The Long Nap
The Long Nap (also known as The Big Nap or The Great Nap) is an elaboration on the history of The Twin Nuclei Problem. It describes the era characterized by magical thinking and extraordinary luck between the end of World War II and the 2020 emergence of COVID-19. Eric introduced this idea in an audio essay at the beginning of Episode 30 of The Portal Podcast.
The Long Napâat least in the developed free worldâwas essentially characterized as a run of extraordinary relative good luck and serenity (at least by the historical standards set by previous world wars, pandemics, depressions, and depressions), where the new gathering storm clouds of the Cold War threatened and menaced in the distance, but the skies directly above remained unprecedentedly clear. This created a bizarre developmental environment where the serenity of The Big Nap led to a worldwide epidemic of magical thinking among the expert and leadership classes that were raised during this time.
The period beginning on September 2, 1945, and ending 75 years later on February 19, 2020âwhich signaled the end of World War II and the beginning of the slide from the peak of the stock market when the world began to accept that the Coronavirus was indeed a serious pandemic, respectively.
The Big Nap, in this theory, is itself divided into three sections.
- The âpower sleepâ (1945 to 1970), when economic growth was extraordinary, and the memory of World War II was still fresh.
- The âmysterious transitionâ (1971 to 1973), when the post-war magic suddenly evaporated.
- The âdeep sleepâ (1974 to 2020 and the COVID-19 pandemic era), characterized by what I've termed elsewhere, the ânew gimmick economyâ in which leaders at first look to restart growth but, sometime in the 1980's, actually gave up and began selling claims against the future so that a small leadership class could continue to pretend the growth was indeed continuing by transferring wealth from their descendants' futures, and from workers who could not politically protect themselves from predation.
The Big Napâat least in the developed free worldâwas essentially characterized as a run of extraordinary relative good luck and serenity (at least by the historical standards set by previous world wars, pandemics, depressions and depressions), where the new gathering storm clouds of the Cold War threatened and menaced in the distance, but the skies directly above remained unprecedentedly clear. This created a bizarre developmental environment where the serenity of the Big Nap led to a worldwide epidemic of magical thinking among the expert and leadership classes that were raised during this time.
As I understand it, we are in fact stuck with the mystery of a leadership class that cannot leave the stage nor let go of its illusions and whom I will refer to as The Big Nappers. In the United States, the final five major [2020] presidential candidates were all miraculously born between 1941 and 1949 within four years of the beginning of The Big Nap. Now that is indeed quite a mystery considering the original diversity of the field of hopeful contendersâfor to be qualified for the final field you needed to be well past retirement age so that any of the five finalists would be the oldest president ever to take the oath of office. Said differently, to be a true Big Napper you needed to have a full lifeâs sleep.
What puzzles me as we shelter in place with no credible plan to regain control of our planet, our lives, and our economy, is what explains our anomalous selection process? I myself am not entirely certain, but I would venture a guess: I would posit that this group is characterized roughly as people who have at least some meaningful formative memory of the time before the mysterious economic transition in the early 1970s. All of the finalists could remember the Cuban Missile Crisis or the moment that they heard of the Kennedy and King assassinations, and where they watched the first moon landing. Yet they also came of age with childhoods untouched by the diversity that followed from the 1965 Immigration Act in the United States or the trauma of service in Vietnam. In short, what they appear to have in common to me is that they both prospered under all three phases of The Big Nap and remained intellectually coherent, at least among themselves.
If you think of a wealthy and reasonably equal country as akin to a family that got wealthy together from a successful family business, these are the people who saw the business prosper in their youth from their parentsâ efforts and, when the business began to fail in the early 1970s, began to collectively sell-off and mortgage the business's remaining valuable assets to disguise the new losses as adults. So long as this class repeated the mantras as a choir that originally came from the academic experts and think tanks that were speaking through the leading newspapers, none of them had to take an excess of responsibility for ideas that could never bear full scrutiny if subjected to serious interrogation. These mantrasâof deregulation, globalization, financialization, education, authoritative news sources, central banking, immigration, and consolidationâwere constructed so that this group could believe that the growth and prosperity that they had experienced as young people were continuing for everyone. That is, so long as they didn't notice the homeless encampments, the mounting student debt, the inequality, rising foreign power, and diminution of national sovereignty.
The problem that this now leaves us with in the United States (and which I believe is echoed abroad) is that this class is all that is left of our national coherence, and they are continuing to hold on to power well past their retirement datesâbecause in a democracy, any shared group beliefs in nonsense, and particularly self-serving nonsense, will still beat an incoherent haystack of noise that nevertheless contains the missing needles of truth.
