August 30, 2024 • 45 mins
Tim Harford's life has been building up to this moment. In this Cautionary Conversation, he discusses the works of his favorite author J.R.R. Tolkien and the social science at play in Amazon Prime's series The Rings of Power. What do elves and whistleblowers have in common? How can evil hide in plain sight? And where do orcs come from?
Season 2 of The Rings of Power is available to watch on Prime Video from August 29th.
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
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 Fin's Cautionary Tales series producer.
(00:37):
And why am I so excited? Alis?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yes, we're going to talk about Gerah 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 forty
five years. And I think that Tolkien is full of
(01:07):
cautionary tales. And this new series, Rings of Power is
also full of cautioning tales. So that is what we're
going to talk about.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
My whole life has built up to this moment I've
been I sense that for you this is amazing. Obviously,
it's a fantasy about elves and orcs and all things
Tolkien esk, and we will get into that. But it
is also full of cautionary tales. It is full of
the kind of ideas that we explore in caution retales.
And as I was watching it, all kinds of things
sprung to mind, and I imagine they sprung to your
(01:52):
mind as well.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
They certainly did.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
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 law, so this is a new
story set thousands of years before the Lord of the Rings.
(02:16):
We do meet some of the characters in the Lord
of the Rings. For example, we meet el Rond, we
meet Galadriel. They are elves, Elands, half Elven. They lived
for thousands of years, so you know you can meet
them as their younger selves before they became those later characters.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yes, so l Rond we know later as an elf
ruler in Rivendell. Galadriel a very powerful royal Elf. They
are played by Robert Rameo and Morphind Clark 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
(02:51):
those Well.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
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 Saron. There were three made by and four the elves.
There were seven for the dwarves. There were nine immortal
men and wrought by himself the One Ring. And this
(03:12):
is a source of ultimate evil and corruption in the
Lord of the Rings. So in the Rings of Power
we get to see, well, why were these things made?
Who made them? And I imagine in season two, which
we haven't watched yet, we're going to see a little
bit more about the consequences of making them.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
We actually see quite a few sort of mini origin
stories peppered throughout season one. So someone else we meet
is an ancestor of Aragon Izildon, who actually.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Sorry to correct you there, Alison Aragon is actually descended
from an Arian who is Isolu's brother, Thank you so,
But yes, Isldure, 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.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I was about to say, if I'm honest, it's not
looking good for him.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
No, no, but there you go. I mean, the character
arc is consistent. You know, he makes mistakes. He's going
to make mistakes in the future. So we're going to
talk about some of the characters, and we are going
to talk about the cautionary tales they bring to mind
from the social science behind what happens in the Rings
of Power and some of the things that occur in
the Rings of Power that echo true stories that we
(04:23):
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 sort of spoilers for season
two because we haven't seen season two. It is out
on the twenty ninth of August on Amazon Prime. I
for one, am eagerly looking forward to it. So we
(05:04):
should begin with one of the key protagonists, 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
(05:25):
mean maybe it's determined, Maybe it's obsessive, maybe it's irrational.
Everyone else seems to think that she's completely unhinged. Saron
has long since disappeared from the world, and yet Galadriel
will not give up the hunt for him.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
So early on in the series covers a few centuries
of Galadriel's life. We see Gladriel and her beloved brother
Finrod battling Morgoth, who is a kind of evil entity
demonic actually who.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Moth Saron's boss, so he when he was defeated, Saron
took up the Baton and continued the pursuit of evil
in Middle Earth.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
So Galadriel vows to take up her brother's mission, and
she spends centuries seeking out Sourn 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
(06:21):
this sort of snowy wasteland.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It looks absolutely miserable, but because they're elves, I guess
they don't die of cold.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Absolutely. She thinks that she is seeing signs of Salon,
but others don't really believe that that's what she's seeing.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
There are signs, right, but the signs are are centuries old.
So the fact that somebody wrote a sign hundreds of
years ago, what does that tell you now?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
It's very hollow. So the King of the Els, Gilgallard,
rewards her with a one way trip to Valenore, which.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Is false retirement, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
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. 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 Gilgalad did this deliberately. It's not just
(07:22):
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 Gilgallard,
the elf king, he thinks that Gladrial is actually the problem,
like the fact that there is still evil in the world.
There's evil in the world because Gladriuel is so obsessed
with evil. There's a line that a wind that can
blow out a fire can also fan the flames. One
(07:43):
of the things that really struck me here is Galadril
is treated a little bit like our whistle blowing hero
in Whistleblower on the twenty eighth Floor, which is our
episode about the equity finance fraud the equity finance Forward
was effectively the equivalent of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme only
in the nineteen seventies. And the man who identified that
(08:04):
this fraud was taking place and delivered the evidence of
this fraud to the SEC cur it as an Exchange Commission,
the US financial regulator. He was then prosecuted by the SEC,
and obviously gladually is a rather more dynamic and compelling
and charismatic figure than Ray Dirk's. But the way that
we punish the people who are trying to alert us
(08:25):
to danger, I think is a is a theme in
certain caution detales, and very strongly a theme in the
early episode ser Rings of Power.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yes, A key takeaway in that episode, the Whistleblower on
the twenty eighth 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.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
It's difficult to survive financially and emotionally. 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,
(09:11):
the first line the whistleblower uttered was, my name is Tarantula.
That is not my real name. You just sound mad.
That's just who phone's a journalist and says my name
is Tarantela. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
You might not endear yourself to people by.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Doing that, really not. But it turns out, actually it
was a very important fraud that this person was blowing
the whistle on, and Ray Dirk's was a kind of
awkward character and glad Youel 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
(09:44):
turns out to be quite common behavior from whistleblowers.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
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 officers 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. Yeah,
you're blowing the whistle on everyone not doing what they're
supposed to do.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
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, not make a fuss.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Don't rock the boat. And Gladriel is absolutely rocking the boat, right.
She's pointing to everyone's collective failure to vanquish evil and
to stay regilant. 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.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yes, I mean there is another way of seeing this.
