Whenever I open the IF blog, I find lots of numbers. To be sure, the If blog is not the only place. Numbers as such are at the forefront when it comes to explaining the world. As I see it, there are three types of numbers.
Decision numbers.
Displeasure numbers.
Distancing numbers.
Greece is the prototype for a decision number.
Will Greece be able to pay back the loans?
Yes/No
No.
Will Greece go bankrupt?
Yes/No
Yes.
If decision numbers are ignored,
the motivation is purely political.
The displeasure numbers summarize the footprints
we humans have left on this planet.
Invented by: Club of Rome.
Main subject matters change continually:
Environmental pollution/wastefulness.
Air pollution/wastefulness.
Water pollution/wastefulness.
The cause is easy to make out, but has no influence on the decision.
Removal or reduction of the human population
is not yet an option.
The distancing numbers are relatively new and they, at long last, are an answer to the constant human wish to be God.
That is: to understand oneself.
Human nature is impatient, undisciplined, subjective, greedy, arrogant and blind towards reality.
That is what you can read in the flyer of a London Hedge fond with 200 employees, 100 of whom are scientists. We are talking the best graduates from Oxford, Cambridge, Harvard, and Stanford. Mathematicians, statisticians, nuclear physicists, bio-chemists.
They did what human science and
neuropsychology never managed to do before:
They made human behaviour predictable.
You can read about it in the last SPIEGEL edition.
Since these numbers are far out and
not intelligible for normal humans,
they are
no longer written down. Instead, they are incanted like deity
in front of the computer.
Existence precedes essence: that is what
the existentialists,
who were just about the only
“thinkers about human nature”, said.
No we did it. It takes no more than
the London computer continually
disgorging mental excesses into
the hollow existential bodies
and already we behave like we are supposed to.
We know the winner of the war of numbers.
SIX
(Translated by EG)
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