And that's where I think we are. Our seniors believe in self-serving nonsense supported by legacy sense-making structures that have a measure of coherence as its major value. And this is weirdly a bipartisan coherence. President Trump, the CDC, the Surgeon General, the Speaker of the House, the Mayor of New York, the Washington Post, have all agreed to various obviously wrong statements about this virus, designed to shield our economy and our institutions from having to look at their abject failure to deal with the crisis in the face. The younger generations are habituated to the chaos of the internet, where the truth is regularly found sitting next to kitten memes, shitposting, and chaos.
Yet it was from these dark alleys and corners that the consensus was first challenged. And our younger and more alienated adults are paying attention to the fact that the establishment center was obviously lying in matters of life and death about the efficacy of face masks, the meaning of small numbers of deaths in the face of the law of exponential growth, and the very real possibility that this worldwide pandemic originated in a high-security Chinese bio lab.
Because the most aggressive such nonsense has become structural through what must be admitted to be an unexpectedly successful pattern of perseveration over more than four decades, our senior leadership class can be relied upon to engage in magical thinking on just about everything in the world of policy. They are not wrong in the same way that younger people on the internet are wrongâwith a million different personal opinions which when aggregated seem to cancel each other out. Instead, this group is actually distinguished by their ability to close their eyes and march in a coherent and even bipartisan direction whenever the source of their growing wealth is actually a suitably and sufficiently disguised transfer from their own children, or a transfer of power to a foreign competitor.
Which brings us to the following generations and their Great Awakening from The Big Nap. At this point, it has become clear to the younger generations that an enormous number of young, alienated, deeply-indebted, and underemployed Millennials or Gen-Xers were able to see this coming for some time. The timestamps on official tweets and newspaper filings are a matter of public record, and there is little question that the wretched internet menagerie trounced the experts on a global matter of life and death. I cannot believe I'm saying this, but in many cases, the cesspool that is 4chan outcompeted the nation's top-ranking health officials and did so handily. When the dreaded internetâmade up of supposedly untouchable trolls, gadflies, tech bros, xenophobes, grifters, edgelords, shitposters, racists, fascists⊠which is to say, the basket of deplorables beyond the control of the institutions that our betters warned us aboutâeasily outcompeted the telegenic MDs, Ivy Leaguers, editorial boards, mayors, and even the executive branch, the jig was finally up: the need to stay within institutionally-acceptable parameters of discussion functioned as if it was an 80 point IQ handicap. The Overton Window had become a deathtrap of defenestration into the waiting jaws of COVID. Those whose primary concern was not public health, but instead respectability, protecting short term profits, or covering for our lack of preparedness, ended up giving deadly advice.
The final nail in the coffinâand I am on the verge of literal speech hereâhad to be the spectacle of our Surgeon General and the Centers for Disease Control blatantly lying by parroting The World Health Organization (which was now seemingly enthralled to Chinese masters) in telling ordinary Americans to put themselves, and each other, at risk of death by eschewing face masks. This was apparently to cover for experts who had cut corners on costs by failing to keep basic life-saving medical equipment and supplies stocked for just such surges.
So let me leave you with a final thought. Normally, an election is speculation as to the ability to lead. Yet we have just run an important natural experiment in leadership and the minimal leadership qualifications for the next president of the United States should obviously emerge from this unexpected exercise. Quite simply, they should be a wide collection of consistent timestamped messages (beginning in late January [2020] at the latest) warning of the need to prepare for a lengthy quarantine, a need to use masks in defiance of the bad advice given by the highest health officers of the country, a need to avoid crowds (contradicting the mayors of our large cities early in the epidemic), and a focus on the scientific need not to a priori exclude the very real possibility of an accidental laboratory release from the Biosafety Level 4 Wuhan facility.
The 2020 election, by this line of reasoning, must not be between Trump and Biden. Twenty-eight years into a string of uninterrupted Baby Boomer presidents has brought us here as a matter of life and death because leadership turns out to actually matter. As loyal Americans, both men could and should simply resign honorably, as many national leaders in recent history have been forced to do, such as Chamberlain or Nixon when measured and found wanting. If this somehow has come to seem inconceivable, well, then it would be time to consider a mutiny against the entire process even to the point of becoming civilly disobedient if necessary. And clearly, somewhat paradoxically, it should never have to come to that if both men understand true leadership, as they claim.
