Pragmatopia
Carla Delastella challenged me to give a positive vision of the future. She made the point that people on the right are often obsessed with negative visions of the future, not positive ones, and that we need something positive to strive for. I agree with her point. Positive visions are important for motivating action.
To be useful, a positive vision cannot simply be wishful thinking. It is easy to come up with an emotionally appealing fantasy. But a useful vision must be realistic and pragmatic. It should be based on knowledge of reality, and there should be a way to do it.
A positive vision is not a prediction of what will happen. It is a goal to work toward, and it has the function of motivating and directing action toward that goal. A positive vision should be doable, but it need not be easy to achieve.
We also need negative visions that motivate us to avoid bad outcomes. A positive vision should always come with a negative counterpart: what will happen if we do not solve our big problems. A positive vision is not the absence of negative visions. It is not just ignoring our problems. The two types of vision are complementary. They motivate us to pursue success and avoid failure.
I will present two visions of humanity’s future: a positive one and a negative one. I will then review the major problems facing humanity and propose solutions to them: actions that we can take to attain the positive vision and prevent the negative one.
My Positive Vision
My positive vision is a global civilization that is peaceful, prosperous, stable and sustainable.
Modern civilization has given us prosperity, relative peace and long life. Modern agriculture has eliminated hunger. Modern medicine has hugely reduced childhood mortality. Modern systems of governance have reduced interpersonal violence and warfare. Most children live to adulthood. Most adults live long, healthy lives. Modern civilization has also expanded individual agency. People have more choices in life. They can choose careers, mates and lifestyles. Humanity has greatly expanded its knowledge and agency with science and technology.
I view these changes as progress. I want to maintain them and build upon them.
However, modern civilization has serious problems. It is not stable or sustainable. To make modern civilization stable, we must replace destabilizing feedback loops with stabilizing feedback loops. To make modern civilization sustainable, we must switch to renewable energy sources, and limit the population and economy. Once we have attained those goals, we should protect our planet and civilization from catastrophic natural disasters, such as asteroid impacts and super-volcano eruptions.
To attain my vision, we must fix modern civilization, not just celebrate its successes. We must create a foundation for long-term human survival and prosperity. On that foundation, we can build further. I believe in real progress, which involves expanding knowledge, power and cooperation. But first we need to fix modern civilization.
My Negative Vision
My negative vision is that modern civilization collapses (probably in this century), plunging us into a long dark age. If we don’t make modern civilization stable and sustainable, then it will collapse, one way or another. It will either destroy itself or run out of resources to consume. If modern civilization collapses, then war, disease and famine will return with a vengeance. Billions will die.
After the collapse, there will be no way to rebuild modern civilization. The easily accessible fossil fuels are gone. It would hard to reboot industrial civilization without easy-to-extract coal and oil. Some scientific knowledge might be preserved, but most of it will be useless without an industrial economy. Humanity will return to the premodern condition of subsistence agriculture and high infant mortality. Our descendants will look back at modern civilization as a paradise lost. Eventually, our species will be wiped out by a catastrophe, or simply fade away.
See Collapse is Forever.
Unfortunately, I think the negative vision is more likely to become a reality than the positive one.
Now, let’s review the major problems facing humanity.
Irrationality
Our big meta-problem is irrationality.
Our irrationality has two components. One is that rationality is limited. The other is that human beings are prone to certain errors of thought. These components exist for both individuals and collectives.
Rationality is limited because thought is limited. We use heuristics to reduce the complexity of problem-solving, but unfortunately those heuristics also cause systematic errors and blind spots. There are also social forces that push us away from truth, honesty and cooperation.
We need collective rationality, not just individual rationality. Even if individuals act rationally, their combined actions may not be collectively rational. Problems of cooperation can cause collective irrationality, such as tragedies of the commons. To be collectively rational, we must solve problems of cooperation.
See Game Theory and Cooperation.
Society can be a cause of individual irrationality, which then generates collective irrationality. The social environment generates a fog of delusion, pretense and deception that clouds our judgment as individuals.
