JL Foreman Speaks

WHY WE WERE WRONG

I have a few questions. But mostly a few comments.

I. Why did our doomsday predictions break down?

Answer: Number crunching doomsday prophecies are always iffy business. I can't think of any that have historically come to pass. You can always look back after doomsday and crunch the numbers that led up to it. But prediction based on numbers is never that successful.

As the debate passed April of '99 there was no new information and the doomsday crowd - of which I was one - resorted more and more to four arguments - which I completely reject both then and now with the exception of the first one.

1) No one has proven our numbers wrong. (I used a form of this argument.) It is a weak argument. Something is not true simply because you can't disprove it. Our entire justice system is not based on proving someone innocent but guilty. There is a carry over in the logic. You can never prove that what works will continue to work.

2) Things must run explainably and perfectly (preferably by some central distributor and organizational system) or not at all. (I exposed this argument somewhere in the bowels of Y2KCHAOS back in the early months of '99.) Almost all doomsday scenarios have as an integral part this purely socialist piece of snake oil sophistry. The Y2K doomsday scenario was built solidly on it. It is a lie. I tie it with socialism because it is a classic argument against capitalism. (jhthornwell - one of my more successful, if fouler, pseudonyms) on Y2KCHAOS exposed this argument early on in '98) If you take a cross section of a capitalistic economy it is pure chaos. There is no guiding force or manager. The hand is truly invisible and at any one time there may be a number of apparently unfair and even illegal things going on. The conclusion is it doesn't work, it can't work, and the unfair things are hurting people that any 8th grade manager could straighten out. Solution: we need to set up a system which has a manager for the economy and we can right all wrongs and restore order from the chaos. This same pattern was applied to the chaotic free market of computer systems from PC to World Wide Banking. We were exposed to the snap shot of this spaghetti mix with no central manager and said it must break down. Notice all who screamed for government to intervene and provide a central solution. I'm glad government ignored us instead of seeing a brilliant opportunity to rein in the last free market we have. In this I have criticized Gary North for adopting a socialistic analysis which runs through his doomsday literature. I must stress that he does not use it to advance the particular snake oil of socialism. None the less it does discredit his otherwise valid and vital social and economic analyses with undue forecasts of doom based on the apparent inability of world systems to cope with his snap shot or cross section of their circumstances.

3) No one can tell you it won't happen. This argument above all others I heard again and again even in the last six months when I was off the net because my computer was fried. In my 45 years of life whenever I have heard this shouted from a pulpit or at a rally, I have reached for my wallet to be sure it was safely in my pocket and not being picked out by the speaker. It is only good to sway the weak minded with rhetorical BS. Of course no one can tell you what won't happen. No one can tell you what will happen either. How empty can you get?

4) No programmers will tell you it can't (or won't) happen. Gary North made a big issue of this in his post Y2K statement continuing to develop blind argument of #3 above to justify his pre Y2Kposition.

First of all he himself printed articles from many programmers who said that they did not think that Y2K would amount to much. But this argument assumes that silence means agreement. The fact is the vast majority of the 900,000 programmers obviously did not think that Y2K would be civilization ending because they continued at the job knowing that it wouldn't get finished sufficiently to satisfy perfection. I can only conclude that we doomsday folks were in the minority from start to finish. We only sounded like a majority because the voice vote we made was long and loud.

5) If Y2K don't get us then all our other doomsday scenarios will finally come true. I initially said there were 4 bad arguments we came to rely on in the last year of pre-Y2K preparation. This fifth reason is one I give you for free.

I simply can't dignify this reason with much comment because it is not a Y2K computer argument at all. It lowers the position I held to that of the other snake oil doomsday charlatans and was just embarrassing to me because it is never true that snake oil will heal you sooner or later if you just drink enough of it. The doomsday predictions of the last 30 - 50 years are as bogus as the rapture theories of the last 150. Drink as deeply as you like, our current system is designed to handle the problems these pseudo prophets (as Gary North correctly calls them) have exposed. What should be bvious to even a fool is the fact that if our system couldn't handle the problems they uncovered it would have fallen long ago. A free market is designed to make one man's problem and downfall another man's Golden goose egg windfall. It didn't fall from those problems then, there is no magic in the turn of the millennium to make them bring us down now. Without the computer break down you have a pile of bad conspiracy theories.

