Don’t Be the Model Citizen of the Society
Or, why history honours the rebel, the contradictory, the inconsistent
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Q: Are there downsides of being too consistent?
Try running for political office and changing your opinion about any matter. You will instantly be labelled a flip flopper. Unprincipled. Inconsistent. Unreliable.
How can I even know who I’m voting for if you’re changing your mind about things? I don’t even know who I’m looking at right now!
There’s this idea that you should have some sort of epiphany moment as a five-year old, “hmm…socialism…I like it!” And then never change your mind about anything ever again, for the rest of your life.
Heaven forbid you grow and change as an individual over the years, or develop yourself as a person. You should feel ashamed if you don’t know exactly where you stand on something.
Or that throughout the process of educating yourself, if you feel one way…then you hear something that changes your mind the next day…and then you hear something else that changes your mind the day after — the consensus is that this makes you an intellectually weak person.
Maybe you just agree with whoever is arguing against you. Maybe your brain is incapable of differentiating between good and bad points. Maybe you’re just dumb!
This fetish we have about the consistency of our beliefs has absolutely nothing to do with being a well thoughtout person.
Today, let’s talk about opinions. More precisely, the importance of applying a scientific approach (as opposed to a political approach) and updating your thoughts, beliefs, ideas, opinions when needed.
People change all the time. People think one thing one day and completely change their mind the next. It’s only natural.
But society has a strange fixation on the consistency of beliefs. This is probably because we cannot build a society around volatile ideas, principles, virtues that change everyday.
This makes us believe that the legitimacy of an idea is directly connected to how consistent that idea is. The thinking is that if something is true, it’s going to be just as true tomorrow as much as it is true today. That if an idea is proven to be false at some point, then we had been formerly living in error as a society.
This feeling causes a strong pain on the rear end of our head. The technical term for this is cognitive dissonance.
Society demands consistency by design. This creates serious problems for the individual.
What is good for a society isn’t necessarily good for an individual. Debt is good for society — if more and more people take debt, the overall economy prospers from the interest generated — but harmful for an individual. It arrests your degree of freedom. This societal obsession with ‘consistency’ with nothing different. Good for the whole, harmful for the individual.
You can see why society inherently might try to make someone feel dumb who changes their mind or contradicts themself from one week to the next.
The truth of the universe is not something you grasp one day and then spend the rest of your life defending — especially after you find contradictory information. The fact that you believe the exact same stuff you did twenty years ago has nothing to do with the legitimacy of what you are believing.
Whenever an individual seems inconsistent or contradictory, a model citizen of the society — one who spends their days embroiled in society repeating what other people told them to say — might see that individual as stupid or confused.
But inconsistency and contradicting yourself is not the mark of a stupid or confused person. It is often the mark of someone committed to truly thinking for themselves. Someone truly in touch with how disordered, unreasonable and inconsistent the truth of things often is. Someone truly interested in finding the truth. Someone not afraid of updating their beliefs when faced with contradictory evidence.
However, the model citizen of the society, from their perspective, is utterly incapable of seeing that this person may actually be more connected to the truth than they ever are.
How do you get to a particular destination on a sailboat if the wind is blowing in the opposite direction? Well not in a rigid, absolute, consistent straight line for sure. If you tried to go in a straight line you’d just stand still or go backwards. You have to go from side to side, zigging and zagging, using the winds to move towards the general direction that you wanted to end up in.
But the people sitting on the beach watching you from the sidelines are gonna be like dang, this person must be crazy or stupid if they’re sailing this way! But for all that movement back and forth, the boat is all the while slowly but surely moving closer to the destination.
There’s no logical sense if you continue to hold on to ideas that are being challenged, simply because you happened to have believed them in the past. Why spend your life ‘defending’ when you can be busy ‘learning’ instead? Why not live in the present instead? Why be so defensive always?
Black holes arise when ungodly amounts of matter get crushed together into a small space. Because of all that concentrated matter, black holes have huge gravitational fields. So huge that nothing can escape their clutches. Not even light. That’s why black holes are black — light goes in, but nothing comes out.
In 1970, Stephen Hawking made an odd discovery about them.
When something that has mass falls into a black hole, the overall mass of the black hole increases. And when the mass increases, so does its sucking power and its size. It’s like a blob. It eats, and it grows.
Now, people knew all these before Stephen Hawking. But Hawking made an unusual connection here.
By definition, nothing can escape a black hole. Once something goes in, it’s stuck. So black holes only grow bigger over time. They never grow smaller. There’s another quantity in physics that shows that same property: entropy.
Entropy is essentially a measure of disorder — of chaos. It comes from the field of thermodynamics, the study of heat. And according to the laws of thermodynamics, entropy never ever goes down.
Disorder always increases. This is why old buildings and things always spontaneously decay but never spontaneous heal themselves.
While other physical quantities can go up or down in value, entropy alone goes in one direction. For a long time, scientists thought entropy was unique in this. But Hawking proposed that the size of black holes also belongs on this elite category.
But here’s the problem. If black holes have entropy, that implies that they have energy — heat. That also implies they have a temperature. Now, if black holes have heat, according to laws of thermodynamics, they would have to radiate energy into the cold outer space. This radiated energy would be in the form of light rays. But that’s a contradiction. Nothing can escape a black hole, not even light. Therefore, Hawking said, black holes don’t radiate heat.
