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Revisionist History: The Staten Island Problem
Tim's Tolkien Obsession & Amazon Prime's The Rings of Power
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- [00:01]
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- [01:11]
Tim Harford
Pushkin hello and welcome to Cautionary Tales. I am Tim Harford. This is one of our Cautionary Conversations episodes. We are sponsored this week by Amazon prime, the creators of the Rings of Power. And I'm actually so excited I could pop. I'm in the studio with Alice Fiennes, Cautionary Tales series producer. And why am I so excited?
- [01:34]
Alice Fiennes
Alice, you're so excited because we're about to do a massive rundown of all your favorite cautionary tales and the works of your favorite author, Tolkien.
- [01:43]
Tim Harford
Yes, we're going to talk about JRR Tolkien, we're going to talk about the Rings of Power, and we're going to talk about cautionary tales. It's like all my birthdays and Christmas have come at the same time. I'm in case you haven't guessed, I'm an absolutely massive fan of Tolkien. I've been a massive fan of Tolkien for approximately 45 years and I think that Tolkien is full of cautionary tales. And this new series, Rings of Power, is also full of cautionary tales. So that is what we're going to talk about.
- [02:09]
Alice Fiennes
And I am this side of the glass today as a non expert enthusiast who has also watched Rings of Power and is also very excited to speak about it. Now, if you haven't seen Rings of Power yet, there's something for everyone in the mix. It's an action story, it's a psychological thriller, it's a fantasy story. So make sure you go and watch it.
- [02:27]
Tim Harford
My whole life has built up to this moment, I've been.
- [02:29]
Alice Fiennes
I sense that for you, this is amazing.
- [02:31]
Tim Harford
Obviously, it's a fantasy about elves and Orcs and all things Tolkien esque, and we will get into that. But it is also full of cautionary tales. It is full of the kinds of ideas that we explore in cautionary tales. And as I was watching it, all kinds of things sprung to mind. And I imagine they sprung to your mind as well.
- [02:49]
Alice Fiennes
They certainly did.
- [02:50]
Tim Harford
Okay, so we should probably begin with a little bit of background. The Rings of Power is a prequel to the events of the Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings. It is set thousands of years before those events. Tolkien wrote enormous amounts of lore, so this is a new story set thousands of years before the Lord of the Rings. We do meet some of the characters in the Lord of the Rings. For example, we meet Elrond. We meet Galadriel. They are elves. Elrond is half Elven. They live for thousands of years. So you can meet them as their younger selves before they became those later characters.
- [03:26]
Alice Fiennes
Yes. So Elrond we know later as an elf ruler in Rivendell. Galadriel, a very powerful royal elf. They are played by Robert Aramayo and Morfydd Clarke rather brilliantly. So Rings of Power gives us their origin stories. And it's also the origin story of the Rings of Power themselves and the One Ring, which there's quite a lot of fuss about. So, Tim, what is going on with those?
- [03:47]
Tim Harford
A lot of fuss about. This is about the Ring and the quest to destroy the One Ring. The Rings of Power were made under the influence of the big baddie, Sauron. There were three made by and for the elves, there were seven for the Dwarves, there were nine for mortal men. And Sauron wrought by himself the One Ring. And this is a source of ultimate evil and corruption in Lord of the Rings. So in the Rings of Power, we get to see, well, why were were these things made? Who made them? And I imagine in season two, which we haven't watched yet, we're gonna see a little bit more about the consequences of making them.
- [04:24]
Alice Fiennes
We actually see quite a few sort of mini origin stories peppered throughout season one. So someone else we meet is an ancestor of Aragorn, Isildur, who actually.
- [04:34]
Tim Harford
Sorry to correct you there, Alys. Aragorn is actually descended from Aenarion, who is Isildur's brother. Okay, thank you so. But yes, Isildur we know from the Lord of the Rings famous tool who fails to destroy the One Ring when he could have destroyed the One Ring. And he's, you know, a little bit of a muppet in the Rings of Power as well, isn't he?
- [04:53]
Alice Fiennes
I was about to say, if I'm honest, it's not looking good for him.
- [04:57]
Tim Harford
No, no. But there you go. I mean, the character arc is consistent. He makes mistakes. He's gonna make mistakes in the future. So we're gonna talk about some of these characters and we are going to talk about the cautionary Tales. They bring to mind some of the social science behind what happens in the Rings of Power and some of the things that occur in the of Power that echo true stories that we have told in Cautionary Tales. I should say there are going to be some spoilers for season one. There are not going to be any spoilers for season two because we haven't seen season two. It is out on the 29th of August on Amazon Prime. I, for one, am eagerly looking forward to it. So we should begin with one of the key protagonists, the. The heroine, one of the heroines of the Rings of Power, Galadriel. We see her in the Lord of the Rings. Here we see her as a child, and then later as an incredibly determined pursuer of evil. I say determined. I mean, maybe it's determined, maybe it's obsessive, maybe it's irrational. Everyone else seems to think that she's completely unhinged. Sauron has long since disappeared from the world, and yet Galadriel will not give up the hunt for him.
