Quicksketch: Contract Mindset

 I recently watched "The Crying Game" a movie possibly now forgotten in time and one I associate mostly with Mayor Quimby of Springfield.

Forrest Whittaker makes some interesting choices with his accent, but the film...I don't know it works, without my necessarily understanding it. It does feature prominently the story of the scorpion and the frog and may be where Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y know the fable from. 

The fable is ostensibly an argument for jailing people with Anti-social personality disorders, or just psychology 101 - the best predictor of future behaviour is past relevant behaviour.

This is an emphasized point though, because the scorpion doesn't just kill the frog but itself in the fable, indicating the strength of a persons nature.

I keep coming back to trying to understand "what are people?" as the essential question of sociology. Certainly they are no one thing, and here's something non-ubiquitous that I've noticed.

Some people have what I'll tentatively call a "contract mindset" but perhaps, because I'm not good at grammar, perhaps it could simply be called "contractism" which is elevating a contract to some magical status.

Predating the modern concept of contracts, we can look at oaths and swearing. People giving testimony in modern legal systems often are sworn in on a bible or other religious text, you will be familiar with the cliche "may I remind you you are under oath." 

If someone is an atheist, well I'm told back in the day, they couldn't serve on a jury because they couldn't be sworn in. I assume these days, they take the oath and you just remove the religious paraphenalia.

Why? Well, because swearing to tell the truth is not a magical process. People who place their palm on a holy book are still physically capable of lying. In another early 90s cinematic darling "Fried Green Tomatoes" Reverend Scroggins provides false testimony in a murder trial that alibis two murderers. The reverend later reveals he was able to do so because the bible he provided was actually a copy of Moby Dick, so no problem with perjury then...YES it's still perjury, because entering a contract with the court isn't based on magic, the (only good) commandment is "Thou shalt not bare false witness" it's not conditional on whether the book is used or not.

The old system of the 18th century or earlier was based on belief in belief. The new system has rendered holy books redundant because it is based on negative reinforcement - if they catch you in a lie you're in big trouble. It relies on risk aversion.

I'm not an expert on how people get scammed and defrauded, but I suspect a big part of it is an excess of faith in contracts. 

People who heard someone promise, on their childrens lives, no less that they were good for it. When their integrity was questioned, they got upset, their feelings hurt. People witnessed them promise. Everybody heard. 

How could somebody possibly, just not deliver on what was promised?

I'm not talking about escape clauses and loopholes in the fine print. I'm talking about people thinking that some performance of sincerity can attain an exception to someone's propensity to lie, misrepresent and renege. 

Most commonly is probably the election cycle, where people vote on non-information that they perceive as information despite often a literal lifetime telling them this is not the case.

Another common area are forecasts, which people can treat like contrasts despite nobody claiming they are. Probability statements treated as promises with no scrutiny as to how that probability was determined.

There is a misattribution or paraphrasing of Dostoevsky's Brothers Karamazov most often expressed as "without God, everything is permitted." and not to be too on-the-nose atheist, what you will find is that whether it is the Buddhist cycle of rebirth and Buddhist hells or Christ dying for the sins of man, Dostoevsky is exactly wrong - generally under religious notions of existence everything is permitted in the moral sense.

Without god, yes, your only constraint is reality so you may find yourself capable of lying, stealing, raping and murder. Not everyone is, though they may appear physically capable. While yes, people can, and do, do these things regardless of their religious convictions, there's only so much they can do before running into consequences.

So from here we can move into the conclusion: Yes the only crimes people can persist in doing are the ones they can get away with. People can probably steal as many paperclips as they like from the workplace stationary cupboard. Some people can get away with murder for years, but they cannot for example just keep murdering every relative they stand to inherit money from. The most "successful" serial killers in terms of amassing victims without being convicted tended to have to target people they had little or no connection to at all and had to go to extraordinary lengths to render those crimes unsolvable. 

In the same way, contracts don't work via magic, which is why there's a difference between a written and signed contract that both you and your attorney have copies of, and a verbal promise made in front of yourself and your friend. 

Society enforces contracts, and it requires you being able to persuade a stranger that the contract exists in the first place. Furthermore, there are going to be a bunch of contracts where the cost of enforcing them exceeds the value of the contract in the first place.

A lot of the population however, remain vulnerable due to a naïve belief that making promises that one doesn't intend to, or cannot know they, can keep.

