![]() It's a weird thing, but a little bit of unearned optimism can help you achieve kind of unthinkable things. So I think he is a lesson in the sort of alchemy of delusion that, you know, delusions of grandeur can lead to realities of grandeur. Whereas if you just sit around looking backwards at all the loss and everything and the utter daunting kind of impossibility of what's ahead, that's not going to get you anywhere. Like at least if you keep going and you try, you keep trying and you invent the 3D printer valve that's cheap and you run the risk of getting sued like those Italian guys - like if you try the thing, you actually might make a little headway. And I think, you know, again, for me one lesson is that a little bit of perhaps foolish optimism can actually allow you to accidentally prevail. I think that you look at the things he did well and learn from them, and look at the things he did poorly and learn from them. And actually, I think there is - something I've been reckoning with as I'm thinking about this moment - I think he actually also has some helpful lessons about how to move forward - I think the truth is, you know, I wanted the moral clarity and moral instruction, and then I got more ambiguity and complexity. Like you can't imagine that a single person can harm so many people's lives. I mean, the breadth of his wreckage, his violence, his cruelty is utterly stunning. I went into it wanting a parable and wondering, you know, if I behave like him with just foolish optimism, will everything be OK, even though that feels like a dangerous road to travel? And then on one hand, he came out showing a cautionary tale. ![]() Once we name a thing, we run the risk of stopping to see it. On the discovery that her "hero" may have been a "villain" But where history leads makes you see why that really matters. It was sort of following this wildman story that led me into some of these deeper ideas about why we should mistrust categories, which sounds so abstract when you when you talk about it like this. That's just something that I mean, honestly, I didn't know when I started out the book that this would be where it where it led. And I think that sometimes those categories, even the ones that feel absolutely certain and just an unmovable have real - that they're obscuring nuance. I mean, in anything we do, we're looking for these proxies to parse the chaos. I think that in order to live, we are constantly doing this almost gerrymandering in everything we do, putting people together and saying that they're all like this or putting categories of creatures or ideas. And it's also something that's sacared me and that, I think, is just something I always want to study and get better at balancing that, you know, I guess that sort of balance between the meaningless that we live with and the meaning we are striving to get in order to make living a little bit easier. And, so, I think that that impulse is something I have very deeply and strongly. ![]() And you can, as a journalist, you could take shortcuts and leave things out of a story that completely biased the telling - or tell something that's false or harmful. But on the other side, the desire to see a story or see order can really be dangerous. ![]() ![]() I mean, even as a journalist, as someone trying to make sense of just the utter chaos and confusion all around us, I think sometimes that lust, that craving for order, or for a story - for meaning - on one hand is the most natural thing in the world, because otherwise we're just overwhelmed and bulldozed by the confusion. So, I wondered how he how he brewed his own optimism. And so I think, I don't know, it was just this intuitive question of, well, how is this guy so hopeful and sure of himself - even while being a scientist and being someone who in other areas of his life is just passionately skeptical and takes down anything that he considers magical thinking or unearned optimism. And that, for me, is just a personal question, because I've always grown up without faith and with a father who was sort of dogmatically atheist and shoving meaninglessness down our throats whenever possible. Like, how did he just come up with optimism when also staring a sort of seeming meaninglessness and utter doomed odds in the face. What I hoped would maybe give me some answers was this idea that he seemed to have faith without faith. And I think in a way, for me, the question I had is: What made him so hopeful when it seemed so clear that what he was trying to do would never work? But, basically, he was a scientist and I was really curious about how he had so much optimism in this moment of utter wreckage. I didn't realize I would get so obsessed with him I seriously set out to maybe write a short essay about what became of him. On how scientist David Starr Jordan inspired her ![]()
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