"[W]e have been accumulating a cultural debt, as our behaviors in these non-industry spheres have been getting increasingly maladaptive."
There seems to be a deeper issue here, but perhaps it is being driven by the institutional distortions you describe. Our culture is abandoning old notions of virtue and normative standards and discipline, in favor of a self-indulgent and increasingly destructive fixation on individual comfort and pleasure and convenience. This makes producers a LOT of money, but it leads to a shallower and emptier life for individuals and it drives the dissolution of communities (which used to enforce norms and help socialize children). Food, entertainment, education, spending, mental health, etc. - in each of these areas and more we have collectively abandoned the recognition that discipline and moderation and modesty are important. We have removed judgment, shame, and expectations as dominant cultural forces... and I suspect that we have one this so that peddlers of distraction and addiction can more easily profit from our cultural decay and our individual unhappiness.
The problems are so vast and confusingly interlinked that I struggle to describe them all (status-seeking among the elite, cowardice among professionals and bureaucratic employees, enshittifcation, feminization, etc.) but they all seem to revolve around this drive to elevate the fickle and pathological desires of the individual above the long-term benefit of the group.
I don’t think what we’re seeing is a straightforward process of “individualization” in the sense of people becoming more autonomous or self-directed. If anything, individuals remain deeply embedded in group identities, norms, and narratives.
The core issue, in my view, is not that individuals have abandoned discipline in favor of pleasure, but that we now have multiple, competing moral communities that no longer share a common framework. These groups are not becoming more individualistic—they are becoming more fragmented and mutually antagonistic.
Each collective tends to believe that its own norms should dominate, and that social harmony can be achieved if only it gains enough power to impose them. That creates a zero-sum dynamic where coordination breaks down and conflict escalates. What looks like moral decay or loss of standards from one perspective is often just the presence of a different, incompatible standard from another group.
This is what accelerates social disintegration: not excessive individual freedom, but the absence of mechanisms to reconcile differences between groups. Without shared rules of coexistence, the system drifts toward polarization and, eventually, toward suppression rather than cooperation — undermining the kind of voluntary, decentralized cooperation on which complex market societies depend.
I think there’s a partial truth in that argument—Western societies do show higher levels of individualism compared to many others, as Joseph Henrich documents.
But I think the conclusion being drawn from that is too strong. Greater individualism does not imply atomization or the disappearance of group identity. What we’re seeing instead is a reconfiguration of how group belonging works.
Rather than being embedded in a few large, stable, and inherited structures, individuals in Western societies tend to form and navigate multiple, smaller, and more fluid groups—family, workplace, ideological communities, online networks, etc. It’s less “absence of groups” and more “plurality of overlapping groups.”
So the difference is one of degree and structure, not a binary. A highly collectivist society may place stronger weight on broad social expectations and conformity, but that doesn’t mean individuals in more “individualistic” societies are free from social pressure. They are still highly responsive to norms—just more selectively, and often within the specific groups they identify with.
In that sense, what looks like individualism at the macro level can actually coexist with strong in-group conformity at the micro level. You could even describe it as a kind of “fragmented collectivism”: we are less bound by a single overarching social order, but still deeply shaped by the norms of the groups we belong to.
> Our culture is abandoning old notions of virtue and normative standards
The problem is that the old agricultural virtue system isn't entirely compatible with industrialization and we still aren't sure what a proper industrial virtue system would look like.
Capitalism / liberalism provides no higher meaning or purpose. Humans need something higher to strive for, or our civ decays into decadence. We need something else in parallel to capitalism that provides meaning. Tradition and religion can be compatible with capitalism (for example, US history until the 1960s) while being in tension with it, to guide and direct our capitalist impulses toward more meaningful ends. Civilization is maximally successful only when there is both an economic engine and a foundational metaphysics of meaning.
Did you write "The biggest change humanity has seen in ten thousand years" specifically because you think (as I do) that the neolithic package was bigger? Just curious.
I rank the Enlightenment as more-important than the Industrial Revo, which was just a (probably inevitable) result of the Enlightenment. But I use the term to encompass multiple Enlightenments, including (to a lesser or greater extent) those of Phoenicia, classical and Hellenistic Athens, medieval Venice, Viking Iceland's Althing, the Haudenosaunee, the transition of Sephardic Jewish finances from Ma'arufiah (a medieval clientage system in which high-status rabbis protected the monopolies of their clients) to the Letra de Cambio ("bill of exchange"; rabbis adjudicated standardized financial contracts), the Dutch Republic, and the British and part of the French Enlightenment.
(Yes, part of the left and of the right both hate the Jews today because the Jews were key in starting the post-dark-age European Enlightenment.)
All unenlightened civilizations attribute all agency to some analog of a "soul": an atomic essence which cannot be usefully analyzed reductively. Real agency includes the movement of animals and machines; legal systems; the invisible hand of a free market; the checks and balances in the Constitution; Darwinian evolution; self-organizing systems such as hurricanes; and the energy-minimizing hillclimbing performed by neural networks in the brain and in LLMs to organize networks in ways that ground the meanings of words in sense data. Apocryphal souls invoked to explain such agency include all gods; the "General Will", "class consciousness", or "spirit of the Volk" that leftists invoke to pretend good people will always agree; and the magical power of words to connect your mind directly to a transcendental Platonic Form, or to cause something to happen ("Let there be light!", "Abracadabra!").
