What's wrong with Silver Bullets?

#magic People have always believed in silver bullets ... even while denying this belief. Advocates of this or that technology often spend a lot of time refuting the claims of earlier technologies to be silver bullets, while modestly and disingenuously avoiding making such claims for the technological breakthrough they are championing.

But the modern notion of silver bullet is based on a misreading of fairy tales and ancient myth. The silver bullet (or any other magical weapon) is not a general-purpose quick fix, providing generic protection against all evils. It is a precisely targeted weapon, providing overpowering force only when used by the right person against the right opponent at the right time. In the wrong hands, the weapon either fails altogether, or proves dangerous to the person using it.

The silver bullet itself has a very specific purpose within horror fiction - to kill or subdue vampires [Monstropedia: Vampires]. As Sam Leith explains, vampires and zombies represent middle-class fear of the upper and lower classes respectively. In other words, silver bullets kill those born with a silver spoon in their mouths. This is based on the important magical principle of similars - the notion that the solution mirrors the problem. As in the belief that rabies can be cured by a hair of the dog that bit you, or that the best cure for a hangover is another drink.

Interestingly, the belief that the solution should mirror the problem happens to be popular among IT folk. For example, they may try justify the use of object-oriented software by the curious argument that business "is made of objects", or they may use "structured" tools and methods that smoothly and painlessly go from a descriptive model of "the business" (AS-IS or TO-BE) to a "logical" system architecture or system design, without tackling the difficult design tradeoffs addressed by real design thinking. This is one of the reasons why New Systems Don't Work.

Meanwhile, the reason why magical thinking survives is that it sometimes works. Primitive man believed that if you want something to fly, you attach a symbol of flight. So they tied feathers to their arrows. As luck would have it, this improved the aerodynamic qualities of the arrows, thus confirming their superstitions.

Modern man is just as superstitious as primitive man, but just about different things. Many so-called best practices are merely optimistic attempts to replicate the lucky successes of the past.

Magical Problem-Remover

"Even if you don't believe in magic" tweets @j4ngis, "Would it not be great if magic could remove ALL problems?"


I can see that this is a seductive fantasy. But we only have to open the pages of Harry Potter to see some of the reasons why this fantasy won't work. J.K. Rowling repeatedly emphasizes three important points about the power of magic.

1. Magical solutions to common problems are often incredibly clumsy and ineffective when compared to their muggle equivalents. When people in the magical world wish to communicate with one another, they are forced to resort to owls, fairy dust, magic mirrors and other devices, instead of just picking up the phone or sending a tweet.

2. Many of the problems faced by people in the magical world are caused by previous acts of magic. So maybe they would be better off with no magic at all.

3. And muggles are better off not knowing that magic is possible, because they will be tempted to seek magical solutions instead of taking responsibility for their own lives.


Am I really interested in magic? No, but I'm interested in technology, which sometimes seems to be almost the same thing. JK Rowling's magical world is a satirical reflection of our own, with stupid governments, narrow-minded people, and technology that doesn't work properly or has unintended side-effects - what Mary Catherine Bateson calls The Revenge of the Good Fairy.

And my final reason why magic cannot remove all problems is that magic is compelled to follow what I call Fairy-Tale Logic - a rigorous logic that produces an inevitable outcome. Which leaves no room for the kind of authentic and creative solution that I am sure @j4ngis believes in as much as I do.

Fairy Tale Logic

Peter Evans-Greenwood makes some interesting points in response to my post on Three Wishes, but I don't agree with his interpretation of fairy tale logic as incomplete and inconsistent. As I see it, fairy tales follow a rigorous logic that produces an inevitable outcome. (From Freud to Lacan and Matte Blanco, psychoanalysts have explored the strange but inevitable logic of dreams and the unconscious.)

It is this logic that makes fairy tales so powerful, not merely as entertainment but as rich sources of metaphor. See Magic Fairy Tales as Source for Interface Metaphors

Magic follows strict rules. J.K. Rowling put a great deal of effort into creating an internally consistent magical world for Harry Potter and his friends to inhabit; although some minor logical anomalies do appear, these are trivial compared to the main elements of magic upon which the plot relies. And within the context of the Rapunzel story, climbing hair is consistent and makes perfect sense.

Now here's the relevance of this for consultants working with organizations. When we look at families or organizations from the outside we may say "that behaviour doesn't make sense", but for the people inside the family or organization the behaviour seems perfectly logical or inevitable or both.

In order to intervene usefully into such situations, the therapist or consultant needs to be in touch both with the external logic (this doesn't make sense) and with the internal logic (this is inevitable, this is how we do things).