As anybody who's read The Lord of the Rings knows
Saron did not disappear. Saron comes back. We know Saron
comes back, and even if we haven't read The Lord
of the Rings, we kind of guess that Saron is
still out there, so we kind of narratively we know
Gladriel's right. And so there is such a thing as
as hindsight bias, and I think it's hard to avoid
(10:57):
that as a viewer of the series. So the classic
example of outcome bias is an experiment run by a
couple of psychologists in nineteen eighty eight Baron and Hershey.
Whether they're asking people to evaluate decisions. These might be
medical decisions, for example, or they might be financial decisions,
but they also explain how things worked out. So here's
a doctor, this is what the doctor did, and this
is in the ed what happened to the patient. And
(11:19):
people find it completely impossible to separate the decision making
process from the outcome. If you're told the outcome, you
can't neutually judge the process. And here we know the outcome.
We know sound's out there, so we know Gladriel's right.
So I think the storytellers have to work quite hard
in this series to make Gladriels seem irrational and seem unhinged.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
When she's speaking about this intangible evil being out there,
what she keeps referencing as 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.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, she thinks she's right. She thinks they're wrong. They
think the opposite. I mean, who's to judge?
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Right?
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I think there is another reading of Gladriel which is
possible here, which is that she is a grieving person
or a grieving elf. She takes on her brother's 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.
(12:19):
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 l ron. 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
(12:42):
reminds me of this trope of the mad woman that
we see kind of recur in history and in literature,
a powerful woman in particular whose emotion renders them overly dramatic,
overly passionate, It automatically undermines them in cautionary tails. It
reminds me of Anna Marie Jarvis.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Oh wow, Anamary Jarvis. That's 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.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Indeed, so her life's work, I mean, Anne Marie Jarvis
is also a grieving woman, right, Her life's work is
honoring her dad, 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 has created, and she's upset. I mean, of course
she's upset.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Yeah, 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 initially of course supported her.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
Why don't you stop fraud against Mother's Day through misrepresentation
about founder. You know, no person in your town ever
gave a cent for Mother's Day, nor was its promoter.
No honest person would make such a claim. Stop the
deception and game.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
It's a miserable story at the end.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
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 busy body,
a recluse, a bit of a weirdo. And there are many,
many ways. I think that Galadriel and Anna Marie Jarvis
(14:32):
are very different, but I do think they are both
judged very harshly by the societies they live in.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Did Galadriel ever throw a Mother's Day salad on the floor.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I think Gladril is going to come out very well
in the end. Well, I think we know that she is.
But I think you're right.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I will say overall, in Rings of Power, women come
across very well. They are very powerful, very wise, very brave.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yes, But Gladriel, she certainly has an edge to her,
so Gladriola's Radix, the equity finance whistleblower, gladriel as Anna,
Marie J. Harvest, 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.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Okay, Tim, picture the scene. You're at home in Oxford,
in your living room, waging a very intriguing dungeons and
Dragons campaign.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Okay, it's all too easy to picture all of us
the typical Tuesday.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Well, it's all about to change. All of a sudden,
there's an almighty crash and through the floorboards appears an
ork who has been undermining your house. What are you
gonna do?
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Okay, yeah, I'm hid in the cupboard. I think would
be my reaction.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
That that's fair, because they're terrifying.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
They are absolutely terrifying. In the Wings of Power. We
should just remind people. I'm Tim Harford, eur Alice find
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.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
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 Orc Apocalypse.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Any particular reason.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Your extensive knowledge the enemy, the enemy, you know that weaknesses.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yes, well sunlight one of the weekness. Yeah, which which
indeed the Orcs are planning to do something about that
particular problem in this series. But no, there they just
are unsettling. They're like something kind of a horror movie
rather than an action film. Here, they're thoroughly chilling, which
(17:00):
I think is is very welcome development in the Rings
of Power. But yes, so they've got this project though,
the Orcs, they have a project not just interested in
butchering livestock and kidnapping people and shooting people full of arrows,
although they do do plenty of that.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
That's also a hobby. Yeah, I mean, we'll come to
the project. But I do have a question for you. First.
Rings of Power sort of elucidates where Orcs come from.
They are these twisted, tortured elves according to Gladriel. Yes,
I've not totally got my head around it. There seems
to be a limitless supply of them. How does this work?
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yes, well, I think orcs are quite feckened. I think
orks 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 are.
They breed quickly as a race, and yes, Galadriel says
they're twisted elves. Tolkien himself actually gave different accounts of
(17:59):
where orcs came from. I mean, this is almost like
a theological thing for him. Could the master of all evil,
mor Goth? Could he create life? Or could he only
twisted pervert life? And so he had different different views.
But I think the view that is most popular, that's
expressed in the Lord of the Rings is that Morgarth
took elves and then he twisted elves in mockery and
(18:22):
turned them into into orcs. And that was the worst
thing he ever did, was to take elves and to
turn them into too 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 that was the worst, the most spiteful
thing he did. But anyway, wherever they came from, their
(18:42):
their back and they are undermining, literally undermining human civilization. Serious.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
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 sun, sunken flesh almost kind
of it's like they shouldn't exist, really, I suppose, which
is partly what makes them terrifying.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yes, and they killed, they kill things, so they kill livestock,
and they chop down tree and for no obvious reason,
they just destruction for destruction's sake. But in the end
they do have a plan.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
They have a plan. We see them in prisoning elves
in what seems to be a kind of prison camp.
I would say, yeah, and we don't know what they're
building at first. We find out later yes.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
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 is this character called ad.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Are played terrifyingly by Joseph Moore.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
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 Sarah. And that's one of the
mysteries of the show, But I think you've identified him.
He's a fair enoughon Brown.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Isn't Did you want to unpack that a bit?
Speaker 4 (19:57):
Well?
Speaker 1 (19:57):
As listeners to our epic V two Rocket trilogy will know,
Von Brown was this not so much brilliant engineer or
brilliant scientists, 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.
