The Paths of Creation and Destruction
Tragedy, agony, apathy, and resentment strike every person. The only question is how much. It’s always understandable for a person to succumb to despair, anger, or even hatred. The harsh, indifferent world can warp or break any individual. History overflows with inconceivable horrors everywhere at every time. There are many stories of people who went down a very dark path of hateful destruction.
If things go right, though, people tend to end up basically healthy and vital, happily participating in the development of their lives, their communities, and humanity. Most people forthrightly take on some frontier, whether it’s space, the Internet, or just growing up and raising their kids well. That’s always the goal, to have as many people make it onto that constructive, hopeful path as possible. That’s how humankind has gotten so far.
Ultimately, there is a dividing line running through every civilization and every person’s heart between optimistic creation and pessimistic destruction. Our fate depends on the balance between those two forces.
The Infinite Game of Creation
Creation is the essential act of a healthy human. Creation is facing reality head-on and striving to make it better somehow, creating something new to redeem the struggles of life. It requires the ability to conceive of and maintain a positive vision of the future and the competence and resiliency to stay engaged in its realization.
This is what Nietzsche called the Will to Power. It’s life-affirming, expansive, and vital. It’s diving to the bottom of the ocean or rocketing beyond the atmosphere. It’s going further than anyone has before, even if you might not make it back. It’s dreaming big and going big and accepting even the ultimate risk. This is not easy. It is heroic. It is an infinite, challenging game.
This way of creation has always been revered and recognized as being of ultimate value, but it might have gotten more precarious as human existence became more complex. Societies have become less coherent and less unified. There are so many paths and so few guardrails. People fall through the cracks, caught by neither family nor state. They drift through atomized cities on a gradual path to complete self-destruction. These lost people have become a striking feature of many of the world’s richest cities.
The Tempting Call of Destruction
The complex, atomized, incoherent, individualistic modern society is perilous. It’s a fundamentally good world that is generally conducive to human flourishing, but portals to the abyss abound. It is heaven pocked with a thousand paths to hell. The paths to hell are tempting. These paths to hell are such a big part of the modern world that they are productized and institutionalized. There are industries whose only product is sickness. See the West Coast homelessness cultivation and harm maintenance — sorry, reduction — industries.
Harm reduction is forsaking a soul to annihilation. It is systemized, bureaucratized enablement of addiction to deadly poisons. It is the blessing of self-destructive despair as a fundamentally correct, justified response to the supposedly irredeemably cruel world we live in. “Who are we to judge?” is a nice-sounding thought. It is a velvet glove on the hand that brushes sick, weak people towards the drain, towards oblivion, hell, and ultimately annihilation. Of course, sometimes you have to meet people where they are. But this kind of suspension of judgment is dangerous enablement when taken to the extreme as it is today on the West Coast.
This is what Nietzsche called the Will to Nothingness. It’s the desire for less, always negation. Keeping people in a sick, dependent state is the most striking version, but the impulse is everywhere. It’s in the obsession with the reduction of energy usage instead of the development of energy abundance. It’s net-zero, absolute zero, degrowth — all these growing currents represent the will to nothingness, the idea that life is fundamentally bad and there should be less of it. They can sound nice, but they never have any idea of greatness, strength, or self-transcendence. This kind of thinking extends the idea of the hospice throughout life: just reduce suffering until you fade into oblivion.
The Essential Choice
A bigger world, more paths, less coherence, less guidance, weaker norms — it all adds up to more variance. Extreme variance in human societies is unnatural to us. It is hard for us to handle. It is harder to wrap our minds around than the smaller, simpler societies of antiquity. The amount of freedom and choice we have is surreal and sometimes overwhelming.
San Francisco is heaven, San Francisco is hell. It depends on which side of the divide you’re on. From one block to the next, a city like San Francisco alternates between paradisal playgrounds of unbounded creation and heart-rending, horrific hellscapes of despair.
Watch your step. The stakes are life or death. Inconceivable suffering and unimaginable flourishing are at stake. With every step, every day, you are part of creating either the greatest abundance of human flourishing ever or just the latest in an unbroken series of hellish life-negating tableaus.
Every day you choose between creating heaven and creating hell. Everything everybody does matters. Humanity is precious, and our very existence is never completely secure. Every person should dedicate themselves to the way of creation, self-actualization, and courageous self-transcendence. The alternative is nihilism and, ultimately, hell.
This is why mass human empowerment is so important. The broader and greater human empowerment is, the fewer people will forsake and curse the whole project of human development. Humanity has been empowering itself at an accelerating rate for hundreds of years now, and we might be embarking on our broadest, greatest round of empowerment yet with ubiquitous AI. Onward and upward is the only way we will thrive. Shooting for the stars is the only way to leave behind the depths.