The spread of Covid-19, or the coronavirus, has reached every continent except Antarctica, with a death toll surpassing 3,000, and the World Health Organization announced that countries should prepare for a global pandemic. The Onion takes a look at the worst disease pandemics in world history.
Plague Of Justinian (541-542):
The deadly virus devastated Mediterranean port cities, dealing a fatal blow to the lucrative bacterium trade.
The Black Death (1346-1353):
Bubonic plague killed between 75 million and 200 million people due to rats stubbornly refusing to vaccinate their children.
Third Cholera Pandemic (1846-1860):
The deadliest of the famous cholera outbreaks, the third cholera pandemic is a reminder to not let your guard down just because most of your loved ones already died in the first two rounds of a disease.
Flu Pandemic (1889-1890):
The last widespread devastation wrought by God’s wrath before researchers finally discovered the cure in 1894.
Sixth Cholera Pandemic (1899-1923):
Derivative and uninspired.
Flu Pandemic (1968):
Killed 1 million people and left millions more victims with chest congestion and a sore throat.
HIV/AIDS (1981-Present):
Despite its large death toll and continued devastation, advancements in treatment have allowed many of those infected to lead equally meaningless lives as those without the virus.
Swine Flu (2009-2010):
Thankfully, pigs have mostly recovered from this massive PR disaster that claimed around 250,000 lives.
“The books we need are the kind that act upon us like a misfortune, that make us suffer like the death of someone we love more than ourselves, that make us feel as though we were on the verge of suicide, or lost in a forest remote from human habitation—a book should serve as the axe for the frozen sea within us.”
– Kafka, quoted in The Savage God
Franz Kafka (July 3, 1883 – June 3, 1924) was a German-speaking Bohemian novelist and short-story writer, widely regarded as one of the major figures of 20th-century literature. His work fuses elements of realism and the fantastic. Wikipedia
Lamott’s words, once again, shine with warm and luminous wisdom. Alluding to the chapter on perfectionism, she writes:
Anne Lamott
There’s a whole chapter on perfectionism in Bird by Bird, because it is the great enemy of the writer, and of life, our sweet messy beautiful screwed up human lives. It is the voice of the oppressor. It will keep you very scared and restless your entire life if you do not awaken, and fight back, and if you’re an artist, it will destroy you.
[…]
Do you mind even a little that you are still addicted to people-pleasing, and are still putting everyone else’s needs and laundry and career ahead of your creative, spiritual life? Giving all your life force away, to “help” and impress. Well, your help is not helpful, and falls short.
Look, I struggle with this. I hate to be criticized. I am just the tiniest bit more sensitive than the average bear. And yet, I’m a writer, so I periodically put my work out there, and sometimes like all writers, I get terrible reviews, so personal in nature that they leave me panting. Even with a Facebook post … do you have any idea what it’s like to get 500-plus negative attacks, on my character, from truly bizarre strangers.
Really, it’s not ideal.
Yet, I get to tell my truth. I get to seek meaning and realization. I get to live fully, wildly, imperfectly. That’s why I’m alive. And all I actually have to offer as a writer, is my version of life. Every single thing that has happened to me is mine. As I’ve said a hundred times, if people wanted me to write more warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
She reminds us that we don’t find time for what matters, we make time — and the priorities we set define our destiny:
Is it okay with you that you blow off your writing, or whatever your creative/spiritual calling, because your priority is to go to the gym or do yoga five days a week? Would you give us one of those days back, to play or study poetry? To have an awakening? Have you asked yourself lately, “How alive am I willing to be?” It’s all going very quickly. It’s mid-May, for God’s sake. Who knew. I thought it was late February.
It’s time to get serious about joy and fulfillment, work on our books, songs, dances, gardens. But perfectionism is always lurking nearby, like the demonic prowling lion in the Old Testament, waiting to pounce. It will convince you that your work-in-progress is not great, and that you may never get published. (Wait, forget the prowling satanic lion — your parents, living or dead, almost just as loudly either way, and your aunt Beth, and your passive-aggressive friends, whom we all think you should ditch, are going to ask, “Oh, you’re writing again? That’s nice. Do you have an agent?”)
She reminds us, too, of something that Debbie Millman articulated beautifully in her 2013 commencement address, advising aspiring creators: “Imagine immensities, don’t compromise, and don’t waste time. Start now. Not 20 years from now, not two weeks from now. Now.” Lamott echoes this sentiment with exquisite, poetic rawness:
Oh my God, what if you wake up some day, and you’re 65, or 75, and you never got your memoir or novel written; or you didn’t go swimming in warm pools and oceans all those years because your thighs were jiggly and you had a nice big comfortable tummy; or you were just so strung out on perfectionism and people-pleasing that you forgot to have a big juicy creative life, of imagination and radical silliness and staring off into space like when you were a kid? It’s going to break your heart. Don’t let this happen. Repent just means to change direction — and NOT to be said by someone who is waggling their forefinger at you. Repentance is a blessing. Pick a new direction, one you wouldn’t mind ending up at, and aim for that. Shoot the moon.
