Two weeks ago, I read Paul Graham’s new essay “The Four Quadrants of Conformism,” and it’s stuck with me since.

As usual, Paul points to something hidden in plain sight — something many of us have probably felt, perhaps without consciously noticing it.

The question he poses is whether and how much the space to freely share and debate ideas has shrunk in recent years; the answer, it seems, is quite a bit.

Anecdotally, and in my own experience, this is true: in the decade or so since I was in college, I’ve noticed (mostly subconsciously) how many fields of discussion are basically closed, how many more require caveats, and how many of those caveats are premised on “Speaking as a …”.

That’s a tough way to carry on a conversation at any level, but it’s also notable how much that was once acceptable to discuss but not to believe can now be said with a straight face. (So far as I know, none of my classmates marched and heiled with tiki torches.)

Banning ideas tends not to work. Identity shapes how we see the world, but not the basic facts of life. (Imagine Galileo’s op-ed today: “As an astronomer, I am compelled to report what I observe ….”)

And, above all, it’s hard to see how we might conform our way out of our problems.

I read a poll this week that said that something like 40 percent of people still support the president, and another 4 percent are undecided.

There’s a separate essay to be written on the 40 percent, and how hard it is to see democracy surviving the “leadership” of a guy who genuinely believes he could shoot somebody on 5th Avenue and get away with it — and he might be right.

But it’s the undecided who really get me. If 4 percent of America really is undecided, that’s an awful lot of people: let’s say 8 million, if two-thirds of about 12 million are of voting age. (That’s a little more than the combined population of Croatia and the country of Georgia.)

There has been no other topic of conversation for five years — until Covid came along and killed more than 150,000 Americans. And some people still can’t decide?

Politicians (especially executives) make decisions. That’s their job. And decisions made and unmade have made the United States not great but, for the first time, pitied.

In a couple of months, it’s our turn to make a decision about those decisions. About who’s responsible. About which way we want to go as a country, as a society.

Decide. And decide well. Because there’s no longer any question as to what a difference four years can make.

Survival is success.

Sometimes, that’s true.

But it’s also true that terrain-following is the most harrowing, technically demanding, exhausting, and dangerous flying there is.

It’s much more efficient — and a whole lot easier — to seek altitude if you possibly can.

It’s painful to watch a sports team coast for years or decades on former glories.

“Never mind the losing,” they say: “Keep coming to the ballpark and paying through the nose for snacks and souvenirs. After all, the ghost of So-and-so still inhabits this field. And who knows? You might catch a glimpse of him.”

The truth, as everyone can see, is that these teams aren’t those teams of yore. And a mismanaged team in legendary uniforms is pretty hard to watch.

Sooner or later, it’s time to rebuild. And once you make that decision, buckle up: it’s going to look different, it’s going to take time, and it can’t be done by half-measures.

After all, the only thing worse than a refusal to rebuild is a constant rebuilding. Then you’re the Browns: named after a founding father of the league and with a proud history, but with a new coach this year, a new GM the next, and a new quarterback after that — and precious little to show for all that on the field or the scoreboard.

Watching the first half of the Netflix series about a young Hasidic woman’s attempt to leave her community in Brooklyn, I was first captivated by the images of travel and music.

Those are scarce commodities these days, of course, so the plot line that unfolds in a Berlin conservatory offers plenty of food for the homebound soul.

But the cultural portrayal leaped off the screen, too: this tiny (admittedly elite, adapted for the screen) slice of Berlin is filled with people of all colors, cultures, and characters. They slip effortlessly between languages and deal openly but relatively lightly with their country’s past.

My first reaction was, “They are who we said we were.” But then I realized that’s not really true: even if we take this ludicrously small sample as representative in any meaningful way, what really matters is that the culture, the history, and — crucially — the promise are different.

Saying that contemporary Germany is like the United States is like comparing the two countries’ constitutions: you can spot the resemblances, but Germany’s resembles — and does not resemble — that of the United States in specific ways, for specific reasons.

Covid might hasten a constitutional crisis in the United States, but the virus isn’t going to help us write a new “basic law,” as U.S. and allied intellectuals did in defeated Germany. We’re going to have to do that for ourselves, but we don’t have to do it truly alone: more than 200 years on, there are plenty of other examples of similar ideas on different evolutionary paths to borrow and adapt.

Mean-reversion is an enormously powerful force — and all the more so for being so drastically underrated.

It’s why new-year’s resolutions don’t stick, habits are hard to change, and the status quo wins as much as it does.

