The tipping point of "the tipping point"?

Someone push the thing over the edge already. Uh, in the broadest sense, our impatience with difficult ideas seems to me to preclude consideration of something as amorphous and enormous as "the economy." Yet media everywhere has otherwise intelligent people throwing out references to it - fixing it, adjusting it, stimulating it, - as though such sweeping generalizations about the behaviors of millions of people were as simple and matter-of-fact as putting on underwear and brushing one's teeth. "It's gonna take billions to lift Canada out of this recession," we might say, not realizing (or if we do realize it we are readily willing to allow our selves the indulgence) that we are treading in the realm of pure abstraction, where words matter only insofar as they link together with other words; Our pronouncements on "the economy" and especially a "world economy" echo the profound absurdities of medieval monks who took razors to hairs where the character traits of God were concerned.

I thought that the collapse of the global financial markets would have led more people to this basic conclusion: that even "economists" don't know what they're talking about when they talk about "the economy." Yet their status as knowledge experts endures as though most of them hadn't been in thrall to delusion (that something - tight profits - can come from nothing) and robber baron mythology (the genius millionaires, that is, to be a millionaire is to be a genius). It all collapses, they blink a few times and quickly proceed to counsel all and sundry on its causes and best course for the future. "We completely dropped the ball back there, but if you'll just hand the ball back to us we'll continue to sketch for you, in the most convoluted jargon available, the ball's rotund essence." And we readily give them back the ball.

Ours is an age of slim learning prancing around as though it were plump. Take for example the many writings of journalist Malcolm Gladwell, whose inimitable musings on the present have caused minor upheavals in North American thought. Probably most famously he grafted the notion of synaptic all or none - i.e. a nerve fires or does not fire - onto human social interactions. Tipping points abound! Human affairs are awash in these minuscule revolutions. Bernie Madoff was a luminous Wall Street wizard right up until the fraction of a second when his duplicity was outed; his reputation tipped over the edge, from atop the precipice of financial glory down into the abyss of legendary sophistry and deceit. But tipping points are far more mundane than Madoff's hilarious and sad fall. For instance, did you know that the humble prairie town Saskatoon itself sits agape atop the apex? Nothing is overlooked by these inquisitive and increasingly common tipping point hounds, they see immediate and profound change bearing down on us from every vantage. The trick is to stay atop the wave of change, by identifying changes we might anticipate and capitalize! And capitalizing on anticipated states of affairs gets at the aching kernel of this neoretropostmodernpop philosophy.

What causes smart people, who are experts in wide ranging fields of human thought, to so blithely take up Gladwell's eloquent sloganeering? Sounds like a subject for Malcolm Gladwell. Actually, he already did it with his book Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, where he considered the instantaneous (two seconds he says) potency of cognition. Using numerous studies from the social sciences, Gladwell offered up a theory about what we're thinking when we're not technically thinking. Though talk of the subconscious had previously suffered its own tipped point fade to obscurity, it's back with new clothes in our age of computer-modeled human thinking. You see, our brains compute elements of whatever our senses are exposed to in ways that go on to affect our more conscious thinking. What's the point of all this? Capitalizing on anticipated states of affairs. Intricate labyrinths of causes and effects; the batting of a butterfly's wings on a warm summer day in 1982 ultimately wound up causing Ted Haggard to covet the flesh-globed derriere of (at least one) male prostitute. Had we but known of that exhausted butterfly's dolorous flutter we might have blackmailed Haggard for our own profit. It's that easy, don't you see?

I don't disparage using metaphors of pieces of straw breaking camels' backs or floodgates opening, but I do disparage using such concepts as though the intellectual world could not exist without them. Put your accusational fingers down, tipping pointsters. Still allow me to follow the herd a little when I say that tipping points are teetering on the verge of their own tipping point. Soon we will awake to a day when someone will say, "My affection for cornflakes has, I'm alarmed to admit, reached its tipping point," and such vacuity will be answered, "That's stupid, shut up."