Thanos Math

In HBO’s The Leftovers, 2% of the population disappears. This is enough of a disruption to transform society in some small ways, which of course grow deeper and more troubling as the series continues. This was briefly used as shorthand in our reality by late night hosts attempting to explain the magnitude of the estimated 3-6% death rate of our current pandemic. What was not discussed was the interesting premise briefly featured in the (mostly terrible) last season of The Leftovers. Carrie Coon’s character travels through space in Jodie Foster’s Contact machine to the place (dimension?) where the 2% went: a film negative of the show’s main universe, in which 98% of the population disappeared, leaving behind a breathtaking trove of resources and global infrastructure that crumbles without the people to support and maintain it. In the b-side to reality, everyone has money, but cannot pay people to do the simple things they need. Everyone has to learn to live with what they truly have, limited skills but capacity to learn, crumbing houses without power or water, roads that become un-navigable within 3-5 years, etc. The true value of society was the people.

This past week I read this Medium article which talks about how radically different society was structured before waves of plague swept through Europe, demolishing populations and leading to the accumulation and consolidation of wealth among workers, raising their status and giving them power as demand for their labor increased. Steve LeVine makes the case that the Plague led to what we think of as the Modern Man, an individual in her own right, no longer a serf indentured to the land she works.

There’s another line of thought making the rounds at the virtual watercooler we’ve created on social media: the idea of Newton's Year of Wonders happening only because he was sent home from university during the the Black Plague. I’ve also heard it with Shakespeare. The logic is we got calculus, gravity, and the structural plot points for some beloved 90’s films in return for 30-60% of the population of Europe dying. And who’s even heard of any of those who died? Worthy trade, right? Or perhaps at the least a viable silver lining?

Perhaps you can see some of the problems with this whole train of thought, key among them the old line of inquiry that those who make these sorts of arguments imagine themselves to be among the survivors. Because the truth is, we can never know the extent of what was “traded” in terms of what might have been created by those we lost. And we can’t even be certain that what was created during the plague would not have been created otherwise. Newton was already working on calculus at grad school, he could have finished it there (if you think he couldn’t, you’re making a more worthy argument against university than for the plague.)

Personally, I have a harder time dismissing the idea that this time away from routine is something of a silver lining; since we don’t have a choice, we can only make the best of how things are. I’m intrigued by the story of how Dr. Acton was selected to head up Ohio Department of Health, and positioned in DeWine’s cabinet in part because of the opioid epidemic. In the face of a legitimate crisis, it becomes very obvious what everyone’s actual priorities are. By the time the epidemic became a pandemic, it was frankly too late for states who weren’t already evaluating their public health situation and seeking genuinely improved outcomes. In some sense, our tremendous losses in the last decade were “traded” for vastly improved outcomes now, but only because we decided we had to do better. Because DeWine was willing to build a good team, and trust the team he built. Because Dr. Acton and her team were putting in the work well before the coronavirus. The reality, bizarrely, is more akin to the comic reality of the Avengers than this mythified “lone genius” narrative we’ve built with our own past.

What level of benefit justifies tragedy? How do you even attempt to judge the proportion of one catastrophic outcome vs. another, the offset of disparate griefs? The counter argument to Thanos’ insistence that you gotta break a few eggs to make an omelette is a resounding we don’t need to eat omelettes. When faced with the choice, we have to ban together, work as hard as we possibly can, and save anyone we can save. Because we don’t really know ultimately what we’re trading. It cannot be a good deal if we know we don’t know the cost.