The 

Final Battle at the End of the World

Applied Divinity Studies 8d

The modern age will not be permanent, and ultimately will give way to something very
different. One must never forget that one day all will be revealed, that all injustices will
be exposed, and that those who perpetrated them will be held to account.

– Peter Thiel, The Straussian Moment

The end is coming, are you ready?

Let’s take stock: Liberals have their climate disaster. Conservatives, their demographic
change, dysgenics, and the collapse of Western society. For their part, libertarians have
witnessed a global suspension of liberty and free enterprise, with little indication that
rights will be simply reinstated once (if?) things go back to normal.

Local politics aside, we’re witnessing the rise of China (both economically and by
degree of brutality), alongside the coming superintelligent silicon. And of course, the
looming spectre of nuclear war. Luisa Rodriguez gives annual odds of 1.1%. Lest you
object that this is just EA fear mongering, it’s actually a more conservative estimate than
the cited expert survey (2.21%). That doesn’t sound like much, but over the next 30
years, it multiplies out to 28%.

Speaking of time, we don’t have much. The world passes 2°C of warming in the
2040s and hits 50% cumulative probability of transformative AI in the early 2050s.
Thanks to China’s superior handling of the pandemic, it’s now expected to achieve
economic superiority over the US by 2028, a full 5 years earlier than forecasted pre-
pandemic.

Derek Parfit thought we were at the most influential time in history. Will MacAskill

disagrees. This is philosophically interesting, but practically a bit silly. If we destroy the
planet and kill all humans, then yes, this certainly was the most influential time, and
forever will be. If not, then some day in the future there will be even more powerful
weapons.

Weapons perhaps, with the power to destroy entire worlds. Or to xenocide entire alien
civilizations, a thousand at a time. One day we may be as gods, fearsome and vengeful,
equipped to destroy even the “universes which embed ours as fiction“.

In the meantime, we are small and vulnerable. The world needs saving, and it’s up to
us. As Mazer Rackham tells Ender, “[You’re not the first]. But you’re the last. If you don’t
learn, there’ll be no time to find anyone else. So I have hope for you, if only because
you are the only one left to hope for.”
Responses to this news call under three categories:

 Technocracy, the view that the apocalypse is not an abstraction, but a set of
specific problems to be solved. Exemplified by Matt Yglesias’s The case against
crisis-mongering:

We’re wasting incredible amounts of energy and brainpower on contemplating worst-

case scenarios… What would be interesting and useful is reporting and analysis on
how to solve significant practical problems in the policy domain. But to get there,
everyone needs to chill out a bit.

 Accelerationism, the view that we cannot stop the future, so we must learn to
harness it and embrace the godhood we’re destined for. Exemplified by Fantastic
Anachronism’s Two Paths to the Future:

Technology is always technology, but the choice is illusory. What happened to stone
age groups that did not follow the latest innovations in knapping? What happened to
groups that did not embrace bronze? The only choice we have is: up, or out. And that is
no choice at all.

 Humanism, the view that we must learn to cope, look death in its face, and
cultivate a sense of purpose even as the world falls apart. Exemplified by Agnes
Callard’s The End Is Coming:

Her job is to acquire and transmit a grasp of the intrinsic value of the human
experience; this is a job whose difficulty and importance rises in proportion to the
awareness that all of it will be lost.

As you read, perhaps, like the participant of a BuzzFeed quiz, you’ve begun to gravitate
towards the viewpoint most sympathetic to you. Are you an Agnes? An Alvaro? A Matt?
The options are laid out, it’s your privilege to choose.

I’m here to tell you that you shouldn’t. That these viewpoints are all unacceptable. It’s
not even close. How could anyone endorse any of this?

And yet, these are three of the authors I respect and admire the most.
I worry, in my darker more Lovecraftian moments, that this is the first strike,
an antimemetic parasite that cripples humanity’s greatest thinkers. A mind-killer that
precludes clarity of thought. The apocalypse has come from the future to infect our
minds, it’s tendrils creeping backwards, exerting influence over vast temporal distances
through the mere concept of its existence.