(20:21):
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 building of the V two rocket, which
is a weapon of mass destruction and targeted I mean
we're not really targeted at all, but to the extent
(20:42):
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 hate 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
(21:03):
the most appalling conditions, thousands and thousands and thousands of
people dying Indora Middle Bow, and Von Brown basically did
not seem to care. He was indifferent because he had
his vision.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
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, 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
(21:38):
would be lackey of Souron, who's longing for Souron's return,
put this sort of like a sword into a landmark
that triggers floods that run through the tunnels they've been digging,
that trigger a kind of volcanic eruption, I suppose. And
what unfolds are these horrendous fiery scenes that are reminiscent
(22:01):
of a bomb going off.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Really yea, it is like somebody just dropped an atomic
bomb on Middle Earth. That's how it reads. What has
actually happened is that ad Are 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 absolutely catastrophically, the extraordinary scenes. It's an absolute disaster.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
I've always wondered where Mount Doom comes from. So this
is it.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
This is it according to the Rings of Power Cannon,
so it was originally Ora dro In as a mountain
at the heart of the Southlands stroke Mordor sort of
symbiotic with Saron. So when Saron is there in Mordoor
and powerful Ora dro In is active, and when Saron
is dormant, oro In is dormant. When in the Rings
(22:51):
of Power, it's a very deliberate plan by add Are.
He causes this massive steam explosion and that causes in
Mount Doom to erupt. And we know, having read Lord
of the Rings, that in the end Mount Doom will
be where Saron's powerful Ring. You know, the ultimate, the
one Ring is going to be forged in Mount Doom
(23:11):
and it can only be destroyed in Mount Doom. So,
as well as being this cataclysmic event, as far as
the Wings of Power are concerned, we also know that
this is paving the way for the return of Sarah,
and it's going to pave the way for the creation
of the evil.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
That is the one ring, 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
(23:47):
to be trusted because in their veins flows the blood
of their ancestors who allied themselves with More Goth.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Right, Yes, which is very deterministic, right as a sort
of you know, it's racial determinism. Absolutely, they are the
descendants of people who serve More Goth and therefore you
can't trust them.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
It's this concept of evil is something primitive within us,
I suppose, But also evil maybe something you choose or deny.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
But yes, there is this sense. A lot of the
people that we see have had their choices predetermined. I mean,
add are the leader of the Orcs. Interestingly, he argues
that they have free will and they need to be
viewed as individuals with names and soone that's one of
the reasons why they love him. But I think in
the in the universe of Tolkien, the Orcs are irredeemably
(24:32):
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 are 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.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I did have another thought actually, as I was traveling here,
Ada is in fact mistaken for Sarin at some point.
He doesn't take that well. But that points to another
issue with evil, right.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Well, absolutely so Ada looks very unsettling. He's this scarred
or corrupted elf. He's coded as a bad guy, and
he's a bad guy, you know, he 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
(25:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
It's not always like that in real life, I think either.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
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 a petty criminal Wilhelm Vot got hold
(26:05):
of a second hand army captain's uniform. This is in
the early nineteen hundreds in Berlin, and just started bossing
around a platoon of soldiers he found on the street,
and 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
(26:27):
in uniform later goes. And then of course there's Harold Shipman,
who's 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
(26:49):
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 they'd be spoilers
(27:11):
for the season one, and I don't want to spoil this.
We know Sarahon's coming back. I think there are four people,
at least four people in the Rings of Power who
who plausibly contenders contenders for being Sarah. And one of
the pleasures is to try to figure out who it
actually is or maybe it's maybe it's none of those four,
but yes, none of them well, with the exception of
(27:33):
ad Are. They don't look like Saron, they don't code
as Saron. What you're trying to see through is, okay,
the Orcs look evil, Ada looks evil. Mount doom looks evil,
that sword looks evil, but Saron himself is the great deceiver,
and he looks exactly how he chooses to look. And
that is one of the big challenges.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Now that you mentioned catching a Killer doctor. Our episode
about Harold Shipman, I am reminded of Karnaman and Teverski's
representativeness heuristic and this idea that certain things kind of
fit into our pre established frameworks. Yeah, and we may
not question.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Them, basically, absolutely not, absolutely so. 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
taken care of his patients and nothing's too much trouble.
And he just fit perfectly into that box, just so.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Much so that some people were actually thrilled that he
was coming to comfort their aged relatives. Yes, and the
dying hours.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Absolutely, but how how kind that he would he would
call on them where when no one else was around
in the middle of the day, and and oh and
then they died, And how wonderful it was that Shipman,
of all people, their doctor was there in that moment
to comfort them. And to be present they didn't die alone.
Of course was a reason they didn't die alone, which
because he murdered them and watched them die for reasons
(28:56):
that are still 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 five 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
(29:30):
the studio with producer Alice Fines. We are being sponsored
this week by Amazon Primes 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?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
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 Gladriel. There's kind of a sense in which she's
changed in wheys she can't quite convey to others, and
(30:15):
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
it spread. Which is an interesting problem, yes, because it
raises a very practical issue, which is how do you
(30:35):
deal with evil? You know, it's not a single cautionary tail,
but many of our cautionary tales look at cruelty and
look at where cruelty comes from, and also how do
we respond to it?
Speaker 1 (30:45):
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 makes it evil has been permanently banished, Saren has
gone forever. Gladual is a problem because Gladiel keeps insisting
that evil has not been vanquished and Saren has not gone,
(31:08):
And in the end she gets blamed not just from
causing a fuss, but maybe she is the source of
evil in making such a.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Fuss to somehow perpetuating it.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Absolutely, absolutely because of the anger that lives inside her
this denial. It reminded me of a couple of Caution
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 and the British
were told in some detail by an incredible piece of
(31:37):
espionade 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 as a very very important piece of information,
and they just would not believe. They see photographs of
the radar equipment. But they're even told before the war.
(31:59):
They're told by a German officer. He's on a kind
of like a I don't know, it's like a student
exchange kind of thing. He shows up because they were
how are you chaps getting on with radar? We know
you are making progress and we're making progress too. In fact,
we think we're ahead of you, and that that astonishing
conversational tipbit just gets lost. So there's a there's a
huge amount of wish for thinking, I think because the
(32:21):
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 always wanting to rationalize the way indications
(32:45):
that Sarahn maybe has returned.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
So, however, we're going to confront evil. It seems that
acknowledging it's there is the first step.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I think very very important, really helpful to know what
you're facing. And that, I mean, there's another example of this,
and this maybe gives you more sympathy for the for
the elf King's position, which is our pandemic episode that
turned to Pascagoula, which is all about deer asters that
are predictable and predicted. So we compare and contrast the
(33:14):
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
and levees. 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
(33:37):
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
(33:58):
who go, you know what, maybe this is just a
waste of money. Maybe this bad thing is never going
to happen.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
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 in some places they
are 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
(34:35):
end of the Second World War, some of them have
become in from us. Some of them, I think are
barely acknowledged, very hard to see any of them coming
in advance.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
So what about you, Tim what's brings to mind for you?
