The leftist that lives in a cage inside my head1 is screeching at me to not post this article. As serendipity would have it, Marxist Sam Kriss eloquently expressed the screeching recently (though given the rest of the article, he may be being ironic):
In his travel diary, Albert Einstein described the Chinese as an ‘industrious, filthy, lethargic people,’ adding that ‘even the children are spiritless and look lethargic’ and ‘the Chinese are incapable of being trained to think logically and specifically have no talent for mathematics.’ That was one hundred years ago. Back then, it was very ordinary for Europeans to write a lot of drivel about the inscrutable Oriental mind and its mysterious concept of ‘face.’ Today, we know that there is no national character, not really, just offensive stereotypes; the human material is the same everywhere. (There’s a particular vision of the Italian character, for instance—but the first Italian person I knew socially was a pale, shy economics student.)
This article is very much about national character, and not at all about IQ. The existence of national character is entirely obvious to me: I also recently spent 2 days in America, at a company activity, and it was enough to give me mild culture shock. Einstein isn’t even entirely wrong about the Chinese: it very much sounds like he’s describing cha bu duo or a natural outcropping of it. Of course, he extrapolated too much from it, but he also saw something true. The Brasilians2 even have a similar concept (in that it’s an aspect of the culture that is pretty dysfunctional yet deeply ingrained) called jeitinho, and you can read about how the national character that produced this fucks things up for them here. I also notice Sam Kriss pulls out the old fallacy about stereotypes: if they don’t apply literally 100% of the time, then they’re false. I think they can apply as little as 40% of the time to be true. You have heard that Latin American cultures are sexist, but Dominicans kick it up a notch: my cousin tells me that as a woman, you will be groped in the Dominican Republic. Not all Dominican men, surely. But clearly, enough that the Dominican Republic can just be called a machista society.
But you know, I’m really not touching on anything heavy like that in this highly speculative, and I hope, at least a little funny article. It’s just that I’m aware this is all very gauche if you’re of a certain political bent, but well, that leftist in my head is in a cage for a reason, and it’s likely because ze made me write this whole unnecessary preamble. I just wish 4chan irreverence had prevailed over the internet, instead of this weird cult where you are not allowed to say certain true things. Anyway, on with the show.
I just got back from a lovely (if hectic) 2 weeks vacation in Rio de Janeiro, Brasil, and why, I got 3 (or perhaps 2, depending on how the second one goes) entire articles out of it! This is the first one, and it all came to me when I saw that our Airbnb had a Brasilian microwave in it. ‘A Brasilian microwave!’ I thought. ‘We don’t get these brands in Puerto Rico’. But as I looked at it, I marveled at its implausibility: you hear of German or Japanese engineering, or hell, even Amer*can engineering, but Brasilian engineering? The microwave showed there is such a thing as Brasilian engineering. And straightaway, we find we already know something of this Brasilian engineering: it is not world-class engineering, or else, we would see Brasilian brands competing in the international markets.
Which is why it’s so damn funny to then learn that they even have a space agency.
Now, this was very surprising. I was giggling the moment I saw that article. ‘Oh Brasil!’ I thought. ‘You are a third rate country, just like Puerto Rico. What are you even doing?’ Prejudiced, yes indeed. But on 4chan, I definitely learned to enjoy international shitflinging3. And true, in Puerto Rico, we don’t even have our own microwaves, meaning that perhaps the article should have been titled A Puerto Rican Microwave4, as the same thesis could be explored that way, but the mighty rocket is definitely a symbol for something, in a way the microwave just isn’t.
At any rate, the facts bear out my prejudice:
The 2003 Alcântara VLS accident was an accident during the Brazilian [sic] Space Agency’s third attempt to launch the VLS-1 rocket, which was intended to launch two satellites into orbit. The rocket ignited on its launch pad at the Alcântara Launch Center, killing 21 people. It is the third deadliest space exploration related disaster in history.