God will not be mocked. Judgment will fall whether instantly - as in the Civil War or on Jerusalem in 70 AD - or over centuries - as with the fall of Rome - or intrinsically throughout the duration of the wicked effort - such as with any socialistic system. But the Bible does not give us a timetable to predict any given judgment. Furthermore, the analyses of men are grossly limited and not designed to replace the info that God has remained silent about. My concern for Y2K was based on the general fact that God does judge in the affairs of men and I along with all my fellow brethren of Western Civilization were royally worthy to bear that judgment. You never found special pleading in my writings for today's Christians to survive Y2K whether they prepared for it or not. Judgment begins with us. The specifics of that judgment, however, were not based on divine revelation but rather the potential of the key technological underpinning of Western Civilization to be suddenly removed. Since that did not happen (nor was there any sign of repentance on the part of the Church in America) I am back to my general convictions that judgment will fall, but I find specific predictions of that judgment self-serving and irrelevant.

II. So, given all the bad reasoning, why didn't I publicly change my mind.

Answer: Because I hadn't privately changed my mind.

If I wasn't so heavily invested in preparing for a break down, by August of '99, I would have put my efforts elsewhere because the position I held was being defended more and more exclusively by these faulty pieces of rhetorical nonsense. But what was undeniable - at least at the time - was that World Wide accounting, banking and government was based on an increasing-number system of dating and that system was about to be restarted with a lower number. I was told and believed reasonable that computers could not compute this lower number when inserted in algorhythms that required an ever higher number to function. That seemed inescapable and besides I had put my hand to the plough I wasn't going to look back now.

Besides I had not privately changed my mind. I was simply disturbed by how those who led the debate on my side were arguing. That last piece of INFOMAGIC before the fall (that is the fall of our position on January 1, 2000) summarized both the best of our arguments and the worst of them. It held nothing that we had not said and documented back in June of 1997. And he added confidently, "Logic, and math are on our side." I shudder to think how many social errors have been made based on impeccable logic and math. Socialism and Eugenics are two of the more horrible. But though not horrible in the least, our Y2Kchaos.com position was just as far out of touch with reality. (Incidentally, I seriously doubt that INFOMAGIC is a computer programmer not that that matters. He sounds much like someone like me who lacking personal knowledge of a hands on expert - like a Cory Hammasaki or an Ed Yourdon - provides pseudo-verification with vague references to jobs he has been on in private an public sectors. It's a standard trick of intellectual types and of all purpose doomsday salesmen.)

Let me stress, I do not think that any one I know of who was in our doomsday camp was intentionally selling snake oil with the exception of the Johnny-come-latelies such as McaIlvaney who is a foul blow to any who hold a position that he happens to endorse. Those exceptions noted, ours - INFOMAGIC, North, Lehman/Richards et al - was by far the most sincere pumpkin patch that ever awaited the rise of the Great Pumpkin. I was simply disturbed by the shift in our logic in the 2nd half of '99.

Nonetheless, I did not see any of our fundamental assertions challenged by any of the figures. I believe some article's I posted in the Fall of '99 articulated the positive case, namely, that the optimists figures were based on a false foundation. That false foundation INFOMAGIC thoroughly exposed in his last gasp of December.

III. Why didn't the system break down.

Answer: Because Charlotte's web is a whole lot tougher than any snap shot analysis or cross section of it make it appear. It really did seem like the dating problem was one that would be a virus the system itself was designed to pass on and destroy it at every point.