- [06:34]
Alice Fiennes
So early on in the series covers a few centuries of Galadriel's life. We see Galadriel and her beloved brother Finrod battling Morgoth, who is a kind of evil entity, demonic, and actually, who or what is Morgoth?
- [06:48]
Tim Harford
Morgoth, Sauron's boss. So when he was defeated, Sauron took up the baton and continued the pursuit of evil in Middle Earth.
- [06:56]
Alice Fiennes
So Galadriel vows to take up her brother's mission and she spends centuries seeking out Sauron and this intangible evil that she believes is there. And eventually others stop rallying around the cause. She starts to seem like she might just be kind of a lone zealot. And it all comes to a head when she leads her company to this sort of snowy wasteland.
- [07:19]
Tim Harford
Looks absolutely miserable. But because they're elves, I guess they don't die of cold.
- [07:23]
Alice Fiennes
Absolutely. She thinks that she is seeing signs of Sauron, but others don't really believe that that's what she's seeing.
- [07:30]
Tim Harford
There are signs, right? But the signs are centuries old. So the fact that somebody wrote a Sign hundreds of years ago. What does that tell you now?
- [07:37]
Alice Fiennes
Right, exactly. The threat is not imminent. There's this brush with the snow troll. They lose faith in her, they stop following her. And when they go home, she's commended for her bravery. But it's all kind of a bit hollow.
- [07:49]
Tim Harford
It's very hollow. So the king of the elves, Gil Galad, rewards her with a one way trip to Valinor. Which is.
- [07:56]
Alice Fiennes
Which is it's fourth retirement, isn't it?
- [07:58]
Tim Harford
Yeah, it's kind of elf heaven. And I mean, it's supposed to be a big reward, but it doesn't feel like a reward to her. It feels like she's basically being, as you say, forcibly retired and stripped of her duties. And it feels like a punishment to her. It becomes apparent later that Gil Galad did this deliberately. It's not just that he meant to reward her, but she didn't really view it as a reward. He wanted to take her out of the picture because it becomes clear that Gil Galad, the elf King, he thinks that Galadriel is actually the problem. Like the fact that there is still evil in the world. There's evil in the world because Galadriel is so obsessed with evil. There's a line that the wind that can blow out a fire can also fan the flames. One of the things that really struck me here is Galadriel is treated a little bit like our whistleblowing hero in whistleblower on the 28th floor, which is our episode about the equity finance fraud. The equity finance fraud was effectively the equivalent of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme only in the 1970s. And the man who identified that this fraud was taking place and delivered the evidence of this fraud to the SEC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the U.S. financial regulator. He was then prosecuted by the SEC. And obviously Galadriel is a rather more dynamic and compelling and charismatic figure than Ray Dirks. But the way that we punish the people who are trying to alert us to danger, I think is a. Is a theme in certain cautionary tales and very strongly a theme in the early episodes of Rings of Power.
- [09:28]
Alice Fiennes
Yes. A key takeaway in that episode, the whistleblower on the 28th floor, is that whistleblowing is often far more trouble than it's worth. You might be shunned. It may be hard to find employment after. People don't like bad news. Essentially you lose your friends because your friends are people from work. It's difficult to survive financially and emotionally.
- [09:49]
Tim Harford
They don't like bad news. And also they often blame the messenger. Not because they don't just dislike the bad news, but because the people who are willing to defy that social pressure are often quite awkward. Whistleblower once contacted my colleagues at the Financial Times. When my journalistic colleague picked up the phone, the first line the whistleblower uttered was, my name is Tarantula. That is not my real name. Like, you just sound mad. That's just. Who phones a journalist and says, my name is Tarantula?
- [10:18]
Alice Fiennes
Yeah. You might not endear yourself to people by doing that.
- [10:21]
Tim Harford
Really not. But it turns out, actually, it was a very important fraud that this person was blowing the whistle on. And Ray Dirks was a kind of awkward character. And Galadriel is in many ways extremely obnoxious in this series. She rubs people up the wrong way. She's absolutely convinced she's right. She doesn't hesitate to let other people know that she thinks they're idiots. And this turns out to be quite common behavior from whistleblowers.
- [10:43]
Alice Fiennes
She is right. But there are moments where you think, oh, take a day off. We talk in that episode, particularly about anti money laundering offices in banks. And there are these examples of how when you blow the whistle on a bank, you're blowing the whistle on regulatory failure.
- [10:58]
Tim Harford
Yes.
- [10:59]
Alice Fiennes
You're blowing the whistle on everyone not doing what they're supposed to do.
- [11:02]
Tim Harford
You're telling people that they screwed up, this organization screwed up, you screwed up. And my job is to tell you that you screwed up. And it turns out that that's your job title, but your actual job is to tick some boxes and not make a fuss.
- [11:14]
Alice Fiennes
Don't rock the boat. And Galadriel is absolutely rocking the boat.
- [11:17]
Tim Harford
Right.
- [11:17]
Alice Fiennes
She's pointing to everyone's collective failure to vanquish evil and to stay vigilant. And it's a lot easier to dismiss that lone voice that's screaming into the wind than to say, hey, maybe we do actually have a problem here.
