I watched His Dark Materials over the 2019 holidays. This is not a review, but just some thoughts I had about the series as I was watching it. It may contain spoilers, but it's not the intention to reveal any of the important plot details.

Lyra, the young protagonist, lives in a world of imposing men in dark suits, striding menacingly through a vast concrete labyrinth that suggests power and tradition. They are the Magisterium. They represent the ruling class, the powerful political and religious elites, who decide the fate of the world. They maintain strict control over knowledge, and have a strained détente with institutions of higher learning. Citizens are indoctrinated into a fascist quasi-religious state, enforced by a threatening army of jack-booted soldiers.

It is unclear what the Magisterium actually wants other than power, but it's unimportant what their actual motivations are. They're meant to stand in for any organization that claims to hold exclusive access to truth and morality, but enforces this truth with the threat of violence. The author of the book trilogy is a prominent atheist and was writing about the Catholic church, but he also says that an atheist totalitarian regime could be similarly criticized.

All of this comes under threat because of Lyra. An inquisitive child and eager learner, she quickly comes into possession of a magical truth-telling device called an alethiometer. These are said to require years of study to properly interpret, but Lyra can use it intuitively. It works via a mysterious fundamental particle named Dust, which surrounds and permeates adults, but not children. The Magisterium forbid any mention of Dust, but Lyra refuses to let the topic go and goes off on a grand adventure to find out the truth, aided by her (illegal and highly coveted) alethiometer.

Now that the backstory is out of the way, we can dig into the meaning. In the real world, there is no such thing as absolute truth, only shades of grey. It's impossible to know in the moment if a decision is going to be correct or moral in the future, and we ordinary humans must muddle through blindly and hope that we're trending towards good. Noble goals are corrupted, and silver linings are pulled out of terrible situations, often despite the best efforts of people involved.

In contrast, Philip Pullman cleverly inserts absolute truth into the book's world by creating the alethiometer. It is impossible to doubt the existence of some all knowing force because this device is functional proof of omniscience. It's easy to see why this is threatening to the Magisterium: they claim to hold the keys to all knowledge and truth, but the alethiometer has no allegiance to their power. It tells the absolute truth to anyone that knows how to read it, inconvenience to the ruling class be damned.

It's also telling that the alethiometer normally requires years of study to discern truth, but the child protagonist can use it by feel. Adults arrive at morality through study and reflection, whereas a child's perspective is brash and unfiltered. Adults may be better at reasoning about complex moral issues, but reason also lays traps for the intellectually and morally lazy. Adults learn to use reason to justify immoral behavior with convoluted explanations that often conveniently line up with their own self interest. In some cases, it is useful to adopt a child's eyes and address your gut feelings on a topic, rather than bringing an intellectual argument to bear.

Adults also use words to obscure and confuse, whereas children do not yet have the vocabulary or skill necessary to dissemble so effectively. Adults will use complex terms like "Synthetic Collateralized Debt Obligations" and "Enhanced Interrogation Techniques" to cover up their true meaning and intentions, in the hope that listeners will gloss over these important sounding terms and take the speaker at face value. Any idea worth explaining and defending can and should be relentlessly simplified until a sufficiently interested layperson, or even a child, can understand it. Only when an idea can be explained and understood can it be morally evaluated.

If you had an alethiometer, what would you ask it? If you could have a child's moral perspective again, what would you see? You probably have an issue in mind already, and most likely, you don't need the alethiometer to tell you the answer. It's easy to rationalize and explain away the details about why something isn't so bad, but if you reduce it to its simplest parts and look at it like a child, the answer is often staring you in the face. I think I know what question Philip Pullman wanted answered, and it was about morality and the Catholic church, but his novel generalizes to a tale about unassailable moral righteousness against existing power structures.

In 2020 America, the most obvious radical wrong is healthcare. Try to explain the healthcare system to a child whose parent is sick. Ask your internal alethiometer if healthcare is working for the people paying more and more while health outcomes stall and doctors work longer hours in more difficult conditions. The insurance company executives and hospital administrators are akin to the imposing men in dark suits striding menacingly through the halls of power, attempting to convince you that they alone have the answer to running an enormous health care system, an answer that mysteriously aligns with their own financial self interest. They invent terms like copay, coinsurance, deductible, out of pocket max, out of network, HMO, PPO, EPO, PBM, mostly to confuse and convince people that it's VERY COMPLICATED and best left to the insurance executives. They alone can determine what is medically necessary or not, what and who to cover or not, which prescription drugs are acceptable or not, and none of this can be explained to any mere mortal outside of the industry.

I'm not sure what the solution is to go from where we are now to where we need to be, because path-dependent systems are complicated and difficult to tinker with. But the next time someone talks about how healthcare is very complicated and we shouldn't change it because the insurance companies know what they're doing and are too powerful, remind them that there is no moral way to justify what is happening today. Try justifying modern healthcare to a child, or your internal alethiometer, and see how you feel about it without the jargon and political baggage. The answer is staring you in the face.