In Search of Certainty

Chapter 4. All the Roads to Nowhere: How keeping things in balance is the essence of control.

“Plus ça change, plus c’est la měme chose.”

(The more everything changes, the more it all stays the same)

Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

Don’t move! Stay where you are! Don’t leave town! Don’t go anywhere!

Let’s hope these are not phrases you have had occasion to hear very often, at least outside of fiction. They are arresting exclamations, challenging someone to stay put, i.e. maintain a stable location, with varying degrees of accuracy—which is a turgid way of saying that they describe a status quo. One could also say that they are different ways of expressing an absence of change, at different scales: they represent different approximations to staying put. The sequence starts with millimetre movements of your muscles, then relaxes to your immediate surroundings, falls back to a geographic region, and finally gives up altogether being specific about location.

We understand these vague concepts intuitively. Our brains’ semantic analyzers regularly decode such patterns of words, and attach meaning to them in the context of a scenario. That is the power of the human mind. If someone says, “I didn’t move for 20 years”, this does not mean that they were frozen in liquid nitrogen for two decades. It probably means that they settled in the same home, in the same town, i.e. that their average position remained within some general threshold radius, even allowing for one or two excursions to holiday destinations. ...