In Rings of Power?
Speaker 1 (34:47):
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 plantity, these
(35:07):
seeing stones are a rupting 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 Newminorians are
a human civilization, very high human civilization. They have a
polante here. They want to look at the polant here
and use it to see the future, use it to
(35:28):
see things far off. And everybody is always convincing themselves
that it'll be for the best, that I won't lose
control of these things. And 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.
(35:51):
The inherent power of the object corrupts the user. And
this really reminded me of a cautioning 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 Holloweth.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Herman Holloweth, I know nothing about Herman Holloweth, Please tell me.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
Herman Hollowith was an engineer American engineer late eighteen hundreds
who designed the machine that became known for obviously since
as the hollow Earth Machine, and the hollow Earth Machine
was a kind of proto computer. He was trying to
solve the problem for the US Census, which is that
you have the census every ten years, and then you
(36:32):
go and you ask loads of loads of households who
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 eighteen ninety census was being conducted,
they still would not have finished analyzing the eighteen eighty census,
the previous census.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
So I'm going to guess Holloth is about to make
this process much more efficient.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
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 are also asking 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 you know,
colored cards and various systems and all kinds of clever
(37:20):
kind of organizational devices. But it's all a bit philo faxy.
And then there's Holloweth's machine. And Hollowth's machine looks like
it 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
(37:42):
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 Hollowth machine
(38:03):
just destroyed the human teams. It wasn't even close. And
so the Census Bureau adopted the Hollowth machine and they
all live happily ever after.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
That sounds like a cautionary tail.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
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 Holloweth machines.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
I see where this is going.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Well, it is disputed exactly how important the machine was
to the Nazi project of genocide, and 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 who
was not, and so having these machines be so powerful
(38:55):
it kind of.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Helped, may have expedited the process.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
It may have expedited the process. And also the US
Census Bureau for decades denied that it had helped the
administration find US citizens of Japanese descent for decades and
decades and decades, said, we know the Census Bureau is
stands alone and is separate, and is independent and does
(39:21):
not do this kind of thing. We're just here to
count the people. And then in two thousand and six
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 chipped off to interment camps. So again, you
see this machine. It's very powerful machine, designed for good,
(39:44):
supposed to be used for good. But then once you
have that power, are you really going to resist the temptation.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
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 segue off a cliff Jimmy
Hesselden invents the Hesko gabions, these concert tinas for shoring
up coastlines to manage flood risks. Ultimately, they're used in
places like Kosovo and Iraq filled with sand to protect
(40:15):
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, yeah, yeah, no,
not just evil. So what's the answer.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
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
(40:52):
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
(41:14):
the Wandering, for example, was really the atomic bomb. He
once wrote, if Order the Things was an allegory, that
the Elves would have used the Wandering immediately, which, of
course I guess is true, because the Allies use the
atomic bomb.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
So there are allegories, and then there are drawing. There's
drawing on ideas which are in the zeitgeist at the time, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
I think it's 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
Keller Brimble, the Great elf Smith as a kind of
Oppenheimer figure or a von Brown figure, and Herman Hollowith.
You see these characters, these these brilliant creators who cause
(41:53):
all kinds of trouble for the world. They definitely have
resonances in the Rings of Power.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
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?
Speaker 1 (42:09):
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 It is really a
soulmate of cautionary tales. And because Tolkien he was fascinated
by fairy stories, he was the person who brought really
(42:30):
be a Wolf to prominence. Be a Wolf 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,
(42:52):
and he wants us to look at that and reflect
on it and learn from it. And in cautioning 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.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
You're saying is you are basically Tolkien. Is that what
you're telling me?
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Well, all I'm saying is that Toulkien died September nineteen
seventy three. I was born September nineteen seventy three. I've
often reflected on this fact.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
He's speechless, absolutely speechless, the sheer gall of that there
are no words, There are no there are no words,
big fat. 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 the twenty ninth.
(43:50):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents
of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Tella Harford, Jammas Saunders and
Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric Handler,
Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production
(44:24):
of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor 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 if Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot fm slash plus no
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 Fin's Cautionary Tales series producer.
(00:37):
And why am I so excited? Alis?
Speaker 2 (00:38):
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.
Speaker 1 (00:46):
Yes, we're going to talk about Gerah 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 forty
five years. And I think that Tolkien is full of
(01:07):
cautionary tales. And this new series, Rings of Power is
also full of cautioning tales. So that is what we're
going to talk about.
Speaker 2 (01:13):
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.
Speaker 1 (01:30):
My whole life has built up to this moment I've
been I sense that for you this is amazing. Obviously,
it's a fantasy about elves and orcs and all things
Tolkien esk, and we will get into that. But it
is also full of cautionary tales. It is full of
the kind of ideas that we explore in caution retales.
And as I was watching it, all kinds of things
sprung to mind, and I imagine they sprung to your
(01:52):
mind as well.
Speaker 2 (01:53):
They certainly did.
Speaker 1 (01:54):
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 law, so this is a new
story set thousands of years before the Lord of the Rings.
(02:16):
We do meet some of the characters in the Lord
of the Rings. For example, we meet el Rond, we
meet Galadriel. They are elves, Elands, half Elven. They lived
for thousands of years, so you know you can meet
them as their younger selves before they became those later characters.
Speaker 2 (02:30):
Yes, so l Rond we know later as an elf
ruler in Rivendell. Galadriel a very powerful royal Elf. They
are played by Robert Rameo and Morphind Clark 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
(02:51):
those Well.
Speaker 1 (02:51):
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 Saron. There were three made by and four the elves.
