08:13

Question from the Shelter

It is quite an experience spending so much time in a bomb shelter at wartime with people you have never met before. There are all kinds of psychological profiles and stories in these places and you get to meet people, their babies and their dogs at a most sensitive and unusual time. My new shelter friend, let’s call him Dudi, has a theory. He says: the missiles do not choose their timing, people do.

And this is what I wish to talk to you about today.

Not why, we know the why. Why is ideology, failed religion, geopolitics, oil and the unfortunate way someone’s father never said “well done my son, i love you”. No, my question to you today is when ? When does somebody look at the clock and decide that 08h13 is the right moment to shoot a missile. Not 08h56. Not 09h15.

Why 08h13?

I ask this because I am convinced that whoever is responsible for pressing on that button has intimate knowledge of my sleep cycle. The alarm comes precisely every single time I reach the deep phase. You know that kind of sleep that restores you, that regenerates new fresh cells for your nervous system to fully operate, the kind of sleep where you feel so held and so safe that you can afford to fully let go. “She’s finally asleep, go for it!” Dudi agrees. He says: you can bring a nation to its knees with a feather, he says, if you know exactly where to tickle. Torture as the twisted twin-brother of Care: someone has studied us so well that he would know where are our softest spots.

Now, the easiest thing to do at this point of time would obviously be to blame Epstein, Trump, BB, Putin, Bezos and the other ten white men for bringing the world to its knees. Don’t get me wrong, I do like the idea of completely delegating my ownership, responsibility and accountability onto others, it is a rather comforting thought. But at the end of the day, something doesn’t sit right with me. For having spent ten years working in a multinational company whose main underlying purpose was profit-making, I came to relate profoundly to what Hannah Arendt called the Banality of Evil. She argued that in a fully developed bureaucracy, there is no single person to challenge, petition, or hold responsible. Bureaucracy, in her view, is precisely the kind of governance that strips people of political agency and the capacity to act. She writes: “ Bureaucracy is the form of government in which everybody is deprived of political freedom, of the power to act; for the rule by Nobody is not no-rule, and where all are equally powerless, we have a tyranny without a tyrant”.

A tyranny without a tyrant.

The world is not shaped by ten all-powerful men but instead by ten zillion small daily decisions made by human beings who are slightly distracted by an Instagram meme, slightly concerned by their sudden hair loss and aren’t sure what they want to eat for lunch. The banality of evil is not indifference to suffering, it is something closer to the very ordinary desire to just get through the day.

Dudi has identified three possible motives for choosing 08h13 specifically. He lists them on his fingers with a spark of ancient wisdom in his blue eyes. “It’s simple Julia, it’s like everything else: Boredom. Jealousy and Love.”

I find this argument persuasive and I like to imagine that Israeli-Iranian-Lebanese-American-whoever-he-is general, like a simple man who had simply not hit his KPIs for the month. Boredom. We’re approaching the end of the fiscal year and the objectives aren’t met. His manager had already cc’d him on two passive-aggressive emails and he’s likely to promote his coworker instead of him. Jealousy. So, our general skimmed through his pipeline of prospects, looked at the time on his clock and made a decision like it was the only one available to fulfil and confirm his whole identity. It also happens to be the only way he will receive his bonus at the end of the quarter and finish paying the mortgage he got on his new car to take his family to the mountains on the weekend. He remembers fondly these moments when he was a child and wants to offer the same horizon to his 5-year-old daughter. Love.

Not far from him, sits a young and brilliant quant-algorithm-analyst, raised by a single immigrant mother, who managed to get a scholarship and graduated as a physics engineer from a prestigious national college. For the past two years, he has been tasked with the project of building one of these extra-powerful spreadsheet that includes conditional formatting, multiple tabs and a logic that can only be brought by a computer: if the coffee has started to boil but has not yet finished, Green light. If the target is about to enter into the deep phase of sleep, Green light. If he has taken out his socks to feel the wet grass through his toes in a public park, Green light. If he has just finished his shower and is standing in front of the mirror checking his black pores and pondering whether the text he sent to that girl he likes wasn’t too much, Green light. If, and this is the most important condition, he has just started to forget about the missiles falling from the sky. That’s it. Green light.

Press the button.

Shoot.

I do sometimes get very angry at these people. But in that underground bunker, at 3am, surrounded by strangers and their dogs, I found myself thinking instead about what it costs to become someone who presses that button. I found myself thinking about that little boy whose father never told him well done and who today, keeps receiving passive aggressive emails from his manager. The years of learning to make yourself small enough to fit inside a system that rewards you for not feeling too much.

The 08h13 missile is an act of extreme dissociation: it is what happens when the distance between a decision and its consequences becomes so unbelievably large that it becomes acceptable to live inside of it.

We are all, to varying degrees, building that distance every single day. Some of us, on the contrary, work hard at bridging that gap.

Dudi nodded and smiled when I explained my spreadsheet theory to him. Then he said: you forgot about it just now, didn’t you? For a moment, just before the alarm, you were thinking about something else… How did he know ? Shelter friends do find you at the most sensitive and unusual time. I had been thinking about the sea, the sound of waves and how far it all suddenly seemed.

We looked at each other in the particular way that humans who have been running in bomb shelters for five days look at each other, when they have run out of every possible performance, standing in the rubble of their night, in a world collapsing under their feet.

Just two humans with no answers and an inexplicable tenderness for everything.

Including, somewhere, somehow, for that man who pressed on that button.

Thank you for reading. I appreciate any support in this adventure