Inculcated Reflex and Disaster, Part 1: Shibboleths and HS2 Failure.

It's a curious paradox that, in order to be accepted into any intellectual circle, or any circle which aspires to intellectual status, an individual must learn to suppress original thought. If we can understand this paradox, we can understand how really great disasters happen, supposedly "without warning".

Acceptance into an intellectual circle is dependent on other intellectuals accepting that you are indeed one of them, and this is why the Nobel Laureate Prof. Richard Feynman refused membership of a sort of secret society for gifted people (which seemed to operate in every major college and university in the United States and possibly beyond), because the only point of membership was to assert one's intellectual status, not to make or facilitate any new discovery or insight. Unfortunately, very few of the world's intellectual elite share Feynman's insight; that membership of any self-defining elite can swiftly destroy your worth and usefulness as a person.

Now, the fact that acceptance into the circle is dependent on the other individuals in it, accepting that you are one of them, means, actually, that each one of them is as nervous of his status as you are. Therefore, they can only agree with your views and ideas if their survival instinct tells them that others will agree with you, too. So, although as a new member you are required to pronounce whatever the local shibboleth happens to be, there is also a  super-shibboleth at work, which threatens to expose and disgrace any establish member who accepts your pronunciation of the shibboleth when others don't.

In Britain, the Royal Society is, in theory, a collection of the nation's brightest and best scientists. In practice, like most similar organizations, it is instead a collection of the most influential British scientists. The Royal Society selects and refines its influential membership through a number of shibboleths, the most currently important of which is rejection of any sort of serious British space programme, especially manned, as a threat to "real science" or just an absurdity: something so ridiculous that all credibility is lost merely by suggesting that it is possible, let alone desirable. Something set up by King Charles the Second to oblige his ministers to become forward looking, inquiring and imaginative, has become a mechanism for opposing and covertly sabotaging the "wrong kind" of progress. The Royal Society stands a barrier between Britain and the second half of the Twentieth Century, let alone any part of the Twenty-first, when it ought to be getting its sights set on the Twenty-second Century by now.

The mechanism by which shibboleths disable a person's capacity for original thought is scientifically explicable: our conscious minds and our subconscious minds work in parallel all the time, and the primary task of the subconscious mind is the avoidance of danger. The sub-conscious mind does not analyse and understand things: it reacts to danger. It's definition of danger is harvested from the experiences of the conscious mind, but without the conscious mind usually being aware of what it is programming its subconscious "watchdog" system with. Shellshock is what the subconscious mind does when there is overwhelming danger which the conscious mind cannot evade or even understand, for a period of time. If the conscious mind knows it might die at any minute, and it isn't supplying any precise definition of what the signs are of the situation it must avoid in order to stay alive, the sub-conscious mind demands a reaction to almost everything.

For members of an elite, membership becomes the core of the individual's self-awareness and eventually the sub-conscious assigns any threat to that status the same significance as it would to a threat to life. The sub-conscious promptly does what it is there for, and speeds up the individual's responses to shibboleth-type situations by making the reaction happen before the conscious mind thinks anything through. Anything touching on matters which are perceived as crucial to the elite, is dealt with by developing a set of inculcated reflexes ("Pavlovian" is nearly but not quite the right word) which guide the individual away from the perceived danger as if it were a cliff edge or a fire. The fatal flaw of the human sub-conscious, is that this can condition the individual to ignore or even actively oppose, the very kind of warning to which he should be paying urgent attention: see the housing market-driven banking crash of 2008, or Stalin's refusal to allow Soviet forces to deploy or even make any preparation for Hitler's "Operation Barbarossa" in 1941, despite being given two weeks warning and a quite reasonably accurate German order of battle by British Intelligence. The heroic outcome: the Red Army managing to halt and then defeat the German army just outside Moscow only by stupendous effort and massive sacrifice even with the help of the weather, should have been a routine and inexpensive annihilation of German invasion forces in summer while they were still safely hundreds of miles from Moscow. It was a Shibboleth of Stalin and the whole politburo, that the British were untrustworthy. manipulative liars, and that shibboleth killed millions of Russians. British Intelligence handed Stalin a chance to win the war before the Wansee conference, that launched Hitler's "final solution", had even taken place. Nearly all of the genocidal violence which the Jewish population experienced before the Wansee conference, occurred in the lands which Stalin lost control of primarily because he ignored British warnings.

And the cryptographic breakthroughs which allowed British Intelligence to offer that warning in the first place, wouldn't have been possible if the Nazis and German military leadership had not developed an "Enigma shibboleth" which made questioning the security of their encryption protocols seem like an act of disloyalty.

Once the proposed HS2 high-speed railway between London and Birmingham achieved "all party support", which in this case is defined as the leaderships of all three "main" political parties agreeing to support it without consulting their back benchers and membership, the necessity, benefits and inevitable success of HS2 immediately became a shibboleth of the British political elite. Precisely because of the importance of the matter, because the technical risks are significant and the financial risks are absolutely gigantic, the political elite started to ignore or reject anything which made anything of any of the risks or the huge unfairness with which half a million households must be treated in order to push the project through. 