There were seven for the dwarves. There were nine immortal
men and wrought by himself the One Ring. And this
(03:12):
is a source of ultimate evil and corruption in the
Lord of the Rings. So in the Rings of Power
we get to see, well, why were these things made?
Who made them? And I imagine in season two, which
we haven't watched yet, we're going to see a little
bit more about the consequences of making them.
Speaker 2 (03:28):
We actually see quite a few sort of mini origin
stories peppered throughout season one. So someone else we meet
is an ancestor of Aragon Izildon, who actually.
Speaker 1 (03:38):
Sorry to correct you there, Alison Aragon is actually descended
from an Arian who is Isolu's brother, Thank you so,
But yes, Isldure, 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.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I was about to say, if I'm honest, it's not
looking good for him.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
No, no, but there you go. I mean, the character
arc is consistent. You know, he makes mistakes. He's going
to make mistakes in the future. So we're going to
talk about some of the characters, and we are going
to talk about the cautionary tales they bring to mind
from the social science behind what happens in the Rings
of Power and some of the things that occur in
the Rings of Power that echo true stories that we
(04:23):
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 sort of spoilers for season
two because we haven't seen season two. It is out
on the twenty ninth of August on Amazon Prime. I
for one, am eagerly looking forward to it. So we
(05:04):
should begin with one of the key protagonists, 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
(05:25):
mean maybe it's determined, Maybe it's obsessive, maybe it's irrational.
Everyone else seems to think that she's completely unhinged. Saron
has long since disappeared from the world, and yet Galadriel
will not give up the hunt for him.
Speaker 2 (05:38):
So early on in the series covers a few centuries
of Galadriel's life. We see Gladriel and her beloved brother
Finrod battling Morgoth, who is a kind of evil entity
demonic actually who.
Speaker 1 (05:52):
Moth Saron's boss, so he when he was defeated, Saron
took up the Baton and continued the pursuit of evil
in Middle Earth.
Speaker 2 (05:59):
So Galadriel vows to take up her brother's mission, and
she spends centuries seeking out Sourn 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
(06:21):
this sort of snowy wasteland.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
It looks absolutely miserable, but because they're elves, I guess
they don't die of cold.
Speaker 2 (06:26):
Absolutely. She thinks that she is seeing signs of Salon,
but others don't really believe that that's what she's seeing.
Speaker 1 (06:34):
There are signs, right, but the signs are are centuries old.
So the fact that somebody wrote a sign hundreds of
years ago, what does that tell you now?
Speaker 2 (06:41):
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.
Speaker 1 (06:52):
It's very hollow. So the King of the Els, Gilgallard,
rewards her with a one way trip to Valenore, which.
Speaker 2 (07:00):
Is false retirement, isn't it.
Speaker 1 (07:02):
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. 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 Gilgalad did this deliberately. It's not just
(07:22):
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 Gilgallard,
the elf king, he thinks that Gladrial is actually the problem,
like the fact that there is still evil in the world.
There's evil in the world because Gladriuel is so obsessed
with evil. There's a line that a wind that can
blow out a fire can also fan the flames. One
(07:43):
of the things that really struck me here is Galadril
is treated a little bit like our whistle blowing hero
in Whistleblower on the twenty eighth Floor, which is our
episode about the equity finance fraud the equity finance Forward
was effectively the equivalent of Bernie Madoff's Ponzi scheme only
in the nineteen seventies. And the man who identified that
(08:04):
this fraud was taking place and delivered the evidence of
this fraud to the SEC cur it as an Exchange Commission,
the US financial regulator. He was then prosecuted by the SEC,
and obviously gladually is a rather more dynamic and compelling
and charismatic figure than Ray Dirk's. But the way that
we punish the people who are trying to alert us
(08:25):
to danger, I think is a is a theme in
certain caution detales, and very strongly a theme in the
early episode ser Rings of Power.
Speaker 2 (08:32):
Yes, A key takeaway in that episode, the Whistleblower on
the twenty eighth 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.
Speaker 1 (08:49):
It's difficult to survive financially and emotionally. 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,
(09:11):
the first line the whistleblower uttered was, my name is Tarantula.
That is not my real name. You just sound mad.
That's just who phone's a journalist and says my name
is Tarantela. Yeah.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
You might not endear yourself to people by.
Speaker 1 (09:24):
Doing that, really not. But it turns out, actually it
was a very important fraud that this person was blowing
the whistle on, and Ray Dirk's was a kind of
awkward character and glad Youel 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
(09:44):
turns out to be quite common behavior from whistleblowers.
Speaker 2 (09:46):
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 officers 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. Yeah,
you're blowing the whistle on everyone not doing what they're
supposed to do.
Speaker 1 (10:06):
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, not make a fuss.
Speaker 2 (10:18):
Don't rock the boat. And Gladriel is absolutely rocking the boat, right.
She's pointing to everyone's collective failure to vanquish evil and
to stay regilant. 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.
Speaker 1 (10:33):
Yes, I mean there is another way of seeing this.
As anybody who's read The Lord of the Rings knows
Saron did not disappear. Saron comes back. We know Saron
comes back, and even if we haven't read The Lord
of the Rings, we kind of guess that Saron is
still out there, so we kind of narratively we know
Gladriel's right. And so there is such a thing as
as hindsight bias, and I think it's hard to avoid
(10:57):
that as a viewer of the series. So the classic
example of outcome bias is an experiment run by a
couple of psychologists in nineteen eighty eight Baron and Hershey.
Whether they're asking people to evaluate decisions. These might be
medical decisions, for example, or they might be financial decisions,
but they also explain how things worked out. So here's
a doctor, this is what the doctor did, and this
is in the ed what happened to the patient. And
(11:19):
people find it completely impossible to separate the decision making
process from the outcome. If you're told the outcome, you
can't neutually judge the process. And here we know the outcome.
We know sound's out there, so we know Gladriel's right.
So I think the storytellers have to work quite hard
in this series to make Gladriels seem irrational and seem unhinged.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
When she's speaking about this intangible evil being out there,
what she keeps referencing as 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.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
Yeah, she thinks she's right. She thinks they're wrong. They
think the opposite. I mean, who's to judge?
Speaker 3 (11:58):
Right?
