Path Dependent.

In chemistry, some reactions are reversible. Others aren't. In quantum physics, the governing equations can be run forward and backward in time. They give the same result either way. Sub-atomic particles live in conservative fields — you can always get back what you put in. You can go somewhere, retrace your steps, and get back to where you started. We are not like those particles. For us, time runs in one direction only. History repeats, but only by analogy. Entropy is a thing. Acts have consequences that can rarely, if ever, be entirely undone. The broken glass does not unbreak. Path-dependency is a thing.

This is obvious. Every child knows this. But at times of great upheaval we often forget the obvious. Humanity is bi-polar. In our depressive phase, we believe that change is dangerous, and probably impossible. We value old things because they are old. We back precedence over ambition. Stability over vision. The old over the young. In our manic phase, the reverse is true. We think change is inevitable, uncontrollable, a force of nature that cannot be stopped or guided. We value the new because it's new.

We move fast and break things. We delegate decisions to the young and energetic, while the old sit on the sidelines and wonder whether this time, it really will be different.

If humanity is to survive and progress, we need to become less bi-polar. We need to synthesize the best of our conservative and progressive traditions. We need to be both ambitious and cautious. We need to value the new and the old for what they do for us, rather than as ends in themselves. We need to move fast without breaking the wrong things. We need to believe that change is something that humans do together, not something that arrives at random from outside ourselves, like a force of nature. Because nature doesn't happen to us like it used to. We happen to it. We have more agency than any species in the history of the planet.

Above all, we need to remember, at this most manic of manic phases, that the decisions we make together have consequences that cannot always be undone. The doors we open cannot always be closed again. The storm unleashed cannot always be calmed. But it's hard to chart a course through a storm without any sense of direction. We need a chart of the available futures and how to get to them. Then we need a way to measure which future we are pointing the ship of humanity at. We need more than vague statements of intent. We need more, even, than moral frameworks even if we could agree on what they should be. We need a map, and we need a compass.

This is a small, insignificant attempt to build that map and that compass. It is written as fiction, because anything else would be hubris of the most extreme kind. But it is still a kind of hubris, because each of the pieces we will publish here is a bet, made with incomplete information, reliant on some contestable statistics and our own tragically limited understanding of history and human nature.

The one bet that we believe to be safe is this: it is better to think about the different futures on offer and how we could arrive at them than not to. Because at times of great change, not thinking is a decision. Not acting is an action. Because the decisions and actions we take today, right now, may not always be reversible. Because path dependency exists.

These fictional essays will be published about once a month. We don't know how many there will be. We don't even know which futures we will write, beyond the first few. We don't know much. Once a few of them are out in the public ether, we might want to step back and ask any long-suffering readers out there which ones seem most likely, which ones we like and which ones we cannot bear to live in. And how we can actively make choices between them.

But that's for later. For now we're starting with an old story made a little new. A leader who wants power, unconstrained by principle. And how they could get it, with the tools we have made for them.