(Yes, Nazis are leftists. The "left" was defined on two occasions: during the French Revolution, and in the break between left and right Hegelians. In both cases, "right" meant conservatives, while "left" meant radicals who wanted to eliminate an oppressive class, after which society would magically become healthy. The Jacobins wanted to eliminate aristocrats, the Hegelian left wanted to eliminate priesthoods; Marx wanted to eliminate capitalist Jews (see his "On the Jewish Question"); and the Nazi left wanted to eliminate capitalist Jews plus other non-Aryans. 90 years of dedicated revisionist history by leftists trying to conceal their initial infatuation with fascism cannot change this fact.)
So unenlightened cultures see the solution to every systemic problem not as fixing the system--because they don't grok what a "system" is, or believe it has any agency beyond the will of the people who built it--but as either to put the right people in charge, or to tear the system down in the presumption that the state of nature is always better than being ruled by a "mere machine" (which in their imaginations becomes the malicious daemon Moloch). Leftist complaints today about "the system" and "systemic racism", based on Foucault's understanding of all governmental systems as nothing but the reified will of the ruling class, are a perfect example. (Foucault, like all post-modernists, always misunderstood the Enlightenment and science because he assumed they must be Aristotelian.)
Aristotle, providing what he thought was an exhaustive list of the different kinds of government, differentiated them only by what sort of people were in charge, not by mechanisms such as trial by jury, appointment to office by lot or election, etc. Enlightenment cultures see the government as the set of mechanisms which order it, which determine collectively how power is allocated. Aristotle saw it the other way around: a city's soul or essence was the group of people in charge, or the "politeia". (Isocrates much earlier called the politeia the "soul of the city" (psyche poleos).)
To Aristotle, the soul of a city came first, and mechanisms of government emerged to serve that soul. So even though he studied the laws of different cities intensively, he didn't see the nature (essence) of a city as emerging from its laws, but the laws as emerging from the city's essence, which was simply the set of people in charge. This is a classical soul-based understanding of government.
(We see the same backwards view of causation in the classical understanding of word meaning, which was that you must begin by defining your terms, as contrasted with the scientific understanding that you must begin with observations, and make up words as labels for your observations as you go. The classical view sees a word's meaning as inherent in its pre-existing eternal soul; the scientific view sees the word's meaning as emerging from the actions of the system being observed.)
(The transition from soul-based to mechanism-based thought is encoded in the use of the word "Constitution" to mean the laws describing a government's mechanism. Leonardo Bruni translated Aristotle's /politeia/ into Latin in the early 1400s as /constitutio/, which then meant the parts making up the human body, and corresponded to Aristotle's meaning. But by the time the US Constitution was written, a nation's "constitution" referred not to who ruled, but to the machinery of government, which is now seen as the phenomenon, not the epiphenomenon. The word's etymology means the soul of a nation, but we understand it as its legal machinery.)
Unenlightened cultures, who see a culture as having an essence with the atomic and eternal nature of a soul, see cultures not as evolving, but as being founded, and then running downhill until they collapse, as in Greek myth, Christianity, Oswald Spengler, and Tolkien. Good government is the continual fight to impose order on chaos by an endless cycle of trying to give more power to more-virtuous people. The pre-Enlightenment meaning of "chaos" was the combination of "randomness" and "emptiness", and with few exceptions (such as Viking mythology), chaos was strictly bad.
(Yes, Loki is an interesting Marvel character because Iceland had a political system of checks and balances.)
The greatest discovery of the Enlightenment was how to harness the power of chaos, which now has the late-20th-century mathematical meaning of the thin border between order and randomness. This applies to building machines with many moving parts, to governments with checks and balances, and to the distributed decision-making of a free market. This harnesses for our own purposes the very same agentive power which caused life to evolve.
Sort of? That looks like the "big picture" here, but the first materialist philosophers came about 2000 years before materialism had any effect on religion. Some important religious thinkers were also philosophers, like the neo-Platonists and Aquinas. And I think the order of events was very different in the development of Hinduism, where the laws establishing the caste system may have come first, and the philosophy next. Buddhism began with philosophy, and the religion Buddhists practice probably developed much later.
Today in the US, we have a huge political change which I think was driven by a deliberate change in pop culture one generation ago, driven by a tiny cultural elite, who had been radicalized by a mass change in politics from the generation before (the Vietnam War era), which was driven by a small and elite band of philosophers, who were reacting against Nazism, which was reacting against... et cetera.
I have looked for some general trend in which kinds of change drive other kinds of change, and so far I think it's better to have no theory at all about that, than to pick one causal ordering and apply it across history.
If i said "yes, i want gender equality to last 1000 years, an Amish/Haredi future is intolerable to me"... why would I also accept living in spartan dorms? "Gender equality, but with terrible sacrifices in other dimensions of quality of life" sounds lousy; from what I hear Maoist China was sort of this, and I don't consider it worth it.