In the remainder of this article, I will fight back. I will demonstrate in persuasive detail
the untenability of each position. I will give you the tools to disinfect your own thoughts.
As the Litany reads:

I must not fear.

Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear.
I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past, I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.

Contra Yglesias: The Reasons to be in Crisis Forever

There remains a denial of the founding role of the violence caused by human mimesis
and, therefore, a systematic underestimation of the scope of apocalyptic violence.

– Thiel, ibid.

You may have heard that this line of argument is melodramatic delirium. Or worse, it’s a
harmful hysteria that distracts from sober consideration. The best recent article in this
vein in Matt Yglesias’s The case against crisis-mongering:

The crisis-mongering outlook is fundamentally illiberal and harmful… I would say that
we are living through some problems that are both serious and difficult, but not
necessarily any more serious or more difficult than the problems of the past, and
certainly not serious in a way that should cause one to doubt the basic tenets of
liberalism.

In conclusion:

What would be interesting and useful is reporting and analysis on how to solve
significant practical problems in the policy domain. But to get there, everyone needs to
chill out a bit.

This is all perfectly sensible. Throughout the piece, Matt undergoes a careful
consideration of the evidence, and concludes that the death of liberalism has been
greatly exaggerated. It’s a well-written piece from a smart author that makes some
important points.
But as promised, I disagree completely.

There’s plenty of room for obnoxious hot takes on Matt’s fundamentally conservative
attitude, his unwillingness to imagine weird futures, his broader rhetorical positioning as
the mature counter-contrarian who says “no, actually good things are good”.

But instead, let’s take his advice, chill out a bit, tone down the inflamed passions, and
methodically analyze specific points one at a time.

1. It’s not overreach, it’s theater over seriousness

In some views, given the risk of a crisis, we should take it seriously and try to avert
disaster. But there is a cost to unnecessary precaution, and a need to consider the
downsides as well. As Matt argues, crisis-mongering is not only useless, it’s a
distraction:

the crisis-mongering outlook is fundamentally illiberal and harmful… mostly I think we’re
living through a time of toxic self-involved drama that threatens to make things worse
through twitchy overreaction.

He goes on to illustrate an exemplary case of that twitchy overreaction:

All this was underwritten by the concept of a “global war on terror.” It was popular in
intellectuals [sic] circles to further gas this up… People wanted to believe they were
living through a dramatic global event — a historic occurrence on a par with Pearl
Harbor or the Berlin blockade. But while obviously, 9/11 was an important moment in
history, the idea of an epoch-defining struggle against radical Islam just kind of petered
out… The whole thing just turns out to be fundamentally less significant than people
said for a time, and now we’ve moved on…during the GWOT Era, the worst thing that
happened was the conceptual overreach itself

But the issue isn’t that epoch-defining struggles are bad, or that radical Islam turned out
to be okay (it didn’t), it’s that even in the midst of our multi-trillion dollar forever war, we
never took any of this seriously.

Look: I’m sure the individual soldiers did. People at risk of being killed by an IED likely
took their jobs very seriously. But the people actually running the war were not.

Matt would disagree. He doesn’t think we were unserious. He thinks we went way too
far, blaming the overreach of the Global War on Terror, pointing out “Nobody knows
why most people are taking their shoes off at airports or why, if that’s important, you can
just buy your way out of it getting TSA Precheck.”

But again, that’s not what serious people do. If it were not theater, if it were actually
about winning a war, TSA requirements would not be the hallmark moment of a twenty
year struggle.
We’ve seen this play out much more explicitly in the latest COVID crisis. Whatever
flashy rhetoric our speeches contain, the US is simply incapable of taking crises
seriously. Per Mark Lutter:

We have an elite that is fundamentally unserious… The response to the crisis has
hitherto been to deny and to focus attention on pet concerns. Trump with the stock
market. The left with prejudice. And so on. Our ruling class ignores the greatest threat to
our way of life in a generation to focus on topics that aren’t relevant.