See Social Delusions and Bad Faith.
To solve modern problems, we must become more rational, as individuals and as a collective.
Resource Constraints
All resources are limited. The Earth is finite, and it receives a finite flow of energy from the Sun. Modern civilization depends on a huge input of energy from fossil fuels. There are finite stocks of fossil fuels in the ground. We can’t pull fossil fuels out of the ground and dump carbon dioxide into the air forever. To have a stable and sustainable civilization, we must switch to renewable sources of energy.
Population Growth
To have a stable and sustainable civilization, we must have a stable population. To maintain a high level of prosperity, we need a high ratio of resources to people, and thus a relatively small population. Currently, the global population is growing rapidly. This cannot go on forever. If we don’t stop population growth deliberately, it will eventually be limited by war, disease and famine. In the long run, the population cannot be limited by voluntary low fertility.
Population growth is a tragedy of the commons. It can’t be solved by individual agency. It requires collective agency to solve.
Dysgenics
In nature, populations and genomes are regulated by the struggle over scarce resources. Organisms reproduce to excess, and then compete for limited resources. Most die young without reproducing. This harsh struggle prevents populations from exploding and eliminates most mutations. It maintains the size of the population and the quality of the genome.
Modern civilization has relaxed selection for the human species. Almost all children live to adulthood, and almost everyone can reproduce. This not only causes population growth, it also degrades the human genome. Genetic noise is added in every generation by mutation, and not removed by natural selection. Also, there is no selection for the traits that make people productive and responsible members of society. For example, global IQ is currently declining.
See We Cannot Transcend Evolution.
To survive and prosper, our civilization needs intelligent, hard-working and law-abiding people. But it does not select for those traits, and those traits are declining in the population. The biological basis of modern civilization is gradually eroding away.
Economic Growth
Just as the population cannot grow forever, the economy cannot grow forever. To make civilization stable and sustainable, we need a stable economy. Unfortunately, the current global economic and financial system depends on infinite growth. Corporations depend on economic growth to bail out their debts. Countries depend on economic growth to support government debt and entitlement schemes, such as retirement benefits. Our societies are addicted to debt, inflation and growth. The global financial and economic system is a huge pyramid scheme, which cannot grow forever. All pyramid schemes eventually collapse.
The Decline of the West
European civilization has been the main generator of global progress in recent history. Modern civilization was created by Europeans over the last 500 years. Today, however, European civilization is in decline. European people are being demographically replaced, due to low fertility and mass immigration. European civilization has become decadent and stagnant.
This is not just a problem for the West. It is a problem for the entire world, because the world has become dependent on the West to generate progress and lead the way into the future. If Western civilization collapses, then it will probably take down global civilization with it.
China might be the exception, because it is big enough to survive the collapse of the West. However, China’s civilization is essentially modern, and thus Western. It has the same internal problems that exist in the West.
War
War is a natural human behavior. It is built into our genes and culture. It is something human beings naturally do.
See Biology and War.
That doesn’t mean war is beneficial or necessary. Ideally, we would replace war with global cooperation and population control.
We now have nuclear weapons that could devastate the planet if used on a large scale. Modern civilization contains the potential for catastrophic war, even if it is relatively peaceful today.
As non-renewable resources decline, conflict between societies is likely to increase. Civil unrest is also a likely outcome of resource scarcity. War could be the factor that tips us into a civilizational collapse.
Alienation
Modern civilization places the human brain outside of its natural environment. In a sense, it makes us aliens on our own planet.
It is not that the environment of modern civilization is harsh, like the environment of Mars. It is the opposite. Human nature evolved to deal with scarcity and conflict. We are not adapted to the comforts, freedoms and amusements of modern society.
The natural purpose of life is reproduction. In the past, human instincts meshed with the environment to produce adaptive behavior. People acted toward reproduction, even if they didn’t explicitly value reproduction. Their life choices were highly constrained. Most people married and had children. Most men did the same job as their fathers. Most women were wives and mothers. Given the constraints of the environment, natural desires and choices were adaptive. Life was hard, but people intuitively acted toward reproduction. It was a natural consequence of their instincts and the environment.
