Numbers give us a handle on the world.  By reducing qualities to quantities, we create data.  When I go to the emergency room, the nurse asks me to state my pain on a scale of 1 to 5.  Pain is a quality that can only be felt, neither expressed nor abstracted, yet the nurse inputs the number into my patient records and takes actions that, in the hospital’s procedures, apply to that number.  Once something has a number, it’s quantized as data, and then it’s fodder for abstract thought and manipulation.  To compare apples to oranges, we put a number on each, say, apple=2, orange=3, hence 3 oranges exchange for 2 apples.  It works the same as language: we abstract a real apple to the concept apple, which permits our use of the concept in abstract analysis. 

 

Mathematics is the language that we use to manipulate numbers.  Math is a system of symmetries that fit together in an absolutely consistent way.  Math is beautiful because of its internal consistency, and it’s also useful: math can vet a scientific idea for its truth-value prior to its application in the material world of It.  Somehow, someway, math corresponds with material reality, which makes math a tool to separate ideas into wheat and chaff: if an idea can’t pass the math test, then it’s a “not ready for prime-time player.”

 

Managers have power when they see the world in numbers and use math to manipulate the numbers.  At the very least, now they have a sense of how much stuff is out there.  And here’s where I’m going: a math-based, quantitative worldview is necessary for the optimal development and maintenance of Caesar’s world, which is modern civilization, mass society, It.  Nowadays we must abstract everything to numbers if we’re to manage the overwhelming volume and complexity of things.  Numbers and quantities have become our primary perspective for understanding, abstracting and manipulating the world.  We start believing that something only exists when we put a number on it.

 

But to manage well, the numbers must correspond accurately to reality.  We use money and markets to do this.  When money is the medium of exchange for every part of an economy, then everything and every activity has a number, that is, a price.  With prices, we know the real value of all things in the marketplace, because all the participants in a free economy collectively and continuously decide on prices, in a bottom-up process.  Billions of people participate in our markets, and we set the prices on all things in continuous communication and feedback loops.  Our decisions to buy this brand at that price is data that travels around the world and comes back to us in the form of revised pricing.  This gives us confidence that prices accurately reflect the current, accepted value of goods and services.  We’ve distributed the job of data accuracy over billions of people!  

 

I’m reminded of a story about Stalin.  Stalin was terrified of the chandeliers in his palaces.  Soviet policy fixed a value on chandeliers based on their gross weight, nothing else.  Hence a good chandelier was a monolithic monstrosity that weighed a ton, and persons underneath lived in fear of the chandelier pulling its bolts and falling.  That’s the problem with socialist economies: they put a number on everything, but the numbers are made-up. 

 

So, in the modern West, mathematics is our map for understanding, abstracting and manipulating the world.  The money economy gives us numbers that, more or less, connect with reality, based on the bottom-up coordination and cooperation of billions of people who participate in the fixing of prices.  Our worldview developed alongside mass society and money economies, each pushing the other forward, so that now we see all through the lens of numbers and quantities. 

 

Some worldviews are more powerful than others.  Not better; more powerful.  In the material world of It, the mathematical worldview gives power.  Imagine you’re a Chinese emperor.  Now imagine your enhanced power when you combine good data with mathematical analysis.  You can use logistics to transport and distribute grain and other commodities from areas of over- to under-supply; you can match education to national economic production; you can use Newtonian physics to invent ballistic weapons.  You will dominate your kingdom and your neighbors.