Speaker 2 (11:59):
I think there is another reading of Gladriel which is
possible here, which is that she is a grieving person
or a grieving elf. She takes on her brother's 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.
(12:19):
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 l ron. 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
(12:42):
reminds me of this trope of the mad woman that
we see kind of recur in history and in literature,
a powerful woman in particular whose emotion renders them overly dramatic,
overly passionate, It automatically undermines them in cautionary tails. It
reminds me of Anna Marie Jarvis.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Oh wow, Anamary Jarvis. That's 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.
Speaker 2 (13:14):
Indeed, so her life's work, I mean, Anne Marie Jarvis
is also a grieving woman, right, Her life's work is
honoring her dad, 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 has created, and she's upset. I mean, of course
she's upset.
Speaker 1 (13:34):
Yeah, 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 initially of course supported her.
Speaker 4 (13:50):
Why don't you stop fraud against Mother's Day through misrepresentation
about founder. You know, no person in your town ever
gave a cent for Mother's Day, nor was its promoter.
No honest person would make such a claim. Stop the
deception and game.
Speaker 1 (14:09):
It's a miserable story at the end.
Speaker 2 (14:11):
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 busy body,
a recluse, a bit of a weirdo. And there are many,
many ways. I think that Galadriel and Anna Marie Jarvis
(14:32):
are very different, but I do think they are both
judged very harshly by the societies they live in.
Speaker 1 (14:37):
Did Galadriel ever throw a Mother's Day salad on the floor.
Speaker 2 (14:40):
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.
Speaker 1 (14:48):
I think Gladril is going to come out very well
in the end. Well, I think we know that she is.
But I think you're right.
Speaker 2 (14:54):
I will say overall, in Rings of Power, women come
across very well. They are very powerful, very wise, very brave.
Speaker 1 (15:01):
Yes, But Gladriel, she certainly has an edge to her,
so Gladriola's Radix, the equity finance whistleblower, gladriel as Anna,
Marie J. Harvest, 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.
Speaker 2 (15:32):
Okay, Tim, picture the scene. You're at home in Oxford,
in your living room, waging a very intriguing dungeons and
Dragons campaign.
Speaker 1 (15:41):
Okay, it's all too easy to picture all of us
the typical Tuesday.
Speaker 2 (15:48):
Well, it's all about to change. All of a sudden,
there's an almighty crash and through the floorboards appears an
ork who has been undermining your house. What are you
gonna do?
Speaker 1 (15:58):
Okay, yeah, I'm hid in the cupboard. I think would
be my reaction.
Speaker 2 (16:02):
That that's fair, because they're terrifying.
Speaker 1 (16:04):
They are absolutely terrifying. In the Wings of Power. We
should just remind people. I'm Tim Harford, eur Alice find
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.
Speaker 2 (16:23):
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 Orc Apocalypse.
Speaker 1 (16:33):
Any particular reason.
Speaker 2 (16:35):
Your extensive knowledge the enemy, the enemy, you know that weaknesses.
Speaker 1 (16:40):
Yes, well sunlight one of the weekness. Yeah, which which
indeed the Orcs are planning to do something about that
particular problem in this series. But no, there they just
are unsettling. They're like something kind of a horror movie
rather than an action film. Here, they're thoroughly chilling, which
(17:00):
I think is is very welcome development in the Rings
of Power. But yes, so they've got this project though,
the Orcs, they have a project not just interested in
butchering livestock and kidnapping people and shooting people full of arrows,
although they do do plenty of that.
Speaker 2 (17:16):
That's also a hobby. Yeah, I mean, we'll come to
the project. But I do have a question for you. First.
Rings of Power sort of elucidates where Orcs come from.
They are these twisted, tortured elves according to Gladriel. Yes,
I've not totally got my head around it. There seems
to be a limitless supply of them. How does this work?
Speaker 1 (17:36):
Yes, well, I think orcs are quite feckened. I think
orks 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 are.
They breed quickly as a race, and yes, Galadriel says
they're twisted elves. Tolkien himself actually gave different accounts of
(17:59):
where orcs came from. I mean, this is almost like
a theological thing for him. Could the master of all evil,
mor Goth? Could he create life? Or could he only
twisted pervert life? And so he had different different views.
But I think the view that is most popular, that's
expressed in the Lord of the Rings is that Morgarth
took elves and then he twisted elves in mockery and
(18:22):
turned them into into orcs. And that was the worst
thing he ever did, was to take elves and to
turn them into too 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 that was the worst, the most spiteful
thing he did. But anyway, wherever they came from, their
(18:42):
their back and they are undermining, literally undermining human civilization. Serious.
Speaker 2 (18:49):
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 sun, sunken flesh almost kind
of it's like they shouldn't exist, really, I suppose, which
is partly what makes them terrifying.
Speaker 1 (19:04):
Yes, and they killed, they kill things, so they kill livestock,
and they chop down tree and for no obvious reason,
they just destruction for destruction's sake. But in the end
they do have a plan.
Speaker 2 (19:16):
They have a plan. We see them in prisoning elves
in what seems to be a kind of prison camp.
I would say, yeah, and we don't know what they're
building at first. We find out later yes.
Speaker 1 (19:29):
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 is this character called ad.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Are played terrifyingly by Joseph Moore.
Speaker 1 (19:41):
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 Sarah. And that's one of the
mysteries of the show, But I think you've identified him.
He's a fair enoughon Brown.
Speaker 2 (19:55):
Isn't Did you want to unpack that a bit?
Speaker 4 (19:57):
Well?
Speaker 1 (19:57):
As listeners to our epic V two Rocket trilogy will know,
Von Brown was this not so much brilliant engineer or
brilliant scientists, 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.
(20:21):
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 building of the V two rocket, which
is a weapon of mass destruction and targeted I mean
we're not really targeted at all, but to the extent
(20:42):
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 hate 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
(21:03):
the most appalling conditions, thousands and thousands and thousands of
people dying Indora Middle Bow, and Von Brown basically did
not seem to care. He was indifferent because he had
his vision.