Today, things are very different. People choose their careers and lifestyles. They can control their fertility with birth control. Women don’t need to get married — they can support themselves by wage labor or rely on state assistance. Women can have children out of wedlock without social repercussions. Modern technology gives us simulated experiences that are cheap and safe. Human instincts do not mesh with the modern environment to produce adaptive behavior. The opposite is true. Most people choose to have few or no children. They do not intuitively act toward their natural purpose of reproduction.
Modernity has a strange paradox. The more we shape the environment to satisfy our desires, the less well our desires are adapted to the environment. Human emotions evolved to make us struggle against adversity to survive and reproduce. Modern civilization has made the basic problems of survival (getting enough food, staying comfortably warm, avoiding predation and disease) easy to solve. It also makes certain problems easier to “solve” by substituting a fake problem for the real one. Sex with birth control still feels like sex, but it isn’t sex. It feels like you are doing something important, but you are just spinning your wheels. Modern technology makes it easy to survive, and easy to spin your emotional wheels without reproducing.
The breakdown of human sexuality goes beyond low fertility. It includes a breakdown of sexual relationships. Modern civilization has made men less attractive to women, and has made it difficult for people to form long-term relationships. This is another example of human psychology breaking down in the modern world.
See Modern Romance.
Modern technology gives us what we want. It is designed to fit our desires. It gives us addictive substitutes for natural problem-solving cycles. Porn replaces sex. Birth control decouples sex from reproduction. Video games and social media replace productive work and social relationships. Opiate drugs make natural problems disappear for a while.
More and more, we use modern technology to manipulate our emotions artificially. Modern man has detached himself from reality, and plugged himself into an artificial reality that satisfies his desires more easily.
The problem of alienation is not an ordinary problem. An ordinary problem is when you desire something and don’t have it. Solving an ordinary problem requires overcoming obstacles to what you desire. The problem of alienation is that you desire the wrong thing, or that you can satisfy your desires in a maladaptive way. This is a philosophical problem. It is a problem of values.
We are used to problems that involve limited resources, constraints on our behavior, and enemies that threaten us. Modern problems are very different. It is hard for us to recognize problems that are caused by abundance rather than scarcity, freedom rather than constraints, and ourselves rather than enemies. Most people are blind to the philosophical problems of the modern world.
Modern civilization makes philosophy relevant to ordinary life. A question such as “What is the purpose of life?” becomes relevant when you have the freedom to choose a lifestyle.
See The Sixties.
Although the ordinary person is blind to the philosophical problems of the modern world, he feels them as anxiety and confusion. There is a growing dissatisfaction with modern life, which people can’t seem to explain. It is sometimes called “the crisis of meaning”. Modern man doesn’t know what to do with himself.
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Now, I will propose solutions to modern problems.
Expand Rationality
We must expand rationality to larger scales of time, space and cooperation.
Our culture places many issues off-limits to rationality. The Overton window (the window of acceptable discourse) excludes many important problems and solutions from rational discourse. A good example is eugenics. Eugenics is considered “evil”, but it is necessary to sustain modern civilization. The decline of the West and the replacement of the European population is another taboo topic. Any pushback against immigration is labeled “racist”. So is any celebration of the West’s historical achievements. These barriers to thought and discourse must be overturned. We need to expand the Overton window to include the major problems of the modern world and the solutions to those problems.
There is a general taboo on understanding human nature. We have myths about ourselves that conflict with reality. A good example is the myth that humans are altruistic. This myth prevents us from understanding the basis of society. We have to overturn those myths. We need to desacralize human nature, so that we can understand it.
See Altruism and Selfishness and Ideology and War.
The major problems of the modern world involve self-regulation. Self-regulation requires self-awareness and self-control. Humanity, as a whole, must develop self-awareness and self-control. This begins by understanding ourselves and our place within nature. We are not magical beings. We are reproducing machines.