It’s not just that we’re complacent, or that the Military-Industrial Complex is perversely
motivated to make war as long and expensive as possible. It’s simply that we no longer
have faith. We can’t even believe that we deserve to win. As ThielThiel) writes:

A religious war has been brought to a land that no longer cares for religious wars… on
the Western side (if it can even be called a side), there is great confusion over what the
fighting is for, and why there should be a civilizational war at all. An outright declration of
war against Islam would be unthinkable; we much prefer to think of these measures as
police actions against a few unusual criminal sociopaths who happen to blow up
buildings. We are nervous about considering a larger meaning to the struggle, and even
the staunchest Western partisans of war know that we no longer believe in the
existence of a Gott mit uns in heaven

In contrast, from Katherine Boyle:

Terrorists are serious people. Anyone willing to strap a bomb on their chest and walk
into a crowded restaurant believes something so profoundly that you and I can’t fathom.

Matt was wrong. Young men did see an epoch defining event. Something to give their
lives meaning. But it wasn’t Young American Men, it was the Taliban. They’ve now
reclaimed their country’s capital from Western invaders and won an epic battle against
more powerful enemies who they truly see as forces of evil. You and I will never
experience a victory of that magnitude in our lives. It’s not merely for lack of opportunity,
it’s the inability to imagine stakes of that scale.

In other words: Matt calls for more sobriety, more analysis and more technocracy. But
the disenchantment is precisely the problem. We generate fake crises because we
cannot even comprehend the real ones. Matt correctly diagnoses and critiques the first
half of this process, but misses the underlying cause. The crisis-mongering will continue
until morale improves. Because we know something is wrong, but can’t acknowledge it.
Eventually it becomes necessary to open our eyes and look the crisis in the face.

Until then, we’ll continue to waste our energy on technocratic analysis and half-hearted
policy. This view is best encapsulated not by Matt, but by a reader comment he
endorses:
you shouldn’t trust the politics of anyone who doesn’t have a clear idea of the kind of
world they’d be happy living in, the kind of world where they could relax their constant
vigilance and just enjoy life…The only legitimate goal of politics is to make more lives
more comfortable.

This is not merely wrong, it’s crucially confused. The state, through its monopoly on
violence, is the ultimate arbiter of legitimacy. Whatever it does is justified by fiat. What
we can do however, is ask what role it fulfils. Thiel again:

In this way, politics serves as a constant reminder to a fallen humanity that life is serious
and that there are things that truly matter… When bin Laden declares war on “the
infidels, the Zionists, and the crusaders,” Schmitt would not counsel reasoned half-
measures. He would urge a new crusade as a way to rediscover the meaning and
purpose of our lives.

1. Anti-crisis-mongering is also too attractive

I’ll admit that Matt is right on one crucial meta-point: crisis-mongering will always be
popular, and you can easily impart a certain fleeting sense of importance by telling
people that X will kill us all or that Y is in decline. Object-level arguments aside, this is a
good reason to be default skeptical of anyone who shills an all-too-compelling view.

So let’s pause for a minute and take seriously the matter of priors and narrative skews.
Matt’s argument, afterall, is not merely that things are not so bad, but there are specific
behavioral reasons we enjoy deluding ourselves. That we are “basically bored and
blowing things out of proportion.”

If you take this view seriously, you should default to a stance of epistemic learned
helplessness. I might be smart, good at writing, and skilled at rhetoric, so you should be
distrustful of anything I say even if it seems to make sense. I am just another
demagogue scaring you into submission with stories of the end times.