Lots of things about my current life seem nicer than the Amish/Haredi lifestyle, but the niceness is a total package. "Make terrible sacrifices for rock music"? heck no. "cosmology"? of course not. To be nicer to live in than Amish/Haredi culture, a culture has to be *pretty overall close* to modern mainstream American culture, along a *lot* of dimensions.
If I were transported to Amish/Haredi world, what would I miss about my current life? Free time, personal luxuries and comforts, personal choices, lack of oppressive authority figures -- but those are precisely the things you say we should sacrifice to prevent Amish/Haredi world! It makes no sense to say "Sacrifice your own X, to avoid a future where humanity will lack X". Even assuming I am totally unselfish and care just as much about strangers someday as I care about myself today, which is a big assumption, it's just "give up the exact thing you hope to preserve".
Unless you're saying that a *small* sacrifice today will lead to *less* sacrifice in the far future? but your stern and apocalyptic language does not give me a lot of hope that you are asking people to make *small* sacrifices!
I actually live near ultra-Orthodox Jews and their lives are not that bad. It's inconvenient and stressful to care for lots of children and obey religious laws -- there's a reason I didn't choose that life for myself -- but it's a better life than most humans throughout history have had. Everybody has enough to eat, modern medicine, even interesting (albeit religious) things to read! I'd rather go baal t'shuva than live in genuine poverty, *no question*.
And religious restrictions on personal choice aren't necessarily worse than the sort of (corporate? governmental?) restrictions on consumption variety and self-expression you recommend. In fact they'd be less unpleasant to live under, because they'd be God's laws, not some asshole's.
In order to be *better* than Haredi World, Hanson World needs to be, at the very minimum, non-Malthusian. You have to have a lot of per capita resources. Otherwise it's strictly worse in my book. I won't quite say no value is worth suffering poverty for, but no value *not found in traditional Judaism* is.
Current Haredi culture might be too parasitic to maintain itself in the absence of a robust social welfare system that'll support you in studying the Torah all day. A more sustainable situation would probably involve large parts of the population shifting to less extreme forms of Judaism until you've got something like the current Israeli demographic situation, with a Haredi minority and a much larger secular population, and high Haredi birthrates shifting the culture enough to keep births at or above replacement with the rest. That seems pretty fine as long as they don't have their own Palestine.
Amish are already doing a pretty good job at increasingly integrating technology into the workplace while keeping it from taking over their personal lives too much - nowadays you've got stuff like Amish owned CNC fabs where they spend all day machining precision components on computers before going back to their rural farm homes in their horses and buggies. I'd predict a hypothetical Amish descendant dominated 2500 AD North America would be more akin to a socially conservative version of solarpunk than the middle ages, and while not ideal there's a lot of worse futures possible.
Either happening at all seems pretty unlikely though, organic cultural shifts towards higher fertility among the broader population or technological solutions (life extension, AI, exowombs etc) should overwhelm those groups before they can get large enough to dominate.
And a Hansonworld that goes into complete marketization dominance eating everything else a la VIle Offspring seems just as unsustainable as one of low birthrates, just for the opposite reason. You'd have a hyperfast em economy growing at a very high exponential rate while available resources only grow polynomially, with everything done just-in-time at the absolute slimmest margins possible and no room to take a breather and plan for the long term. It seems like a perfect recipe for mass civilizational autocannibalism, and once they start competing violently every major actor can pump out arbitrarily large quantities of thermonuclear weapons from the nanofabs.
The need for formal markets or industrialization as an organizational process also seems questionable in a world with embedded AI in everything that can network at lightspeed. It might be closer to a sort of technological ecology than modern industry.
I think there was a different post where Robin advocated things like giving parents, a share of the income of their children and the right to sell this right to their portion of the income. He explicitly contrasted his approach of trying to replicate the profit motive and financial metrics for optimisation from industry to an approach which only tried to copy freedom from the marketplace without these other elements to encourage what he sees as the right kind of optimisation.
What we need and what we get are two very different things.. in a climate of rising dominance of the limbic system (emotion as driving perspectives and decisions especially for the young), and anti market forces overriding rationality, we are more likely to see Amish and Haredim versions of society winning the battle with the help of the extreme Left (“progressives”) and extreme Right (MAGA).
I don't view MAGA as extreme right. It arose as a counter force to a solid and formally beneficial liberalism that had morphed so far to the left as to be almost Marxist. True liberalism is not far from the center and neither is MAGA. The once slightly right of center conservative branch was high jacked by NeoCons and industrial Oligarchs. MAGA was a return to the center. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of far right mentalities trying to ride on the coat tails of MAGA. At it's core, it is for smaller less intrusive government and as much as possible a focus on making life better for Middle Class Americans.
MAGA might have started as backlash to “woke” insanity, but as far as economic rationality is concerned, it has drifted as far from free market perspective as the Left. Under Trump, crony “capitalism”, industrial policies, and intimidation of private enterprise signaled the drift of the Right into interventionist policies. The small government was the Tea Party ideal, not the current MAGA.
"We can let our civ fall, to be replaced by the Amish, Haredim, etc."
