--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 058
+title: Catch-22
+date: February 24, 2017
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: video
+---
+
+<p style="text-align: right">**Motto**:
+*Yes, indeed, you can see him, when he isn't there.
+That is, he'll see you, all right, but only in his office, and only when
+he's not there.
+The other times, when he's in... he's not there to be seen.
+Except when he's out.*
+</p>
+
+The film[^1] is an excellent piece, seemingly on war, but really
+gravitating around three major themes and the interplay between them,
+namely: death, travesty and power.
+
+The story begins with Captain John Yossarian's glance
+[in the mirror, at his own death][the-mirror][^2], which is a full
+circle starting with the death of him who may have been his only
+friend. The events set in motion by the story illustrate the same
+Yossarian's struggle -- which may very well be your struggle or mine --
+to escape this circle, this tar pit of its own. And what better setting
+for representing death other than war; empires rise and fall, but war,
+murderously laughing in the face of everything, never changes[^3].
+
+Along with death, our main character is accompanied in his journey by
+travesty, a travesty exposed by the writers of this particular piece
+under the name of Catch-22; no different, however, from doublethink,
+post-truth, or whatever flavour's in fashion this season. The travesty
+in cause is run by a bunch of bureaucrats who like to call themselves
+General, Colonel, Major and whatnot, but who are in fact naught but
+derps derping around in a puddle of crass incompetence. It doesn't
+matter one bit that the USAF has invested power in them, as power
+without substance corrupts not in evil ways, as Tolkien's fantasy would
+have one believe, but in mind-bogglingly stupid ways[^4].
+
+And speaking of power. The wielder of power in this movie is not the
+USAF nor the military daddy, but the Lieutenant Jew Milo Minderbender,
+who for his own profit, and as his name suggests, feeds the entire
+travesty. But make no mistake, the man is the only one who doesn't
+actually fall in the puddle, but who keeps everyone else there in order
+to make a buck. And if you pay attention, he's honest about it, he
+gives "the facts"; though "the facts" are not an object used to build a
+narrative, but the very product of the narrative itself[^5]. Surely, you
+may think he's evil, and maybe he is, but you don't see anyone else
+trying to make [the best][building-business] of it.
+
+Catch-22 has aged well. There are beefy portions of comedy scattered
+throughout the movie, in every scene, in every event which otherwise
+gives one the chills -- a so-called dark comedy which is quite obviously
+the literary device through which the narrator permeates, that is,
+conveys all the bits of madness beyond the screen and to the viewer. I
+for one was pleasantly impressed by this technique, despite the fact
+that it dates back to a couple of millenia before ol' Caragiale.
+
+There's not much left to add. We conclude with:
+
+> **Old man**: You all crazy!
+> **Boy**: Why are we crazy?
+> **Old man**: Because you don't know how to stay alive. And that's the
+> secret of life.
+> **Boy**: But we have a war to win.
+> **Old Man**: But America will lose the war; Italy will win it.
+> **Boy**: America's the strongest nation on earth. The American
+> fighting man is the best trained, the best equipped, the best fed...
+> **Old man**: Exactly. Italy, on the other hand, is one of the weakest
+> nations on earth and the ltalian fighting man is hardly equipped at
+> all. That's why my country is doing so well while yours is doing so
+> poorly.
+> **Boy**: That's silly! First ltaly was occupied by Germans and now by
+> us. You call that doing well?
+> **Old man**: Of course I do. The Germans are being driven out, and we
+> are still here. In a few years, you'll be gone, and we'll still be
+> here. You see, Italy is a very poor, weak country, yet that is what
+> makes us so strong. Strong enough to survive this war and still be in
+> existence... long after your country has been destroyed.
+> **Boy**: What are you talking about? America's not going to be
+> destroyed.
+> **Old man**: Never?
+> **Boy**: Well...
+> **Old man**: Rome was destroyed. Greece was destroyed. Persia was
+> destroyed. Spain was destroyed. All great countries are destroyed. Why
+> not yours? How much longer do you think your country will last?
+> Forever?
+> **Boy**: Forever is a long time, I guess.
+> **Old man**: Very long.
+> **Whore**: Ciao!
+> **Boy**: Please, we're talking.
+> **Whore**: We go to bed now?
+> **Boy**: No. Would you go put some clothes on? You're practically
+> naked. (To old man:) I wish she wouldn't walk around like that.
+> **Old man**: It is her business to walk around like that.
+> **Boy**: But it's not nice.
