There is no perfect policy; there is no solution that will once and for all solve a problem unproblematically. This is to say: no solution, however good, will not open up more problems. And oftentimes our circumstance is worse than that, for while moving from worse to better problems is a virtue and indeed one of the joys of life - a beginning of infinite progress - there can be occasions where purported solutions turn out to be anything other than genuine. Some (so-called!) "solutions" exacerbate our circumstance: they actively make things worse. We cannot know ahead of time how things might fail or succeed. All we can rely upon at any moment are our best explanations and those can always be improved.

It is for this reason, that in the area of politics, our system cannot be designed to install the optimal solution or the best solution or the solution that will once and for all solve our problem(s). The world simply does not bend to the hopes of some that once the best policies are enacted that finally then, there will be relief from needing to continue to strive for something ever better or, in many cases, to undo an attempt to improve things that turned out only to make things all the worse. But people can and do become ideologically wedded to particular policies even in the face of failure and so this is why we need a system for removing those failed policies and people in power so wedded to them.

This is why democracy is about not installing the ideal or best leader who will do the thing that solves the crisis because they can no more foresee the future than any of us. They are guessing their way to a better future - but they, like we, are fallible. Their policies and plans imperfect and the world changes around them anyways in ways they could not have foreseen with political culture such that “changing ones mind” when new evidence is found is a virtue and no vice. We should expect our politicians and their policies to fail just as we should expect our scientific theories to eventually fail. Politics, to a large degree, is still mired in a philosophy of being deeply committed to one’s beliefs and for this reason punishes those who might try to adapt and change when the circumstances do. This is unreasonable. It is irrational. The eventual failure of any solution is the normal state of things and so being wedded to any particular solution is a recipe for disaster. We must always be willing to adapt, change our minds and perhaps on a dime turn around and go completely in the other direction. Or simply change tac so our progress can be far more rapid.

Our political system is not for answering the question “Who should rule?” so the answer cannot be “the most erudite; the most qualified, the educated and the experts” - for they are just as fallible as the rest of us. Plato’s mistake was not necessarily in thinking that philosopher kings were preferable to rule by the demos (the citizens) because the demos was a mob. It may very well be that the demos is a mob and should not rule over other minorities. It may very well be that philosopher kings would be preferable to rule by a rabble. Or it may be the opposite. It does not matter in either case because what Plato imagined was not democracy. And democracy is the only rational system for governing a group of people. So what is democracy?

Democracy is not rule by the demos. That is not what it is. Democracy is a system for removing the rulers without violence when those rulers fail. Whether those rulers are “the mob” or “philosopher kings” does not matter. It does not matter if one of them claims to be “a man of the people” or “the smartest person on Earth” - they are part of a democratic system if they can be removed from office without the use of force. Votes are cast and they leave with the traditional peaceful transfer of power.

In any modern democracy, the mob does not rule anyway, though their representatives may. And once in power they might try to implement the policies of the mob. And those policies may succeed to solve the problems that caused them to run for election in the first place - in which case one presumes they will be re-elected. Or, of they fail, they will lose the election and be removed from office. And the self-designated “best and brightest” can try their hand at fixing things. And when they succeed or fail, the cycle continues.
But what no one can expect is an unproblematic state. Because even if the very best happens: even if your favoured candidate succeeds and your party wins an overwhelming majority and all of their policy platform enacted with very little delay - those solutions reveal new problems not able to be seen before. Obscured, as it were, by the detritus of problems right in front of your face and only once removed is your view now clear and you are able to see so much more. And besides, our universe is in flux and at any moment the unexpected and inherently unpredictable happens to undo all of your grand plans for finally setting up society in a way that is better. And the existing policies will fail to make things better - to solve the new problem at hand. And creativity will be needed, and thus new policies. And if the existing people in power lack new ideas then the purpose of democracy is to remove them. Guessing a new answer and checking it against reality. Iterating by error correcting. Because problems are inevitable. There is no way of installing the best candidate because "best" is always relative to a problem situation and different people have different problem situations.

Civilization could well be regarded as the state of removing the initiation of force - of violence - from a society. It may well begin with knowledge - take no one’s word for it. The removal of “authorities” when it comes to “what one should endorse as true”. We rightly recognise now that religious zealots beating children into submission until they can recite pages out of some holy book is the sign of an uncivilised society. Learning through violence does not work. We rightly recognise now that commissars and barons who would by decree divide up the labor of the peasant farmers by sending soldier backed tax collectors to take all of the grain and the cattle - is the sign of an uncivilised society that has no learned how free trade can benefit both the baron and the peasant. And democracy is where not the will of a tyrant is imposed once and for all upon the citizens not even the will of the people imposed once and for all upon the citizens. But rather leaders and policies are tried and tested and when they fail, just as in science, they are discarded as not actually solving the problem after all.

We are part of an ever improving civilisation. Our institutions are a recognition of the fact there can be no unproblematic state.
Our education system, ideally, does not use violence or coercion of any kind to inculturate and teach those who come new into it, the lessons those who went before us learned over millennia. Violence is anathema to learning.
Our methods of research - in science, technology, art, the humanities, academia and industry do not use violence to insist that their way is the best way. We try, we fail, we try again and improve. We know this enables the most rapid progress. Violence is anathema to discovery.
Our business and commerce is predicated on the assumption that providing a service is the way to provide value to the rest of society. No one is compelled to purchase your good or service. They can walk right out of the store or not renew the contract. Violence is anathema to trade.
Our democracy is predicated on the assumption that no one has all the answers and no policy can provide all the solutions. Any actual solution will reveal more problems and any ruler will, eventually, fail to offer up something as good as some alternative. So we have elections - the purpose of which is to remove peacefully, without force, bad policies and bad rulers. Violence is anathema to democracy.

Becoming civilised is the state of gradually eliminating violence wherever it still lurks in our society. It is the incremental removal of authorities who can make and enforce rules or the adherence to ideas at every level in every place, where possible, and where we know how in such a way as to not make things catastrophically worse. (For example: eliminating police tomorrow in any major city would fail to make things better - the exact opposite). People are fallible and will not always be reasonable (including most especially people we are yet to encounter) and so a civilised society must also have at its disposal the option to use force where necessary and so it will need individuals especially highly trained in its use because a civilised society will not be civilised for long if it outsources all expertise in violence to the uncivilised - especially to vast uncivilised mobs.
​
But, as a rule, civilisation is where peace reigns. Swords and guns exist but they are almost all of the time sheathed and holstered because the business of civilisation is to peacefully keep on trying to solve problems that have nothing to do with violence as rapidly as possible. Because problems are inevitable. Happily they are also soluble. As people that is our very purpose of life: to solve our problems today so that new and better and more fun problems can be solved tomorrow. Civilization is what allows us to continue to do that peacefully.
Forever.








(Postscript: By the way so called “direct democracy” is not democracy either. It seeks to install, as a tyrant of a kind, the demos. Direct democracy is this idea that for any problem a particular set of policies are put forth (exactly by who and how, is another matter altogether) and then these are voted on by everyone. It has recently become popular with the advent of the internet and the real possibility of being ruled by some sort of technocratic voting system on…well anything people can think of presumably. But this is just to say: we can imagine a system where the majority can never be removed from power, by definition - because their votes on any given issue will always win the day and if you tend to disagree with their underlying philosophy the only thing for it is to leave that society or tolerate living subdued beneath it - for you cannot ever vote out those who rule over you and try out something different. Again: democracy, properly conceived, is the ability not to install any particular policy but to remove it. Minorities, outsiders and iconoclastic rebels need protection and representation too. A "direct democracy" is a direct path to their removal from a society and that would be the undoing of any such society because it is often those people who push genuine democracies forward.)

