A Washington lunch, and the fiction that makes builders build
I had lunch recently with a friend at a small Italian place in DC near Sibley Hospital. We gossiped a bit and then got down to business. Our agenda? Intelligence – the medium of exchange here in Washington – and a set of public facts on which the two of us had completely different perspectives. His was an active framework: take the constraints and work from within to do something substantially new on the science front, albeit with less money. Mine was more positional: block where you can, wait for better times to build back, and meanwhile amplify the lame-duck narrative to prepare stakeholders for a colossal policy reversal.
At the same time, we were both signaling to each other at the meta-level. Carefully chosen turns of phrase, from me: “legal exposure” and from him: “peer review is over” conveyed an entirely different subtext, at least as important as the first. At that meta-level, the signaling and the conversation that accompanied it were about the future. For me, it meant the current Administration has a definite end date and that, in anticipation, key members might be lawyering up for the hearings and court cases that might come to pass if things don’t go their way. For him, that while he might leave his government job sometime soon, there was no such constraint on the policies that the Administration has been putting into place with such gusto: I should consider them permanent.
What I’m describing above happens many times over each day here in DC. Nominal conversations about policy and current events between individuals on the ‘inside’ and the ‘outside’ of government that, in actuality, operate on two levels at once: the nominal level of information exchange and the other meta-level that sends prediction signals. What’s the purpose of those? Why bother?
The answer is that both sides aim to shape the other’s behavior, at least at the margins. My colleague’s ‘the policies are here forever’ is aimed at forestalling resistance, whether in the courts, legislative branches, or in the media. And mine was about reminding him that while the incumbents hold power and the cards today, that won’t necessarily be the case after the next election, and that they might want to think about some restraint, if only to avoid future oversight.
But all of that raises a larger question that, these days, is more important than ever here in the States: why, given political power, do individuals pretend it will never be lost? Any cursory reading of history reveals a constant dynamic: the Roman Republic became an Empire which eventually fell. Stalin eventually passed away, as did the USSR. And within America, over 250 years, the one relentless constant is change from the drafting of the Constitution to DOGE. So is the ‘we’re here forever’ schtick: a sincere, if misguided, belief, or something completely different. To my mind, it’s the latter: if you didn’t act as if your work would last forever- whether that be to rescue a large infrastructure project or to cap overhead rates- you would never have the energy required to put change into place in the first place. At some point, even as a neuroscientist, I became convinced that NSF’s National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) was critical to the future of Biology writ large. And…that NEON would last for at least its planned 30-year campaign. And the reason I began to think of NEON as ‘forever’? Because, if I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have had the internal motivation to fix it in the first place.
Earlier in my career, I had built the Krasnow Institute from a small, nearly broke non-profit into an internationally ranked academic unit of George Mason University, complete with an MRI brain scanner, wet labs, shared instrumentation, and degree programs in neuroscience and computational social sciences, all with the internal idea that it would be around long after I was gone. Today, only the building is left: Krasnow Hall. The academic departments, faculty, fundraising boards–they are scattered to the wind. If I’d known that when I got started, well, I’d have gone back to the lab bench or something else.
The point isn’t that the ‘forever fiction’ plays out well in some cases and not in others. NEON’s story is still playing out. Rather, it’s the idea that without some internal world-building exercise (like what some novelists do when they commit to rules that will end when the book does), humans have a hard time summoning the willpower to build new things. The intuitive realization of the second law- that entropy is constantly increasing- would lead to paralysis.
All principals create the internal fiction that they’ll be around for the long haul. It goes with the territory. And even if the long haul is term-limited (as it was in my case), their pet projects will last long after they’re gone. They will be immortal. Until, of course, they’re not.