Echoing Neil Gaiman, who counseled young artists to “make glorious, amazing mistakes,” Lamott concludes with a recipe for an antidote — the only real antidote — to perfectionism:
Here’s how to break through the perfectionism: make a LOT of mistakes. Fall on your butt more often. Waste more paper, printing out your shitty first drafts, and maybe send a check to the Sierra Club. Celebrate messes — these are where the goods are. Put something on the calendar that you know you’ll be terrible at, like dance lessons, or a meditation retreat, or boot camp. Find a writing partner, who will help you with your work, by reading it for you, and telling you the truth about it, with respect, to help you make it better and better; for whom you will do the same thing. Find someone who wants to steal his or her life back, too. Now; today. One wild and crazy thing: wears shorts out in public if it is hot, even if your legs are milky white or heavy. Go to a poetry slam. Go to open mike, and read the story you wrote about the hilariously god-awful family reunion, with a trusted friend, even though it could be better, and would hurt Uncle Ed’s feelings if he read it, which he isn’t going to.
Change his name and hair color — he won’t even recognize himself.
At work, you begin to fulfill your artistic destiny. Wow! A reviewer may hate your style, or newspapers may neglect you, or 500 people may tell you that you are bitter, delusional and boring.
Let me ask you this: in the big juicy Zorba scheme of things, who fucking cares?
(Or, as I wrote some time ago in reflecting on my learnings from seven years of doing this: “When people try to tell you who you are, don’t believe them. You are the only custodian of your own integrity, and the assumptions made by those that misunderstand who you are and what you stand for reveal a great deal about them and absolutely nothing about you.”)
Nietzsche had a unique vision that allowed him to see through the beliefs of most people. His writings gave his vision tremendous colour. Painting: Wassily Kandinsky, Landscape with Factory Chimney, 1910. (Source: Wikimedia Commons. Public Domain).
“I am not a man, I am dynamite.”
No philosopher has ever been so “right” as Nietzsche. His insights into western civilisation and what it is to be human in the modern world are so on the money, they seem like God-given prophesies.
Nietzsche had an extraordinary insight into human belief systems. He called out the beliefs that held the Victorian world together: official religion, nationalist politics, and faith in science and reason. He was dynamite because he blew those beliefs to smithereens.
What made Nietzsche such a great critic and forecaster for our entire culture? The 2015 book, Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction by Philip E. Tetlock and Dan Gardner, examines how some people can be so consistently right about the future, while supposed experts get it so wrong.
Having studied the phenomenon at length, the authors concluded that “superforecasters” are not just lucky. They share traits that enable them to bypass the cognitive biases that cloud the judgement of most people.
We’re all invested in the future and investors too often let emotion guide them. Nietzsche was the ultimate superforecaster because he detached himself from others’ investment in the future.
But how? There’s no such thing as in-born genius. Nietzsche simply had a different vision from most people. The difference is that he articulated it exquisitely in his writings.
There are four traits that enabled Nietzsche to blow our precious beliefs apart and see a clear vision of the future.
1. Questioning widely held beliefs
“In individuals, insanity is rare; but in groups, parties, nations, and epochs, it is the rule.”
This is what makes you a philosopher. Bertrand Russell recalled being taught basic mathematics as a child. Two plus two equals four, he was told. He asked: why? Why does two plus two equal four? It just does, he was told. But he didn’t stop asking and went on to write Principia Mathematica with Alfred North Whitehead, the textbook on the fundamentals of mathematics.
Nietzsche questioned everything he was taught, and then everything everybody seemed to take for granted. His father was a priest, but young Friedrich became the man who declared “God is dead. We have killed him.” The philosopher examined the nature of belief itself. He wrote,
“There are two different types of people in the world, those who want to know, and those who want to believe.”
He loathed mob-thinking. He saw German nationalism — pervasive among intelligent people in his time — to be stupid, the same with anti-Semitism — the two things that would scar twentieth-century Europe.
Behind every belief is a goal. Nietzsche was sceptical of widely held beliefs because he mistrusted their goals.
Wassily Kandinsky, Composition VI, 1913. In just a few years, Kandinsky’s vision took him beyond recognisable things into a realm of abstraction. He transformed modern art as a result.
2. Self-sufficiency
“He who cannot obey himself will be commanded.”
Self-sufficiency came to Nietzsche in many ways. His idea of self-overcoming, of creating your best self from the chaos within you requires an enormous amount of discipline. To be a Nietzschean is to walk against the herd and out alone in the wilderness. Calling out other people’s bad faith will entail being branded as eccentric or even dangerous (Socrates was executed for questioning beliefs in ancient Athens).
Nietzsche was also lonely. The love of his life, Lou Salome, abandoned him. He became estranged from his family and friends through his convictions. Loneliness can crush many people, Nietzsche confronted loneliness through his choices.
He obeyed himself. His aversion to “the mob” gave him the insight to see the world how it really is. The inconvenient truths that many of us fear so much gave him inspiration to envisage a different world.
3. Everything changes
“Our destiny exercises its influence over us even when, as yet, we have not learned its nature: it is our future that lays down the law to our to-day.”
Every civilisation believes it has the last word until it doesn’t. Western civilisation has shown the same arrogance that many dead civilisations have displayed.
Nietzsche had a deep-seated affection for Heraclitus, an ancient Greek philosopher whose work survives only in fragments. Heraclitus believed that the only thing we can be certain of is change. “You never step in the same river twice,” is a Heraclitus phrase that can be applied to the wider culture as well as our individual lives.
We are poor predictors of the future because we are so invested in things remaining as they are. Change is frightening. This is especially true when we benefit from the way things are.
