What does it take for wisdom to win?

On Money, Power, and Theories of Change for the Meta-Crisis

Hi, it’s been a moment. Much happened—we launched Daylight in May¹, Potential will not be resurrected, I’ve been on two amazing meditation retreats—but that’s all for another day.

Over the last weeks, I’ve been sketching out a concept I call Monastic Capitalism. And while I’m writing the white paper on it… the creative process is asking me to offer something more raw, to make sense of things by sharing the inquiry with you in real time. 

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The basic question is this: What does it take for wisdom to win? Given The State of Affairs—of meta-crisis, meaning crisis, market misalignment, and exponential technology—it should be obvious that we’re in urgent need for wisdom. 

“If we are gaining the power of gods, then without the love and wisdom of gods, we self-destruct.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger

What I mean by “wisdom” is the capacity to govern and direct our emergent technological and civilizational power—the capabilities that emerge from technology and markets at a global scale—in a way that’s in alignment with the flourishing of life on earth. Maintaining, creating, and regenerating conditions that are conducive to life.

There’s something going on with our civilization, with the way markets and technology work, that is causing all sorts of negative externalities: from chronic health issues to rampant anxiety and loss of biodiversity. 

Beyond that, we’re looking at both…

• dystopian possibilities: authoritarian governments, “you will own nothing and eat ze bugs”², rampant addiction and AI girlfriends, further disintegration of our social fabric, Wall-E humans

• and catastrophic risks: civilizations do collapse sometimes, aligned AGI/ASI is not guaranteed, runaway technology might just subsume the biosphere

So effectively we’re looking for ideas that can help us move the trajectory of civilization away from dystopia and collapse, and towards a desirable future of human and planetary flourishing:

If this line of thinking is new to you, I invite you to ask questions. You can also find various rabbit holes in the footnotes. If you’ve indulged in this stuff before, bear with me here, there is a genuinely new perspective coming up.

So yes, in other words, we are talking about how to save the world, how to preserve human dignity and freedom, how to prevent a 7th mass extinction, etc.

No small ask, and one that’s been discussed at length. From the last decade of Daniel Schmachtenberger’s work, the GameB community that came most online in 2020, the Stoa, the Liminal Web at large, to Metamodernism and The Listening Society, … all offered very articulate articulations of the problems we’re looking at, and some ideas for how we might move forward.³

Before that still, we’ve seen the Human Potential movement and Greenpeace talk about saving the planet, and saving the whales, for a really long time. And yet, it seems that The State of Affairs mostly just kept going. Sure, we now have electric cars, renewables, and a more widespread consciousness around sustainability etc. 

But really, capitalism and technology kept doing their thing. 

It begs the question: Why is that? With all of these visions and ideas for a better, “more beautiful” world⁴, why are Moloch and its constituents⁵ still doing their thing?

There’s really only two possible answers to this question:

1. It simply isn’t possible. “What Technology Wants”⁶ is more powerful than any coordination we monkeys could come up with or execute with our medieval institutions⁷. Technological Accelerationism, at the cost of all life on earth, is the unfortunate emergent course of nature, the thing that’s been bound to happen ever since we created the stone ax, stumbled into language, and killed God through science.

   1. …and things won’t be okay. Maybe the “Technium” ends up tiling the planet with data centers. Maybe AI turns all matter into paperclips. Maybe we just fade into irrelevance as artificial processes outcompete biological ones at an exponential rate.

   2. …and things might be fine, there’s nothing to be done? Maybe the Gods of ASI turn out to be profoundly benevolent, and all the externalities to date were unfortunate but necessary for the creation of the next God — ushering humanity and life on earth in an era of peace, prosperity, and profound enlightenment. Sam and friends will fuck around and find out. Maybe, for the rest of us, this is an opportunity to practice our stoicism, an exercise of faith in the inherent goodness of the universe. All that’s left to do is trusting in Elon’s “The most entertaining outcome is the most likely.”

2. Our Theories of Change SUCK. The ideologies of “change-makers” are plagued with ungrounded idealism and an unwillingness or inability to engage with the realities of money and power.

   1. If we just show people the truth they'll change, We just need to all come together and cooperate, Money is the root of all evil, Technology is the problem, Love is the answer, … What if sentiments like these are some insane virtue-signaling hippie bullshit that inspired an entire generation to do things that don’t scale, have no pathway for financial sustainability, and zero chance of winning in the marketplace at scale?

