Towards Heroic Flourishing
Malaise in paradise: that is the essence of existence in the post-Cold-War, post-privation rich world. So much has been passed down to us, but we look at our fantastic inheritance and shrug. What’s it all worth if we’re not happy? Maybe we should burn it all down. Maybe we should just stop trying to move forward. It’s too dangerous and scary.
We’re bumbling. It’s time to step up to the demands of our age. It’s time for 21st-century heroism. It’s time to rescue ourselves from an age of decadence, meaninglessness, and nihilism. It’s time to embrace our power as modern, technologically-empowered individuals and groups.
Where We Are
This malaise is not universal. It’s really a problem of the rich world, which is about one-seventh of the global population. The rich world has contributed much to the world in the last few centuries, but it is beginning to falter. Some go so far as to call the rich world the “descending world” and the developing world the “ascending world.” So, what is wrong with us?
In short, we are coping poorly with the demands of unprecedented freedom and power. Humans are adapted, biologically and culturally, to a fearful, insecure existence. We are scrawny, awkward, hairless apes who have been scrambling to survive in a hostile environment for ages. Now we are awakening to realize we have developed superpowers.
The seemingly everyday breakthroughs in AI are reminding us that we are capable of creating what feels like magic. We are utterly unique in our environment, and with each generation of technological and cultural evolution, we distinguish ourselves more sharply from other animals. As an individual grows and becomes unique over the course of their development, so humanity has evolved over the millennia into beings that can fly to other planets.
When you can go anywhere and do anything, where do you go? What do you do? Like in superhero movies, first, you go wild. You try out your powers and do some really cool stuff but also do some damage.
You realize that you can have super-clean, super-dense energy that is too cheap to meter, then you have some disasters as you learn to produce it at a large scale. You scare yourself. You introspect. You navel-gaze. Then you choose. You either forsake your powers as too dangerous or learn from your experiences to use them more safely and effectively.
We are currently in a phase of forsaking our power. This is the age of safetyism, institutionalized neuroticism, and ever-more centralized control of scary new technologies and the scary free humans that use them. AI risk hysteria and the accompanying demand for draconian controls on AI is just the latest in a series of predictably neurotic, extreme overreactions.
There is a fundamental mismatch between our worldview and our reality. Dangers are overrepresented 10x while opportunities for thriving are underrepresented 10x. So when a real-life superhero emerges, many portray him as a supervillain. With Elon Musk, we have seen 20th-century fantasy (Iron Man) become 21st-century reality (SpaceX and Tesla). We have an exceptional individual who is doing 100x more good than bad, and our reception of him is ambivalent. The enthusiastic boosters, of which there are many, are canceled out by the armies of envious neurotics, which amounts to a societal shrug.
Where We Must Go
We need to go in a very different direction. Instead of focusing on and cultivating individual and group fear and victimhood, we need to aim for the empowerment and self-actualization of individuals and groups. The aim should be 1,000 Elon Musks, not 1,000 Greta Thunbergs.
Technology moves forward, and everything else is pulled along with it, sooner or later. When Nietzsche spoke of the Superman in the 19th century, he might have been seeing hazy glimpses of a future of super-empowered individuals, with his usual superhuman foresight. The launch of ChatGPT might mark the beginning of the age of the super-empowered individual.
You sometimes hear that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. We all just gained an always-available assistant that synthesizes an approximation of all recorded knowledge. We now have the cognitive upgrade we need to grasp the ever-complexifying modern world.
We have been bumbling along with various low-resolution, half-baked worldviews that look a lot like pre-modern superstitions. At the extremes, we can choose between romantic, Mother Nature-worshipping environmentalist socialism on the left and romantic, bronze-age-dreaming atavism on the right. In the mainstream, the normie left endlessly LARPs 60’s activism while the normie right endlessly LARPs 50’s conservatism.
Very few are looking forward to something better. Who is building toward a great 2050? Maybe it’s just been too hard to get a handle on the modern world. Maybe with always-on intelligent assistants, we can at an individual level. We needed a cognitive upgrade to intellectually catch up to the modern world.
Increasingly, people are forming distinct visions of how the world should work. Right now, in the US, that has some pretty ugly implications. Political polarization has increased as people have become more ideological, sorting themselves into a few sharply distinct groups, woke and conservative being the two most prominent right now. There is nasty rhetoric and even violence. Political violence is routinely rationalized.
This development of a marketplace of sharply distinct visions will be good in the long run. As Marc Andreessen said “Conflict drives evolutionary improvement of ideas (memes), just like life. Conflict levels (non-violent, of course) are rising. The marketplace of ideas is strengthening, not weakening.” This differentiation is necessary.
Now have to figure out a better way for people to pursue these sharply different visions of the good life. We need space to explore and experiment with these visions. We are entering an age where everyone can be their own philosopher-king, even in a small way. Everyone can form a clear vision of how things should be, of what the good life is. These visions will be the kernels of purposeful, aligned communities. These visions will be attractors, bringing together profoundly aligned people.
The woke movement has a head start here. They have created enclaves throughout the US, perhaps most famously on the West Coast with Seattle, Portland, San Francisco, Oakland, and Berkeley. These are cities that have been fundamentally reshaped in pursuit of a deeply-felt vision of social justice. These cities are even somewhat more sovereign than typical American cities. San Francisco now has a history of openly flouting federal laws its people find distasteful, first with gay marriage, and more recently by more or less suspending enforcement of immigration and drug laws.
So far, nobody else has had the zeal and conviction to take over cities, re-found them on a radical new doctrine, and even start to break away from the host country. The simple explanation for this head start is that it’s easy to inspire and organize around fear. That’s essentially what the woke doctrine is: the program of pathological neuroticism. It’s a culture that discourages hope and striving and encourages feelings of helplessness and depression.
What would it look like to organize people around an elevating vision instead of a self-destructive one? We need new philosophies that encourage greatness and vitality. Super-empowered individuals will form super-empowered, purposeful groups and effect accelerated progress with many experiments.
Some sprouts are emerging. There is e/acc, Effective Accelerationism, the optimistic response to the apocalyptic AI Risk movement. In the last few days, x/acc, Existential Accelerationism has been proposed. This is more grounded in overcoming humanity’s grand challenges with technological progress. More broadly, there is the emerging idea of the network state, a way to form purposeful communities that move the world forward. It’s early days, certainly. It seems far-fetched right now, but maybe we humans are just at a bumbling, awkward, early stage in our grand, collective hero’s journey.