Nietzsche lived at a time when profound change was underway but was yet to manifest itself. Europe and America were industrialising rapidly, cities grew, technology boomed, scientific discoveries were undermining old ways of thinking.
Nietzsche was among a number of thinkers changing the world at the time along with Charles Darwin, Sigmund Freud, and, of course, Karl Marx. In the nineteenth century, the world was a powder keg. Nietzsche knew it was going to blow.
The twentieth century saw wholesale changes: two world wars, the rise of Fascism, the fall of the European empires, Marxist revolutions in Russia and China. It has been the bloodiest century in the history of mankind. Millions died in wars and revolutions. Millions were exterminated simply for who they were.
4. Optimism
“I am a bringer of good tidings such as there has never been… only after me is it possible to hope again.”
You’d think that questioning everything, being a loner and knowing that everything changes would make you a pessimist, but Nietzsche was the opposite.
He ruthlessly called out everything that he believed to be flawed and corrupt in western civilisation’s pillars of progress: religion, science, nation and politics, yet always warned against the nihilism that might come with the vacuum of belief. It is nihilism that made people believe in other mob-mentality goals like fascism and communism.
Instead, Nietzsche looked inwards for meaning, and he urges us to find transcendence in ourselves. He preached for the coming of the “overman” (“Ubermensch”) the higher human that can transcend the human. Optimism and self-belief made him a superforecaster, since pessimism and nihilism cause us to retreat into the comfortable beliefs of the mob.
The overman is the self-overcomer, the self-actualiser that lives beyond mere beliefs and embraces conviction to create their own meaning for life. “It takes chaos to give birth to a dancing star,” he wrote, “and you have chaos within you yet.”
What does this mean for us? A lot. In the same pages as his “dynamite” quip, Nietzsche wrote of a future even more extraordinary than what humankind witnessed in the twentieth century.
He wrote:
“When truth steps into battle with the lie of millenia we shall have convusions, an earthquake spasm, a transposition of valley and mountain such as never has been dreamed of. The concept politics has then become completely absorbed into a war of spirits, all the power-structures of the old society have been blown into the air — they one and all reposed on the lie: there will be Wars such as there has never yet been on earth. Only after me will there be grand politics on Earth.”
The world wars, fascism, the Holocaust, and communist revolutions have come to pass, but is there more to come?
We are dozing on an unexploded bomb. Technologies such as gene editing, robotics and artificial intelligence will pose dilemmas to us that are unprecedented in all history. We will be challenged to define what being human means, what life is, what “rights” are. We’ll need to redefine happiness, democracy and even freedom.
Wildlife and resources are evaporating. What was once called the “Third World” is quickly rising to prosperity and power. Nations humiliated by colonialism will be humiliating their colonisers. The wealth gap between rich and poor is widening faster. There may be revolutions.
Will there be even more suffering? That is up to our capacity to handle inevitable change. That is up to us.
Life is full of polarities that give our existence meaning. We know pleasure because we have felt pain. We revel in beauty because we have witnessed destruction. We experience happiness only because we have known despair. The emotional energies that fuel our lives spring out of this grand dichotomy that separate the light from the dark, the constructive from the destructive.
Sigmund Freud plucked this phenomenon up and out of the great undercurrent of the human experience and awarded these opposing forces mythological labels: Eros was established as the “life instinct” (alluding to the Greek god of love) and, later, Thanatos for the “death instinct” (alluding to the Greek force of death). Freud articulated these two instincts as being hopelessly locked in a state of eternal battle.
Eros encapsulates the will to survival and the desire to create. What blooms out of this instinct are the potent forces of love and ambition that both draw civilization and color it, so to speak. Allegorically, Eros can be expressed as Renaissance art — creations that prioritized elegance, the exquisiteness of the human form, and classical notions of man’s nobility. Eros is both the impulse to sustain (to attain basic necessities of life) as well as the impulse to thrive (to carve higher ideals). Eros is nurturing and stimulating, infused with the precepts of humanism. It seeks to rise out of the muck of chaos and to fashion order. It endeavors to surface above messy animalistic impulses and put something more palatable and more attractive in its place.
Eros is life and love, vigor and purpose, cooperation and civilization.But indeed, all of these ideals are defined by their opposites. The very conceptualization of Eros and Thanatos is based on the necessity of the one to provide meaning for the other. Without Thanatos staring back at us in the mirror, Eros has nothing to push against, nothing to strive for, nothing to sculpt meaning out of. Absent of its shadow, Eros can feel peculiarly antiseptic, plagued by a hollow, soulless quality.
Thanatos, then, can be conceptualized as the grinning skull of death. It is the drive towards obliteration; it is aggression manifest. It is the heady lure of destruction, the greedy pursuit of confrontation with our own mortality. It is flirtation with death; it is a testing of our human ability to destroy that which we have patiently labored to create. It is hatred that once applied, calcifies the world and crumbles it — reducing it to primordial dust. It is the human hunger for gross power, for subversive exploitation. It is decay immortalized. It is tearing down the curtains, stripping off the wallpaper, knifing a gash through the window. It is the drive to return to the dust, the desire to snuff out life — to kill humanity, to kill civilization, sometimes even, to kill the self.Dissolution is the objective of Thanatos — the temptation to revert back to — in Freud’s terms — an inanimate, motionless state.
Eros is the intrepid pushing of new growth through the soil; Thanatos is the snapping of the stem, the crushing of life under the heel, the brutish ripping out of the plant.