We need to understand human psychology, and the causes of irrationality. Our mental abilities are limited, and they evolved in a very different environment. We should be critical of our intuitions, not view them as a reliable source of truth and value judgments. We need an explicit theory of truth and value to critique and augment our intuitions.
We need to understand human society and culture, and their pathologies. Social feedback can generate mass irrationality, such as crowd manias. Memetic parasites, such as ideologies, can spread through new media and have destructive effects on individuals and societies.
We must abandon morality as a frame for solving problems. Morality is a delusion, and it creates a virtue-signaling tragedy of the commons. Ironically, morality is an obstacle to cooperation in certain areas. It prevents us from acknowledging that we are the cause of our problems. Instead, it makes us to look for a scapegoat to blame, an enemy to hate.
Collective rationality is a type of cooperation. As such, it requires solving problems of cooperation. To solve problems together, we need institutions that align individual interests with the collective good.
See Game Theory and Cooperation.
Expanding rationality is a job for a cognitive elite. The masses are not capable of thinking psychologically or philosophically. They might be dimly aware of the problems of the modern world, but they cannot fully understand them, let alone propose solutions to them. The masses will be led, one way or another. They might be led off a cliff by crowd dynamics and bad leaders. Or they might be led toward a better future by a rational elite. Hopefully, true intellectual leadership will emerge. If not, modern civilization is doomed.
We need to reform the institutions of collective knowledge and agency: the academy, the media, the financial system and the government. They must be designed to generate collective rationality, not irrationality.
Obviously, expanding human rationality is a tall order. But it is the big meta-problem of the modern world, and if we cannot expand our rationality, modern civilization is doomed. All the other problems depend on human rationality.
Explicit Values
Modern civilization replaced the ancestral struggle to survive with a new struggle to find meaning. We have to choose how to live our lives, but we are not equipped, psychologically or culturally, to make those choices. Instincts and traditions are not sufficient as a basis for life. We need explicit values to guide us. To make choices, we need values, and to make the right choices, we need the right values.
But how can we choose the right values?
There is no prior basis for choosing values, because choices depend on values. However, there are values that are self-affirming if chosen. There are also values that are self-negating.
I propose two self-affirming values, one for the individual and one for the collective. The individual value is reproduction. The collective value is civilization. As individuals, we should try to reproduce. As a collective, we should try to maintain and improve our civilization.
In the past, purpose was implicit. The natural purpose of life is reproduction. Our emotions have functions that are instrumental to the purpose of reproduction. Hunger, thirst, lust, love, sadness, etc, are all heuristic mechanisms for generating adaptive behavior. They evolved to be instrumental to reproduction, but they don’t make us consciously want to reproduce. Modern civilization, and especially birth control, detaches our emotions from their natural purpose. To be a functional organism in the modern world, you need an explicit purpose. I propose reproduction as the individual purpose of life.
Likewise, collective purpose was implicit in the past. It emerged from the interplay of individual desires in a social context. Society consists of people cooperating to attain their individual goals. Moral values emerge out of this interplay. Their implicit basis is cooperation, but people view them as objective facts, rather than emergent cultural norms.
We can no longer afford this delusion. We need an explicit collective purpose, to justify the social order and make social choices. Civilization is our collective home, and we have a collective interest in maintaining that home for our descendants. I propose civilization as the core unifying value for the human species.
Eugenic Population Control
Nature regulates populations by killing the young. Reproduction generates excess population, which is then killed off by competition over limited resources. Humans are not exempt from this process, although we have temporarily suspended it in most parts of the world. Modern civilization allows most children to live to adulthood. This causes population growth and dysgenics.
See Life is Violent and We Cannot Transcend Evolution.
Population growth will not stop due to voluntary low fertility, because voluntary low fertility is self-limiting.
If we want to maintain the conditions of modern civilization, in which most children live to adulthood, we need eugenic population control. Otherwise, population growth and dysgenics will destroy modern civilization, and nature will once again regulate the human population with premature death.
The right to have a child should not be unconditional, as it is now. It should be conditional on certain responsibilities to the child and to society.