This is an idea you've put forward several times. But it's not close to reality.
If there is a demographic replacement of the First World, it won't be by Amish and Haredim. In the world as a whole, the Amish and Haredim are a rounding error.
There are about 500K Amish in the world, and about 2.5M Haredim. Replacement births (each woman bears two children lifetime) for a population of 3M would be about 40K/year. If their women bear 10 children each, that would be 5X replacement, so 200K/year would be an upper ceiling for Amish and Haredim.
In Nigeria, there are over 7M children born each year.
If the Amish and Haredim doubled their numbers every 20 years (faster growth than any nation in the world today), in 100 years there would be about 100M of them. That would be a bit over 1% of the world's population, assuming no net growth elsewhere.
I think Robin is assuming/implying that other cultures will continue to see increasing fertility decline, so we can't just extrapolate from existing numbers; and also that he is looking forward across a pretty long time horizon, probably over a century.
Imagine any modern problem in light of "solving sex". What does that mean? Well imagine anything you feel is dire about monkeys like ourselves, who seem to do everything as a reduction towards "so we can have sex", and what would happen to said sure thing if unheard of numbers of the human species were sexually fufilled. Genuinely.
Existential risks, depression/suicide, political conflict, aliens, whatever the fuck you care about, would we all have more skin in the game? Would we be more motivated to cooperate? I really think problems should be solved at a fundamental level. We're really simple monkeys at the end of the day, and this seems to be the problem under which all problems rest.
Of course, it's not like people havent been doing this. Weve been "solving sex" before writing words. It's just that we're a) poorly motivated and b) confused and so we've mostly fucked things up royally until now. Here's a spoiler to improve your experience as a human: figure out how to have more sex and better sex and behold
“The arts, humanities, and culture adopted strong norms against overly-overt industry-style practices”
You don’t say why, or how this should change.
Re why: in the arts, clearly there is prestige associated with elite highbrow arts, such as classical music. Maybe because of the status associated with exclusivity (eg supposed need to be highly educated to appreciate classical music fully). And in the 20th century there was a sharp divide between elite and popular art forms - eg classical composers would almost never get involved in popular music which was seen as beneath them and would harm their image.
But reduced government subsidies have forced their hand into commercialisation via popularisation, resulting in ‘crossover’ music, top classical orchestras recording Hollywood sound tracks (a big source of their revenue), etc
Re how: I assume continuing commercialisation will eliminate the “strong norms against overly-overt industry-style practices” over time without intervention being required. Eg in cinema, popular music and also sports, top performers are highly paid, their output is heavily marketed, and everyone knows it. It’s pretty overt these days.
There is pushback about eg charging for tickets on a fully commercial basis (hundreds of $ a ticket for top performers/teams), but not enough to prevent it. Noteworthy that in the elite sport of tennis, AFAIK Wimbledon still refuses to charge commercial rates for tickets, resulting in absurd overdemand - except for corporate packages (purchased by banks etc to entertain their capitalist clients), which are far more expensive, and looked down on snootily by the cognoscenti.
I disagree re: we haven't invented anything big recently.
I think e.g. crypto is pretty cool. Decentralised money where people buy coins by people they believe in. If we are smart, we can make it like a prediction market: which cultural beliefs would and should win. What do you think? 🙃
The Bronze Age saw the Birth of writing and democracy and the wheel. It's nothing to be sneezed at in terms of greatness and impact on society. Your assessment of One foot in The Industrial Age (though others would proclaim it the Information Age) is pretty spot on with maybe twenty percent of the world having 'industrialized' by this point- not quite two hundred years post partem- so it's a little more like Two Little Piggies in The Industrial Age.
"It's not progress if it doesn't make your life better." -overheard, somewhere.
You argue that human cultural evolution is 'broken' because we’ve fundamentally altered the hyperparameters of our environment: we've drastically lowered the selection pressure through wealth and safety, collapsed our search space via a global internet monoculture, and increased the rate of environmental change far beyond what biological generations can adapt to. I completely agree with this diagnosis.
However, an AI culture modeled after human culture, also meaning it inherits our foundational mechanisms of cooperation, trade, specialization, and knowledge transfer, could theoretically bypass these biological bottlenecks and 'fix' the evolutionary process.
AI points toward a third path, like synthetic evolution. We can use AI to run the harsh evolutionary simulations we no longer can, helping us 'choose' our cultural adaptations much better. I believe AI will save us, obviously, but not as a magical 'Savior’, rather, as a powerful computational tool that allows us to offload our evolutionary iteration to silicon.
"[W]e have been accumulating a cultural debt, as our behaviors in these non-industry spheres have been getting increasingly maladaptive."
There seems to be a deeper issue here, but perhaps it is being driven by the institutional distortions you describe. Our culture is abandoning old notions of virtue and normative standards and discipline, in favor of a self-indulgent and increasingly destructive fixation on individual comfort and pleasure and convenience. This makes producers a LOT of money, but it leads to a shallower and emptier life for individuals and it drives the dissolution of communities (which used to enforce norms and help socialize children). Food, entertainment, education, spending, mental health, etc. - in each of these areas and more we have collectively abandoned the recognition that discipline and moderation and modesty are important. We have removed judgment, shame, and expectations as dominant cultural forces... and I suspect that we have one this so that peddlers of distraction and addiction can more easily profit from our cultural decay and our individual unhappiness.