Freud is often criticized for his speculative theories that erred on the primitive side of man — that treated individuals as ruled by forces they could neither really see nor wrest control over. He was apt to believe, for example, that the so-called “death wish” wasn’t something that could be transcended. The primeval desire for annihilation could never be blotted out, he thought. His original introduction of this heavy duality came on the heels of his debut of the “pleasure principle” which is famously known as the idea that we humans are wired for instant gratification.
This particular theory maintained that humans were so magnetized to pleasure mostly because such a state was defined by the absence of tension. Tension had to be eradicated in order to experience this elusive pleasure. (Of course, this is technically rather difficult in life and necessitates a constant chase.) Freud mulled over the notion that the “death wish” was so appealing in part because it contained the heady promise of a tensionless state. A truly tensionless state, after all, is only achievable in death.
But such a formulation of the death instinct feels almost too superficial, too forgiving. I think it’s just as true that the drive to annihilate is motivated by a feverish desire to find out just what we humans are capable of. In an urge towards wanting to grasp concrete certainty — that is, to discover in glaring, raw detail the intimate knowledge of our own nature — it could be said that the dark side of human nature is secretly pining to hit rock-bottom — to test the full strength of our own powers, to collapse or kill our way to the very bottom.
It is a goal to strive towards, after all. It promises something in the way of sure knowledge. It promises something in the way of victory. Both of these things are human vices; both are enticing in ways that we cannot fully understand.
We are also, I suspect, wary of our eviler, base impulses. Society suppresses these destructive impulses, effectively pushing them into darkened corners. (Which is exactly what it’s supposed to do and thank God it does.) But because it binds this destructiveness, it also blinds by providing us with only a fuzzy awareness of our destructive drive and attendant capabilities. This, in turn, makes us skittish and curious and in the event that our external world devolves into Thanatos (such as in the case of war) we can fall prey to this skittishness, we can indulge in this morbid curiosity.
War, and this may be obvious, is one of the clearest examples of Thanatos in action. It is the stage upon which the drama of the human fascination with the death wish is enacted in fierce, macabre detail. In war, the strictures that hold society taut in peaceful times snap. Civilized reason yields to the heat of tribal violence. The economics of cooperation are upended, replaced by the careless sparking of mayhem with the enemy.
In war, architecture that bears the mark of human ingenuity and persistence is razed to the ground. Bullets and bombs devastate the physical and the human landscape, ripping holes through the cultural tapestry, destroying that which has been built up over time. The race to the bottom can feel exhilarating to those ensnared in the clutches of Thanatos. To level the world, to reduce it to rubble, to break loose from the bonds of society and to take up that speck of savagery hidden inside the human heart — these things can powerfully grip a people.
In this way, war, for some, can be a letting-loose. It is the blasting away of the societal pact to preserve and to patiently cultivate. Individuals can be sickened by the atrocity of war, by its grisly aspects, by its rejection of Eros. The contrast can be profoundly disorienting. Combat is nauseating for most of those involved, but the environment of war itself has a perverse attraction. War is not an empty, aimless endeavor, contrary to what some might think. It is charged with energy — the drive to destroy, specifically — and is marked not by moral neutrality but by moral perversity.
We as humans are rightly invigorated by the idea that we can test our mettle at reaching our full potential — indisputably a function of Eros. But could it not also be true that we’re unconsciously drawn with dark fascination to our Thanatos potential? Could it be that the two are equally alluring? The brutalities of war represent the ancient vice of human destructiveness being invited to come out to play. The lawlessness can have an enticing quality. War is the devil’s playground — vicious, vaguely apocalyptic and morally toxic.
War, after all, is not always logical. It is fueled by rational motives less than we’d like to admit. It is performed in a manner less neat and orderly than we’d prefer to believe. We mistakenly conceive of war as a callous, businesslike affair but this is not necessarily true. War is wildly infused with emotion. It can trace its origins and escalation all too often to the ravenousness of hate, love, fear, anger — to the swell of emotional intensity. History has never been able to expunge battle from its pages for precisely this reason.
Diverging from war as mankind’s Thanatos instinct writ large, there’s a more existential dimension to the tug-of-war between Eros and Thanatos. What separates humans from animals? It is largely the magnitude of our consciousness. We possess not only the cognitive prowess necessary to comprehend the harsh face of our own mortality but the ability to be keenly aware of our participation in either good or evil. Isn’t this what the legendary story of Adam and Eve’s Fall was all about? Attaining consciousness which shattered innocence. Feeling shame and grasping wrongdoing.Becoming disquietingly aware of human potential that runs in two directions — up and down.
We are motivated to discover what is upstream, to push towards love and human flourishing, accomplishment and virtue. But so too can we be motivated to discover what lies downstream — motivated if only out of a kind of ghoulish curiosity. We do not want to admit that creation and destruction can be equally riveting.
As children, we took pride in building towers, hungrily stacking them higher and higher. But guess what? We derived some kind of glee out of destroying them too — giving them a kick, watching them topple helplessly to the ground.
So too do we flirt with our own annihilation. We cannot help but be imaginatively gruesome in entertaining the different ways we could die, for example. In the words of Stephen King, “Everyone who looks off the edge of a tall building has felt a faint, morbid urge to jump.” We cannot help but experience a delicious shiver of excitement from a brush with danger.