Some time ago I responded substantively to the content here: https://meaningness.com/ via a podcast-type bit of audio that can be found here:  
soundcloud.com/brett-hall-653181617/what-is-this-thing-called-cr
What follows is a supplement  to that motivated by some further tweets that came across my feed. Hence it seems to be worth emphasising the following if they were not clear from that audio:
“CR” is just an account of how knowledge is created. It is not an ontology. Realism is not a hugely substantive ontology either - it’s little more than the stance “reality exists” and CR says both “it’s knowable” (in the Popperian sense) and we can be wrong about it (which is “fallibilism” by another route and merely underscores what “in the Popperians sense” is getting at with knowledge and our relationship to it). a
Unlike with what is stated here https://meaningness.com/resolution and here https://meaningness.com/nebulosity and at the links one follows from those pages about “meaningness” and “nebulosity”, CR, fallibilism and realism are silent on *ontology* in a way “meaningless” and “nebulosity” are not.

The epistemology Popper and Deutsch among other - what we simply call “epistemology” (along with science & everything else) allow us to create knowledge about reality but are silent on what reality “really” is (which is to say “ontology”).

In other words what that reality is *ultimately* like (the ontology) is not knowable by fallible means - by any epistemological, philosophical, scientific or other methodology. And these (and related domains like mathematics, introspection and so on), broadly speaking, are all we have and the only means by which we imperfectly access reality - never directly - only through our knowledge - our interpretations of our theories which are themselves interpretations of that underlying reality which exists but in what form precisely we cannot say.

So it seems “ontology is nebulous” or meaning is, and so forth are far stronger claims than anything in CR, the work or Popper, Deutsch or other kinds of “vanilla realism” so to speak. Because we cannot utter perfect truth (which would require us speaking in perfect propositions - an impossibility) we cannot make claims about ultimate reality rather only claims about reality as it is known. So we stay silent on final reality aside from the rather prosaic claim that it - reality - exists and we can know it imperfectly.

Beyond that there are only faith claims and *no problem is solved* by conjecturing what final reality is like in any sense. So, instead, we just do science, mathematics and philosophy and create fallible explanations which are imperfect but somewhat accurate (they are not utterly false) accounts of what is out there and how it works. But whether reality is made up of “discrete” or “continuous” quantities, or only one of those, or some combination of those, a “third option” which is neither of those at all and entirely separate to them, whether is be something “nebulous” or something physical, abstract, physical and abstract or something stranger than all of these realism does not say. It - realism - merely says reality is knowable imperfectly. I raise all this only to highlight how far divorced from dogmatic claims, superstitious claims or faith claims this philosophy descended from Popper (and, say, Xenophanes) is. We only admit of what we know (in the Popperian sense as fallible conjectures) and remain silent on either statements or propositions about (ultimate) reality. Not because we know that reality is or is not nebulous or that it is in reality nebulous or not but rather because no such claim can be made. What we know instead is reality in terms (and via) of science, reason, philosophy, morality - explanations as a whole. What we understand at any given time are theories of reality - not reality itself. So we understand general relativity that describes a continuous spacetime and a (quantum) physics that in part describes discrete quantities and physical “stuff” as well as a continuous aspect of those things across the multiverse. So is reality nebulous or not? Again, that is not knowable anymore than “it is discrete” or “it is continuous”. Our theories now say of some things: they are continuous quantities and of other things: those are discrete. But is reality as a whole discrete or continuous? Both? Neither? Nebulous? Wait and see until we learn more? None of those as a stance (which “meaningless” seems to admit on one page: https://meaningness.com/stances-are-unstable only to make the substantive claim, and take the stance, “meaning is nebulous” https://meaningness.com/nebulosity-of-meaningness and reality is nebulous https://meaningness.com/countercultures. We are more modest in making no strong claims about “reality” in this way or what “meaning” or “knowledge” and so forth might represent in some “final” sense because all of these set the stage for answering the wrong question given how knowledge works and what we are as conscious explanation creators that only access reality only ever through interpretations indirectly - not “perceiving” the ontology directly.

But there is a sense in which none of these statements about “meaningless” or “nebosity” ever “land” so to speak as the philosophy does tend to hold itself immune from criticism by claiming logic does not apply to it as it would to other “stances” https://metarationality.com/formal-logic and can seem to say of itself - it is not a philosophy as such https://meaningness.com/complete-stance-appeal and the author claims not to be “doing philosophy” https://twitter.com/Meaningness/status/1258138059415019520?s=20&t=0ruRGIsW8vKtpYgt4ulMYQ

Which might all suggest that this is more akin to religion of a kind or as the author says “To help the reader…shift to a more enjoyable way of being (thinking, feeling and acting).

Which is great - but would also entail not engaging philosophically either. But its adherents do engage with those who want to pin them down on what is being claimed about reality exactly and those adherents do indeed defend the thesis as a substantive philosophy.

Of course saying it’s “not philosophy” can act as a way of holding the arguments made immune from criticism when “the mood strikes” so to speak. Very well. But here we might all do well to follow Wittgenstein’s lead and endorse “Whereof we cannot speak thereof we must remain silent”. In other words: we can take the author at his word: it’s not philosophy, it need not be regarded as being about anything but rather is more of contemplative, subjective tool of introspection couched in (at times) the language of philosophy. Which as hinted at already, is reminiscent of a more religious sensibility or, more precisely still: theology. This is not meant to be pejorative. Theology can serve a useful purpose. And what “meaningness” is, could be something more like an English translation of some of the central messages of a version of Buddhism. Personally useful and even, for some perhaps transformative - but, despite the superficial similarities: not a philosophy and not able to be understood as anything like a domain of explicit and explanatory knowledge as (say) some field of science (even a first person science) or philosophy might be despite what is claimed explicitly here https://twitter.com/JakeOrthwein/status/1386922593052094464?s=20&t=0ruRGIsW8vKtpYgt4ulMYQ

People have problems. If either (or both) the magnitude of any one (or more) of them becomes too great, or the total number of them too large is combined with rank ignorance - which is to say a lack of knowledge (both general and specific) - then solutions become elusive. It is then that those problems can become overwhelming and joy becomes diluted and suffering more concentrated. This happens throughout life - but particularly for many towards the end of their lives. It is then that, finally, the insurmountable problem is ultimately encountered. The health issue for which no one knows a solution either in oneself or in a loved one. Another time common to many, but not to all, when one problem after another can seem to be “overwhelming” are the teenage years - especially the late teenage years and leading into the early 20s. 

The reason, in epistemological terms, is that at this time there is a rather unique confluence of events. The number of new problems well outside the range of what has been encountered before in terms of emotional stress begins to maximise precisely at the time when one’s knowledge of “what to do” in such circumstances is at its lowest ebb. For most of us (though admittedly not all) this is a time where personal decision making becomes increasingly less constrained by the adults in one’s life. One begins for the first time to have all the thoughts that plague many throughout their lives (if they never learn the lesson in their teenage years): what should I be doing with my time? Am I wasting it right now? What is the point of this right now? This is not fun: why should I have to do it? X seems to be having more fun then me - but then X has more money than I do. How can I get more money? Y seems fitter, stronger, better looking, more intelligent, more skilful and more popular than me - what can I do to be fitter, stronger, better looking, more intelligent, more skilful and more popular? 

Problem after problem is encountered - but at this time for the first time and there is no background knowledge to call on. No “previous experience” and perhaps no one to ask in many cases. Or if there are people to ask, the responses given can seem - which is to say can be - unsatisfactory. There may be wisdom in the words of others, but in a cruel trick of logic, one might simply lack the knowledge to know wisdom when one hears it. One can be told “Problems are soluble” all day long or encounter The Desiderata framed on a wall every day or recite The Serenity Prayer each morning and not ever really get it much less get anything useful from it:

God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and wisdom to know the difference.