Speaker 2 (21:17):
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, 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
(21:38):
would be lackey of Souron, who's longing for Souron's return,
put this sort of like a sword into a landmark
that triggers floods that run through the tunnels they've been digging,
that trigger a kind of volcanic eruption, I suppose. And
what unfolds are these horrendous fiery scenes that are reminiscent
(22:01):
of a bomb going off.
Speaker 1 (22:02):
Really yea, it is like somebody just dropped an atomic
bomb on Middle Earth. That's how it reads. What has
actually happened is that ad Are 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 absolutely catastrophically, the extraordinary scenes. It's an absolute disaster.
Speaker 2 (22:26):
I've always wondered where Mount Doom comes from. So this
is it.
Speaker 1 (22:29):
This is it according to the Rings of Power Cannon,
so it was originally Ora dro In as a mountain
at the heart of the Southlands stroke Mordor sort of
symbiotic with Saron. So when Saron is there in Mordoor
and powerful Ora dro In is active, and when Saron
is dormant, oro In is dormant. When in the Rings
(22:51):
of Power, it's a very deliberate plan by add Are.
He causes this massive steam explosion and that causes in
Mount Doom to erupt. And we know, having read Lord
of the Rings, that in the end Mount Doom will
be where Saron's powerful Ring. You know, the ultimate, the
one Ring is going to be forged in Mount Doom
(23:11):
and it can only be destroyed in Mount Doom. So,
as well as being this cataclysmic event, as far as
the Wings of Power are concerned, we also know that
this is paving the way for the return of Sarah,
and it's going to pave the way for the creation
of the evil.
Speaker 2 (23:26):
That is the one ring, 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
(23:47):
to be trusted because in their veins flows the blood
of their ancestors who allied themselves with More Goth.
Speaker 1 (23:53):
Right, Yes, which is very deterministic, right as a sort
of you know, it's racial determinism. Absolutely, they are the
descendants of people who serve More Goth and therefore you
can't trust them.
Speaker 2 (24:02):
It's this concept of evil is something primitive within us,
I suppose, But also evil maybe something you choose or deny.
Speaker 1 (24:09):
But yes, there is this sense. A lot of the
people that we see have had their choices predetermined. I mean,
add are the leader of the Orcs. Interestingly, he argues
that they have free will and they need to be
viewed as individuals with names and soone that's one of
the reasons why they love him. But I think in
the in the universe of Tolkien, the Orcs are irredeemably
(24:32):
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 are 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.
Speaker 2 (24:47):
I did have another thought actually, as I was traveling here,
Ada is in fact mistaken for Sarin at some point.
He doesn't take that well. But that points to another
issue with evil, right.
Speaker 1 (24:58):
Well, absolutely so Ada looks very unsettling. He's this scarred
or corrupted elf. He's coded as a bad guy, and
he's a bad guy, you know, he 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
(25:20):
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.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
It's not always like that in real life, I think either.
Speaker 1 (25:42):
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 a petty criminal Wilhelm Vot got hold
(26:05):
of a second hand army captain's uniform. This is in
the early nineteen hundreds in Berlin, and just started bossing
around a platoon of soldiers he found on the street,
and 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
(26:27):
in uniform later goes. And then of course there's Harold Shipman,
who's 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
(26:49):
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 they'd be spoilers
(27:11):
for the season one, and I don't want to spoil this.
We know Sarahon's coming back. I think there are four people,
at least four people in the Rings of Power who
who plausibly contenders contenders for being Sarah. And one of
the pleasures is to try to figure out who it
actually is or maybe it's maybe it's none of those four,
but yes, none of them well, with the exception of
(27:33):
ad Are. They don't look like Saron, they don't code
as Saron. What you're trying to see through is, okay,
the Orcs look evil, Ada looks evil. Mount doom looks evil,
that sword looks evil, but Saron himself is the great deceiver,
and he looks exactly how he chooses to look. And
that is one of the big challenges.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Now that you mentioned catching a Killer doctor. Our episode
about Harold Shipman, I am reminded of Karnaman and Teverski's
representativeness heuristic and this idea that certain things kind of
fit into our pre established frameworks. Yeah, and we may
not question.
Speaker 1 (28:09):
Them, basically, absolutely not, absolutely so. 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
taken care of his patients and nothing's too much trouble.
And he just fit perfectly into that box, just so.
Speaker 2 (28:27):
Much so that some people were actually thrilled that he
was coming to comfort their aged relatives. Yes, and the
dying hours.
Speaker 1 (28:34):
Absolutely, but how how kind that he would he would
call on them where when no one else was around
in the middle of the day, and and oh and
then they died, And how wonderful it was that Shipman,
of all people, their doctor was there in that moment
to comfort them. And to be present they didn't die alone.
Of course was a reason they didn't die alone, which
because he murdered them and watched them die for reasons
(28:56):
that are still 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 five 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
(29:30):
the studio with producer Alice Fines. We are being sponsored
this week by Amazon Primes 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?
Speaker 2 (29:53):
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 Gladriel. There's kind of a sense in which she's
changed in wheys she can't quite convey to others, and
(30:15):
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
it spread. Which is an interesting problem, yes, because it
raises a very practical issue, which is how do you
(30:35):
deal with evil? You know, it's not a single cautionary tail,
but many of our cautionary tales look at cruelty and
look at where cruelty comes from, and also how do
we respond to it?
Speaker 1 (30:45):
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 makes it evil has been permanently banished, Saren has
gone forever. Gladual is a problem because Gladiel keeps insisting
that evil has not been vanquished and Saren has not gone,
(31:08):
And in the end she gets blamed not just from
causing a fuss, but maybe she is the source of
evil in making such a.
Speaker 2 (31:13):
Fuss to somehow perpetuating it.
Speaker 1 (31:16):
Absolutely, absolutely because of the anger that lives inside her
this denial. It reminded me of a couple of Caution
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 and the British
were told in some detail by an incredible piece of
(31:37):
espionade 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 as a very very important piece of information,
and they just would not believe. They see photographs of
the radar equipment. But they're even told before the war.
