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The Obvious vs. Desired Remedy

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The Obvious vs. Desired Remedy

Isaac Asimov’s The Gods Themselves (1972) is organized around a discovery with existential stakes: the Electron Pump — a technology that transfers energy from a parallel universe with different physical constants — is slowly altering Earth’s sun in ways that will eventually cause it to go nova. The scientists who discover this face a wall of institutional indifference and public resistance. The novel’s central human drama is not the physics puzzle but the sociology of how intelligent beings systematically choose comfortable lies over uncomfortable truths.

Asimov distills this into one of the most incisive observations in his fiction:

“It is a mistake,” he said, “to suppose that the public wants the environment protected or their lives saved and that they will be grateful to any idealist who will fight for such ends. What the public wants is their own individual comfort.” — Isaac Asimov, The Gods Themselves

The Obvious vs. Desired Remedy

The novel’s sharpest formulation of this psychology is the distinction between two types of responses to a known problem:

  • The obvious remedy: the response that directly addresses the root cause, even at the cost of present comfort or convenience
  • The desired remedy: the response that preserves present comfort while appearing to address the problem — even when it cannot actually solve it

Asimov’s examples are precise:

“Once it was well known that cigarettes increased the incidence of lung cancer, the obvious remedy was to stop smoking, but the desired remedy was a cigarette that did not encourage cancer. When it became clear that the internal-combustion engine was polluting the atmosphere dangerously, the obvious remedy was to abandon such engines, and the desired remedy was to develop non-polluting engines.”

Both the cigarette and the internal combustion engine examples follow the same structure: the public accepts the diagnosis (cigarettes cause cancer; engines pollute) while resisting the most direct response. Instead, they demand a technological solution that lets them continue the comfortable behavior. This is not denial of the problem — it is denial of the discomfort required to solve it.

In the context of the novel’s plot, the Electron Pump is the most extreme version: an energy source that provides unlimited clean power at the cost of eventually destroying the sun. The obvious remedy is to stop using the pump. The desired remedy is to find some technical fix that allows continued use. The scientific establishment chooses the desired remedy and works to suppress awareness of the obvious one.

The Mechanism: Comfort as Override

Why do rational beings systematically choose the desired remedy over the obvious one, even when they understand the stakes? Asimov’s diagnosis: comfort and self-interest override rational calculation at the individual level, and collective action failures prevent correction at the systemic level.

“The easiest way to solve a problem is to deny it exists.”

This is not merely laziness. Asimov presents it as an almost mechanical feature of how public attention and institutional resources get allocated. Everyone — individually — has strong incentives to support the desired remedy (it costs them nothing) and weak incentives to advocate for the obvious remedy (it imposes costs now for benefits that are diffuse, delayed, and uncertain).

The result is that even when the obvious remedy is technically known, the political and social dynamics systematically suppress it in favor of comfortable alternatives.

“Earth lies to itself for comfort’s sake.”

The Title and the Epigram

The novel’s title comes from Friedrich Schiller’s The Maid of Orleans: “Against stupidity, the gods themselves contend in vain.” This is Asimov’s verdict on the phenomenon he depicts. The problem is not ignorance — the scientists in the novel know the truth. It is not malice — most of the characters are not ill-intentioned. It is motivated stupidity: the systematic, almost structural choice to be stupid about inconvenient facts.

The protagonist Lamont discovers the truth about the Pump’s danger and spends most of the novel trying to make anyone care. He is correct, methodologically rigorous, and completely unable to move the institutions around him. His climactic outburst — “And no one on Earth will live to know I was right” — captures the isolation of anyone who advocates for the obvious remedy against the momentum of the desired one.

Connection to Asimov’s Broader Work

This theme connects to the psychohistorical framework of Asimov’s Foundation series. Hari Seldon’s insight is that individual intelligence does not aggregate into collective wisdom; large populations behave according to psychological and sociological laws that transcend individual rationality. The obvious-vs.-desired remedy dynamic is a specific instantiation of this principle: individually, people may understand that the obvious remedy is necessary; collectively, the social and political dynamics produce the desired remedy instead.

See Psychohistory and Historical Determinism for the full Foundation framework.

The Three-Gendered Aliens: A Counter-Narrative

The novel’s middle section — widely considered its most original and accomplished — is set in the parallel universe among a species Asimov calls the Soft Ones, who have three biological genders that must merge for reproduction and cognition. This section is told from the perspective of Dua, a Soft One whose gender role is to provide the emotional and intuitive bridge in a triad — and who is constitutionally capable of a more complete form of reasoning than any single gender achieves alone.

Asimov uses the Soft Ones to model a form of understanding that is not available to either pure rationalism or pure emotion alone. Dua — who is partly both rational and emotional — is the one who discovers the existential truth about the Pump’s danger to her universe. But her discovery exactly parallels Lamont’s on Earth: she knows something that her civilization would prefer not to know, and she faces the same wall of motivated resistance.

The parallel is structural and intentional: Asimov shows that the obvious-vs.-desired remedy dynamic is not a human failing but a near-universal feature of any civilization capable of building convenient technologies. It is, in his telling, almost a law of intelligence.

Relevance Beyond the Novel

The obvious-vs.-desired remedy distinction maps onto a wide range of real-world policy debates:

  • Climate change: the obvious remedy (dramatically reduce fossil fuel consumption) vs. the desired remedy (develop carbon capture technology that allows consumption to continue)
  • Antibiotic resistance: the obvious remedy (dramatically restrict antibiotic use) vs. the desired remedy (develop new antibiotics faster
  • Social media and attention: the obvious remedy (use less) vs. the desired remedy (make it healthier without reducing use)

Asimov was writing in 1972, fifty years before these specific debates reached their current urgency. His observation about cigarettes and internal combustion engines was already a demonstrated pattern then. The pattern has only become more visible since.

The Desired Remedy Is Not Always Wrong

It is worth noting that the desired remedy sometimes works. The clean combustion engine and the smokeless cigarette were not purely wishful thinking — both catalyzed real technological development. The error is not wanting the desired remedy; it is refusing to acknowledge the obvious one as a necessary parallel or fallback when the desired remedy fails or is insufficient. In the novel’s terms: pursue the technical fix if you want, but do not suppress awareness of the obvious remedy in order to protect the desired one politically.

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