So too do mental illnesses such as depression smack of the death wish. Depression can be painted as the self-destruction of the self, the regression of self-actualization. The sword of aggression is stabbed inwards, sometimes performing a fatal twist and resulting in the literal elimination of the individual — in the finality of suicidal death.
Thanatos is spellbinding. Its counterpart, Eros, can be equally captivating. But we are always in danger of forgetting this basic nature of ours. We must always be on the lookout, humbling ourselves before the truths that we do not want to own about ourselves.
The business of killing and destroying and wreaking havoc has scarcely let up over the course of history. And this should be telling. The leaps and bounds of human progress were never able to bleed Thanatos of its power. This is because Eros and Thanatos occupy separate poles which humans are ineluctably strung between. Naturally, Eros has never been successful in eclipsing Thanatos. And herein lies the truth: They are both acutely, undeniably legitimate forces that have always been with us and that will never leave us.
The human heart and mind are destined to a grim dance between Eros and Thanatos that will stretch for all of earthly eternity. Being able to gaze forthrightly into the dimensions of both directions and become sharply conscious of our own inescapable nature will lead us to the ultimate acceptance and knowledge of what it truly means to be human.
“Men will always be mad, and those who think they can cure them are the maddest of all.”
―François-Marie Arouet, known by his nom de plume Voltaire (November 21, 1694 – May 30, 1787), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian, and philosopher famous for his wit, his criticism of Christianity, especially the Roman Catholic Church, as well as his advocacy of freedom of speech, freedom of religion, and separation of church and state. Wikipedia
Thomas Ormerod’s team of security officers faced a seemingly impossible task. At airports across Europe, they were asked to interview passengers on their history and travel plans. Ormerod had planted a handful of people arriving at security with a false history, and a made-up future – and his team had to guess who they were. In fact, just one in 1000 of the people they interviewed would be deceiving them. Identifying the liar should have been about as easy as finding a needle in a haystack.
So, what did they do? One option would be to focus on body language or eye movements, right? It would have been a bad idea. Study after study has found that attempts – even by trained police officers – to read lies from body language and facial expressions are more often little better than chance. According to one study, just 50 out of 20,000 people managed to make a correct judgement with more than 80 percent accuracy. Most people might as well just flip a coin.
Ormerod’s team tried something different – and managed to identify the fake passengers in the vast majority of cases. Their secret? To throw away many of the accepted cues to deception and start anew with some startlingly straightforward techniques.
When it comes to spotting liars, the eyes don’t have it. Credit: Thinkstock.
Over the last few years, deception research has been plagued by disappointing results. Most previous work had focused on reading a liar’s intentions via their body language or from their face – blushing cheeks, a nervous laugh, darting eyes. The most famous example is Bill Clinton touching his nose when he denied his affair with Monica Lewinsky – taken at the time to be a sure sign he was lying. The idea, says Timothy Levine at the University of Alabama in Birmingham, was that the act of lying provokes some strong emotions – nerves, guilt, perhaps even exhilaration at the challenge – that are difficult to contain. Even if we think we have a poker face, we might still give away tiny flickers of movement known as “micro-expressions” that might give the game away, they claimed.
Yet the more psychologists looked, the more elusive any reliable cues appeared to be. The problem is the huge variety of human behaviour. With familiarity, you might be able to spot someone’s tics whenever they are telling the truth, but others will probably act very differently; there is no universal dictionary of body language. “There are no consistent signs that always arise alongside deception,” says Ormerod, who is based at the University of Sussex. “I giggle nervously, others become more serious, some make eye contact, some avoid it.” Levine agrees: “The evidence is pretty clear that there aren’t any reliable cues that distinguish truth and lies,” he says. And although you may hear that our subconscious can spot these signs even if they seem to escape our awareness, this too seems to have been disproved.
Despite these damning results, our safety often still hinges on the existence of these mythical cues. Consider the screening some passengers might face before a long-haul flight – a process Ormerod was asked to investigate in the run up to the 2012 Olympics. Typically, he says, officers will use a “yes/no” questionnaire about the flyer’s intentions, and they are trained to observe “suspicious signs” (such as nervous body language) that might betray deception. “It doesn’t give a chance to listen to what they say, and think about credibility, observe behaviour change – they are the critical aspects of deception detection,” he says. The existing protocols are also prone to bias, he says – officers were more likely to find suspicious signs in certain ethnic groups, for instance. “The current method actually prevents deception detection,” he says.
If only body language revealed deception. Credit: Getty Images.
Clearly, a new method is needed. But given some of the dismal results from the lab, what should it be? Ormerod’s answer was disarmingly simple: shift the focus away from the subtle mannerisms to the words people are actually saying, gently probing the right pressure points to make the liar’s front crumble.
Ormerod and his colleague Coral Dando at the University of Wolverhampton identified a series of conversational principles that should increase your chances of uncovering deceit:
Use open questions. This forces the liar to expand on their tale until they become entrapped in their own web of deceit.
Employ the element of surprise. Investigators should try to increase the liar’s “cognitive load” – such as by asking them unanticipated questions that might be slightly confusing, or asking them to report an event backwards in time – techniques that make it harder for them to maintain their façade.
Watch for small, verifiable details. If a passenger says they are at the University of Oxford, ask them to tell you about their journey to work.
Observe changes in confidence. Watch carefully to see how a potential liar’s style changes when they are challenged: a liar may be just as verbose when they feel in charge of a conversation, but their comfort zone is limited and they may clam up if they feel like they are losing control.
