Month: September 2021

My review of ‘The Truth’ by Stanisław Lem

The Truth and Other StoriesThe Truth and Other Stories by Stanisław Lem
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I just finished the title short story, The Truth, with tremendous thanks to a Polish friend of mine, who recommended it to me.

Humbly and with embarrassment for my Anglo-centricity, I am forced to admit I would otherwise never have read Lem, nor was I even truly aware of his existence as a writer – despite his having written the book behind the classic sci-fi film Solaris.

Yet The Truth, in its execution and in the concepts it evokes, is as deserving of a place among the great works of 20th Century sci-fi as anything written by Bradbury, Asimov or Clarke.

Nor does the genius of the story repose entirely on the strength of its ideas. The writing is more than competent – some passages touch on the beautiful. But what I really liked was how Lem uses the common narrative device of an unreliable narrator to reflect on a personal level the story’s (eponymous) philosophical question. In this way, he creates a perfect mirror between the metaphysical and the psychosocial.

Of course, in the end, it is the ideas that are the lasting mark of this story’s greatness. Here we come back to humility – in under ten thousand words, Lem manages to construct a plausible hypothesis that challenges our most basic assumptions about the universe and our place in it. That is enough to humble even the most widely read sci-fi enthusiast.

The Truth deserves more than just five stars. It deserves all of them.

View all my reviews

Sanity is just the average of all the different kinds of crazy.

I went out last night with a group of people from work. It was a late summer night, the weather was near-perfect, the bars were crowded and everyone was in a good mood.

But the one prevailing sentiment was this: “we should make the most of it now, before the next lockdown happens and we’re all stuck back in our houses for an indeterminant amount of time, until ‘they’ decide to release us”.

It impaired my enjoyment of the event by more than a little, to witness how this received wisdom has become an average thought, and therefore is a sane point of view.

Because by the standards of my own internal logic, it sound crazy to me that intelligent, educated people would so easily accept that, in a country where 80% of the population has been vaccinated, we are likely to endure further lockdowns over a virus which, even in the absence of any vaccine or therapeutics, has an infection fatality rate known to be below 0.4%, and for which proven treatments are available which can drive that IFR to much lower levels.

I didn’t bother to question the premise very much yesterday evening – it was not the time, and I was not so inclined. But if I had, I know that I would have been dismissed as ‘crazy’ – in today’s language, a ‘CovIdiot’, for questioning the efficacy of lockdowns, for which the evidence is at best scant. For questioning the value of wearing facemasks, for which the evidence is at best scant. For questioning the efficacy of vaccines in a country in which 25% of new PCR positive tests are among the fully vaccinated. For vehemently opposing vaccine passports on the grounds that there is no logical reason for them, much less a clear cost-benefit case.

I am crazy for thinking these things. I am crazy because it is a ‘belief’ to hold that reason defines what is and what is not true. Most of human history contradicts this assertion, so only a crazy person would persist in believing it.

But they are crazy too. They are crazy for believing in the dangerosity of a disease that mainly affects the old and comorbid, and for which valid therapeutics exists. They are crazy for sacrificing all of their basic freedoms to enrich Big Pharma and Big Tech, in the vain hope of avoiding an illness they will in any event almost certainly get, but will do them little actual harm.

The only difference between our brands of crazy is that theirs is much more common.