I wrote this one a few years ago. It is the origin of the horse drawing I use for my podcast. Don’t forget to tip! I appreciate you all!
Did you ever consider the thought process that led to the creation of Pegasus, the winged-horse from Greek mythology? In some ways, it reminds me of the thought process of modern conservatives.
“What’s the fastest way to travel?”
“By horse.”
“Well, what if you had to go faster than even the fastest horse?”
Long pause. “I know… you’d need a winged horse!”
Yeah, because naturally you can just throw a couple of wings on a horse. Boom! You’re all set!
This feels like the way decisions are made in our country. Nobody stops to consider, instead, they just land on the first absurd solution they can think of and then defend it tenaciously to the detriment of all.
Why not a bird?
The worst part is that the idea of a flying horse almost makes sense. But what if somebody a little smarter came along and said, “Why not a bird?”
The original two jokers would probably laugh dismissively, “Nobody can ride a bird you fool, a bird is too small. Get a load of this guy! What a dope!”
“Well, what about a large bird?” you might say. But once people have established that they think you’re foolish, none of your subsequent arguments are likely to change their opinion.
“Well, what happens when you land smart guy? How are you going to get around when you don’t need to fly anymore? Have you ever seen a bird walk around? You’d look stupid riding around on a bird.”
“All I’m saying is that there must be some reason that nature designed a bird for the air and a horse for the land. Doesn’t it seem implausible to just stick wings on a horse and have an effective flying animal? Besides, there’s no place you can walk that you can’t more easily fly, so you wouldn’t need a bird/horse combo.”
“You’re just not getting it. I like the idea of a flying horse, why do you have to ruin it? You need to go and educate yourself. I’m done wasting my time talking to you. Pegasus has worked fine for thousands of years. Why do you think you can come along and come up with anything better?”
The thing is, Pegasus hasn’t worked for thousands of years. It’s a complete fantasy just like everything about right-wing philosophy.
America in the 50s and 60s
America in the 1950s and 1960s is sometimes held up on a pedestal. Toxic males lament how much women have changed from what was considered the “ideal” as represented by the way people behaved in those decades.
Never mind that women weren’t allowed to get so much as a credit card in their name until 1974. The conservative model for women is complete servitude combined with denying them the financial freedom to escape.
Now consider how rare it is that people will talk about America in the 50s and 60s as if it that time was completely backwards.
America in the 1960s is a funny decade. Everyone was all excited about space. You can see it in the architecture. Everything was streamlined and shiny and looked like an airplane. The Jetsons was on television.
The Jetsons had flying cars.
Of course they had flying cars. What’s faster than a car? A flying car! A moment ago we were making fun of ancient Greeks for sticking wings on a horse. Well, the joke is on us because it wasn’t that long ago that people in our own culture did the exact same thing.
This was at the same time that our country was fixated on going to the moon. Think about that. There was a percentage of our population that was grounded enough in reality to successfully navigate space travel. There was another percentage that thought the next logical step in evolution from cars was… cars with wings.
A flying car is a terrible idea
Yeah! Just stick some wings on a car! It will work out great. Think of it, you can fly down to Florida for the weekend, land, and then drive around in your own personal flying car!
The trouble is, they actually built one. Here’s what it looks like:
Look at that thing! It’s a piece of junk! You’ve got to bolt on the wings in a process that takes a crew of guys half the day to perform. What about the safety checks? Do you really want to fly a car that just had the wings bolted on? I get nervous about the bolts when I change a tire!
Yeah, it’s nice and romantic to have flights of fancy about how great it would be to have a car/plane combo, but it just doesn’t work. You have issues of lift and weight to consider. Superfluous features mean your wing length has to be absurd just to get your contraption off the ground.
It’s way, way easier to fly in with your plane and rent a car when you land.
Birds yes.
Flying horses, no.
The real Pegasus would look horrifying
There are some cute representations of flying horses. They all have these adorable little wing buds that totally don’t get in the way. Read here for a discussion by a group of physics students on how big wings would have to be to get a standard horse to fly. To sum it up, it would look freakish.
If you watched the video of the flying car above, perhaps the word “freakish” went through your mind when they trotted out the wings. It looks awful.
A depiction of a horse with wings large enough to fly would also look awful.
This is uncanny valley territory. When you see the reality of what you’re proposing, you want to run away and hide. The problem is, when people make dumb proposals like flying horses and flying cars, they defiantly avoid the practical drawbacks. They don’t even want to hear them.
Even worse, we’ve allowed our society to develop so that people generally believe you’re at fault if you bust somebody’s fanciful delusion.
There’s a reason that nature didn’t create flying horses. Heck, even a bird big enough to carry a human rider would be problematic, but it would be a lot less problematic than a flying horse.
Could any flying animal carry a rider?
The largest ever flying animal was the Quetzalcoatlus with a 40-foot wingspan (I had to look it up). However, I bet if you went up to a scientist and asked if it was big enough that a human could ride one, he’d look at you like you’d just said something preposterous.
Then he’d think about it and say, “It would depend on the weight of the rider.”
You see? There are a lot of variables in flight! When the students did the experiment on how long Pegasus’s wing span had to be, did they consider a 200 pound rider?
Lift has to equal weight in order for something to fly. The lift comes from the wings. The problem is that bigger wings weigh more. I assume you get greater lift with greater speed which is why we have enormous airplanes with turbine engines.
