I recently read an article that gave a lot of insight into 12 Monkeys (the movie, 1995), and by extension also into the series (2013) which follows much of the same story-line. The story in a nutshell: the world has been devastated because of a virus and it has caused global collapse in every possible way (famine, climate change, poverty) and it has forced people to live underground. The 12 Monkeys are a group that are believed to have released the original virus. Scientists figured out a way to travel back in time to retrieve an original sample of the virus in order to create a vaccine.
Now that we have all been through something similar, although not to the extent that’s laid out in the 12 Monkeys ---- the story doesn’t seem so far fetched. Just imagine that the recent global tensions caused here and there caused a global war, in turn causing a complete collapse in the global supply chain ------ and not just a global unavailability of consumer goods, but also famine, throwing countries back ‘a hundred years’, withdrawing policies to mitigate climate change, nuclear missiles being launched here and there, accelerating not just climate change with rising temperatures, but a complete collapse.
It’s a stretch to imagine that this would ever happen, but the reality is that we have never been so close since the beginning of the cold war, and since the global trend to have consumer goods produced at very low prices in countries with cheap labor (China), which in some way must have kept things together. Although, there might also be a good case to increase production at home through 3d-printing and highly automated factories, but that’s on a side-note.
More about the monkeys
The article explores the back-story of the 12 Monkeys, chronicling what made it such a challenge to get the movie made, and also about cues in the world at large and the inspiration drawn from the personal lives of its authors.
The idea to get an original strain from a virus was a current idea at the time and it was turned into reality as well: scientists actually retrieved a sample of the original Spanish-flu-virus out of the permafrost in Norway that had brought the world to its knees, some 70 years prior.
The authors had also spend time working in a psychiatric institution, and during their time there were frequent protests by animal-rights-groups outside of this facility. This became the 12 Monkeys. Where the story works better than other time-travel-movies, is that they have this notion that the past already took place: their presence in it will not dramatically impact the future.
I personally like the series more than the movie, because it has more suspense and it gives a better notion of the impossibility of the situation that they had found themselves in (plague, famine, nature collapse), but also that other small notion that even if time travel was possible, it might actually still be close to impossible to dodge what was about to come down inevitably.
The idea of the whole story was to get a live strain of the virus, with the idea in mind to develop a vaccine based on that. It does raise the question though: how did it all end up in that place to begin with? Or to para-phrase it: how could it have gotten so far out of hand?
Exhausting every possible alternative
Some time ago I read this statement about the US government that they will always exhaust every possible alternative before doing what needs to be done in the first place. I’m not sure why it was related to the US government, because it seems to be a universal principle in the same vein as that in any organization the number of people who do most of the work can be estimated by the square root of the number of employees.
It’s one of those instances where you might want things not to be so, but when it comes down to it: you can’t go much against human nature, not when it comes to the private, and not when it comes to the social. That’s why it totally makes sense to draw that comparison.
In an organization of 100 folks it’s about 10 folks who do most of the work. In an organization of 40 folks, it’s about 6 folks. The larger the organization, the bigger the chances are of just being able to coast by and not do too much of anything (or at least, not having to work too hard).
When it comes to work, it’s hard to argue that this is ‘bad’, because there are different folks with vastly different skill-sets. Besides, most of us are okay with doing what is required and calling it George, because when it comes down to it: you work to live your life, right?
In much of that same vein; we have all been there when we started out with our first job: spending money and partying like crazy; and basically living paycheck to paycheck. It’s a lot of fun while it lasts, and you should definitely enjoy when you’re in a stretch like that, but at some point you start realizing that it’s pretty unsustainable.
At first you may try to figure out how to keep up that life-style, you explore every possible alternative before doing what you should have done from the start: minimize debt, budget and invest.
Where this instance is different is that there’s no way around that little fact that you have to do what needs to be done at some point in time. And that’s where it borders on that other notion of figuring out what you ultimately want out of life, which depends on your definition of ‘success’ and when you want to have accomplished in terms of ‘this-and-that’.
The fact of the matter is though that there will always be some past that takes time to get undone, if it can get undone. If you amassed debt during those first few years, it will take you some time to pay it all back, but it can be undone. On the other hand; if you contracted, let’s say, some sort of chronic disease, or you destroyed a part of your body, then it’s a different matter entirely.
The personal, the social and the city-organism
In The Bird Man I played around with this idea how a city that has been sliding down in every possible way can create a breeding ground for a lot of bad stuff to happen. At the time it seemed to me that this was one of the big questions of 2020, not just because of the plague, but also because of Trump and the rise of right-wing politics in general.
This year it seems slightly less dramatic, with Biden elected and global politics having receded to the middle (although that might be temporary). That’s more or less how I shifted that notion in The Caves away from being in a situation where things are already bad, towards how things could have gone so terribly wrong in the first place. I believe that this is one of the big questions that has to be figured out when life is about to return back to normal. Which makes it more or less one of the big questions of 2021.
And this is where all of this ties back to the plague and how we ended up there in the first place. It’s so obvious that it’s almost silly to point out: not enough resources have been dedicated to controlling and defeating viral outbreaks on a global level. Despite the fact that a vaccine based on modified rna has been in development for over 20 years. Despite the fact that there were institutions that rolled out as soon as the word of the plague has come about.
The whole point here is that it ties in to all those bigger issues: climate change, global waste and ultimately an unfair distribution of wealth. Ultimately it’s just another example of exhausting every alternative, before doing what needed to be done in the first place.
But it gives some sort of twisted understanding of the other end: if you’re cornered and with your back against the wall ------ things seem different. Maybe that’s a whole other layer to the 12 Monkeys: a destruction out of which to rebuild, only then things got out of control. Maybe, when all was said and done, that is what those 12 Monkeys had on their mind even though they might not even have been aware of this themselves.
Key points:
- 12 Monkeys is a great story, especially the series because it has more suspense
- the plague could have been much worse
- ultimately you can’t go against human nature in the private, or the social
- in most organizations, most work is done by a small group of people (square root of total number of employees)
- exhausting every alternative before doing what needs to be done is a universal human tendency
Continue reading
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