Which is yet another way of saying: Either a thing is prohibited by the laws of physics and cannot possibly be changed - so accept that fact of reality or you cannot change the thing due to a lack of knowledge - so perhaps with some effort you can create the knowledge that will be the solution to your problem. In all other cases: you can change things; you can solve your problem.

The wisdom passed on through ancient traditions sometimes takes work to distill out from the noise - but it is there. We cannot blame the ancients who often got there first for having to dig the gems from out of the mud if sometimes those gems are not so perfectly polished. We can do the polishing now.

But back to our proverbial teenager (or indeed almost anyone) encountering problems at a rate exceeding their capacity to deal with and their background knowledge to - seemingly - help with. If one’s immediate social circle or even any larger concentric circle seems unable to provide the guidance needed it can feel an isolating time and in those situations many will turn elsewhere: books and the lectures or guidance of notable thinkers. Self help pop psychology books might be consulted, perhaps experimentation with religion - particularly any religion far removed from that dominating the culture into which one has been born. 

Sometimes these searches can bear fruit. And the problems begin to be solved. Peace and joy are found again. But this is rare. Often what is found is that much of the “self help” is of a nature so general (like The Desiderata) as to seem useless and is easily dismissed on that basis. Other times sources of self help seem to strictly contradict. Some will say suffering is a part of life that needs to be accepted because it is inevitable. “To be is to suffer” and so on. Others will say that suffering can be overcome and can be replaced with joy. So do I accept my suffering and meditate so as to be relieved of it - for all suffering is in the mind? Or do I avoid the suffering and seek out joy? Can I do both? Now one begins to be paralysed by indecision, confusion and some amount of skepticism. Perhaps none of these gurus has any clue? After all they’re not me and have not been in my exact situation (which can tend to seem more hopeless by the minute). One could very well become not merely skeptical of the “older and wiser” but cynical that any of them have useful wisdom to impart. Many of them seem downright depressed and confused themselves as if they’ve learned nothing of much use at cultivating joy in their own lives. Sometimes the problem is: why doesn’t he or she like me? One can quickly pursue entire courses on psychology motivated by: how to understand the mind of others. What are they all thinking? What is he, in particular, thinking? What is she? But none of the books seem to ever have the answer.

The truth is there can be no one size fits all self help. There is no universal theory of psychology unless it is so broad as to be of very little help in any specific situation. “Solve the problem” is indeed a universal claim that might be of some help to someone who is paralysed by complete inaction. Perhaps. But it does not say how. “Drop the problem” might be of use to someone who is in extremis and distress over some mental anguish. But detachment, mindfulness and even complete divestment of self will not solve any actual problem - it will merely alleviate the symptoms caused by the discursive thoughts for the short time one maintains that state. Perhaps it helps to declutter. But no amount of decluttering removes the tumour, brings back the dead, repairs the relationship, gets the job, finishes the work or improves the fitness.

Ultimately, we have to find our own paths and often the paths that lead to joy, greater enlightenment, fun and a fulfilled life of equal measure are wildly divergent - at least on the surface - so that for any young person following in the footsteps of one they admire (for example) who seems to have it together can be fraught with simply misinterpreting the wisdom they offer about how to replicate - at least imperfectly - what they have achieved in one’s own way.

Members of the same species are not identical. The differences between them are described by the term “variation” and it is variation between the members of the species that allows for them to evolve. After all, if it really were the case that members of the same species had “the same DNA” or something like that - if their genomes really were identical, then when the environmental change occured-when there was “selection pressure” (like a drought) then if one of them was to perish because of the change, all of them would. For example if there was some species of deer which, going 5 days without any water, would die and all members of the species lived in some area where all the water had dried up and no rain fell, then if one of them would die after 5 days, then so would they all. For they would all be identical and the one to survive longest would be the one who drank last of all. 

But in the real world, within a single species of deer there is variation. Some might only last 2 days without any water. Some might last 2 weeks, even if on average “a deer can go 5 days without water”. Not all deer are identical genetically. They are just more identical to each other than other species of deer and hence, they are (on at least one definition of the term) regarded as being of the same species. (There are other definitions of species like, for example: “two members are of the same species if they can mate to produce fertile offspring” - which is all very well unless they cannot “mate” at all because they are trees or bacteria).

Sometimes the genetic differences between members of the same species can look wildly different. Consider dogs. Dogs have remarkable variety - because of what we have done to engineer them that way through artificial selection. But even the genetic variety of dogs is nothing like the variation among people because the variation among people is not primarily down to genetic differences. The crucial differences between people are differences in their mind: not their bodies (or brains). The knowledge, experiences, dispositions, values and preferences of one person as compared to another is like the difference between one entire species and another. Or more than that: an entire kingdom of life (almost). People are wildly different one from another. Sure there are exceptions to this: people within the same family are quite close at times - but not always. Twins will often have completely different preferences for food or music or ambitions for life. One can remain within the same family and witness completely opposed political stances. Moving outside the family and people are just huge unknowns to each other - at times delightfully surprising and other times confusing. As Jaron Lanier observes in his book “You are not a gadget” words to the effect that people are infinite wells of mystery. We have no direct access to the mind of another person - we can only take them at the word (or their outward behaviour). 

People are minds and minds are a form of software running on the hardware that is the brain. That software is a unique algorithm (so far as we know) in the universe for generating knowledge: creative explanations of the world and renderings in the virtual reality of those minds. Those renderings evolve rapidly, changing and adapting to new circumstances, events and other inputs like the sudden rush of emotion that accompanies the unexpected. And this uniqueness - this differentness is uplifting at one extreme - you are entirely unique and therefore literally irreplaceable. Never mind your genome - your mind and your unique experiences and knowledge is the truly unique thing. And at the other end, we are apart and this can cause some existential crises in many and is also the reason why these crises: existential or just more mundane forms of worry - can be so difficult at times to deal with - most especially when the knowledge is lacking. 

As a much younger person I ran through the gamut myself of “self help” - beginning first with informal studies into psychology - reading what I could garner online before a brief (but formal) study of psychology. That branched into more “common sense” self help with people like “Dr Phil” whose plain talking “tell it like it is” approach was something I preferred to so much that (even then) cast a person as a victim of circumstance. Encounters with Eastern mysticism and contemplative traditions came and went once the central messages were distilled out. Eventually I found myself that Nike’s motto “Just do it” contained within it just about all that was needed whenever some crisis or life decision presented itself. The problem, rather often, was inaction. If you do something then there is no need to worry about what would happen: it would be happening and there would be no mental space left for worrying about what will be because one would be right in the midst of what is.
I still find much self help personally useful but I can also spot that which is of very little practical use. The first form of self help is the anti-coercion kind that one can distill out from the work of David Deutsch. If things seem difficult - that is useful information. If something has ceased to be fun and you need to really push yourself through: that’s useful information. It’s a red flag. If you do not want to do something, but you are doing it anyways: red flag. Bored? Red flag. Just not having fun? Red flag. Now none of those are disqualifying. I have been terribly bored on long international flights even though I can do just about anything I like within the limits of what is reasonably possible in the “culture of air travel”. But we just lack the knowledge of how to “have fun” even in a comfortable chair with the world’s entertainment at your fingertips. Because the chair just isn’t quite comfortable enough and, well, it was fun at takeoff but after 14 hours of roughly the same position - you have to just push through because there are few other options. The best one can do is minimise the unpleasantness by repeating the distractions from it. Those kinds of exceptions aside, if coercion can be almost entirely eliminated then that solves a vast spectrum of problems and when a problem does arise the question: am I being coerced here (by myself or others) - is a central one to be explored. 

