How to measure mythquakes
In this episode, we explore how to assess the impacts of an untested assumption colliding with Reality Department
In the last episode, we looked how an unknown, unacknowledged, untested or ‘we-know-it’s-wrong-but-we’re-holding-on-to-it-anyway assumption can sometimes collide with reality - sometimes in a good way, though more usually in a bad one. We used the term mythquake, to describe those types of events, by way of a social analogy with earthquakes - ‘tectonics of the soul’ and all that.
But how do we measure mythquakes, or mythquake-risk? How can we assess the potential impact of an untested assumption? How can we categorise the risks posed by different types of assumptions? As we’ll see, one way to do it is to go back to that analogy with earthquakes - but before we dive into that, let’s do a quick review of what we’re dealing with here.
So here’s a real-world everyday example of a small-scale mythquake. A car-enthusiast had been doing maintenance-work on his pride-and-joy of a classic-car. He’d assumed he’d tightened up the sealing-nut on the fuel-line, but hadn’t actually tested that assumption - and half an hour later, driving proudly through town to show off his work, what happened was this:
He was lucky, in one sense at least: from when he first saw the smoke coming into the cabin, he’d had just enough time to pull over and dive out of the car before it fully exploded into that fireball. But still devastating, though: years of passion and hard work and expense of all kinds all destroyed in a matter of minutes. And it could have been a whole lot worse, if he and his family had been trapped inside, and caught other cars and other people in the blaze…
Yet how would we measure that kind of mythquake? - in this case, to warn others of the potential risk from not checking the tightness of an essential seal? What could we use to denote the scale of risk? What criteria would use as the base for that scale? Given the concept of a mythquake, that seems to be something worthwhile to explore.
We’ve seen what it can look like in practice - but what are we dealing with here?
First, there’s that point about untested assumptions, and their, uh, uncomfortable tendency to collide with Reality Department in disruptive ways. Sometimes it can be good that that collision occurs, such as when an assumption about “I can’t do it!” is a block when we’re developing a new skill. More often, though, as in that car example above, the collision has a less-happy outcome. Oh well.
There are so many different types of untested-assumptions, though, and so, so many different ways that they can and do collide disruptively with reality. On the surface at least, that makes these things kind of tricky to assess. One common element we do have, though, is the way that a mythquake can be literally life-changing: that one point may give us something on which to build a metric.
We also have that analogy with earthquakes, too, and stress-buildup when the metaphoric tectonic-plates and so on get stuck and can’t move. That matches up with the way that the potential intensity of a final mythquake increases the more that people refuse to face reality. And it also matches up with the way that mythquakes often have aftershocks that can sometimes be as intense as the initial mythquake.
So let’s combine all of these into a way to measure mythquakes.
We have several different types of metrics for earthquakes, such as the Richter Scale, which measures the released energy of an earthquake; the Mercalli Scale, which measures local impact of an earthquake; and the Japanese Shindo Scale, which kind of blends measurement of energy and impact to give a dynamic metric of intensity that changes in real-time as the earthquake ripples out across the landscape. What we need for mythquakes is somewhere between all of these: the Shindo scale is probably the closest, but we probably don’t need its real-time element (or not yet, anyway).
Given that, what unit would we use for the measurement? Short-answer number of people affected in life-changing ways.
And what type of scale? Short-answer: like the Richter scale, let’s make it logarithmic, number of people in powers of 10.
So our MQ Scale to measure mythquakes will assess the number of people potentially or actually affected in life-changing ways by any given mythquake. It’s in base-10 logarithmic, so MQ0 is 10^0, or one person affected; MQ1 is 10^1, or ten people affected; then all the way up to a just-feasible MQ10, 10^10, or ten billion people, more than the entire current human population of the planet. And for an analogy of the respective energy-levels, an MQ0 represents that fireball of the burning car; MQ1 would be ten of those fireballs; MQ2 a hundred; MQ3 a thousand fireballs; don’t even ask what the energy of an MQ10 would look like, but that’s what we’re heading for with some of the potential mythquakes we’re facing right now. Ouch indeed…
Right: we now have a mythquake-scale, measuring the number of people potentially or actually affected in life-changing ways by a given mythquake. And we know that what increases the energy of a potential mythquake is that people keep holding onto an unknown, untested or known-invalid assumption until finally collides with reality. There’s also the point that risk and opportunity are flipsides of each other, so there’s always potential for ‘good’ mythquakes too - but those tend to be ‘slow-burn’, quietly changing the world in the background, whereas ‘bad’ mythquakes tend to go off with an almighty bang, often causing colossal damage in the process.
In which case, which types of misplaced assumptions represent the greatest mythquake-risk? Let’s look at some real examples, level by level, with typical incidence at global scale, and typical types of cause:
— MQ0 picomythquake; life-changing impacts for one person; millions every day. Typical cause: small personal mistakes, such as that vehicle-fire. These are almost imperceptible at the larger scale, other than as a kind of background noise or metaphoric ‘Brownian motion’.
— MQ1 micromythquake; life-changing impacts for ten people; many thousands. Typical cause: ‘everyday upsets’, inattention to important untested-assumptions at ‘family’-type scale, leading to events such as a family car-crash, or having the family’s savings wiped out in a scam. These are still barely perceptible in the larger scheme of things, but may get noticed in the local-newspaper or equivalent.