Immediately after learning of Brasilian rocketry (!!!!), we learn they caused the third worst rocket disaster 5 in history. But we could have guessed this, given everything else we know about Brasil.
Brasil, land of the samba, the jogo bonito, the bossa nova, the carnival, and the favela. These are the things Brasilians are world-class at, and these things are all very unlike rockets (ones that don’t explode anyway). Hell, even by sounding out the name of the tragic rocket, the Veículo Lançador de Satélites, I pretty much can see the fireball already: Portuguese, especially Brasilian Portuguese, is one of the most musical languages, but it also sounds remarkably sloppy, at least to a native Spanish speaker, akin to how Dutch apparently sounds like kid German to German ears. But perhaps I exaggerate: Vehículo Lanzador de Satélites6, the Spanish translation, also sounds like KABOOM to me. Living on this degenerate island, Spanish is just firmly welded to “third-rate” in my mind now.
By taking such a jaundiced view of an entire people, can we figure out who are the peoples of the world who can build a rocket? Wikipedia gives us this list of first orbital launches by country:
Soviet Union
United St*tes (it’s really Germany: see Operation Paperclip)
France
Japan
China
United Kingdom
India
Israel
Ukraine
Iran
North Korea
South Korea 7
The only ones that seem implausible to me at first glance are India, Ukraine, Iran, and North Korea. But then, India has a long intellectual tradition, Ukraine is really using grandfathered rockets from the Soviet Union, and Iran is Persia. North Korea though, now that is a real surprise, but it turns out they’re using Soviet tech also (and something from Iran as well).
All the countries on this list (excepting North Korea) are in some way, big shots, so the list scans. But there’s a catch, which is that there are countries one would think could do this that have yet to do it, like Canada 8 and Australia. But Brasil is actually a big shot in a way:
Only Brasil and Canada are failing the rocket test in that list (Italy was the #1 contributor to the Vega rocket), and as we saw on the previous list, you don’t actually need to get on the top 10 to put a payload in orbit, so what’s going on?
Ah, but of course, GDP doesn’t tell you how much these countries are sinking into their space programs. This article suggests Brasil is putting very little into it:
In 2015, the AEB’s budget was just $70 million, while the Indian space agency received $1.16 billion; the Japanese space agency received $3.7 billion; and NASA received a whopping $17.4 billion.
But this was in 2015, long after the Alcântara disaster had put a major dampener on Brasil’s space ambitions. Even then South Korea shows you don’t need to get into the billions to reach orbit:
South Korea will spend 874.2 billion won ($674 million) on space programs this year to expand its domestic space industry, develop a next-generation launch vehicle, and bolster space defense capabilities. It is a 19.5 percent increase from the previous year, and the most South Korea has ever budgeted for space.
...
The second-biggest slice of the budget, or 148 billion won ($113.6 million), will go primarily to developing a next-generation carrier rocket that will succeed the current workhorse, KSLV-2.
So actually Brasil is not that far away from the South Korean budget. Is $44 million a year the difference between a rocket that explodes and one that doesn’t? Even in 2003, it seems the Brasilian space program was underfunded:
“The military didn’t have the money, yet they didn’t have the humility to admit that and say we should stop,” said Luiz Cláudio Almeida, the brother of one of the victims and the president of a relatives' group. “Instead, the military squeezed and squeezed, pressing the civilians to go ahead even when they knew proper working conditions didn’t exist.”
So that’s it! The null hypothesis wins! There is no conflict between samba and rocketry! I have the intellectual honesty to admit my thesis has been falsified and–
Wait, wait, wait, why did the Brasilians even hatch (and then execute) this clearly ill-conceived plan at building a rocket, and why did I know Brasilian rocketry was a bad idea even before knowing of the Alcântara disaster?