The aim is a casual conversation rather than an intense interrogation. Under this gentle pressure, however, the liar will give themselves away by contradicting their own story, or by becoming obviously evasive or erratic in their responses. “The important thing is that there is no magic silver bullet; we are taking the best things and putting them together for a cognitive approach,” says Ormerod.
A psychological experiment in an airport revealed new tricks to spot liars. Credit: Thinkstock.
Ormerod openly admits his strategy might sound like common sense. “A friend said that you are trying to patent the art of conversation,” he says. But the results speak for themselves. The team prepared a handful of fake passengers, with realistic tickets and travel documents. They were given a week to prepare their story, and were then asked to line up with other, genuine passengers at airports across Europe. Officers trained in Ormerod and Dando’s interviewing technique were more than 20 times more likely to detect these fake passengers than people using the suspicious signs, finding them 70 percent of the time.
“It’s really impressive,” says Levine, who was not involved in this study. He thinks it is particularly important that they conducted the experiment in real airports. “It’s the most realistic study around.”
The Art of Persuasion
Levine’s own experiments have proven similarly powerful. Like Ormerod, he believes that clever interviews designed to reveal holes in a liar’s story are far better than trying to identify tell-tale signs in body language. He recently set up a trivia game, in which undergraduates played in pairs for a cash prize of $5 for each correct answer they gave. Unknown to the students, their partners were actors, and when the game master temporarily left the room, the actor would suggest that they quickly peek at the answers to cheat on the game. A handful of the students took him up on the offer.
Afterwards, the students were all questioned by real federal agents about whether or not they had cheated. Using tactical questions to probe their stories – without focusing on body language or other cues – they managed to find the cheaters with more than 90 percent accuracy; one expert was even correct 100 percent of the time, across 33 interviews – a staggering result that towers above the accuracy of body language analyses. Importantly, a follow-up study found that even novices managed to achieve nearly 80 percent accuracy, simply by using the right, open-ended questions that asked, for instance, how their partner would tell the story.
Are police any better at spotting lying suspects than anyone else? Credit: Thinkstock.
Indeed, often the investigators persuaded the cheaters to openly admit their misdeed. “The experts were fabulously good at this,” says Levine. Their secret was a simple trick known to masters in the art of persuasion: they would open the conversation by asking the students how honest they were. Simply getting them to say they told the truth primed them to be more candid later. “People want to think of being honest, and this ties them into being cooperative,” says Levine. “Even the people who weren’t honest had difficulty pretending to be cooperative [after this], so for the most part you could see who was faking it.”
Clearly, such tricks may already be used by some expert detectives – but given the folklore surrounding body language, it’s worth emphasising just how powerful persuasion can be compared to the dubious science of body language. Despite their successes, Ormerod and Levine are both keen that others attempt to replicate and expand on their findings, to make sure that they stand up in different situations. “We should watch out for big sweeping claims,” says Levine.
Although the techniques will primarily help law enforcement, the same principles might just help you hunt out the liars in your own life. “I do it with kids all the time,” Ormerod says. The main thing to remember is to keep an open mind and not to jump to early conclusions: just because someone looks nervous, or struggles to remember a crucial detail, does not mean they are guilty. Instead, you should be looking for more general inconsistencies.
There is no fool-proof form of lie detection, but using a little tact, intelligence, and persuasion, you can hope that eventually, the truth will out.
This article was originally published on September 6, 2015, by BBC Future, and is republished here with permission.
We’ve made an artificially panpsychic world, where technology and nature are one.
BY GEORGE MUSSERFEBRUARY 27, 2020 (nautil.us)
Years before smart homes became a thing, I replaced all the switches in our house with computerized switches. At first, it was just a way to add wall switches without pulling new wire. Over time, I got more ambitious. The system runs a timer routine when it detects no one is home, turns on the basement light when you open the door, and lights up rooms in succession on well-worn paths such as bedroom to kitchen. Other members of the family are less enthusiastic. A light might fail to turn on or might go out for lack of motion, or maybe for lack of any discernible reason. The house seems to have a mind of its own.
Under the rubric of “ubiquitous computing,” “smart dust,” and the “Internet of Things,” computers are melting into the fabric of everyday life. Light bulbs, toasters, even toothbrushes are being chipped. You can summon Alexa almost anywhere. And as life becomes computerized, computers become lifelike. Modern hardware and software have gotten so complicated that they resemble the organic: messy, unpredictable, inscrutable. In machine learning, engineers forswear any detailed understanding of what goes on inside. The machine learns rather like a dog: by trial and error, with ample treats. Some systems even have features we commonly associate with consciousness, such as creating models of their environment in which they themselves are actors—a kind of self-awareness.
Gradually, we are turning an old philosophical doctrine into a reality. We are creating a panpsychic world.
HOW ROMANTIC: Few people experience nature red in tooth and claw, or would want to. We romanticize nature, just as we do our advanced technology. So what’s the difference?Quick Shot / Shutterstock
Panpsychism—the proposition that consciousness is fundamental and ubiquitous—is one of humanity’s oldest ideas. It has cycled in and out of fashion in Western philosophy and has been enjoying a resurgence of late. For many neuroscientists and philosophers, panpsychism will be an essential feature of a theory of consciousness: Whatever mechanism creates the human mind need not be limited to humans.
