Magic and Metaphor
Robert Jordan’s tainted energy source.
[Letter #008]
Good morning, son.
The various baby books tell us that the certain fetus in question should be developing ears and the ability to hear within the next week or so, which hopefully means that all of the nonsense I’m saying to your mother’s abdomen may be something other than pointless soon. It does make her laugh though, so I suppose it’s not total shenaniganry.
In what I suppose is a fairly universal maternal experience, your mother is fretting fairly constantly about her weight gain, complaining just this morning about how she’s heavier than she’s ever been. My go-to joke with her, delivered with a stark deadpan, is “You don’t think you’re pregnant, do you?”
As you know, I very much enjoy stories. It’s likely that I will have told you many by the time you read these letters. One of my favorite genres has always been fantasy. The knights, the dragons, the wizards and magic. It’s whimsical and foreign, but somehow it’s simultaneously relatable and can hit eerily close-to-home. If you recall, as you were growing up there was a map that hung on the wall in our house that depicted the fictional world of The Wheel of Time by Robert Jordan. This series is in my top-3 all time favorite stories. Might even be the top, depending on which day you ask me.
When dealing with a world that includes magic, the storyteller has to lay out some ground rules. If it’s just “anything goes,” then the story becomes difficult to tell, difficult to relate to, and not really very fun. The constraints on the magic are what give it definition and make it recognizable. One of the interesting parts of any story involving magic is finding out just how each magic “system” will work. Do magic spells require saying certain words? Making certain hand or body gestures? Holding some arcane item or using odd reagents? Can anyone use magic, or is the ability only granted to certain people?
Or, maybe the magic doesn’t manifest as “spells” at all. Maybe it’s more like nature. The growth of life is incredibly complex and certainly seems magical. Maybe the story includes a “dark force,” which usually just serves as a thing to blame for all of the ill effects and influences in the world. It could be that the story simply uses “science and technology” as its substitute for magic. After all, as the science-fiction author Arthur C. Clarke famously wrote, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.”
I also really enjoy trying to figure out the inspiration that the storyteller bases the magic system on. For example, in Ursula K. Le Guin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, the protagonist’s journey to outrun and then later defeat the shadow appears to be a metaphor for one’s own “inner demons.” It seems like a stand-in for depression arising from one’s own mistakes, or maybe it’s just the unwillingness to forgive oneself for those mistakes. Le Guin makes it a very important element of her magic system to know and use the “true name” of a thing in order to understand and defeat it. It’s much the same way to know that you’re dealing with, say, depression and not, “Something is wrong with me!” Being able to name a thing helps to adapt to it.
In Robert Jordan’s The Wheel of Time world, the metaphor is enormous, purely by way of the story being over a dozen novels in length. As a result, it doesn’t always line up perfectly with what I interpret as being its real world counterpart. But, what metaphor is perfect anyway? Hell, I have no way of knowing if Jordan even considered this interpretation when he was writing it, but I think it works a little too well for him not to.
First, in the extremely unlikely event that I haven’t read you this series yet, I should quickly explain how his magic system is arranged.
Jordan has a fascination with balance, which is something that really resonates with me as well, incidentally. He took the concept of yin and yang and ran with it, even using it as the symbol for the main character. The problems with the world in his story all originate from lacking balance in some very fundamental ways.
Everything in life must be in balance to be in harmony. Every day has a night, every birth has a death, and so on. His concept of “The Creator” is often spoken synonymously with “The Light,” just as the supernatural evil entity is referred to as the “Dark One,” as common folk don’t like using his real name.
Jordan decided to make his magic system based on the gender binary as well, which doesn’t end up coming across nearly as non-binary-phobic as it might initially seem (I thought early on that it would really grate on me, but if you trust the guy through to the end, he’s much more sensitive to the topic than might be first suspected). The “female” half of the magic system is called saidar, and that’s the subject of a different letter. The “male” half, saidin, is the point of concern today.
In the lore of the story, a long time ago, there was an emergency wherein the Dark One had been released into the world. This caused an imbalance. Too much evil. It was up to the heroic magic users, called “channelers,” to bind and return him to imprisonment beneath the ground.