Quicksketch: No Guiderails on the Balance Beam

The economy is retracting, automation made you redundant but just when you were facing the hobo life you land a job at a Soy Sauce company. 

You are a "batch controller" in the Quality Assurance department and you are being trained on the job by Mark. He walks you up to a vat, instructs you to get a clean teaspoon, taste the batch of soy sauce and Mark tells you "Yeah. This batch is too salty, so you need to add a little water." and then he pours water in. 

Now this analogy is flawed because this job and process almost certainly doesn't exist, but I'll press on. 

You think "Sweet. Easy peasy. Saltiness is bad. Just add water." so Mark leaves you to it, and you go around adding water to every batch to ensure they aren't salty.

Your error is an easy fix in this analogy. When Mark checks in to see how you are going, he tastes some of the batches and remarks "Oh! No, I'm sorry. These are two watery what we need to do in this case is reduce them, evaporate some of the excess water until the flavour is right." and Mark gives you a patient smile while he turns the gas or whatever up.

By the end of the first day, you have adjusted your schema to understand that the job is not as simple as "just add water" but in fact you need to train your palette to recognize what adjustments need to be made.

Above is Monty Python's Dennis Moore sketch, a period-sketch for that era of highway banditry. If you can't be bothered watching it, here are the bones: Dennis Moore is a silly bandit that robs flowers from the rich to give to the poor. The poor point out to Dennis Moore that flowers aren't really helpful, and ask him to steal something they can use. Dennis Moore takes note and starts robbing the rich of their wealth and giving it to the poor, then paradoxically, he crosses a threshold where he is now stealing from the poor and giving to the rich having totally redistributed the wealth.

The sketch may seem ridiculous, but the mid-to-late 70s were a period where labour unions were so strong that capital went on strike. The incidence of stagflation is what lead to the Neoliberalism of the Reagan-Thatcher 80s. At the moment, the working class is too weak against the asset owning class, but the point is, it's not as simple as just add regulation it may not seem like it, but capital needs to be able to collect a risk premium to have any incentive to invest. That's the cliff-notes version of what began to happen in the 70s. You had scarce labour supply meaning if a company grew it's revenues by 4% the workforce could strike until it had secured a 4% pay rise. At some point, the people investing in the firms were like "what's the point of building a firm that employs people when I can just park my money in a government bond and earn a risk free 3%?"

This issue of calibration is what is so frustrating for me, trying to find people to stimulate me intellectually. Many people are capable of identifying real problems, but then posit oversimplified solutions, likely because of what Stephen Fry said at the beginning of the current culture war era on Dave Rubin's show: "People want things to be simple but they aren't."

A job is much less stressful if all problems are identical, and the solution is something you can just add more of until it is fixed. There are many that can point to the excesses of the left or the right, both of which are just plain radical and generally trying to implement old ideas with disastrous track records whether it is Marxist Utopias or Theocratic Orthodoxies, there are fewer who don't then prescribe leaning hard against the guard rail on the left or the right.

Those guard rails don't exist. There's nothing you can figure out today, that will absolve you of needing to recalibrate tomorrow. The fundamental nature of the Universe we live in, is that it's dynamic. Circumstances are changing.

I'm sorry, but you can't just do. You are also going to have to think.

How I Wouldn't Do Foreshadowing

It appears the Acolyte has been a huge moneymaker for Youtube content creators watching it in order to pan the series to people with no intention of watching/not watching it.

Having said that, nothing I've seen convinces me that at any point in time "The Acolyte" has been unfairly treated. Unless we take as the first premise of the case of unfairness, that it is fair to allocate a budget of $180 million for eight episodes of a show intended for an incredibly small target audience.

I would put it to you, that it would be forgivable to say that either such a large investment should target the largest possible return, or in the interest in reviving interest in an IP, several smaller bets could have been made to see which one sticks.

Anyway, I haven't watched the show, have no intention to watch the show and am resolutely in the camp that I would prefer there to be less, rather than more star wars content. Given that that is physically impossible, I would settle for Star Wars content to simply stop. I am not hanging out for a return to good star wars, given that I don't think it has ever been achieved. 

What falls into my lap, is an opportunity to ask myself the question: What makes a hack writer?