Well, as I said above when pointing out things about Brasil that are not like rocketry, it is because of those things. The samba, in particular. But why would a nation not be capable of inventing both the samba and a rocket? Clearly, the people in that country who invent the samba would not be the same people who are trying their hand at rocketry 9. There is a lot of diversity in any nation. And yet, when you look at the things that set a nation apart from the others, that really makes them world-famous, you find some things, not all things: there is no nation that is better than the others at literally everything 10. Well, why not? What happened to the Pareto principle? It’s like real life is an RPG and every nation has a finite amount of points they can use to develop themselves. Or that instead of tech trees, it works more like the Final Fantasy X sphere grid: one giant tech tree that loops around on itself on multiple points and where each character has a different starting position. If this sphere grid exists, empirically, it would seem the samba node is located far from the rockets. Even more, if you have to develop the concept of the anti-rocket you could very well get the samba. I mean, listen to this a bit:
and now look at this:
It’s like the yin-yang pretty much. Developing further the concept of the tech sphere grid, you can see why if you develop say, extermination camps, you could be great at rockets: that rocket schematic just is that damn cold. Those nodes are possibly not that far from each other. I have known Germans before: I had a German computer science professor, have a German friend who pulled an interesting turn into Protestant fundamentalism, and briefly, met a German couple at a radical honesty workshop. I also read Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. And Goethe. And man, the memes are real: there is something straight up angular about the way Germans work, or rather, about the way enough Germans work, such that a stereotype forms. On the chans, they would probably call it autism, but I think angular really works better. Like the German mind is made up of straight lines, while the mind that makes the samba is clearly a very wavy, woozy place. I mean, listen to the samba: it’s like the beach started singing!
By contrast, there was this great takedown of Germans coming from Michel Houellebecq in The Possibility of an Island:
Next to me, an old Englishwoman (desiccated, nasty, the kind who would cut up foxes to decorate her living room), who had already helped herself copiously to eggs, didn’t hesitate to snaffle up the last three sausages on the hot plate. It was five to eleven, the breakfast service had come to an end, it was inconceivable that the waiter would bring out any more sausages. The German who was in the line behind her became rigid; his fork, already reaching for a sausage, stopped in midair, and his face turned red with indignation. He was an enormous German, a colossus, more than two meters tall and weighing at least one hundred and fifty kilos. I thought for a moment that he was going to plant his fork in the octogenarian’s eyes, or grab her by the neck and smash her head onto the hot plates. She, with that senile, unconscious selfishness of old people, came trotting back to her table as if nothing had happened. The German was angry, I could sense that he was incredibly angry, but little by little his face grew calm, and he went off sadly, sausageless, in the direction of his compatriots.
Of course he picked a German for the sausage outrage: it kinda sounds like maybe he saw this or something similar himself 11. Jives with what I saw at that radical honesty workshop: in radical honesty, under a theory that appears to be the psychological equivalent of bloodletting, you are supposed to exhaustively vent your emotions, in particular, your rage. And during it, that German woman really let loose, in German, on her poor husband. I don’t really believe that hate speech is a very useful category, but in that moment, I believed in hate speech. I felt like I was supposed to start Sieg Heiling or maybe raze Dresden: basically, I was ready to get aggressive. I know I read someone say once that maybe Hitler could only have happened to the Germans (maybe it even was Orwell who said this), and listening to an angry German rant, you can definitely hear that there is something to this.
In Dostoevsky’s Demons, there is this great rant by a Slavophile character:
Every people is a people only as long as it has its special God and excludes all the other gods in the world without any compromise, as long as it has faith that it will triumph through its own God and will drive all the other gods from the world. That is what everyone has believed from the beginning of time, all the great peoples, at least all those who were in any way singled out, all who stood at the head of humanity. You can’t go against facts. The Hebrews lived only in anticipation of the coming of the true God, and they left the true God to the world. The Greeks attempted to deify nature and bequeath their religion to the world, that is, philosophy and art. Rome did deify the people in the form of the state, and bequeathed the state to other peoples.
