[Theory] The flaw in Taravingian's plan

[Wysawyg]

First post here so I hope I'm doing it right.

 

Being mulling over The Diagram since I finished WoR and wondering why the 'save the world' plan also seems to be a 'kill the rest of the heroes' plan and I think I have an idea why (And I couldn't see this theory anywhere else so sorry if someone has already realised this).

 

First, assume that the Nightwatcher is a lawful neutral character. It does what you ask for, not what's best for you/the world. So Taravingian asks for a way that he could save the world. Sounds like a good idea except...

 

In order for Taravingian to save the world, he has to eliminate everyone else that could save the world.

 

This might also play into the shifting intelligence. When he's brilliant, he doesn't have the compassion to care that he's dooming the rest of the MCs. When he's stupid, he doesn't realise the Diagram is also eliminating the composition.

 

It might also explain why the Diagram is in code (especially the numeric code in one of the chapter headings). Much like Eshonai tuning to the song of peace, the inner conscience of Taravingian was screaming at him as he wrote and tried to disguise parts of the plan in the hopes he wouldn't understand it.

[The Ja he/him]

I doubt my idea is right, but I've always hoped that the diagram may indeed save the world, just not the way Mr. T suspects.  He is always talking about uniting the world to save it, so he thinks that by following the Diagram, he will be able to unite the world.  I think that in his day of brilliance, he realized that there was only one way to unite the world.  He had to unite it against himself.  Since that day, he has not been intelligent enough to realize that the Diagram actually means his doom, while uniting the world, as he wished. 

[GreyPilgrim he/him]

Welcome, Wysawyg! 

 

I don't believe that the Diagram will necessarily spell Taravangian's doom. It is certainly a possible outcome, but not the definite one I feel.

 

You say, Wysawyg, that the Nightwatcher is neutral. This is not my belief. I feel that she is interested in saving the world. We see that she is giving some sort of help to some people; at least with the example of Lift, whom she gifted the ability to metabolize food into Stormlight. It has been heavily speculated that the Nightwatcher is to Cultivation as the Stormfather is to Honor. The Stormfather has a great interest in stopping Odium, and as we saw in the climax of WoR, he will do it at all costs. I feel like the Nightwatcher must act similarly.

 

Therefore, my belief is that her gifting Taravangian with this great intelligence was to create the Diagram as a sort of last-ditch effort to save the world. We have seen already that the Diagram is very radical in what it commands. It includes great loss, but we know that if followed, it will almost certainly work.

 

So yes, it could very well be that in order to work, the Diagram must remove all opponents to Taravangian. Possibly this is because there are so many different parties trying to save the world that the Nightwatcher feels that the only way to definitely save the world is to get everyone under a collective interest.

 

What I wonder if the Nightwatcher necessarily intended Taravangian to begin the Diagram so soon. As I said, it seems to be the last possible route, the least desirable. Based on Taravangian's Interlude, he should not have gotten smart enough to make the Diagram yet. Maybe for some reason it happened sooner than intended. It could also be in code because the Nightwatcher didn't intend for Taravangian to begin it yet. Possibly she wanted him to comprehend its last-effort nature and wait to translate it until it was absolutely needed.

 

Just my thoughts. They could all be wrong.

[Moogle]

Being mulling over The Diagram since I finished WoR and wondering why the 'save the world' plan also seems to be a 'kill the rest of the heroes' plan and I think I have an idea why (And I couldn't see this theory anywhere else so sorry if someone has already realised this).

 

I'm curious, would you mind expanding on the 'kill the rest of the heroes' bit? The only hero I can think of that Taravangian wants dead is Dalinar, and he wrote the Diagram back when Dalinar was a bloodthirsty warlord, and only said to kill him if he refused to kill the Parshendi (ie. Voidbringers). He's got contingency plans for the Radiants, but he went out of his way to not kill Jasnah, Kaladin, and Shallan, despite knowing/suspecting they were Surgebinders.