- [11:30]
Tim Harford
Yes. I mean, there is another way of seeing this. As anybody who's read the Lord of the Rings knows, Sauron did not disappear. Sauron comes back. We know Sauron comes back. And even if we haven't read the Lord of the Rings, we kind of guess that Sauron is still out there. So we kind of narratively, we know Galadriel's right. And so there is such a thing as hindsight bias. And I think it's hard to avoid that as a viewer of the series. So the classic example of outcome bias is an experiment run by a couple of psychologists in 1988, Barron and Hershey, where they were asking people to evaluate decisions. These might be medical decisions, for example, or they might be financial decisions. But they also explained how things worked out. So here's a doctor, this is what the doctor did, and this is, in the end, what happened to the patient. And people find it completely impossible to separate the decision making process from the outcome. If you're told the outcome, you can't mutually judge the process. And here we know the outcome. We know Sauron's out there, so we know Galadriel's right. So I think the storytellers have to work quite hard in this series to make Galadriel seem irrational and seem unhinged.
- [12:36]
Alice Fiennes
When she's speaking about this intangible evil being out there. What she keeps referencing is this inner intuition. It's not really perceptible or measurable by her colleagues. They can only kind of work with what's in front of them and think about all the other things they need to balance.
- [12:49]
Tim Harford
Yeah, she thinks she's right. She thinks they're wrong. They think the opposite. I mean, who's to judge, right?
- [12:55]
Alice Fiennes
I think there is another reading of Galadriel, which is possible here, which is that she is a grieving person or a grieving elf. She takes on her brother's mission after he dies. She takes his dagger. She says his vow became mine. She's grappling with her relationship with him even though he's gone, which is sort of what grieving is. There's a sense in which his death ignites this fire in her. In her words, it whips up a tempest that won't be quelled. Emotion and loss are kind of propelling her on. For Elrond, for people observing her, it seems like something's broken in her. Right. There's a sense that emotion and anger are clouding her judgment rather than helping her maybe see truths other people can't. Which reminds me of this trope of the mad woman that we see kind of recur in history and in literature. Powerful women in particular, whose emotion renders them overly dramatic, overly passionate. It automatically undermines them in cautionary tales. It reminds me of Anna Marie Jarvis.
- [13:57]
Tim Harford
Oh, wow. Anna Marie Jarvis. That's a deep cut. I like that. So, yes, the inventor of Mother's Day. Or was she the inventor of Mother's Day? She certainly thought she was the inventor of Mother's Day and then was incredibly defensive of it.
- [14:10]
Alice Fiennes
Indeed. So her life's work, I mean, Ann Marie Jarvis is also a grieving woman, Right. Her life's work is Honoring her dead mother. And she believes that, that then her day, Mother's Day gets co opted by these sort of cynical interests and she tries to take back what she's created. And she's upset. I mean, of course she's upset, yeah.
- [14:31]
Tim Harford
But she starts writing very vitriolic letters and everything is sort of painted as good and evil and sort of the noble idea of Mother's Day. And these corrupt florists, the evil florists who have, you know, initially, of course, supported her.
- [14:47]
Ray Dirks
Why don't you stop fraud against Mother's Day through misrepresentation about founder. You know, no person in your town ever gave a sent for Mother's Day, nor was its promoter. No honest person would make such a claim. Stop the deception. End game.
- [15:06]
Tim Harford
It's a miserable story at the end.
- [15:07]
Alice Fiennes
I think it is. So she does write these letters, but it is striking to me that she starts something or she is instrumental in starting something that is still recognized in the US today. But in the end, Time magazine remembers her as just this old woman, a busybody, a recluse, a bit of a weirdo. And there are many, many ways I think that Galadriel and Anna Marie Jarvis are very different. But I do think they are both judged very harshly by the societies they live in.
- [15:33]
Tim Harford
Did Galadriel ever throw a Mother's Day salad on the floor?
- [15:37]
Alice Fiennes
I wouldn't put it past her. But they're judged for their extremes of emotion and for the fire that lights in them and the missions that gives them.
- [15:44]
Tim Harford
I think Galadriel is gonna come out very well in the end. Well, I think we know that she is, but I think you're right.
- [15:51]
Alice Fiennes
I will say overall, in Rings of Power, women come across very well. They are very powerful, very wise, very brave.
- [15:57]
Tim Harford
Yes. But Cladriel certainly has an edge to her. So Galadriel as Ray Dirks, the Equity finance whistleblower. Galadriel as Anna Marie Jarvis, the salad hurling creator of Mother's Day. These are depths that I had not previously seen. In the Rings of Power. We will plumb more depths and we will explore more parallels after the break.
- [16:26]
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- [17:33]
Alice Fiennes
Okay, Tim, picture the scene. You're at home in Oxford, in your living room, waging a very intriguing Dungeons and Dragons campaign.
- [17:43]
Tim Harford
Okay. It's all too easy to picture all of a sudden, except for a typical Tuesday.
- [17:49]
Alice Fiennes
Well, it's all about a change. All of a sudden, there's an almighty crash and through the floorboards appears an orc who has been undermining your house. What are you gonna do?
- [17:59]
Tim Harford
Okay. Yeah. I mean, hide in the cupboard, I think, would be my reaction.