And film critic youtubers "Film Threat" published a video with the following thumbnail:

I haven't watched the video, it asserts, and I don't even know if this is the case, that the Acolyte like many streaming service content contains a mystery box. My hack test is can I deduce the contents of the mystery box from minimal evidence?

So exhibit one:

Importance to story as a function of layout.

Exhibit two:

Carrie-Anne Moss dies in first scene, allegedly the first seven minutes.

If we all haven't deduced that Carrie-Anne Moss is the most likely candidate to be the guy in the mask, the prize in the mystery box then I don't know what to say. In the above picture you can see the namesake "Acolyte" weilding something like a butterknife to attack Trinity.

So bonus Xibit:

Apparantly the first on-screen instruction the master gives the Acolyte is: "If you kill a jedi with a weapon they won't die." or something.

The prediction reads thus: If the writers of the acolyte are indeed hacks, then the master will take off their mask to reveal they are Trinity from the Matrix.

What I'm willing to concede now, is that if the hood doesn't come off to reveal it is the expensive high profile actress given prominent position on the series promotional material juxtaposed to the character she is disguised as in the same way, what I understand to be the identical twin protagonists are juxtaposed, then it is a clever bluff, red-herring etc. making novel use of star power to throw us off the scent. I don't know what would be a satisfying reveal though, because the opposite of foreshadowing is deus ex machina.

Like when in Psych series 5 finale when fraud psychic detective Shawn Spenser finally sees the face of nemesis serial killer Mr Yin, there's no "reveal" beyond the fact that they got Lance Reddick the actor who played Robocop to cameo as Mr Yin. The reveal is like "ooh did they get Lance Reddick to cameo?"

By contrast, the reveal of the antagonist in Umberto Eco's "In The Name of The Rose" is incredibly satisfying because it makes total sense of a confusing and complicated mystery even though the plot is discovered too late to prevent any deaths but William of the Baskervilles and his student Adso, the detectives in the mystery.

In real life, if you find a series of prostitutes murdered via strangulation and dumped in the woods, we might infer that the killer is likely a male acting alone. Beyond that, it could prove to be almost anyone. If one were to make a documentary miniseries on Gary Ridgeway it likely could not be structured as a mystery, because it doesn't lend itself to a parlour scene where the Poirot deduces which of the suspects is indeed the murderer. Poirot would at first conclude that the killer was a man with a car and likely a drivers license. After gathering half the population of the state in a train carriage, there's no real way for Poirot to point to Gary Ridgeway and say "but because you sign your cheques with a looping 'y' I knew it had to be you!" 

Indeed as the identity of Jack the Ripper is most likely to be. But if you are watching a mystery like the very well-made non-hack 'Broadchurch' Olivia Coleman in the opening scene walks down a street where we meet every single suspect including the killer, so it is all foreshadowed for a satisfying reveal.

A film that would be misconstrued as a mystery is "Anatomy of a Fall" where the premise demands a mystery to set up a situation where a child has to decide if his mother is a murderer or if his father was suicidally depressed. There is no answer nor reveal to the mystery, though the director and writer choose to open and close the film with the dog, whose ball is never scene beyond the opening shot of the film, suggesting that the ambiguity arises from everyone overlooking the possibility that the dad slipped on the dog's ball and fell out the window.

These are all good pieces of foreshadowing. I put it to you, that a hack tries to tell us who the mystery box is as soon as they can, then try to get us to look the other way. Ideally, you do so before you reveal there is a mystery that begs an answer. You get people to rule out a suspect by faking their death.

That's hack foreshadowing 101. 

One of the best reveals, with foreshadowing paying big dividends can be found in the movie "Hot Fuzz" where the writers went to serious effort to create two superimposed plausible conspiracies supported by evidence. Simon Pegg figures everything out, with the one failing of not crediting how insane the conspiracy could be.

So I think 4 episodes of The Acolyte have been made available as at watching. I am yet to watch "The Last Jedi" though I did watch "Solo: A Star Wars Story" on a long haul flight.

Should it turn out Carrie-Anne Moss was just a bait-and-switch purely for the spectacle of killing off a big star in a single scene give or take a flashback at some point. Then, I mean. Well whatever, it doesn't make The Acolyte good, or worth making, or interesting. Just less predictable.

If however, people have to eat their hats because they didn't see Carrie-Anne Moss being revealed to be "the big bad" then I will simply be disappointed in the human race.