While valid, these reasons are not necessarily decisive. So long as we’re reasoning on
the meta-level, let’s consider what biases may be on the other side. Consider, for
example, the incentives working against taking any truly existential risk too seriously:

1. If you’re wrong, no one gets to collect: If the world ends tomorrow and we all die,
no one will have the satisfaction of correcting Matt Yglesais. In contrast, if the AI-
risk people are wrong and there is no crisis, we will happily mock them
ceaselessly as paranoid nerds. More seriously, you can’t bet on x-risk and you
can’t form markets, so our primary mechanism for dealing with complex problems
is incapacitated from the start.
2. Future people have no voice: Alongside capitalism, democracy is our other go-to
mechanism for collective decision making. But since future people don’t exist yet
and can’t vote, we’ll tend to massively underrate their importance. Future people
do have some market power, but only in a limited ethereal sense.
 3. Existence is a global public good: In addition to coordinating with future people,
we also have to coordinate with all other currently existing humans. Positive
externalities at this scale and breadth are immensely difficult to price in.

And of course, since existential risk, by definition, has never happened before, there is
no historical precedent and no proof of existence. For beings that reason through
induction, it’s a systematic blind spot.

Those are some of the meta-level reasons to believe that crises are still
underappreciated. What does it all come out to on balance? Should you, by default, give
crisis-mongering more or less credence than you would otherwise?

Ultimately, these arguments are best seen not as over or under appreciated, but as
rhetorically messy and psychologically difficult to reason about. Your best bet isn’t to
accept or reject them all by default, it’s just to maintain vigilance, be wary of pitfalls and
reason at the object-level as best you can.

1. The base rate for survival is really bad

Matt continues:

The point isn’t that there isn’t a serious problem here, but that there is no historically
unique crisis… the world has always had very serious problems, and there’s nothing
uniquely serious about today’s issues, grave though they may be.

This is correct, but also a bizarre standard. The non-unique historical crises have been
bad enough. We should have acted with much more urgency. Matt adds “We face
problems. As have all societies ever.” Again, this is true but unimportant. Many of those
societies have since fallen. Their cultural artifacts lie in other people’s museums, their
values have been lost to time, their great sagas now footnotes to our story.

As Tyler writes in Stubborn Attachments:

Although many people currently live in relative peace and prosperity, we should not take
its durability for granted. If we look at the broader historical record, economic growth is
hardly the rule, and civilizations are fragile.

Michael Shermer has compiled an informal database on civilizational survival… He finds

that the average civilization endured for 402.6 years. He also finds that decline comes
more rapidly over time; since the collapse of the Roman Empire, the average duration of
a civilization has been only 304.5 years

Or from Joseph Tainter’s classic The Collapse of Complex Societies:

The implication is clear: civilizations are fragile, impermanent things…. The fall of the
Roman Empire is, in the West, the most widely known instance of collapse, the one
which comes most readily to popular thought. Yet it is only one case, if a particularly
dramatic one, of a fairly common process.

Perhaps there’s some measure of comfort in knowing that we’re not alone, but not that
much! Mostly, the historical evidence should tell us that collapse is possible, and in fact,
has been the rule for every historical civilization. Drawing analogies to past crises, or
demonstrating that “there’s nothing uniquely serious about today’s issues” should not
bring us much relief.

1. The adequacy of our machinery is good, but deeply embarrassing

So far, you might feel that this discussion is largely instrumental, which is to say
relativist. It’s all just matters of narrative. Of which myths made us more productive,
which narratives are more life-promoting and motivational. A purely practical debate on
how to best cultivate a personal affect and cultural moment that allows for urgency
without inducing anxiety.

While those questions are important, they’re a bit misleading. It’s all narrative, but it’s
not all arbitrary. It’s not a coincidence that our culture lacks the political will, the
technological capacity, and the analytical ability to solve the problems that face us.
These failures are precisely a problem of our fundamentally unserious mood.

For example: On the topic of climate change, Matt ventures a defense of capitalist
liberalism, pointing out that privately owned corporations have taken great leaps in
promoting a solar-powered plant-based-protein EV future. We don’t have carbon
pricing, but only because it’s “hideously unpopular”. He continues:

privately owned business corporations (“capitalism”) have done a great job bringing
down the cost of photovoltaic panels… creating the building blocks of a sustainable
economy….