+> **Old man**: Of course it's nice!... She's nice to look at.
+> **Boy**: This life is not nice. I don't want her to do this.
+> **Girl**: When we go to America, Nately?
+> **Another girl**: When we go to America, Nately?
+> **Old man**: You will take her to America? Away from a healthy, active
+> life? Away from good business opportunities? Away from her friends?
+> **Boy**: Don't you have any principles?
+> **Old man**: Of course not.
+> **Boy**: No morality?
+> **Old man**: I'm a very moral man. And ltaly is a very moral
+> country. That's why we will certainly come out on top again if we
+> succeed in being defeated.
+> **Boy**: You talk like a madman.
+> **Old man**: But I live like a sane one.
+> **Old man**: I was a Fascist when Mussolini was on top. Now that he
+> has been deposed, I am anti-Fascist. (Sips wine.) When the Germans
+> were here, I was fanatically pro-German. Now I'm fanatically
+> pro-America! (Gestures.) You'll find no more loyal partisan in all of
+> ltaly than myself.
+> **Boy**: You're a shameful opportunist! What you don't understand is
+> that it's better to die on your feet than to live on your knees.
+> **Old man**: You have it backwards. It's better to live on your feet
+> than to die on your knees. I know.
+> **Boy**: How do you know?
+> **Old man**: Because I am 107 years old. How old are you?
+> **Boy**: I'll be 20 in January.
+> **Old man**: If you live.
+
+[^1]: 1970, directed by Mike Nichols, after the book bearing the same
+ name written by Joseph Heller. Starring Alan Arkin, Art Garfunkel,
+ Martin Sheen, Jon Voight, Orson Welles and a bunch of other guys.
+
+[^2]: Giving in to the enemy's logic is equivalent to death. Yes, the
+ body may carry on, it may last a decade, two or five, but
+ then... what? Ponder on that for a moment.
+
+[^3]: In a manner similar maybe to that other well-known piece about war
+ and its paradoxes, this time with Martin Sheen in a major role. I am
+ talking of course about Apocalypse Now.
+
+[^4]: Did you ever wonder why your politicians fail you? and not in any
+ exceptional way, but consistently and without any apparent end.
+
+ Think about it for a moment: you live in times in which democracy is
+ considered valuable. Thus politicians' greatest incentive is to
+ claim that they do things "for the people" -- not to actually do
+ that, mind you, but only to *claim* it. Some of the more stupid ones
+ will actually give it a shot, despite the numerous examples of
+ failure given to us by history. And despite the failure, they will
+ continue claiming the opposite, leading to a spiral of
+ [marketing][marketing] and PR and whatnot, leading us to MAGA and
+ whatnot. Popescu's got details in [his writings][politicians].
+
+ But this is an aspect masterfully illustrated by the movie -- and
+ this in the beginning of the '70s, when America was still great! --
+ so read on.
+
+[^5]: Which is, if you think about it, one of the great marks of
+ power. Science is by its very definition falsifiable, and science
+ put aside, politics becomes the art of making people believe (in)
+ the leader, and not just by mere persuasion. Conversely, perverting
+ science in order to support a narrative is inherently evil; but I
+ digress.
+
+[the-mirror]: /posts/y00/01e-the-mirror.html
+[marketing]: /posts/y02/043-on-the-failure-of-marketing.html
+[politicians]: http://trilema.com/2017/why-politicians-dont-ever-do-anything-for-the-people-a-model/
+[building-business]: /posts/y01/028-building-business-or-why-gypsies-are-smarter-than-romanians.html
--- /dev/null
+---
+postid: 059
+title: The problem of trust
+date: February 26, 2017
+author: Lucian Mogoșanu
+tags: cogitatio
+---
+
+The concept of trust is as simple as it is deeply problematic. Let us
+first [define it][mw]:
+
+> **a** : assured reliance on the character, ability, strength, or truth
+> of someone or something
+>
+> **b** : one in which confidence is placed
+
+and the remaining definitions are more or less similar.
+
+Human societies are built on trust, and thus the ability to place trust
+in others, be they things or others of their kind, is a fundamental
+quality of the Zōon Politikon. In fact nowadays we trust so many things
+and so many people that this trait has become implicit in our way of
+life. We must bear in mind however that trust is inherently
+asymmetrical, so that the trusted needn't give his entruster one iota of
+trust in return -- if we were able to quantitatively appreciate trust,
+which as far as I know we do not.