The problems are so vast and confusingly interlinked that I struggle to describe them all (status-seeking among the elite, cowardice among professionals and bureaucratic employees, enshittifcation, feminization, etc.) but they all seem to revolve around this drive to elevate the fickle and pathological desires of the individual above the long-term benefit of the group.
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-war-on-norms
https://jmpolemic.substack.com/p/the-primacy-of-subjectivity
Producers would make just as much money, in fact more, if people were less self-indulgent. It would just be different producers.
I don’t think what we’re seeing is a straightforward process of “individualization” in the sense of people becoming more autonomous or self-directed. If anything, individuals remain deeply embedded in group identities, norms, and narratives.
The core issue, in my view, is not that individuals have abandoned discipline in favor of pleasure, but that we now have multiple, competing moral communities that no longer share a common framework. These groups are not becoming more individualistic—they are becoming more fragmented and mutually antagonistic.
Each collective tends to believe that its own norms should dominate, and that social harmony can be achieved if only it gains enough power to impose them. That creates a zero-sum dynamic where coordination breaks down and conflict escalates. What looks like moral decay or loss of standards from one perspective is often just the presence of a different, incompatible standard from another group.
This is what accelerates social disintegration: not excessive individual freedom, but the absence of mechanisms to reconcile differences between groups. Without shared rules of coexistence, the system drifts toward polarization and, eventually, toward suppression rather than cooperation — undermining the kind of voluntary, decentralized cooperation on which complex market societies depend.
Nah, group identity and group norms are way less influential. I suggest reading the weirdest people in the world book.
I think there’s a partial truth in that argument—Western societies do show higher levels of individualism compared to many others, as Joseph Henrich documents.
But I think the conclusion being drawn from that is too strong. Greater individualism does not imply atomization or the disappearance of group identity. What we’re seeing instead is a reconfiguration of how group belonging works.
Rather than being embedded in a few large, stable, and inherited structures, individuals in Western societies tend to form and navigate multiple, smaller, and more fluid groups—family, workplace, ideological communities, online networks, etc. It’s less “absence of groups” and more “plurality of overlapping groups.”
So the difference is one of degree and structure, not a binary. A highly collectivist society may place stronger weight on broad social expectations and conformity, but that doesn’t mean individuals in more “individualistic” societies are free from social pressure. They are still highly responsive to norms—just more selectively, and often within the specific groups they identify with.
In that sense, what looks like individualism at the macro level can actually coexist with strong in-group conformity at the micro level. You could even describe it as a kind of “fragmented collectivism”: we are less bound by a single overarching social order, but still deeply shaped by the norms of the groups we belong to.
> Our culture is abandoning old notions of virtue and normative standards
The problem is that the old agricultural virtue system isn't entirely compatible with industrialization and we still aren't sure what a proper industrial virtue system would look like.
Capitalism / liberalism provides no higher meaning or purpose. Humans need something higher to strive for, or our civ decays into decadence. We need something else in parallel to capitalism that provides meaning. Tradition and religion can be compatible with capitalism (for example, US history until the 1960s) while being in tension with it, to guide and direct our capitalist impulses toward more meaningful ends. Civilization is maximally successful only when there is both an economic engine and a foundational metaphysics of meaning.
Did you write "The biggest change humanity has seen in ten thousand years" specifically because you think (as I do) that the neolithic package was bigger? Just curious.
I rank the Enlightenment as more-important than the Industrial Revo, which was just a (probably inevitable) result of the Enlightenment. But I use the term to encompass multiple Enlightenments, including (to a lesser or greater extent) those of Phoenicia, classical and Hellenistic Athens, medieval Venice, Viking Iceland's Althing, the Haudenosaunee, the transition of Sephardic Jewish finances from Ma'arufiah (a medieval clientage system in which high-status rabbis protected the monopolies of their clients) to the Letra de Cambio ("bill of exchange"; rabbis adjudicated standardized financial contracts), the Dutch Republic, and the British and part of the French Enlightenment.
(Yes, part of the left and of the right both hate the Jews today because the Jews were key in starting the post-dark-age European Enlightenment.)
All unenlightened civilizations attribute all agency to some analog of a "soul": an atomic essence which cannot be usefully analyzed reductively. Real agency includes the movement of animals and machines; legal systems; the invisible hand of a free market; the checks and balances in the Constitution; Darwinian evolution; self-organizing systems such as hurricanes; and the energy-minimizing hillclimbing performed by neural networks in the brain and in LLMs to organize networks in ways that ground the meanings of words in sense data. Apocryphal souls invoked to explain such agency include all gods; the "General Will", "class consciousness", or "spirit of the Volk" that leftists invoke to pretend good people will always agree; and the magical power of words to connect your mind directly to a transcendental Platonic Form, or to cause something to happen ("Let there be light!", "Abracadabra!").
