A Political Compass for Human* Flourishing

Between Power and Precarity, Wisdom and Degeneracy

Okay… Last week, we’ve asked the high-level question: What does it take for wisdom to win? In this post, I’ll outline a political compass for making sense of ideologies that can orient us towards human flourishing.

---

The premise of this work: We need an ideology/religion with the express aim to transform human civilization towards a viable future—grounded by an intellectually rigorous theory of change for resolving the meta-crisis and making our economies conducive to life on earth.

I want to contextualize the inquiry by mapping out ideologies on an evolved political compass. The classic dimensions of a political compass, Libertarian <> Authoritarian and Left <> Right, won’t be adequate though.

The map we’re looking for needs to help us answer the following question: What are the dimensions of an ideology that can win in the context of cultural evolution — including all the power struggles, game theoretic dynamics, and social darwinism that contribute to this?

In this context, I refer to culture in the broadest sense: ways of doing things that win and propagate in the world, including how people live, how corporations do business, what we value collectively, etc.

Here are some axes of that political compass we might consider:

• High Tech <> Low Tech
  Technologically advanced vs. back to nature

• Evolutionary Fitness: Powerful / Winning <> Impotent / Losing
  Does this win in a game theoretic context, does it have evolutionary fitness, mimetic virality? Eg. Luddite lifestyles have a certain anti-memetic quality, ideas which discourage or prevent people from spreading it.

• Degenerate < Healthy > Evolutionary
  A developmental / health-oriented perspective

• Wise <> Foolish

• Desirable <> Dystopian

• Socioeconomics: brings about Prosperity <> Precarity, living according to it is High Status <> Low Status

• Hopeful / Optimistic <> Pessimistic
  doom and gloom, death cults vs. beautiful, colorful visions of life’s possibilities

• Bullshit <> Meaning
  The corporate pretense of meaning found at WeWork or Flow¹, vs Traditional Dream Factory² (a grass-roots crypto-co-owned community doing regeneration projects in Portugal)

• Trans-Human <> Humane <> Human Potential oriented

• Naive < Informed > Cynical

• Ironic <> Sincere

While all these dimensions offer insightful perspectives, here are the two axes I landed on:

• POWER / CapabilitiesDoes this ideology confer power and competitive advantage? (often through technology). This translates into evolutionary fitness, the ability to win games and propagate in [cultural evolution] and [the marketplace of products and ideas].

  • as opposed to approaches that are limited in their effectiveness, non-competitive, and as a result mal-adaptive in the context of cultural evolution

  • Causation; what we can do

  • relates to AI capabilities research; how can we bring about Artificial Super-Intelligence (ASI)

• WISDOM / Alignment Care for sentient beings, the life-affirming orientation that leads to wholeness, centers regenerative practices, and inspires real meaning.

  • as opposed to extraction, toxicity/degeneracy, and bullshit

  • Ethics; what we ought to do

  • relates to AI Alignment research; how can we ensure AI/ASI systems align with human values and bring about human flourishing

When put together, the following map emerges:

and we might contextualize and and populate it like so:

---

TECHNO-OPTIMISM is the currently most dominant ideology shaping the modern world and our civilization. While often praised by the Progress Narrative as the ultimate source of progress, improvements in quality of life, etc, it has some unfortunate downsides.³

• extractive: turns Nature into Technium

• creates toxicity and degeneracy: make number go up - engagement, profit, shareholder value, GDP - but human minds go stupid, children go addicted, democracy go eroded, the amazon deforested, etc.

• is full of bullshit, void of meaning⁴

  • maintains an immature progress narrative that consistently overlooks or downplays externalities and risks

  • the phenomenon of “bullshit jobs”⁵

• comes with an element of social control.

Naive Techno-Optimism: Turning Nature into Technium to Make Number Go Up

The attractors in the top left corner are Authoritarian Dystopia and Ecological Collapse — driven by mechanisms of control and enslavement on the social level, extraction of natural resources on the physical level and toxicity as a result of it.

The Progress Narrative, as expressed eg. in Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto or Sam Altman’s blog wants to make you believe that human ingenuity expressed through science, technology, industry, and free markets will lead to a prosperous human future for all—by providing clean abundant energy, intelligence too cheap to meter, etc. BUT this optimistic view of progress is incomplete because it fails to fully account for its negative externalities.6

---

LIMBIC CAPITALISM is the result of the Race to the Bottom of the Brainstem, the result of a century of consumerism driving the advertising industry to innovate ever more sophisticated methods of demand engineering. It’s the set of perverse incentives that leads to businesses to optimize for addiction. From food to media to dating, everything is porn, engineered to be hyper-palatable and over-stimulating.⁶

Unlike the other ideologies mapped out on this compass, no one strives to be a follower of Limbic Capitalism. It’s not a system of belief that people subscribe to, but that’s exactly the point. It’s a system that controls and enslaves, built around the lowest common denominator of engineered addiction, inducing a kind of neurological nihilism: If you are unable to control your attention, you become agnostic to what is even worth paying attention to, unable to value anything at all. The ever increasing intensity of nervous stimulation replaces any other orientation towards the good. 

