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Straight up confession: every time I read a biography of the Bloomsbury scene—Virginia Woolf, Keynes, Wittgenstein—I cry when it gets to the First World War. We were so close. We could be on Mars by now, if they hadn't blown it all up. BUT.
Now I ask myself: maybe it had to happen. Keynes was a eugenicist. Yes, he wasn't really. But that was his world. He avoided it because his soul wasn't poisoned. But the meritocracy around him, all those Eton scholar, all the IQ 130, that's what they believed.
It's so obvious to me now, having grown up in the UK, moved to the States, and seen the Canadians. Black in the US; BAME in the UK; indigenous in Canada. Just look at who is getting shot.
It's a logic of history. Empire for the Brits; and the Canadians. Slavery for the US, and the Brits, and the Canadians. It's so obvious to me now.
I remember visiting the Soane in London, all the bric-a-brac. There was a set of slave chains; not labelled at the time. You could feel the evil aura off of them, something deeply sick. Like a horror movie, to see them—London so wonderful and beautiful, and at the heart of it...
In physics we have what we call the fine tuning problem. Something so precisely balanced so that we could live. It feels the same way now. We have the capacity—have had since the 1970s—to be a multi-planet species.
And at the same time, we are hurtling towards self-destruction. Not just biochemically, via climate change, but also ethically, through our own systems; the West, and India, and China.
It's so strange to see, to get autistic for a moment. Such capacities. We have so much, even a fraction of a percent would send us to the stars. I think everyone knows this. Elon Musk is just a synecdoche for that.
You don't need to be woke to see it. It's so obvious. I can't see how it's not completely obvious to people. Maybe that's curse of knowledge, having been on the inside for so long. We need creative people, yes, obviously—it's not something you can order off of Amazon.
I can't see how it's not completely obvious to people that we need more than just the same old same old to get us the last steps there. Honestly. It feels so close. We have all the archives, the documentation, to show us how to get there.
It's such a puzzle to me. Could it really be that we are at a point in history where we are so close to fulfilling our promise as a species—and yet, at the same time—so close to self-destruction? I suppose that's been every intellectual's thought since the Bomb.
I think there's this fantasy that we can rewind, back to that moment before the First World War; that we can reboot the Empire, build some rockets, and achieve escape velocity from the past. I completely get it, straight up. It's just that it's not true.
It's in all of them; most recently, for me, Skidlesky's of Keynes. (The single volume abridged.) https://twitter.com/misha_saul/status/1278178420963213313?s=20
Despite my ridiculous accent, and my let's say physiognomy, I felt, as a kid back in the 1990s, part of the British Empire. The idea was that all of this obvious racism was just a side-show, it would wash out, all (& we) would be forgiven.
But I think what cracked me was the Harlem Renaissance and jazz. Reading Baldwin; listening to Charlie Parker. I suppose it's the Dream deferred. It's almost like a theological fact. You can't get to Mars until you reckon with the sin. Can't quantify that, obviously.
Imagine being that good, and having people treat you like an animal. No culture that does that can get to the stars. I get that some midwits can pretend Baldwin is a zero, Charlie Parker is a zero.
But the funny thing about reality is that it doesn't care about your "meritocracy". Yes, it might be able to handle a little bullshit around the edges. But somehow—honestly, I don't know how—the bill comes due. How else to explain it?
Yes. Part of joining the system was learning to throw a cocktail party—Cocktail Party Model, as I said to @jim_rutt. Don't say what's completely obvious to all of us, just be gracious about it. https://twitter.com/AdrianLeeOliver/status/1278182263252037633?s=20
Yeah, @CaitLamberton gave me this advice as well. https://twitter.com/peligrietzer/status/1278181691899752449?s=20
Thanks for listening. God bless.
Come at me bro. What's the plan? How many BLM protestors do we have to shoot? https://twitter.com/vgr/status/1278190199881691137?s=20
Close! As Peter Theil said, you promised me Mars Colonies, you gave me 140 characters. https://twitter.com/misha_saul/status/1278182561647177728?s=20
Given that we've been able to go to Mars for fifty years now, yeah, I'd say maybe the problem is us, not Newton. https://twitter.com/misha_saul/status/1278192201223176193?s=20
Can't stop the signal. https://twitter.com/AdrianLeeOliver/status/1278193510248845312?s=20