 

So yes, it could very well be that in order to work, the Diagram must remove all opponents to Taravangian. Possibly this is because there are so many different parties trying to save the world that the Nightwatcher feels that the only way to definitely save the world is to get everyone under a collective interest.

 

I can't think of anyone in the world who's working to save it from the Desolation besides Taravangian, Dalinar, and Nalan. Which parties are you referring to?

[GreyPilgrim he/him]

I can't think of anyone in the world who's working to save it from the Desolation besides Taravangian, Dalinar, and Nalan. Which parties are you referring to?

 

I was thinking of our secret societies, and their differing ideas or how to treat the future. We have the Sons of Honor trying to return the Heralds and restore the Vorin Church, the Ghostbloods and whatever they're up to. So maybe "saving the world" was not the best phrasing. "All of the differing opinions of what is best for the future of Roshar" is more what I meant, not to prevent the Desolation per se.

[Moogle]

I was thinking of our secret societies, and their differing ideas or how to treat the future. We have the Sons of Honor trying to return the Heralds and restore the Vorin Church, the Ghostbloods and whatever they're up to. So maybe "saving the world" was not the best phrasing. "All of the differing opinions of what is best for the future of Roshar" is more what I meant, not to prevent the Desolation per se.

 

Ah, my bad. I should have realized. I agree with your original thought, then. Too many players trying to play world politics definitely makes it hard for anyone to actually accomplish their goals. I wouldn't be surprised if the Diagram demanded every secret society be wiped out.

[kaellok he/him]

Welcome to the forums!  Here have a free cookie upvote.  And now I move on to the part where I tear holes in your plan, because that's what I'm good at.  Building or creating something is hard, but finding what's wrong with it is easy--and I'm lazy.

 

First!  The Nightwatcher gives you what she wants, not necessarily what you ask for.  I recall there being a point in WoK (sorry, don't have my books at the moment), in an interlude, where someone specifically mentions that it doesn't matter how carefully you phrase your question, you get what she feels like giving you, boon and curse, and be done.  So it doesn't really matter what he asked for, it wouldn't be selective based on the wording (ie, the emphasis on "How do I save the world?" wouldn't matter.

 

Second!  What about when Mr T is of average intelligence?  In Mr T's Interlude we are told not to underestimate the intelligence of the average person, and at the very end Hoid tells us that salvation will be found in the hearts of men (implying the hearts of average men, not just a few special heroes).  So, what does average Mr T think about it all?  He should be smart enough to see what is happening (and he does, to a limited degree, otherwise Jah Keved would never have fallen to him), and compassionate enough to care (and again, he does, even though it pains him)--but he keeps following through anyway.  I forget where I was going with this bit, but it sure seemed important when I started so I'm leaving it in!

 

Finally!  I disagree fundamentally that the Nightwatcher is Lawful Neutral.  Assuming, of course, that the Nightwatcher is related to Cultivation (and Lift's Interlude really provides strong evidence for that, I would say) then she is most definitely Chaotic.  What flavor of Chaos she subscribes to is clearly unknown, but remember--one time she gave a man a bunch of bolts of silk so that he could feed his family, and in return made him see everything upside down.  That sort of capriciousness simply can't be found in a creature of Order, I tell you!

 

But still, very interesting idea, with some merit to it. 

[king of nowhere]

Well, the diagram states that taravangian must eliminate all the other heroes because all those people trying to save the world are going to clash into each other. You can't trust your plan to work if something unpredictable may happen at any time as a result of someone else's plan.

the flaw with this line of reasoning is of course that 1) it removes from the scene many other plans, which may as well have worked, and 2) it inimicates all the other heroes, who will start fighting you instead of the voidbringers.

Such a plan only works everything goes according to it. you must absolutely be sure in yourself. you'll need to defeat not just the bad guys, but also the other good guys, and if you fail at some of that everything will go wrong and there is no chance for a backup plan.