But… even the best horse can only run so fast. Poor horse.
Also, the muscles used for flapping wings would be different than the muscles used to run. Flapping isn’t all that effective at generating speed for large animals… that’s why there aren’t any.
Here’s another thing I had to look up, “How much weight can an eagle carry?” The answer is 5–6 pounds, but it depends on whether or not the eagle is flying into a headwind. See how complex these discussions become?
Think about this the next time somebody insists that “woman” is a simple thing to define. Everything is complicated. The only people who insist otherwise are con artists and dullards.
The problems we run into every day
One of the great issues of modern society is that people who walk around with foolish ideas can often present themselves as reasonable.
“Just stick wings on a horse. You’d have a flying horse to take you wherever you needed to go. It’s simple.”
Even in the space age, people didn’t just hypothesize about a flying car, they actually wasted the time and resources to build one! Why didn’t they trust the math when result after result indicated that it wasn’t going to work?
The problem is, it’s a lot easier for somebody to sit down and make a sketch of a flying horse. Random passers by will look at it and say, “That looks elegant and beautiful.”
They want to believe it’s possible. They don’t want to hear about the problems. It’s easy to get suckers to believe.
The fact is, it’s really hard to explain why a flying horse is never going to work! It takes an advanced understanding of aerodynamics. My college minor was in Physics and I can’t walk you through the math. The main benefit of my education is that it has taught me to defer to the opinion of people who actually know what they’re talking about!
Unfortunately, the majority of the voting population does not have that level of understanding. I guess it’s more “beautiful” to assume that the ignorant masses are always right about everything.
This means the voting public is susceptible to the influence of those that say, “Imagine flying through the clouds with the wind in your hair and the smell of horse all around you!”
They almost always show the horse as trotting through the sky. Why would he do that? Why not fold up his legs so they’re out of the way? I guess it’s because they don’t want him to look stupid.
America is anti-education and anti-intellectual
The point of all of this is to underscore the fact that we don’t live in a society that respects intellectual achievement. Much of our decision-making is based on corner-cutting arguments that don’t hold up if you do the math.
For example, everyone knew that the tax cuts for the wealthy were going to lead to inflation and a surge in the national debt. The republicans did it anyway. When the predicted consequences came true, the ones responsible for the bad decisions tried to blame the new administration that hadn’t even had time to put any policies into effect.
In work settings, when somebody says something that’s deeply racist, misogynistic, or otherwise hurtful, they follow it up with pressure that you should laugh it off. “Why do you have to be such a downer? Why do you have to take the fun out of everything?”
You might say, “Let me walk you through why your comment is hurtful.”
“Why do you have to blow a little thing into something so big?”
This equates to, “I just want to admire the flying horse, I don’t want to look at a page of boring calculations that prove why it could never fly.”
I get this all the time. Conservatives say things like, “Imagine what this guy must be like at parties. He can’t even take a joke.”
But the truth is, racist, misogynistic, hurtful comments are not a little thing. It’s hard to explain why a horse with wings can’t fly. Americans only believe that a thing that’s hard to explain isn’t true because they’ve been conditioned to despise independent thought.
Why can’t we have anything nice?
Years ago I was listening to a radio host discussing the work of some students who had calculated how fast Santa had to go in order to reach every house in the world in one day. It was a clever bit of math. It took into consideration things like population densities, accelerations, and time zones.
The host was furious about it. He lamented, “Why can’t we ever just have something beautiful? Why do people have to take the fun out of things?”
The right just wants us to believe what they say. They don’t want us to get mired down in evidence or proof.
I think this is why the political right is so anti-education. They don’t want people sitting down and doing the math. They’re afraid that the general public will become aware of how much of their policy is based on complete nonsense. None of this is hidden. It’s very basic.
Back when everyone was complaining about gas prices, nobody bothered to go and check the share price of major oil companies (they were showing record profits). Americans have been trained to believe they shouldn’t trust any calculations until they hear them on television. I jot down numbers on a napkin all the time. They almost never add up with what our society pressures us to believe.
Seriously, try it.
The right tries to present fact as “misery”
Some people will read this and say, “I happen to like the idea of a flying horse! Why does this author have to ruin the fantasy for me? What a horrible person. Why can’t he take his math and his calculations and his facts and just go away.”
I’d answer, “I like the idea of actual, possible flight. Sometimes achieving a better tomorrow means giving up on the misconceptions of our past. If you insist on believing in flying horses, you deny yourself access to the skies.”
The empowerment of actual knowledge is better than the fleeting delight of an absurd fantasy, but it’s a little harder to perceive the truth in that. It becomes easier to recognize the horror of delusion when some lunatic tortures a horse to death by grafting wings onto its body and then pushes it off a cliff.
People who believe absurd things cause a lot of suffering.
At some point our country is going to have to realize that uneducated fantasies aren’t always “beautiful.” When people believe nonsensical things and they base the policy that guides the nation on those nonsensical beliefs, it leads to widespread agony.
“There’s nothing we can do about schools getting shot up by men carrying military grade assault rifles. That’s what I believe, don’t show me your dumb calculations.”
Con men love to sell you on the merits of a beautiful lie. But lies have consequences for which you’ll pay dearly. You end up with a nation that’s 30 trillion dollars in debt. It takes more effort to recognize the beauty in truth, but it’s there. Once you see it, truth pays for itself.
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