Explosive Knowing

A Third Thought on competence, risk, and who gets to say no

I have always wanted to blow up a toilet. I know it would be hilarious and slightly dangerous fun. I know it the way I know some bowel movements are going to be epic, some challenging and some imminent. It is not a reckless impulse I need talking down from. It is knowledge — specific, embodied, mine — about a small private act of demolition involving porcelain, a modest charge, my own back garden, and nobody else's morning. It continues to be a feeling of possibility really.

Of course I am not allowed to. Not because I would hurt anyone. Because someone, somewhere, at some point I was not present for, decided that people like me cannot be trusted with the means, and wrote it down, and the writing-down has outlived the deciding by half a century. The toilet stays intact. The knowing stays mine. The no belongs to someone I have never met and who has never met my toilet. If it could I am sure my toilet would breathe a sigh of relief at this.

This is a Third Thought about that knowing which is "no-ing". How officials tend to be Fuckwits rather than informed decision makers. About who issues the no, how it does not cost them, and the remarkable trick by which a flat refusal to let you risk yourself gets dressed up, every single time, as superior knowledge of what is good for you.

Caldetes Celebration

Earlier this week, on a Mediterranean beach for the Festival of Sant Joao, I watched children set off explosives. Thankfully they accepted me after some minor pleading as a lesser being who should be allowed to play too. Several observed that I was truly deprived being brought up without fireworks. At 58 it was my first time setting them myself, but I had watched them from afar with awe at New Year's Eve and grand finals and the like. Other children in the group assumed I must be from some kind of backward country and were quite sorry for me. This is not an unreasonable conclusion.

These were not sparklers. Explosives called cohetes (rockets, launched into the sky to explode in colour) and cometas (comets, like rockets but with a smoking or sparking tail trailing behind as they climbed). You buy them in stores on the ground floor of apartment blocks and from vans on the side of the road. They are graded like films — some general, some eighteen-and-over, the age printed on the box the way it is on a cinema ticket. There was a bonfire the size of a small house. There was public drinking. There were children, between the ages of perhaps six and sixteen, holding lit fuses with a confidence my own country would classify as criminal endangerment and I would classify as the most natural thing in the world.

Nobody died. Nobody, as far as I could tell, was even hurt. The children were having the single best night of their year, again, and the adults were having a pretty good one too, and the whole apparatus of catastrophe that my own country would confidently predict from these exact ingredients simply — failed to arrive. The carnage was a no-show. It had not been invited, because it does not, in fact, turn up the way we are told it does.

I grew up in Queensland. I was born in 1968, which means I was not old enough to remember Cracker Night and young enough to have it taken away from me before I could properly enjoy it. Australia permits none of what I watched on that beach. Not the supermarket fireworks, not the eight-year-old with a Roman candle, not the casual trust that a family can manage a small explosion without a permit, a licence, a marshal, and a printed risk assessment. And certainly no public drinking.

So why the difference? What does Catalonia know that Australia doesn't — or, as we will see, what does Australia no that Catalonia doesn't bother to?

The death of Cracker Night

The first thing to understand is that the answer is not a clean one, and the people who banned fireworks would prefer you thought it was.

Cracker Night did not end on a single date by a single hand. It was strangled slowly, state by state, across the better part of two decades, each jurisdiction reaching independently for the same lever at a slightly different time. Queensland pulled retail fireworks in 1972. New South Wales phased them out through the early seventies. Victoria held the line on public sale until 1982. The Australian Capital Territory, gloriously, let you buy fireworks until 2009 — which means that for thirty-seven years after Queensland decided the risk was intolerable, a resident of the ACT could drive across the border and buy the same product Queensland had banned as a public menace.