(I read somewhere that in post-war Britain, American management consultants had some advantage over British management consultants. At that time, one of the biggest perceived issues was something called "Industrial Relations" - in other words, conflict and distrust between management and labour. Whereas British consultants were constrained by their perceived background, American consultants were outside the British class system, could pretend to know nothing about the role of the trade union in British politics, and could ask dumb but necessary questions.)

Dysfunctional organizations may sometimes be logically incomplete or inconsistent. But more often they are obsessively complete and consistent. (J.K. Rowling paints a disturbingly plausible satire of government in the Ministry of Magic - see Harry Potter and the Half-Crazed Bureaucracy). We can learn a lot from the structure of magic.

Three Wishes

RT @j4ngis I wish I had more wishes Not seen this in any of the classic fairy tales. Yet so obvious?

Another excellent and stimulating Tweet from Anders Jangbrand. When my sons were too small to appreciate the inflexible logic of fairy tales, they used to ask similar questions. Can't we have more wishes? Can't we have some kind of blanket security wish (nothing-bad-ever-happens)? In other words, can we trick the good fairy into granting more than the story intends? Can intelligence divert the inevitability of the story?

From the perspective of creativity and innovation, questions like these count as thinking outside the box. The fairy tale describes a closed world (box) in which only certain kinds of wishes are valid: like desires, they need to be concrete and specific. In the context of a fairy story, general-purpose or open-ended wishes would be too vague and abstract, would lack the necessary psychological force and might suggest moral weakness as well (avarice or greed). In fairy stories, character always triumphs over intelligence, and the selfishly or cleverly deployed wish typically rebounds in unexpected ways.

Technology promises a similar escape from the limitations of the physical world. Mary Catherine Bateson, in her brilliant essay The Revenge of the Good Fairy, shows how simplistic technological projects are doomed to find failure, and puts in a plea for ambivalence.

Ambivalence is the mirror image within the person of certain characteristics of hierarchically organized systems, where the individual is a subsystem in some larger system. When the individual wishes too efficiently, he may disrupt the larger system-- and his entire wish-mechanism may have evolved to push against environmental constraints, but not to succeed. When the individual who has matured under these circumstances finds himself suddenly able to make wishes come true, he may subvert that possibility. Phrasing it rather differently, we could say that ambivalence is not only a neurotic residue of childhood but a form of wisdom, a memory of what it is to be a part of a larger whole. Kierkegaard once said, purity is to will one thing, but it seems possible that a divided will is the beginning of wisdom.

The moral of the fairy story is be careful what you wish for, and do not try to be too clever. Innovation may entail thinking outside the box - but it also entails deep appreciation and respect for the logic of the box.

 

Mary Catherine Bateson, The Revenge of the Good Fairy (Whole Earth Review, Issue 55, Summer 1987)

See also Fairy-Tale Logic (May 2009), Magical Problem-Remover (December 2009)

Hogwarts Security 2

In my previous post, I suggested that the ineffectual security mechanisms in the Harry Potter books could be read as part of J.K. Rowling's ongoing satire against technology. The books also include a good dose of political satire, regularly presenting the Minister for Magic and his aides in a poor light.

In the Prisoner of Azkaban, Hermione possesses a Time Turner, which allows her to be in two places at once. She and Harry use this device to frustrate the plans of the Ministry of Magic, while retaining a cast-iron alibi. And yet Hermione's possession of the Time Turner had previously been authorized by the Ministry of Magic - presumably by a separate department. Clearly the wizarding world has failed to embrace Joined-Up-Government.

All through the Half-Blood Prince, wizards mock the stupid authentication mechanisms invented by the Ministry of Magic.

"You have not asked me, for instance, what is my favourite flavor of jam, to check that I am indeed Professor Dumbledore and not an imposter, ... although of course, if I were a Death Eater, I would have been sure to research my own jam preferences before impersonating myself."

"I still don't understand why we have to go through that every time you come home. ... I mean, a Death Eater might have forced the answer out of you before impersonating you." "I know, dear, but it's Ministry procedure and I have to set an example."

In my view, Rowling has perfectly captured the kind of bureaucratic panic that causes Government Departments to disseminate such half-baked security schemes.

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Into The Machine (updated now with a sensible title and a new URL) is an excellent blog documenting the serial follies of the British Home Office. And here is a great video of the British Home Secretary, singing the benefits of the UK Identity Card scheme. [updated to add] ... and I've just discovered this sequel thanks to Robin Wilton.