Western society is on the verge of collapse, as a natural consequence of moral, political and technological decline, and it matters little what the local trigger is. So little does the following examination that came to the author’s mind when looking at NASA’s non-launches matter, perhaps at this point it counts more as historical evidence.
To understand what is wrong with the current situation, let us take the famous non-paradox1 from Achilles and the turtle, and adapt it to the NASA of 2022. I will then discuss the fable of Achilles and the bureaucratic turtle.
Accomplicated by a poor foundation of mathematical analysis and several too many grappas, Achilles and the turtle schedule a race. They hold meetings to organise the event, tell newspapers and schools, prepare the page for live2 on YouTube, create a logo and print all the appropriate T-shirts and stickers.
The day of the race is approaching, but there is a problem, the turtle should renew his medical certificate that very day. No problem, everything is moved to the next day. The next day, the judges discover that the digital signature on the turtle’s new medical certificate has expired, so it is not valid. Everything is moved to the following week, for the bureaucratic time of the signature renewal and the new medical examination. The following week everything is ready, Achille and the turtle position themselves at the starting blocks, but just before starting Achille discovers a suspicious rash on the left ankle: according to the procedures he calls the sports medical experts who look at the ankle, consult, concern, reconsult, and when in doubt about the nature of the rash between sun, hives, fungus, allergic reaction or black plague, framing this unexpected problem from the point of view of sports safety, decide it is better to postpone the race to do all the necessary tests. See you again in a couple of weeks, keep your Facebook live on, we’re off. After the inconclusive examinations, the fateful day returns, Achilles and the turtle seem to be in top form… but before they even get on the blocks, an official runs towards the judges waving a document. Apparently the certification of the asphalt on the athletics track had expired twelve days earlier: the asphalt, which to the naive eye seemed perfectly normal, actually conceals who knows what pitfalls, and if someone gets hurt, who is responsible? A meeting of the organisers is held on site, and the possibilities are analysed. A recertification would take two days, but could be unsuccessful because the asphalt had been certified for one year and is now fifteen months old, on the other hand, a new resurfacing would take three days, plus ten days for safety drying…
This is only the beginning of the story of Achilles and the bureaucratic turtle, I will spare you the rest and go straight to the moral of the tale:
Achilles and the turtle will never run that race.
In this Polish dance of bureaucracy to accomplish activity X, the final purpose fades into the background and the bureaucracy leavens until it occupies every hour, every space, every money, every mind: given enough time, no one will even remember what the initial purpose was, and they will all be caught up in sub-bureaucracy 2B-1 that has to be tuned to the new sub-bureaucracy 171-23.
This mechanism has something to do with Storytwisting, because there is a perversion of logic to achieve something. Both in the past and today we are confronted with people who believe they are taking the appropriate actions to achieve the result, but the difference is that over time we have become self-convinced that instead of normal actions, a fractal development of infinitesimal and arbitrary bureaucratic actions is instead required, and that a thousand repeated technical steps are necessary when before only a couple of them were sufficient3.
The footrace is the moon landing, and like Astolfo you have to retrieve Senno, who is on the moon. The Senno is among the lunar rovers that did 36km in three days against the Martian rover Curiosity that did 28km in eleven years, among the photos of Von Braun that did not have a page on NASA’s website nor did he take courses in safety at work, the Senno is in the DSKY display and the Apollo Guidance Computer, in the Voyager probes.
*1 it appears to be a paradox because it tricks most people with a supercazzola based on infinitesimal calculation, in reality Achilles sows the turtle, wins, runs back, pisses on the turtle and goes to fuck a blondie, but we’ll talk about that another time
*2 a live broadcast in Italian that is not followed by ‘live’ in English is not really live, it’s a poor ignorant thing, it has a few seconds of delay and the video lags. Always put the English somewhere, don’t be some poveretti Italian ignorants.
*3 this apparent magic is explained by the fact that in the past between one technical drawing and another the brain was switched on.