+
+When trust as a whole is broken or otherwise disappears by some other
+means, society collapses and war ensues. That is not to say that lack of
+trust (or distrust) is necessarily a cause of war; after all it is not
+that Genghis Khan didn't trust the peoples he conquered, but that he
+conquered them first and foremost because he could. Lack of trust is
+also not a problem in and of itself -- (too much) trust is, especially
+when it is not accompanied by [verification][reversing-lists].
+
+Since I am an engineer by formation, I will use the closest example I
+have available to formulate the problem of trust: let us imagine that we
+are [the last remaining men on Earth][humanity] and that we wish to
+build an advanced technological artifact, say, a high-performance
+numerical computer. Now, how do we go about making that?
+
+The approach of `n`-societies[^1] builds the state of the art in
+computers by using large computer-factories relying on complex
+[chains of dependencies][software-engineering-iii]. This works
+principally because large numbers are readily available on both ends of
+the chain; on one end lies the cheap overworked labour; on the other lie
+[fat worms][slither] who are able to take in the end product in big
+quantities. This approach works for now, but it has the major
+disadvantage that it is fragile because of its multiple interdependent
+points of failure; in other words, it is disadvantageous because of its
+incompatibility with our previously enunciated scenario.
+
+The approach of small societies, numbering as few as one individual,
+[does not exist yet][future-hardware], a fact which is somewhat
+disquieting.
+
+Let us further imagine then that we had readily available
+[synthesizers][3d-printing] to help us in our endeavour, along with
+enough knowledge of hardware and software to allow us to build a system
+from scratch. At this point we will have eliminated trust[^2] in other
+hardware and software developers, who at the point of our
+post-apocalyptic scenario are long gone anyway.
+
+But this is not done yet, because now we have to trust the device
+printing our chips either in terms of design-to-implementation
+correctness or of lack of subtle malicious behaviour[^3]. Ideally we
+would use the printer to make our own hardware printing device, but this
+is necessarily incomplete, as demonstrated by Gödel. In other words we
+cannot trust that the `n`th order printer-of-printers will not replicate
+the same incorrect or malicious behaviours in their lower order
+creations.
+
+The naïvely correct approach would be to start by placing our trust in
+the laws of physics, which we know to manifest in a specific way
+according to common sense[^4] scientific experiments. From here we can
+use fire to refine iron to make tools that help us make tools, and so on
+until we are able to build the tools necessary to build computing
+machines of a satisfactory performance. The viability of this approach
+has been demonstrated by history; however, given the time required to
+put it in practice, this might not the right approach from a pragmatic
+point of view.
+
+Assuming that the scarce society in our thought experiment still
+contains leftover technology from our `n`-ancestors, an honest enough
+avenue would be to employ common sense combined with existing tools as
+means to verify existing systems. This is in itself a hard problem,
+since there is no general method to this verification, and I doubt there
+will ever exist one[^5].
+
+Fundamentally this thought experiment reduces the problem of trust to
+the question of trading off between outsourcing and independence. I have
+no doubt that there are people who at least believe they have the answer
+to this problem; however, history seems to show that in general there is
+no stable point of equilibrium to balance the two situations.
+
+One lesson we can take away from all this, though: knowledge is never
+ever to be outsourced, for it is the primary prerequisite for the
+ability to verify.
+
+[^1]: This term is borrowed from the definition of "slave empires" in
+ Trilema's [Republican Thesaurus][thesaurus].
+
+[^2]: And moreover, [dependence][freedom-is-slavery].
+
+[^3]: At the time of writing, this is a problem worthy of consideration,
+ as illustrated in Yang et al., "A2: Analog Malicious Hardware",
+ published at the 2016 IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy.
+
+[^4]: Common sense is used here merely as a device to put a halt to the
+ "turtles all the way down" phenomenon described previously.
+
+[^5]: I have actually thought about this. Stay tuned.
+
+[mw]: http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/trust
+[reversing-lists]: /posts/y03/057-reversing-lists.html
+[humanity]: /posts/y01/032-your-worth-to-humanity.html
+[thesaurus]: http://trilema.com/2016/republican-thesaurus-with-vocabulary-and-dictionary/
+[software-engineering-iii]: /posts/y03/04e-the-myth-of-software-engineering-iii.html
+[slither]: /posts/y02/048-slither-io-unfairness.html
+[future-hardware]: /posts/y03/04d-future-of-computing-hardware.html
+[3d-printing]: /posts/y00/01c-3d-printing.html
+[freedom-is-slavery]: /posts/y03/04f-freedom-is-slavery.html
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