Seemingly opposed to this at the other end of the spectrum, I find discipline to be another piece of “self help” that I have embraced. Jocko Willink the ex-Navy Seal who has been a guest on Joe Rogan and Sam Harris’ podcast posts a picture each day on Twitter of his watch upon waking up. The time is always around 4:30am. He works out - hard and posts the sweaty “evidence” on Instagram soon after titled “Aftermath”. The man is supremely disciplined. 

Is he coercing himself? Is he suffering through all this? At first pass it seems these worldviews: do not suffer coercion and: be disciplined are completely at odds. But they need not be. Sure: if you are taking orders from someone and obeying them this might be called “discipline” and you might hate each moment of it. Clearly that is coercive. But if you find that waking up each and every day is the very thing that brings you joy - you would be coercing yourself not to do that thing. It is a subtle point. I do not think Jocko is coercing himself in quite the same way (indeed I do not think he is coercing himself at all) as someone else who does not want to get up at 4:30am each morning and work out…before breakfast. Jocko’s personal recipe for success could be hell on Earth for others. But for him - it is the very thing that makes him himself. He is doing exactly what he wants to do because he is someone who can do exactly what he wants to do. He actively makes choices and he is something that happens to the world. The world does not merely happen to him. Jocko has said that the reason he gets up at 4:30am each day is because (1) That’s all the sleep he needs (2) To get ahead of the enemy - who will still be asleep. 

Now that last point is said somewhat tongue in cheek. Of course during his military service is could very well have been literally true. But now, speaking on Jocko’s behalf - a dangerous thing to do - we can actually interpret “enemy” as “all those unpleasant problems that would be encountered by sleeping in”. Namely the emails not answered because the workout was completed later and the opportunities missed and, as Jocko observed - having to have so many more encounters with other people and other conversations simply because almost no one else is awake at 4:30am. So it actually solves a bunch of his problems. The “discipline” of following this regular pattern brings joy and fun because it has eliminated many sources of potential suffering.

Jocko is disciplined in doing exactly what he wants. He does not let others dictate what he is doing. He chooses. And that takes discipline. It takes discipline not to give into coercion: either self coercion or the coercion of seeking first to please other people before you please yourself by doing just as you please. Far form anti-coercion and discipline being at odds: they can be in perfect harmony: if you’re playing with them both just right. 

There is much made in some (so-called) “rationalist” online communities about “just do what you like” - which is true. For many people. For some however it is a recipe for disaster unless coupled with an instruction to be disciplined: to pay careful attention to what one actually wants. And often what one actually wants is to solve specific problems that will take attention and effort. For some less effort will be needed. But the idea that one can live a life of “no coercion” without thinking further on it can lead to a kind of apathy. If one has not yet figured out what to do - what they actually like - then the instruction to “not coerce yourself” is of no help at all. One is still left with: so what do I do now? Which actually is the first and most important problem and remains the most important problem each moment, hour, day and throughout ones life. What now?

Once one figures out what is fun (often by a process of elimination: by trying and finding out what is not) - then one will find that Just Doing It is rewarding in and of itself. But how to go about doing it can be part of the process as well. Perhaps you find that working 24 hours straight really is the thing. You might not find out that it isn’t the thing until you try. It can take time to figure out you’re not a morning person. Or you are a morning person. Or you were for so long not a morning person - and now - you are. And so that can take discipline so that the experiencing self and the remembering self are aligned. This is why people can train themselves (which is to say learn) to love exercising and lifting heavy weights or running long distances or doing any kind of hard physical activity that they know is beneficial in the long run. But what if you’re not there? How can you pull yourself up by non-coercive bootstraps to begin exercising if you already hate it. Well: you don’t know you hate it and stop telling yourself you do. And why do you want to work out hard anyways? Perhaps just try for 10 minutes. Later try 15. And so on. Be disciplined in trying. Does this mean coercing yourself? No. Well: not exactly. Ah! You might think. Got him! He’s appealing to a form of coercion so that you can “find the fun”. Well no.

Words have multiple meanings and senses: they cannot be infinitely precise and many times words can have two senses that are even opposed to each other. Words that mean their opposite are called “Janus words”. A common one, more often used in military settings is “fast”. If a guard is told to “stand fast” - they are being told to go nowhere. The fast means “to secure in place” - as in fasten. But of course we all know fast can mean move quickly - rather the opposite of going as slowly as possible - moving nowhere. More classically “cleave” can mean both to split apart and to join together.

At the other end of the spectrum we have words that appear to be opposites but are synonyms. Flammable and inflammable is the go to example here. My only point is to illustrate that insofar as there is a science called linguistics: it does not have the precision of physics (which is not infinitely precise either - for one reason it needs to be expressed in ambiguous language). We simply cannot pin down perfectly precise definitions of words. That is the “Wittgenstinian error” and rather too much of what passes for “philosophy” is consumed by it. Debates about terms. Language evolves, can be quirky and is made up of words themselves “defined” in dictionaries using other words to label concepts which are not perfectly precise. All of that said: it is possible to be wrong and there is an objectivity to this. Black is not white. Tomorrow is not today. The existence of grey does not change that and nor does midnight. The thing is you can be disciplined and you can use it to find the fun you did not know was there to enter into a state of non-coercion. All this is possible. And at no point does any genuine suffering need to go on.

So there are, what I would say two quite distinct senses of the term “discipline”: an enlightened and a naive species. Discipline of the form “I am doing this because of someone else’s expectations” - is naive. And it is coercive. There may be no understanding of why you should or why it is best for you. But doing what you want and being disciplined in ensuring you’re doing just what you want is not a matter of coercion but its opposite. 

Discipline - being committed to getting something done - to getting something solved can actually be fun. For 25 years or so now I have witnessed people in the gym appearing to suffer. And some are. But others are experiencing the opposite. Same outward appearance. Two diametrically opposed experiences internally. People come to learn to love the pain they learn to love the struggle. It is fun to push through that pain and struggle not merely in expectation of the feeling afterwards but because “I did it - I set a new record” or whatever else it might be. In my case these days it’s rather often “this is amazing - I can multitask - I can get through a book or podcast while staying strong and fit. Life is truly brilliant.”

Sometimes from the outside the phenomena is the same but internally the experience is utterly different. And sometimes from the outside the phenomena is utterly different but internally the experience is completely the same. Jocko will yell and seemingly coerce and be disciplined! It will be testosterone to the maximum and for many this discipline and all the outward signs will make it seem like a kind of self coercion that might barely be possible to exceed. But it is not coercion in our sense. Because he finds joy in it and is doing it even though he has the option of doing just about anything else money can buy. Many can have fun doing what others would find hell. The human mind is universal. It can take any stimulus at all and turn it into almost anything one likes. 

These two ways to succeed in the world: being disciplined and not being coerced need not be opposed. One can live “to the full”  and experience joy, contentment and fun all the while improving yourself and the world by solving the problems you are interested in and perhaps only you are interested in. Joy through discipline and joy through non-coercive fun are both actually experiences in reality to be had and in reality there can be no contradictions. Both are paths to enlightenment and both end up in the same place. A person may walk one or the other or straddle both perhaps. But it cannot be the case that these two worldviews are in any deep sense in conflict. They may appear to be. But so what? Stars appear cold and dim even though they are the opposite. 

I explained earlier how Jocko has explained why he gets up at 4:30am each day. He was once asked on a podcast how he was able to get up at 4:30am each day. The listener wanted to know how he just did not hit the snooze button even if he was tired. He said what he said whenever someone asks him this. He said: “You know what I do? Get ready. So to get up at 4:30am each day I…get up at 4:30am each day.”

People who want to do that - or think they do but it gets to 4:30am and they lay in bed and don’t and go back to sleep haven’t coerced themselves to sleep. But if they get up - they just get up. But there is a strand of person who will think and think and think and perhaps coerce themselves up out of bed or rather try to. 

