From Nihilistic Stagnation to Revolutionary Heroism
The Special Revolution
Today, Americans commemorate something rare and special: a good revolution. The Declaration of Independence marked the creation of something truly new and good: the United States of America. The American Revolution inspired other revolutions but has been hard to equal, maybe harder than anyone thought at the time. There is a long history since then of American idealists supporting revolutions at home and abroad that usually turn out disastrously. Revolution is risky, but it is essential to human nature, and we need to figure it out to truly thrive.
We’re All Revolutionaries
Really, humans are just a revolutionary kind. We can’t resist revolution. In America today, we say that about half of the country is conservative, and about half is liberal or progressive. This distinction obscures the truth that all Americans are essentially very “progressive” in the grand scheme of things.
It might be more correct to say that the Right favors one contemporary revolution (the rapid, broad realization of the two-car-garage, white-picket-fence American Dream in the post-WWII era) while the Left favors another (the civil rights revolution that has been going on for sixty years).
On a smaller scale, too, we are suckers for revolutions. Every day, we get bombarded with promises of quick fixes for all of our problems, a hundred variations on “one weird trick that they don’t want you to know.” These are promises of personal revolutions, magical transformations into a perfect existence.
Zooming out, Jordan Peterson has described the eternal human ideal as “the revolutionary hero.” As summarized by ChatGPT, the revolutionary hero:
rejects conformity and complacency, stands up against oppressive systems or ideologies, and strives to bring positive change to society. The hero’s journey involves a personal transformation and the pursuit of higher ideals.
The Great Hesitation
We are not looking much like that lofty ideal today. We are now in the strange position of living in the wake of a series of basically good revolutions: first, the Revolutionary War, then the Industrial Revolution, then the Civil Rights Era. Things don’t usually go like this. It has been more typical in the grand arc of history for change to be perceived as essentially cyclical instead of a steady progression.
Maybe at some level, we feel lucky and are afraid to mess with what we have. So we’re complacent, cautious, and incurious. Instead of decisively creating our own revolutions, we play-act revolutions that already happened that we know turned out well. Black Lives Matter and Make America Great Again are attempts to recapture the glory of the Civil Rights Era and the post-WWII Golden Age. The problem is that times have changed. A new time calls for new heroes.
Becoming Revolutionary Heroes
We won’t really thrive until we find our way back to revolutionary heroism. I shudder a little to say it, though, since humankind’s history of revolutions in the last 100-odd years is very mixed. So we’re in this position where we have it pretty good, we can see some ways things might be a lot better, but we know that many modern revolutions are incredibly disastrous. So we hesitate and distract ourselves with bullshit.
We now have to rise to the occasion and create our own revolutions for our own problems. But we have to do it with the knowledge that the stakes have never been higher, the world has never been more complex, and it won’t get any easier. We have to get serious, and we have to get smart. We face a set of epic challenges and now have to take them on in earnest to reach new levels of thriving. In doing so, we will benefit greatly at both the individual and collective levels.
For Self-Actualization
At the individual level, becoming revolutionary heroes will make our lives epic adventures instead of empty, aimless slogs. A world where not much changes is boring. It sucks. I’m tired of it, and I bet you are, too, at some level. We want to make something important happen, but we usually don’t have the initiative, time, or energy to develop good ambitious projects, so we get sucked into other people’s ambitious projects instead.
We end up enslaved to an ideology or cult. We give away our agency to realize someone else’s half-baked dream. It’s all pretty dumb, frankly. Movements like abolish-the-police and QAnon are really just very dumb and don’t stand up to any scrutiny. We can do better.
At some level, we know when we’ve enslaved ourselves to a dumbass, half-assed revolution. It feels bad. You become very touchy and defensive about the house of cards you’ve based your life on. You have to deny what is in front of you every day to believe that your life makes sense. It’s exhausting. In the end, you have to face the painful fact that the revolution failed.
If you pursue a good revolution, though, your life becomes a grand, meaningful, boundless game in which you repeatedly transform into a better, stronger person. Think of Elon Musk accelerating the space industry or Sam Altman leading the AI revolution. It has to be a lot more rewarding when the feedback you get is telling you that you’re onto something, you’re not just bullshitting yourself. You can see the real value that you’re adding to the lives of billions of people. You can see yourself becoming more creative and productive than you ever thought possible.
For Collective Progress
Achieving this kind of revolutionary heroism is redemptive at the individual level, but has the wondrous side effect of making the whole world better and setting it up for subsequent revolutions. Scientific, technological, and measured, practical political revolutions improved billions of lives. GMOs might have saved a billion lives, and China going capitalist enriched hundreds of millions.
To Avoid Annihilation
With great power comes great responsibility. We also have unprecedented power to destroy. While the aforementioned revolutions improved billions of lives in the last one hundred years, horribly misguided ideological revolutions killed about a hundred million in the same time period.
Now many fear existential risk due to global warming or superintelligent AI. Safety might have been overemphasized in recent decades, but it will have to be a major focus going forward. Starting with the development of nuclear weapons, we have been living with the burden of managing existential risk. We have also inherited responsibility for existential risks that have always loomed but have never been feasible to manage: asteroids, supervolcanoes, and more. Existential risks will require one revolution after another.
The Way Forward
We have in our hands the power to destroy everything, or to create a kind of paradise. We can rise to unprecedented levels of self-actualization and empowerment, or degrade ourselves with ideologies and weapons of mass destruction.
There are signs of progress towards broad revolutionary heroism. Y Combinator is something like a reliable machine for producing positive-sum revolutions in the form of tech startups. Now this kind of startup playbook is being proposed as a way to develop startup societies and even cloud-first network states. This could mean bringing the dynamism and rapid innovation of the tech startup world to governance.
At the same time, the creative power of the individual generally grows each year with ever-improving tools of all kinds. The obvious ones right now are AI tools.
With each generation of revolutions of every kind, we get a little smarter about how to design and effect revolutions. And with each generation of science and technology, we increase the scale and quantity of revolutions we can effect.
None of it’s a given, and the risks are as frightening as the upside is inspiring. But the overall course of the development of humanity gives us reason to have hope and to keep trying to revolutionize our world into something better.
So what does this all mean here and now? It’s more reason to be ambitious and try to create something, in whatever way you can. For my part, I have begun this fledgling newsletter, which has just a handful of subscribers. I am trying to clarify what this heroic future might look like for myself and others, and encourage myself and others to seize the opportunities before us. There are a million problems waiting to be solved, and it will take all of us to solve them and level up humanity.