This is the real reason why the Transport Secretary has just invoked what amount to war powers to keep secret a report, submitted to the Cabinet in 2011, which warns of the risks of HS2 failing in financial and political terms. (The risk of a purely technical failure: some part of the project proving technically impossible, has not yet even been considered so far as can be discerned by any document in the public domain.) Patrick McLoughlin claims that he is acting to protect the confidences of those civil servants who prepared the report, though he has no such respect for those who have authored material in support of the project and he publishes their work widely and freely. The truth is, he is acting to protect, not the process by which the report was prepared, but the process by which it was ignored by the political elite, acting on their inculcated reflexes.

One doesn't need to know what the report says to know why it has to be secret: if it raised serious doubts, or issued some grave warning, and ministers (with the support of the opposition leader) had decided to press ahead anyway, based on a reappraisal or some fresh evidence, that would be perfectly respectable and there would be no call for secrecy. The reason for keeping such a report secret for so long can only lie in how that report was dealt with in the decision-making process and not in its content. Perhaps campaigners should amend their freedom of information requests to cover the way the report was considered after being submitted, rather than anything which involves its content or the privacy of those civil servants who compiled it?

Although the blog author does not know of any equivalent report covering technical, rather than financial, risks to the HS2 project, any plan which involves a river diversion near where the A52, important existing railways and the proposed HS2 railway all intersect the river Erewash, must have been subjected to some well-informed scepticism by one or more engineers by now. The apparent silence on this issue suggests that there is another report, so threatening to the HS2 shibboleth, that even its existence has been kept secret. There is, however, a set of outline descriptions of the civil engineering challenges for each bit of track: Please accept the preceding link as acknowledgement of the source of the extract below.

3.5.4
In the vicinity of the station and Toton Yard, the existing Trent Junction to Chesterfield (Erewash Valley) line would be diverted to pass through the proposed new station on the modified existing network, and this line would lie to the east of the high speed alignment along this length. Trains from the high-level lines would also be able to bypass the new station by utilising the new rail flyover that passes over the high speed alignment, and rejoining the Trent Junction to Chesterfield line alongside Sandiacre after passing through Toton Yard.

Toton station to Trowell

3.5.5
North of Toton, the high speed route would reduce from six tracks to four and then two tracks, and it would then pass under the bridge carrying the A52 Brian Clough Way over the current railway (2). The extent of the alteration of the lateral positioning of existing lines, as well as the introduction of HS2, would require that the existing bridge be demolished and replaced. As the A52 could not be closed for the duration required to achieve these works, either a new permanent off-line bridge would be constructed or a temporary off-line diversion and associated temporary structure would be needed.

3.5.6
North of the A52, the River Erewash would require diversion over approximately 100m to avoid conflict with the realigned existing lines.

3.5.7
Further north from the A52, Derby Road crosses the existing lines (3). There is insufficient vertical clearance under this structure to accommodate the new high-speed lines, and the horizontal positions of the high speed and realigned existing lines would conflict with the supports of the existing structure. The structure would therefore have to be demolished and replaced about 2m higher.

3.5.8
North of Derby Road, the route would rise in level, climb out of the Erewash Valley, and swing eastwards to run parallel to the M1, north of Stanton Gate. About 550m north of Derby Road, the route would cross the River Erewash, the Erewash Canal and the realigned existing Erewash rail lines, on a 780m viaduct (4).

The blog author is somewhat inclined to bet that one of the sections of HS2 most likely to halt the entire project for technical reasons, is highlighted above. Note that the A52 has to be permanently realigned merely to allow the river to be moved in order to allow the existing railway to be moved to allow the HS2 line to be built without a low radius bend in it. This is entirely a consequence of ministers setting a specification for a very high track speed of 400 kph, (for prestige reasons and no other), when the need they are supposedly meeting is one of capacity. Even the brief summaries of engineering challenges are so vast in aggregate that he cannot be sure that there are not dozens of other sections like this. Despite the utter indifference of the political elite to any problem besetting a shibboleth project, the civil service is methodical and the blog author expects that they will have commissioned reports and assessments, or will do so shortly. The blog author is also quietly confident that the political elite will ignore these in their own decision-making and suppress news of their existence in order to avoid the political embarrassment of using war powers to prevent their publication.


PS:
The above should also give some clue as to why a degree of privacy is essential to mental health: if a person is concerned (or knows for certain under many regimes) that any thought they might voice, or note down, can be heard, observed or recorded and then used against them in some way, then conscious attempts at self-censorship will turn into a reflex by which the sub conscious mind attempts to keep the conscious mind out of trouble by stopping it from thinking at all. It's not just a question of the harm that may be done by intrusive surveillance by the state: many elite groups and cults require candidates and members to open their whole lives, including their innermost thoughts, up to constant scrutiny and in many cases systematic and relentless criticism. It's almost impossible that such a process will fail to do damage.