In the previous Megamachine papers we described the mechanics mainly through industrial, political and territorial cases — DMG Mori, Index-Makino, Cerrejón, Catatumbo, Colombia's EPS system, the climate conferences, the change of course in German politics after 1992. We showed how substance is shifted without any single authority intending or overseeing the shift. We characterised the Megamachine as a socio-technical system whose effect consists in producing collective consequences for which nobody personally answers.
This paper is laid out differently. It is not about industrial substance, not about territorial violence, not about institutional procrastination. It is about a discourse — the optimism discourse of our time. More precisely: about the thesis that there is an automatic, data-backed, professionally run optimism which itself fulfils a function in the Megamachine. It is not its corrective. It is its sedative function. It supplies the subjects with the relief the system needs so that the shifts can carry on without resistance forming.
That is a strong thesis. It should not be read as the condemnation of a genre or of a single author. Hans Rosling, whose book Factfulness we discuss at length below, is not the villain of this paper. He was a committed Swedish physician, a gifted educator, a man who relied on humility and a foundation of data. He died of pancreatic cancer in 2017; his book appeared posthumously in 2018, edited by his son Ola and his daughter-in-law Anna Rosling Rönnlund. What we are examining is not Rosling's personal motivation. What we are examining is the function his work has taken on in global discourse — and the conditions under which a certain type of data-backed optimism is installed today as required reading for the educated middle class.
I. A Spiegel Column as a Point of Entry
On 29 April 2026 — one day ago, on the eve of this paper — Der Spiegel published a column by Ullrich Fichtner under the headline "Dagegen ist auch Donald Trump machtlos" [Even Donald Trump Is Powerless Against This]. Fichtner is an experienced Spiegel reporter, born in 1965, who has reported from war and crisis zones; his Spiegel profile shows him with changing postings in Hamburg, New York and Paris. He has made his book "Geboren für die großen Chancen" [Born for the Great Opportunities] (Penguin, 2024) into his own brand. His argument in the column follows a simple line. The Global Wind Report 2026 shows 1,300 gigawatts of installed wind-power capacity worldwide. Renewables are growing fast. Adam Ferguson, the 18th-century Scottish Enlightenment thinker, teaches: "The world is the result of human action, not of human design." So whoever makes plans against the energy transition will fail. "The cheese has been eaten," Fichtner writes. "Taken as a whole, a revolution is rolling up the whole shop, and it can no longer be stopped."
Fichtner cites the Spanish economist Carlota Pérez, who since the 1980s has ordered the history of the industrial revolutions into five waves — textile machinery, steam, steel-electricity-heavy industry, oil-automobile-mass production, information-telecommunications-IT. Pérez argues that each wave, after an installation phase of crises, crashes and upheavals, develops a "golden age" of stability and prosperity. The Wind Report simply extends Pérez's theory by a sixth wave — that of renewables — and Fichtner adopts this. His closing sentence: "But thoughts are free. And our times today are so much in motion that, with all these technological revolutions, one can easily get confused."
Three observations on this text before we come to the real core. First: Pérez herself has pointed out again and again over the past ten years that the golden age does not come automatically — it requires political steering that is not taking place today. Fichtner suppresses this point. Second: the 1,300 gigawatts of wind power are a fraction of global energy production — fossil capacity stands at over 8,000 gigawatts, and in 2024 China built more new coal-fired power stations than all other countries combined. Fichtner does not supply this context. Third, and this is the decisive point: if the cheese has been eaten, nobody needs to negotiate any more. If the revolution cannot be stopped, nobody needs to work any more. If Trump is powerless, his arguments no longer need to be refuted. The message brings relief. It frees people from having to act. That is precisely the function we are examining.
II. Who Was Hans Rosling, and How Did He Become a Phenomenon
Hans Gösta Rosling was born on 27 July 1948 in Uppsala. He studied medicine at Uppsala University, later public health at St. John's Medical College in Bangalore. In 1981 he was sent to Mozambique as a young doctor, where he discovered the disease konzo — a paralysis caused by cyanide poisoning from insufficiently processed cassava, which affected thousands of people in famine regions of sub-Saharan Africa. This research made him known as a physician. In 1997 he became Professor of International Health at the Karolinska Institutet in Stockholm. In 2005, together with Ola Rosling and Anna Rosling Rönnlund, he founded the Gapminder Foundation, whose declared aim was to promote a "fact-based worldview" through animated visualisations of statistical data. In 2007 Gapminder sold the Trendalyzer software to Google.
