The Jonah Carnival#
A season of celebrating short amateur Jonah Plays about a catastrophe that has not happened yet but could be locked in at any moment. The prime example here is accidental nuclear winter, starving billions after failing harvests are caused by blocked sunlight due to soot blown into the atmosphere by burning cities after a nuclear war gets triggered by accident. Such near-disaster accidents have happened on 26 Sept 1983 and 27 Oct 1962, respectively commemorated from Petrov Day on 26 September to Arkhipov Day on 27 October.
The free plays, amateur by design, are named after the ridiculous prophet Jonah who saved Nineveh, the capital city of the superpower of his day from annihilation by getting its citizens to organize a grass-roots movement for changing each their own hearts and minds. They did this fast enough to avert disaster in a real-world explosion of gentle kind reasonableness that changed the direction of Reality in less than 40 days.
Use the pilot play script below (Jonah Play b11) or rewrite it to your heart’s content. No permission needed. The core idea of the play is that whether the city is spared at the end depends on what the city does.
If you read only this box
Somebody, somewhere, has to be the person who notices in real time that a disaster is approaching for a city, and that city has to listen to avert it. A Jonah Play is a short play about that person and that city. It needs three people or more, a bedsheet or more, one die and no stage. Put it on in a city hall, a common room, a bar, a classroom, a street corner, and maybe even in a synagogue, a church hall, a mosque, or whatever other place of worship or gathering you can find. Let’s all cry out with all we have to any higher power we can reach to help us do the right thing so that accidental nuclear winter (and other human-made disasters may be averted). Will it be enough to organize a month-long carnival of Jonah Plays between 26 September and 27 October to change enough hearts and minds? Or will this world need more time for this KISS by Reality to Keep Its Study Simple?
Take a seed play: the ancient Jonah-Play-b11 — Forty Days, Overturned, or the modern Jonah-Play-b12 — Arkhipov and the Steel Fish.
Rewrite it, in your own words and your own language.
Share what happened and tell us. Every Jonah Play performed anywhere that keeps the seven rules gets a link from this page.
Why these two dates#
Between them, the two dates hold both halves of the accidental nuclear winter story: the machine that raised a false alarm, and circumstances nearly wrongly interpreted by people as “forcing them to act”.
26 September 1983 — Petrov Day. The screens at the Soviet early-warning station Serpukhov-15 reported American missiles inbound. The duty officer, Stanislav Petrov, judged it a false alarm and reported it as one, at great personal risk. He was later shown to be right: it was sunlight on high cloud. Almost nobody heard about it for years. The UN keeps the same date as the International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons.
27 October 1962 — Arkhipov Day. On the most dangerous day of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet submarine B-59, hunted by US ships and cut off from Moscow, carried a nuclear torpedo the Americans did not know about. Twice that day her exhausted captain reached for that nuclear torpedo. Vasili Arkhipov gentle kind reasonably infused the right reasoning into both situations, even though he knew that his prioritizing to “save the world” may cost him the submarine and his life. It took until 2017 for his family to receive the first Future of Life Award on his behalf. More details and documented uncertainties are in the Matheo-b16 forecast study (its Appendix SIA-X7).
A month in between. As Annie Jacobsen shows in her 2024 book “Nuclear War”, a credible scenario runs from the first launch to the end of a nuclear war in about 72 minutes: far too fast for even the most alert people to react. The question posed to humanity is therefore: will the month between Petrov Day and Arkhipov Day be sufficient for a Jonah Carnival to motivate enough gentle kind reasonable actions to tip the balance of the world towards transitioning to a sustainable future? A month may be long enough for most motivated groups like schools, congregations, book clubs, bars, companies, and others, who understand the problem to organize some amateur plays or other meaningful actions to help highlight the problem and opportunities they see for changing. Yet, since a Jonah Carnival starts with a single person, it may take a few more initial weeks to gain sufficient traction to lock in the new direction as required for averting the disasters at hand. Either way, the essence of a Jonah Carnival is the limited time available for achieving an existentially important system-wide change.
“Carnival” means many plays, not one. A single short play in a single hall is a Jonah Play. When enough of them happen in the same season, then they can become a Jonah Carnival.
What a Jonah Play is#
It is not a new invention but an old art form with many parents.