“Do or do not do. There is no try.” As Yoda admonished Luke. Rather: trying - trying to do something rather than just doing something (even if you fail) is the thing. If it’s a trial - if you’re trying and there’s no joy to be found - there’s your problem. But if you cannot wait to attack the problem even if you think you might fail then you’re not quite “trying”. You’re doing. And maybe you’re failing to succeed that time. But that might come with excitement, fun and learning - quite the opposite internal experience from “trying” and failing and suffering. 

So much of self help won’t be helpful because it’s not tailor made to you. You are utterly unique.  Things may seem gloomy at times and fun may seem to have leached out of life - but this is always a temporary situation because problems are soluble. Sometimes the most pressing problem is how to discover: what do I find fun? Not just now: but all the time? And “fun in the long run” - the kind of fun that is fulfilling - that brings joy in the moment and contentment on reflection. Once the fun is found then you won’t need to coerce yourself into doing the thing - you won’t require more “self help” to figure out “what to do next” - you’ll know what to do. But you just might need to be disciplined about how to go about it. Like Jocko. Because if you can make your life about something, it will be something.

Coming out of high school and entering university like many university students who take on anything related to the sciences from medicine to mathematics, metaphysics or meteorology - there is a sense of growing sense of scientific “superiority” which one may readily fall victim to or may resist (more or less well). One need not formally study the sciences, one could simply be "coming out" in a sense from forms of  "magical thinking" into a somewhat more rational understanding of the world they inhabit - but it can bring with it hazards as well as virtues.

For many it may first show up in terms of one’s atheism and how one reacts to others upon their new "discovery" that religion just might not be the truth and the whole truth. “With all the zeal of a convert” one rejects (if they ever had) their faith (monotheistic or otherwise) and they may begin to proselytise to friends, family and anyone who will listen about their new found arguments against faith. They’ll cite Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens (I know I did). Not long after, or perhaps in lock step, (sometimes instead of if those arguments were already had in high school) the same scientific mind grows into a vociferous anti-pseudo-science warrior. Michael Shermer’s work is consulted and Joe Rogan episodes one after another loudly debunked. One has no time for nonsense claims. One has become "a rationalist" - wielding “reason” like a lightsaber to cut through the metaphysical BS.

“Those crystals have no energy - they do not “vibrate” at the same frequency of the human body - the human body doesn’t even have a single frequency!” one gleefully tells their sisters and cousins. Brothers are told UFOs and big foot are absolute nonsense given the paucity of evidence. One loses potential dates or other friends because “the paleo-diet is pure pseudoscience. Those studies are bunk. By the way: weight training is better than running.” And so it goes as the growing scientific mind becomes a skeptical and critical one seemingly so bursting at the seams with knowledge it just has to come rushing out and spilling into every conversation about whatever the topic is. Worse are the online critics, of course. Sometimes anonymous - but not always. Deliberately wading in to discussions about religion - and yes the religious do too, but they always have. They’ve been proselytizing so long and so passionately some found “proselytise” wasn’t strong enough and so began evangelising and in the limit when words failed - crusading. Online the spectrum is found everywhere from the anonymous bot account simply spewing out talking points to the next rung up - the anonymous troll account doing similar with the a kernel of human creativity. 

But the critic can be as cruel - sometimes more so. And remarkably the so-called rational and reasonable are eager not to merely correct and eager to persuade but seem to want to ensure everyone conforms. The truth must be obeyed - just as in traditional religion. Some of the anti-woke become as dogmatic as the woke. Those who want to insist on the scientific sex binary will hurl insults right back at the gender-is-a-spectrum "experts" and the scientific minded might be found on both sides of that debate. Both sides will tend to agree that "double blind placebo controlled trials published in quality assured referred journals" are treated as (literally) more true than Gospel. And once you are in possession of the final truth, well, as Popper wrote “The doctrine that the truth is manifest is the root of all tyranny”. And that truth is manifest no more clearly than in science on this view. So what should we do about, let’s say, pseudoscientific medicines?

“This paracetamol brand is selling the exact same product in three different boxes on the shelves. This one says “For tension headaches” and this one says “For period pain” and this one says “For symptoms of cold and flu.” But it’s exactly the same chemical! Someone should do something! One is, therefore, rather eagerly today at this point (but not always, there are important exceptions) on the "liberal left" in these conflicts. “Why doesn't the government regulate the pharmacy industry? Why are they permitted to sell this homeopathic nonsense?” (And from here slide seamlessly into state intrusion into almost any conceivable medical procedure, personal choice, child rearing, education and so it goes.)

The early (or even late stage) "convert to critic" might even approach political activism on this front. “We’re surrounded by people ignorant of science. We need regulations to protect people! Sign this petition! Help paint posters! Here's a pin!"

The bias for any politician is towards "doing something" and although "not regulating" is doing something, it is never seen that way by the more vocal parts of the electorate. So it's usually a one way slide into regulations on any issue where people might otherwise be free to choose. No leader wants to be the one who "did nothing" or "didn't support the bill" and so on. For everyone’s safety we need to eliminate fossil fuels. We need to eliminate combustion of almost any kind. We must reduce sugar in drinks or smokers in public places or drinking alcohol at certain hours. It's for everyone's health. And everyone's safety. Not just yours. Everyone must mask up, sanitise, get the vaccination. Your mask does not just protect you - and it does not protect you enough. Everyone must mask up for it to be effective. And in many places - workplaces and spaces of learning - it is not enough to merely agree: one must be an enthusiastic supporter ​lest one be treated like Kramer from Seinfeld who (despite every other effort) did not want to wear the ribbon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3iV8X8ubGCc​

Listen To The Science! Anything less is “lunatic libertarianism”. One is either on the side of informed compassion and life or ignorant cruelty and death. Never mind how much shouting, how many arrests or how much more violence it takes to get from here to the safe tranquility of a finally, once and for all more scientifically informed society that’s better for everyone - action must be taken. It’s almost moral that you take on the fight. So you do. Or, perhaps not. Perhaps you just voice your opinion whenever the topic comes up. Every time it comes up. It’s reasonable to try to persuade at least those around you. After all you’re the scientifically literate one. Lucky them. To have you around.

Indeed wherever you are on that spectrum between scientist-as-political-activist through to “I Believe in Science” badge bearer, you feel yourself preen at the many ears willing to listen to one’s passion and erudite enunciations about the world ignorant of science. One dismisses those who are bored with it all as unfortunate - missing the beauty of science. “The ignorant are so lucky. They’re at peace. Not plagued by deep thoughts of what is going wrong and how much worse it can all get”.

It takes time to realise one is tending towards being an authoritarian, dogmatic bore regurgitating the mainstream talking points of those who get the most airtime. Sure: almost always one is (narrowly) factually correct. [And don’t you know it as a science graduate? "Try me" you think “I’ve got receipts” (references to journal papers bookmarked).] But the thing is, as one comes out of any combative malaise, one can recognise it will always be the case there will exist people with whom you disagree. Right now it’s ubiquitous across societies no matter how “well educated” that some will use, and stand by in the face of all evidence to the contrary that, pseudoscientific nostrums “work” - in the sense they feel better when bought and used. And it’s also true some people disingenuously sell and hence profit from the ignorance of others. Pharmacists - who almost always know better - own stores that sell the homeopathic remedy (which they could also routinely mathematically prove in 60 seconds on a scrap of paper - has zero active ingredient and is therefore, mathematically, a placebo) right alongside the actual treatment with the active ingredient - and seemingly without compunction.

