TYRANNY OF THE NUMBER
William Turner, Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Background, 1835
7 is always exactly 7. Even when it's approximately 7, it's exactly approximately 7. Thanks to statistics, even the inexact has become exact. There's never any wiggle room, there's never any room for interpretation or doubt.
This exactness has conquered the world.
It is not human passion that birthed 7-going-on-8 billion. It is not passion that tilled the soil or bred the plants-- there was no passion, no desire in the endeavor whatsoever. It was not even capitalism that did it, though capital harnessed this greater power most effectively.
Not passion-- but the number.
The foundation of technological society is the number. No one denies that there were quite a lot of interesting things happening before the number-- social hierarchy, war, agriculture-- but human civilization truly did not start its runaway train until the number was fully unlocked.
The thesis is simple: without the number, there is nothing to increase. There is no population to increase-- no capital to increase-- no living standards to increase-- no food surplus, no square miles of territory, no progress to be measured-- without the number.
No time without the number. No beginning and no end. No lifespan, no age. Just living and then dying, at some point.
Everything ineffable-- nothing explicit. Comedy and tragedy, unexplainable. Life and death, approximate. Fate, destiny, impossible to measure and pointless to dissect.
Are you starting to see the tyranny we have fallen under?
My age-- my weight-- my lifespan-- my IQ-- my estimated remaining years of life-- my productivity-- my wages-- my expenses-- tyrannies all.
Words have so many of their own problems. But at least-- before the invention of the number-- words could make a little bed for you to land on, comforting you with their vagaries, allowing the space between interpretations to be a place where one could live comfortably, never knowing, and being OK with that.
It is coming to terms with unknowing that is the true test of happiness. It's not overcoming desire, suffering, or death-- these are pointless things to overcome just as they are pointless things to experience.
It's the number that gives us hubris and false hope-- the impression that we could know that 7 is exactly 7. If 7 is exactly 7, then couldn't some things out in the world be 7 too? Couldn't this pencil be exactly 7 inches? Couldn't this man live exactly 7 decades? Couldn't we sustain exactly 7 billion people for a day with exactly 7 billion pounds of corn? -- and so on.
The number is a child of the word-- a cursed child. A storm approaches. Pandora's box opens: and I don't know if it can be closed.
Besides, even if we could go back-- how would we figure out if we liked it better before the number? We'd have no way to measure, after all.
Which is tyranny and which is liberty? An imprecise question for an exacting time.
And that's what remains after all is said and done-- the questions. You can't ask open questions with numbers. Everything in the solution exists in some form in the problem-- that's the whole point, isn't it? To have no magic tricks along the way? To prevent the impossible? To make a long chain of equivalencies stretching back to the beginning of the universe? To leave no room for error, accounting for all, to say that everything must have been there in the beginning?
To make the leap from seven equaling seven-- to the universe being run by numbers-- is a fatal error. Conveniently, we can't prove any of it.
Why must we insist the world is logical? Why must it be so? That's the real magic trick. To invent 7 and then say the universe has 7 in it. What a load of horseshit.
Humanity is like a child throwing a tantrum-- insisting the universe must be made out of numbers-- and only accepting evidence that it is. The love affair of the number.
Well I ask, where will your numbers be, at the end of it all, with the last atom accounted for-- where will your numbers be when I have one question left to ask--
why?