However, the group of saidin channelers and those of saidar could not agree on a plan to accomplish their mission. The guy in charge, because of course it was a hotheaded guy, took his fellow saidin channelers and went to fight the Dark One. They succeeded in imprisoning him again, but he corrupted their magic source. Saidin itself couldn’t be used anymore without making the men sick, psychotic, and eventually murderous and suicidal. This affected all men who used saidin, including the guy in charge. He was particularly powerful, so when he lost his mind and used too much saidin at once, he “broke the world.”
To my mind, the metaphor is instantly obvious. Saidin is a neat analog to fossil fuels in the real world modern age. Even when Jordan describes a channeler touching it, he depicts it as a flow of tremendous energy coated in a corrupting, oily outer layer. The flow itself has unfathomable power, capable of untold destruction or unprecedented growth, but it comes with a heavy cost. It will kill the one using it eventually, and it may cause the deaths of many others around the user along the way. I’ll discuss the power differences between saidar and saidin in the letter about saidar.
We’ve built our real world using saidin, in the form of coal, oil, natural gas, and uranium. Immense power, packed into dense, easy to transport forms of carbon. Energy that took millions of years to flow in from the sun, live and grow as plantlife, and then sequester beneath the ground to “cook” into concentrated fuel, was the only reason that humans were able to initiate and maintain the short few centuries of industrialization. We pat ourselves on the back for being so clever, but none of it would be possible without that tremendous source of energy that we’ve burned through a million times faster than it was collected.
The series is, of course, a work of fiction, so the author can do whatever he wishes. Thus, the characters sometimes hope that there is a way to use the “male” half of the power without the corrupting effects, and the protagonist eventually figures out a trick to do just that. That’s not going to happen in the real world though. There never was any “clean coal,” and the “carbon capture technology” that they told us would save the planet by reducing atmospheric CO2 was frankly pathetic. We still don’t have a solution to handle the build-up of radioactive waste from every fission operation that was ever started.
There are just no methods of “channeling saidin” in the real world without releasing polluting, corrupting toxins, and there never will be. I think that’s the part that people these days have the hardest time accepting. Industrialization has been dominant in the human experience for the past couple of centuries, but since World War 2, its effects have been all-consuming for those of us in “the West.” The vast majority of us in “developed nations,” I’d presume nearly all of us, would have no manner of survival without copious use of fossil fuels and the benefits they provide. People today can’t imagine a world without it, and they insist that there simply must be a way that we can keep this lifestyle without “breaking the world.” It’s already driven us all mad.
Saidin is everywhere. It’s in everything. It grows the food, transports the goods, powers the lights and air conditioning, conveys us from place to place, provides tools to do our jobs, and makes communication possible over great distances. Humans in cities today can exist for days, weeks on end, without ever touching, tasting, hearing, or even laying eyes on a single physical thing that has not been created by, provided by, or otherwise touched by saidin. Concrete, steel, filtered air, processed foods, chemically treated water, and plastic, plastic, plastic! Plastic in the food, plastic in our clothes, plastic in the air, and even plastic in breast milk!
In Jordan’s books, saidin was capable of affecting all of the elements: earth, fire, air, water, and spirit. Its strongest influences, however, were over earth and fire. This meant that it was particularly suited to destruction. One of the story’s most memorable scenes is a battle in which a group of saidin channelers show up as reinforcements, and the conflict is immediately finished. By ripping up the earth and launching geysers of flame and lava, the enemy is literally ripped to pieces, torn inside out, and burned to cinders, leaving nothing but unrecognizable remains. I don’t think Jordan could have made it more on-the-nose if he tried. He was in the military earlier in his life, and he saw firsthand the effects of munitions on human bodies. What he calls a “rolling ring of earth and fire,” we just label as bombs and napalm. It’s appropriate that one of the characters present actually vomits from the horror of the carnage.
So, why can’t we just stop? There is a movement today called “Just Stop Oil” that demands we do just that. All of this use of fossil fuels is destroying everything and causing the sixth mass extinction event in the planet’s history. Why can’t we just stop using it altogether? Maybe we could use the other power source, saidar, instead? It doesn’t have the corrupting effects. We have to stop.
But, we won’t. We can’t.
