This is a continuation of my uncle's diary. The previous installment is here.
Philosopher's club of the Ministry of Everything
The cornerstone idea of our system is that we do not know much about the future, cannot put much trust in the past, and live in a world where nothing lasts forever. The spiral of dialectic development propels things through an eyelet of self-negation and comrades want to know: where are we in this cycle?
This is an important question that is inspired by a growing sense that we might be a bit lost. And this is how our club started. We meet twice a week in a drab and dark shed that we call Smolny (after the Bolshevik headquarters during the October revolution) and we take pains to maintain total secrecy. Still, our meetings would not amount to much if not for a serendipitous event that provided a much needed reference point.
The trip
The comrades from the Botany Unit do not travel much. In the eyes of the Command Center, travel is an unnecessary folly. The theory of the leisure class is a favorite book of the senior comrade responsible for approving our travel requests, and consequently no gratuitous luxury will sneak under his watchful gaze. "You do not want to read about yourselves in the Central Committee bulletin" he warns us with a fatherly smile. Younger comrades call him Frankenstein, after a mythical creature that was built entirely from Party propaganda.
But a miracle has happened. Whether Frankenstein got sloppy or just wanted us out for a few days, we were sent on an official delegation to Moscow! Imagine that, a foreign country. We were allowed standing places for the two day train trip, although Frankenstein was genuinely concerned that this luxury would spoil us.
The trip was uneventful and the business part was trivial - visit to Lenin's Tomb, Red Army headquarters and a local elementary school. Our adventure started soon afterwards. We cracked the first bottle on Biblioteka Imieni Lenina station taking the Red line towards Komsomolskaya where our tents were pitched on a large construction site. But we never made it there, on Lubyanka station a bunch of grim looking agents interrupted our revelries and soon we were locked up in a holding room for transient passengers. Public disturbance and unlawful consumption, they said. We took nervous sips from the last vodka bottle that survived the check-in procedure until we realized that we were not alone. A foreign-looking young men was lingering in the corner and by the look of him, he must have been there for weeks. In broken Russian he explained that his name is Edmund Slowdown and that he took upon himself to reveal the ugly truth about the capitalist empire. There is little that we do not know about capitalist conspiracies against us but when we mentioned the Ministry of Everything he lit up and pulled out a big roll of perforated tape. "This", he said, "will interest you because it is about your sister organization that the capitalists copied from you. It is called the Government Science Organization."
Government Science Organization - from beginning to the end
Reading perforated tape is a tall order, but it was worth it. This turned out to be a fascinating story not unlike our own. GSO as it used to be called was started with a great idea. We have all agreed that sometimes you owe respect to your adversaries and this was clearly the case. Fortunately for us, after several glorious decades the vision started to fade. Our comrades found the process strangely familiar. Every day we come across members of the Central Committee who, no matter what the question is, are ready with an answer - "Build another steel mill" or "Dig up more coal". For our comrades at GSO, as we started thinking about them, the pitfall was in the concept of so-called "interdisciplinary research". The documents are never clear what the "interdisciplinary" contributes to other than that it is "pushing", "accelerating" and "transcending" - things that in our system are aptly delegated to the Secret Police in cases where the workers' willpower to get things done is waning. It looked as if capitalist scientists, not unlike small children, fought bitterly to be narrow, parochial, disciplinary and also slow, systematic and incremental, while their administrators like good parents wanted them to taste the interdisciplinary cake and open their eyes to a wider experience.
Eventually the GSO's management got tired of listening to a gaggle of conflicting voices and started looking for shortcuts. They forgot the centerpiece of their system, a free market of ideas, and decided to do what they do worst - to lead. Like a battleship in heavy seas GSO was firing broadsides of solicitations aimed at the challenges that nature put in front of them. Eventually our foreign comrades slowly started losing their grip on reality. The so-called Research Proposal Manual was edited every six months, threatening more and more draconian penalties for wrong fonts and margin size and single-minded enforcement of rules addressing mostly irrelevant issues. We were chuckling that after decades of poking fun at us, our capitalist comrades were getting the taste of the centralized planning of scientific endeavors, a bitter experience that we learned long ago is better swept under the rug.
