The Edge of Prediction
It time to demand more of our leaders
At age 13, I discovered science fiction. I’d always loved fantastic and mythological stories, but science fiction was a whole new level. Spaceships and aliens and strange new worlds [Oh, My!] all seemed so much better than being trapped in school with people who seem to hate me for no reason I could understand. Science fiction and fantasy were my escape, and I read a lot. On average, four novels a week on top of my schoolwork.
Some of it, admittedly, gave me an overly optimistic idea about human nature. But that probably wouldn’t have been so bad if I hadn’t been utterly ungrounded. Certainly, I’m in peace with it now. But speculative fiction, as fantasy and sci-fi are now called, give people room to examine big ideas in the framework of story.
If mythology tells us about what was, and about the pitfalls that humans stumble into routinely, speculative fiction creates a frame that lets us examine new ideas. A good story must be written inside a frame. The frame is the rules of the world that the writer has created. The closer those rules align to actual human nature and physics the more likely the idea will be more than a romp, and become useful or cautionary.
There are plenty of stories out there that are cautionary. There’s hundreds of novels and movies about robots or computers destroying the world. Or, of nuclear bombs or biological weapons destroying the world. That genre is post-apocalyptic fiction, and while it is useful for people to consider how they might survive if the world came to an end, it’s only useful in the context of people who know nothing of how to work with their hands, defend themselves, or who don’t know the basics of how to produce food.
People who actually know these things don’t usually find apocalyptic fiction entertaining. Or even any fiction.
While most apocalyptic fiction frames the end of the world as something brutal, where humans must scramble for food, water, shelter, and safety, I haven’t read very many books that talk about how cultures get rebuilt after a disaster. Stephen King tackled it in The Stand, but his ending was all ‘hand of god,’ and thus unsatisfying. [as his ending often are.] Admittedly, the subject probably isn’t as exciting as gun fights, illness, and starvation.
But no matter what kind of world you build, there has to be rules. The rules can be broken, but only in a way that the reader will believe. It’s the building of worlds that I find most exciting. I don’t want to build worlds that are half-destroyed. I want to build worlds that are functional and complex and as close to my ideal as I can get. If I’m going to spend my time speculating, I’m going to speculate about what we could do well rather than how we screw it up.
That doesn’t mean I can ignore human nature.
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Science fiction writers have often given considerable thought to political systems. Science fiction in particular has been a place to consider how we might use AI as part of our governing systems. Robert Heinlein had many examples in his later works of AI that helped to run governments and even helped in revolutions. More recently, Travis Corcoran did the same, perhaps inspired by Heinlein‘s work.
One of the most interesting government systems that stuck with me was Donald Kingsbury‘s Courtship Rite. Looking back on it, I suspect he wanted to write a story about a political system and built a world in which it might work. I wouldn’t wanna live in that world. I don’t think anyone would. It was an example of how humanity might survive in an alien environment filled with poisons, and heavily laced with starvation.
The political system of one tribe in this particular world revolved around their ability to predict what was going to happen in the future. This was not a psychic phenomena. It was the ability to assess their environment, and the people and groups around them in such a way that they could foresee what was likely to happen in the coming years. But that wasn’t all. It was based on any given person’s ability to create the possibility they forsaw. Those who could predict the best would rise into leadership. The consequences for those who failed was dire. Predictions were registered with an archive for specific periods of time and those who were the best at it, rose in prominence.
At the time I read the book, I was less interested in the political system than I was in the family systems. This world assumed large families and loyalty within families that allowed people to help build the prediction of the most successful member of the group. A family was a tightly-knit coalition, rich in trust and with a balance of varied talents.
Among the many podcasts I listen to I’m hearing a lot about predictive power. Particularly since Covid. The informational environment during Covid meant that if one was going to make a reasonable prediction about the future and make a decision about one’s current behavior, one had to be willing to go looking for unconventional streams of information.
The consequences for getting this wrong have been dire.
Both Jordan Peterson and Brett Weinstein often speak of the ability to have predictive power. In an environment that’s changing far more quickly than we are evolved to deal with, the ability to accurately imagine the future, and/or to create it, is a matter of survival.