— MQ2: mini-mythquake; life-changing impacts for one hundred people; low thousands per day. Typical cause: a myth of ‘I am the centre of everyone’s world’ that continues beyond the early-childhood stage of ‘the terrible twos’, with schoolyard bullying as one classic example. These will usually be noticed, but often not addressed, as people ‘turn a blind eye’ to the abuse - allowing the myth to go unchallenged to ever-increasing levels, with a potential to develop in full-blown paediarchy further down the line.
— MQ3: minor-mythquake; life-changing impacts for a thousand people; low hundreds per day. Typical cause: a myth of ‘I am what I do’, with sense-of-self associated too tightly with a type of work or place of work. A classic example is when a mid-sized company shuts down or is taken over, and will be noticed in that form. We also see this type of mythquake in less visible form at a more personal level, such as when people go through career-change, retire, or come to the end of active parenting - this becomes the equivalent of a minor-mythquake through ‘accumulations of picomythquakes at scale’.
— MQ4: light-mythquake; ten thousand people affected in life-changing ways; low tens per day. Typical cause: ‘the government got in…’, a change in policy that disrupts many people’s lives. This level of mythquake will definitely be noticed, and often loudly complained about, though usually little will be done to address them.
— MQ5: moderate-mythquake; life-changing impacts for one hundred thousand people; low numbers per month. Typical cause: ‘money makes the world go stop’, a relatively-localised yet significant breakdown of the myth that ‘money makes the world go round’. One infamous example here in Australia was the ‘Robodebt’ scheme, summarised as “an unlawful method of automated debt assessment and recovery … employed by the Australian government” against welfare-recipients, and “not just a maladministration scandal, it was a human tragedy that resulted in people taking their lives”. This level of mythquake will be noticed out to national level, though (as in the Robodebt case) action to repair the damage will often come too little and too late.
— MQ6: strong-mythquake; life-changing impacts for one million people; low numbers per year. Typical cause: a collective myth of ‘my truth is The Only Truth‘. Often seen in the form of religious-wars and the like. this level of mythquake often has a relatively-local focus but will definitely be noticed at global scale.
— MQ7: major-mythquake; life-changing impacts for ten million people; low numbers per decade. Typical cause: a dysfunctional variant of ‘I am what I am‘, particularly when combined with ‘my truth is The Only Truth‘ into myths such as ‘by my very nature I am better than You‘. I sometimes describe this as ‘sugar and spite’ - active promotion of support for an arbitrary in-group coupled with active denial of support for an arbitrary out-group - and is often seen as large-scale oppression against others about attributes that they cannot change, such as race, gender, ethnicity or country of birth.
— MQ8: great-mythquake; life-changing impacts for one hundred million people; around one per century. Typical cause: a myth of ‘it’s my right!‘, or any other extreme variant of ‘I before We‘. The classic example is the ‘post-empire collapse’: whole cultures can be built around myths of this type, but when there’s no social-glue to hold it together, it has a tendency to fall into a cascading-collapse, like an overloaded heap of gravel - and when it does fail, the results are usually devastating for everyone within its range.
— MQ9: catastrophic-mythquake; life-changing impacts for a billion people; low numbers per millennium. Typical cause: a global-scale pervasive-myth with roots in early-childhood such as ‘my right to possess‘, or failure to address a global-scale risk such as a high-morbidity/high-mortality pandemic. This level of mythquake can cause the end of an era across an entire continent, or literal decimation of the entire global population.
—MQ10: annihilation-mythquake; in theory, life-changing impacts for ten billion people, but in practice an eon-boundary event causing devastation for all human life, or even for all life on the planet; one per eon. Potential cause: failure of a foundational-myth such as ‘we can safely ignore physics‘ or ‘we can safely ignore human-stupidity‘. We don’t have any clear examples, because there’s no way to recover from that level of mythquake…
Given the current global human population, right now the maximum possible mythquake is around MQ9.8 to MQ9.9, or just short of MQ10. And unfortunately there are several deeply-fragile deep-myths at present that make the risks of an annihilation-level breakdown at that scale all too real. Not A Good Idea?
The key lesson from measuring mythquakes is that each time we fail to tackle the broken myth at the respective level, the potential for damage continues to increase until a breaking-point is finally reached. That’s how a trivial-seeming MQ0-level risk such as a toddler’s tantrum can, if unaddressed, all too easily scale to MQ2-level schoolyard-bullying, and, if still unaddressed at each level, slowly morph in an MQ7-level abusive oligarchy, an MQ8-level violent dictatorship, or an MQ9-level global paediarchy, or else to the not-quite-yet-MQ10-level dangers represented by the dysfunctional deep-myths behind current global-’economics’. Hence why leaving even trivial-seeming low-level mythquake-risks unaddressed is most definitely Not A Good Idea…
The only way to reduce those risks is for all of us to get a whole lot better at identifying those untested and/or clung-onto myths, and addressing, resolving and removing them as best we can. Sure, it’s far too dangerous to try to tackle the big mythquake-risks straight away; instead, it’s usually best to build up practice and experience by starting small with the lowest-level mythquake-risks, and work our way upward from there. Yet however we choose to do it, we need to do it fast - because we’re fast running out of time to do anything at all.