- [18:03]
Alice Fiennes
And that's fair because they're terrifying.
- [18:05]
Tim Harford
They are absolutely terrifying. In the Rings of Power, we should just remind people, I'm Tim Harford, you're Alice Fiennes. We are sponsored by Amazon prime and the Rings of Power. And we're talking about parallels between the Rings of Power and Cautionary Tales. And yes, they are spine chilling. The audience.
- [18:24]
Alice Fiennes
They're spine chilling. They spend a lot of time digging. That scene I just described, in fact, unfolds in the show. I have to say, I would back you more than most to survive the orcapocalypse.
- [18:35]
Tim Harford
Any particular reason?
- [18:36]
Alice Fiennes
Just your extensive knowledge of the enemy.
- [18:39]
Tim Harford
I know the enemy.
- [18:39]
Alice Fiennes
You know the enemy.
- [18:40]
Tim Harford
Exactly.
- [18:40]
Alice Fiennes
You know their weaknesses?
- [18:42]
Tim Harford
Yes, well, sunlight. One of the weaknesses, which, indeed, the orcs are planning to do something about that particular problem in this series. But, no, they just are unsettling. They're like something out of a horror movie.
- [18:57]
Alice Fiennes
They absolutely are.
- [18:58]
Tim Harford
Rather than an action film here, they're thoroughly chilling, which I think is very welcome development in the Rings of Power. But, yes, so they've got this project. They're the orcs.
- [19:09]
Alice Fiennes
They have a project.
- [19:10]
Tim Harford
They're not just interested in butchering livestock and kidnapping people and shooting people full of arrows, although they do do plenty of that.
- [19:17]
Alice Fiennes
That's also a hobby.
- [19:18]
Tim Harford
Yeah.
- [19:19]
Alice Fiennes
I mean, we'll come to the project, but I do have a question for you first. Oh, Rings of Power sort of elucidates where orcs come from. They are these twisted, tortured elves, according to Galadriel.
- [19:31]
Tim Harford
Yes.
- [19:32]
Alice Fiennes
I've not totally got my head around it. There seems to be a limitless supply of them. How does this work?
- [19:37]
Tim Harford
Yes, well, I think orcs are quite fecund. I think orcs like to get busy with other Orcs. And. Yes. Or. I mean, there are certain scenes where they appear to be almost manufactured. But, yes, I think they breed quickly as a race. And, yes, Galadriel says they're twisted elves. Tolkien himself actually gave different accounts of where orcs came from. I mean, this is almost like a theological thing for him. Could the master of all evil, Morgoth, could he create life, or could he only twist and pervert life? And so he had different views. But I think the view that is most popular, that's expressed in the Lord of the Rings, is that Morgoth took elves and then he twisted elves in mockery and turned them into orcs. And that was the worst thing he ever did, was to take elves and to turn them into orcs. It was. Of all the evil acts he commits over thousands of years and he gets up to all sorts of mischief, the creation of the orcs was the worst, the most spiteful thing he did. But anyway, wherever they came from, they're back. And they are undermining, literally undermining human civilization.
- [20:49]
Alice Fiennes
They are. This sense of them as an inversion of something is very interesting. There's something kind of corpse like about them. They're sort of bloated, rotting. Sunken. Sunken flesh, almost. You kind of. It's like they shouldn't exist, really, I suppose. Which is partly what makes them terrifying.
- [21:06]
Tim Harford
Yes. And they kill things. They kill livestock and they chop down trees. And for no obvious reason, they just. Destruction for destruction's sake. But in the end, they do have a plan.
- [21:17]
Alice Fiennes
They have a plan. We see them imprisoning elves in what seems to be a kind of prison camp, I would say.
- [21:26]
Tim Harford
Yeah.
- [21:26]
Alice Fiennes
And we don't know what they're building at first. We find out later.
- [21:29]
Tim Harford
Yes, yes. But both humans and elves are being kidnapped and enslaved and put to work on this project. So the leader of the Orcs, who.
- [21:38]
Alice Fiennes
Is this character called Adar, played terrifyingly by Joseph Maul.
- [21:42]
Tim Harford
He is very unsettling, and we're trying to work out who he is and where he came from and what his connection is to Sauron. That's one of the mysteries of the show. But I think you've identified him. He's Fernor von Braun. Adar is Fern.
- [21:56]
Alice Fiennes
He is indeed. He is Indeed. Do you want to unpack that a bit?
- [21:58]
Tim Harford
Well, as listeners to our epic V2 rocket trilogy will know, Von Braun was this not so much brilliant engineer or brilliant scientist, but brilliant coordinator of scientists, brilliant project manager who had this vision of going to the moon and didn't really care who was hurt in seeing that vision realized. And so, while it all worked out very well for him, in the end he ended up working for NASA and making films with Disney and living the American dream. He first of all was probably the single most important person involved in the the building of the V2 rocket, which is a weapon of mass destruction. And targeted. I mean, not really targeted at all, but to the extent that it was even vaguely aimed, it was aimed at civilians. So you're trying to kill civilians. And they successfully did kill civilians with this rocket. And he didn't seem to care because, hey, he's got funding to build rockets and he wants to build rockets. And in the end he's going to go to the moon. And then the second thing, and this is the even closer parallel with the Rings of Power, the use of concentration camp labor in just the most appalling conditions. Thousands and thousands and thousands of people dying in Dora Mittelbau. And Von Braun basically did not seem to care. He was indifferent because he had his vision.