   2. What if it just so happens that those with the spiritual and moral sensibilities to “connect with nature”, who score high on empathy and compassion, are less likely to be competitive and power-seeking—as a result leaving the power games that determine who gets to influence the world to psychopaths?

   3. What if the false dichotomy of “competition vs. cooperation” cost us half a century that we could have otherwise spent figuring out how to outcompete capitalism?

   4. I want to make clear that while I think these narratives need to be comprehensively dissected, scrutinized, and disposed of, I do have empathy for the people and culture in which they emerged. It’s easy to dunk on how the environmentalists failed to take over capitalism, now that we have many decades of hindsight. It might also be the case that ruthless extraction and exploitation of natural resources confers so much competitive advantage that there’s no way of building an alternative at scale (without much deeper cultural development).

   5. The main point I’m trying to make here is that we still don’t have theories of change adequate to the weight that is to be placed on them. Many of the individuals and organizations working on “improving the world” don’t seem to think deeply about how wisdom can win in the marketplace of products and ideas.

While I’m open to the idea that 1.b.—benevolent ASI bringing about flourishing for all life on earth—is possible, I’d much prefer for humanity to not gamble the ENTIRETY OF LIFE AS WE KNOW IT on the goodness of an alien species.

If anything, we can expect AI to exacerbate and amplify current market misalignments⁸, and add a whole bunch of externalities to the mix.

In other words, I’d love for us to have a Theory of Change that articulates HOW WISDOM CAN WIN, fully factoring in how power works in the world.

We need to embrace a "realpolitik" approach to moral progress. We need to understand, rigorously, the principles of cultural evolution. We need a list of criteria for what would constitute an adequate Theory of Change. From there, we need to paint a vision of the future that can attract and convert some of the most capable talent and influential elites to coordinate around the cause.

Most importantly, we need a focus on WINNING. If we don’t figure out how to make more enlightened ways of being WIN in the marketplace of products and ideas, we’re not going to see the kind of positive feedback loops that can attract the capital, attention, and talent required for outcompeting extractive capitalism with a better version of capitalism.

Again—it might just be that this is not possible. It might be that there are whole fields of relevant ideas that I haven’t studied or even come across. It might be that there are no easy answers, that my attempt at looking for them is somewhat insane.

But in the meantime, I can’t help but feel that working towards this kind of theory of change is the most important work we could be doing. What if, while waking up to the higher possibilities of human nature in 1968 the hippies were a bit more rigorous in their thinking? What if the Buddhists stopped, just once, to contemplate what it would mean for their prayers “for the benefit of all beings” to be reflected in their lives, in the world—and what kinds of realities they’d need to grapple with to have a satisfactory answer?

What if we had a theory of change that an entire generation could have confidence in and coordinate around? 

I have some ideas, and I won’t shut up about them for the foreseeable future. You’re welcome to come along for the ride, or to make liberal use of the unsubscribe button…

 

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I enjoy hearing back from you, and I’m grateful for your support—from sharing your ideas to forwarding this to a friend or signing up for a paid subscription—it means a lot.

Conversations with friends helped me make sense of these questions. I’m particularly grateful for the help of James Risberg, Morgan Sutherland, Susan Barnes, and Tina Jia.

Claude helped with research and editing.⁹

1. Daylight is a healthier, more human-friendly approach to personal computers. daylightcomputer.com

2. Welcome to 2030. I own nothing, have no privacy, and life has never been better, World Economic Forum

3. 🐇🐇🐇

• Daniel Schmachtenberger’s website, Civilization Research Institute, The Consilience Project

• The Liminal Web: Mapping An Emergent Subculture Of Sensemakers, Meta-Theorists & Systems Poets

• The Stoa is now Less Foolish, Peter Limberg

• Metamoderna, blog of Hanzi Freinacht, author of The Listening Society

4. The More Beautiful World Our Hearts Know is Possible, Charles Eisenstein

5. Meditations on Moloch, Slate Star Codex

6. What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly

7. “The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology” —E.O. Wilson

8. Development in Progress by The Consilience Project offers a comprehensive critique of the progress narrative, articulating how it systematically overlooks negative externalities.

9. Claude, Anthropic