The system did not break down for the same reason that UN Troops are not about to forcibly take over the US. A common slight of hand that doomsday theorists play on the simple (and perhaps even themselves since they seem sincerely trumped by their own trumpery) is to take numbers which are extremely large to the uninitiated and make them appear sufficiently large to accomplish the huge tasks which doomsday requires if it is to indeed be a true doomsday. So the thought of 20,000 UN troops quartered here or there seems like a huge number. But it doesn't take a military tactician to tell you that 20,000 men (with what supply line?) would not be able to hold a major city for more than a few months - much less an entire state. (Besides they always seem to miss the fact that the government education system is doing everything a UN takeover would do without firing a shot.) This is just an analogy of the same faulty logic in another arena this paper is not about doomsday scenarios in general.

The web of an essentially free market and essentially free people is a whole lot stronger than anyone gives it credit who has an agenda against the success of the west. I'll be willing to bet that whether from the liberal right or the conservative left, the premillennial 2nd coming prophecy hounds or the Reformed Calvinistic gloomy optimists, 99% of those who were convinced of the Y2K threat had a preexisting axe to grind with the West. I know I did.

IV. Yada yada yada, I still want to know, "Why didn't the system break down?" Even countries like Italy who did nothing are still up and running - if you could call them "running and up" under any scenario.

Answer: That's a good question. The hardware didn't break down because there were enough rerouting possibilities to handle what did break - news of our death was premature - and apparently the system doesn't have to work perfectly to work sufficiently. So the lights stay on. And as embedded systems go down they will reroute and fix and bring back on line the affected end users. That crisis is over. The only possible exception is the oil supply. I have heard that production has been cut. But even here, the figures I heard are no more serious than hundreds of other factors which have historically cut production in that segment of the economy.

The accounting and software systems of business from PC's to World wide Banking and sales and procurement et. al. apparently are in one of two situations:

1) Running accurately with no system threatening glitches to iron out. Whatever data corruption is taking place is controllable and correctable. Data corruption and glitched systems are the bread and butter of IS staffs so they work a little harder and company profits are a bit lower.

2) The errors are piling up and either unknown or covered over. If this is the case then we are in for a serious down turn. Maybe.

My opinion is that too little has surfaced in the first 2 weeks of January '00 to make the bell curve high point of hidden, systemic corruption serious enough to provoke even a depression or recession. Depression and recession or even unprecedented boom will or won't happened based on other forces. Y2K is finished. (It's only hope is that now that I have declared it dead my private inverse/Foreman theory will kick in - "whatever I predict is always wrong.")

The fact is, we were impeccably right in our logic and many of our facts, but utterly wrong in our conclusions.

V. So what do I do with ten years supply of toilet paper?

Answer: Personally I made it a point not to buy anything I couldn't eat or use. I don't plan to make corn bread for the next 50 years, but our animals will eat it for the next year. The only real boondoggle in our purchasing was the four cartons of cigarettes for barter, and we took those back. Part of my advice was to prepare for disaster in a way that would not leave you destroyed if disaster did not befall. Y2K preparation as insurance was the first thing I ever wrote and a theme I never left. I hope you can say the same.

VI. Seriously, what now?

Answer: I'm with Gary North on this point. We return to our tasks humbled and more focused.

To the extent that we tied our world views and deeper convictions to the Y2K induced Fall of the West we will search for a way to explain our error without explaining away our deeper convictions. I offered my explanation above and no doubt those who hate me and my positions in general will not be convinced and those who agree with me will not need the bolstering I offer. But I, like any honest man when proven wrong, feel an obligation to do damage control to the rest of my convictions.

Better Answer: I like where I am. I like the people who made the move both from my Church and from the rest of America to this little spot.

I would encourage you to consider moving here as well. Y2K was our catalist to move, but we did not move here merely to survive. If you recall 1/3 of what I wrote on Y2KCHAOS.COM, you know that I did not expect to survive a worst case scenario - the lights going out for good.