(31:59):
They're told by a German officer. He's on a kind
of like a I don't know, it's like a student
exchange kind of thing. He shows up because they were
how are you chaps getting on with radar? We know
you are making progress and we're making progress too. In fact,
we think we're ahead of you, and that that astonishing
conversational tipbit just gets lost. So there's a there's a
huge amount of wish for thinking, I think because the
(32:21):
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 always wanting to rationalize the way indications
(32:45):
that Sarahn maybe has returned.
Speaker 2 (32:47):
So, however, we're going to confront evil. It seems that
acknowledging it's there is the first step.
Speaker 1 (32:53):
I think very very important, really helpful to know what
you're facing. And that, I mean, there's another example of this,
and this maybe gives you more sympathy for the for
the elf King's position, which is our pandemic episode that
turned to Pascagoula, which is all about deer asters that
are predictable and predicted. So we compare and contrast the
(33:14):
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
and levees. 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
(33:37):
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
(33:58):
who go, you know what, maybe this is just a
waste of money. Maybe this bad thing is never going
to happen.
Speaker 2 (34:04):
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.
Speaker 1 (34:14):
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 in some places they
are 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
(34:35):
end of the Second World War, some of them have
become in from us. Some of them, I think are
barely acknowledged, very hard to see any of them coming
in advance.
Speaker 2 (34:43):
So what about you, Tim what's brings to mind for you?
In Rings of Power?
Speaker 1 (34:47):
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 plantity, these
(35:07):
seeing stones are a rupting 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 Newminorians are
a human civilization, very high human civilization. They have a
polante here. They want to look at the polant here
and use it to see the future, use it to
(35:28):
see things far off. And everybody is always convincing themselves
that it'll be for the best, that I won't lose
control of these things. And 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.
(35:51):
The inherent power of the object corrupts the user. And
this really reminded me of a cautioning 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 Holloweth.
Speaker 2 (36:08):
Herman Holloweth, I know nothing about Herman Holloweth, Please tell me.
Speaker 1 (36:11):
Herman Hollowith was an engineer American engineer late eighteen hundreds
who designed the machine that became known for obviously since
as the hollow Earth Machine, and the hollow Earth Machine
was a kind of proto computer. He was trying to
solve the problem for the US Census, which is that
you have the census every ten years, and then you
(36:32):
go and you ask loads of loads of households who
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 eighteen ninety census was being conducted,
they still would not have finished analyzing the eighteen eighty census,
the previous census.
Speaker 2 (36:53):
So I'm going to guess Holloth is about to make
this process much more efficient.
Speaker 1 (36:56):
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 are also asking 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 you know,
colored cards and various systems and all kinds of clever
(37:20):
kind of organizational devices. But it's all a bit philo faxy.
And then there's Holloweth's machine. And Hollowth's machine looks like
it 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
(37:42):
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 Hollowth machine
(38:03):
just destroyed the human teams. It wasn't even close. And
so the Census Bureau adopted the Hollowth machine and they
all live happily ever after.
Speaker 2 (38:11):
That sounds like a cautionary tail.
Speaker 1 (38:13):
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 Holloweth machines.
Speaker 2 (38:28):
I see where this is going.
Speaker 1 (38:29):
Well, it is disputed exactly how important the machine was
to the Nazi project of genocide, and 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 who
was not, and so having these machines be so powerful
(38:55):
it kind of.
Speaker 2 (38:56):
Helped, may have expedited the process.
Speaker 1 (38:58):
It may have expedited the process. And also the US
Census Bureau for decades denied that it had helped the
administration find US citizens of Japanese descent for decades and
decades and decades, said, we know the Census Bureau is
stands alone and is separate, and is independent and does
(39:21):
not do this kind of thing. We're just here to
count the people. And then in two thousand and six
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 chipped off to interment camps. So again, you
see this machine. It's very powerful machine, designed for good,
(39:44):
supposed to be used for good. But then once you
have that power, are you really going to resist the temptation.
Speaker 2 (39:51):
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 segue off a cliff Jimmy
Hesselden invents the Hesko gabions, these concert tinas for shoring
up coastlines to manage flood risks. Ultimately, they're used in
places like Kosovo and Iraq filled with sand to protect
(40:15):
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, yeah, yeah, no,
not just evil. So what's the answer.
Speaker 1 (40:31):
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
(40:52):
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
(41:14):
the Wandering, for example, was really the atomic bomb. He
once wrote, if Order the Things was an allegory, that
the Elves would have used the Wandering immediately, which, of
course I guess is true, because the Allies use the
atomic bomb.
Speaker 2 (41:24):
So there are allegories, and then there are drawing. There's
drawing on ideas which are in the zeitgeist at the time, right, Yeah.
Speaker 1 (41:31):
I think it's 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
Keller Brimble, the Great elf Smith as a kind of
Oppenheimer figure or a von Brown figure, and Herman Hollowith.
You see these characters, these these brilliant creators who cause
(41:53):
all kinds of trouble for the world. They definitely have
resonances in the Rings of Power.
Speaker 2 (41:59):
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?
Speaker 1 (42:09):
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 It is really a
soulmate of cautionary tales. And because Tolkien he was fascinated
by fairy stories, he was the person who brought really
(42:30):
be a Wolf to prominence. Be a Wolf 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,
(42:52):
and he wants us to look at that and reflect
on it and learn from it. And in cautioning 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.
Speaker 2 (43:09):
You're saying is you are basically Tolkien. Is that what
you're telling me?
Speaker 1 (43:13):
Well, all I'm saying is that Toulkien died September nineteen
seventy three. I was born September nineteen seventy three. I've
often reflected on this fact.
Speaker 3 (43:23):
He's speechless, absolutely speechless, the sheer gall of that there
are no words, There are no there are no words,
big fat. 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 the twenty ninth.
(43:50):
Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim Harford with Andrew Wright.
It's produced by Alice Fines with support from Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music is the work of
Pascal Wise.
Speaker 1 (44:03):
Sarah Nix edited the scripts. It features the voice talents
of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge, Tella Harford, Jammas Saunders and
Rufus Wright. The show also wouldn't have been possible without
the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Greta Cohene, Eric Handler,
Carrie Brody and Christina Sullivan. Cautionary Tales is a production
(44:24):
of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor 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 if Apple Podcasts,
or at pushkin dot fm slash plus no
Host
Tim Harford
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