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For a couple of months now I’ve felt a particularly strong wave of realism, or pessimism, depending on how you gloss it. At least, that’s how it seemed at first. But as the impulse crystallizes over time, perhaps its better to say it is macroscopism : a sense of large-scale long-term consequences and implications, and a sense of the void in short-term successes or losses within a long-term process that remains unchanged.
In some cases, an entire field is built up around principles and assumptions which haven’t had their usefulness assessed — or which are discovered to be invalid — on some important scale; on a global scale, or on a very small scale, or under a meaningful set of boundary conditions. I refer to this as field failure. A carefully-constructed field can immediately rectify the situation by reframing its axioms and recalculating its key theorems and propositions. A field built more on philosophy, debate, and force of personality is just as likely to be unwilling to admit a failure has occurred (or even could occur!). Instead, prominent field members may attack the suggestion that such a failure has occurred, avoid clearly stating axioms in a way that allows direct challenge, or highlight local predictive successes of the field as though that invalidates the discovery of a systemic failure.
This is like announcing the resolution of an error in a 100-page angle trisection proof, making it “more correct”, when a 3-page counterproof exists demonstrating that no such proof can ever be correct.
From this perspective, I will highlight field failures I imagine as they arise — starting with a branch of economics.
For a field to fail, a subset of language must also fail; the accepted jargon for a set of thoughts will not suffice to describe things that contravene the field’s foundation. And each failure of this form captures some portion of human output, intellectual and physical and social, and turns it on itself.
So when you find yourself encountering what seems an insurmountable logical disconnect, in family or business or social life, it may not be a lack of eloquence on your part. The language you are using may not be nuanced enough to express what are straightforward and natural thoughts.