Like any carnival, a Jonah Carnival is meant to liberate the imagination to envision what would usually be unthinkable, albeit in this case by focussing creative energies on averting a very specific disaster at hand. In that sense it is more targeted than a general carnival, where anything goes.
At the other end of extremes are the highly specific nativity plays meant to take a very specific historic story for re-enacting it. A Jonah Play is deliberately broader than that. While it does have a template, the point of a Jonah Play is to adapt it to a well-defined set of circumstances in the real world. Not merely for entertainment value, but with the explicit goal to inspire existential change for the better where it matters most.
Maybe Jonah Plays are best seen in the tradition of the purimshpil. This is the amateur folk play of Purim, the Jewish festival for a genocide, planned by dice, that did not happen because someone dared to speak up. Millennia old in principle and much refined in recent centuries, purimshpils motivated ordinary people to put on costumes, make a racket at the villain’s name, and turn the world upside down for a day. The repertoire was never only Esther: it included Joseph as well as Jonah. So a Jonah Play (in the old form, a Jonah-shpil) needs nobody’s permission. It is an old thing being picked back up. More serious theatrical adaptations exist as well.
At least three traditions already mark a catastrophe that did not happen: Purim (Jewish), the Fast of Nineveh (kept by Syriac, Assyrian, Coptic and Armenian Christians: a city warned and spared) and Petrov Day (secular). These show that humanity knows how to hold a festival for a disaster that did not happen. If people choose to remember.
What is new here is that humanity has never before held such a festival in advance for a disaster that it hopes to avert because if it is allowed to occur it would be of such cataclysmic global proportions that barely anyone would be left to celebrate anything.
Many Jonah Plays, merging into a grand Jonah Carnival are meant to be such a festival of hope.
In order to maintain the essential levers of hope all Jonah Plays in this sense must preserve certain functional elements to avoid falling into either of these extremes:
Despair destroys true hope by presumptively concluding that no true hope exists; it’s like throwing out the baby of true hope with the bathwater of unavoidable illusions.
Presumption destroys true hope by faking a certain yes about what is not certain yet; it’s like trying to preserve the bathwater as if it was the baby, even if no baby exists.
Both destroy true hope by suppressing the uncertainty that must necessarily exist for any hope to be a true hope. Without this uncertainty at the core of true hope the respective system collapses into an oversimplified, closed, deterministic system.
This functional core of Jonah Plays is described in more detail below after giving a seed example for what a Jonah Play might look like.
Jonah Play Seed Examples#
Jonah-Play-b11 — Forty Days, Overturned is the ancient seed play: the book of Jonah itself, told close to the original as a play. Jonah-Play-b12 — Arkhipov and the Steel Fish is the modern one. Each stands alone; played together, they make a double bill. Treat both as scaffolding drafts, not a text to be set in stone. Both are currently at the maturity of a Mockup Model.
b11, in five scenes. Jonah is sent, refuses, and is the first to put on the mask of ASON (Hebrew אָסוֹן, “disaster”). It is the abstract calamity that arrives without an author and proceeds to cause a concrete calamity if nobody bothers to stop it. ASON acts as unexpectedly as a crocodile, which is an ambush-predator that stays hidden until it’s too late. On this site ASON is defined as the Ambiguous Semantics Of Nothing. This ASON crocodile gets Jonah to run away from his true calling by taking a ship to the opposite direction. So a storm arises (made by people shaking a bedsheet at the boat). The sailors cast a real die to find whose fault it is. Jonah is identified that way and proposes a radical solution to calm the storm. Fast forward through a wild roller coaster that brings Jonah back to square one and puts him on a path to get to Nineveh, the city he must warn to stay true to his conscience.
Jonah preaches possibly the shortest sermon ever: “Forty days, and Nineveh is overturned.” To Jonah’s surprise the whole city turns around; everyone contributes, down to the cattle in sackcloth.