-Eric Weinstein on The Portal #30
On X[edit]
On YouTube[edit]
I think that the, let's call it The Big NapâThe Big Nap is itself the greatest threat to us, and this is bad, but it is also a shot across our bow. And you know, this is what was happening in my mind when I was on here talking about the Twin Nuclei Problem of Cell and Atom. We didn't stop history. It's not like we're past the atomic war, like we figured that out. We just hit the pause button for a little while. We hit snooze.
- Eric Weinstein on JRE 1453
Lex Fridman: Do you see a connection between World War Two, and the crisis we're living through right now?
00:02:14
Eric Weinstein: Sure. The need for collective action, reminding ourselves of the fact that all of these abstractions like, everyone should just do exactly what he or she wants to do for himself and leave everyone else alone, none of these abstractions work in a global crisis. And this is just a reminder that we didn't somehow put all that behind us.
00:02:36
Lex Fridman: When I hear stories about my grandfather, who was in the army, and so the Soviet Union where most people die when you're in the army, there's a brotherhood that happens. There's a love that happens. Do you think that's something we're going to see here? Sinceâ
00:02:50
Eric Weinstein: Well we're not there. I mean, what the Soviet Union went through, I mean, the enormity of the war on The Russian doorstep.
00:03:02
Lex Fridman: This is different. What we're going through now it's notâ
00:03:04
Eric Weinstein: We can't talk about Stalingrad and COVID in the same breath yet, we're not ready. And the, the sort of, you know, the sense of like the Great Patriotic War and the way in which I was very moved by the Soviet custom of newlyweds going and visiting war memorials on their wedding day, like the happiest day of your life, you have to say thank you to the people who made it possible. We're not there. We're just restarting history. We, you know, I've called this on the Rogan program, I called it The Great Nap. 75 years with very little by historical standards, in terms of really profound disruption.
00:03:46
Lex Fridman: And so when you call it The Great Nap, meaning lack of deep, global tragedy?
00:03:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, lack of realized global tragedy. So I think the development for example of the hydrogen bomb, you know, is something that happened during The Great Nap, and that doesn't mean that people who lived during that time didn't feel fear, didn't know anxiety. But it was to say that most of the violent potential of the human species was not realized it was in the form of potential energy. And this is the thing that I've sort of taken issue with with the description of Steven Pinker's optimism is that if you look at the realized kinetic variables, things have been getting much better for a long time, which is The Great Nap. But it's not as if our fragility has not grown, our dependence on electronic systems, our vulnerability to disruption. And so all sorts of things have gotten much better. Other things have gotten much worse, and the destructive potential has skyrocketed.
00:04:47
Lex Fridman: It's tragedy the only way we wake up from The Big Nap?
00:04:51
Eric Weinstein: Well, no, you could also have you know jubilation about positive things, but it's harder to get people's attention.
00:04:59
Lex Fridman: Can you give an example of a big global positive thing?
00:05:02
Eric Weinstein: Well, I could happen. I think that when, for example, just historically speaking, HIV went from being a death sentence to something that people could live with for a very long period of time. It would be great if that had happened on a Wednesday, right? Like all at once, you knew that things have changed. And so the bleed-in somewhat kills the sort of the Wednesday effect where it all happens on a particular day, at a particular moment. I think if you look at the stock market here, you know, there's a very clear moment where you can see that the market absorbs the idea of the Coronavirus. I think that with respect to positives, the moon landing was the best example of a positive that happened at a particular time, or recapitulating the Soviet-American link up in terms of Skylab and Soyuz, right, like, that was a huge moment when you actually had these two nations connecting in orbit. And so yeah, there are great moments where something beautiful and wonderful and amazing happens, you know, but it's just there're fewer of them. That's why that's why, as much as I can't imagine proposing to somebody at a sporting event, when you have like 30,000 people waiting, and you know, like "she says, 'Yes'!", that's pretty exciting. So I think we shouldn't we shouldn't discount that.
00:06:29
Lex Fridman: So how bad do you think it's going to get in terms of the global suffering that we're going to experience with this with this crisis?