But there are some who never escape the “scientifically superior” mindset. Science informs what you should do and that’s that and end of story unless you do not care. It’s almost a Mandolorian stance on regulation: “This is the way”. If we’re not going to use science to do good then we are being as ignorant and careless as those who won’t continue to physically distance. “We need to protect “low information” citizens. I am a scientific leader - an authority. A superhero of a kind. I’ll look after them!” (grandiose Avenger’s theme plays in the background. Lab coat flutters in the wind as spectacles (or lab goggles) are removed and the Sun comes out from behind a cloud.)

But there is another way. And you see this too. Others who have moved beyond all that. And it has nothing to do with “the older you get the wiser you get”. After all, if being “at peace” in life is some measure of wisdom then some of the least wise people online are some of the elder statesmen and women of science. So it’s not age, it’s a certain lesson in humility. Or rather fallibility. One can be passionately pro-science and agree with all the facts but realise coercion creates more problems than it solves in the long run in any society. Hence: regulation here is not the key. No one convinced the nostrum works is convinced by the law that says you can no longer have the nostrum because government regulators say it does not. Instead what happens is they source it on the black market where now there’s not even any recourse should the product never arrive…or not be what was paid for. So: everyone loses. Yes: except those who always do exactly what their parents and teachers tell them to. Whoops, I mean what government tells them to.

What works better than regulating every single scientific truth as a moral imperative is allowing people to make their own mistakes and correct them. Or simply learn from the mistakes of others. Indeed we can admit: people have died because they did not treat their cancer with the chemotherapy recommended by the oncologist. They decided to go on a strange diet. Or take colloidal silver or something else equally useless or actively harmful. But there is not a pandemic of this. They are the exception to the rule and it would happen regardless. What is the alternative? Strapping down those afflicted with tumours and curing them for their own good? Sometimes the utopian vision of society looks rather a lot like its complete opposite - which is no accident. All of this was true before the pandemic and truth be told I wrote all of this without thinking once of COVID. Until I did and had to go back and edit it with comments like this one: there will still be people who say pandemics are the exception here. And what would you do IF questions and they will fall immediately into “I’m going to persuade you” mode of the worst kind. “I would force you if I could” mode when it comes to it and I will vote to ensure that if I can’t, someone damn sure will. Those tendencies have seemingly always been in the memeplex - the desire to control and coerce because the chief and the medicine man know best. And it might be tempting to argue vociferously back. When it’s lives and liberty on the line, who wouldn’t? And yet, in the “interglacial” pandemic time - the peaceful interludes between civilisational catastrophes (like, right now, once might say) - it can be useful to fall back into that other mode. One doesn’t need to exist in persuasion mode all the time. One can be persuasive, sure. But that’s a side effect. If one is explaining a worldview and the worldview is correct, then that in and of itself will be persuasive. No additional work needs to be done. The work of persuasion is all done for you, ahead of time. That’s the advantage truth and reality have.

We are all fallible or “equal in our infinite ignorance” to quote Karl Popper. And as David Deutsch gently suggested to me once, himself also channelling the spirit of Popper with words to the effect: you don’t need to aim to persuade - you’re explaining a worldview.

So to me it has always appeared to be that the step beyond mere scientific literacy and critically and skeptically minded is: live and let live. This is not to be uncaring. It’s the opposite. If someone wants your advice, give it. If someone seems to need your advice and hasn’t asked, offer it. But the caring thing to do is to allow others to do as they wish (with all those caveats about swinging arms and lengths of noses). We have to allow others to make their own mistakes too if they are to learn as we have. That may mean correcting what their sources of information are rather than actually going on the grains-and-berries-only diet. Not everyone has to make the mistake of getting infected first before being convinced vaccines are a fantastic innovation. But the lesson of accepting you too are fallible, even on all that is perhaps a lesson we all need to learn. Right or wrong, you should not coerce anyone else into your way of thinking.

And there’s the rub.

“With all the zeal of a convert” the scientific skeptic then runs head first into fallibilism and anti-coercion. For many it then becomes seductive and even important to proselytise not so much the science and rationality but fallibilism and anti-authority, anti-coercion liberty centred lives. One becomes a zealot for anti-coercion! And of course that is the same kind of error. It’s a better error. But an error nonetheless.

The Emergence of an Enlightened Epistemology

There is a step beyond even that - beyond being a philosophical activist; beyond the conscious attempt to try to persuade. It’s just to explain a worldview. It is to relax into the truth of fallibilism: you are not in possession of a final truth, or rather you cannot know that you are. It’s always the case you might be wrong: so don’t get pushy. Realise and sense how much better things quickly become when you’re not trying to persuade but to explain. The difference can be subtle from the outside: but inside, it’s a universe of difference. Every interaction one goes into is genuine. Trolls and terse Trotskyists alike might be convinced by what you say - persuaded if you will. But not because you were ever aiming for that. You were playing and having fun throwing ideas around in such a way as to clarify them to yourself as much as anyone else. There are no losers because there are no winners because it was never a competition. The abstract truth won out - as it necessarily does in time, under the right conditions where coercion just isn’t a part of the picture. And by coercion here we do not mean simply “the application of force or the threat of violence” we mean also the emotional impact of words said in such a way as to berate or scare off or silence under the intellectual glare of one apparently so deeply knowledgeable and qualified. That sort of coercion is a maelstrom of self-coercion and the coercion of the expert onto the layperson. No hands ever have to be placed on anyone. It’s the “Sit. Stay. Rollover” of the dialectic.

Have fun, be excited and passionate and curiously interested. Just don’t berate, be mean and badger. You’ll be surrounded by errors. Most of them your own. So don’t be so sure - even of not being so sure. Don’t be so sure of fallibilism. Don’t act like you are. Don’t fall into relativism. You know a lot and it’s right for you to state your view clearly, forthrightly and passionately. But - when you’re asked. And politely. You’re in a civil society. Most people most of the time, for the rest of your time, won’t agree with you. But they might if you seem like an attractively persuasive person. Because you were never trying to persuade them so they never felt that repulsion one feels when they’re being sold something. You’re not selling something. You’ve got what you want when it comes to all this and you’re looking for more wisdom and knowledge still.

So take it all seriously the science, philosophy, morality and life lessons — sure. Explain yourself clearly for as long as the other person wants to engage - or so long as you do. But relax and have fun.

There may be steps to epistemological enlightenment beyond even this. Again: never to the point that none of it matters - because it clearly does. But where it doesn’t matter if the other person is convinced or not - so long as the conversations can continue. As long as life goes on, then so can the explanations. You’re explaining a worldview when someone asks. You’re not trying to persuade them. And it's not as if I sit now cross legged atop the mountain. There is no mountain - but there is a journey. And one is always at the beginning - always learning with an infinite more to learn about everything. But there is progress to be made and errors to correct. Including better and worse ways of approaching knowledge like cooperating with others in order to bring brighter kinds of enlightenment to both yourself and to them.

And even all this, here and now - this very post - is not intended to persuade anyone. I’ve written it for me, in my way, repeating myself and editing to standards internal to me without thought of what the reader might prefer. This could contain a serious error because perhaps to be persuasive at all one must first hone that skill soit may be that one must try to persuade before one can cease to chase the dragon of persuasion. I leave these words here for the reader to contemplate; an aspect of a worldview that may or may not appeal, be useful, seem true and allow a path towards kindness. Or it may do none of those things. Eventually one just writes because they want to - not because they want to be read.

Yes, I think in part it does. This needs unpacking because it's not like people are (therefore) inherently anti-innovation. I'm about to use the word "inherently" a lot and that's because it's the best one without any accurate synonyms in this context. It means something stronger than "characteristically" but less than "essentially" (which has mystical overtones) and rather more like "necessarily" because, so far as we know, people are explained as entities that create explanatory knowledge so they bring new stuff into the world; they innovate. So they can't be inherently anti-innovation but rather they're more the opposite: sensing from birth a desire to solve problems. One response to this is manifest as attempts to innovate (solve problems for which they (or no one) yet has solutions for). 

