wins, the wave form may remain uncollapsed, and you can tell yourself there's no sword of Damocles.  You can tell yourself that he isn't constantly threatening things like the Insurrection Act.  You can tell yourself that he would have stepped down.  Probabilistically, though, you wanna think about which universe you inhabit?

If Trump loses, the wave form collapses, and we see which universe we really inhabit.  We see where we are, relative to the true end of democracy.  I think we're done.

So let's ask a Seldon question.  The first one.  About individuals.

Did James Comey matter?  What if Comey didn't make that announcement, two weeks before the 2016 election about the "re-opened investigation" of Hillary Clinton's emails?  He was way out of line.  It violated the Department of Justice's policy of making such announcements too close to an election, the "investigation" was bullshit, and Comey knew it.  He did it anyway.  The question of why will remain difficult to answer for a long time, but the effect?  It almost certainly handed the election to Trump.

So what if Comey hadn't done that?  As one guy?  Would we have been saved?  Well... two problems, from the psychohistory perspective.  First, Trump was doing the same thing in 2016 that he's doing now.  The reason we know, with 100% certainty, that he would refuse to step down in the face of a loss in 2020 is that in 2016, he pointedly refused to say that he would accept a loss, while claiming widespread and non-existent fraud, and insisting that everything was "rigged," in increasingly insane conspiracy theories.

So if Comey hadn't done what he did, would that have simply moved up the timeline?  I don't know.  I was scared in 2016 about what would have happened with a Clinton victory.  On The Unmutual Political Blog, I was writing about the possibility that Trump's insane conspiracy theories and refusal to concede would lead to blood in the streets, after a campaign in which he repeatedly incited actual, literal violence, even going so far as to promise to pay the legal bills of any supporter who committed acts of violence against opponents.

Yes.  He did this.  And Trump is such a complete atrocity, day after day, that you probably forgot this.  This is why I exist.  To remind you of the many Trump horrors.

The other element to consider, on the "individuals don't matter" side of the Seldon model, is that in order for the Republican Party to turn into the Church of Trump, something had to have been very wrong before November, 2016.  Years before, Thomas Mann and Norman Ornstein began documenting how the Republican Party started losing its way as a party, and driving the political system nuts, and prior to their work, they were simply considered nonpartisan, apolitical think-tank political scientists.  Smart guys.  Very smart, and they were right.  Long before Trump came along.

People like Newt Gingrich and Sarah Palin paved the way.  Fox News.  Rush Limbaugh.  Without these factors in play, you could not have the Church of Trump, Salvation Through Owning The Libs.

And once you start down that road, are we back to "individuals don't matter?"  Historical trends?  This gets harder.  And at this point, it is of questionable relevance because we may be somewhere akin to Seldon staring down the equations predicting the collapse of the galactic empire.

So let's deal with the concept of a Seldon Crisis.  The idea of a Seldon Crisis is that it is a moment of transition, where the system of the world itself is changing, and changing dangerously.  A system built on religion, for example, is different from one built fundamentally on trade.  The process of changing is somewhat gradual, but you can reach a sort of crisis point, like the one faced by Hober Mallow in the first Foundation novel, and if you make the wrong move, badness happens.

Understanding a Seldon Crisis requires understanding the social forces at work, and understanding the broad historical context, meaning where you are in the swath of history, both looking backwards and forwards.  Within the novel, the solution tends to be, ironically, doing nothing.  Going with the flow, because Seldon set it up such that the flow is the direction that minimizes the hardship during the interregnum.

Of course, in the real world, we aren't following a path set up by Hari Seldon.  And whether or not any individual can move history is a point of contention anyway.  However, the concept of the Seldon Crisis is a useful one for now.

This is a Seldon Crisis.  Everything that has come before now in American history is a part of a dead system.  That system is gone.  What comes next is uncertain.  There is a combination of forces, consisting of Donald Trump and his enablers in the Republican Party, pushing the country ever further towards straight-up authoritarianism.  I'm not going to rehash How Democracies Die, but to repeat:

The Insurrection Act.

Tear gassing peaceful protesters.  For a photo op.

The country you thought you knew is gone.  A Seldon Crisis involves the collision of multiple social forces.  We are observing that.  As General James Mattis noted, Donald Trump is the first president who doesn't even try nor pretend to try to unite anyone.  His goal is to sow division for his own narrow ends.  The existence of those divisions, though, is a social force.

We are observing those social forces.  Those divisions are psychohistorical facts, relevant to any predictive or prescriptive endeavors, to follow from my language yesterday.  The empirical and normative questions are, what happens to those divisions, and what should happen to those divisions?

The Seldon approach is to connect those questions.  To ask, what will happen, and how can I affect the answer through my predictions, and my answers?

I don't know what happens next.  I honestly don't.  Of course, I'm writing about Hari Seldon, so maybe I wouldn't tell you if I did, and yesterday, I said that I don't think I can say everything that I really have to say.  So, take that word, "honestly," for what you will.  But, I don't know what happens next.  Salvor Hardin, Hober Mallow... they didn't either.

I am so not Hari Seldon.  Yeah, I took a bunch of statistics courses, but I am so not Hari Seldon.  I'm some schlub, writing about Isaac Asimov on a Sunday morning because I thought it'd be fun.

Hard times a-comin'.  Not for everyone, but for a lot of people.  That's a part of what I have to say.  In the third book of the Interdependency trilogy, by John Scalzi, (I have written about it before), Lady Kiva decides that the end of civilization means that chaos is no longer working for her, totally self-interested as she is.  The end of a system and self-interest.  Some ideas to consider.  Maybe I'll write about that later.

I think that's what I have to say for today.

*Asimov was writing long before the replication crisis hit psychology so a) let's ignore this, but even so, b) Seldon was working far into the distant future, so let's grant the science fiction premise that in his future, like Ariane Emory's future, psychology has addressed its replication crisis and started to function scientifically.  Once we grant stuff like light speed travel, that's less of a suspension of disbelief.  I guess.