I moved here to be a part of a Christian community that would be a light on a hill. I want to be part of a Christian community that would stop complaining about how bad everything was and begin to live by the Biblical answer. Until now, the only folks doing this without fanfare are Missionaries and the Amish. The missionaries are too busy elsewhere on the cutting edge of conversion around the world. The Amish are a dead end. (As cute and quaint and sweet as they are, they have rejected God's call to WWDominion.com)

God's kingdom doesn't come with force. It comes as Christians live together and convert those around them and become the leaders, morally intellectually and in their productivity. Zechariah 8 ends with a prophecy that sets the scene of the Messianic reign of Jesus Christ in Chapters 9 and 10. "Ten Gentiles will grab hold of the cloak of one Jew and say take us with you for we have heard that God is with you." The victory of God's kingdom is not through military expansion, not through the whining cynical criticisms of theonomic books, not from the rapture and set up a magical millennial kingdom sometime in the near future, but through His people becoming the sort of people that everyone else looks to for hope.

That's what we're about here in South West Virginia.

By the way if you are looking for a hand out, or for a communal situation go somewhere else. If you are looking for a top-down hierarchy you can fit into for your private security, go to Idaho. If you want good neighbors, a vibrant Church and kids your kids can grow with and marry, if you want your kids to be part of a community that is preparing a top flight education system that still revolves around home schooling - come on. If you want a vision for what God can do that is more than a pipe dream of wanna be - come on. If you're tired of hanging out with folks who think that God is a looser in the world except insofar as he makes you feel good about your faith - what are you waiting for?

I can't endorse every bit of reasoning that got us here, but none the less I'm glad that God has seen fit to start this work and overlook our initial reasoning. I am especially glad that God has left essentially intact the modern world where you can still come join us and have the technology to multiply your efforts. Lets make good use of it.

I'm not sure that all of the reasons motivating the Pilgrims and Puritans to come over to America were noble and good, but I'm glad they came.

Why don't you?

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingingthroughthejunglewithouta.net), January 13, 2000

Answers

None who made predictions should feel bad. Years before the turn of the century, I reviewed prophecies by both Edgar Cacey, and Nostrodamus. They both were well known prophets. Many said their predictions had come true in the past. However both of them predicted dire things for the world and our nation in particular for the last pat of the century. Not a one of their predictions came to pass. I am glad if they had taken place, a great portion of our nation would be under water, and the rest of us would be engaged in a great war. Their predictions tho depicted in graphic stories and documentaries, fell flat. Zilch, nothing, flat zero. Man's predictions always come short of happening. Only thing rock solid are those in the scriptures of the bible. However even they do not come with a date stamp. Even they are under a lable that proves almost to be a disclaimer. All we have as a human is our faith in what ever God we choose for ourselves. There are always flaws in man's actions, even if those flaws are actually good for mankind. I personally feel that God personally intervened in the whole scheme of things, for the outcome to be as it was. He wants to prove to man that He and He alone is supreme above man's machines, and man's intellect. He has something far greater in store for man. One can speculate forever, and never come to the truth.

-- Notforlong (fsur439@aol.com), January 13, 2000.

A nice essay, JL. Perhaps God will use concerns about technology and the roll-over to promote more intentional Christian community. I appreciate your analysis of why we made wrong assumptions. I suspect we will be processing this for a long time.

You did not make any mention of Dale Way's essay on complex, interdendent systems. Are you familiar with it? Any opinions?

-- JoseMiami (caris@prodigy.net), January 13, 2000.

Numerically, that looks like FIVE arguments.....

-- Jay Urban (Jayho99@aol.com), January 13, 2000.

Jay-

"I initially said there were 4 bad arguments we came to rely on in the last year of pre-Y2K preparation. This fifth reason is one I give you for free. "

-- Tarzan the Ape Man (tarzan@swingingthroughthejunglewithouta.net), January 13, 2000.

This guy was never at a loss for words...his web site is painfully long.

-- TM (mercier7@pdnt.com), January 13, 2000.