By "innovation" here we just mean a solution novel to them. It need not be a new piece of technology or a whole explanatory theory - it might just be a positive increment on how to have a better relationship or a faster route to work. So, once more, people cannot be inherently anti-innovation nor more generally  inherently pessimistic either. I don't think they are inherently anything negative at all (besides mortal!). The opposite! If people (or humans more specially) are "inherently" anything at all, they are inherently problem solvers which makes them inherently optimists (of a kind). So what is going on? Are they being persuaded out of it by culture? Culture being memes causing people to behave alike in some ways like. In this case alike in their overt response to certain kinds of problems. I have written and spoken about versions of pessimism many times  ToKCast. Eg - writing here: https://www.bretthall.org/blog/pessimism and lengthy comments in this 3 part mini-series.

And see what Naval and I had to say about it here (it's only a 2 minute listen or else you can read the transcript also posted at this link  https://nav.al/pessimism

So evidence seems to be that pessimism arises over and again as if it's a ubiquitous feature of us. Again - what’s going on? Well, some religions do teach that human beings are born inherently flawed ("born sinful" in Saint Augustine's explanation of our "inherent" human nature or "fallen" as protestants/evangelics may prefer to couch things from that Christian perspective. Other ancient religions have equivalent "people are inherently evil/need fixing" so tend to be also skeptical about whatever people actually do or tend to do or are capable of doing and so their products are evil too. Judaism tends to emphasise the divinity of people somewhat more (as least on the surface) as well as their base animal urges that are in constant tension. Note how these monotheisms do contain accurate wisdom hinting at our modern understanding of people being unique creators of knowledge that sets them apart from all other things in the universe. We are special. Religion not only gets this right, but even hints at why. It's far from all being nonsense. Sure, we can do without the supernatural appeals to a miracle performing God, but as has been said by some atheists: so much of the wisdom in religious holy books can be consumed with little awkwardness by an atheist if only one replaces every reference to "God" or "The Lord" or so on in those ancient texts with the word "truth". Try it! Here's a few random examples I found in a 2 minute google search of The Bible:

Ephesians 5:17 Therefore do not be foolish, but understand what the will of the Lord is.
Proverbs of Solomon 10:1  The Lord does not let the righteous go hungry, but he thwarts the craving of the wicked.
12:2 Good people obtain favor from the Lord, but he condemns those who devise wicked schemes.
12:22 The Lord detests lying lips, but he delights in people who are trustworthy.

Christian-atheists could even consider the entire Jesus story as a story of people escaping tribalism only to attack and try destroying the truth ("crucifying Jesus") through lies or relativism (denying truth by embracing either evil itself or just denying the objective good) which has terrible repurcussions. Unless you accept the truth will win out (believe he rises again - so believe in him/the truth). But before I begin to channel Jordan Peterson further, let me return to the main matter at hand: the answer to Vincent's question up there at the top of the page. Anti-innovation may stem from a broader, perhaps deeper memes that foster pessimism. They can come from religion - but this does not mean the non-religious are especially immune to religious ideas (as I have written before: https://www.bretthall.org/blog/mainstream-morality

So there exist “atheist” versions of pessimism which are very similar and focus on our "sins" of polluting and causing hurt to all other life on Earth as well as each other and argue that humans seem to only ever - or at least mainly - cause problems. Just yesterday (!) as I write this, astrophysicist and science populariser/communicator and documentary maker Neil deGrasse Tyson quipped

My own reply is there in full beneath his which is here at the following link:
​: https://twitter.com/neiltyson/status/1507514587041746944?s=21 

And in "reader form" my reply thread becomes:

What motivates Dr. Tyson's tweet is that atheist version of pessimism (which I suggest stems itself from religious memes). But why does it just keep cropping up - this notion people are inherently problem-causes and not problem-solvers? Why do we get that message that we are cannot or do not in the main make things better? It's because the message “Rely on yourself: *your* mind - you can create solutions and understand stuff. You, like other people (individuals) are amazing. Especially when freely cooperating!” has been crushed for almost all our existence as a species. That’s *tribalism* - collectivism. Defer to authorities/the collective it implores us. So it appears to be that version of “anti-humanism” that is the deeper of the two doctrines motivating us for so many millenia. Other stuff like a broader pessimism about people and the anti-tech, anti-progress, anti-natalism, anti-innovation stuff are the modern manifestations of a deep cultural idea about who can (or cannot) make progress, to what extent and how.

So my contention is that meme has mutated a little & evolved. Fundamentally it's the same outcome (perhaps somewhat worse) but it has competed with reality and loses battle after battle. So we exist, make progress and multiply still! In spite of the pessimism we make progress anyway and that's the best refutation of it.

On May 23, 2019 the first round of Starlink satellites were placed into orbit by Elon Musk's company SpaceX to much public fanfare and excitement. Fanfare that was rapidly deflated by not the usual billionaire bashes but by the space-sciences natural allies:  the community of astronomers. Why would astronomers complain about satellites? There were already thousands of satellites in space - why were these such an egregious error? Online the complaints were vociferous from prominent and well qualified astronomers and astrophysicists across the world fearing the impact of the satellites upon ground based observations. Musk's attempts on social media, like the above Tweet, to allay the fears and problem solve have had little effect in the years since. My contention here is that the criticism of Musk over Starlink's effect on ground based observations was less about the impact on science and more about a very modern malady: a personal dislike of the man that many astronomers today harbour.

What is going wrong with the culture of professional astronomers?

There is nothing new about ill-feeling towards the wealthy. An entire side of politics (indeed sometimes all sides of politics) seem devoted to fomenting feelings of envy for anyone, or anything, successful. Starbucks was a celebrated progressive counter-cultural startup in Seattle. But with success comes a certain kind of critic - which is all very well except that the criticism is often of the success. Why would anyone want to be seen praising what is popular? It’s not enough to support the struggling competition - one must actively campaign against the market leaders. After all, on this view, the size of the pie is fixed. There is only a certain size of the coffee market and any success Starbucks has must come at the expense of “mom and pop” corner store operations. It’s not like Starbucks actually created coffee culture and massively increased the size for the pie for everyone, right? Well, wrong: https://www.drivencoffee.com/blog/coffee-waves-explained/

Market success should be celebrated. There are insights to be learned. Anyone inside business knows this. But I am not from business. So I have some sense of what people outside business “know”. And what they know just isn’t so rather often. If one spends their school and university years almost exclusively taking sciences and mathematics subjects (and perhaps philosophy) while looking down their nose at anyone diving into marketing, business or economics degrees a vast (and even outrageous) blind spot can tend to open up. The two cultures end up speaking different languages. It’s almost as if the science types cannot imagine there is even a thing as “expertise in business”. Business is seen purely as some combination of luck and perhaps grift - a form of dishonest misrepresentation of the product or service being offered. 

The professional scientist, like everyone else, visits businesses every single day. They encounter advertising every single day. Sometimes they even have family and friends involved directly in business. Ipso facto: the scientists, like everyone else, has expertise in business, right? But if your main or indeed only real encounter with “business” are the advertisements you encounter and visits to the shopping mall, the idea you have genuine insight into “how to succeed at business” can be very skewed indeed. Aren’t most of those businesses being run by the kids who never quite qualified for the top mathematics class in high school? Weren’t subjects like “business studies” and “personal finance” what you did if you couldn’t handle the actual tough content of chemistry and physics?

