The Government Project
Considering how much the Government of India has missed anticipating – the rise of a second wave of COVID-19 infections, the crippling medical oxygen shortage, the circulation of new variants of concern – I have been wondering about why we assemble giant institutions like governments: among other things, they are to weather uncertainty as best as our resources and constitutional moralities will allow. Does this mean bigger the institution, the farther into the future it will be able to see? (I’m assuming here a heuristic that we normally are able to see, say, a day into the future with 51% uncertainty – slightly better than chance – for each event in this period.)
Imagine behemoth structures like the revamped Central Vista in New Delhi and other stonier buildings in other cities and towns, the tentacles of state control dictating terms in every conceivable niche of daily life, and a prodigious bureaucracy manifested as tens of thousands of civil servants most of whom do nothing more than play musical chairs with The Paperwork.
Can such a super-institution see farther into the future? It should be able to, I’d expect, considering the future – in one telling – is mostly history filtered through our knowledge, imagination, priorities and memories in the present. A larger government should be able to achieve this feat by amassing the talents of more people in its employ, labouring in more and more fields of study and experiment, effectively shining millions of tiny torchlights into the great dark of what’s to come.
Imagine one day that the Super Government’s structures grow so big, so vast that all the ministers determine to float it off into space, to give it as much room as it needs to expand, so that it may perform its mysterious duties better – something like the City of a Thousand Planets.
The people of Earth watch as the extraterrestrial body grows bigger and bigger, heavier and heavier. It attracts the attention of aliens, who are bemused and write in their notebooks: “One could, in principle, imagine ‘creatures’ that are far larger. If we draw on Landauer’s principle describing the minimum energy for computation, and if we assume that the energy resources of an ultra-massive, ultra-slothful, multi-cellular organism are devoted only to slowly reproducing its cells, we find that problems of mechanical support outstrip heat transport as the ultimate limiting factor to growth. At these scales, though, it becomes unclear what such a creature would do, or how it might have evolved.”
One day, after many years of attaching thousands of additional rooms, corridors, cabinets and canteens to its corse, the government emits a gigantic creaking sound, and collapses into a black hole. On the outside, black holes are dull: they just pull things towards them. That the pulled things undergo mind-boggling distortions and eventual disintegration is a triviality. The fun part is what happens on the inside – where spacetime, instead of being an infinite fabric, is curved in on itself. Here, time moves sideways, perpendicular to the direction in which it flows on the outside, in a state of “perpetual freefall”. The torch-wielding scientists, managers, IAS officers, teachers, thinkers are all trapped on the inner surface of a relentless sphere, running round and round, shining their lights to look not into the actual future but to find their way within the government itself.
None of them can turn around to see who it is that’s chasing them, or whom they’re chasing. The future is lost to them. Their knowledge of history is only marginally better: they have books to tell them what happened, according to a few historians at one point of time; they can’t know what the future can teach us about history. And what they already know they constantly mix and remix until, someday, like the progeny of generations of incest, what emerges is a disgusting object of fascination.
The government project is complete: it is so big that it can no longer see past itself.
