[Earthsea] The Power of Perturbation
[Earthsea] The Power of Perturbation
Chaos is the last refuge in an unfair fight
This is week eight of our summer Wizard of Earthsea book club. This week’s chapter is “Hunting.”
It’s a very quiet chapter of Earthsea, even though it’s the first time Ged confronts the Shadow on his own terms. There are always lulls in the chase and time to recover amid the care of strangers. One of Ged’s tactical choices stood out to me:
On the sea he wished to meet it, if meet it he must. He was not sure why this was, yet he had a terror of meeting the thing again on dry land. Out of the sea there rise storms and monsters, but no evil powers: evil is of earth. And there is no sea, no running of river or spring, in the dark land where once Ged had gone. Death is the dry place. Though the sea itself was a danger to him in the hard weather of the season, that danger and change and instability seemed to him a defense and chance.
When you are already losing, introducing more noise and chance is your best bet. I’m not as sure that Ged needs to rely on this kind of advantage—he still seems like he is operating from a sense of despair. But I think his overall reasoning is correct about who is favored when you seek out a chaotic environment.
The pandemic has had some of the disruptive effect of the sea that Ged seeks out. I contributed to a one-year pandemic project called Breaking Ground. We were focused on what small, good things might suddenly be possible when the rules were in flux. (My two contributions were “Locating Our Invisible Wounds,” “Snow Days and Slack,” and “All Aboard the Generation Ship.”)
Usually, when I think politically, I’m focused on how to give the gift of predictability. People who are vulnerable benefit enormously from a clear, regular process, where you don’t have to find an angle or pay a “time tax.”
But this always starts with the assumption I’m trying to smooth the way for people to access a mostly functional system. Seeking out rougher ground like Ged makes more sense when you feel the fight is rotten from the start, and you’re trying to stave off an otherwise inevitable loss, rather than pushing for a hard, but possible win.
The other quote that stuck with me was the change in how Ged conceives of his struggle:
He knew now, and the knowledge was hard, that his task had never been to undo what he had done, but to finish what he had begun.
There’s very little we do that can be cleanly undone. Expecting to return to the status quo before a mistake, rather finding a new way forward, sets us up for thwarted effort and profound disappointment. I’ll have a piece on this theme (broadly interpreted) for Fairer Disputations soon.
Last week, Julia was struck by the theme of slavery in the last chapter—first when Ged rows along enslaved men and then when he confronts the Terrenon. She wrote:
“The Terrenon...will tell you that name.”
“And the price?”
“There is no price. I tell you it will obey you, serve you as your slave.”
[This quote about] there being no price since using the Terrenon is as easy as slavery, was jarring for me, as it probably was for Ged as well.
Slavery obviously exacts a price from the enslaved person. It also comes at the price of the morals of the slaver and slaveholder. A more subtle price of moral injury, a disorientation or callousness, may be paid by anyone who witnesses or is complicit in and feels powerless against the injustices of slavery.
And lastly, as we see among the oarsmen, society pays a price for slavery, in the form of division.
She also reminded everyone, since I had asked about choosing to forgo a weapon, that Petrov Day is coming up on September 26th.
On September 26th, 1983, Soviet Lt. Col. Stanislav Petrov chose not to launch retaliatory nukes, even though the Soviet early warning system was blaring that the Americans had launched a first strike. He thought it could be a false alarm (and he was right). If he had followed protocol, he would have passed the alert up the chain with the recommendation to launch, and then most of us would be dead or not born.
This week, I’d like to hear your reflections on this chapter, especially:
When have you benefited from more chaos and noise as a way to even up an unfair fight? Have you ever deliberately made a situation more chaotic because the state of play was unworkable?
Have you ever gotten stuck trying to undo or erase something that couldn’t be reset in the way you hoped? What did you ultimately do instead?
This reflection immediately brought to mind Des Linden’s 2018 Boston Marathon win. In that particular year, Des was far from the fastest runner on the field, and was privately dealing with a hypothyroid diagnosis. However, she leveraged the disastrous race conditions (severe, freezing rain and win the whole way) in her favor. What she lacked in speed, Des made up for in grit and resilience, and she shocked herself by breaking the tape and taking gold.
I don't do well with chaos or noise, so I've never introduced it deliberately!
And I think it's worth remembering that the people who suffer the most from chaos are the already vulnerable - those without a buffer, savings, or reflexes - and those with something or someone to protect. So we should hesitate to advocate for chaos when bystanders like that could be affected. Fortunately, Ged's open ocean has few bystanders.
The reasons I can think of for why introducing (or correctly predicting) chaos can give one an advantage are:
1. If you're already on the losing side, it's a kind of re-roll of conditions; with the caveat that if your buffer is unavoidably low as per the above, you might just be making your odds even worse, like they would be in a war of attrition.
2. If you are the one initiating or predicting the chaos, that's an information advantage your opponent doesn't have, so you can prep your buffer better for the unusual conditions to come, making yourself less vulnerable than the default your opponent is probably at.
3. When dealing with chaos, your opponent might take more predictable actions, such as hastening to shore up their buffer, which predictability you can then use to your advantage.
As an illustration of that third one, I am reminded of a tactic from Wildbow's web serial Twig, a dark biopunk novel that I probably wouldn't have the stomach or the time to read these days, but from which a few ideas stuck with me. Here's the relevant excerpt:
"Humans as a species were like a collection of bugs in a box. Left alone, it was hard to predict how they’d move, or the patterns that would form.
"Shake the box, and it generated chaos. Maddened, they would seek to escape, butting their heads against barriers. They would turn on their closest neighbors and strike out. Even seek to kill. In their frenzied movements, they were very predictable."
"Force people into darkness, then offer them a light, and they were a moth to a candle flame.
"The darkness that surrounded Mothmont wasn’t my darkness. It was meant to work against me.
"But it was darkness I could use. The headmistress was worried, and I very much doubted she was sleeping after so many of her students fell ill. Many of them had rich and powerful parents. She’d been driven into a corner.
"Taking a blank piece of paper from the drawer of her desk, I placed it on the top, and I penned out a simple statement with a fountain pen.
"'The Academy would like for you to please order a quarantine… None of the blame in this lies with you. Provided you speak of this letter to no-one, you have nothing to worry about. All will be well.'
"Giving the moth her candle flame.
"The only way this situation could go sour was if something happened to my group, or if more of the puppeteer’s Bad Seeds decided to make a break for their families.
"The quarantine would keep that from happening and it would force our adversaries into a corner."
https://twigserial.wordpress.com/2015/03/28/taking-root-1-8/
That character sometimes initiates "shaking the box of bugs," and sometimes just takes advantage of when it happens.
Which brings me to this other idea sometimes attributed to Sun Tzu:
Build your opponent a golden bridge to retreat across.
I like to remember that one when navigating conflict with people I actually don't want to be opponents with, which I'm relieved is the norm in my life.