Ideas Are Cannibals (2013)

I am fascinated by scriptlessness: the state of not having a script telling you what to do. I've danced around this question a lot in my writing, mostly with reference to the American middle-class life script. But I've never really tackled the phenomenon head-on.

I'll define scripts as collections of learned patterns of behavior that reliably supply both psychological and material resources for survival.  These lend meaning and sustenance to power the script, respectively. Both are necessary, and any loss on one front, if not quickly reversed, usually leads to loss on the other, triggering a vicious cycle of increasingly severe script breakdown.

This is the unraveling of scripts. It is the subjective experience of collapsing social and material realities around you, leading eventually to a state of behavioral collapse: scriptlessness. Along the way you encounter all those demons poets like to talk about.

Scripts can collapse for groups and organizations, not just individuals, but let's start with individuals.

Let me say a little bit more about scripts before I talk about how they unravel.

A script in the sense of a performed play is more than the guiding narrative, stage directions and dialog. Actors also engage in many behaviors that are necessary to complete the performance but are not specified in the script. They may sit down, open doors, sip coffee, display appropriate expressions, and so forth. Much of the energy of the performance is actually in the highly varied behaviors that must accompany performance.

So the script induces a lot more action than it specifies, by cueing patterns of behavior that already exist in the culture (so a script is something like a program in a high-level language that makes extensive use of API calls and library functions, unlike raw machine code). In the case of improvisation, the script is also driven by these patterns. Most scripts are some mix of pre-scripted and improvised (or feedforward and feedback).

If meaning erodes in a script, motivation erodes, creating the important-but-not-urgent problem of anomie. This can happen, for instance, when you move to a new job in a new city where you have no friends and suddenly realize that all meaning in your old life was derived from a few workplace friendships.

If the sustenance becomes uncertain, the material quality of life starts to deteriorate, creating the urgent-but-not-important (for individuals in reasonably developed societies) problem of immediate survival. This can happen for instance, when economic shifts make your skills worthless at age 45 and you have no savings to fall back on.

If both are eroding simultaneously, you are inching towards an existential crisis.

As the unraveling continues, not only do losses (of meaning and sustenance) accumulate, the rate of loss usually accelerates exponentially, since both meaning and sustenance are compounding processes.

Scripts can unravel in irreversible ways, with losses increasing in severity as they spiral down into unsolvable problems.

On the sustenance front, your skills might be enduring and setbacks temporary. Maybe you can easily learn a new skill that takes low marginal learning effort relative to an existing skill. Or maybe your existing skills are just temporarily in recession, and might make a comeback. Savings, loans and a little learning effort will solve that kind of problem.

But the sustenance source might also be drying up irreversibly. Maybe everything you know has to do with the manufacture of photographic film and you can't think of any other use for those skills. Or your financial burdens are so high that you cannot afford the time to learn anything that can replace what you've lost. You become downwardly mobile.

Similarly, on the meaning front, you might experience a bout of transient depression and recover fully, or experience an irreversible, terminal loss of meaning -- a loss of innocence of some sort for instance.

You can usefully distinguish two kinds of irreversibility in an unraveling to a scriptless state.

The absolute kind of irreversibility is easier to understand. It is caused by lack of necessary external resources required to meet psychological and material needs. Death due to starvation/destitution/healthcare being out of financial reach, as well as suicide driven entirely by psychological trauma (say solitary confinement for a highly extroverted person, or bullying/hazing for a troubled teen with no adult support) fall into this category.

The relative kind is when the irreversibility is relative to a particular script rather than the material environment. So for example, if you cannot find a job despite your best efforts, the loss is only irreversible within a nominal script that says a job is the only way to derive sustenance. If you are willing to adopt a different script based on short-term gigs, the relative irreversibility might go away, with no material change in the environment.

If all your meaning in life is derived from community and friendships, but you are able to discover a new script that provides a different kind of meaning from solitary creative work, the irreversibility associated with loss of friends again goes away.

You can't do much about absolute irreversibilities. They have to do with fundamentally irreplaceable kinds of material or psychological resources. But fortunately they are not as common as the relative kind. In practice, relative irreversibility is by far the most important kind.

The key to tackling relative irreversibility in script unraveling is ideas. But few people seem to appreciate the subtleties of how ideas and unravelings interact, which leads to incredibly naive and inefficient use of ideas to solve problems.

The mere existence of an accessible alternative script does not mean it will be accessed, so relative irreversibility can kill just as surely as the absolute kind can.

But the reason there is more hope in the relative case is that you might be able to weave a new script even as the old one is unraveling, starting with just an idea.