But it was implied that for taravangian, with greater intelligence comes greater self confidence. when he wrote the diagram, he was absolutely confident he could pull it out. and afterwards, he trusted the advice of the diagram.

so the chances of it working are quite slim, and if it does, it probably wasn't necessary anyway.

[Shardmancer he/him]

Perhaps the Diagram forces all of the KR to team up against him.. Him being the focal point is what evenutally unites everyone against him.. So him thinking hes saving the world his way actually somehow brings other to save the world (making him the catalyst) Perhaps he was the original mastermind being Gavalair death- we do know he talked to him beforehand and knew of his plans.. he was smart enough to manipulate to Parshendi..

[Wysawyg]

 My use of killing was probably too strong. Eliminating would be better, given that he seems set to get rid of the KR (or at least prevent them from reaching full potential given the Oh Crap moment when attacking Elhokar leads to Kaladin's power up) and the decoded text from the chapter header 

which seems to indicate how to get rid of the KR when they emerge

.

 

I really like GreyPilgrim's idea that the plan was supposed to be a last resort hence why using it too early is trying to get the rest of the Judean People's Front and People's Front for Judea etc out of the way because the Diagram was supposed to kick into action after they were already dead/defeated.

[FirstSelector]

I like this idea!  The Diagram fascinates me as a concept, because it appears to be so precise about some things (names, magic, and so on) but has other parts that very open to interpretation.  Additionally, it is the sort of "prophecy" that often only makes sense in retrospect.  Where did Taravangian learn all of this?  How does he know about Hoid (the wanderer)?

 

I wonder if Taravangian's smart/dull days were planned out in advance, so that he would only understand a certain part of the Diagram at a certain time.  It would certainly be something to have Taravangian's death come with his perfect clarity about how the Diagram was to be interpreted, only to have it set the world up to unite against him.

 

I'm also a bit curious about how the Diagram can predict anything, due to the fact that it is interpreted by many people and depends on their interactions with each other and with other people.  There are random elements in here that can not possibly have been predicted exactly.  But with 20/20 hindsight, the Diagramists will be able to say "Aha!  We simply interpreted it wrong, clearly it is still right."

 

Lastly, if this is the Nightwatcher's grand scheme to prepare the world, perhaps Taravangian wasn't simply being enlightened as he thought.  Given the precise comments about the Unmade, we surmise Taravangian found this information somewhere and pieced it together.  But it could also have been that the Nightwatcher used the "random" smart/dull days as a distraction for the one day she revealed part of the future to him.  After all, Cultivation is better at that than Honor...

[LazerWulf]

Mr T asked for “Capacity to stop what was coming. The capacity to save humankind.” What if we (and Mr T) have it backwards? What if his intelligence is the curse and his compassion is the boon? Hoid said that salvation would be found in the hearts of men, which sounds like compassion to me. So if his intelligence is a curse, then The Diagram will only harry The Desolation, not prevent or stop it.

[Chrono she/her]

Hey, welcome to the forums! Have an upvote for your actually interesting idea.

 

I really like this theory, mainly because there's tons of evidence to suggest it. Taravangian has without exception chosen to off all of his competition instead of cooperating with them. Dalinar is a great example. Instead of sending him a message by spanreed (Hey, Dalinar. I've heard that you have these strange delusions. Perhaps one of my medical teams could come to the Shattered Plains, you could get a diagnosis, and we could talk about the future of Roshar.), he pretty much says "Oh, whoops. We let him have too much power. Oh well, gotta kill him now." There's also this:

 

"You must become King. Of everything."

 

Sounds like there's not a lot of room for competition there.

[Numb]

Cooperating with Dalinar would be too risky. Mr. T has done far too many things that Dalinar would not agree with and Dalinar tends to want everything to be done his way(Not to say his way is wrong). 