This matters, because a single clean ban looks like a decision. A thirty-seven-year smear of staggered, inconsistent, jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction prohibition looks like what it actually was: not one society deciding something, but many small officials each reaching, at their own pace and for their own self-referential reasons, for the lever marked NO. The inconsistency is not noise around the signal. The inconsistency is the signal. If a coherent truth about fireworks and human safety had been discovered, it would have arrived everywhere at once. What arrived instead was a mood — a precautionary reflex that spread from regulator to regulator the way fashions spread, self-referentially, each new jurisdiction citing the ones before it as evidence of consensus rather than evidence of anything about fireworks.

The stated reasons were real enough on their face. Injuries — burns, blinded eyes, the standard catalogue, weighted heavily toward children. And bushfire, which I will concede without a fight, because a cracker in dry Australian bush in fire season is a genuinely different object from a banger on a wet Catalan beach, and anyone who pretends otherwise is selling something. Fire is the one honest entry on the list. Hold that thought; we will need it later, because it is the exception that proves the rule.

But notice what the injury argument has to do to work. It has to convert a true number — children are hurt by fireworks every year, both of them (sic) — into a prohibition that falls on everyone, forever, regardless of who they are or what they know about their own hands. The number is real. The leap from the number to the universal no is where the knowing quietly turns into something else.

The test nobody calls tyranny

Here is the thing that ought to puzzle anyone who thinks the fireworks ban is about safety. We gate competence all the time, everywhere, and most of the time nobody minds in the slightest.

To fly a plane you sit a licence, you are tested, and you are pulled out of the sky the moment you fail a check. To practise medicine, to wire a house, to pour the forty-amp circuit my outdoor sauna needs, you pass through a gate built precisely for that task, renewable, revocable, specific. And when you reach a certain age, in most of the developed world, you re-sit your driving test — because we accept, without anybody storming a parliament about it, that a capacity specific to operating a vehicle may diminish with time, and the appropriate response is to check.

Nobody calls the eye chart at the licensing centre tyranny. The principle is conceded across the whole of society and it is a good principle: competence is task-specific, it is testable, and the test should track the task. The eighty-year-old who must demonstrate, this year, that he can still read a number plate and judge a roundabout is not being oppressed. He is being assessed — checked, individually, against the actual thing, with the burden on the system to show he has lost the capacity, not on him to prove he never had it.

This is real knowing. It checks before it concludes. It looks at the specific person and the specific task and it produces a specific, reversible answer. When the machinery of authority actually knows something, this is what knowing looks like, and it is almost dignified.

Now hold that beside the fireworks ban, and the franchise, and my toilet, and watch the dignity drain out of it.

The one gate that disappears

There is exactly one decision in our societies that allocates real power, and it is the one place all of this careful, task-specific, renewable assessment simply vanishes.

The vote.

To drive a car at eighty you must prove, annually, that you still can. To help choose the government that sets monetary policy, drafts the criminal law, and decides which explosives an eight-year-old may hold on a beach, you need only to have continued breathing for eighteen years. The same eighty-year-old we re-test for the roundabout votes on the future of the nation untested, his judgement assumed sound for the one task we never check, however far it may have wandered from the road.

And at the other end: an aware, discerning sixteen-year-old — one who could pass any civics examination you cared to set, who follows the arguments better than half the electorate — is barred. Not assessed and found wanting. Barred, by a proxy, sight unseen.

Eighteen is an assumed competence licence. We simply refuse to admit it is one, because admitting it would force us to notice that it is a spectacularly bad one. It is not even pointed the right way. If eighteen were an honest floor, competence would at least rise as you crossed it. Instead the proxy lets the declining vote and bars the capable, and a genuinely consistent competence floor — one that actually tracked the thing it claims to measure — would have to re-test the old and admit the precocious, and nobody in power wants either of those things.

The recoil is the tell. We keep eighteen because it is wrong about everyone roughly equally. A better proxy would have a shape — it would favour some group, some sex, some temperament — and any shape is a faction someone could weaponise. Done right it should clearly favour ME, because I am the most competent person I have ever met. Don't you feel the same way? But I digress. So we choose the proxy that is wrong about everyone, and we mythologise its wrongness as fairness, and call the equality of the error democracy, and leave the gate right there because moving it would cost the movers something and leaving it costs them nothing.

