B (43:38)
But. But what you find in the best of those people, the Wright brothers being a classic example of this, is there Wasn't this sense that everyone else trying to tackle the flight problem, and it was a problem other people, like, people have been interested in it for thousands of years, but, you know, like, all the armies of the world were also rushing to try to figure this out. At the same time, you know, there wasn't this sense that everyone else is a moron and we're geniuses. What the Wright brothers had was this curiosity, this sort of openness to how it might work. You know, they spend hours and hours just studying how birds, you know, fly. They had a scrappiness to them. They were outsiders. They were independent. But, you know, the first thing the Wright brothers do is write to the Smithsonian for, like, every book ever published on flight. It wasn't like, burn it all down. Everyone's a moron. And in fact, they would have loved to collaborate with the powers that be and would have loved to be brought in as part of it. So there's this tendency to celebrate the sort of brash, you know, domineering outsider who comes in and tears everything apart. But I think you tend to find that the most effective reformers have a profound understanding of why things are the way that they are. So that's actually the negative capability to go, like, here's what I know, and here's what I think is true, and here's what I understand as an outsider. And then here I've done a profound deep dive as to why it is this way. Like, one of the most profound. I'll give you two sort of related reformers. You have Abraham Lincoln, and then you have Thomas Clarkson, the two basically forerunners of the abolitionist movement. Thomas Clarkson in the UK leads to the eradication of the slave trade and then slavery in England, and then Abraham Lincoln ends it in the United States. Both of them start their campaigns against slavery. They had this as outsiders or as just human beings, this immediate impulse that slavery is wrong, that. That it doesn't matter that we've been doing it for thousands of years. It doesn't matter that, you know, billions of dollars are riding on it. Doesn't matter that all the religious teachers say it's okay. None of that matters. They understood it was wrong. That's your classic sort of outsider view, seeing the world from a new perspective. But then what they both do is they go, I got to figure this out. Like, Abraham Lincoln goes to the State House Library in Illinois and then the Library of Congress when he's a congressman, and he goes. And he actually reads, like, what the founders said about slavery, and he realizes that the sort of dominant view at this time that the founders were out to preserve and protect slavery actually wasn't true. Thomas Clarkson, his genius is he realizes that slavery is actually just like bad as a business. Like, he studies the insurance claims that slave traders are making on the human cargo that they are transporting. He's looking at the fact that like 20% of the sailors are dying on each voyage. He's actually going and looking at what a slave ship looks like. And then he draws this famous diagram that like illustrates the vividness of what was an abstract problem before. So the point is, it's not that you have to absorb the dominant view or the status quo, but you have to understand the logic of why it is that way. This is where justice and wisdom are interrelated virtues. Like, it's not just, oh, I have this opinion, I'm morally correct, so therefore the world should agree. You have to have this curiosity to go, well, these people probably aren't wrong on purpose, so why do they think this? What are the underlying conditions or incentives to that are making them things? You know, Lincoln, a lot of people have tried to go, well, you know, Lincoln is equivocating on slavery because, you know, he was so understanding of the South. But no, that's what empathy is. He says, you know, like, we are just what they would be. We are just, they are just what we would be in there in if we were in their condition. Meaning he's like, if you were raised in the south and this is what you were taught from day one, you would think about it this way. And so what, what you have to have the negative capability to understand. And for people who don't know, that's a thing that Keats talked about, the ability to have mutually exclusive ideas in your head at the same time, or contradictory ideas. You have to be able to go, here's what they think and here's why they think it. That's not going to change what I know to be true, or that's not going to change the fact that that's still fundamentally incorrect. But I have the ability to understand why it is that way. And that is usually a prerequisite to doing anything about it or doing anything about it effectively. Like Elon Musk is right, the federal government is very inefficient and he has a lot of domain expertise in his specific areas. But most people predicted Doge would fail because it would run up into these sort of long standing obstacles and difficulties that I think he thought he could overwhelm with sheer force.