- [23:18]
Alice Fiennes
What we discover about the massive construction project that the elves and humans are working on is that in a sense it's all leading up to a kind of weapon of mass destruction as well, right?
- [23:31]
Tim Harford
Yes.
- [23:31]
Alice Fiennes
They're digging all these tunnels. We don't know what it's for, but they're digging away. And eventually in the series we see a kind of would be lackey of Sauron who's longing for Sauron's return. Put this sort of like a sword into a landmark that triggers floods that run through the tunnels they've been digging.
- [23:53]
Tim Harford
Yes.
- [23:53]
Alice Fiennes
That triggers a kind of volcanic eruption, I suppose.
- [23:57]
Tim Harford
Yes.
- [23:57]
Alice Fiennes
And what unfolds are these horrendous fiery scenes that are reminiscent of a bomb going off? Really?
- [24:03]
Tim Harford
Yeah. It is like somebody just dropped an atomic bomb on Middle Earth. That's how it reads. What has actually happened is that Adar and his orcs and their slave labor have reactivated Mount Doom. They have taken this dormant volcano and they have reactivated it and it explodes above absolutely catastrophically. They're extraordinary scenes. It's an absolute disaster.
- [24:27]
Alice Fiennes
I've always wondered where Mount Doom comes from. So this is it.
- [24:30]
Tim Harford
This is it according to the Rings of Power canon. So it was originally Orodroen as a mountain at the heart of the Southlands stroke Mordor, sort of symbiotic with Sauron. So when Sauron is there in Mordor and powerful, Orodroan is active. And when Sauron is dormant, Orodroan is dormant. But in the Rings of Power, it's a very deliberate plan by Adar. He causes this massive steam explosion and that causes Orodroan Mount Doom to erupt. And we know, having read Lord of the Rings, that in the end Mount Doom will be where Sauron's powerful ring, you know, the ultimate power, the One Ring, is going to be forged in Mount Doom, and it can only be destroyed in Mount Doom. So as well as being this cataclysmic event, as far as the Rings of Power are concerned, we also know that this is paving the way for the return of Sauron and it's going to pave the way for the creation of the evil that is the One Ring.
- [25:29]
Alice Fiennes
Which brings me to another thought, which is that there are very big questions in this series about what evil is, where it can be found, how do we deal with it? Is it something you choose? Is it an act of self determination? Is it something you inherit? For example, the Southlanders, early on, they're not to be trusted because in their veins flows the blood of their ancestors who allied themselves with Morgoth. Right, yes.
- [25:55]
Tim Harford
Which is very deterministic. Right. As a sort of, you know, it's racial determinism.
- [25:59]
Alice Fiennes
Absolutely.
- [26:00]
Tim Harford
They are the descendants of people who served Morgoth, and therefore you can't trust them.
- [26:04]
Alice Fiennes
It's this concept of evil is something primitive within us, I suppose, but also, evil may be something you choose or deny.
- [26:11]
Tim Harford
But yes, there is this sense. A lot of the people that we see have had their choices predetermined. I mean, Adar, the leader of the Orcs, interestingly, he argues that they have free will and they need to be viewed as individuals with names and so on. That's one of the reasons why they love him. But I think in the universe of Tolkien, the orcs are irredeemably evil and the elves are inherently good. But one of the really interesting questions is, well, where does that leave the humans? And the humans have moral agency. The humans get to choose, the humans have to choose. And some of them choose well, and some of them choose very badly.
- [26:48]
Alice Fiennes
I did have another thought, actually, as I was traveling here. Adar is in fact mistaken for Sauron. At some point, he doesn't take that well. But that points to another issue with evil, right?
- [26:59]
Tim Harford
Well, absolutely. So Adar looks very unsettling he's this scarred or corrupted elf. He's coded as a bad guy, and he's a bad guy. He does all kinds of terrible things. The orcs look horrendous. We know the orcs are evil and the elves look beautiful and do good things. So there is, in Tolkien's universe and in the universe of the Rings of Power, there is this association of people who look beautiful also being morally beautiful. And, you know, evil is worn on the surface. So evil creatures look evil. Except it's not always like that. It's not always like that in Tolkien, and it's not always like that in the Rings of Power, and it's not.
- [27:40]
Alice Fiennes
Always like that in real life. I think either.