(Yes, Nazis are leftists. The "left" was defined on two occasions: during the French Revolution, and in the break between left and right Hegelians. In both cases, "right" meant conservatives, while "left" meant radicals who wanted to eliminate an oppressive class, after which society would magically become healthy. The Jacobins wanted to eliminate aristocrats, the Hegelian left wanted to eliminate priesthoods; Marx wanted to eliminate capitalist Jews (see his "On the Jewish Question"); and the Nazi left wanted to eliminate capitalist Jews plus other non-Aryans. 90 years of dedicated revisionist history by leftists trying to conceal their initial infatuation with fascism cannot change this fact.)
So unenlightened cultures see the solution to every systemic problem not as fixing the system--because they don't grok what a "system" is, or believe it has any agency beyond the will of the people who built it--but as either to put the right people in charge, or to tear the system down in the presumption that the state of nature is always better than being ruled by a "mere machine" (which in their imaginations becomes the malicious daemon Moloch). Leftist complaints today about "the system" and "systemic racism", based on Foucault's understanding of all governmental systems as nothing but the reified will of the ruling class, are a perfect example. (Foucault, like all post-modernists, always misunderstood the Enlightenment and science because he assumed they must be Aristotelian.)
Aristotle, providing what he thought was an exhaustive list of the different kinds of government, differentiated them only by what sort of people were in charge, not by mechanisms such as trial by jury, appointment to office by lot or election, etc. Enlightenment cultures see the government as the set of mechanisms which order it, which determine collectively how power is allocated. Aristotle saw it the other way around: a city's soul or essence was the group of people in charge, or the "politeia". (Isocrates much earlier called the politeia the "soul of the city" (psyche poleos).)
To Aristotle, the soul of a city came first, and mechanisms of government emerged to serve that soul. So even though he studied the laws of different cities intensively, he didn't see the nature (essence) of a city as emerging from its laws, but the laws as emerging from the city's essence, which was simply the set of people in charge. This is a classical soul-based understanding of government.
(We see the same backwards view of causation in the classical understanding of word meaning, which was that you must begin by defining your terms, as contrasted with the scientific understanding that you must begin with observations, and make up words as labels for your observations as you go. The classical view sees a word's meaning as inherent in its pre-existing eternal soul; the scientific view sees the word's meaning as emerging from the actions of the system being observed.)
(The transition from soul-based to mechanism-based thought is encoded in the use of the word "Constitution" to mean the laws describing a government's mechanism. Leonardo Bruni translated Aristotle's /politeia/ into Latin in the early 1400s as /constitutio/, which then meant the parts making up the human body, and corresponded to Aristotle's meaning. But by the time the US Constitution was written, a nation's "constitution" referred not to who ruled, but to the machinery of government, which is now seen as the phenomenon, not the epiphenomenon. The word's etymology means the soul of a nation, but we understand it as its legal machinery.)
Unenlightened cultures, who see a culture as having an essence with the atomic and eternal nature of a soul, see cultures not as evolving, but as being founded, and then running downhill until they collapse, as in Greek myth, Christianity, Oswald Spengler, and Tolkien. Good government is the continual fight to impose order on chaos by an endless cycle of trying to give more power to more-virtuous people. The pre-Enlightenment meaning of "chaos" was the combination of "randomness" and "emptiness", and with few exceptions (such as Viking mythology), chaos was strictly bad.
(Yes, Loki is an interesting Marvel character because Iceland had a political system of checks and balances.)
The greatest discovery of the Enlightenment was how to harness the power of chaos, which now has the late-20th-century mathematical meaning of the thin border between order and randomness. This applies to building machines with many moving parts, to governments with checks and balances, and to the distributed decision-making of a free market. This harnesses for our own purposes the very same agentive power which caused life to evolve.
Religion, philosophy, culture and the last, in order, is law.
Sort of? That looks like the "big picture" here, but the first materialist philosophers came about 2000 years before materialism had any effect on religion. Some important religious thinkers were also philosophers, like the neo-Platonists and Aquinas. And I think the order of events was very different in the development of Hinduism, where the laws establishing the caste system may have come first, and the philosophy next. Buddhism began with philosophy, and the religion Buddhists practice probably developed much later.
Today in the US, we have a huge political change which I think was driven by a deliberate change in pop culture one generation ago, driven by a tiny cultural elite, who had been radicalized by a mass change in politics from the generation before (the Vietnam War era), which was driven by a small and elite band of philosophers, who were reacting against Nazism, which was reacting against... et cetera.
I have looked for some general trend in which kinds of change drive other kinds of change, and so far I think it's better to have no theory at all about that, than to pick one causal ordering and apply it across history.
If i said "yes, i want gender equality to last 1000 years, an Amish/Haredi future is intolerable to me"... why would I also accept living in spartan dorms? "Gender equality, but with terrible sacrifices in other dimensions of quality of life" sounds lousy; from what I hear Maoist China was sort of this, and I don't consider it worth it.
Lots of things about my current life seem nicer than the Amish/Haredi lifestyle, but the niceness is a total package. "Make terrible sacrifices for rock music"? heck no. "cosmology"? of course not. To be nicer to live in than Amish/Haredi culture, a culture has to be *pretty overall close* to modern mainstream American culture, along a *lot* of dimensions.
