The Undoing Project: A Friendship that Changed the World(89)

Envy was different. Envy did not require a person to exert the slightest effort to imagine a path to the alternative state. “The availability of the alternative appears to be controlled by a relation of similarity between oneself and the target of envy. To experience envy, it is sufficient to have a vivid image of oneself in another person’s shoes; it is not necessary to have a plausible scenario of how one came to occupy those shoes.” Envy, in some strange way, required no imagination.

Danny spent the first several months of his separation from Amos with these strange and beguiling thoughts. In early January 1979, he wrote Amos a memo titled “The state of the ‘undoing’ project.” “I have spent some time making up disasters and undoing them in various ways,” he wrote, “in an attempt to order the alternative modes of undoing.”

A shopkeeper was robbed at night. He resisted. Was beaten in the head. Was left alone. Eventually died before robbery was noticed.

A head-on collision between two cars, each attempting to overtake under conditions of restricted visibility.

A man had a heart attack, tried in vain to reach the phone.

Someone is killed by a stray shot in a hunting accident.

“How do you undo those?” he wrote. “And Kennedy’s assassination. World War II?” He went on for eight neatly written pages. Imagination wasn’t a flight with limitless destinations. It was a tool for making sense of a world of infinite possibilities by reducing them. The imagination obeyed rules: the rules of undoing. One rule was that the more items there were to undo in order to create some alternative reality, the less likely the mind was to undo them. People seemed less likely to undo someone being killed by a massive earthquake than they were to undo a person’s being killed by a bolt of lightning, because undoing the earthquake required them to undo all the earthquake had done. “The more consequences an event has, the larger the change that is involved in eliminating that event,” Danny wrote to Amos. Another, related, rule was that “an event becomes gradually less changeable as it recedes into the past.” With the passage of time, the consequences of any event accumulated, and left more to undo. And the more there is to undo, the less likely the mind is to even try. This was perhaps one way time heals wounds, by making them feel less avoidable.

A more general rule Danny labeled “The Focus Rule.” “We tend to have a hero or an actor operating in a situation,” he wrote. “Wherever possible we’ll keep the situation fixed and have the actor move. . . . We don’t invent a gust of wind to deflect Oswald’s bullet.” An exception to this rule was when the person engaged in the undoing was the main actor of his own fantasy. He was less likely to undo his own actions than he was to undo the situation in which he found himself. “Changing or replacing oneself is much less available than changing or replacing another actor,” wrote Danny. “A world in which I have a new set of traits must be very far from the world in which I live. I may have some freedom, but I am not free to be someone else.”

The most important general rule of undoing had to do with what was surprising or unexpected. A middle-aged banker takes the same route to work every day. One day he takes a different route and is killed when a drugged-out kid in a pickup truck runs a red light and sideswipes his car. Ask people to undo the tragedy, and their minds drift to the route the banker took that day. If only he had gone the usual way! But put that same man back on his normal route, and let him be killed by the same drugged-out boy in the same truck, running a different stoplight, and no one thought: If only he had taken a different route that day! The distance the mind needed to travel from the usual way of doing things to some less ordinary way of doing things felt further than the trip made from the other direction.

In undoing some event, the mind tended to remove whatever felt surprising or unexpected—which was different from saying that it was obeying the rules of probability. A far more likely way to spare the man was to alter his timing. If he or the boy had been just a few seconds faster or slower at any moment on their tragic journeys, they’d never have collided. When undoing the accident, people didn’t think of that. It was easier to undo the unusual part of the story. “You may amuse yourself by mentally undoing Hitler,” Danny wrote, then mentioned to Amos a recent history that imagined Hitler having succeeded in his original ambition, to be a painter in Vienna. “Now imagine another [counterfactual],” wrote Danny. “Simply remember that just prior to the instant of conception there was a better than even chance that Adolf Hitler would be a lady. The probability of his being a successful artist was perhaps never so high [as the better than 50-50 chance that he would be born a girl]. Why then do we find one of these approaches to undoing Hitler quite acceptable and the other shocking, almost ungrammatical?”

The workings of the imagination reminded Danny of cross-country skiing, which he’d tried and failed to take up in Vancouver. He’d taken the beginner’s course twice, and discovered mainly how much more effort it took to climb some hill than to ski down it. The mind also preferred to go downhill when it was engaged in undoing. “The Downhill Rule,” Danny called this.

As he worked out this new idea, he had a new feeling—of having gone fast and far without Amos. At the end of his letter, he wrote, “It would help a lot if you could spend a couple of hours writing me a letter about this, before we meet next Sunday.” Danny wouldn’t recall if Amos ever wrote that letter—most likely he didn’t. Amos seemed interested in Danny’s new ideas, but for some reason he didn’t contribute to them. “He had little to say, which was rare for Amos,” said Danny. He suspected that Amos was wrestling with unhappiness, which was also unlike Amos. After he left Israel, Amos would later confide in a close friend, he was surprised by how little guilt he felt, and also by how much homesickness. Maybe that was the problem; maybe Amos, having formally immigrated to the United States, wasn’t feeling himself. Or maybe the problem was how different these new ideas felt from their other work. Their work until then had always started as a challenge to some existing, widely accepted theory. They exposed the flaws in theories of human behavior and created other, more persuasive theories. There was no general theory of the human imagination to disprove. There was nothing to destroy, or really even to push up against.