Two dice run through b11. Jonah’s own die keeps coming back to him, however often it is rolled: that is what an odd vocation feels like from the inside. Nineveh’s die rolls towards the city’s end by default, every day. Jonah’s five words do not say which “overturned” they mean (the Hebrew can mean destroyed, or turned around), so the city decides: every Ninevite who says “later” costs a roll, and the city is spared only if it turns before the die shows a certain number. Either way, Jonah waits under a dying plant, watching Nineveh in his “tele-vision”. When Reality decides to turn Nineveh around, making Jonah formally a false prophet, the play ends on the question the book ends on (Jonah 4:11). Whether Jonah stays a Cassandra or becomes Jonah, the false prophet, depends on whether anyone listened.
b12, in four scenes. On 27 October 1962 a Soviet submarine, a steel fish, has heard nothing from home for days and is seemingly under attack. Its furious captain orders its nuclear torpedo readied; Vasili Arkhipov speaks up for gentle kind reasonableness, and they surface instead. That night, blinded by searchlights, the captain orders an urgent dive, again with the torpedo tubes ready; Arkhipov sees an American ship signalling by lamp, and cancels the dive. “Nothing” happens, in this case sparing the world by rewarding the courage to speak up. But then the dice keep rolling, year after year, until the audience is asked who they want to win, and to decide by remaining in their chairs by default or standing up to avert accidental nuclear winter.
The one idea to keep through every rewrite: ASON is a mask, not a character. Anyone who puts it on becomes an unwitting tool for ASON, the worst enemy ever. ASON changes wearers at least three times. Nobody wants to fail due to ASON. Reasonable people step into important jobs and want to do it well. Then at some unsuspecting moment ASON takes over anyone to instigate mischief. There are no villains in this play, except for ASON. ASON keeps tricking hapless people into unwittingly destroying civilizations. The key problem here is the shape-shifting nature of ASON, the most universal villain ever. More on ASON, and other ways to show it, just below.
The seven rules of the form#
These are what keep a Jonah Play about existential risk from becoming something worse than useless. A play that keeps them gets a link from this page. A play that breaks them does not. These seven are the only rules. Everything else on this page is advice, because a carnival with too many rules would not be a carnival.
The way out is always shown, even if the city does not take it. The city is spared if its inhabitants listens and stops the rolling dice in time. If it will not listen as a whole, or too many mean to act later, it may fall. Either ending may be played. A disaster that nobody could have prevented may not, like a disaster that is always prevented. Because both would turn the play into a deterministic simulation that takes away the human responsibility to choose between fate (death by default) and destiny (life by following the narrow, risky-looking escape from fate).
ASON is the only enemy. Here ASON is the ambiguous semantics of nothing, a highly dangerous form of nothing that poses advanced persistent threats to all agents in complex worlds. This is the real enemy and the only enemy. All others are merely perceived “enemies”, turned into “foes” when misguided algorithms for how to handle ASON demonizes others for nothing. Therefore, no nation, government, … or person, living or dead, is made the villain: no flag is booed, no official is impersonated. A real city may be the place where a play happens (see Which city), but its people are never the enemy. Note that that doesn’t mean that everything ever done by anybody has to be called good. Mistakes are mistakes. Yet mistakes can become learning experiences if those who did them turn them into fertilizer by taking down the fig-leaves that excuse those mistakes. Everyone is free to present their own mistakes (by “impersonating” themselves by presenting how they fell for their own Structurally Inconsistent Notions and their own Least Inconvenient Explanations that tricked them). Laughing at one’s own expense is OK. At the expense of others is not. Laughing at the expense of nothing in general and ASON in particular is OK. Trivializing it is not.
Make a racket whenever ASON or nothing is summoned. The summoning line is a version of “and nobody said anything” or “important persons said nothing”. That nothing is where ASON lives. Someone puts on the ASON mask and the room makes as much noise as it can.
The joke is at our own expense. Jonah is the most ridiculous prophet in scripture. Play him as one of us, because he is.
Amateur by design. Cardboard fish, bathrobes, a cooking pot for a helmet. Anyone who wants a part gets a part. This is not to say that Holywould-productions will not be listed, but it is to say that slick Hollywood or other institutional productions will not get special treatment. The blood-red carpet of failing to avert disasters is rolled out for everyone equally.
Never simulate a real alert, and never destroy anything real. No sirens, no emergency-broadcast sounds, no blasts or flashes, no “this is not a drill”: a plausible false alarm is the exact harm the play is about. The abstraction of nothing gets broken, burned and smashed, but no real-world items of any type. Not even a card-board box. Missiles are pillows; nuclear winter can be simulated by white sheets drawn over a city - or not-so-white-ones for simulating dirty fall-out.
