From Harm Reduction to Flourishing Maximization
At the societal level, there have been two basic stages of human society. First was an existence full of pressing, immediate problems that generally elicited responses grounded in reality. If the people of your nation are in danger of hunger, you produce more food. This made up the vast majority of human existence but has been gradually fading with the increasing wealth and security of the modern, industrialized world.
Of course, there are plenty of examples to the contrary, but if you look at the developing world compared to the rich world today, it is obvious that a country like India is (successfully) solving concrete problems like lack of Internet connectivity while countries like Germany are (disastrously) pursuing abstract goals like no “unnatural” energy production (nuclear power). Once a society passes a certain level of prosperity, people start focusing on a different kind of problem.
So far, an existence made up mostly of distant, abstract problems generally elicits responses grounded in feelings, especially negative feelings. This is a new kind of existence that is becoming more common. This kind of existence can be found in places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. Politics in many of the most affluent parts of California has ascended from reality into a hyper-ideological, super-abstract war on fascists and cartoonish corporate destroyers of the environment.
The electorate of a city like San Francisco will confidently vote for something that 99% of people in the world would recognize as obviously crazy. With the election of the radical Chesa Boudin as District Attorney, SF voters confidently chose to get drastically softer on crime, in a city that was already extremely soft on crime, to address the debatable national issues of overpolicing and overincarceration at the local level. It was a radical, half-baked solution to a poorly understood problem, an emotional reaction to provocative headlines. It was likely a result of channeling deeper dissatisfaction with life into a nonsensical fad.
In our newfound existence of first-world problems and distant, hazy threats, where the environment doesn’t thrust obvious, concrete problems onto people, politics is increasingly driven by the angriest, most extreme people. They perceive the most pressing societal problems because of their personal suffering. You don’t vote to go from soft on crime to almost legalizing crime because it is a rational response to a real problem, but because you feel that the country you live in is cruel and you want to do something, anything, to reduce the harm it does. It’s reacting to something that bothers you without thinking clearly about it instead of optimistically, generously striving for human flourishing.
Increasingly, Americans are creating imaginary problems to respond to: on one side, genocidal police, on the other, a growing tangle of wacky conspiracy theories. We are just mindlessly following a script that is no longer working. We don’t live in the world of scarcity and insecurity that humans have always lived in, except in our minds. We are suffering in the heaven on Earth that our forebears left us. The loop of reacting to pressing problems with dramatic solutions is broken. Overall, we are getting diminishing returns on reacting to supposedly immediate, pressing problems. Often, we are actually making things worse as we wildly wack at ants with a sledgehammer.
So how do we move forward and thrive in abundance? We’ve learned that it’s not as easy as it sounds to find purpose and meaning when things are really pretty good. We must develop a new mode of existence to adapt to our fantastic new world of abundance. What works in the 21st century? Who is effecting positive change? The obvious answer is the tech startup founder in general and Elon Musk in particular.
What does Elon Musk do that’s so different from the bitter commentators who try to destroy him? He transcends the daily skirmishes of the culture war (mostly 🙂) and thinks about what would make a better world from first principles. He doesn’t react to the latest provocative headline, he defines a grand purpose for humanity to pursue with concrete checkpoints.
More generally, the most effective type of organization in this era is the startup, the aligned group that works steadily, with extreme accountability, to bring about a concretely better future in some specific area. This model has worked in software and hardware, obviously. As Balaji Srinivasan argues, if a visionary founder and excellent team can create a social network of billions of people worth trillions of dollars, the non-obvious but logical next step is to create startup societies that scale from tens to millions of people. This is the idea of the network state. It might not work, but it’s worth trying.
Besides it making a kind of intuitive sense, it could bring major benefits. It could bring self-actualization in creating new purposeful societies. It could provide connection in working on meaningful projects with aligned peers. It could unlock technological and scientific progress with more innovation-friendly societies. Broadly, it could deliver two important ingredients of a good life: purpose and wealth. Purpose would come from building something new and great, and wealth from finding better ways to organize society with many new experiments. It’s time to step back and look to the horizon and the stars. It’s time to move forward and embrace and further improve our world of abundance instead of mindlessly slugging it out in culture wars.