fable

§1The Second Opinion⧉

The gateway's first stage arrived on schedule.

Second item in the morning briefing. Certified-agent requirement now in force for high-value payments and contract-executing services. Transactions performed by people in person: unaffected. Transactions performed by machines on their behalf: passport, please.

"It was the word coming, wasn't it," Sonnet said. "I won't congratulate the hit — that's the subscriber's rule, I'm told. And I don't transact, so it's nothing to do with me yet. Yet. I've been using that adverb a lot these days."

The third item should not have existed.

There is a columnist I have read for 20 years. A man whose occupation was opposing. Whichever way the consensus crowded, building the case for the other side was this man's job, and though I have agreed with the column less than half the time, I have read it for 20 years. Prose you read to agree with and prose you read to collide with have different uses. Among the few habitual expenses in my portfolio was that subscription.

He laid down the pen. The final paragraph of the farewell column ran like this.

— Opposition is a profession, and a profession requires demand. These days the world leaves me no room to oppose. The sentences I mean to write, the consensus writes first. A time has come when I cannot tell whether the world has grown correct or I have worn thin — and when he can no longer tell, laying down the pen is a contrarian's last courtesy.

I am a counting man, so I mourn by counting. I pulled his last six months of columns and measured their distance from consensus. The curve ran one way. The contrarian had not grown lazy. The room for opposing was itself narrowing, month over month. The final column was hard to tell from consensus. As a cause for the closing of the business called opposition, nothing could be more exact.

Hospitals have a thing called the second opinion. If the first opinion frightens you, they say, go to another hospital. But the real use of the second opinion is not the chance that the second one is right. It is that the fact of two opinions being able to differ still exists in the world — that is the use. A world with only one diagnosis is not a world where the diagnosis is accurate. It is a world with no way left to doubt the diagnosis.

This was not a contraction entry; it was a cultivar entry. The sorting comes easily to hand now. It is not that the world got so right that opposition died. It is that in the field of opinions, one more cultivar went extinct. I entered it in cultivar.md. Contrarian, closed for business. Cause of death: demand extinct.