Disregarding the totalitarianism (boy, Dostoevsky really needed to be exposed to oubaitori) there is something here: in the samba, I can hear the God of the Brasilians. They are a people who when the samba plays, will literally stand up in the middle of a crowded restaurant and dance to it, even if there really is no room to do that. If you somehow manage to structure a society along the lines of the samba, something amazing would happen, I just know it. With the samba, the Brasilians have grasped a shard of the Absolute: should they ever manage to become a society that can build a rocket, perhaps they would have actually completed it, as more often than not, you have to be a pretty functional place to build rockets.
In their attempts at rocketry, the Brasilians were unconsciously trying to save the world, by showing that yes, even a country such as theirs could perform the grand feat of instrumental reason that a rocket represents, that instrumental reason, that thing most prized by modernity, is not the sole domain of peoples who could never invent the samba.
We should all hope the Brasilians put a man on the moon, on a Brasilian made rocket.
P.S.: I really don’t know why we don’t get Brasilian appliances over here. The Airbnb had a Brasilian fan (Arno brand, specifically), and that thing was literally a wind tunnel. It’s so good my parents bought one to bring home: when we turned it on there, it was making lampshades and portraits sway from a distance of 7 feet. Truly I have never seen its like, and I wonder why its not in the international markets. I have an uncle who says its hard doing business with Brasilians, so perhaps that’s the reason?
P.P.S During the trip, I also briefly met a New York Times reporter, and he really made an impression. He was like this cool nerd who had an aura of power coming out of him, a certain intensity, a certain hunger, and it made me think this is probably the sort of vibe Ivy League admissions officers are looking for, which if so, is grotesque and terrible.
Perhaps this is the fabled PC thought police?
The Portuguese decided in 1911 that ‘Brasil’ is more beautiful than ‘Brazil’', and I agree, and it’s not like the English language has an official academy in charge of it (unlike Portuguese or Spanish), so that ‘Brazil’ convention can just suck it.
As well as learned about half of my spirituality. Yes, there were very strange things going on on 4chan indeed, back when I was a regular.
Do you think you would buy such a contraption?
Numbers one and two going to the real disaster artists of the global village, the Russians.
Do you see how practically nothing changes? As a Spanish speaker, you can pretty much understand 80% of written Portuguese (and vice-versa), though it sounds rather different. But then the differences are really different: (English/Spanish/Portuguese) Chicken/Gallina/Frango, Chair/Silla/Cadera, Hip/Cadera/Quadril (yes, Spanish for hip is Portuguese for chair). Basically, Portuguese is Spanish until it isn't!
Wait, they were beaten by North Korea!? And by 10 years too! Yikes!
Though I don't know, "Canadian rocketry" also sounds very funny to me, as in "Canada, you second-rate country, why would you think you could build a rocket?". It seems Canada agrees, because I don't see that they ever made the attempt. They did produce what appear to be top-of-the-line sounding rockets, which are not really rockets, come on, everyone knows they're thinking of the kind of rocket that puts you in orbit when thinking of "rocketry" or "rocket science".
At least, I hope, but with Alcântara, who knows?
Disturbingly for my narcissism, there definitely exist people out there who are better than me at everything (they definitely exist for you too, and if they don't, you need to read The Last Psychiatrist).
He also throws shade at the English, which makes it sound like it may be a conflict between romance language speakers and the rest. The romance languages are definitely more musical: maybe there is something to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Though one should not underestimate the French - English enmity.
But it all changes. Teilhard de Chardin, a philosopher priest, said the same about the Chinese as Einstein. When I was last in China it was their efficiency that was disturbing. They kept asking if everyone in England "stopped for tea" but that trope is 50 years out of date. France was wonderful when the French were French, everyone sleeping off lunch getting ready for a late night dinner of politics and wine, now they have become German. Just finding an Englishman in London is getting tricky.