Your own mandate. Nobody forces anyone to perform a Jonah Play, and nobody controls these plays. Whoever performs one or participates does it on their own mandate and at their own risk, because they believe it matters. Nobody performing speaks for anyone else: not for a movement, a religion, a government, or any author of any particular analysis. If a Jonah Play calls for a mandate then it is for all to follow Reality through real quests for real answers to avert disasters for all in the interest of the common good. No special interest promotion.
Fallen or Spared?#
A Jonah Play does not promise that the city is spared. In fact the default is that it falls. Whether Jonah’s first call led to a near-miss disaster that got the city to pay attention once Jonah actually showed up remains for a play to interpret. Whether a city is spared in your play is yours to decide; rule 1 asks only that the way out be visible, whether it is taken or not. Here is what to weigh.
For letting the city fall:
Death by default. A city that is always spared starts to repeat a very comfortable LIE: the Least Inconvenient Explanation that e.g. more than sixty years of nothing already tell: that nothing always turns out to be harmless. The arithmetic says otherwise. As long as the dice keep rolling, the question is when, not whether doom arrives. For accidental nuclear winter in our time, the model on this site finds disaster more likely than not within a human lifetime, as long as today’s hair-trigger policies persist. Such disasters haunt and hunt humanity like crocodiles. These ambush predators lie motionless until some unwitting prey gets close enough. Then they unleash all their fury.
The story itself is conditional. Nineveh is spared because the whole city turns, down to the cattle, and the book of Jonah ends on a question, not a promise. The real Nineveh fell a bit later in 612 BCE, about a century and a half after the time in which the story is set; the book of Nahum is about that fall. Being spared once is not the same as being safe.
The same research that warns against discussing a threat without a way out finds that a threat with a visible way out works. The answer is to show the way out, not to hide the fall.
Tragedy ends in disaster, and for two and a half thousand years tragedies in theater have made people think. Promising that it always works out, or that there is always a second try, is no kindness: it teaches that this is not a real test and that human behavior doesn’t matter. Unless corrected at some point, this produces cultures where irresponsible children grow up to become irresponsible blinded adults, causing such dooming by default.
For letting the city be spared:
The form’s promise is that a warning can work.
A carnival is meant to be joyful.
A threat with no visible way out tends to produce denial and fatalism. That is a well-studied finding about fear-based messages.
Amateurs who stage a catastrophe badly can hurt people in the room.
The fall is the moment most likely to be clipped and passed around as doom-preaching.
Preaching doom and gloom and fear-mongering are harmful; showing a way out by Facing Everything And Rising is the easiest way to turn doom and gloom into delight and glory — as long as the way out is genuine.
Not wanting to look is human, but it cannot be a veto. Many of us would rather not talk about our own death, and it is natural that the same reluctance extends to the death of a civilization. But a city cannot deal with a danger it is not allowed to name. This news may be as hard to hear as news of one’s own death, with one great difference: this civilizational death is actually avoidable. The rolling of dice can be stopped. But to do that the death-trifecta of incurious ignorant indifference must be overcome.
Which city#
The city in a Jonah Play can be Nineveh, an invented city, your own city, or a city your audience thinks of as the “enemy’s””. The choice is the playwright’s. Whatever it is, Rule 2 holds: ASON is the only true enemy, never the people of a city. Here are some pros and cons.
Nineveh, or a city with an invented name. Nobody’s home is shown falling, and the play travels anywhere as the audience makes the connection by itself. But it can feel like a fantasy, far away, and easy to shrug off as “just a story”.
Your own city. This is what is actually at stake, and nobody enjoys the fall of their own home. But it is harder to watch, and a clip of it can be misread as a threat or a prophecy about a real place. Say plainly, in the play and in anything you post, that it is a play and that nothing has happened. Denounce any self-fulfilling prophecies in the clearest possible way.
