What's the plural of Moënghus?
Moënghuses? Moënghuii?
Well, it's Moënghuii all the way down, man...
I like that. Or maybe, Moenghati
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Great post TH!. Wish you had started with this
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One of the reasons I brought this up is that if we take the Dunyain ability to path the future with any accuracy, then they can't be wrong - you start the path and it happens.
I don't think so, you describe why below.
Is Moe simply incorrect?
It's the "probability trance", so error is baked in and it should still work?
Kellhus going "mad" threw him, he wasn't expecting it and was recalculating the path in real time during their conversation ( or so he was saying, that conversation could've been part of the TTT ).
Yes.
Its a probability trance, not certainty trance. Sometimes unlikely outcomes happen. Sometimes you discount the possability that your son will come through his trial a raving mad lunatic, and sometimes that's the mistake that kills you.
Either prescience ( by intellect, divine or magic ) either works or it doesn't.
No. Its not prescience in that its not a prophesy of the future. Its cause-and-effect predictions based on input data using statistical methods to produce potential outcomes.
Just like any mathmatical model, garbage in equals garbage out. Worse yet, if your assumptions at the start are wrong, everything you did is garbage.
Is this some message that the reader/anyone beware of anyone/anything claiming prescience?
I don't think so. Certain 'beware of anyone peddling snake oil' and/or 'don't take things at face value, especially when the thing is question is someone caliming divine right'.
Does the story teach us lessons - like be careful of whom you worship/trust?
Probably
Was this whole TTT just a fool's gambit?
Depends what you think the TTT is. There's little consensus even among us.
IMO Moenghus is pretty straightforward with his description. TTT is a name he used for the big convergence of decades of probability trance-ing, and describes Moenghus' solution to the Human Extermination Problem - the fact that there is an alien species trying to blog out humans. Moe is a human, so he doesn't like this, so he has tried to set in motion a very specific string of events to prevent it.
Was it a fools gambit? How does one decide such things? I would say no, it was a brilliant gambit - after all, no one else was doing anything to stop it.
Or is it still working ( either Moe's or Kell's or ... ).
Since its a construct of an extrapolation of the PT, "It" isn't doing anything. Kellhus, as the one in charge of events, had his own plan. He called it TTT as well.
Sorta like Herbert's when 2 prescients are in company with each other, it darkens their future views ( as they can now directly effect each other making future telling impossible ).
I'd liken it a bit closer to the Seldon Plan a la Asimov, but Herbert and Leto's Golden Path / Melange Prescience is a good analogy as well, yes.
Would Moe's TTT have "worked" if no one else was employing the Probability Trance?
No I don't think so. His plan didn't work because he didn't isolate improbable outcomes enough. His entire plan was pinned on the hope that Kellhus made it to him alive and sane.
He did the best he could with the time and resources available. It just wasn't enough though. He tells us his goal was to unite humanity under one religion, and use that united humanity to challenege the consult before it was too late. But Kellhus needed another 30ish years to do the second half - no matter what, it was a multi-generational plan, and further needed a full Dunyain to take over the plan. The only Dunyain available to him that he could think of was Kellhus. The only path that got him there AND left the world enough time to marshal a defense before the Consult won, was bringing the world to a holy war at the same time he brought Kellhus.
With the Mutilated, Kellhus and Moe Sr and who knows who else leveraging this ability, is the collision/contention with each other the driver behind all that we've seen?
I don't think so. Its merely a difference in assumptions. Kellhus fears that any Dunyain would side with the Consult. That to achieve the Absolute, the Consult had the shortest path. Kellhus, and I suspect Moenghus, took a different path - one that wasn't 100% "The Mission" but included some allowance for the fact that genociding your entire race might be a bit too far.
Or is it all laid to waste simply by divine intervention, the TTT being unable to account for Outside activities?
Like I said, garbage in equals garbage out. Part of Moenghus' failure might have been a misunderstanding of how influential the Gods really were. For that matter, it appears that Kellhus fell for this same trap.
But its not TTT's, or the PT's, failure. That's like blaming the pencil for making mistakes when writing. Those are tools. The fault is the wielder. Just above we have a succinct description of the failings of the Dunyain - they have this problem with dismissing things they don't understand. This makes a tool like the PT very unstable when brought up to the complexity of TTT. For an exchange between two people, or a sword fight, it works great. Anything where all, or most, of the variables are known and accounted for, the PT is very nearly an unstoppable force.
But even in the battle with Mek and Kell in the beginning, a single unknown variable nearly cost him his life. I believe Kellhus himself muses how difficult it is to control an entire room of people given all the variables.
Raise the stakes further to the level of predicting outcomes of entire nations, aliens, and the Gods themselves, and it isn't difficult to see why things don't work out exactly as expected.
Just seems the TTT was too important ( name of even one of the books ) for it to be flushed in this manner is all.
If it makes you feel better, the title was very nearly "When Sorcerers Sing", and in fact the French translation kept that title.
Further, look at the names of the other titles.
TDTCB - still just a pretty nebulus concept
TWP - Important in Book 2, but eventually he dies.
TTT - A failed mechanism by Moe, but continues in some altered for for the rest of the series
TJE - Seeming very powerful, but ultimately doesn't do anything to change the fate of the world. An abject failure really.
TWLW - Not one but two incarnations of TWLW die without accomplishing their mission.
TGO - Ends in total failure.
TUC - The Consult we were expecting all died. Total failure, but will remain in force in some changed manner.
So really, TTT and TUC, both the last book of the series, describe something that seemed to be indomitable, but ends up failing as initially described but maintains importance.
Everything you've read up til now has been error is too much surprise to my thinking.
I hope I've helped you see a different explanation.
Someone's plan is cooking, me thinks. Otherwise it's all a colorful exercise in reading chaos.
Of course. The series continues.
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Its just not Moenghus. He dead.
