Systemic Risk Control: Is it Possible to Have Too Much?
In 1948 Poul Anderson, a giant of Science Fiction writing, published his first story, “Genius”. It is a story about the mis-management of systemic risk.
In its particulars it is about an intergalactic empire (of course), the Solarians, committed to the maintenance of stability as the only path for long-term survival. A potential threat from within has come to the attention of the imperial government. Something needs to be done about it.
The story isn’t a “space opera.” More in line with Gallileo’s “Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems,” the story is, essentially, a dialogue on the political philosophy of stabilizationism (I made up that word).
The protagonists are Heym, a psychologist arguing against the single-minded goal of stability, and Goram, the head of the imperial armed forces (the regulator, if you will), who would stamp out any “disruptive factor” as “a danger that can wreck civilization.”
Heym avers, “Progress is disruption.” To which, Goram responds, “the Empire is based on stasis. It’s sacrificed progress for – survival.” “Even stasis isn’t safe,” is the comeback from Heym.
Achieving a crisis-free equilibrium may be quite painful, and maintaining it might impossible except at great cost. Heym says, the “purpose of ultimate satisfied stasis cannot be realized in a basically dynamic cosmos.” He continues, “How reconcile and coordinate a hundred thousand stars except by absolutism, by deliberate statism?”
For Heym, systemic risk and progress must coexist to achieve dynamic stability over time.
“Genius” has a surprise ending, in which the disruptive forces of so much concern to Goram are revealed to be already beyond the Empire’s ability to exterminate them. "Genius" suggests the inevitability of the failure of the public policy goal of stabilizationism.
“Genius” is a good story. And as a metaphorical tale about the hazardous side of systemic risk regulation, it is thought provoking.
The story was published in Astounding magazine and subsequently reprinted in The Best Science Fiction Stories 1949, currently out of print.
A short radio drama version of the story, first aired in 1958, unfortunately shorn of much of the political philosophy, can be found online, here: http://bit.ly/1Kgduxt