You Gotta Speculate to Accumulate

Throw the spear

What’s the biggest risk you’ve taken, recently? I think mine was pushing send on the draft of this post to some internet friends the other day. 

In the moment when I saw these emails come in, I had this weird feeling, akin to when you’re at the edge of the diving board and it’s like: No going back now. It wasn’t entirely unpleasant.

I’d speculated that something was a bit off kilter in the first draft; maybe my emphasis was a bit incoherent, that my essay read like someone a few pints in at the local pub, picking up momentum in a ramble.

I took the risk. I shared the draft, and pow. The bet paid off. The feedback was just what I needed; a few comments to make me course correct. Shout outs to Alex Adamov and Michelle Varghoose!

A lot of people I admire read the poet David Whyte (I’m looking at you Paul Millerd). At the start of his poem ‘We Are Here’, he writes: ‘We are here essentially to risk ourselves in the world. We are a form of invitation to others and to otherness, we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing’. 

I’d taken a risk in sharing my work, not a big one, sure, but a risk nonetheless: a risk that was worth it.  

What I find interesting in Whyte’s quote is the idea that risk is bound up with being. It’s not just a by-product of a course of action; Whyte’s saying something closer to: the true self is meant to be actualised in the engagement risk. It’s necessary.  

It’s an idea that’s been popping up in a few places for me, recently. If risk is the potential for downside, then speculation is how we weigh it up.  

We are a speculating species. We speculate about everything. We bet on the future through publicly traded shares. We set up our own businesses, a living speculation as it were. We speculate about news. Drama. Sport. My own tipple of choice is supporting Arsenal Football Club, when after each match there is a ripple across the globe as a babel’s tower of fans begins their infinite speculation on the team, the club and the next match.

It’s an idea Dostovesky teases out in his insane novella The Gambler. It tells the story of its narrator Alexei Ivanovich, a classic of the Dostoevskian oeuvre; a psychological experiment where one personality trait is turned up to eleven. For Alexei it is the sheer thrill of risk.  

By the end of the novella, set in the casino town of Roulettenburg (ha-ha), Alexei has bounced around like one of his roulette balls, having gambled away his fortune, his career and his love. Even so, he says: ‘there really is something peculiar in the feeling when, alone in a strange land, far from home and from friends, not knowing whether you will have anything to eat that day – you stake your last gulden, your very last.’

He really is a mono-maniac. I’d personally wager that if you were to find yourself in some random place (Dijibouti, say), cut off from society, and not knowing where your next meal was coming from, that that ’peculiar feeling’ when you decided to gamble away your last few coins, would be some sort of bleak existential realisation at how fucked your life was, but hey-ho. 

As ever, when it comes to Dostoevsky, there’s more to his characterisation than simply beating on some crazy with a gambling problem. Because Alexei’s weird compulsion to gamble, even when his life is a total, abject mess, looking from another angle, is something like an act of rebellion. It’s an act of defiance. That even when life is telling you that you’re done, you’re still the master of your own free will.      

In that moment between when Alexei stakes his bet and that bet comes in, for that very moment, the world is open, it’s a Schrödinger’s cat, where all outcomes are on the table, a rarefied moment when speculation runs riot and possibilities abound.  

This was often a theme in Dostoevsky’s work. Not gambling, but  the stifling nature of determinism. This was a world dominated by grand deterministic theories: of history, of philosophy and of science: deterministic theories that over indexed the inevitability of events, and turned free will and human choice into nubbins. The white foam on a wave that at its core is formed by deep currents far from the shore. 

I think there’s a case to be made that this deterministic spectre is making a comeback, by way of the stiflingly predictable identity driven politics of our era - a topic for another day.    

I found this idea sort of captivating. So much so that when I first learned of it, I headed to the nearest casino and staked my entire wealth and that of my family’s on red number seven. Not really. 

But, I felt like this was an idea that really got to the bottom of something fundamental about human nature; the idea that our free will is bound up with speculation at a deep, subterranean level. Because what is a gamble really? It is an assertion about the future. It is the still mysterious, crackling and firing of neurons in that weird liminal space in here, to paint pictures of what may come to pass out there.

I came across John Vervake’s work a few years ago, a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. He has this brilliant course called Awakening From The Meaning Crisis which is unbelievably sitting on YouTube, waiting for you to find it. He’s like your favourite eccentric classics teacher who can ad lib on Heroditus for three hours straight without taking a breath. 

Early on in the course, in this intense, serious and enquiring style, Vervaeke hits on this idea about speculation, but from the perspective of deep, historical enquiry. It was a real a-ha moment for me listening to him speak. Previously disparate ideas began to form connections. 

He starts at a sort of beginning for humanity: 40,000 BCE, the upper palaeolithic transition, a time during which a radical change was underway for humanity; when a type of humanity was beginning to emerge that was genuinely recognisable to us, and as us.

This was a time when humans started doing magical things that until then, they had never done before: they engaged in representational art, sculpture, painting and even music. There is more evidence that a significant enhancement of cognition was underway. They’d begun developing and using calendars, using symbolic representations of phases of the moon, to enhance their hunting capabilities. And of course, they had now begun to develop projectile weapons: thin bone tipped spears that could be launched at their quarry.  

Vervaeke tells us that humans had now begun to develop the ability to carry multiple missiles, that they could project at a distance, a development that required the increased development of the frontal lobe area.

It’s this development in particular that I want to linger on, because it so incredibly meshes with the speculating Alexei; the same Alexei who, when he has driven his life to the edge of despair, can still find it in himself to project possibility into the present moment with a final throw of the die.  

The best part of the lecture is when Vervaeke follows this thread and riffs on just how deep in our cognition this idea of throwing is. A ‘project’ is something we work on, sure, but it literally means to throw. Then there’s an ‘object’ - something you throw against - to object to an argument, say. Then even a ‘subject’ - something you throw under - to be subjected to.  ‘All day long’ he says ‘we are cognitively throwing’. 

It is a cognitively difficult task, requiring complex modelling: physical and probabilistic. We take it for granted as a species, but this throwing, is a foundational action, not just a physical action, but one that gets at the core of our minds interacting with the world, our agency. 

My edition of The Gambler has a great quote from Albert Einstein on the front: ‘Dostoevsky gives me more than any scientist.’ I love that Dostoyevsky, in his genius, twigged through his gambling narrator this same idea that Vervaeke nails with brute historical enquiry. Alexei Ivanovich’s fatal flaw, of course, was that he loved risk for the sake of risk. As David Whyte says: ‘we are meant to hazard ourselves for the right thing’. Alexei ruins his life for the sheer thrill of it. I guess our job as creators is to find out what’s worth taking a risk on, what’s worth throwing your spear at.