Finding Omega - A Preface draft
No. This won’t be about grand innovations or narratives, Malcolm Gladwell style. Because if you want to learn and remember (!) how the world works, don’t read books. Complete the Model Thinking course by Scott E. Page of University of Michigan on Coursera. And then review it again. Really, I mean it. Since Marx, philosophy and critical thinking should aim to change the world. Not just explain it. He was quite accurate in naming the problems. Needless to say, his solutions failed at best. In this light, modern pop thinkers represent a setback. They excel at compelling narratives spiced up with data and science. But for all the words of technological disruption, they don’t challenge the status quo enough. They just want to sell books that should have stayed essays. Because you cannot sell an essay, they stretch an idea into 150 pages, full of feel-good stories or counterintuitive and catchy arguments. In this sense, my aim is to create an “antibook”. Instead of so called Big Ideas, we need small but achievable solutions that cut to the very core of today’s problems. Minirealistic. Not drones and 3-D printers saving Africa. But inventions similar to primitive SMS-based banking that revolutionized finance in Kenya. These are the hardest to find. Therefore we still hear people talking about the eight year old M-Pesa service of Safaricom.
What is the smallest and cheapest change or reform that can have the biggest impact? I don’t call it an innovation. Rather an opportunity not noticed. I want to present only four simple solutions and two ideas that I distilled from years of my thinking and reading. Finding Omega is a rather cynical play on words. The opposite to the Seeking Alpha, a popular blog for investors. Alpha is risk-adjusted measure for active return on investment. Omega is a holy grail, or rather a holy calf that needs to disappear.
The four solutions:
1) Abolish or tax per diems to fight hunger and climate change.
2) World needs Laozi besides Confucius Institutes to find a new ideological balance.
3) Forget GDP. We need a new unified metric to measure the progress of countries. It could be composed of inequality-adjusted HDI, press freedom index and CRIS.
4) Only “hacking the obsolete narrative” disrupts the order. Hacking computers only actually strengthens it in the long term.
Two thoughts:
1) The Counter-Counterintuitive: Sometimes it seems we cannot find a direct solution; we need two negatives to cancel themselves out. It sounds a lot like Zizek, but bear with me. Which group is the “oppressed African or Roma” of the 21st century? Maybe gays or women? It turns out, it could be still the same oppressed African from the last century. Maybe not legally, but... economically? Today, it is not an obvious argument but it sounds trivial. Less trivial is the theory. The counter-culture revolution of ’68 failed to challenge capitalism and saw a growing backlash globally in the last two decades despite current short-term breakthroughs in the West. But I argue that it has been important in the long term for the sake of economic and racial equality that still appears elusive today.
It looks as if human intuition (soul, you name it...) was a hole between two magnets with negative poles facing each other. The magnets are held by reason. They represent two opposing ideologies. Once reason disappears, snap, only a cold metal binary matter remains. Last year Google registered a patent for a program that can write emails and post statuses instead of people. Just saying. Ok, this paragraph is not a theory and it still sounds like Zizek. I still need to work on it. But it is poetic, hence my second idea.
2) Poetical Economy as opposed to the political one: Another silly sounding term. It is not easy to model the complex “political economy” and predict how exactly one country will progress relative to its peers for example in ten years. My third solution of a new paradigm in country rankings mentioned above, deals with this partially. But what about the Balloon Dog statue by Jeff Koons that recently sold for $58.4 million? It is the most expensive piece by living artist sold to date at auction. It is too easy to say that the underlying asset here is not the metal sculpture alone, but the brand of Jeff Koons. In my opinion the underlying asset is the process of sale itself. Similar is the case of the diamond skull art piece named For the Love of God by Damien Hirst. It is like the wave–particle duality problem on quantum scale. There are different laws that govern the sales of contemporary art in tens of millions of dollars. Hence Poetical Economy. One theory about recent global economic crisis blames trade imbalances magnified by Chinese excessive savings. And Chinese one child policy is one of the culprits. Families have to amass big savings to marry their sons on the very competitive market. But yet there are many rich single women. Maybe the whole crisis starts at the dinner date. You see, it is very tempting to get back to Malcolm Gladwell style. People love interesting counterintuitive narratives. They sell books. But here the underlying asset is not information on paper, but an ability to hold a witty conversation at the next date or party. Information is not power. A good feeling is. Poetry is.
Well if you think something mentioned above sounds interesting, feel free to skip to that part and give me feedback at @jakubsimek.