If I were transported to Amish/Haredi world, what would I miss about my current life? Free time, personal luxuries and comforts, personal choices, lack of oppressive authority figures -- but those are precisely the things you say we should sacrifice to prevent Amish/Haredi world! It makes no sense to say "Sacrifice your own X, to avoid a future where humanity will lack X". Even assuming I am totally unselfish and care just as much about strangers someday as I care about myself today, which is a big assumption, it's just "give up the exact thing you hope to preserve".
Unless you're saying that a *small* sacrifice today will lead to *less* sacrifice in the far future? but your stern and apocalyptic language does not give me a lot of hope that you are asking people to make *small* sacrifices!
I actually live near ultra-Orthodox Jews and their lives are not that bad. It's inconvenient and stressful to care for lots of children and obey religious laws -- there's a reason I didn't choose that life for myself -- but it's a better life than most humans throughout history have had. Everybody has enough to eat, modern medicine, even interesting (albeit religious) things to read! I'd rather go baal t'shuva than live in genuine poverty, *no question*.
And religious restrictions on personal choice aren't necessarily worse than the sort of (corporate? governmental?) restrictions on consumption variety and self-expression you recommend. In fact they'd be less unpleasant to live under, because they'd be God's laws, not some asshole's.
In order to be *better* than Haredi World, Hanson World needs to be, at the very minimum, non-Malthusian. You have to have a lot of per capita resources. Otherwise it's strictly worse in my book. I won't quite say no value is worth suffering poverty for, but no value *not found in traditional Judaism* is.
Current Haredi culture might be too parasitic to maintain itself in the absence of a robust social welfare system that'll support you in studying the Torah all day. A more sustainable situation would probably involve large parts of the population shifting to less extreme forms of Judaism until you've got something like the current Israeli demographic situation, with a Haredi minority and a much larger secular population, and high Haredi birthrates shifting the culture enough to keep births at or above replacement with the rest. That seems pretty fine as long as they don't have their own Palestine.
Amish are already doing a pretty good job at increasingly integrating technology into the workplace while keeping it from taking over their personal lives too much - nowadays you've got stuff like Amish owned CNC fabs where they spend all day machining precision components on computers before going back to their rural farm homes in their horses and buggies. I'd predict a hypothetical Amish descendant dominated 2500 AD North America would be more akin to a socially conservative version of solarpunk than the middle ages, and while not ideal there's a lot of worse futures possible.
Either happening at all seems pretty unlikely though, organic cultural shifts towards higher fertility among the broader population or technological solutions (life extension, AI, exowombs etc) should overwhelm those groups before they can get large enough to dominate.
And a Hansonworld that goes into complete marketization dominance eating everything else a la VIle Offspring seems just as unsustainable as one of low birthrates, just for the opposite reason. You'd have a hyperfast em economy growing at a very high exponential rate while available resources only grow polynomially, with everything done just-in-time at the absolute slimmest margins possible and no room to take a breather and plan for the long term. It seems like a perfect recipe for mass civilizational autocannibalism, and once they start competing violently every major actor can pump out arbitrarily large quantities of thermonuclear weapons from the nanofabs.
The need for formal markets or industrialization as an organizational process also seems questionable in a world with embedded AI in everything that can network at lightspeed. It might be closer to a sort of technological ecology than modern industry.
“Such as by freeing capitalism more to run education, medicine, law, governance, and fertility.”
I’m fully in favor or more capitalism in these realms but why fertility? Secondly, what does even more capitalism in running fertility even mean?
I added links in that sentence.
Maybe being able to buy surrogates more easily, being able to pay for a baby to be made so it can work as a servant or something.
I think there was a different post where Robin advocated things like giving parents, a share of the income of their children and the right to sell this right to their portion of the income. He explicitly contrasted his approach of trying to replicate the profit motive and financial metrics for optimisation from industry to an approach which only tried to copy freedom from the marketplace without these other elements to encourage what he sees as the right kind of optimisation.
One of the hard to change aspects of culture is that it overrides rationality. Confirm or be ostracized.
We’d need a culture that prioritizes rationality to rise in popularity, if we ever expect to make some of your proposed changes.
What we need and what we get are two very different things.. in a climate of rising dominance of the limbic system (emotion as driving perspectives and decisions especially for the young), and anti market forces overriding rationality, we are more likely to see Amish and Haredim versions of society winning the battle with the help of the extreme Left (“progressives”) and extreme Right (MAGA).
I don't view MAGA as extreme right. It arose as a counter force to a solid and formally beneficial liberalism that had morphed so far to the left as to be almost Marxist. True liberalism is not far from the center and neither is MAGA. The once slightly right of center conservative branch was high jacked by NeoCons and industrial Oligarchs. MAGA was a return to the center. That's not to say that there aren't plenty of far right mentalities trying to ride on the coat tails of MAGA. At it's core, it is for smaller less intrusive government and as much as possible a focus on making life better for Middle Class Americans.