Jordan gives us his fictional explanation. Saidin is intoxicating and rapturously addictive. The channeler wants more and more and more, filling himself with as much as he can handle until he explodes, often literally. If the channeler is cut off from his ability to use saidin, he generally falls into depression and dies within a few months or years. As symbolic imagery goes, it’s hard to beat the directness.
But, why can’t we just stop using it? This is the planet we’re talking about.
Because, we aren’t ready for that. People today don’t know how to hunt, kill, and clean food from the woods. They know how to place an order for food to be prepared for and delivered to them. They don’t know how to start, maintain, and efficiently use a fire for heat and light. They know how to flip a light switch and adjust a thermostat. They don’t know how to weave fabric together to make usable, durable, and effective clothing. They know how to tap buttons on websites to get clothing, made on the other side of the planet, shipped to their doorstep. If the flow of fossil fuels were to just suddenly cut off, needless to say that people all over “the West” would immediately go without virtually every necessity of life. This would cause vast numbers of them to die from starvation, exposure, violence, and lack of medical care. Cut off from the source, they die.
We aren’t trying to get ready for it either. Most people are too busy just trying to keep up in our complicated, confusing, stressful world. There’s no time to even learn about what’s going on with energy and collapse, much less have time to process what that means and how to adjust.
Most people couldn’t “just stop oil” if they wanted to. As I said before, we built the entire modern system with saidin. It’s in everything. This letter was composed on a computer, the letters shining back at me from the light of a screen powered by electricity. The words are transferred from my fingertips directly into plastic keys, each touching plastic actuators that send electronic signals to the computer’s processor, a device whose construction is only possible through the precision manufacturing processes that dense energy provides. Despite the brightness of the daylight outside, I’m sitting in a dark room with an electric lamp illuminating my workspace. My phone buzzes on my desk to alert me that it has blocked a communication attempt from a charlatan trying to sell me a fraudulent warranty for my petroleum-powered vehicle.
There’s also the political aspect of it. It’s unlikely that the flow of energy will just suddenly stop everywhere all at once. Once the absolute peak hits, it won’t go instantly to zero. It’ll fall over time. That implies that in some places, it’ll still be flowing when other places aren’t. It implies also that when fuel sources start to contract, the price of fuels will rise. Those constraints cause power imbalances in our world, and that brings the politicians out of the woodwork. Political leaders will try to make sure that energy stays constant for “you and yours,” and that we cut it off for “those people.” We’ll make sure that fuel prices stay low for “your state” and we’ll let “those people” in that other state pay extra. Vote for me!
A writer by the name of Alan Urban on Medium critiqued an article he read in The Atlantic. He summarized it as follows:
[President] Biden worr[ied] about the midterms since voters tend to blame gas prices on whoever’s in power.
In order to lower gas prices, he tapped the strategic oil reserve, bringing it down to a 40-year low. …
But the presidential election is far more important. Trump is leading in the polls, including 7 swing states, while Biden’s approval rating is hitting a new low. Even if the polls are overestimating Trump’s support by a few points, it still looks like he’s on his way to a victory in 2024 since the electoral college gives Republicans a built-in advantage.
What would happen if Trump won? … They want to go full-speed ahead with fossil fuels, despite the fact that we just experienced the hottest year in 125,000 years.
So from Biden’s perspective, we have to do whatever it takes to stop Trump from getting reelected, and that includes pumping more oil than ever before in order to refill the strategic oil reserve and keep gas prices low, lest voters get angry and kick Biden out of office.
Even if we did cut oil production, that would just encourage other countries to produce more oil — countries that don’t have the same emissions standards we do. The US has one of the least emissions-intensive oil industries in the world, so allowing countries with looser standards to lead the way in oil production would be even worse for the climate.
So you see, in order to stop climate change in the long run, we have to pump oil as fast as possible in the short run.
Quite the pickle we’ve gotten ourselves into. The only way we can see ourselves getting out of it is by drawing in as much saidin as possible, as quickly as possible. I’m sure that won’t have any unfortunate side effects, right? The US, and the world as a whole, is producing (which is to say, “drilling and mining”) more fossil fuels and faster than at any point in history. It’s a finite source, which means that we’re blindly racing for the point at which we can’t get it anymore. Unlike Jordan’s One Power in the story, our source of magic isn’t eternal.