A city your audience thinks of as belonging to the “enemy”. This is Jonah’s own case. Nineveh was the great and cruel city of Assyria, the superpower that would later destroy the kingdom of Jonah’s people. He was sent by Reality to save it; that is why he sulks. He didn’t want to share a good thing with his “enemies”. It asks the hardest question in the book (Jonah 4:11): do we still want the disaster averted if it means our worst enemy is spared too? Nuclear winter does not stop at borders: the smoke from the enemy’s burning city darkens your own harvest. If you choose to model an “enemy-city”, the play must want ultimately want that city spared, as the book does, and its fall must be mourned, never enjoyed. This mourning must be made abundantly clear to merit a recommendation here. Plays that beat down or look down on their enemies are not proper Jonah Plays as defined here.
How it ends#
Four endings are allowed. Each teaches something, and each can mislead.
The city is spared. A warning is seen working. But if every play ends this way, the Carnival teaches that it always works out — making people complacent.
The city falls, and the play ends there, as tragedy does. It shows plainly what happens if nobody stops the rolling dice and the Titanic continues to plow through the ice-field that sank it. But such a play becomes helpful when it shows how the potential for fatalism turns into a fatalistic prison when people start to believe that they can do “nothing”. Make sure the moment when somebody could have stopped it is highly visible (rule 1), and stay to talk.
The dice decide. Every “later” costs one honest roll, and the city falls only if the die comes up before anyone stops the rolling. The outcome is really open, as in the real world. But a fall can feel like bad luck rather than a delay in acting, so make sure the room knew it could act. This is where it can help to visibly define the ASON Crocodile (see below) and make a racket whenever it shows its deceptive face.
The scene is played again, and this time anyone in the room may shout “Stop!” and step in, as in forum theatre. It is a strong rehearsal for acting. But it suggests there may be a second try, or a third, which may or may not exist in the real world. Hence, to take Jonah seriously means to embrace all uncertainty as best as possible. Fittingly, his Hebrew name is ambiguous. It can stand for “dove” or for “terrifying”.
How to show a fall without harming anyone or anything. Nothing real is destroyed (Rule 6). Pillows or paper-planes fall on the city as missiles: throw them onto the stage, never at the audience and never at faces. A non-white sheet drawn over the city is for toxic soot darkening the skies (if modeled), and a white sheet may shortcut to blanketing everything with the eventually unavoidable nuclear winter that kills global harvests and kills most people by starvation in the years after. Use breathable cloth only, never plastic sheeting; let nobody lie under a sheet who does not want to; keep cloth away from candles.
Then silence, for as long as the room can bear it. Consider it a real memorial silence for those who will die if accidental nuclear winter is not averted andOr for the many who had to die for LLoL to finally take ASON seriously, simulate waiting times until accidental nuclear winter, describe a credible escape hatch, and put together this proposal for Jonah Plays.
When the play is over, the cast stands up as themselves, so that everyone sees the fall happened only in the play.
Holding space in the room#
Say before you begin that the play may end with the city falling, and that it falls only in the play.
If young children are coming, talk to their parents first.
If anyone may find this frightening (death, disaster, questions about the end of things), offer to talk with them before the play, after it, or both. Details see next.
For those talks, and for any Jonah Play, two distinctions matter most. Fear is not danger: fear is a feeling made in us, danger is the thing out there in the world that can hurt us. Telling them apart is a skill that can be learned. And fate (“nothing can be done”) is not destiny (“I refuse to ignore it, and I explore what I can do”). Both are explained in Fate or destiny, a short guide.
Stay afterwards. Talk, and eat something if possible to help processing.
News like this is often taken in stages. SD7, this site’s map of healing, names seven in its column on grieving. Condensed, with where some of them show up in a Jonah Play:
Denial, overcome from outside: hear the bad news, and do not kill the messenger. (Jonah 1)
Denial, overcome from inside: see the cause for yourself, dismantle your own illusions. (Jonah 2)
Anger at reality: Jonah under his dying plant. (Jonah 4)
Bargaining: later; somebody else; one more roll. (Jonah 5?)
Depression: sorrow feeds the loss of hope, so real encouragement is a matter of survival. (Jonah 4)
Acceptance of the pain that cannot be avoided, which spares the suffering that can. (Jonah 6?)
Homecoming: understanding why is not needed in order to accept, but it is needed in order to live together again. (Jonah 7?)
What is accepted is the news, not the disaster. People rarely go through the stages in order, and nobody goes through all of them in one evening. A play can show that the road exists. Note that Jonah 1-4 are de-excerpted from the Hebrew Bible for this purpose, whereas “Jonah 5?-7?” are fictional chapters presuming that Jonah’s story continued after Jonah 4.