What went wrong?
All this reading was convincing us that we too might be nearing the end of the cycle, but a clear picture was eluding us. Many things went wrong but not so much as to explain why the Ministry of Everything is still alive and kicking while poor GSO is biting the dust.
In the end, we came up with a simple explanation that still needs to be verified. It has to do with our comrades scientists, a community whose basic features are the same regardless of the time and environment. Many of our best scientists are arrogant, full of themselves, narrow-minded when confronted with issues outside their expertise, and just plain jerks. Through trial and error we discovered that they work best when stationed in isolated little hamlets in Siberia, free of distractions and temptations to torment weaker minds. However, our capitalist comrades have taken a different path and tried to ingratiate their scientists with the rest of the society. Needless to say, it did not quite work and one of the last ideas coming from GSO to address the issues was the "Second Best" program. Rather than constantly fighting to get the best scientist, talented manager, or most qualified employee, and so on, the idea was to aim for the second best. These would be more mellow people, with a big smile replacing acerbic wit, and good rapport with the general population. It appears that "Second Best" program unleashed powerful forces of mediocrity and started the race to the grave which ended several years later.
We were sipping warm beer in a dark shed, patting each other on the back, commiserating with capitalist scientists, and wandering what the future of the Botany Unit might be.
Aftermath
The sad end of our capitalist comrades was immortalized in art. The monument to commemorate efforts of the scientific workforce to earn societal support was build in San Francisco a few years after GSO was shut down (you can see the famous Golden Gate bridge in the background).
It shows a throng of distinguished capitalist scientists pleading for grants and, like poor lemmings, being pushed off the fiscal cliff. But I suspect the sculpture allows an alternative interpretation as well. When brave and talented people set out for a journey of discovery, success and failure may superficially look just about the same. In hindsight, this is not so surprising, given that the people responsible for the outcome, sponsors and administrators, usually prefer to stay out of the picture.
Continued here.
Philosopher's club of the Ministry of Everything
The cornerstone idea of our system is that we do not know much about the future, cannot put much trust in the past, and live in a world where nothing lasts forever. The spiral of dialectic development propels things through an eyelet of self-negation and comrades want to know: where are we in this cycle?
This is an important question that is inspired by a growing sense that we might be a bit lost. And this is how our club started. We meet twice a week in a drab and dark shed that we call Smolny (after the Bolshevik headquarters during the October revolution) and we take pains to maintain total secrecy. Still, our meetings would not amount to much if not for a serendipitous event that provided a much needed reference point.
The trip
The comrades from the Botany Unit do not travel much. In the eyes of the Command Center, travel is an unnecessary folly. The theory of the leisure class is a favorite book of the senior comrade responsible for approving our travel requests, and consequently no gratuitous luxury will sneak under his watchful gaze. "You do not want to read about yourselves in the Central Committee bulletin" he warns us with a fatherly smile. Younger comrades call him Frankenstein, after a mythical creature that was built entirely from Party propaganda.
But a miracle has happened. Whether Frankenstein got sloppy or just wanted us out for a few days, we were sent on an official delegation to Moscow! Imagine that, a foreign country. We were allowed standing places for the two day train trip, although Frankenstein was genuinely concerned that this luxury would spoil us.
The trip was uneventful and the business part was trivial - visit to Lenin's Tomb, Red Army headquarters and a local elementary school. Our adventure started soon afterwards. We cracked the first bottle on Biblioteka Imieni Lenina station taking the Red line towards Komsomolskaya where our tents were pitched on a large construction site. But we never made it there, on Lubyanka station a bunch of grim looking agents interrupted our revelries and soon we were locked up in a holding room for transient passengers. Public disturbance and unlawful consumption, they said. We took nervous sips from the last vodka bottle that survived the check-in procedure until we realized that we were not alone. A foreign-looking young men was lingering in the corner and by the look of him, he must have been there for weeks. In broken Russian he explained that his name is Edmund Slowdown and that he took upon himself to reveal the ugly truth about the capitalist empire. There is little that we do not know about capitalist conspiracies against us but when we mentioned the Ministry of Everything he lit up and pulled out a big roll of perforated tape. "This", he said, "will interest you because it is about your sister organization that the capitalists copied from you. It is called the Government Science Organization."