In 2006 Rosling gave his first TED talk — "The best stats you've ever seen" — in which he used animated bubble charts to show the growth of the world population, the development of life expectancy and the fall in infant mortality in emerging and developing countries. The talk became a viral phenomenon — today more than 15 million views. Rosling became the science pop star of an attention-driven media sphere, the "Sword Swallower of Statistics", as he liked to call himself. He spoke at the World Economic Forum in Davos, before the UN General Assembly, before Bill Gates in person. His last wish was a book — Factfulness, which appeared posthumously in 2018.
Bill Gates spread the book as widely as possible. In the summer of 2018 Gates gave a copy to every college graduate in the USA of the class of 2018 who asked for one. Gates wrote in Time: "One of the best books I have ever read." Barack Obama recommended it too — "a hopeful book about some of the most important trends in the world, which many people do not know about." The German edition carries the Obama line on the jacket. The first German edition appeared in 2018 from the publisher Ullstein. Factfulness became a bestseller in more than 30 countries; it became required reading at business schools, in consulting firms, in corporate leadership. UNICconsult, a German strategy consultancy, wrote in a typical recommendation: "An evidence-based view of the world is necessary in order to design fact-based strategies for the future at the international level. In an evidence-based world, little room then remains for symbolic politics or for the most varied ideologies."
This last formula is analytically important. Whoever speaks in the name of "facts" implicitly claims to stand beyond all ideology. And whoever stands beyond ideology can dismiss politics itself — as the negotiating space of competing values and interests — as ideological and therefore obsolete.
III. The Ten Instincts as a Doctrine of Reassurance
The centrepiece of Factfulness is a list of ten "instincts" which, according to Rosling, distort our perception of the world. They are: the gap instinct (we divide the world into rich and poor although it is a spectrum), the negativity instinct (we expect bad news), the straight-line instinct (we extrapolate linearly), the fear instinct (we overestimate risks), the size instinct (we lose proportions), the generalisation instinct (we divide into "us" and "them"), the destiny instinct (we believe things do not change), the single-perspective instinct (we see only one side), the blame instinct (we look for scapegoats instead of systemic causes), the urgency instinct (we react rashly). The book devotes a chapter to each instinct, with anecdotes from Rosling's research life, with charts from the Gapminder database, and with the recurring punchline that chimpanzees choosing answers at random do better in his tests than "teachers, journalists, Nobel laureates and investment bankers".
At first glance the list is reasonable. Some of the instincts are known from cognitive psychology — the fear instinct corresponds to what Daniel Kahneman described as the "availability heuristic", the size instinct to the "neglect of base rates", the gap instinct to the tendency towards binary classification. Nobody will dispute that people have cognitive biases. Nobody will dispute that statistics can help against these biases.
But if you read the ten instincts together, a pattern emerges that is hidden in the individual parts. Nine of the ten instincts point in the same direction. They all criticise a perception that makes problems seem too big, too pressing, too serious, too fraught with conflict. The negativity instinct (we think things are getting worse) is defused with the punchline that things are getting better. The fear instinct (we fear risks) is defused with the punchline that the risks are smaller than thought. The urgency instinct (we think we must act) is defused with the punchline that most things are not so urgent. The blame instinct (we look for those responsible) is defused with the punchline that we should rather analyse systems — which in practice often means that no one responsible is named, because the system is diffuse enough.
There are not ten instincts pointing in all directions. There are nine instincts in one direction — reassurance — and one in the other: the straight-line instinct warns against assuming linear growth where exponential growth would be possible. But this one is applied exclusively to positive trends — to education rates, life expectancy, income growth. It is not applied to negative trends — exponential CO2 growth, exponential rates of biodiversity loss, exponential debt growth.
Analytically, this is the decisive point. Rosling's ten instincts are not a neutral list of cognitive biases. They are a doctrine of reassurance in list form. They enable the reader to weaken every worry — about climate change, about inequality, about war, about job losses through AI — by applying one of the ten instincts. Nothing in the list helps to recognise a justified worry as justified. Everything in the list helps to classify every worry as overdramatised.