Tell us what happened — and how plays get their numbers#
After a performance, two things are asked of you.
Put it where someone can find it: a photo, a phone video or a paragraph. Tag it #JonahPlay and #AuditTheMath.
Send a line to FF+jonah-carnival@balospe.com saying where it was, roughly how many people came, what went wrong (probably the more useful part) and what may be useful tips for others (what went right without becoming self-congratulatory).
What happens next. Every play that keeps the seven rules is listed here with a link. No one has to register and no one approves scripts. The only thing checked is whether the rules were kept.
Numbering. Plays are numbered the way this site numbers everything (the lettered-numbering system). b10 is reserved for the form’s template, b11 and b12 are the seed plays above, and new plays take b13, b14, … in the order they arrive, never skipped and never reused. a1 to a9 are kept for the greatest hits, assigned later, by impact.
To maximize flexibility (until further notice and until someone can argue a better case): numbering may be reserved for Jonah Plays that are open for use by anyone under the free, open Jonah License (see at the bottom). Not so free plays may still get mentioned without official numbers.
How impact is judged, and why it is hard. The measure that matters is how much a play did to avert the disaster, and that measure cannot be read off directly. A warning that works leaves no evidence: it looks like a Tuesday. So the greatest hits are judged by the nearest things that can be seen: how many people a play reached, how many of them went on to check the arithmetic, and how many put on a play of their own. That this is a proxy is clear. Ultimately it is the position in the global causality chain that determines the impact. For example, anyone composing a play with the humor required to win the trust of all 10 Nuclear Kings of Earth (including Iran for ambition) and put them in such a good mood that they happily agree to put Earth in escrow by guaranteeing to not bomb ResearchCity efforts to smithereens and instead helping ResearchCity to become truly transparent — that would in this case probably become the winner on that global impact list. Let the race begin!
The one fact every play should carry#
Whatever else changes, for a Jonah Play about averting accidental nuclear winter, the audience should afterwards be able to say roughly this:
Most of us are likelier to die in an accidental nuclear winter than in a car crash. If today’s hair-trigger policies persist, the question is when, not whether: any yearly risk above zero, rolled year after year, ends the same way. Readings of the record differ only in how fast; the model on this site finds disaster more likely than not within a human lifetime. Extended waiting times such as many decades or centuries are unlikely and do not change the fact that the ending will be the same - unless the game is profoundly changed. Like human nature, it is not fate: Hearts and minds do have the demonstrated ability to change if people allow themselves to acknowledge all real-world uncertainties that exist. The danger lasts as long as the dice rolling continues, and the rolling can be stopped. The arithmetic is public, and anyone can check it.
No precise number is needed for that, and the play should not lean on one. The readings differ about when; given the stakes, the burden of proof lies with anyone who claims the dice can safely keep rolling. Check it here. Assume the person who did the arithmetic is probably wrong somewhere. Even then, truly looking cost only a little. But not looking, denying, doubting, ridiculing, … costs everything if that messenger was indeed sent by Reality.
Needless to say, accidental nuclear winter is not the only existential disaster to which the Jonah dynamic may be applied. Feel free to adapt to other scenarios, as long as they are grounded in real-world analyses.
Play about changing hearts and minds, build entirely from made up problems in fictional worlds can still be useful for changing hearts and minds in the real world. Whether it is still useful to call them Jonah Plays remains to be seen.
What the plays are for#
Each performance is a small public act of giving ourselves a mandate: to take human-made, self-organizing disasters seriously before they happen, not after. Accidental nuclear winter is the one at the center of this Jonah Carnival; but it is far from the only one. See recent discussions of existential AI risks. Nobody hands out a mandate to act on such long-ignored risks. People create such mandates by paying attention, because they believe it matters (rule 7). A Jonah Play is an opportunity for creating and amplifying such existential mandates, one play at a time. Written. Performed. Attended. Documented. Published. Filmed. Shared. Discussed. Promoted. And so on.