Liberal ideology is also very capable of grokking the most important complementary
policy we haven’t had all these years — a price on carbon that would raise the price of
greenhouse gas emissions to something closer to the real social cost of emissions…
Now of course we don’t have carbon pricing, and I think we never will because it’s
hideously unpopular.

But that’s the essence of the climate crisis — not an ideological crisis for liberalism, but
tragically a crisis of mass indifference.

Again, this is right, but only superficially, and mistakes the underlying ideological
tensions generating our policy squabbles. The problem isn’t that people are indifferent.
The problem is that as a civilization, we’re unable to overrule collective will (or collective
apathy) even when it’s killing us. It’s not surprising that people can’t coordinate to
overcome massive coordination problems to fund global public goods; it’s only
surprising that we have to rely on this kind of miracle to save ourselves from imminent
disaster.

This puts us in the horrible double bind of either infringing on the will of the public, or
choosing to accept a disaster we know we have the scientific and economist capacity to
avert. The fact that we’re still facing climate change, despite, as Matt correctly identifies,
having the “conceptual and technical resources” to address it, is precisely what makes
this a crisis for liberalism in particular.

Or stated more evocatively: we’ve gone around the room, and seen that okay,
technological capacity doesn’t seem to be the limiting factor, awareness doesn’t seem
to be the problem, and it’s not a failure of prediction either, and so we rightfully conclude
that something deeper and more troubling is going on.

1. It’s not crises, it’s existential threats

At a high level, Matt’s post can be taken to argue that A) we’re not under siege from
facism, B) the far-left isn’t taking over, and C) climate change can be solved. In a
section titled “The phantom of the left”, Matt explains that despite the summer BLM
protests/riots, it all just sort of fizzled out. There is no longer blood in the streets, no
overhaul of the criminal justice system, no broad imposition of socialist policies:

…it’s not just that the rioters haven’t burned down your home, the whole problem seems
to have vanished… It’s a good reminder that the world is full of opportunistic
overstatements.

Unfortunately, I was never worried about having my home burned down, so this isn’t
really comforting. I think that what’s really gone wrong is that Matt and I are simply
considering problems on different scales. If you’re looking at the world of policies and
politics, then sure, I agree that Donald Trump was not the herald of end-times. And so
Matt concludes that “We’re wasting incredible amounts of energy and brainpower on
contemplating worst-case scenarios.”

But climate change, racial tension and political radicalization are not the worst-case
scenarios at all! Far from it. If you zoom out, consider how many empires have fallen,
how many civilizations lie in ruins, how many great cultures are forever lost, or if you
look to the far future and consider the background risk of nuclear war, or the newfound
capacity for stable totalitarian dystopias enabled by mass surveillance and automated
censorship, or if you take the transformative AI timelines seriously, then it is abundantly
clear that we are spending far too little energy contemplating the actual worst-case
scenarios.

Or since Matt likes bell curves: Some people are worried about 2-sigma risks, which
Matt correctly points out very unlikely, and not that bad even if they do occur. But I’m
worried about the 3-sigma risks which are even less likely, but much much worse. Since
severity scales up faster than probability scales down, these end up being much more
worthy of our energy. And since humans, on an individual psychological level, and
society, as the broad set of capitalist/democratic/liberal norms and mechanisms, both
systematically undervalue black-swan tail risks, they remain neglected and thus a
worthy investment of our collective attention.

Finally, you might object that this has all been interesting, but is essentially irrelevant.
I’m talking about civilizational collapse, sci fi dystopias and existential risk, Matt’s just
trying to have a nice sober discussion of some political issues. The people he’s
rebutting aren’t even part of my world, they’re just political hacks and policy wonks
desperate to be invited to pen an op-ed about the looming threat of facism. Isn’t it
bizarre and actually somewhat unfair of me to respond with a totally separate set of
concerns?

