Number of words: 1166<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Most people act as if there were no secrets left to find. An extreme representative of this view is Ted Kaczynski, infamously known as the Unabomber. Kaczynski was a child prodigy who enrolled at Harvard at 16. He went on to get a PhD in math and become a professor at UC Berkeley. But you\u2019ve only ever heard of him because of the 17-year terror campaign he waged with pipe bombs against professors, technologists, and businesspeople.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In late 1995, the authorities didn\u2019t know who or where the Unabomber was. The biggest clue was a 35,000-word manifesto that Kaczynski had written and anonymously mailed to the press. The FBI asked some prominent newspapers to publish it, hoping for a break in the case. It worked: Kaczynski\u2019s brother recognized his writing style and turned him in.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
You might expect that writing style to have shown obvious signs of insanity, but the manifesto is eerily cogent. Kaczynski claimed that in order to be happy, every individual \u201cneeds to have goals whose attainment requires effort, and needs to succeed in attaining at least some of his goals.\u201d He divided human goals into three groups:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
1. Goals that can be satisfied with minimal effort;<\/p>\n\n\n\n
2. Goals that can be satisfied with serious effort; and<\/p>\n\n\n\n
3. Goals that cannot be satisfied, no matter how much effort one makes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This is the classic trichotomy of the easy, the hard, and the impossible. Kaczynski argued that modern people are depressed because all the world\u2019s hard problems have already been solved. What\u2019s left to do is either easy or impossible, and pursuing those tasks is deeply unsatisfying. What you can do, even a child can do; what you can\u2019t do, even Einstein couldn\u2019t have done. So Kaczynski\u2019s idea was to destroy existing institutions, get rid of all technology, and let people start over and work on hard problems anew.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Kaczynski\u2019s methods were crazy, but his loss of faith in the technological frontier is all around us. Consider the trivial but revealing hallmarks of urban hipsterdom: faux vintage photography, the handlebar mustache, and vinyl record players all hark back to an earlier time when people were still optimistic about the future. If everything worth doing has already been done, you may as well feign an allergy to achievement and become a barista.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
All fundamentalists think this way, not just terrorists and hipsters. Religious fundamentalism, for example, allows no middle ground for hard questions: there are easy truths that children are expected to rattle off, and then there are the mysteries of God, which can\u2019t be explained. In between\u2014the zone of hard truths\u2014lies heresy. In the modern religion of environmentalism, the easy truth is that we must protect the environment. Beyond that, Mother Nature knows best, and she cannot be questioned. Free marketeers worship a similar logic. The value of things is set by the market. Even a child can look up stock quotes. But whether those prices make sense is not to be second-guessed; the market knows far more than you ever could.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Why has so much of our society come to believe that there are no hard secrets left? It might start with geography. There are no blank spaces left on the map anymore. If you grew up in the 18th century, there were still new places to go. After hearing tales of foreign adventure, you could become an explorer yourself. This was probably true up through the 19th and early 20th centuries; after that point photography from National Geographic showed every Westerner what even the most exotic, underexplored places on earth look like. Today, explorers are found mostly in history books and children\u2019s tales. Parents don\u2019t expect their kids to become explorers any more than they expect them to become pirates or sultans. Perhaps there are a few dozen uncontacted tribes somewhere deep in the Amazon, and we know there remains one last earthly frontier in the depths of the oceans. But the unknown seems less accessible than ever.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Along with the natural fact that physical frontiers have receded, four social trends have conspired to root out belief in secrets. First is incrementalism. From an early age, we are taught that the right way to do things is to proceed one very small step at a time, day by day, grade by grade. If you overachieve and end up learning something that\u2019s not on the test, you won\u2019t receive credit for it. But in exchange for doing exactly what\u2019s asked of you (and for doing it just a bit better than your peers), you\u2019ll get an A. This process extends all the way up through the tenure track, which is why academics usually chase large numbers of trivial publications instead of new frontiers. Second is risk aversion. People are scared of secrets because they are scared of being wrong. By definition, a secret hasn\u2019t been vetted by the mainstream. If your goal is to never make a mistake in your life, you shouldn\u2019t look for secrets. The prospect of being lonely but right\u2014dedicating your life to something that no one else believes in\u2014is already hard. The prospect of being lonely and wrong can be unbearable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Third is complacency. Social elites have the most freedom and ability to explore new thinking, but they seem to believe in secrets the least. Why search for a new secret if you can comfortably collect rents on everything that has already been done? Every fall, the deans at top law schools and business schools welcome the incoming class with the same implicit message: \u201cYou got into this elite institution. Your worries are over. You\u2019re set for life.\u201d But that\u2019s probably the kind of thing that\u2019s true only if you don\u2019t believe it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Fourth is \u201cflatness.\u201d As globalization advances, people perceive the world as one homogeneous, highly competitive marketplace: the world is \u201cflat.\u201d Given that assumption, anyone who might have had the ambition to look for a secret will first ask himself: if it were possible to discover something new, wouldn\u2019t someone from the faceless global talent pool of smarter and more creative people have found it already? This voice of doubt can dissuade people from even starting to look for secrets in a world that seems too big a place for any individual to contribute something unique. There\u2019s an optimistic way to describe the result of these trends: today, you can\u2019t start a cult. Forty years ago, people were more open to the idea that not all knowledge was widely known. From the Communist Party to the Hare Krishnas, large numbers of people thought they could join some enlightened vanguard that would show them the Way. Very few people take unorthodox ideas seriously today, and the mainstream sees that as a sign of progress. We can be glad that there are fewer crazy cults now, yet that gain has come at great cost: we have given up our sense of wonder at secrets left to be discovered.<\/p>\n\n\n\n