This site’s own proposal for what such a mandate should build is a ResearchCity, scaled up in stages to work on exactly the disasters that otherwise get ignored, with a MADI, a Mutually Assured Destruction Inhibitor, made responsible for scaling it up. A MADI is a function, not a person: any competent person could in principle fill it. One of the main contributions of the Balospe.com site is the development of formal, public criteria for testing credible MADI candidates. You do not have to agree with that proposal to put on a Jonah Play. The arithmetic, and the play, stand without it.
Other times to perform#
The Jonah Carnival has a proposed starting season (see above). The other Carnival has an established season. But the art form is not bound in time. If your community keeps one of these days, use it:
Purim (late winter or early spring): the form’s native ground. The festival is named after the lot that Haman cast. The echo of stochasticity in nuclear roulette is eerie.
The Fast of Nineveh (three days, in the weeks before Lent in the Eastern calendars): a city warned and spared, kept for centuries by some communities.
Yom Kippur, afternoon: Jonah is the assigned reading. Ask whoever leads your service first, because that day is theirs, not yours.
Any day that is called Today. The Jonah Carnival obviously aims for a global turnaround at a globally critical decision-time. It’s hard to predict when that turn-around will happen. If now, wonderful. If a bit later, also good. Let’s keep going until a real, workable way appears that can credibly lead out of the current quagmire. Once committed, let’s remember the time to help everyone to recall that they might be Jonah or Arkhipov or Petrov or whoever will be that rare odd-one-out person in their area that prevents the next disaster by staying alert and acting gentle kind reasonably.
How this could fail, said plainly#
A page that lists only its hopes is advertising.
It may not be funny, and an unfunny play may be worse than none. We don’t need more doom.
ASON may become a cartoon that the audience blames, letting everybody off. The mask changing wearers is the guard, and a careless production will drop it.
The dice may be read as fatalism, and a fallen city even more so. The guard is rule 1: the way out is always shown, and the city that falls is the city that waited too long.
A fall may be read as a threat or a prophecy, or clipped and passed around as one. A superficial guard is rule 6: it happens only in the play, with pillows and sheets, and never looks real. The more important guard is to realize how believing in doom can become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Those who see times of peace as opportunities for preparing the next war will inevitably find themselves in the next war. (ResearchCity is about how to avert such self-fulfilling doom and gloom by turning it into delight and glory.)
It may re-terrify someone who has lived through a war. Say beforehand how the play may end, and offer to talk before and after.
It may be taken as a religious or a partisan claim. Rules 2 and 7 exist to hopefully prevent that.
It may be performed three times and then stop. Three is more than zero.
A dire warning may be real and work and leave no evidence at all. That is the joke Jonah never got.
Sources, for anyone who wants to check.
Leviathan and the hook: Job 41 (40:25 in Hebrew numbering), BSB.
Jonah faces Leviathan: Pirkei de-Rabbi Eliezer, chapter 10, Sefaria.
Nineveh turns, and the book ends on a question: Jonah 3:9–10 and 4:11, BSB 3, BSB 4.
The fall of Nineveh: the book of Nahum, BSB; and a Babylonian chronicle for the year 612 BCE, ABC 3, the Fall of Nineveh Chronicle.
Causal networks in plain words: Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie (2018), The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect, Basic Books, New York (author’s page). The technical version: F. R. Kschischang, B. J. Frey and H.-A. Loeliger (2001), “Factor graphs and the sum-product algorithm”, IEEE Transactions on Information Theory 47(2): 498–519, doi:10.1109/18.910572.
Fear appeals: Kim Witte and Mike Allen (2000), “A meta-analysis of fear appeals: implications for effective public health campaigns”, Health Education & Behavior 27(5): 591–615, doi:10.1177/109019810002700506; and Melanie B. Tannenbaum and colleagues (2015), “Appealing to fear: a meta-analysis of fear appeal effectiveness and theories”, Psychological Bulletin 141(6): 1178–1204, doi:10.1037/a0039729.
Free to share: the Jonah License
Everything on this page is under the Jonah License (JoLi): CC0, public domain. Copy it, perform it, change it, translate it, sell tickets or not, keep none of the words or all of them. No permission is needed. Credit is welcome but not required.
The Jonah Licence’s one twist is about nothing. Doing nothing with it is not nothing. The license asks a single thing of all who use it, and cannot enforce it: “Prepare to explain on Judgement Day what you failed to do with any material you received under the Jonah License.”