00:06:38
Eric Weinstein: I can't figure this one out. I'm just not smart enough. Something is going weirdly wrong. They're almost like two separate storylines. In one storyline, we aren't taking things nearly seriously enough. We see people using food packaging lids as masks who are doctors or nurses. We hear horrible stories about people dying needlessly due to triage. And that's a very terrifying story. On the other hand, there's this other story which says, "There are tons of ventilators some place, we've got lots of masks, but they haven't been released. We've got hospital ships where none of the beds are being used." And it's very confusing to me that somehow these two stories give me the feeling that they both must be true simultaneously. And they can't both be true in any kind of standard way. I can't figure out whether it's just that I'm dumb, but I can't get one or the other story to quiet down. So I think weirdly, this is much more serious than we had understood it. And it's not nearly as serious as some people are making it out to be at the same time, and that we're not being given the tools to actually understand, "here's how to interpret the data" or "here's the issue with the personal protective equipment is actually a jurisdictional battle or question of who pays for it, rather than a question of whether it's present or absent." I don't understand the details of it. But something is wildly off in our ability to understand where we are.
00:08:13
Lex Fridman: So that's policy. That's institutions. What aboutâdo you think about the quiet suffering of millions of people that have lost their job? Is this a temporary thing? I mean, what I'm my ears not to the suffering of those people who've lost their job or the 50% possibly of small businesses that are going to go bankrupt. Do you think about that quiet suffering?
00:08:42
Eric Weinstein: It could be not quiet, too. I mean, It could be a depression. This could go from recession to depression, and depression could go to armed conflict and then to war. So it's not a very abstract causal chain that gets us to the point where we can begin with quiet so suffering and anxiety and all of these sorts of things and people losing their jobs and people dying from stress, and all sorts of things. But like anything powerful enough to put us all indoors in aâI mean, let's think about this as an incredible experiment. Imagine that you proposed, hey, I want to do a bunch of research. Let's figure out what what changes in our emissions, emissions profiles for our carbon footprints when we're all indoors or what happens to traffic patterns or what happens to the vulnerability of retail sales as Amazon gets stronger, you know, etc, etc. I believe that in many of those situations, we're running an incredible experiment. And am I worried for us all? Yes. There are some bright spots, one of which is that when you're ordered to stay indoors, people are going to feel entitled and the usual thing that people are going to hit when they hear that they've lost your job, you know, there's this kind of tough love attitude that you see, particularly in the United States. "Oh, you lost your job, poor baby. Well, go retrain, get another one." I think there's gonna be a lot less appetite for that. Because we've been asked to sacrifice, to risk, to act collectively. And that's the interesting thing. What does that reawaken in us? Maybe the idea that we actually are nations, and then, you know, your fellow countrymen may may start to mean something to more people. It certainly means something to people in the military. But I wonder how many people who aren't in the military start to think about this? It's like, Oh, yeah, we are kind of running separate experiments, and we are not China.
00:10:51
Lex Fridman: So you think this is kind of a period that might be studied for years to come? From my perspective, we are a part of the experiment, but I don't feel like we have access to the full data, the full data of the experiment. We're just like little miceâ
00:11:06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah! Does this one make sense to you Lex?
00:11:11
Lex Fridman: I'm romanticizing it, and I keep connecting it to World War Two. So I keep connecting to historical events and making sense of them through that way, or reading The Plague by Camu. Like, almost kind of telling narratives and stories, but my, I'm not hearing the suffering that people are going through. Because I think that's quiet, everybody is numb, currently, they're not realizing what it means to have lost your job. And to have lost your business there's kind of aâI'm afraid how that fear will materialize itself once the numbness wears out. And especially if this last for many months. If it's connected to the incompetence of the CDC and W.H.O., and our government, and perhaps the election process, you know, my biggest fears that the, you know, elections get delayed or something like that. So the the basic mechanisms of our democracy get slowed or damaged in some way that then mixes with the fear that people have the turns to panic that turns to anger, that angerâ
00:12:31
Eric Weinstein: Can I just play with that for a little bit? What if, in fact, all of that structure that you grew up thinking aboutâand again, you grew up in two places, right? So when you're inside the US, we tend to look at all of these things as museum pieces, like how often do we amend the constitution anymore? In some sense, if you think about the Jewish tradition, of simpler Torah, you've got this big beautiful scroll that has been lovingly hand drawn and calligraphy, that's very valuable, and it's very important that you not treat it as a relic to be revered. And so we one day a year, we dance with the Torah, and we hold this incredibly vulnerable document up. And we treat it as if, you know, it was Ginger Rogers being led by Fred Astaire. Well, that is how you become part of your country. In fact, maybe the election will be delayed, maybe extraordinary powers will be used. Maybe any one of a number of things will indicate that you're actually living through history. This isn't a museum piece that you were handed by your great-great-grandparents.