To be clear, Mr. Urban did not agree at all with The Atlantic. He responded with this:
Now look, I’m not going to argue with the logic of this article. He’s right that if we don’t pump more oil, gas prices will rise, Biden will lose, and Trump will destroy all the progress we’ve made. After that, it will be too late to stop climate change from destroying civilization.
But here’s the thing: If the best-case scenario involves ramping up oil production to levels never seen before, then it’s already too late to stop climate change from destroying civilization.
…
My point is, if our best hope is to burn more fossil fuels at a time when we’ve already crossed one major tipping point and several others are just a few years away, then we’re already doomed.
If the system requires us to keep burning fossil fuels in order to stop burning fossil fuels, then the system has failed.
And that’s it, right there in the last line: “The system has failed.”
We’re drawing in more and more energy with the hope that we can use it to preserve our way of life. Every “product” that we have ever known, eaten, worn, played with, driven, carried, or otherwise interacted with has been touched in one way or another by fossil fuels. Every skill or profession that we’ve ever learned or taken part in has been affected by the power of saidin. In every sense, it’s all that anyone alive today in any but the most “undeveloped country” has ever experienced in life, and so it’s what we’re drawing on, faster and faster, more and more. We are the character in the story.
He was still touching saidin, the male half of the power that drove the universe, that turned the Wheel of Time, and could feel the oily taint fouling its surface, the taint of the Shadow’s counterstroke, the taint that doomed the world, because of him. Because in his pride he had believed that men could match the Creator, could mend what the Creator had made and they had broken. In his pride he had believed.
He drew on the True Source deeply, and still more deeply, like a man dying of thirst. Quickly he had drawn more of the One Power than he could channel unaided; his skin felt as if it were aflame. Straining, he forced himself to draw more, tried to draw it all.
– Robert Jordan, The Eye of the World, prologue
After this calamitous event in the story, the “breaking,” the world settled down again. Many people died in the explosion and immediate aftermath. More still died who couldn’t adapt to the new way of living. Technology simplified to an agrarian subsistence. Villages scattered across the countryside, with the occasional city forming eventually.
I think life will imitate art in this case. We’re going back to hand-powered tools, animal-drawn plows, and a time of simpler living. We’ll have blacksmiths again and ride horses to get places. Or we’ll walk. Mostly, I think we’ll just walk.
We’ll walk, sing, tell jokes, gossip, drink a bit, eat as much as we can, tell stories, and play. We’ll work, sweat, clean, repair, invent, pretend, love, and fight. We’ll do all of the things that have always made us human, the things that we’ve done for two hundred-thousand years. What we won’t do will be punching keys on a computer to send an email while listening to a podcast and watching streaming videos. Things are about to simplify.
I know a lot of people in the world aren’t ready for that. They won’t be ready for it when push comes to shove either. We won’t get the dramatic “big explosion” world-ender like the Hollywood movies and Robert Jordan’s story give us. Ours will be a fall like any other in history, only on a global scale. It’s already started, and the pace of decline will accelerate from time to time, intermixed with some periods of relative stability. Well, if things go like they historically have, that is. Even so, people will continue to do what they’re doing now: denying reality.
I’m going to try to be ready though, and I’m going to try to make sure that you are as well. It’s why I’ve been filling the house with books that teach how to do things. It’s why I’ve started writing you these letters. If our age is ending, it means a new age is dawning, and I want you to be as prepared as possible for it. I hope that these letters can help you to avoid the mistakes of the past. I hope they’ll help you identify things as you encounter them, giving you the stories through which to frame them.
I love you, son. I know you’ll be the best of your mother and me. As of this writing, I’m excited to watch you grow, despite the hard times I see for us. Once you read this, I’m sure that I’ll have lived with and loved you for many years.
I hope this letter finds you well.
Your father,
Papa Bear
[Author’s note: This is a series of letters that I intend to print to paper and deliver to my son, probably around the year 2040. You are more than welcome to read along. The links in the article are only for you, the reader, and will include citations, jokes, asides, and links to books or other items. If you happen to purchase anything through such a link, I’ll get a small commission. Every little bit helps, right?]