Normally, I might agree. But Matt isn’t just some random journalist-turned-substacker.
He’s the co-founder of Vox, which runs Future Perfect, one of the world’s most popular
and influential Effective Altruist publications.

It’s not weird for me to bring this up, it’s weird that he omitted it in the first place.

Eschatology as Control; Eschatology as Ruinous Freedom

By making people forget that they have souls, the Antichrist will succeed in swindling
people out of them.

 Thiel, ibid.

Stereotypically, eschatology is deployed primarily as a tool for controlling the masses.

Once everything is on the line, it’s easy to convince people to abandon any one
particular thing. You don’t need money, you need the church.

But atheist eschatology is something quite different. There’s no promise of Heaven. No

looming threat of Hell. Without the afterlife, eschatology has no carrot or stick, and there
would be, aside from perhaps promoting nihilistic hedonism, no real point to my fatalist
demagoguery. That’s not just emotional defeatism, it’s the optimal view. In the end
times, egoism and utilitarianism converge. Cowen:

Imagine that the world were set to end tomorrow. There would be little point in
maximizing the growth rate; arguably, we should just throw a party and consume what
we can.

You might feel a tinge of paradox here. The end of the world gives unlimited agency,
while also removing it. But it’s not that complicated. You can do anything you want since
none of it matters.

It doesn’t even matter if the world ends in fire, or in glorious eternal life in the Kingdom
of heaven. As Thiel writes, “extreme pessimism tells you there’s no point in doing
anything. Extreme optimism tells you there is no need to do anything. They converge on
doing nothing.”

The philosopher Samuel Scheffler believed that our sense of meaning relies on the
knowledge that there will be future generations. As Agnes Callard summarized: “The
meaning of our lives, in the here and now, depends on future generations; without them
we become narrowly self-interested, prone to cruelty, indifferent to suffering, apathetic.”

But Callard, for her part, disagrees in a subtle but devastating way. She points out that
there will eventually be a last generation, and since they have no future, their lives will
not be meaningful. This cascades backwards in time, leaving the whole structure
without foundation:

The Schefflerian edifice is doomed to collapse. Just as the thought that other people
might be about to stockpile food leads to food shortages, so too the prospect of a
depressed, disaffected and de-energized distant future deprives that future of its
capacity to give meaning to the less distant future, and so on, in an kind of reverse-
snowball effect, until we arrive at a depressed, disaffected and de-energized present.

And yet complete social disorder has not occured. Why not? Callard’s essay gestures at
the importance of humanistic disciplines, but ultimately concludes “I do not know the
answer, nor even whether there is one. “

Life on a Knife’s Edge

That world could differ from the modern world in a way that is much worse or much –
the limitless violence of runaway mimesis or the peace of the kingdom of God.

 Thiel, ibid.

If humanity is hampered by infighting and petty disputes, perhaps we can find both
meaning and solutions not through individual agency, but through a more universal
collectivism.

So often, we have willed ourselves to believe this noble lie: that if humanity ever faced a
great external threat, we would succeed in facing it together. Even Thiel makes this
mistake, stating “there never can be a world state that politically unites all of humanity”,
with the caveat that this is true “absent an invasion by aliens from outer space”. Pre-
Covid, we might have held onto this myth.

But post-Covid there should no longer be any doubt humanity will fail even in times of
collective crisis. As Baradaran writes in A Plea for Fatalist Sleeplessness:

In the beginning, there was at least hope that in the midst of such a desperate situation,
there would be more solidarity and cooperation around the world…. A few days into
Italy’s lockdown, people across the country sang and played music from their balconies
as they came together to say “Everything will be alright” (Andrà tutto bene). Three
weeks on, the singing has stopped and social unrest is mounting as a significant part of
the population, especially in the poorer south, realize that everything is not alright.

In some ways this is tragic, the last cry of humanity’s last great collectivist myth, but it’s
crucial that we learn our lesson. To believe otherwise would be too dangerous. We can
no longer fool ourselves into thinking that despite decades of inaction, once climate
change really becomes serious, surely at that moment we will act to stop it. The world is
ending now, we can procrastinate no longer.

