The Ministry for the Future: A Novel

For a while, therefore, it looked like the great heat wave would be like mass shootings in the United States—mourned by all, deplored by all, and then immediately forgotten or superseded by the next one, until they came in a daily drumbeat and became the new normal.

Ideology, n. An imaginary relationship to a real situation. In common usage, what the other person has, especially when systematically distorting the facts. But it seems to us that an ideology is a necessary feature of cognition, and if anyone were to lack one, which we doubt, they would be badly disabled. There is a real situation, that can't be denied, but it is too big for any individual to know in full, and so we must create our understanding by way of an act of the imagination. So we all have an ideology, and this is a good thing. So much information pours into the mind, ranging from sensory experience to discursive and mediated inputs of all kinds, that some kind of personal organizing system is necessary to make sense of things in ways that allow one to decide and to act. Worldview, philosophy, religion, these are all synonyms for ideology as defined above; and so is science, although it's the different one, the special one, by way of its perpetual cross-checking with reality tests of all kinds, and its continuous sharpening of focus. That surely makes science central to a most interesting project, which is to invent, improve, and put to use an ideology that explains in a coherent and useful way as much of the blooming buzzing inrush of the world as possible. What one would hope for in an ideology is clarity and explanatory breadth, and power. We leave the proof of this as an exercise for the reader.

Enough times like that, and looking down the actual barrel of an actual gun, its trigger under your actual thumb—not your forefinger, because you have the gun pointed at yourself, resting against your sternum, and it's the thumb that can best pull (or in this case push) the trigger—this can be seen as a huge relief, as a promise that the fear will finally stop. This happens all the time. It happens so often that one form of PTSD therapy goes like this—you don't have to worry so much, because if it stays this bad you can always kill yourself. And for some sufferers this thought is a real comfort, sometimes even the anchor point of a way back to sanity. You can always end this misery by killing yourself; so give it another day and see how it goes.

thus neoliberalism: the market rules because it's the best calculator.

The laws defined the behaviors that were legal. Possibly it was chicken and egg, but never was it effect causing cause—that would scramble the definitions of the words beyond comprehension.

Everyone alive knew that not enough was being done, and everyone kept doing too little. Repression of course followed, it was all too Freudian, but Freud's model for the mind was the steam engine, meaning containment, pressure, and release. Repression thus built up internal pressure, then the return of the repressed was a release of that pressure. It could be vented or it could simply blow up the engine. How then people in the thirties? A hiss or a bang? The whistle of vented pressure doing useful work, as in some functioning engine? Or boom? No one could say, and so they staggered on day to day, and the pressure kept building.

now mainstream economists everywhere were fearful that this sudden flood of new currency was going to cause massive deflation. Or perhaps inflation: macroeconomics was no longer so very clear on the ultimate effects of quantitative easing, given that the evidence from the past half century could be interpreted either way. That this debate was a clear sign that macroeconomics as a field was ideological to the point of astrology was often asserted by people in all the other social sciences, but economists were still very skilled at ignoring outside criticisms of their field, and now they forged on contradicting themselves as confidently as ever.

Words are gossamer in a world of granite.

In a high meadow, wild bighorn sheep. Their lambs gambol. When you see that gamboling with your own eyes, you'll know something you didn't know before. What will you know? Hard to say, but something like this: whether life means anything or not, joy is real. Life lives, life is living.