But I’m talking about a different kind of panpsychism—artificial panpsychism. All the computers with which we surround ourselves are starting to be endowed with a rudimentary sentience. We are placing minds everywhere and instilling seemingly inanimate objects with mental experience. To my knowledge only one thinker—the computer scientist and science-fiction author Rudy Rucker—has described panpsychism as a phenomena we might create, although even he doesn’t think it very plausible. I would go further and say, not only is it plausible, it is happening. By dispersing intelligent artifacts, humanity is awakening the material world.
Traditional philosophical panpsychism comes in multiple varieties, but all have one intuition in common: that subjective experience can’t be reduced to mechanistic physics. Proponents make three main arguments. The first is that there doesn’t seem to be any principled way to draw the line between conscious and non-conscious. If we are conscious, why not a dog? A paramecium? A protein molecule? A proton? These systems lie on a continuum with no obvious break.
Second, panpsychism would solve the hard problem of consciousness. The objective methods of science seem inherently incapable of explaining subjective experience. The scent of a rose or awfulness of scratching a blackboard is not decomposable into smaller pieces, not mathematically describable, and not experimentally accessible. It seems to require a new feature of reality as deep as anything in physics, or perhaps even deeper. Complex minds are composed of simpler ones—“mind dust,” as William James put it. If so, everything in the universe is conscious to some degree.
We are placing minds everywhere and instilling inanimate objects with mental experience.
Panpsychism might also solve a complementary problem: the hard problem of matter. Philosophers such as Hedda Mørch and Philip Goff argue that physics describes what material objects do, but not what they are—their intrinsic nature. Subjective experience might plug that gap, because it is intrinsic. There is something about scents and screeches that is impossible to grasp by reference to anything else; it must be experienced directly. By this argument, everything in the world has phenomenal as well as material qualities.
Third, several of today’s leading theories of consciousness imply panpsychism. One of the most popular, Integrated Information Theory, takes our psychological unity as its starting point. Our sensations form a seamless whole, and brain activity reflects this coherence. When people are awake or dreaming, their neurons fire in a coordinated way; when in deep sleep or a coma, neural activity is fragmented. The theory surmises that an information processing system is conscious to the extent that its parts act in harmony. Anything with parts—which is to say, anything beyond a structureless elementary particle—has the potential to be conscious by this theory. Another line of thinking, based on the free-energy principle put forward by neuroscientist Karl Friston, observes that any self-sustaining structure has to maintain its boundary against external insults, which requires an internal model of the world. That is a core feature of mind.
Whether or not you buy these arguments, and many don’t, you can foresee two types of artificial panpsychism. If it’s true that mind cannot emerge from mindless atoms and must be a new fundamental ingredient of nature, you can imagine mind engineering: assembling components not to perform some function, but to achieve some type of experience. And if not—if we can make minds out of mindless atoms after all—then artificial panpsychism is a straightforward extension of present technology.
Neuroscientists have some evidence for the latter. Consciousness seems to be a specific cognitive function performed by identifiable brain mechanisms that not all species possess. There was an evolutionary rationale for it to develop; it needn’t have been built in from the start. When experimental subjects become consciously aware of something, certain brain areas change in activity; people who exhibit conscious awareness are able to reason across gaps in time, follow complicated directions, and imagine things that have never existed. When they perform tasks without conscious awareness, as if on autopilot, they are limited to reacting to what is in front of them. Consciousness also helps us socially. We are always trying to fathom other people’s thoughts and motivations, and self-awareness may emerge as we turn this ability on ourselves. Other mammals possess these same brain areas and show analogous behavior.
So, consciousness helps us navigate a complex world. And if consciousness helps us, it could help robots and computers, too, giving engineers a practical reason to design it into their systems. Out of philosophical caution, we might still question whether these systems are conscious. That is perhaps unknowable. But if they act as if they are, people will treat them as such. Thus we have both elements of panpsychism. Engineers have achieved the “pan”—they have embedded computers everywhere—and are working on the “psychic.” Mind dust, meet smart dust.
When debating panpsychism, the question is not whether, but when. Either the world already is panpsychic or it will be.
Rucker has imagined such a transformation. In a short story for Nature in 2006, he speculated that brain-to-brain interfaces might be applied to non-human objects. The protagonist mind-melds with a rock.
In a 2008 physics paper, Rucker addressed an objection to panpsychism raised by Karl Popper and others. A mind needs memory. Without it, organisms could only be reactive; they could have no inner life. Yet basic physics is memoryless. How the universe evolves depends only on its current state; it doesn’t matter how it reached that state. Memory is a higher-level feature requiring large assemblies of atoms. Simple structures lack it. How, then, could they be conscious? Rucker speculated that exotic new physics, such as the dynamics of higher dimensions of spacetime, could endow even the simplest system with memory. The cosmologist Bernard Carr has explored similar ideas.
If we could hear machines converse, they would sound like the squeaking and squawking of a rainforest.
Rucker incorporated these musings into his novels Postsingular and Hylozoic. In Postsingular, the world is infested with nanobots that network together into a hive mind. In Hylozoic, the material world itself springs to life as a result of higher-dimensional physics and ejects the nanobots. Rucker depicts two steps toward artificial panpsychism, technological at first, then anti-technological.
The books paint a fascinating picture of a fully sentient world. People can telepathically communicate not just with friends and family, but with atoms, burbling brooks, and the planet as a whole. If your friends come over for dinner, the group forms a temporary collective mind that you can commune with. Every act becomes a negotiation: You had better apologize to the brook for urinating on its bank and talk nice to your hand tools. Say the right words to the right atoms and you can heal wounds or fly like Superman. On the downside, villains can brainwash atoms, unraveling the fabric of reality.