Why? Because the driving test inconveniences a citizen, and the franchise test would inconvenience power. We gate competence with great care and precision for every task that does not touch power, and we abandon the gate entirely for the one task that does. That is not an oversight. The enfranchised will never vote to narrow the franchise, so the one assessment that would require the powerful to re-justify their grip is the one assessment we have all agreed to call holy and leave alone.

Now: I am not, before anyone reaches for the obvious club, proposing a voting exam. Hold that objection — it is a good one, and we are coming to it, and it turns out to be the hinge the whole argument swings on. For the moment only notice the pattern, because once you have seen it you cannot unsee it: the careful contextual knowing for the small things, and the flat untested no-ing for the large ones, and the line between them falling exactly where power begins.

Knowing, listened to again

Say it aloud, the word the whole apparatus uses to justify itself. Knowing. We know what's good for you. We know you can't be trusted with the fuse. We know eighteen is old enough and seventeen is not. We know you shouldn't have the firework, the cigarette without the warning, the death on your own terms, the toilet.

Now listen to it again. It is not knowing. It is no-ing. The two words sound identical, and the system needs them to, because the entire trick is to borrow the authority of the first while doing the work of the second. Real knowing checks before it concludes — the driving test looks at the actual person and the actual task and returns an actual, reversible answer. No-ing concludes before it checks, and then wears the voice of knowing so that the refusal sounds like wisdom rather than flinch.

This is the whole of it. Almost every "no" issued over a risk to your own self is a no-ing pretending to be a knowing. The official who bans the firework has not assessed your hands. The line that bars the discerning sixteen-year-old has not met her. The rule that kept my toilet intact was written by someone who has never seen my garden, costed nothing to the writer, and will never be revisited because revisiting costs effort and leaving it sits there costs the writer nothing at all. The free no is the most powerful thing in the regulatory toolkit precisely because it is free. The bureaucrat who says yes and is wrong gets the headline. The bureaucrat who says no and is wrong — who refuses the competent adult, who keeps the knowing citizen from the firework they could safely handle — gets nothing. No name. No cost. No consequence at all. So the system selects, invisibly and automatically, for no. Not because no is right. Because no is free.

The wince

And then there is the franchise, and I have to be honest about it, because it is the one place this argument turns around and bites the hand that is writing it.

I want voter licences. I think the discerning sixteen-year-old should vote and the demonstrably checked-out should not, and I think the flat eighteen-year line is a stupid, lazy, untested gate of exactly the kind I have spent this entire essay despising. I want competence to matter where it matters most.

But I cannot build it. I have tried. Every voter-competence test I can design devolves, on inspection, to my idea of competence — and to everyone who is not me, that is not a fair test, it is simply capture wearing my face. Hand the pen to someone else and it is their capture instead. There is no neutral chair in the room. Every literacy test in the franchise's grim history was sold as competence and used as exclusion, not because the designers were unusually wicked but because the test that is genuinely neutral has not been invented, and the prize for seizing the pen is too large for anyone powerful to resist.

So I am forced — resentfully, with a bad grace I want on the record — to defend the flat eighteen-year line. Not because it is good. Because it is too dumb to capture. Its stupidity is the entire case for it. A gate that asks no one to think cannot be bent by a clever person who thinks, and the franchise is the one prize valuable enough that someone clever will always, always try to bend it. Age is a terrible proxy for competence and a magnificent one for incorruptibility, and at the franchise — and, I will argue, only at the franchise — incorruptibility beats accuracy, because the cost of a captured vote is not one stupid firework ban. It is the whole game.

I hate that this logic is sound. I have checked it from every side I can reach and it keeps being sound. The dumb gate wins exactly once, in the one place where what you are protecting against is not incompetence but capture.

