Zero or Infinity: Part One
The rich world is in a perilous moment. Our ancestors would see our world as heaven, but many of us are profoundly dissatisfied. Our existence feels meaningless and absurd. It seems like every ambitious technological project we try fails in a way we don’t foresee. We thought we could have a fossil-fuel-powered civilization, but we caused global warming. We thought we could have energy too cheap to meter with nuclear power, then there were the frightening accidents.
Then there are our grand societal reform efforts, where it gets really ugly. Some thought they could create social justice by seizing the means of production and forcibly redistributing them. That was the most disastrous project of all time, killing a hundred million people. More recently, some thought they could fundamentally reform faraway nations at the point of a gun, and that was an embarrassing failure costing half a million lives and trillions of dollars.
Now we are resigned to thinking small. We are timid and cautious. We’re not aiming up, we’re aiming down. The general thrust of efforts in the rich world is increasingly toward less. Less energy usage, less harm to the earth, fewer rich people, and ultimately less hope and less vitality. Humans do best when striving for more. We need more energy, a better earth through human efforts, more rich people, and ultimately more hope and vitality.
In this essay and the next, I’ll outline where these two diverging paths might take us: to zero or infinity. First, I’ll project the path to zero.
Aiming Down
This is easy to project because it is the path we are on. This is what we believe: the more powerful humans become, the more destructive they become. The primary effect of more people and better tools would be destruction of our one delicate planet Earth. Free, powerful humans are dangerous and must be enfeebled and controlled. Draconian measures are no problem, because the danger is so vast and even existential. In short, the more free and empowered humans are, the worse off everyone is.
Seeming solutions to our stated problems (nuclear power for clean, abundant energy) aren’t real solutions unless they humble and reduce the power of humanity. So unreliable, intermittent, “natural” power sources like wind and solar are good because of their limitations, not in spite of them. Their limitations keep it from being too easy for humans to build a technologically advanced, abundant world. Amory Lovins said “it’d be little short of disastrous for us to discover a source of cheap, clean and abundant energy because of what we would do with it.”
So we have arrived at a curious point where there is a consensus in the establishment that the wealth of the world must not grow, and it might not be so bad if it decreased greatly. It is stagnation by design. We might get more radical and embrace degrowth, the idea that “wealthy economies should abandon growth of gross domestic product (GDP) as a goal, scale down destructive and unnecessary forms of production to reduce energy and material use, and focus economic activity around securing human needs and well-being.”
The Alternative
In the next piece, I’ll show how we can strive for infinity instead of zero. Key to this will be the network state concept. It is a way for people to organize themselves into new societies to help us break out of our stagnation. A great future is in our grasp if we believe in it and strive for it.