In the world Rucker portrays, you can see the emotional appeal of panpsychism, how it enchants people who find the world of physics cold and impersonal, and how it would imbue all things with moral status. Environmentalists, in particular, are drawn to that. People maybe wouldn’t pollute streams that could talk back. Artists, too, often speak of their work as a negotiation with their materials. “Art is really a cooperative endeavor, a work of cocreation,” wrote philosopher David Abram in The Spell of the Sensuous, one of the most eloquent evocations of this romantic view of panpsychism.
For Rucker, the second stage in the panpsychic transformation is essential. The world of nanobots doesn’t qualify as panpsychic to him. A philosopher might agree. True panpsychism embeds mind within basic physics; it’s not enough to scatter smart chips like seed corn. On his website, Rucker publishes an extensive series of notes about the backstory to his novels. He writes: “Already my car talks to me, so does my phone, my computer, and my refrigerator, so I guess we could live with talking rocks, chairs, logs, sandwiches. But they’d have ‘soul,’ not like chirping electronic appliances, which is really kind of different.”
But is it? If your house is filled with picture frames, vacuum cleaners, and smart speakers that dim the lights, answer your questions, dodge around your feet, and watch over you, it may well be the suburban equivalent of living among forest spirits. It will not matter where the minds come from as long as they are there.
Imagine being a conscious electron. You have some kind of inner life, but no senses, no mouth, no opposable thumb.
Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature. Agriculture de-wilded the meadows and the forests, so that even a seemingly pristine landscape can be a heavily processed environment. Manufactured products have become thoroughly mixed in with natural structures. Now, our machines are becoming so lifelike we can’t tell the difference. Each stage of technological development adds layers of abstraction between us and the physical world. Few people experience nature red in tooth and claw, or would want to. So, although the world of basic physics may always remain mindless, we do not live in that world. We live in the world of those abstractions.
For now, we can just about maintain the distinction between technology and biology. But what seems like high technology to us now might seem like a law of nature to future generations. Having forgotten the origin of the computers that permeate their world, people might take them to be an innate feature of the universe. Their philosophers might well assume that mind is fundamental. (You might also wonder whether alien civilizations, which could be billions of years ahead of us, are invisible to us because they are so deeply woven in the fabric of our reality.)
Digital panpsychism is rather more plausible than higher-dimensional physics, anyway. Rucker magics away the problem of communicating with other minds by making a hand-wavy appeal to quantum effects. But in an artificially panpsychic world, it’s just a matter of wiring. Brain-to-brain interfaces are already under development. Neuroscientists have linked the brains of rats and of monkeys using implanted electrodes and of humans using scalp electrodes and external magnets. Last year, a team of scientists and visionaries speculated about using nanotechnology. As a proof of principle, some conjoined twins share neural circuits: one feels, tastes, and sees what the other does. It is not outlandish to imagine that brain interfaces could be extended to artificial brains.
A brain could also be linked to an artificial-intelligence system by adapting the “chip test” proposed by Susan Schneider. Scientists would swap parts of your brain for functionally equivalent electronic components to see whether it affects your conscious experience. If not, this would demonstrate that consciousness can be implemented in any substrate and is not specific to brain tissue. But it might also be a way to share subjective experiences with our electronic creations.
For Abram, much of the appeal of panpsychism is that it makes us engage with the non-human; it takes us out of ourselves. Artificial panpsychism is starting to do that. Right now, technology is closely tied to specific human needs. But as machines proliferate, they will have their own needs, which other machines will satisfy. If we could hear them converse, it would sound like the squeaking and squawking of a rainforest. An ecosystem is emerging with its own logic that, for better or worse, is not human logic.
You might well wonder whether that is desirable. My family, driven mad by our smart house, certainly would. But if artificial panpsychism has troubling aspects, so does the natural variety. In all the debates over panpsychism, skeptics concede its romantic aspects. Nobody asks whether they would really want to live in such a world.
A panpsychic world is not a warmly embracing community. Unless telepathy really is possible, most minds would be locked in, forming a vast crowd of atomized individuals. Imagine being a conscious electron. You have some kind of inner life, but no senses, no mouth, no opposable thumb. You feel utterly alone. You will have to endure forever; death can bring you no relief. It sounds like the very definition of hell. Admittedly, the electron’s experience is unimaginable in human terms, and we shouldn’t project our own values onto it. But isn’t that what writers and thinkers do when they romanticize mentality?
And there are other issues. Forget about privacy. You couldn’t so much as take a shower in solitude. Moral considerations could backfire. It’s impossible to reduce our environmental footprint to zero, and depending on what kind of mind you think things possess, your every breath might cause suffering. Vegetarians might find that eating tofu is as morally fraught as carving a steak. And as soon as you tell an artist they have to do something—in this case, respect their materials—they want to try the opposite. They might long for the freedom of an insensate world.
The good thing about artificial panpsychism is that it is our choice. If we don’t want to live in a world surrounded by minds, we don’t need to go there.
George Musser is an award-winning science writer and the author of Spooky Action at a Distance and The Complete Idiot’s Guide to String Theory. Follow him at @gmusser
Lead image: Andrey Suslov / Shutterstock
Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more