Ideas are a very unique sort of resource because they can be generated entirely internally, unlike material resources. Even if nothing in the material environment changes, something might click in your head, making you see your environment differently, allowing you to solve what is, within your old script, an impossible problem.

But what exactly is an idea? I only recently realized that I've never actually attempted to define the term. I've only circled around it with near-synonyms like "insight." But here's a shot at it: ideas are cannibals.

More precisely, every  idea is fundamentally a cannibalization hypothesis. I am convinced this is true of even the most abstract and metaphysical ideas (for the philosophers among you, yes this is radical empiricism in disguise).

This is obvious in simple cases involving only sustenance (breaking eggs to make omelettes).

It is harder to see in the case of meaning (as in superhero mythologies effectively desecrating religious mythologies).

It is even harder to see when an idea involves both material and psychological substitutions, simultaneously changing meaning and sustenance sources.

It is hardest to see when the vicious cycle of unraveling has progressed so far that ideas are about  patterns of substitution of material and psychological resource complexes.

We call these complex beasts visions, and the process of realizing them from small, generative seed ideas missions.

But the cannibalistic aspect is what people don't usually appreciate. Simple or complex, seed ideas don't start growing into visions in a vacuum. Ideas are inextricably linked to the unraveling scripts -- destruction processes -- within which they are planted, and on which they feed.

Creation is fueled by destruction, materially and psychologically, not just accompanied by it. You only need to walk into a grocery story to appreciate the beautiful canvas of ongoing destruction of life laid out for your creative pleasure.

When seeds of complex ideas are injected into unraveling scripts, behavior patterns are forced to change. The shift from coal to oil was merely a material substitution in a source of sustenance, with limited impact. But the idea of renewable resources involves replacing a script derived from the idea of endless progress with one derived from the idea of sustainability, and creating a corresponding wholesale shift in behavior patterns.

This is why human societies have continued to traffic in ideas tens of thousands of years after they first started having them. Ideas are how we cannibalize old realities to create new ones. This is why, when we resort to harsh material intervention measures when we suspect a good idea will do the trick, we call it brute force. This is why we resist brute force that we see as premature with the complaint, "are we out of ideas?"

It is also why, despite my action-oriented friends mercilessly making fun of me for being addicted to insight porn and armchair "refactoring," ideas remain the mainstay of my writing (and getting people and organizations unstuck remains my favorite kind of consulting work, even though other kinds of work pay better).

We are rarely in situations so extreme that we run out of script-switching ideas before we run out of time. The prototypical example is falling off a cliff. There are no known ideas that will allow humans to fly without specialized material resources (this is partly why Arthur Dent learning how to fly in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, by "missing the ground" is so funny; it is the adult version of the classic gag in cartoons for kids: characters who only fall after they notice they've walked off a cliff).

If we could rewind  time, there might be no irreversible unraveling at all (that is the premise of Groundhog Day).

Whether or not they work, ideas trigger discontinuous changes in behavior, even if decline is arrested and reversed only gradually, or not at all.  Since scripts are patterns of behavior, the best ideas are generally seed behaviors that can induce entire new scripts comprising a whole new universe of behavior patterns derived from the seed behaviors, with collapsing old habits snowballing into new personalities and stories.

The only problem is that generating a new script from a seed is time-consuming, while unraveling is a fast process.  Creation is slower than destruction.

This seems like a timing problem: it is tempting to believe that if you seed a new script sufficiently early, with a sufficiently powerful idea, you can switch painlessly. In practice this never happens because energy reserves are almost entirely absorbed by the active, unraveling script. The pace of cannibalization to fuel new scripts is limited by the pace of unraveling of old scripts.

In other words, the pain of an irreversible unraveling is unavoidable, even when you know it is the transient kind caused by relative rather than absolute irreversibility. You can anticipate it, but not avoid it entirely.

Which is why it is worth examining the pain of unraveling more carefully.

When you put (relative) irreversibility, sustenance and meaning together, you get eight states you might encounter on the way to complete scriptlessness. For completeness, let's include a state zero: a scriptful state that has reliable sources of sustenance and meaning.

Herman Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener can be read as the relationship between an individual approaching state 5 observing someone approaching state 8. Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire can be read as the tragic story of an individual transitioning through states 6, 7 and 8 (the downwardly mobile Blanche duBois ends up institutionalized rather than dead, which can be considered a fall into a sub-human script).

When you land in a scriptless state, you either need to find an idea to seed a new script before time runs out, achieve mind-like-water enligh