The fork

But notice what that concession does not cover, because the no-ers would love you to think it covers everything.

The franchise earns its dumb gate because the franchise can be captured — seize the test and you seize the state. That is the specific, narrow reason the stupidity is worth it. Now ask the same question of my toilet. Who captures the state by deciding whether I may blow up my own toilet? What faction seizes power through the firework ban? Whose grip on the nation depends on whether the discerning adult may choose his own death? Nobody. There is no prize. The risk is mine, the body is mine, the garden is mine, and there is no government to bend by controlling the outcome.

Which means the one argument that saves the eighteen-year line — capture-resistance outranks accuracy — has no purchase whatsoever on the firework, the toilet, the cigarette, or the death. The thing that excuses the dumb gate at the franchise condemns it everywhere else, because everywhere else the capture risk that justified the dumbness simply isn't present. Strip it away and what's left holding up the firework ban? Nothing but the flinch. Nothing but the free no, laundered as knowing, protecting no one but the nervous system of the official who would rather not have his name on the next headline.

So here is the fork, and it is the whole argument in one joint. Where a risk is capturable — where controlling it means controlling power — accept the dumb, flat, incorruptible gate, and hold your nose. There is exactly one of these, and it is the vote. Everywhere else — every risk that is yours to carry, every act whose downside lands on your own body and nobody else's morning — the gate should be the opposite: individual, contextual, revocable, and defaulted to yes. Presumed competent until shown otherwise. The driving-test model, not the firework-ban model. Knowing, not no-ing.

And that flips the burden, which is the entire point.

The reverse onus

Today the competent must prove themselves to a standing no. You may not have the firework; petition if you dare. You may not blow up the toilet; the prohibition is the default and your competence is the exception you must beg for. The burden sits on you, the knower, and the no-er sits back and is owed nothing.

Turn it over. Let the default be yes. Let me buy the firework, light the cohete, own the means, the way the Catalan father on the beach owns them — presumed, like him, to be an adult in charge of my own risk. And let the official who wants to stop me carry the burden he has dodged for fifty years: let him prove, in my specific and named case, that I cannot be trusted — not that someone, somewhere, once couldn't, but that I, here, am the danger. Individually. On evidence. Reversibly.

Detonate my toilet through genuine idiocy and injure someone, and yes — then the no may fall, on me, named, having earned it. That is a knowing. It checked. It looked at the actual person and the actual outcome and returned an actual, reversible answer. Everything before that point is no-ing, and the reverse onus is simply the demand that the no-er do the work the word "knowing" has been claiming, falsely, all along. If you would say no to me, know me first. Show your working. Carry the cost of being wrong about a specific competent adult, the way I would carry the cost of being wrong about my own toilet.

They will not like it. Of course they will not. The whole appeal of the free no is that it is free, and the reverse onus prices it — makes the refuser bear the foregone liberty the way the permitter currently bears the foregone caution. That pricing is the reform. Not the abolition of every gate. The pricing of the no, so the flinch is no longer free, and the word "knowing" has to be earned before it can be spent.

The greatest firework

Which brings me, finally and inevitably, to the largest no-ing ever laundered as knowing, and the most beautiful firework the species will ever be denied.

In 2004 we discovered an asteroid and named it, with a candour the namers may not have fully intended, after the Egyptian god of chaos — the serpent that swallows the sun. Apophis. For a short while the numbers were genuinely frightening: a 2.7 percent chance of impact, the highest rating any asteroid has ever scored on the scale we use to rank these things, and an energy yield, were it to strike, of around 1,200 megatons. That last number is true and almost impossible to feel, so it gets translated, and the translation is the tell. Twelve hundred megatons is roughly eighty thousand Hiroshimas. Nobody converts your annual risk in a motor car into Hiroshimas. The conversion is chosen, every time, because it frightens, not because it informs.

