Comforting lies and postmodern bullshit in science fiction: The Futurological Congress, by Stanislaw Lem (read it)

 Time for a breather.  Time for some science fiction.  And when the world is so absolutely absurd that no sane writer can explain it, I think it is time to turn to Stanislaw Lem.  This morning, let's have ourselves an examination of his classic, The Futurological Congress, which was one of the Ijon Tichy books.

As a general rule, I detest postmodernism, and all things solipsistic.  Yet right now, on November 1, 2020, I find something of value in thinking about The Futurological Congress and its applicability to a period in time that feels too bizarre to be real.  Is this a drug trip?  I don't know.  I never did drugs.  But I kind of hope to wake up in a sewer, with rats walking upright because they, too, are under the influence of hallucinogenic drugs, and they think they are human.  If you have read The Futurological Congress, that makes sense.  As... much sense as anything in that book.

Anyway, here's the deal.  Lem was a Polish science fiction writer, and he had an interesting perspective on things.  He wrote The Futurological Congress in 1971, and I'll recommend the Kandel translation.  Very well done.  The "plot," such as it is, goes as follows.  Tichy attends something vaguely resembling an academic conference!  They are to discuss overpopulation.  Disaster strikes, and everybody gets dosed with hallucinogenic drugs.  Tichy and a few others escape to the sewers to get away.

Every time Tichy "escapes," it is just a hallucination.  He wakes up back in the sewers.  The longest, and most elaborate hallucination proceeds when Tichy is hauled off to a mental institution for his refusal to believe that he isn't hallucinating.  He is then frozen cryogenically, and awoken years later in a future in which everyone is drugged into various forms of blissfulness, and all problems are solved with drugs.

Side-note:  this is a weird book for me to recommend.  I spent six years in grad school at Berkeley, and I've never even taken a puff of marijuana.  I'm that guy.  Besides.  Read this book, and you don't need drugs.

Anyway, Tichy experiences a hallucination of a future in which all problems are solved with drugs.  Constantly wondering whether or not he's just hallucinating, and still in those sewers.  Lem introduces the moral questions of drugging people into being good.  Drugging people into being nice to each other, being civic-minded, responsible, and yadda-yadda-yadda.  Tichy himself gets angry when he is originally drugged and finds himself feeling so warm and fuzzy towards everyone!  Interesting questions, right?

Symington-- a hallucination, of course-- runs a business of giving people hallucinatory experiences of committing evil acts as outlets in a world in which everyone is drugged into being good.  Yet within these hallucinations, people want to see themselves as the heroes.  The good guys.  Otherwise, what's the point?  And the question posed is the extent to which Symington's business facilitates the otherwise-civic-mindedness into which people are otherwise drugged.  And if you aren't actually doing those things...  Actions and intentions and what's underneath the surface, and these are running themes I've been addressing anyway!

Yet even within this grand hallucination, everything is still a hallucination.  The conference Tichy was to attend?  They had planned to discuss overpopulation, and the premise of Tichy's hallucination was a world that continued towards overpopulation.  And rather than deal with those problems, people just took drugs to pretend they weren't there.  Happy, happy me, no problems here!

Eventually, Tichy starts peeling back layers within his hallucination, and the world (hallucination) within the hallucination is basically shit.  Lem notes early in the sequence that people walk around panting all the time.  Why?  All those cars and things?  There are no cars.  No elevators either.  People run around deluded about whether or not they are driving, and don't even ask about how they get around those skyscrapers in New York!  They are panting because they are... "out of breath" doesn't begin to describe it.

I keep quoting Philip K. Dick at you.  "Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away."  There is something both perverse and satisfying about giving Dick to Lem.  Wait... that sounded weird.  Whatever.  If I were as cool as Philip K. Dick, I'd keep the name and accept the jokes.  Anyway, nobody in the future that Tichy... um... hallucinated believed in reality.  Which... was a hallucination.  But only Tichy's hallucination.

Hang on.  I'm lost.  Anyway, within Tichy's hallucination, the simple fact that they didn't believe in reality-- or, the reality of Tichy's... hallucination-- didn't make reality go away.  Or... the reality of... Tichy's... hallucination.

This all makes way more sense if you read the damned book.  Lem was a better writer than I could ever hope to be.  Obviously.  And Kandel's translation is awesome.

Lemme try again.  (Sorrynotsorry.)  Anyway, the people in the utopian future (which Tichy imagined) believed that their utopian world was real, but that belief did not protect them from the physicality of their circumstances (even though there was no physicality, since it was all in Tichy's head).  OK, got that?

Now.  Let's dig in.

Normally, I disdain postmodernism and solipsistic bullshit, but you can probably see why I am taking a Sunday out, right before the weirdest election ever, to discuss The Futurological Congress.