There is an important sense of meaning however, which comes not from naive
universalism, nor from a hope that we can prevent tragedy, but from the knowledge that
we sit between two extremes: eternal death or eternal salvation. Crises are
opportunities, and since overcoming them means accomplishing unprecedented feats,
survival is equivalent to divine ascendance. More specifically:

 If we do transition to sustainable energy production, we not only avert climate

change, we awake the next day with energy too cheap to meter, solar panels
blanketing the sun and fusion rockets soaring into space.
 If we do succeed in ensuring the safety of superintelligent AI, we not only avert
being subsumed into paperclip production, but awake the next day having
enslaved a God capable of solving all problems and bringing forth a post-scarcity
society.
 If we do manage to keep fertility rates high, we not only avert the death spiral of
population decline, but awake the next day with a recursively self-improving
engine of near-limitless economic growth.

More rigorously, that last dynamic is illustrated macroeconomically in Charles Jones’

recent The End of Economic Growth?:

If the starting value for x is below the jump point in Figure 6, the economy converges to
the “expanding cosmos” steady state. Conversely, if the starting value for x is above the
jump point, then the economy asymptotically converges to the “low” steady state, the
Empty Planet outcome.

Note that “The candidate “middle steady state” is unstable”. There’s no outcome in
which we simply carry on as usual.

The macroeconomics of the problem, however, make this distinction one of critical
importance: it is the difference between an Expanding Cosmos of exponential growth in
both population and living standards and an Empty Planet, in which incomes stagnate
and the population vanishes.

This happens to be the solution to Callard’s dilemma, and also to everything else. It’s
not that life is meaningless because there will one day be a final generation. Having it all
come to an end makes you helpless and hedonistic. The precise opposite view is
having it all come to an end, but with some hope of stopping it.

We want to know that our lives are consequential, and what’s more consequential than
having the power to save or end the world?

This also, by the way, ends up solving the issue of failed collectivist coordination. It’s not
that we will all come together to solve the world’s problems. In fact, it’s difficult to
seriously imagine a situation in which literally all humans are required, such that your
individual presence makes a difference. Just as your choice to wear a mask was never
going to put a dent in Covid, and your choice to recycle was never going to put a dent in
climate change, your desire and will to come together as one people was never going to
move the needle one bit. The collectivist myth is not only wrong, not only dangerous,
not only an excuse to procrastinate on our most important problems, it is also
antithetical to individual agency.

No, this really is, in all seriousness, up to you. Ivan Zhao used to joke “Moby Dick was
written by one person.”. His own company was founded by two people, and now it’s
valued at $2,000,000,000. OpenAI was founded by a small handful of people, as was
DeepMind. Even now, these are not massive institutions. They are not collectivist efforts
struggling to engage universal human values. Briefly encapsulated: the future is shaped
by technology, and technology is invented by people, often in very small numbers.

Tyler Cowen’s Stubborn Attachments is read as a paean to economic growth, but really,
it’s about the importance and fragility of individual liberty. From it’s first few pages, the
quest is framed by “the smallness of the individual human mind compared to the vast
expanse of nature”. “In ancient days, men looked at stars and saw their heroes in the
constellations.“ In modern times, we do much the same, but we see only an
unfathomable expanance, and thus lay crushed by the nihilism of insignificance.

But Cowen’s contrast is not a lamentation, it is a reversal. If we are the only intelligent
life, then the universe belongs to each of us. One-hundred-billion galaxies, each
with one-hundred-billion stars. That’s one trillion for each human alive today, and it is up
to each of us to determine whether or not we will ever reach them. Not for crude
maximalism, but to dictate whether or not life ever reaches beyond the cradle of our
universe. Whether we embrace growth, or lay fallow and end it all here on our small
blue dot.

The Talmud writes: “Whoever saves one life, saves an entire world”.

We ought to take it both literally and seriously.