A couple of weeks ago, I was musing about what it might look like to return to “normal,” and I realized (again) that we’re still not far enough into the new. “Normal” still brings up images of office buildings, ubiquitous air travel, and pretty much limitless energy consumption.

Of course we’re all sick and tired of being sick and masked and tired, and of course we’re all looking forward to enjoying the freedoms and opportunities we used to take more or less for granted.

But.

For one thing, taking the climate emergency seriously will require adaptations much wider in scope and longer in duration than anything we’ve experienced thus far with Covid. Five months into really living with Covid, this story still isn’t getting enough play.

For another, what if we’re not looking at the right means in the right ways? More than 75 years of unprecedented global peace and prosperity, if truly unprecedented, means we might have some much bigger and tougher long-term mean-reversions on the horizon.

Fear-mongering or facile historical analogies won’t help us prevent or prepare for the possibility, but neither will willful ignorance. More connected and more prosperous isn’t necessarily normal. Still less more prosperous because more connected.

Not every generation lives through something like this, but the decisions we make now will surely shape what’s normal for generations to come.

An honest question, and the answer matters.

It’s worth getting clear on this.

Consider this question for a few minutes longer than you ever have before today. Get past the first answer, the glib one, the one with all the corporate nonsense words in it. Get uncomfortably specific.

Then, ask yourself if there’s any viable strategy available.

The most important article I read this past week was David Leonhardt’s long-form exposé on “The Unique U.S. Failure to Control the Virus.” (This pairs well with Jonathan Swan’s viral interview with the president on HBO/Axios.) There is a conclusion or two that I’d quibble with here, but it’s essential to understand the situation of the United States in context: simply, we failed to move fast enough, failed to coordinate economic and health policy, and — above all — have been shouting more lies and confusion through a bigger megaphone than anyone else. We’re still suffering in a way that no other developed “peer” country is, it shows, and the beatings will continue until morale improves.

Another article worth reading comes from the NYT magazine. It asks, “What if Working From Home Goes On … Forever?” The better question might be, why wouldn’t or shouldn’t it? There will be reasons to go back to working in person, but they’ll be discrete — and by the time that’s generally possible (let’s say at least a year from now), our habits, baselines, technologies, and workflows will have adjusted tremendously. Most U.S. workers didn’t know what Zoom was in March. Now it’s a verb, and so ubiquitous as to be exhausting. Consider how much and how quickly they’ve iterated in that time, and consider how many other companies are working like crazy to make software for a truly remote-first world. “Skype, only better” is one promise; “international business meetings, only better and without the jet lag” is a new category just coming into focus.

Finally, on a more personal note, the article that changed my mind and actions the most this week was Ben Kuhn’s “Be Impatient” [HT to last week’s newsletter from Farnam Street]. How fast can you go? How about when you know which direction you’re trying to go vs. when you don’t?

Let’s get really, really clear about a few things:

First, the net effect of the ongoing Covid crisis — especially in the United States — has been to accelerate pre-existing patterns. Working from home feels different, but we’ve had the current generation of tools for years, and the digital workforce was already growing. The brokenness of our health and insurance systems shouldn’t surprise anyone; that it’s been breaking even faster in recent months shouldn’t surprise, either.

And the disparate experiences of people of different races, classes, and household-wealth percentiles have been accelerating, too. There was great hope at the outset (in some quarters) that this would be the great reset, but evidence is still lacking. Instead, we’re getting austerity-lite: without the macho “confidence” narratives of 2008, perhaps, but with all the pious tropes of “discouragement” and “disincentives” that just won’t die — even in the face of a pandemic.

The second big thing is to recognize that change — if it’s going to happen at all — is going to have to come through politics (and the culture, which is as ever upstream of the politics).

An important and often missed distinction. And it’s now clear we badly need better of both.

In politics, partisanship just keeps metastasizing. Even a cursory glimpse at history (or medicine) would indicate that’s not a good thing. It would also show that it’s very, very hard to stop: being social and political animals, people really like competing in teams — and once team loyalty to a subgroup eclipses loyalty to an overarching (constructed) group, it’s difficult to reverse.

In the more prosaic realm of policy, we simply need better work. And no, more technocratic “nudging” is not necessarily better. Even to the extent that policy organs are in thrall to political dysfunction, there’s no excuse for just plain shoddy work.

Trying to define policy is difficult enough. (Just try doing it for yourself.) But, once you’ve got a working common-sense definition, ask yourself if the results we’re seeing and getting are acceptable.