- [27:43]
Tim Harford
I certainly agree that it's not always like that in real life. The favorite themes of Cautionary Tales, which we come to again and again, is the deceiver, the plausible deceiver. So going right back to one of our very first cautionary tales, the Rogue Dressed as a captain, where this impoverished shoemaker and petty criminal, Wilhelm Voigt, got hold of a secondhand army captain's uniform. This is in the early 1900s in Berlin and just started bossing around a platoon of soldiers he found on the street. And he, you know, he's wearing a captain's uniform. And so they do what he says because he looks the part. And it's funny, but it's also, it's quite dark because we know, we understand where this unconditional obedience to people in uniform later goes. And then, of course, there's Harold Shipman, who is this kindly, trusted community doctor who is one of the worst serial killers ever in human history anywhere in the world. And he, you know, he doesn't look like a serial killer. He looks like the person who's going to take care of your grandmother. So you would think that's not part of the way that Tolkien views things. That's not part of the way that the Rings of Power portrays the world. But then you realize, oh, no, there are people in this universe who are not what they seem. And one of the pleasures of watching this season is trying to figure out who looks good and is actually good and who's hard to place. And I would say, I think. And we said there'd be spoilers for season one, but I don't want to spoil this. We know Sauron's coming back. I think there are four people, at least four people in the Rings of Power who plausibly like contenders, contenders for being Sauron. And one of the pleasures is to try to figure out who it actually is. Or maybe it's none of those four, but yes, none of them. Well, with the exception of Adar, they don't look like Sauron. They don't code as Sauron. What you're trying to see through is, okay, the orcs look evil, Adar looks evil, Mount Doom looks evil, that sword looks evil. But Sauron himself is the great deceiver and he looks exactly how he chooses to look. And that is one of the big challenges.
- [29:55]
Alice Fiennes
Now that you mention catching a killer Doctor. Our episode about Harold Shipman, I am reminded of Kahneman and Tversky's representativeness heuristic and this idea that certain things kind of fit into our pre established frameworks and we may not question them, basically.
- [30:12]
Tim Harford
Absolutely not. Absolutely. So Shipman just fitted into the kindly doctor shaped box that we have in our heads. We've got this kind of stereotype of the community doctor who goes door to door and is always taking care of his patients and nothing's too much trouble. And he just fit perfectly into that box.
- [30:28]
Alice Fiennes
Just so much so that some people were actually thrilled that he was coming to comfort their aged relatives.
- [30:33]
Tim Harford
Yes.
- [30:34]
Alice Fiennes
In their dying hours.
- [30:35]
Tim Harford
Absolutely. How kind that he would call on them when no one else was around in the middle of the day and oh, and then they died. And how wonderful it was that a shipment of all people, their doctor was there in that moment to comfort them and to be present. They didn't die alone. Of course, there was a reason they didn't die alone, which cause he murdered them and watched them die. For reasons that are still unclear and I think will never become clear. But yes, that representativeness heuristic is very, very powerful. We should take a break and I think we are going to talk about one final theme in Tolkien and how that is reflected in some of my. Some of my favorite ideas from cautionary tales. We'll do that after the break. We're back. I'm Tim Harford. I'm here in the studio with producer Alice Fiennes. We are being sponsored this week by Amazon Prime's series the Rings of Power. And we're having a cautionary conversation about what cautionary tales spring to mind when you watch this epic series set in Tolkien's Middle Earth. Alice, what sprung to your mind?
- [31:54]
Alice Fiennes
This isn't strictly a cautionary tale, but something we see throughout the series is this idea that evil is somehow contagious. So by touching darkness, you will be changed. That happens to Galadriel. There's kind of a sense in which she's changed in ways she can't quite convey to others. And in that sense, knowing evil cuts you off from other people. So she says, you have not seen what I've seen. And she knows others believe evil infects you as well. So you mentioned earlier this idea of the same winds that seek to blow out a fire may also cause its spread, which is an interesting problem.
- [32:33]
Tim Harford
Yes.
- [32:34]
Alice Fiennes
Because it raises a very practical issue, which is how do you deal with evil? You know, it's not a single cautionary tale. But many of our cautionary tales look at cruelty and look at where cruelty comes from. And also how do we respond to it.
- [32:47]
Tim Harford
Yes. And how the elves want to respond to it is to bury their heads in the sand. They are very keen at the beginning of this season to conclude that basically evil has been permanently banished. Sauron has gone forever. Galadriel is a problem because Galadriel keeps insisting that evil has not been vanquished and Sauron has not gone. And in the end, she gets blamed not just for causing a fuss, but maybe she is the source of evil.
- [33:14]
Alice Fiennes
In making such a fuss, she's somehow perpetuating it.
- [33:17]
Tim Harford
Absolutely. Absolutely. Because of the anger that lives inside her, this denial. It reminded me of a couple of Cautionary Tales episodes. So one fairly recent episode, How Britain Ignored the Mother of All Secrets, which was this extraordinary story about how during the Second World War, the British were told in some detail by an incredible piece of espionage, brave intelligence leak. They were told that the Germans had defensive radar and therefore, if the British flew sorties over Germany, the Germans would see them coming and would shoot them down. That's a very, very important piece of information and they just would not believe it. They see photographs of the radar equipment, but they're even told before the war. They're told by a German office. He's on a kind of like a. I don't know, it's like a student exchange kind of thing. He shows up and says, how are you chaps getting on with radar? We know you're making progress, and we're making progress too. In fact, we think we're ahead of you. And that astonishing conversational tidbit just gets lost. So there's a huge amount of wishful thinking, I think, because the British want to believe that the Germans don't have this technology. They want to believe they're superior. They want to believe that their technology is superior and they want to believe that this. It would be bad if the Germans had this. So they don't want to believe it's. True. And that denial continues for well over a year after they should have realized. And yeah, and the elves are in the same denial. They're always willing to rationalize away indications that Sauron maybe has returned.