I propose the following:
- Potential parents must have enough income to provide a decent standard of living for the child and pay taxes that cover their share of society’s costs.
- Potential parents must not have committed any serious crimes, such as murder or rape, that they have not been pardoned for.
- Both parents must agree to the birth and be responsible for the support of the child. Paternity fraud would be a serious crime.
- Women would have an unlimited right to an abortion, but they would also bear the full responsibility for children born in violation of this scheme.
- Women who have unlicensed children would be placed on monitored birth control until they are able to meet the criteria and pay a penalty. Multiple offenses would result in permanent sterilization.
This scheme would regulate the size of the population. Most people could not afford to have many children. When resources are scarce, it would be harder for most people to satisfy the economic requirements. It would also regulate the genome, because it would allow productive members of society to have more children, while people who are unproductive or destructive would have no children.
These requirements might seem harsh to modern sensibilities, but they are far less harsh than nature’s method of population control. If we want a future without war, disease and famine, we need to impose eugenic reproduction control on ourselves.
My proposed scheme balances rights and responsibilities. It makes the right to reproduce conditional on responsibilities to the child, the other parent, and society. It would allow a society to have a safety net without subsidizing dysgenic reproduction. It is laissez faire, not totalitarian. It just imposes simple rules on the population and allows outcomes to emerge within that framework. It does not try to select for a “master race” or micro-manage the genome. It just selects for whatever traits happen to make people productive and responsible members of society.
Also, this scheme would be easy to enforce in a modern society: easier than the law against murder, and much easier than traffic regulations. The rules are simple and easy to follow. Enforcement would be relatively easy, and require minimal intrusion into people’s lives.
It is not a radical new idea to regulate reproduction. It is a radical old idea. In the past, most societies regulated the sexual behavior of their populations with marriage and a prohibition on extramarital sex. I am proposing a modern, rational version of reproduction control. It would solve the same problems as traditional marriage. (See The End of Marriage.) It would also solve the problems of population growth and dysgenics.
Limiting the freedom to reproduce seems a very small price to pay for long-term peace and prosperity.
Global Governance
Large-scale problems require large-scale agency to solve. In the long run, we need a global government to solve global problems: to prevent wars, to protect the natural environment, to manage natural resources, to regulate the global economy, and to prevent or deal with major natural disasters.
We already have an ad hoc global society, which is based on cooperation between the major global powers. International trade agreements have created a global economy. The current global society is fragile, however. It is an ad hoc network of agreements and relationships that depends on a few major powers agreeing to maintain the status quo. It does not have the agency to solve any of the big problems facing humanity.
We need a global government that is explicit and designed, not implicit and ad hoc. It should have sufficient power to solve global problems.
Some will say that a global government creates the potential for corruption on a global scale. That is true, of course. However, global anarchy is not a better alternative. Governments have the potential for corruption, but that does not mean that governance is bad. Generally speaking, governance is better than anarchy.
Those who fear a global government typically believe that we already have a global shadow government. They believe that there is a conspiracy to rule the world for the benefit of a minority. I don’t believe that there is such a conspiracy, but I believe that there are various hidden agendas being pursued by various powers, not all of which correspond to countries. So, there is a shadow global power structure — an emergent global establishment. The best way to prevent a corrupt shadow government is to create an explicit and limited one.
There is no peaceful state of global cooperation without some type of global power structure. We can have global conflict, a global shadow government, or an explicit global government. I prefer a global government that is designed, stable and explicit. It will inevitably have some corruption — no government is perfect. But an imperfect government is better than anarchy, and an explicit government is harder to corrupt than a hidden power structure.
So, we should work toward a global government. What I am proposing is not a replacement for a smaller scale of governance, but a larger scale of governance on top of what currently exists: a global government that is limited to dealing with global problems.
A global government would require cooperation between existing large power blocs, of which the West would ideally be the strongest and most influential. Unfortunately, the West is in decline, and that window of opportunity is closing.