Then the apparatus did something it almost never does. It kept looking, and the looking produced actual knowledge. By 2021, with better radar, the impact probability for the next hundred years was refined to zero. Not low. Zero. Ruled out. They knew.

And here is the exhibit, the worst one in the essay, the Merck-tier sin. The number that travelled — the one that made the headlines, the documentaries, the God-of-Chaos branding, the planetary-defence budget lines — was 2.7 percent and eighty thousand Hiroshimas. The number that is true is zero. They reach vastly different audiences. The terror was loud and funded and named after a serpent; the correction was quiet and arrived late and changed no posters. This is no-ing at its purest: not a lie — every figure was real at the moment it was spoken — but a true number selected and framed for direction, the scary one amplified and the accurate one buried, because amplified threat is the safest thing an institution can hold. It justifies the budget. Nobody is ever blamed for over-warning. The flinch, scaled to the heavens, wearing the lab coat of planetary science.

But I want to end on what Apophis actually is, rather than what it was sold as, because it is the perfect closing image and the no-ers have stolen it.

In April 2029, Apophis will pass closer to Earth than our own communications satellites. Roughly two billion people across the Eastern Hemisphere will see it cross the sky with the naked eye. It is, in plain fact, going to be the most spectacular thing the human species has ever been able to look up and watch — a city-sized rock from the birth of the solar system, lit and moving, closer than the things we put up there ourselves.

And if it did hit — it won't, they finally know that, but if it did — what a firework. What an absolutely magnificent, civilisation-ending, once-in-a-species firework. The same object that the apparatus calls eighty thousand Hiroshimas of catastrophe is, from the only chair that matters, the greatest show the sky will ever stage. The megatonnage doesn't change. Only the chair you're sitting in changes — and the entire question of this essay is who gets to sit in the chair that assigns the meaning. Danger or wonder. Catastrophe or spectacle. The no-er insists on his sign and calls it knowing, and his sign is always the frightened one, because the frightened one is the one that keeps him employed.

Here is the part that should make you laugh before it makes you cold. Apophis is the one firework no official can ever ban. There is no permit for watching it. No registrar can confiscate the sky. If it comes, every human being alive sees the most epic explosion in the history of the species whether the apparatus licensed it or not — and then, in the final and perfect joke, there is no one left to file the incident report, open the investigation, or write the renewal exclusion. The ultimate firework is also the ultimate un-bannable risk: self-regarding at the scale of the entire self, the whole species at once, with the nervous official vaporised alongside the spectator he spent his career protecting from the view.

Back to the toilet

I have always wanted to blow up a toilet. I told you at the start that I know it would be hilarious and slightly dangerous fun, and you have read far enough now to hear that word the way I meant it.

Because the whole essay has been about that knowing — about who actually has it, and who only claims it. And the answer, in the one case that is purely mine, is not complicated. The only person on this earth who can actually know whether I can be trusted to blow up my own toilet, in my own garden, on a morning that is nobody else's, is me. There is no one better placed. There is no register, no scale, no examiner, no god of chaos with a clipboard who knows my hands better than I do. The knowing was always mine. The no was always theirs. And they spent my whole life pretending those were the same word, sounding it out identically, borrowing the dignity of the one to do the work of the other.

So price the no. Flip the burden. Let me light the fuse, and if you would stop me, know me first — stand in my garden, look at my specific competence, and show your working, and carry the cost if you are wrong about me. Until then the default is yes, because the risk is mine and the knowing is mine and the morning is nobody else's.

And if you will not grant me even that — if the flat free no must stand, unpriced and unearned, all the way to the end — then I will simply wait for 2029, and look up, and watch the one explosion no official could ever forbid, lit across the whole sky, gorgeous and uncarded and entirely beyond the reach of anyone's permission.

It would, I know, be hilarious and slightly dangerous fun.

I just hope I am not the only one still insisting it was always mine to enjoy.