2025 As A Seldon Crisis: Lessons from Asimov’s Foundation Series
A light-hearted look at how Asimov's Foundation series might help us face the alarming headlines of 2025
You know that feeling when you focus desperately on something you must do, and the harder you focus, the harder it becomes? I’ve been trying to write a new “Discussing with Friends” article, this time about post-scarcity. But clarity and soundness of the explanation are paramount to me and I’m not there with this article yet. It needs to cook a little bit more, so in the meantime here is a shorter, lighter post about a pocket philosophy that I got from Asimov’s Foundation series.
If you’re not familiar - or if you last read it many years ago - the Foundation series is set in a distant future, in a Galactic Empire encompassing most of the Milky Way. A mathematician, Hari Seldon, develops psychohistory, a new science that lets him predict future trends on a galactic scale based on the statistical law of mass action. Through this lens, Seldon foresees the empire’s collapse and the 10,000 years of barbarism and regression that will follow. But he also identifies a path across history that shortens this dark age to 1,000 years and leads to the emergence of a better empire. To set into action the series of events that will lead to this preferable future, Seldon makes various preparations, including the installation of a scientific Foundation holding all the knowledge of humanity on the planet Terminus.
The Foundation series spans seven books, but the ones I’m most interested in here are the first three, which were published between 1951 and 1953: Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. Those books are based on nine earlier short stories. Together, they span the first 300 years of the 1000 interregnum period. This structure of stories outlining a long period of time gives the series its distinct feeling of detachment, as the reader is put in a position of witness of the centuries and the various crises that emerge and get solved. Each story focuses on different characters, who are confronted with a “Seldon crisis”: a major turning point in the path toward the new empire, where some events will be necessary to push the Seldon plan forward, while others may derail it completely.
When I first read Foundation many years ago, what I immediately liked - and reused - was the idea of seeing our current time in the context of a long history in the making. In Foundation, the backdrop of some of the Seldon crises is grim: petty interests seem to corrupt the original mission, some knowledge disappears and a devastating war even leads to the planet’s occupation. Yet, those ultimately do not hinder the ability of the story to keep going toward the promised goal. Rather, they often have unexpected consequences and reveal themselves as necessary milestones.
Like us, the characters of Foundation do not know what weight each event will have in the threads of History. Some of them believe in the Seldon plan and hence have faith that those threads must lead to the glorious future announced by Seldon. But even then, they are continuously wondering whether the plan is in danger and whether their actions are the ones that will derail it.
Similarly, when Trump drastically pivots the historical US international policy toward an alliance with Russia, or drives scientists out of the country, we are experiencing those as net bad for the world. But those events too may have unintended, positive consequences. Maybe in 20 years we will pinpoint Trump’s second presidency as the moment Russian’s authoritarianism started crumbling, without the scarecrow of America’s hostility. Or as a factor for the emergence of other bright spots of scientific research in the world, where new environment may lead to previously unthought-of advancements. I’m not arguing here that those paths are particularly likely, nor that Trump have any of them in mind. My point is that we can mitigate the anxiety we feel in the wake of those news, by taking into account that we are experiencing a tiny point in a developing history and that the outcome is ultimately out of our reach. This too shall pass says the old Persian proverb, and for as bad as things are today, they do not condition tomorrow to be as bad. Eventually, things will get better, because there is no reason for history to be stuck in things being bad.
This joins another framework I’m fond of, the one about the end of history, or rather the absence of it. Our natural bias is to see whatever is the current time as the crucial one, where our choices will make or break the future of our species. Recently, this illustrates itself with climate change or AI: the idea that what we do or don’t do today will irremediably impacts the rest of history and even humanity’s survival. That those decisions will be the definitive end to a process or a topic. This stems from our modern view of history as a linear process and from our limited ability to imagine the events and capacities of tomorrow, those that may reverse our choices of today, or make them insignificant. Believing that we have such a responsibility can become intolerable and, ironically, can paralyze decision-making.
All those considerations work at the collective level, but knowing that things should get better beyond one’s own lifetime might be of little consolation to the individuals affected by today’s mass deportations, economic instability, and hate discourse. When Ayn Rand wrote “The individual may fall, but the Collective lives forever” in “We the Living”, she did not account for the fairness of it. In my turn, I can only say that if the Foundation series is right, that we progress toward a better future through the combined trends of our reactions to events, then by following our trends - spreading ideas on Substack counts - then we are right where we need to be. So when the news feed gets especially grim or especially stupid, take the high view and contemplate the process of history in the making.