- [34:48]
Alice Fiennes
So however we're going to confront evil, it seems that acknowledging it's there is.
- [34:53]
Tim Harford
The first step, I think very, very important. Really helpful to know what you're facing. And I mean, there's another example of this. And this maybe gives you more sympathy for the Elf King's position, which is our pandemic episode that turned to Pascagoula, which is all about disasters that are predictable and predicted. So we compare and contrast the spread of COVID with Hurricane Katrina. Everyone knew that New Orleans was vulnerable. Hurricanes would come over from time to time, just a matter of time. People knew there were weaknesses in levies. Over and over again, people were told something bad could happen, and they just didn't want to believe it because the costs of preparedness were so great. And in fact, in the Rings of Power, we see that the elves have been prepared for centuries. They have standing garrisons looking over the humans in case the bad guys come back. And ironically, they abandoned them just before they're needed. But the fact that those garrisons are there and there's a real cost to maintaining them, there's a cost to being prepared. And so you have some sympathy with people who go, you know what, maybe this is just a waste of money. Maybe this bad thing is never going to happen.
- [36:05]
Alice Fiennes
And then, as we've discussed, sometimes evil is hiding in plain sight and is unpredictable. Yeah, it's not something we can totally prepare for.
- [36:16]
Tim Harford
No, absolutely. So you know that pandemics are a risk, but you don't know what kind of pandemic. And you don't know when you know that hurricanes are a risk or earthquakes, but you don't know when you know there are some places they might strike and some places they're unlikely to. And then, of course, there are things that we just didn't see coming at all. So some of the genocides that the world has suffered since the end of the Second World War, some of them have become infamous. Some of them, I think, are barely acknowledged. Very hard to see any of them coming in advance.
- [36:44]
Alice Fiennes
So what about you, Tim? What springs to mind for you in Rings of Power?
- [36:48]
Tim Harford
Well, I think a really important theme in this series and in Tolkien in general, is the idea that power corrupts. So there's this sword that is a corrupting influence. The Rings are, of course, a corrupting influence. The Palantiri, these seeing stones are a corrupting influence and it's always tempting to use them. So the elves attempted to use the rings, the humans attempted to use the sword. The Numenoreans are a human civilization, very high human civilization. They. They have a palantir. They want to look at the palantir and use it to see the future, use it to see things far off. And everybody is always convincing themselves that it'll be for the best that these. I won't lose control of these things.
- [37:39]
Alice Fiennes
It's convenient.
- [37:40]
Tim Harford
Yeah. I'm a good person and I'm going to use this for good ends and with good intentions, and therefore good will result. And good does not result over and over again. In Tolkien, evil results. The inherent power of the object corrupts the user. And this really reminded me of a cautionary tale that I have not yet written, but I will write because I think it's an amazing story. And that is the tale of Herman Hollerith. Do you know who Herman Hollerith is?
- [38:10]
Alice Fiennes
I know nothing about Herman Hollerith. Please tell me.
- [38:12]
Tim Harford
Herman Hollerith was an engineer, American engineer, late 1800s, who designed a machine that became known, for obvious reasons, as the Hollerith machine. And the Hollerith machine was a kind of proto computer. He was trying to solve a problem for the U.S. census, which is that you have the census every 10 years and then you go and you ask loads and loads of households, you ask every household in the country lots of questions, and then you need to kind of organize all the answers and analyze the answers. And it was taking seven or eight years to put together the analysis of the answers. By the time the 1890 census was being conducted, they still would not have finished analysing the 1880 census, the previous census.
- [38:54]
Alice Fiennes
So I'm going to guess Hollerith is about to make this process much more efficient.
- [38:58]
Tim Harford
There's a race. There is a race between man and machine and there are various human teams. The census say, look, we're going to have a competition. Somebody needs to figure out how to analyze the census results more quickly because they're also asking more and more complicated questions. So they're being more and more ambitious. It gets more and more difficult. And so there are various human teams involving colored cards and various systems and all kinds of clever kind of organizational devices, but it's all a bit filofaxy. And then there's Hollerith's machine. And Hollerith's machine looks like. Looks like an upright piano and it operates using punch cards. So You've got these stiff cards with holes in them and the machine has these spring loaded pins that dip into little cups of mercury. And so you put the punch card in and the pins come down and those that hit a hole go through the hole and into the cup of mercury and they complete a circuit. And those that don't hit a hole are stopped by the stiff cardboard. And that's fundamentally how the machine worked. And the operator of the machine was like, this is like the voice of God producing this amazing insight. Clearly was just high on mercury fumes. But the Hololorth machine just destroyed the human teams. It wasn't even close. And so the Census Bureau adopted the Hololith machine and they all live happily ever after.
- [40:12]
Alice Fiennes
That sounds like a cautionary tale.
