John Paul nodded. “As my research progressed, I soon became able to identify omens of escalating violence in patterns of language that people used to communicate with each other. It wasn’t something that you could identify from individual conversations, but rather something that happened at the structural level of a society. You could even see it in the language used by the society’s victims. You can see it in the discourse of the Jews who lived in the Third Reich, for example. And to get a true picture you need to perform frequency analysis on an entire region. What you end up seeing is an outbreak of a particular type of change inside the minds of people who’ve been subjected to this discourse over an extended period of time. Specifically, the part of the brain that makes certain value judgments becomes inhibited. That thing that we have come to call ‘conscience’ becomes twisted. Biased, if you will, in a certain direction.”
John Paul had said enough. The horrific logical conclusion to his story was now looming before me.
I wondered when he had experienced his “eureka” moment. When he lost his wife and child? Or when he was with Lucia replaying that initial report of the news from Sarajevo over and over?
After a pause, I timidly ventured my conclusion. John Paul’s conclusion.
“So you wondered which came first, the chicken or the egg …”
John Paul smiled. “Just so.”
Genocide could be predicted by the frequency of certain types of deep grammatical structures used within a country’s discourse.
So what would happen if you took a stable country where no such discourse was happening and somehow deliberately increased the frequency of this type of deep grammatical structure?
What would happen to a region when its people started speaking with the grammar of genocide?
You’d have to be a lunatic even to consider it, I thought. It was an idea that might crop up during the course of research—a whimsical hypothesis, a joke almost. But you wouldn’t actually try it out. How could you, for starters? As John Paul had said, this wasn’t a hypothesis that manifested itself on an individual level, only at the level of a whole society. You’d need to be able to influence public discourse on a massive scale—the logistics were mind-boggling.
And yet …
“So you experimented? With a Third World country?”
“Why do you think I joined a public relations firm?” John Paul said. “The perfect opportunity to embed myself in the core of a country’s propaganda machine. All I had to do was influence the national media broadcasters, sign off on the head of state’s speeches, tell the cabinet ministers what to say, and make sure that no government announcement went out without being checked by me first. It was easy. I had left MIT by then and my government funding had dried up, but I already knew everything I needed to know. And sure enough, the experiment proved successful.”
“But what about the other countries?” I said. “They didn’t give you the same level of access to influence the core of their government communications.”
“And they didn’t have to,” John Paul said. “A little judicious application of SNDGA and it was easy enough to work out which branches of communication I needed to focus on to yield maximal returns. Not so different from you guys, right?”
“SNDGA?”
“Not your field, perhaps? SNDGA stands for Social Network Directed Graph Analysis. It’s what your bosses use to work out which target you need to kill next in order to have the biggest chance of suppressing the violence in a region.”
He’s Public Enemy Number One. The leader who is causing the massacres, fanning the flames of chaos, bringing about death and destruction to his society. That’s why he’s your target. You need to kill him for the greater good. The sort of thing I had always been told on a pre-mission briefing. Same with Williams, Alex, Leland.
Well, I suppose someone in Washington or Fort Mead must have had a way of identifying our targets.
John Paul seemed to have seen something in my momentarily blank expression because he squatted down next to me and looked straight into my eyes as if he were talking to a crawling toddler.
“Have you ever heard of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon?” he asked me. “A party game named after an old movie star.”
Footloose was one of my guilty pleasures.
“You take two actors who’ve never been in a movie together and try and connect them in as few steps as possible,” John Paul continued. “If there’s an actor they’ve both been in a movie with, that’s one degree of separation. If the first actor has been in a movie with an actor who in turn has been in a movie with an actor who has been in a movie with the second, then that’s two degrees of separation, and so on. Virtually every actor ever known can reach Kevin Bacon within three degrees of separation. In other words, the game is about personal networks.”
“Thanks for the explanation, but I doubt there’s an American alive who hasn’t heard of the Kevin Bacon game.”
“Do excuse me. I wasn’t trying to patronize you. It’s just a useful analogy for explaining graph theory. The study of analyzing networks made up of these sorts of links. The NSA, the Center for Counterterrorism, and DARPA all poured money into the field of graph theory once it became clear that the new type of terrorist threat was decentralized and not tied down to a specific geographical location. Graph theory became a subject of interdisciplinary military research, just like my field. Graph theorists would study data intercepted at Echelon and observe the interactions between different people in different regions—how data were exchanged. It wasn’t the contents of the data as such that was important, but the flow: how information dispersed and which channels would cause it to disseminate most effectively. All this can be ascertained through network analysis.”