Where We Are: The Era of the Prophet
In The Wizard and the Prophet, Charles C. Mann describes two archetypes shaping the course of the 20th century: the Wizard and the Prophet. The Wizard is an optimistic tinkerer who just loves building cool stuff. The Prophet is a pessimistic preacher who predicts doom at every turn, usually but not always incorrectly.
These also seem to be the two large, expanding forces in the West in the early 21st century. There is the optimistic, daring, risk-embracing technologist-builder group (think Elon Musk) and the pessimistic, neurotic moralist-activist group (think Greta Thunberg). It’s time to build, or it’s time to burn it all down. These are the two groups with strong beliefs about what the future should look like and the power to influence it.
Both of these groups are revolutionary and future-focused, but they have opposite strengths and weaknesses. The builders are good at making things that work but bad at convincing people to adopt them. They love their new tools and expect their value to be self-evident, but end up alternately boring and scaring people with their poorly-explained innovations. For example, AI will have almost unimaginable value to humanity, but many are hesitant to adopt it.
The moralist-activists are bad at making things that work but good at convincing people to try “bold, progressive reforms.” Remember the now memory-holed movement to defund, delegitimize, and demoralize the police in the US? This was a shockingly radical idea that played recklessly with the core human need for physical security, but the leading American cities threw themselves headlong into this glorious revolution without much thought. It’s as if a spell had been cast on them. Millions of years of wisdom just melted away when attacked with a few well-chosen words.
There is a place for both types, but the current order is upside down. The people who don’t know how to do anything but criticize and tear down now rule the culture, making for an elite that hates the society it rules and is destroying the culture it has been entrusted with. These idealistic, egalitarian, romantic, moralizing types are best suited to a more marginal role, calling out the corruption and injustice of society, protesting, and “speaking truth to power.”
Now, they are the dog who caught the car. They are making themselves and everyone else miserable by trying to play the role of elites and creating a paradoxical chaotic stagnation. There is a lot of drama and a lot of exciting gestures but no material progress. No one’s life is getting better, but every day we celebrate a hero who is “fighting injustice” in a perpetual, increasingly absurd war on fantastical abstractions. The crusading activists have gone from requiring seatbelts and saving millions of lives to requiring consent pop-ups and wasting millions of hours. How did we get here?
How We Got Here
Once the West established consistent scientific and technological progress in the 18th and 19th centuries, the Wizards ruled. The goal of Western societies in those times was simple: build, build, build! Hungry (literally and figuratively) people saw a window to vault themselves out of privation once and for all. Malthusian concerns about overpopulation were sidelined in the rush to riches.
Eventually, in the ’60s and ’70s, all this frantic building seemed to reach a point of diminishing returns. The higher progress took us up Maslow’s hierarchy, the less obvious it became that we needed to continue further up it. Once we had cars and solid roofs over our heads, we noticed that our cars were fouling the air and our houses were marring beautiful landscapes. We noticed that material abundance did not inevitably lead to a good life and started to wonder if it might be the problem, not the solution.
In the last sixty years, there has been a great inversion. The leadership of American culture passed from Henry Ford to Jane Fonda. Now the great egalitarian social engineering experiment has been run. At this point, all the idealistic new ideas from the ‘60s have been tried at a large scale and taken to stunning extremes. Just as the focus shifted from the luster of technological progress to its ugly side effects in the ‘60s, now Americans and the West more broadly are shifting from focusing on the pretty promises of left-wing idealists to the ugly realities of energy shortages, food shortages, and chaotic urban dystopias that cultivate human misery instead of flourishing. We now see that we are reaching diminishing returns on romantic, egalitarian activism.
Where We Must Go and Why
We have both major problems that we need to solve and endless opportunities for more human flourishing. Global warming and pollution are real problems. We need to build our way out of these problems and towards opportunities. If the Earth was ever an idyllic, peaceful, happy Eden (it wasn’t), we couldn’t return to it through atavistic degrowth anyway, not without subjugating and killing many, many people. Like it or not, most people want to be rich, not poor, and you would have to pry their cars and motorcycles from their cold, dead hands.
The only way out is through. A beautiful world that is conducive to human flourishing will not be dropped into our laps if we just give up on the idea of human progress. That would be too easy. The Earth does not and never has organized itself for our enjoyment. It’s up to us to shape it to our design to suit our needs. If we go forward courageously, optimistically, and wisely, the possibilities are endless. What might the world look like in 2050 if we once again build like our well-being depends on it?
Energy and Environment
A nuclear renaissance could provide clean, abundant energy, leaving the tradeoff between energy and the environment in the past. Farming could be more efficient, allowing more space for untouched landscapes and wildlife. Biodiversity could be increased by bringing back the wooly mammoth and other animals.
Mobility
Mobility is an essential aspect of our existence. It is one of the most obvious ways in which technology has empowered us, giving us superhuman speed and even wings. Progress has actually been proceeding pretty nicely in this area, but…where is my flying car?
Fortunately, a picture is coming together of a future of ubiquitous, cheap, autonomous personal transportation on land, sea, and air. It will be faster, more convenient, cleaner, and simply cooler than having to navigate traffic every day. Of course, driving or flying for pleasure will always be an option. We will just have more and better options.
Toys
The average person could have toys and hobbies as fun as the richest person has now. Today eFoils are starting to appear in places like the Southern California coast and tech founders’ quirky Independence Day social media posts.
Then there are the jetpacks under development. There is just so much fun that comes with technological progress.
Virtual Reality
With advances in VR, we could have fully immersive shared experiences regardless of geographic distance. We could visit with family and friends on the other side of the world in a much better way than we can now with phone and video calls.
We could have more novel and beautiful experiences with high-fidelity, immersive, intuitive simulations: playing fantastical games with friends, flying around the world and space in a flash, creating and experiencing beautiful art, designing machines, and surely more that we can’t imagine yet.
Acceleration
We can have it so much better, and we are starting to see it. A scrappy rebel alliance is stirring, led by fearless counter-elites like Marc Andreessen and Balaji Srinivasan, builder-philosophers making compelling moral cases for more courageous, more optimistic, more determined, and more rugged societies to boldly build a better future. We can create societies of bold pioneers, not hyper-neurotic, agoraphobic Twitter activists. The prophets of doom have their place and always will, but right now, it’s time to build.