This of course is the stuff that classics like Amusing Ourselves to Death, Huxley’s Brave New World, etc articulated at length. You could say Limbic Capitalism is the consumer reality created by Techno-Optimism, and it’s the thing that leads to The Modern Struggle:

The attractor in the bottom left corner is Degenerate Consumption. In some sense it represents the most impoverished human future, the end of human dignity and freedom. 

---

The bottom right quadrant is home to a variety of movements: Environmentalism, the “Change-Maker” scene, Back to the Land, the Hippies, etc. They’re all characterized by care, wisdom, and a life-affirming orientation. They’re plagued by ineffectiveness and a lack of power in the world. However, …

BUDDHISM might be the prime example of a wise but relatively inconsequential ideology/wisdom tradition. Many Buddhists dedicate their practice “for the benefit of all beings”. A significant aspect of the eightfold path is about cultivating compassion, becoming more skillful at being in service of sentient life. 

It is an incredibly rich source of wisdom and offers a system for refining and training the mind that is unparalleled in its specificity and effectiveness. Enlightenment is a real possibility, one that deserves a much more prominent place in our maps of human development.

And yet… while Buddhism has inspired entire populations to not even hurt bugs, they did not figure out how to interact with technology, capitalism, and global culture in a way that solves misaligned markets and coordination failure. On the scale of civilization, Buddhism’s evolutionary fitness and its ability to guide and align the other systems, is limited—there’s lots of wisdom, little power. 

Our most noble aspirations (I love all beings and my life proves it), our most sacred spiritual practices, … are incomplete without an ideology, a way of engaging with the world at large that is powerful enough to meaningfully change the trajectory of our civilization.

One might say the unfortunate fate of the bottom right quadrant is that of Irrelevant Idealism: Loving, enlightened, idealistic individuals with little influence in the world.

Many projects in this quadrant fail to find pathways to financial sustainability and success, often depending on philanthropy and donations. Poor epistemics, from magical thinking to bad strategy, are also prevalent in this space.

---

What does this all mean for the top right quadrant, and the theory of change we’re looking for? It’s very much work in progress.

The attractor is HUMAN* FLOURISHING, and we’re looking for the successful coordination of wisdom and power that can bring it about at scale.⁷

Elements in this quadrant include Solarpunk as a beautiful and livable vision of the future, Metamodernism as the substrate for our political philosophy, a developmental view, cutting-edge cognitive science, “a religion that isn’t a religion”, etc.

Things like conscious capitalism and impact investing, want to live here, but I believe they’re fundamentally incomplete.

In upcoming posts we’ll explore the history of and contenders for this top right quadrant. We’ll dive deeper into Techno-Optimism and Limbic Capitalism. And we’ll take a look at the beliefs of “change-makers”, activists, buddhists etc, understanding their shortcomings and… we’ll have to sacrifice some sacred cows.

I’ll then introduce MONASTIC CAPITALISM, a system that leverages market forces and consumer culture to drive cultural evolution and human development, built around the principle of finding Religion/Market Fit for more enlightened ways of being.

In short, I believe there’s a tremendous opportunity to offer healthier, more integrated, more meaningful ways of living to the public, to carve out conditions that are conducive to spiritual practice, helping people transcend the modern struggle. In the process, the ecosystem of companies and organizations making this future possible/desirable/accessible might be able to redefine luxury and bring about a profound cultural awakening.

What if we had a beautiful vision for how to live that resolves the problems of the meta-crisis? What if that way of living had a system of positive feedback loops making it widely accessible, financially viable, and self-replicating?

---

I’d love to hear back from you: What do you think belongs in the top right quadrant? What about this compass makes sense to you, what doesn’t?

1. www.flow.life I mean… maybe their spaces make for a good living environment, but I can’t help but feel that they’re bringing a certain lowest-common-denominator aesthetic and vibe to spirituality-inspired living.

2. traditionaldreamfactory.com

3. Development in Progress, The Consilience Project

4. To explore the themes of meaning, values, and how it relates to wisdom, we’ll dive deeper into the works of my friends at the Meaning Alignment Institute, such as Exit the Void and What are human values, and how do we align AI to them?

5. Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber

6. Limbic Capitalism was coined by David T. Courtwright in his excellent book The Age of Addiction: How Bad Habits Became Big Business.

The Race to the Bottom of the Brainstem was coined by Tristan Harris and the Center for Humane Technology, in the context of persuasive technology and the attention economy. 

7. * The human element of flourishing must be central if we are to offer something compelling to a marketplace made up of humans, but there’s a deep recognition that our existence and flourishing is fundamentally interdependent with the integrity and aliveness of our biosphere.