In a deeper sense, Hawking was saying that the laws of thermodynamics simply don’t apply to black holes. That the very laws of physics break down in their presence. The fact that entropy and black-hole size are the only two known quantities that always increase is just a coincidence — nothing more. There’s no connection between them. Or so Hawking thought. But one person was not convinced.
Enter Jacob Bekenstein.
Bekenstein was the son of poor Jewish refugees from Mexico. His dad was a carpenter. One day in 1971, Bekenstein picked up a paper by Hawking where he made the above claims.
But that conclusion didn’t sit right with Bekenstein. Saying that something violated the laws of thermodynamics seemed crazy to him. Thermodynamics is a wildly successful theory, and utterly universal. How could black holes skirt this fundamental law of nature?
So Bekenstein sat down to do some calculations. And sure enough, with a little work, he found something interesting. It went like this.
If you toss something into a black hole, you increase its mass. But according to Einstein and E=mc², mass and energy are interrelated. If you increase mass, you increase energy. And if you increase energy, you increase the entropy. So by the transitive property, increasing a black hole’s mass increases its entropy.
This little chain of reasoning pleased Bekenstein. Maybe there was a connection between entropy and black holes after all.
Still, there was one big glaring objection here. If black holes have entropy, they have to radiate heat in the form of light rays. But how could that be, if nothing can escape them? It was a paradox. And Bekenstein didn’t know how to resolve this paradox.
Hawking, meanwhile, was furious. He felt that Bekenstein had taken his beautiful work and twisted it into something ugly. How dare he! So Hawking set out to prove this punk Bekenstein wrong and put him in his place.
But after two years of exhausting labour, Hawking eventually had to swallow hard and admit that — ugh — he had blundered. Bekenstein was right: black holes seemed to radiate heat.
But what about that paradox? Hawking thought about it long and hard. This was a problem involving thermodynamics and general relativity. But Hawking developed a hunch — just a hunch — that maybe the way to resolve the paradox lay in a third branch of physics — quantum mechanics.
The way Hawking explained the paradox was this. Black holes do not radiate heat from inside, because nothing can escape from inside. But black holes can create the conditions for heat to escape right outside them. In other words, black holes do have entropy and a temperature after all, and they create the conditions to radiate heat in the form of photons.
These photons are now known as Hawking radiation. It’s the discovery he’s most famous for. And he never could have made it without making his original blunder and being corrected by Jacob Bekenstein.
This wasn’t the only time Stephen Hawking was wrong. In fact, he had something of a history of making bold statements about scientific controversies and getting things backwards.
“His style of doing science is quite dramatic,” says Hawking’s Cambridge University colleague Gary Gibbons. “He will propose a thesis and defend it to the last, until it is overthrown by better reasoning.”
If you want to grow, you have to dare to be inconsistent. No great thinker who has ever lived has ever been considered a great thinker because they consistently adhered to the status quo.
History isn’t filled with names of those who believed what everyone else believed. No! History honours the rebel, the contradictory, the inconsistent — not the model citizen of the society.
When you are inconsistent, you shall be misunderstood. But think about it once. Is it so bad be misunderstood by others, especially when their understanding is misplaced?
Pythagoras was misunderstood. So was Socrates, Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, and every scientist, philosopher, social worker, revolutionary, and entrepreneur who has shaped human history.
It isn’t an easy ride when you venture out in search of truth. In order to be inconsistent, you also have to be a non-conformist. While it might be easy to be a non-conformist sitting in your bedroom never talking to anyone, but try doing it in public where you’re being attacked by a mob of conformists screaming somebody else’s ideas in your ears. Much more difficult, but much more necessary nonetheless.
True change, the kind of change that affects generations — the independence of a nation, abolition of slavery, religious equality, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ rights — is only going to come about from individuals who are willing to step out and dare to exist outside of that mob. Individuals who are willing to be inconsistent.
It is a disgusting idea to think that you are somehow not capable of being that individual.
Timeless Insight
Humans are unhappy in large part because we are insatiable.
After working hard to get what we want, we adapt to its presence in our life and lose interest in the object of our desire.
Rather than feeling satisfied, we start getting bored, and in response to this, we go on to form new and grander desires. Because of this, we often find ourselves on a satisfaction treadmill. Our possessions become commonplace and uninteresting. The people in our lives become invisible.
What I’m Reading
There are fifty American states, but they add up to one nation in a way the twenty-eight sovereign states of the European Union never can. Most of the EU states have a national identity far stronger, more defined, than any American state. It is easy to find a French person who is French first, European second, or one who pays little allegiance to the idea of Europe, but an American identifies with their Union in a way few Europeans do theirs. This is explained by the geography, and the history of the unification of the United States.
― Tim Marshall, Prisoners of Geography
Tiny Thought
You will get the most attention from those who hate you. No friend, no admirer, and no partner will flatter you with as much curiosity.
Before You Go…
Thanks so much for reading! Send me ideas, questions, reading recs. You can write to abhishek@coffeeandjunk.com, reply to this email, or use the comments.
Until next Sunday,
Abhishek 👋