A refrain in the television series Foundation is that, in the grand scheme of history, individuals and individual actions do not matter. Amusingly, the focus of the series is on individuals and individual actions. As it turns out, the lives of individuals make for more compelling storytelling than long arcs of history. Show creators David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman were wise in this regard to deviate from Isaac Asimov’s source material. But the tactic simultaneously undermines the central premise of Foundation as a concept while also revealing two fundamental truths about human existence: individuals matter and we cannot predict the future.
As the show explains, in the far distant future, mathematicians Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick have figured out how to foretell future events using what they call “psychohistory.” They confront the Empire—the dominant power in the galaxy—with the news that the empire will collapse in 500 years. Galactic chaos, a new dark age, will follow for tens of thousands of years. The collapse cannot be prevented, but its length can be shortened by the creation of a Foundation—a group whose function will be to preserve knowledge and rebuild society.
Seldon and Dornick present their case as an attempt to alleviate human suffering on a massive scale, and across a huge swath of time and space. The show takes liberties with the books to provide viewers with consistent and relatable characters over long periods. This means adding a virtually ageless robot, a series of cloned emperors, and multiple characters (including Seldon and Dornick) who either undergo generational sleep, appear in hologram form, or both. The result is a series where characters lecture one another on their insignificance while performing significant acts that alter the course of events time and time again.
In this way, the message of the show is in this way far different from that of the books. The books give the impression that Seldon has successfully developed psychohistory. The drama is in watching the plans unfold and trying to figure out how to live in the moment while they do. This narrative has proven inspirational to some. Economist Paul Krugman famously cited Foundation as what led to his choice of career: “I didn’t grow up wanting to be a square-jawed individualist or join a heroic quest; I grew up wanting to be Hari Seldon, using my understanding of the mathematics of human behavior to save civilization.” As Murray Rothbard has pointed out, the original motto of the Econometric Society was “Science is prediction.”
But, of course, Krugman’s perspective (while popular) is not the only take on what economics is or what it ought to be trying to accomplish. In his book Theory and History, Ludwig von Mises countered that, “As a corrective of these fancies the truism must be stressed that only individuals think and act.” Mises goes on to explain that:
What distinguishes the sciences of human action is the fact that there is no such foreknowledge of the individuals’ value judgments, of the ends they will aim at under the impact of these value judgments, of the means they will resort to in order to attain the ends sought and of the effects of their actions insofar as these are not entirely determined by factors the knowledge of which is conveyed by the natural sciences. We know something about these things, but our knowledge of them and about them is categorially different from the kind of knowledge the experimental natural sciences provide about natural events.
In other words, individual humans acting in response to the unique circumstances of their time and place and the influences that shaped them (including other individuals) will not behave in ways that are easily predictable either in isolation or over long periods of time. Our inability to view or treat individual humans as interchangeable or ultimately unimportant to history should point us away from deterministic doctrines. Instead, it should encourage us to value the unpredictable, idea-generating, history-shaping potential of each one of us. That’s not a bad lesson to take away from a science fiction show.