Dick.

When your name can be a paragraph that is simultaneously obscene and non-obscene, you are the coolest writer ever.

I have been writing semi-frequently about the problem of truth.  No, truth is not subjective.  There isn't your truth and my truth.  There is the truth.  The scientific method is the best and only method ever devised to converge asymptotically to the truth.  The.  Singular.  Convergence means that the attempt to study the truth is an iterative process.  On matters of fact, reality... postmodernism and solipsism should be rejected on the basis of their non-falsifiability and total.  Fucking.  Uselessness.

You know what's useful?  Science.

Science proceeds, though, asymptotically and iteratively.

Kuhn's conception of the scientific process, as an iterative process, isn't quite how I am describing it here.  The replacement of one paradigm with another is an iterative one, but whether or not that can be described as the asymptotic convergence towards truth is something over which one can argue.  I'd argue that if you are sequentially replacing paradigms with new paradigms that solve more problems, then you are converging towards truth with your models.

But we distinguish between models-- "theories," in more conventional jargon, and questions of simple fact.  The word, "theory," has a colloquial usage that differs significantly from its usage in science.  Colloquially, a "theory" is a claim that one thinks might be true, but that one doesn't know to be true.  A questionable proposition.  That is most definitely not what scientists mean by the word.  Hopefully, you already knew that.  We, scientists, get very annoyed at such use of the term in any scientific context.  In its scientific context, a "theory" is an explanation for a broad set of empirical observations, which has been subjected to repeated empirical tests and verification.  Rather than being something less than fact, it is something more than fact.  A claim does not become "theory" until it has been repeatedly tested, and verified.  Yet, we still use the word, "theory," because a better theory may come along later.  Kuhn simply preferred, "paradigm."  Same diff.  Basically.  Theories, paradigms, whatever... we must always be open to the possibility of a paradigm shift should our models require replacement because the whole point of the scientific process is that iterative convergence.  Our level of attachment to an existing paradigm, theory, whatever, must simply reflect its empirical, predictive power.

Yet on matters of simple fact, we should not bother to engage with solipsistic bullshit.

OK.  So much here.  So much here.

Let's start with the basic observation of the 2020 election.  Donald Trump is telling the country to pant its way through a pandemic.  Why does everyone in the future (or, Tichy's hallucination of it) pant?  They are out of breath.  They think they are driving and taking elevators and living in a paradise of technological sophistication, but none of that is true.  It's all a lie.  And they have been Dicked.  Reality-- or the semi-meta-reality within the hallucination (?)-- is affecting their cardiovascular and pulmonary systems regardless of what they see and think and feel.  (Except... that none of it is real, outside Tichy's head...)

COVID?  Ignore it!  Pretend it doesn't exist!  Ignore the doctors!  Ignore the epidemiologists!  Ignore it all!  Pretend none of it is real!  Sure.  Yeah.  Unless you think you live in Ijon Tichy's head... maybe not such a great idea.  This is the irony of a postmodern solipsistic novel that acknowledges the limits of postmodern solipsism.

Unfortunately, the ideology of liarism does not.

When COVID hit, before we had any real policy plans, we were facing the possibility of a death toll of 2 million.  As I calculated, in order to demonstrate the scale, that's 1/6th of a Holocaust (6 million jews, 6 million assorted others).  If we don't have sane policy, which requires sane leadership, we'll get there eventually.  We'll just get there the long way.  We have slowed the spread because most of us don't do what Donald Trump tells us to do, but there is only so much the country can do without sane policy and an eventual vaccine, trusted, because the process hasn't been polluted by the lying-est liar who ever lied a lie.

In The Futurological Congress, the world in Tichy's head ignored overpopulation rather than dealing with it, and the result was that all anyone could think to do was to drug everyone to the point that they didn't see how bad everything was, leaving people to drop dead of heart disease without understanding that it was because they were only pretending to drive and take elevators and things.  And nobody could even see the corpses.

From the perspective of those few who knew the truth at that time, they thought they were doing right.  Once it got that bad, what else can you do?  Drug everyone into some semblance of happiness because nothing is fixable anymore.  But if you lie to everyone rather than...

fix the fucking problem...

then eventually, you will be stuck.

OK, do you get why I'm rambling about The Futurological Congress this morning?  Watching Fox News and having everyone tell you that everything is awesome and that there's no problem may be a nice, little solipsistic drug, but if you just keep taking that drug, the problem will eventually be unfixable, and if you aren't even aware that you are stuck in a sewer, you're never getting out.

The Futurological Congress, by Stanislaw Lem.  The only postmodern, solipsistic drug trip novel that you should bother reading.  Right now, anyway.