Bruce Lee and The Three Delusions of Modern Life
Volver 
I was watching a video the other day of Bruce Lee playing ping-pong with a nunchaku and I felt puzzled by my own reaction, a reaction probably not very different from that of many other viewers. At first I was incredulous at the physical possibility of such a performance, the ease, the precision and the consequences of hitting a thin plastic ball with a hard swinging object at that speed all went quickly through my mind. But then I thought: "Oh well, he is Bruce Lee, a man that ought to be able to do that and even more. Isn't he extraordinary? Yes, he must be no matter what!"
The Possibility of the Extraordinary is ever present in our lives, rationalistic and deterministic as we are, we never seem to come to terms with reality in its entirety. That same delusion accounts for our believing, against all odds, that at some point in the future, let's say tomorrow at 12:30, for the first time in the history of humanity, a new pure and clean technology will be invented that not only will solve our major environmental problems, it will do so without creating new ones.
With an effortless fist stroke, it will remove 540 kilotons of carbon from the atmosphere, it will regrow depleted rainforests that took 1.5 million years to develop and it will recap the ice poles by separating freshwater from the sea. Unfortunately, for the time being at least, that revolutionary formula seems to consist mainly in trying to imitate what nature was doing for free before we stupidly destroyed it: carbon storage (previously known as "trees"), pollination management (previously known as "bees") and desalinization (previously known as "water").
Radical as it may sound, the only antidote against this pernicious mentality is to recognize, first of all, that we live in a closed dynamic system, and second, that the world is made of things, of extensive macroscopic objects. It is not made of sovereign debt, superconductors and monads, but of discrete entities whose internal order, spanning over a period of more than three billion years, cannot be released and regenerated in a matter of a few decades by the prodigious act of scientific arrogance and parochial misconceptions. The first of those medicines will help us in understanding local thermodynamic processes (the most important law alongside cosmological expansion), the second one in creating accountability and “skin in the game”, as Nassim Nicholas Taleb likes to call it.
Believe it or not, the ultimate truth is that life has successfully evolved in this planet for a few billion years without the aid of scientific research, which in a non insignificant proportion is essentially historiographic, that is, it is aimed at confirming just that fact. We now know that it didn’t evolve continuously or teleologically but in small jumps followed by long periods of stagnation, or as evolutionary biologists like to call it, in a pattern of “punctuated equilibrium”. But that is not essentially different from the way chaotic systems reach an equilibrium state and then fastly degenerate into a new order when the appropriate external conditions are met.
The great Stephen Jay Gould liked to point out that life only actually “evolved” during a “small” period of 600 million years, being mainly unicellular during five sixths of its entire history. Sadly, he did so alongside one of the most gruesome misjudgements that a man of such genius ever made. Evolution towards complexity over long geological and cosmological periods is undeniable, no matter how much simple organisms (e.g bacteria) and basic elements (e.g hydrogen) have proliferated and succeeded, and how many steps back organic and inorganic matter have been subjected to. Embarrassingly, he seemed to have forgotten that at some point in the past everything that surrounds us was just “loose matter in the solar nebula”.
The second delusion of modern life is a bit more subtle but not less effective. It stems from the fact that complex systems tend to increase sub-system’s specialization, creating the feeling that one lives in a secure and controlled environment. I would like to call this widespread phenomena: “The Ringfencing of Functional Domains”. The paramount example of this tendency occurred yesterday, not far from where I live. A lollipop man has been banned by the city council from high-fiving children at the pedestrian crossing, under the argument that this creates “a hazard for drivers and school children”. Obviously the real fear here is that an unrelated accident may cause an expensive sueing for the local government. The proliferation of red-tape and lawsuit prevention policies in every order of life exacerbates the sense of diminishing responsibilities, individualistic and corporativistic attitudes and ultimately the eroding of human compassion and communal solidarity.
Of course that is not the only effect, even more worrying is its rigidity and the decreasing resilience it produces, defined as the capacity to handle and process change in your own benefit. Ringfencing creates highly adapted systems, but only to its local function and environment. They are very poor at managing the unexpected. If it were and organism, it would have a better defence system to protect him against an alien invasion, therefore enhancing its chances of replication, but shall one of those variables fail (the Borough Council be declared bankrupt for some other reason) the system won't easily recover its lost phenotype (the children at that stage would have become disenchanted and unfriendly). Most public roles throughout the world have now become islands of functionality and fear. Academics only talk to academics, landlords only talk to tenants through state agents, while politicians... well, politicians only talk to themselves!
The antidote here has to come in the form of so called “voluntary simplicity”, an effective way of increasing resilience and improving human life for the majority of people. The economist Tim Jackson not only showed that it is perfectly achievable, he demonstrated that it is highly preferable. And no, that’s not going back to isolationism, which is a form of mendicity!
The last delusion is the worst of all evils, the mother of all propagandas, which impregnates every aspect of human life up to the point where it becomes the word of all measures: it is called “The Narrative of Success”. Examples abound, but considering that we have given what we think is an illuminating case for each delusion so far, this one cannot be the exception. If I were to pick a recent one it cannot be any other than Andy Murray’s victory at Wimbledon and the embarrasing front pages that followed in the British press. They were invariably in the line of “Andy Murray ends 77 years of waiting for a British champion” and then vociferously calling for the scotsman to me knighted, adored and immortalized. Forty eight hours later we all woke up to discover that in fact there was another person who won Wimbledon 36 years ago, her name is Virginia Wade. She has been forgotten by the narrative of success.
The narrative of success wants us to believe that Steve Jobs changed the world seven times, just to leave it in the exact same state as it was before. The narrative of success is not the narrative of survival, one is elusive and short lived, the other is altruistic and eternal. The narrative of success asked us to applaud Nassim Nicholas Taleb, because he successfully predicted the unexpected, while attacking the arrogance and hubris of academics, so one day he could become one of them. The narrative of success does not speak through Edward O Wilson, when he quietly suggests that there are three days left in the Earth’s calendar: today, tomorrow and too late (Joseph Tainter pointed out that there is only one).
The narrative of survival wiped off 99% of all the species that ever lived on this planet, but left us with the biggest biodiversity that ever existed in the known Universe.
The narrative of success put a man on the Moon, and when it couldn’t do it any longer, she put him on a hot-air balloon, and made him jump for no particular reason.
Adrián Icazuriaga
Adrián Icazuriaga