[name_here]

The Diagram's plan seems to be to create power vacuums everywhere so Taravangian can step in and fill them. So the plan can't work if someone else unifies the Alethi. I'm not sure that the plan automatically preempts every other method of saving the world, but it can't be carried out if Dalinar unites the world. I'm actually willing to believe that when created it was the best plan for fufilling the stated conditions, but it makes someone with relatively little power at the beginning the centerpiece of the plan, necessitating brutal action and major sacrifices to accomplish.

 

 

I'm also a bit curious about how the Diagram can predict anything, due to the fact that it is interpreted by many people and depends on their interactions with each other and with other people.  There are random elements in here that can not possibly have been predicted exactly.  But with 20/20 hindsight, the Diagramists will be able to say "Aha!  We simply interpreted it wrong, clearly it is still right."

 

I gather that it's a probabilistic prediction. There are random elements involved, but you can predict the aggregate outcome of a large number of random events with a fair degree of certainty. However, it should also be pointed out that Taravangian has himself noted that it's actually wrong; the Diagram predicted a different number of factions in the civil war. But they can't scrap and replace the whole thing, so they're sticking with it and praying everything works out. I also don't know that it's very open to interpretation; the segments we get seem pretty clear. However, it's also got a massively elaborate and multilayer encryption scheme, so they can't actually read the thing properly.

 

It seems that it can't predict the behavior of individuals well if at all, so when everything rests on Shallan locating the Oathgate or the like the Diagram does not predict the outcome. Presumably it holds together for international politics because Taravangian knows the players and can guess at what they'll do with acceptable reliability.

 

I have two ideas for what is up with the encryption scheme.

 

First, it might be for space and time reasons because he needed to finish it before his intelligence reverted. Theoretically, if you had a string of text, you could embed several messages by taking every odd letter, or every even letter, or every third letter, and have each of those give a distinct intelligible message. Actually, you could take a completely random string of text and then generate encryption schemes that give any number of intelligible messages. Normally that would be completely insane, but he was a super-genius at the time and could potentially have thought up the encryption schemes faster than he could write cleartext. The ciphers we've seen directly are computationally pretty simple and can be explained quickly, so he could get a lot more information down by doing that, especially if he also used some basic character-shift ciphers.

 

Second, he could potentially have predicted exactly when each segment would be decoded and how his future self and subordinates would react, and the timing of the information release is itself part of the plan. I am honestly not too happy with this theory, though. First, it seems a bit too precise compared to the known predictions; it'd go off the rails if they broke portions in the wrong order, although I suppose a nested hint structure or orders to work on certain segments first could handle that. Secondly, though, that seems needlessly convoluted. Everyone in on the Diagramist conspiracy is happily following the plan, so if he secretly has a better plan I don't see why he couldn't just write that instead.

 

Come to think of it, though, there's at least one entity that might be reading the Diagram who wouldn't like the plan: Odium. Now, there's simply no way the ciphering can stop Odium from accessing the information; it can be broken by humans so it cannot possibly stop a Shard with the same starting point if he works at it. But if the real plan isn't written down in the first place, Odium can't read it. However, the heart of Voidbinding is attempting to divine the future, so I'm not sure how hiding the plan would help if Odium can foresee the outcome anyway with his magic system. Maybe it produces an infinite precog recursion because the outcome of the plan is tied to what Odium does about the plan. They've certainly got to foul his precognition somehow; there's no winning against someone who is vastly more powerful than you and can predict your every move before you even decide to make it. Maybe Cultivation can generate a Shard-scale shadow cloud.

[Aleksiel]

....

 

 

Unfortunately, if Odium can really read what's written, then he already knows about Tanavast's advice to Dalinar to convince Odium he can lose so that a champion is arranged. I think Honor would have certainly known if his enemy could read written words and would have told the resiver of the visions to not write it down. Well, at least I think it's reasonable to assume he would... Thus, I don't think Vargo is trying to prevent Odium from reading his plan.

 

I like the idea of Vargo hiding (parts) his plan from himself and his subordinates. May be ever since the accident with proposing anyone below average intelligence to commit suicide, he has learned that the direct approach won't lead to the desired results.