IV. The Four-Level Model and the Invisible Axis
A second pillar of Rosling's work is the four-level model. Instead of dividing the world into "developed" and "developing countries" — which Rosling calls outdated — he proposes a division by daily income. Level 1: up to two US dollars a day (about one billion people). Level 2: two to eight dollars (three billion). Level 3: eight to 32 dollars (two billion). Level 4: over 32 dollars (one billion). This classification is analytically more powerful than the old two-worlds view; there is nothing wrong with that. It correctly shows that most people today live neither in extreme poverty nor in Western prosperity, but in a statistical middle field.
But the classification has a built-in act of making things invisible. It measures only income, not wealth. It measures only average income, not the internal distribution. It says that one billion people live on Level 4 — which puts an Indian with a daily income equivalent to 35 dollars in the same class as the richest resident of Manhattan. According to Rosling, an Indian teacher and Elon Musk share the same income level. What lies between them — a factor of 100,000 — disappears in the classification.
This is no accident. Rosling does something that has become a method in the development literature over the past twenty years: he shifts the gaze from the internal inequality of rich societies to global averages. If you compare globally — Indian teachers with Congolese farmers, Brazilian saleswomen with Chinese factory workers — living standards converge. Global inequality between countries has been falling since 1990, measured by classical indicators. But if you compare within rich societies — the top one per cent with the bottom 50 per cent in the USA, in Germany, in France — inequality has been rising dramatically since 1980. Thomas Piketty documented this in 2013 with his book Le Capital au XXIe siècle [Capital in the Twenty-First Century]: the concentration of wealth in the developed countries is higher today than in the Belle Époque before the First World War.
Rosling does not speak of this internal inequality. He concentrates on global convergence, which can be read optimistically. The four-level model makes internal inequality invisible by creating a Level 4 of one billion people in which an Indian teacher and Elon Musk carry the same label. What would statistically be a coarsening becomes an ideological message: most people are in the middle, so the world is no longer shaped by the class antagonisms that Marxism or Critical Theory analysed.
This message is not false — it has an empirical basis. But it is a selection. It suppresses what the internal history of the rich societies since 1980 tells. And precisely this internal history — the growing concentration of wealth, the shrinking middle class, the erosion of the wage share — is the precondition for many political phenomena that Rosling cannot explain in his book: right-wing populism, the Brexit decision, Trump's election in 2016 and 2024, the yellow-vest movement, the German AfD wave. Whoever reads Rosling has no explanation for these phenomena. They appear to him as distortions of a perception that has been wrongly calibrated by ten cognitive instincts.
V. The Distribution — Bill Gates as Godfather
The history of how Factfulness was disseminated is worth an investigation of its own. Bill Gates did not recommend the book by chance. He made it a standard work. In the summer of 2018, via the Microsoft-owned bookselling platform, Gates gave a copy to every college graduate in the USA who asked for one — a campaign that must have cost several million US dollars. On his blog GatesNotes he recommended the book as "one of the best I have ever read" and explained what had convinced him about Rosling: the four-level model as a correction of the "developed/developing country" dichotomy which Bill Gates himself — as he admitted — had used for years.
As the second-richest person in the world, Bill Gates has his own view of global development. Through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation he has made more than 75 billion US dollars in foundation spending since 1999 — above all in health, education and agriculture. The Gates Foundation has certain success stories — the reduction of infant mortality, the fight against polio, the distribution of malaria nets. These are real successes in which Gates personally has a share.
But the Gates Foundation also has its own lens on the global. It sees development problems as technically solvable — through better access to vaccines, through more efficient seed varieties, through digital education offerings. It sees less of the structural questions — the debt burden of developing countries, the terms of trade, the ownership structures, the patent regimes, corporate tax flight. When Gates makes a book required reading that shares this lens — presenting problems as technically and cognitively solvable, not as structural and political — he is not just spreading a book. He is spreading a worldview.
This should not be read as a conspiracy. Gates' commitment is sincerely meant. But it has a line. Whoever has a line, and wealth besides, and access to global discourse platforms besides, can impose a worldview without arguing for it. The book replaces the argument. Whoever reads it is convinced — not because he has checked it, but because it is installed as required reading. The UNICconsult recommendation in Germany — "required reading not only for journalists, pessimists, politicians and do-gooders" — is symptomatic. It even names the opponents: pessimists, do-gooders. These are the people who are supposed to read the book so as to be pessimists and do-gooders no longer.