Dick Minnis
removingthecataract.substack.com
MAGA might have started as backlash to “woke” insanity, but as far as economic rationality is concerned, it has drifted as far from free market perspective as the Left. Under Trump, crony “capitalism”, industrial policies, and intimidation of private enterprise signaled the drift of the Right into interventionist policies. The small government was the Tea Party ideal, not the current MAGA.
"We can let our civ fall, to be replaced by the Amish, Haredim, etc."
This is an idea you've put forward several times. But it's not close to reality.
If there is a demographic replacement of the First World, it won't be by Amish and Haredim. In the world as a whole, the Amish and Haredim are a rounding error.
There are about 500K Amish in the world, and about 2.5M Haredim. Replacement births (each woman bears two children lifetime) for a population of 3M would be about 40K/year. If their women bear 10 children each, that would be 5X replacement, so 200K/year would be an upper ceiling for Amish and Haredim.
In Nigeria, there are over 7M children born each year.
If the Amish and Haredim doubled their numbers every 20 years (faster growth than any nation in the world today), in 100 years there would be about 100M of them. That would be a bit over 1% of the world's population, assuming no net growth elsewhere.
I think Robin is assuming/implying that other cultures will continue to see increasing fertility decline, so we can't just extrapolate from existing numbers; and also that he is looking forward across a pretty long time horizon, probably over a century.
Maybe AI will save us; the details of how AI culture will be derived from present human culture are yet to be determined.
Imagine any modern problem in light of "solving sex". What does that mean? Well imagine anything you feel is dire about monkeys like ourselves, who seem to do everything as a reduction towards "so we can have sex", and what would happen to said sure thing if unheard of numbers of the human species were sexually fufilled. Genuinely.
Existential risks, depression/suicide, political conflict, aliens, whatever the fuck you care about, would we all have more skin in the game? Would we be more motivated to cooperate? I really think problems should be solved at a fundamental level. We're really simple monkeys at the end of the day, and this seems to be the problem under which all problems rest.
Of course, it's not like people havent been doing this. Weve been "solving sex" before writing words. It's just that we're a) poorly motivated and b) confused and so we've mostly fucked things up royally until now. Here's a spoiler to improve your experience as a human: figure out how to have more sex and better sex and behold
“The arts, humanities, and culture adopted strong norms against overly-overt industry-style practices”
You don’t say why, or how this should change.
Re why: in the arts, clearly there is prestige associated with elite highbrow arts, such as classical music. Maybe because of the status associated with exclusivity (eg supposed need to be highly educated to appreciate classical music fully). And in the 20th century there was a sharp divide between elite and popular art forms - eg classical composers would almost never get involved in popular music which was seen as beneath them and would harm their image.
But reduced government subsidies have forced their hand into commercialisation via popularisation, resulting in ‘crossover’ music, top classical orchestras recording Hollywood sound tracks (a big source of their revenue), etc
Re how: I assume continuing commercialisation will eliminate the “strong norms against overly-overt industry-style practices” over time without intervention being required. Eg in cinema, popular music and also sports, top performers are highly paid, their output is heavily marketed, and everyone knows it. It’s pretty overt these days.
There is pushback about eg charging for tickets on a fully commercial basis (hundreds of $ a ticket for top performers/teams), but not enough to prevent it. Noteworthy that in the elite sport of tennis, AFAIK Wimbledon still refuses to charge commercial rates for tickets, resulting in absurd overdemand - except for corporate packages (purchased by banks etc to entertain their capitalist clients), which are far more expensive, and looked down on snootily by the cognoscenti.
I disagree re: we haven't invented anything big recently.
I think e.g. crypto is pretty cool. Decentralised money where people buy coins by people they believe in. If we are smart, we can make it like a prediction market: which cultural beliefs would and should win. What do you think? 🙃
It sounds democratic which is disasterous because the electorate is always a) dumb and b) a exploitable
The Bronze Age saw the Birth of writing and democracy and the wheel. It's nothing to be sneezed at in terms of greatness and impact on society. Your assessment of One foot in The Industrial Age (though others would proclaim it the Information Age) is pretty spot on with maybe twenty percent of the world having 'industrialized' by this point- not quite two hundred years post partem- so it's a little more like Two Little Piggies in The Industrial Age.
"It's not progress if it doesn't make your life better." -overheard, somewhere.
You argue that human cultural evolution is 'broken' because we’ve fundamentally altered the hyperparameters of our environment: we've drastically lowered the selection pressure through wealth and safety, collapsed our search space via a global internet monoculture, and increased the rate of environmental change far beyond what biological generations can adapt to. I completely agree with this diagnosis.
However, an AI culture modeled after human culture, also meaning it inherits our foundational mechanisms of cooperation, trade, specialization, and knowledge transfer, could theoretically bypass these biological bottlenecks and 'fix' the evolutionary process.
AI points toward a third path, like synthetic evolution. We can use AI to run the harsh evolutionary simulations we no longer can, helping us 'choose' our cultural adaptations much better. I believe AI will save us, obviously, but not as a magical 'Savior’, rather, as a powerful computational tool that allows us to offload our evolutionary iteration to silicon.
Running entire civs in sim is always very expensive, relative to the going wages of the day.