- [40:14]
Tim Harford
Yes, because Hollerith retired, his company turned into IBM and well, a couple of things happened. One thing is that IBM Germany became quite close with the Nazi regime who were very interested in buying Hollerith machines.
- [40:29]
Alice Fiennes
I see where this is going.
- [40:30]
Tim Harford
Well, it is disputed exactly how important the machine was to the Nazi project of genocide. And we were perfectly capable of murdering enormous quantities of people without a machine to count them. But I mean the German Census Bureau was utterly co opted by the Nazi state and they were very, very interested in trying to identify who was Jewish and who was not. And so having these machines be so.
- [40:55]
Alice Fiennes
Powerful, it kind of helped, may have expedited the process.
- [41:00]
Tim Harford
It may have expedited the process. And also the US Census Bureau for decades denied that it had helped the administration find U.S. citizens of Japanese descent for decades and decades and decades, said the Census Bureau stands alone and is separate and is independent and does not do this kind of thing. We're just here to count the people. And then in two 2006, Margo Anderson, historian, found the smoking gun that in fact the Census Bureau had told the Roosevelt administration exactly where all the Japanese Americans were living. And they were all of course, shipped off to internment camps. So again, you see this machine, this very powerful machine, designed for good, supposed to be used for good, but then once you have that power, are you really going to resist the temptation?
- [41:53]
Alice Fiennes
Here's the thing though, you can't always tell what's going to happen to an invention. I'm thinking of our episode the hero who wrote his Segway off a cliff. Jimmy Heselden invents the Hesco gabions, these concertinas for shoring up coastlines to manage flood risks. Ultimately, they're used in places like Kosovo and Iraq, filled with sand to protect People from Bomb Blast. Now, you could argue that they are co opted as instruments of war, I suppose, but you can't tell how an invention will travel once you invent it. Maybe it can also do good.
- [42:29]
Tim Harford
Yeah, yeah.
- [42:30]
Alice Fiennes
No, you not just evil. So what's the answer?
- [42:33]
Tim Harford
Well, I think the answer for Tolkien, Tolkien was quite conservative in his writings and I think the answer for Tolkien is that you shouldn't take the risk. And in general, technology is shown as being not a progressive force, it's a potentially destructive force. So whenever you have new technology, it could potentially be used for evil and therefore people will be tempted to use it for evil. And most people are not strong enough to resist that temptation. There are a couple of exceptions, but they're very, very minor exceptions. They're the exceptions that I think serve to highlight the rule in Tolkien. There's another interesting parallel along these lines. I mean, Tolkien strongly rejected the idea that Lord of the Rings was an allegory. He hated the idea that the One Ring, for example, was really the atomic bomb. He once wrote, if Order of the Rings was an allegory, the elves would have used the One Ring immediately. Which of course, I guess is true because the Allies use the atomic bomb.
- [43:26]
Alice Fiennes
There are allegories and then there's drawing on ideas which are in the Zeitgeist at the time. Right.
- [43:32]
Tim Harford
Yeah, I think it's. As a watcher of the Rings of Power, it is hard not to be tempted by that parallel. And in particular the character of Celebrimbor, the great Elf Smith, as a kind of Oppenheimer figure or a Von Braun figure. And Hermann Hollerith. You see these characters, these brilliant creators who cause all kinds of trouble for the world. They definitely have resonances in the Rings of Power.
- [44:00]
Alice Fiennes
Tim, this has been very fun and very interesting, but if I'm honest, also a bit of a downer. Do you think there is hope that things will get better in series two of Rings of Power?
- [44:11]
Tim Harford
I'm sure there will be ups and downs in series two, as there always are. But I was reflecting on this. I think Tolkien is a very. Is really a soulmate of cautionary tales because Tolkien, he was fascinated by fairy stories. He was the person who brought really Beowulf to prominence. Beowulf is not a story with a happy ending. A lot of fairy tales don't actually have happy endings. A lot of cautionary tales don't have happy endings. And a lot of Tolkien stories are about, yes, evil is defeated, but it comes back and often comes back stronger. There is a sense in Tolkien of often of diminishment, of loss, of death. And he wants us to look at that and reflect on it and learn from it. And in Cautionary Tales we want people to look at diminishment and loss and death and to learn from it. So I want to paint too close a parallel, but there's definitely what you're.
- [45:11]
Alice Fiennes
Saying is you are basically Tolkien. Is that what you're telling me?
- [45:14]
Tim Harford
Well, all I'm saying is that Tolkien died September 1973. I was born September 1973. I've often reflected on this fact. Speechless. Absolutely speechless. The sheer gall of that.
- [45:30]
Alice Fiennes
There are no words.
- [45:31]
Tim Harford
There are no words. Big fan. I love watching this. I really did love watching this. And I'm looking forward to season two. And just a reminder, you can watch season two of the Rings of Power on Amazon prime starting August 29th. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fiennes with support from Marilyn Rust. The sound design and original music is the work of Pascal Wise. Sarah Nick edited the scripts. It features the voice talents of Ben Crow, Melanie Gutteridge, Stella Harford, Gemma Saunders and Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilley, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brodie and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardour Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. Tell your friends and if you want to hear the show ad free, sign up for Pushkin plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin FM plus.
- [47:17]
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