In the letter, Conrad bleakly imagines society as a metaphorical “knitting machine” that knits “time, space, pain, death, corruption, despair and all the illusions”, such that “nothing matters”. The machine is remorseless, incapable of being influenced – “you can’t even smash it”.
Conrad’s inhuman knitting machine, which “knits us in and knits us out”, is very different from the cheery, liberal social contract, in which society is constituted by rational individuals giving up some freedoms, such as the freedom to kill or rob, in return for other freedoms, such as the freedom from being killed or robbed.
In Lord Jim, the knitting machine appears as the “sovereign power” and “the spirit of the land” – Marlow speaks about both. These concepts have nationalist overtones, and this is understandable, seeing as the nation is something to which people belong. But ultimately, for Conrad, the knitting machine is less tangible than the nation. It is the seemingly upright world of industry and work and public life to which Marlow and Jim himself belong.
The crux of Conrad’s philosophy is that our relationship with this knitting machine is existential. The best account of this appears in Under Western Eyes (1911), where we read:
Who knows what true loneliness is – not the conventional word, but the naked terror? To the lonely themselves it wears a mask. The most miserable outcast hugs some memory or some illusion. Now and then a fatal conjunction of events may lift the veil for an instant. For an instant only. No human being could bear a steady view of moral solitude without going mad.
Guide to the classics: Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim sees humanity’s darkness
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What do intelligence analysts do?
The people who are really good understand sourcing and how important it is for critical thinking. The education should be focused on helping people recognize and refute bullshit. Step one is the critical thinking necessary to say, “This makes no sense,” or “This is just fluff.” The people who are professionally trained to be really good at understanding the quality and history of a source, and to understand the source’s access to information or lack of, are librarians. We should probably steal shamelessly from librarians. Data journalism, same thing. There are lots of parallel professions where we could be learning more to improve our own performance.
The folks that I’ve seen who crush it, they’re like a dog with a bone. They will not let go. They’ve got a question, they’re going to answer the question if it kills them and everybody else around them. It’s a kamikaze thing. Those people, the tenacious ones who care about sources and have critical thinking skills, or at least tools to help them think critically, seem the highest performers to me. As a rule, they all keep score. It’s part of their process.
That is from Santi Ruiz interviewing Rob Johnston, interesting throughout
James Dobson Is Dead, Was A Monster. “The world is a much worse place as a result of his life’s work; it would be a better place had he never been born.”