VI. The Few Critical Voices
In the German discourse there were two voices that read Factfulness critically. Thomas Steinfeld in the Süddeutsche Zeitung was sceptical — Rosling's method of "letting only facts speak, as a strict utilitarian", without arguing historically or politically, was "questionable, generalising and ideological". Rosling's style, he wrote, was an "aesthetic of sensation that wants to sell statistics as miracles of enlightenment". This review remained one voice among many — the majority of German reviewers praised the book.
In the international discourse, the Swedish professor of economics Christian Berggren pointed out the systematic bias in several articles. Factfulness, he said, contained "many charts of bad things that are declining and good things that are increasing — but not a single chart of problematic phenomena that are increasing". Berggren listed them: the climate crisis, the loss of biodiversity, the rise in global debt levels, the growing inequality within the developed countries, the geopolitical tensions. All of this is missing from Rosling's book. The ten instincts are constructed in such a way that each of these topics appears to the reader as "overdramatised".
A second line of criticism came from the non-governmental organisation The Overpopulation Project (TOP). It accused Rosling of underrating the continuing population dynamics in sub-Saharan Africa and of underestimating the ecological limits of development. Ola Rosling replied in the comments on the TOP website that the book had a "pedagogical purpose". This brings us to an important self-description. Factfulness does not see itself as a scientific work but as a pedagogical one. It does not want to prove but to persuade. It does not want to analyse but to calibrate. What it lacks in analytical depth is to be compensated for by pedagogical effect. The method of the ten instincts with their catchy examples, the chimpanzee punchline, the anecdotes from Rosling's research life — that is not science, that is didactics. And the didactics has a message.
A third line of criticism came from academic statistics. Several statisticians have pointed out that the famous 13 test questions on which Rosling hangs the chimpanzee punchline are skewed in their answer options. Whoever wants to choose the right answer must in every case choose the optimistic one. A chimpanzee would indeed answer optimistically more often than a well-informed citizen who knows the state of affairs in question. The construction of the test is therefore a construction of the proof. It produces the result Rosling needs to justify his ten instincts. That is not necessarily manipulation — it may also be unintended. But the result stands.
VII. The Historical Depth — Voltaire, Pinker, Ferguson
The optimism discourse is not new. It has a philosophical prehistory reaching back at least three centuries. Voltaire's Candide of 1759 is one of the earliest satires — it caricatures Leibniz's proposition that we live in "the best of all possible worlds" by sending its hero Candide and his tutor Pangloss through a world of earthquakes, wars, torture and enslavement which refutes Pangloss's thesis at every stage. Voltaire recognised optimism as the ideology of the privileged — as the doctrine of those who have little to complain about, and for whom it is therefore comfortable to fend off every complaint.
In the 19th century Hegel built the World Spirit as an optimism machine — history as the progress of freedom, in which reason necessarily prevails. Marx turned this into class antagonism but kept the belief in progress. The social democracy of the Second International made evolutionary socialism out of it — the doctrine that the proletariat will inevitably come to power through democratic growth. The functionaries of the GDR proclaimed the historical necessity of socialism until 1989. In 1989 Francis Fukuyama proclaimed the end of history — liberal democracy as the end point.
In 2011 Steven Pinker, with The Better Angels of Our Nature, declared violence to be ending — a very influential variant of data-backed optimism, methodically constructed much like Rosling's four years later. In 2018 Pinker followed up with Enlightenment Now — named Bill Gates' favourite book of the year. The two books, Pinker / Rosling 2018, mark the high point of the optimism industry. They still sell today, they are required reading in MBA programmes, they are celebrated at TED conferences.
Adam Ferguson, whom Fichtner quotes, is a different matter. In 1767, in his Essay on the History of Civil Society, the Scottish Enlightenment thinker wrote the sentence Fichtner cites: "The world is the result of human action, not of human design." But Ferguson did not mean this optimistically. He meant it soberingly. He warned against the loss of republican virtues in commercial society. He saw the unintended consequences of human action as a threat — not as the guarantee of a better end point. Fichtner quotes Ferguson and turns him into the prop of a message Ferguson himself did not mean. That is symptomatic of today's optimism discourse — it fishes out of intellectual history the sentences that fit its line and ignores the contexts in which they stood.
VIII. Three Layers of Optimism
Today's optimism discourse has three layers that act upon one another.
