THE MECHANICS OF DENIAL

June 11th, 2025

Someone was commenting on how wild politics is these days so I told them what happened between Hamilton and Burr and their jaw dropped. If you don't know, they had a duel with pistols, Hamilton missed, Burr hit Hamilton and he died. Imagine if that actually happened between two American politicians today. Modern politics is about as tame as a gossiping sewing circle compared to when the United States was founded.

The disconnect between a modern assessment of current politics and it's accuracy relative to politics as it's existed throughout all time has to do with an inability to keep things in perspective, in proportion. 

Our focus determines our reality, and if we focus narrowly on some current event and divorce it from all of history, then that object of focus has the entire spectrum of reaction applied to it, because there is nothing else to act as a counterweight.

This disease of narrow focus and recency bias makes people woefully untalented if not flat out incapable of assessing proportion. But what's the antidote? How does the inverse function?

First, another example: Cancellation in the last decade has meant losing a job and some digital public embarrassment.

Cancellation used to mean getting burned at the stake, the Spanish Inquisition, guillotines in France or getting sent to a gas chamber. 

If anything social networks may have greatly reduced the violent tendency of the censor-impulse in culture by making it digitally simulated instead of physically carried out. That censorship-impulse has been lurking within human culture forever (at least since we drove other humanoid species extinct several hundred thousand years ago) and now forums like Twitter and Facebook have functioned like a ghostbuster's trap, and captured that impulse in the digital space where it's physical impact is stunted. 

Instead of putting things into proportion by examining events within a larger context, those events become all consuming - perspective becomes very skewed.

To zoom out even more: have you ever heard any one say Not in my lifetime! This thought-terminating cliche is a favorite because it's so indicative of the calcified echo chamber that doubles as a personal shrine to one's own pride about the horse blinders they've constructed and proudly wear. When someone like this hears about some impending innovation and says "Not in my lifetime" I bite my tongue. It's futile to argue. One of these inevitable tomorrows will unveil their hasty judgement and I know by that time their slippery logic and feeble memory will have found some convenient way to completely forget those fatalistic words they'd uttered: Not in my lifetime. Instead, they'll complain about how said innovation doesn't work perfectly.

Again, its a matter of proportion, but its time that must be examined. The widespread mistake is to make judgements based on the present as a static snap shot - which is what most people do. Again it's a kind of recency bias mixed with an inability to zoom out and place events in a larger time line. 

Let's zoom way out: Think about the time between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution, compared to the time between the industrial revolution and the digital age? And you really think the time between the digital age and the next level of magic isn't going to occur in a far more contracted period of time? ...ok.

I've been thinking about denial quite a bit lately, and I've realized that it's seed, stem and root is far more subtle than they first appear. Willful ignorance seems to be at the heart of denial, but I think that's a contradiction. People are certainly capable of hypocrisy, but ignoring something you know isn't the same as being unable to envision the implications with enough visceral force to change behavior. I think in most cases denial is the result of a weak imagination. 

There's another software engineer in the family and I'm always shocked when we talk about tech and the future. He seems to be fully committed to the idea that his profession and career has a few more decades to fill out what he thinks will be a normal human lifespan. (His company is beginning to talk about incorporating Cursor into their workflow. Meanwhile I show him a couple full stack applications that I've built and launched within the last few months that are in production and being used across an entire company and his jaw drops) While I do worry about him and his family, all of whom I'm very close to, I realized that he simply lacks the imagination required to extrapolate the implications of recent innovations. I suppose this is maybe why not everyone writes sci-fi? Such implications seem to come naturally to me in daydreams. I invested in Tesla in 2016 because the advent of robotaxi seemed obvious after watching a lecture from Tony Seba about disruption technology. It was just a matter of....time. And time is the only reliable superpower for investing.

Imaginative extrapolation is again a matter of proportionate thinking. It's seeing today - not as a static snapshot - but as a vector, one that creates a ratio of yesterday:today:tomorrow. We always have two parts of that equation, and the more yesterdays we stack into it, the easier it is to solve for tomorrow. This is why the ratio of time between the agricultural revolution and the industrial revolution compared to the industrial revolution and the digital age is so important. The staggering contraction makes the implication clear: unless you're already on your deathbed, the future is definitely going to happen in your lifetime.