J.D. interrupted his sip of coffee, “Mark could have taught most of the computer science courses in college.”
Sara froze. She was staring at Mark — trying to understand with whom she was speaking. He was looking at the ground. Then he changed the subject,
“Sara, let me ask you a question. How is it that countries like North Korea are able to get so far with their evil? I’m not just talking about nuclear weapons but also about their gulags, their gangster-style governance, or the famines they allow to happen in their country. How is it that we are only now scrambling to figure out what they might do? How is it that we have not done something before? How have they gotten this far with their nuclear weapons program and we are only now dealing with it?”
Sara thought for a moment. “Well I guess part of it is the issue of whether means justify ends, which we always need to think about here. Does it make sense to take action which might be messy in order to get some far out goal we have?”
“But if you think about it, history is filled with cases where evil was somehow allowed to go too far. The Nazis in World War II were given never-ending appeasements even though people knew how evil they were. Same with the Japanese during that time, who committed atrocities in China. You can keep going farther back in history. But in most cases, what small harm was permitted took us to terrible consequences, like World Wars or Cold Wars.”
Sara lowered her eyebrows in thought. “Maybe it’s related to Zeno’s arrow paradox.”
“How?”
“Well we all see time moving slowly. We live minute by minute. Actually we probably really live week by week. We view the world in snapshots. We see the world in a certain state and agree that it is acceptable for the moment. We thought thirty years ago that North Korea was trying to get nuclear weapons but was nowhere close, and for the particular week where that analysis was done, everyone felt comfortable with doing nothing. Somehow people must have known that if the North kept working, they would eventually get to the point where we are now. But the contradiction between the snapshot of that moment, seemingly frozen in time, and the target in the distance was so great that it could be ignored. People always look at Zeno’s arrow, frozen in the air, but don’t really see that it is flying towards that target. Somehow their not having nuclear weapons that week, the following week, and the week after led to them having nuclear weapons today, 1,560 weeks later.”
“That’s an interesting way to think about it. Now that you put it that way, it seems similar to Sorites Paradox.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a paradox, also from our friends in ancient Greece, that says if you take one grain of sand, it does not make a heap, or pile, of sand. If you put it on the ground in front of you and throw another grain of sand on it, you still will not have a heap of sand. But if you repeated this process and kept throwing grains on, after a while you will be standing in front of a heap.”
“Exactly. That’s how these totalitarian regimes take advantage of us and their own people. In the 1930’s Europe thought that if Hitler were allowed to rebuild an army, that alone would not make him a threat to world peace. But after allowing him to rebuild an army, annex Czechoslovakia, take Austria, and rebuild a navy, he eventually became a real threat to world peace. Just like grains of sand turning into a heap. Each individual action was too small to threaten world peace, but taken together, all of those actions did threaten world peace. Few saw it coming because they were looking at each sequential step as another snapshot of that arrow. Few saw that it was actually flying at a target.”
J.D. finally jumped in, “This reminds me of the British TV series Yes, Prime Minister. Do you guys know what I’m talking about?”
Mark and Sara both gave a simultaneous “No.”
J.D. went on, “It’s funny — the Brits make some of the best TV and few people in the US know. Anyway in the ‘80s there was this comedy series called Yes, Prime Minister. The setup was that it followed a somewhat incompetent prime minister. He loves to be in front of cameras and he loves to make bold statements or proclamations, but he is not very bright and often gets manipulated by the civil servants that work in the government. In one episode the chief scientific advisor to the Prime Minister is asking the PM when he would press the nuclear button. The PM responds that he would do so if Russia attacked. Then this advisor asks if the PM would press the button if the Russians invaded West Berlin. The PM hesitates, indicating he would not. Then the advisor asks if the PM would press the button if Russian tanks accidentally crossed into West Germany and then stayed there. The PM again hesitates and says he probably would not. Then the advisor asks if the PM would press the button if the Russians had similarly taken over all of Western Europe, through France and Spain. He asks if the Russians sat at the edge of France ready to invade the UK, whether the PM would press the button then. Again, the PM hesitates and now it appears he thinks he would not be able to. That’s either Zeno’s Arrow or Sorites Paradox at work, right? The advisor in the show called it salami tactics, in that your opponent takes advantage of you slice by slice.”
Mark nodded “It appears that when the human mind encounters paradox-like situations, it is not able to take action.”
Sara continued the thought “You know? This probably even applies to other dangerous situations. Think about climate change. How many times have you and I heard how many degrees the Earth will warm over the next fifty years? We know that target would be a bad spot for the arrow to hit. But we look around and say that for this week, the climate situation does not seem too bad, so we forget about it for the moment. We are only looking at that frozen arrow. The same goes for deforestation, overfishing, and other environmental issues that seem slow-moving.”
“Going back to the totalitarian examples — where do you think the Totalitarian Uncertainty Principle plays in?” J.D. asked.
They all thought for a minute. “Maybe a regime’s use of the Totalitarian Uncertainty Principle is a way for them to smooth out the process,” Sara said. “Maybe that extra veil over our eyes helps them throw grain of sand after grain of sand onto that spot on the ground. It makes us more likely to look at the arrow frozen. When Hitler was rearming, he not only made everyone else think of it as just a grain of sand. He lied about wanting to respect international law and peace to make everyone misunderstand what he was doing.”
“What would you call it? When people are looking at the frozen arrow rather than the flying arrow?” Mark asked.
Sara thought about it. Then she shrugged her shoulders and said, “to volerate? Maybe like we all have been volerating the North Korean regime’s behavior for the last thirty years? The rhyme with tolerate or tolerating makes it seem right.”
“How did you come up with that?” Mark asked.
“I studied French — it’s the only language I know other than English. I love France and have visited it many times.”
“Really” Mark asked, “Where do you like to go?”
“My favorite town outside Paris is Eparnay. Anyway, in France they have a problem where English is invading their language. English words are being used for more and more things. Maybe we can add a word from French into English for once.”
“What’s the word in French?”
“Voler. It means ‘to fly,’ and I just combined it with ‘tolerate.’ Volerate. Does it sound right? It can be defined as tolerating an act that would eventually lead towards an undesirable conclusion because the act itself is tolerable. We tolerate the arrow flying because it is not yet at its target, which we cannot tolerate.”