Our Uphill Battle

I recently said our civ will fall if we do not find finish the industrial revolution, and apply the industry trio of math, big orgs, and capitalism to more areas of life. Especially our fast activism-driven evolution of values, morals, and norms.

But watching a documentary on early activist H.D. Thoreau brought home to me just how huge an ask this seems. Our modern world has come to deeply adore and revere changing its morals fast via youth movements, and a great many features of our modern world support this new pattern.

For example, youths are generally more risk-taking, emotionally expressive, eager to impress potential mates, less invested in prior arrangements, and better able to bond together into groups. Which attracts youths to the chance to skip the usual dues to rise fast in status as leaders of new tightly-bonded emotional youth movements.

Helping further, we legitimized fashions, seeing those who first adopt new popular changes as more virtuous. And we put kids together in high school and college, where they have more time for activism, bond into their own youth cultures, and are taught to see the world more abstractly and thus morality more simply and universally. Also, better communication tech has let them coordinate faster across wider distances.

Finally, the modern world has widely adopted the views (a) that morality is a whole separate realm where the usual adult knowledge and experience are less relevant, (b) that moral opinions should from come authentically from within, and (c) that youthful opinions on morals tend to be less corrupted by habit and self-interest.

All of this has created a perfect storm encouraging youth to repeatedly make and join new internal-feelings-driven moral crusades, movements maximally suspicious of opposing older adults with ties of interest and habits to the existing order.

Could we apply industry to more strongly to manage this process? For example, by paying big orgs to create, suppress, and influence such movements to achieve key metrics. Yes, big orgs do substantially influence youth movements today, but mostly from behind the scenes. And these are mostly not for-profit orgs, and our world is pretty hostile to for-profit orgs operating outside their usual scopes, especially in sacred areas like moral activism. Social media feed algorithms seem to be the main form of this now, but I doubt they could do that much more than they do now.

We should do our best to try, but damn does this look hard.