Government Science Organization - from beginning to the end
Reading perforated tape is a tall order, but it was worth it. This turned out to be a fascinating story not unlike our own. GSO as it used to be called was started with a great idea. We have all agreed that sometimes you owe respect to your adversaries and this was clearly the case. Fortunately for us, after several glorious decades the vision started to fade. Our comrades found the process strangely familiar. Every day we come across members of the Central Committee who, no matter what the question is, are ready with an answer - "Build another steel mill" or "Dig up more coal". For our comrades at GSO, as we started thinking about them, the pitfall was in the concept of so-called "interdisciplinary research". The documents are never clear what the "interdisciplinary" contributes to other than that it is "pushing", "accelerating" and "transcending" - things that in our system are aptly delegated to the Secret Police in cases where the workers' willpower to get things done is waning. It looked as if capitalist scientists, not unlike small children, fought bitterly to be narrow, parochial, disciplinary and also slow, systematic and incremental, while their administrators like good parents wanted them to taste the interdisciplinary cake and open their eyes to a wider experience.
Eventually the GSO's management got tired of listening to a gaggle of conflicting voices and started looking for shortcuts. They forgot the centerpiece of their system, a free market of ideas, and decided to do what they do worst - to lead. Like a battleship in heavy seas GSO was firing broadsides of solicitations aimed at the challenges that nature put in front of them. Eventually our foreign comrades slowly started losing their grip on reality. The so-called Research Proposal Manual was edited every six months, threatening more and more draconian penalties for wrong fonts and margin size and single-minded enforcement of rules addressing mostly irrelevant issues. We were chuckling that after decades of poking fun at us, our capitalist comrades were getting the taste of the centralized planning of scientific endeavors, a bitter experience that we learned long ago is better swept under the rug.
What went wrong?
All this reading was convincing us that we too might be nearing the end of the cycle, but a clear picture was eluding us. Many things went wrong but not so much as to explain why the Ministry of Everything is still alive and kicking while poor GSO is biting the dust.
In the end, we came up with a simple explanation that still needs to be verified. It has to do with our comrades scientists, a community whose basic features are the same regardless of the time and environment. Many of our best scientists are arrogant, full of themselves, narrow-minded when confronted with issues outside their expertise, and just plain jerks. Through trial and error we discovered that they work best when stationed in isolated little hamlets in Siberia, free of distractions and temptations to torment weaker minds. However, our capitalist comrades have taken a different path and tried to ingratiate their scientists with the rest of the society. Needless to say, it did not quite work and one of the last ideas coming from GSO to address the issues was the "Second Best" program. Rather than constantly fighting to get the best scientist, talented manager, or most qualified employee, and so on, the idea was to aim for the second best. These would be more mellow people, with a big smile replacing acerbic wit, and good rapport with the general population. It appears that "Second Best" program unleashed powerful forces of mediocrity and started the race to the grave which ended several years later.
We were sipping warm beer in a dark shed, patting each other on the back, commiserating with capitalist scientists, and wandering what the future of the Botany Unit might be.
Aftermath
The sad end of our capitalist comrades was immortalized in art. The monument to commemorate efforts of the scientific workforce to earn societal support was build in San Francisco a few years after GSO was shut down (you can see the famous Golden Gate bridge in the background).
It shows a throng of distinguished capitalist scientists pleading for grants and, like poor lemmings, being pushed off the fiscal cliff. But I suspect the sculpture allows an alternative interpretation as well. When brave and talented people set out for a journey of discovery, success and failure may superficially look just about the same. In hindsight, this is not so surprising, given that the people responsible for the outcome, sponsors and administrators, usually prefer to stay out of the picture.
Continued here.
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