The Trump administration has, as part of its team, a number of people who have the kind of predictive ability referenced in Donald Kingsbury’s book. They are people who were successful in their fields of endeavor, which meant that they needed to first be able to inspire people with their vision. Second, they had to determine the steps to reach that vision, and third, they had to read the existing culture and forces aligned against that vision and find the path forward.
Our ancestors also needed predictive power. They achieved this by observing the world as it was, noticing patterns, and codifying those patterns into stories and structures. Because of the nature of the world that they lived in the building of those structures often involved in voluntary labor. This is not true in the western world. The West has been free of legal slavery for 150 years. So if you want people’s voluntary labor, you have to enroll them in your vision.
I think it’s time we started asking politicians what their vision of future is, and how they think we should get there. Politicians make promises about fixing this issue or that issue and sometimes they even write a book and/or tell us how they want to do it. It’s certain that they should be telling us how, because pretty words are useless if the methods involved things that are antithetical to biology, physics, or the values enshrined in the Constitution. Historically, politicians come in with big ideas and don’t deliver. There are a lot of reasons for that. One of which is politics itself, which is a continual process of compromise. But the other reason is that they never intended to deliver on it at all. Or, that the vision they held or the way they got there was actually a lie. Incompetence and lies, not to mention corruption, have created dire consequences for the rest of us.
I want to hear what politicians think they can create. I want to see if that vision of the future aligns with mine. I want to see how they plan to get there because I want to know if their values align with mine. If they can accurately predict what they’re aiming for and can make it happen, then maybe they deserve to be in office for an additional term, but only if they’ve accurately predicted the future.
Selina Rifkin, M.S. [Nutrition], LMT, has been to Hades in a handbasket. More than once. This has given her some opinions. Like most of her generation [X] she’s okay with snark. Most days she tries for good writing. But the snark, and side comments creep in. She lives with her husband, and is Mother of Cats; three boyz. Selina has written The Young Woman’s Goodlife Guide: Things I Wish I’d Known When I Was 20. Or… Learn From My Pain, and How to Train Your Cat: Using a Clicker and Leash to Keep Your Indoor Cat Happy and Healthy, the Goodlife Guide to Nutrition, and The Storytellers: a Journey of Discovery.
I like how you put words on the ability to “predict” the future. Not in the sense of the great prophets, but what the process may be for so-called ordinary people who are better at it than others. One thing that immediately came into my mind, and this is an aside, is the people now around trump “have that predictive ability” also have an exorbitant amount of money. So they have the privilege of actually being able to fund what they envision and predict. Obviously the rest of us don’t. Money being an important energy that greases the wheels of things happening. Yet there are other forms of energy that have the ability to do that. Predicting successfully is a skill that, to me, seems to start with an awareness of the reality of nothing except the present moment. That’s it. To “be here now”. What that does is offers the space needed to process information about what is happening right now, on all the different levels - politics, the economy, Earth, all of it. Then it takes a certain kind of “logic” to see how the energies move given today’s reality. Obviously there are many possibilities, but if one has a predetermined desire for a certain type of life or reality, then they’re going to engage with the path that emerges naturally from their present moment reality. Prophecies, predictions, the ability to “see” the future, knowings I’ve had about the future. There are times when I’ve seen parts of, not what’s coming for sure, but what’s coming if . . . It’s like a movie in my head, though often short, which is good because so far what I’ve seen is not good. I don’t sense anything is foretold and unchangeable. The key to changing the future is telling ourselves different stories, stories that take us to a different future than our current stories do. Which you say well here. This awareness is increasing, but it’s still so on the fringe. Yet, what we are learning about the nature of life, the universe, the cosmos through physics, cosmology, and in many other fields confirming all beings are alive, requires a different story. A story that does not fit into the story of materialism where humans are the only ones who can think and reason and communicate and feel. We’re learning so much! Our stories must synthesize the realities as we understand them now. Then I feel we will have the tools to create that world you are talking about. Once the stories start being told, and more people envision them, the more likely they are to come about.
I suspect that post-apocalyptic fiction tends t be a young-person's genre. I enjoy these stories, right up until I had kids. Then, suddenly, the vision of my family suffering through such circumstances was too disturbing. But maybe that's just me.