The first layer is the publicistic one. It is carried by writers such as Hans Rosling, Steven Pinker, Hans Rosling Junior in his work now appearing, Matt Ridley, Johan Norberg, Fareed Zakaria, and the German Ullrich Fichtner. Over the past twenty years this class of authors has installed a genre — the book that reminds the educated middle-class reader that he is better off than he thinks, that the world is better than the headlines suggest, that the next golden age is already rolling in. The books sell well. They are discussed on talk shows. They become TED talks. The writers have book contracts with Penguin, with Random House, with Ullstein. They are regular guests in Davos, Aspen, Salzburg.
The second layer is the political one. It is carried by politicians, business associations, consultancies. It translates the publicistic message into political lines — "change through trade" (German China policy until 2022), "the energy transition is coming anyway" (German climate policy of the 2010s), "demographic problems will be solved by migration", "the Trump phenomenon will outlast itself". These political lines are not accidental. They have a function: they spare the effort of steering. If change comes by itself, nobody needs to negotiate. If the problem solves itself, nobody needs to allocate resources. If history has a path, nobody needs to choose.
The third layer is the economic one. It is the most structural and the hardest to grasp. It is the matter-of-course way in which today's economic order presupposes growth, innovation and market efficiency — does not prove them, but presupposes them. It is the doctrine that AI will save us, that renewables will come by themselves, that demography will sort itself out, that free world trade benefits everyone. This doctrine is not the conviction of individuals but the discursive precondition of the entire market-economy architecture. Whoever contradicts it is marked as a "pessimist" or an "ideologue". Whoever shares it is recognised as "fact-based" — as the UNICconsult recommendation puts it in exemplary fashion.
These three layers work together without any authority coordinating them. The publicistic layer legitimises the political one, the political legitimises the economic, the economic pays the publicistic through book commissions, speaking fees, consultancy contracts. It is an ecosystem, not a plot. But it has a function: it produces the reassurance the system needs.
IX. What Optimism Makes Invisible
Whoever is practised in automatic optimism no longer sees certain things.
He does not see the decline of industrial substance, because the DMG Mori case appears to him as "natural consolidation". He does not see the shift of power in the machine-tool world, because global efficiency matters more to him than local sovereignty. He does not see the erosion of collective wage agreements, of co-determination, of social benefits, because the growth of the global middle class counts for him as the more important indicator. He does not see the Wayuu children dying of Cerrejón coal dust in La Guajira, because he looks at Colombia's overall child-mortality statistics and notes that they are falling — which they are, but not for the Wayuu. He does not see the Colombian women patients who lose their day in the EPS waiting room, because he looks at the global statistics on the number of people with health insurance and notes that it has risen over the years — which it has, but not in lived experience.
He sees the data, but not the differentiation within the data. He sees the average, but not the distribution. He sees the trend, but not the pace. He sees the aggregate, but not the subject.
That is precisely the function. Whoever sees the trend but not the subject can lean back, reassured. Whoever sees the subject must react. Automatic optimism directs attention in such a way that the subjects disappear from the picture. Only aggregates and trends remain. Aggregates and trends cannot be blamed for anything. They are the actors of a history that nobody writes.
X. The Connection to the Megamachine
Here comes the point that brings us back from Rosling and Fichtner to the Megamachine series.
The Megamachine, as we have described it in the previous papers, is a socio-technical system that, through interlocking, produces consequences for which nobody personally answers. It works not through commands but through structures. It works not through manipulation but through things taken for granted. It works not through conspiracy but through diffuseness. For it to work, it needs a certain mental condition in its subjects. It needs subjects who do not look, or who look and are reassured, or who are disquieted and cannot show it because they would be marked as "pessimists".
Automatic optimism produces this mental condition. It makes it easier not to look. It makes it easier to look and be reassured. It makes it easier to be disquieted and not show it — for whoever is disquieted has activated one of the ten instincts and is thereby "dramatising". In this respect the optimism discourse is not a corrective of the Megamachine but its indispensable companion. It is the sedative function without which the system could not run.
That is the thesis of this paper. It is not directed against Rosling as a person. It is directed against the function his work has assumed. Hans Rosling was a committed physician who documented real progress in global health. But after his death, through its dissemination by Bill Gates and its reception in economic discourse, his work has become a doctrine that achieves exactly what the Megamachine needs: reassuring the subjects about the reality of the shifts the system produces.