Save and Revitalize the West
European civilization is a source of global progress that should be defended, not destroyed. To save the West, we must defeat anti-Western ideologies, and stop the self-destructive policies that they promote. We must stop mass immigration, restore the family unit, and end anti-white racism.
We should also push for unity within European civilization. Instead of trying to export liberal humanism to the rest of the world, we should focus on fixing our internal problems, and creating a strong, unified European civilization. We should not do this in opposition to other civilizations, but in cooperation with them, as part of an emerging global civilization.
A New Financial System
At some point, we need to stop economic and population growth. However, our financial system requires endless growth, because it is based on debt. We need a new financial system that is based on savings, not debt.
Banks should not be in the business of making loans. Instead, they should merely allow people to save and make transactions (pay or receive money). Investors, not banks, should bear the risk of lending money.
Governments and central banks should not micro-manage the financial system or economy by rigging interest rates. We need to abandon Keynesian economics, and adopt a more Hayekian approach. There should be no bailouts of investors or companies by the government, and no attempts to stimulate the economy with government spending or inflation. The government should only define and enforce the rules of the system, not try to manage it. Also, the government should not be able to finance itself by printing money or “borrowing” from a central bank. Governments should be financed by taxation, not debt.
Instead of an infinite spiral of debt, the financial system should be based on a finite stock of money that enters or leaves circulation depending on the demand for money. Instead of inflation, we should have price stability or mild deflation. I won’t explain all the details here, but it is possible to create a stable financial system based on savings instead of debt, a system that doesn’t require infinite growth to prevent financial collapse.
Natural Resource Taxation
There is a circularity to how markets determine prices: prices are based on other prices. The price of a product is based on the prices of the inputs to its production. Those, in turn, are based on other prices. The most basic inputs to production are natural resources. The prices of natural resources bootstrap the prices of everything else. It follows that natural resources can’t be properly priced by markets. They must be priced in some other way.
Currently, natural resources are priced in ad hoc ways. Usually, the price is based on the cost of extracting the resource, plus some tax or fee added by a local government. Natural resources should be priced in a principled way that takes into account their potential value and their environmental costs.
There should be a tax on all natural resources, charged at the point of extraction or use. It should be a flat fee per unit of the substance, not a percentage of the current market price. This would raise and stabilize the prices of natural resources, and it would provide incentives to use them efficiently.
Finite natural resources, such as fossil fuels, should be taxed in a way that reflects their long-term value to humanity. This would create an economic incentive to shift to renewable energy sources. Natural resource taxation would act as a proactive brake on the economy, slowing and eventually stopping growth. Otherwise, growth will continue until we run out of critical resources (especially fossil fuels), and have a catastrophic collapse.
In the long run, natural resource taxation would regulate the global economy. We could also add hard limits to the total amount of resources used per year. Self-imposed limits are the only way to have long-term prosperity.
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Modern civilization is unstable because it has amplifying feedback loops built into it: population growth, monetary growth, and economic growth. To have a stable, sustainable civilization, we need to replace those amplifying feedback loops with damping feedback loops. Otherwise, modern civilization will continue to grow out of control on multiple dimensions until it collapses.
I am proposing that we take control of our destiny by taking control of ourselves.
The Long, Long Run
In the long run, we need to scale down the population and economy to sustainable levels. With a reformed financial system, this would not cause economic collapse. Laissez-faire capitalism would regulate and improve the economy. Eugenic reproduction control would regulate and improve the population. A limited global government would prevent war over resources. We could slowly shift to other energy sources as we scale down. Eventually, we would have a stable, sustainable global civilization.
Then we could turn our attention to other long-term risks and challenges. We need a space defense system to protect our planet from asteroid and comet impacts. We need a global disaster recovery program to deal with major natural disasters. Once we have those in place, we would have our house in order. We would have a civilization that could last for thousands or even millions of years, perhaps indefinitely.
Then what?
We would have a lot of time to think about what to do next, if we ever got there. We could continue to expand human knowledge and agency. Perhaps we could expand our civilization beyond the Earth. There are many things that we could do if we make it that far.
May we live long and prosper.