Ullrich Fichtner is an example of this function in action. He is an experienced journalist with a good tradition of research. But when he writes in the Spiegel column of 29 April 2026 that the cheese has been eaten, he replaces the negotiation over how to steer the energy transition with faith in its running by itself. The steering tasks in the energy transition that would still have to be carried out today — grid expansion, storage technologies, industrial electricity prices, supply-chain security, the social distribution of costs — drop out of the picture. What remains is "collective human action", which will sort things out anyway. That is not enlightenment. It is the dissolution of the question of steering into a reassurance drawn from the philosophy of history.
XI. What Would Have to Take Its Place
The critique of automatic optimism is not a plea for automatic pessimism. Nobody needs a second book telling us that the world is bad and getting worse. There are enough such books, and they have the same problem as their counterpart: they spare the effort of differentiation. Whoever is pessimistic has just as little to do as whoever is optimistic. Both are released from the task of considering reality in its many layers.
What would have to take its place is a different attitude, one harder to describe than the two poles of the discourse. It is the attitude that acknowledges both that global infant mortality has fallen and that the Wayuu children are still dying. That acknowledges both that global life expectancy has risen and that German life expectancy has lagged behind in OECD comparison for ten years. That acknowledges both that renewables are growing and that fossil capacity continues to be expanded. That acknowledges that the world has become better in many respects and that in other respects it has become dramatically worse — and that the two lines are not independent of each other but often causally linked.
This attitude is that of differentiated observation. It demands more of the subject than the ten instincts demand. It demands that the subject take its worries seriously and at the same time examine them. It demands that the subject read data and at the same time ask about the gaps in the data. It demands that the subject see the aggregates and at the same time the subjects behind the aggregates. It demands that the subject not crawl away into a worldview — neither the pessimistic nor the optimistic one — but remain in the toil of looking.
This attitude is not popular. It does not sell books. It is not suited to TED talks. It has no punchline that could be quoted in a single sentence. It is not reassuring — but nor is it shattering. It is demanding. It is the precondition for subjects being able to act as subjects — not as consumers of a doctrine of reassurance, but as participants in a history that is still open.
Carlota Pérez herself has attempted this attitude over the past ten years — not in the texts the Wind Report cites, but in her academic essays and lectures. She has not said that the golden age of renewables will come by itself. She has said that the Pérez waves lead into a golden age only if political steering guides them there. Without steering there is only crisis, crash, upheaval. Pérez's message is not Fichtner's message. Whoever really reads Pérez knows that the golden age is a task, not a promise.
XII. Conclusion — a Warning to the Practised Optimists
Whoever reads this paper to the end may have the impression that it was itself pessimistic. That would be a misunderstanding. It is not pessimistic. It is directed against automatism. Against the automatism of pessimism just as much as against that of optimism. What we need is not a different mood but a different attitude.
The Megamachine works quietly. It works because its subjects are reassured, or are disquieted and cannot show it. It works because the discourse that accompanies it cannot be contradicted without the contradicter being marked as ideological. It works because the chimpanzee punchline lands so well that anyone who says publicly today that the world is more complex and more dangerous than the bestsellers claim must put up with the reproach of scoring worse than an ape in a test.
What keeps this Megamachine in check is not other bestsellers. What keeps it in check are the subjects who begin to take their worries seriously — not as distorted perception, but as a legitimate signal. Who begin to question their data — not as an end in itself, but as a means of differentiation. Who begin to write their own history — not as the consequence of a trend, but as an act of choice.
In his last letter, placed at the front of the book Factfulness as a foreword, Hans Rosling wrote: "This life's task — fighting against the ignorant worldview — will not be completed with this book. But I hope that it will become a tool in the hands of those who carry this task forward."
It is possible to take Rosling's task seriously without accepting his book as required reading. It is possible to fight against the ignorant worldview without lapsing into automatic optimism. It is possible to love data and at the same time see the gaps in the data. It is possible to understand the world without sedating it.
Automatic optimism is not the opposite of the Megamachine. It is its companion. Whoever wants to understand its history must also understand the history of its sedative function. Today it is called Factfulness; in the past it was called something else, and tomorrow it will be called something else again.
The task is that of differentiated observation. It is laborious. It does not sell. But it is the only attitude in which subjects remain subjects of an open history. Whoever thinks the cheese has been eaten has stopped cooking. The Megamachine is glad of everyone who gives up cooking — for it goes on cooking for him, in a kitchen he no longer enters.