Ok, so not all science minded types think like this. But there is some kind of symmetry between how so many scientists on social media feel when a non-scientist butchers a scientific explanation in the media somewhere and how a business person must feel when a non-business person opines about how their profits must have been ill-gotten, easy to come by and should be invested not back into the business but back into “the community” from which they were stolen or coerced in the first place. The rank ignorance about the virtues of profit and how difficult it is to turn a profit at all in the first place let alone large profits is what drives so much of this ill feeling towards the wealthy on full display on social media. In particular, on Twitter.

This dislike spans a spectrum from outright (perhaps only nominally) murderous hatred to a more vanilla non-violent disdain or aloof indifference. It is as unfashionable as it ever has been to speak of self-made millionaires and billionaires as being anything like heroic (as scientists, medical professionals, veterans and first responders are). Praise for hard work, brilliance and society-serving contributions is reserved for those professions - but perhaps even teachers and those working in trades. Anyone BUT the businessperson and entrepreneur. The wealthy (or not even wealthy: simply those who own a business) are almost always and everywhere cast as the villains and therefore most of the essential means of becoming wealthy (such as any profit motive) need to be hated too. Being “self made” makes no difference to their critics: wealth, according to their dogmas, is never created. It is confiscated. And it can be confiscated for the greater good, or confiscated and hoarded by the few. “Record profits” are a pejorative term in the media. Why aren’t those profits being shared out among the deserving workers? Nevermind that profit is precisely what is needed for innovation, creation, research, development and further investment in the business or new businesses to generate more progress more rapidly from which everyone benefits. What exactly is funding the innovation to create the technology to allow many scientists to do their work with more efficiency than ever before? Even the purely theoretical physicists or pure mathematician these days spends much of their time on their computers and the only reason that computer is not the same as the one from 1995 is because “record profits” from the technology sector continue to be reinvested in the businesses rather than siphoned off into the pet projects of politicians and community organisers and so on.

But the tin-ear of those who have absorbed the messaging of academia on matters of business is immune to arguments of that sort. Hence the fact billionaire-bashing is a pastime of mobs online can in many cases be made sense of: we are saturated in messaging on social media about how they are “grifters” and their wealth the ill-gotten proceeds of theft. These are tropes that have always been at the vanguard of collectivist movements – whether political (the communist tendency to cast the wealthy as undeserving not merely of their wealth but – if history is a guide – their very existence) or religious (the Christian tendency to cast the wealthy as especially compromised in life and so unworthy of any “good place” in what comes after it either). 

The Soviet Union put “Huge obstacles and the threat of harsh penalties”  in the way of anyone trying to generate wealth. Whether late 70s Khmer Rouge, Cambodia, or the modern day Kim Dynasty in North Korea - regimes remixing and riffing off Maoist China share an anti-individual-wealth character (which, for reasons beyond the scope of this piece is necessarily anti-wealth, period).  All collectivist coercive “economic systems” degenerate into some form of tyrannical plutocracy where government leaders become the actual thieves and beneficiaries: they do not produce anything themselves – there is no innovation by those with the most wealth inside such a system - but rather individual wealth is accrued only ever by a process of taking directly from the productive for the purpose of lining the pockets of the politically powerful. An elite echelon of those sharing in government largesse in some systems might ostensibly be elected politicians, but many more are bureaucrats and “officials”: those providing the necessary cover and “legal” sanction for those who, in turn, award them with relatively lucrative positions of authority. When meritocracy and democratic institutions are replaced by a culture of quid-pro-quo favour-doing then political loyalty up and down the chain and to the very system itself becomes a moral and legal imperative. 

The history of each of these versions of collectivism of the last century (which all trace the ancestry of their ideology to some version of Marxism) begins with the denigration of the wealthy. It begins there by misunderstanding (or perhaps outright lying) about the causes and hence the source of wealth: it says all (or almost all) the wealth was stolen. Once this is established – the wealthy can be called out as literal criminals – so it becomes virtuous for their ill-gotten gains to be taken from them and (in theory) for the purpose of it all being returned to its rightful owners: fairly and equally to all citizens. The government is Robin Hood – the ethical thief - righting wrongs allowed to go on for far too long. As dystopian as it may seem, history attests to fact that events rarely end with the mere confiscation of property from the well-off when and if ever allowed to go that far. When wealth confiscation fails to improve the ills of that society immediately (and of course this social technique always fails) more severe measures are demanded. Government takes complete control of businesses “nationalising essential services”, communication and media “to curb misinformation” and individuals “to keep the nation safe and protect lives”. State violence continues apace and culminates only in the nadir of horror: actual extermination of the rich and then, if not simultaneously, then soon after, the extermination of the educated too. The Khmer Rouge murdered en masse intellectuals, artists – basically anyone with a post secondary education as a danger to a system which lionised what it regarded as the “base people” – the foundation of the nation: those engaged in physical labour. Anti-intellectualism is a hallmark of Marxist-style collectivism – the Khmer Rouge was not an outlier. Whether it was true that for good measure they took out anyone wearing glasses or not just incase the “intelligent” was not captured by any other category is a fable or not https://www.shadowsofutopia.com/blog/did-the-khmer-rouge-really-kill-everyone-who-wore-glasses the fact remains that what counts as “the elite” tends to broaden out so as to include anyone suspected of not likely to remain fiercely loyal for all time to the new order. Being broadly supportive is generally in itself not enough. North Korea (https://www.dailynk.com/english/north-korean-intellectuals-oppress/) and China (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stinking_Old_Ninth) both turned on their intellectuals - even if the intellectuals leaned left. (For example North Korea even turned on Marx and Marxists but not Marxism. With a thin coat of paint, almost all the content and consequences of Marxism or communism have been incorporated into “Juche” the “self reliance” doctrine of The Kims.)

The fact collectivist systems which denigrate the wealthy so often also denigrate intellectuals has meant that, until recently, there was more affinity in the west, under capitalism, between the wealthy in that society and its intellectuals. Philanthropy has therefore been an important mainstay of the income of many members of the western intellectual class providing more freedom and greater security when engaged (most especially) in open ended research. State-run funding models with their mandated policies and outcome-driven expectations are simply less lucrative and more intolerant of “risky” research – research that just may prove a complete dead end. Individual philanthropists rarely require vagaries such as proof of constant publication or a detailed proposal for success or profitability - let alone the filling out of time consuming, lengthy grant applications. The successful entrepreneur can eschew all of that and streamline the process of money-granting simply through word of mouth recommendations and objective look at successes so far and perhaps some subjective criteria no “objective” government bureaucracy would dare take into account for fear of being accused of a lack, in our modern world, of meeting so-called diversity, equity and inclusion criteria.

But hitherto there remains a (pun intended) rich history of western intellectuals – especially those working in science– being supported by generous endowments with few strings attached granted by patrons: sympathetic, curious, “scientifically literate” and charitable individuals with great personal wealth. So it makes perfect sense that partnerships have arisen historically between scientists and those of “independent means”. It is well known (or at least should be) that astronomy in particular has a history of patronage. The very origins of modern astronomy (and science) grew out of partnerships between such luminaries as:
Charles Montagu and Isaac Newton
The Medici Family and Galileo Galilei
Peter Oxe and Tycho Brahe
And this is just to name but an early trio of couplings in the lineage of astronomers who upended our understanding of the “system of the world”. Behind almost all the big names of astronomy prior to the beginning of last century were patrons – philanthropists – funding pure research. And throughout the 20th century philanthropy from successful entrepreneurs not only continued as a cultural force in astronomy but gradually became ever more generous and general in the form of, just for example:
William Keck – an oil magnate who funded what at the time were the world’s largest reflecting telescopes – the Keck Observatory consisting of two 10m telescopes that today remain among the most powerful on Earth.
Fred Kavli whose foundation has funded things at every scale from nanotechnology to astrophysics 
A 40 page report by Fiona Murray in 2012 details many partnerships and concludes that even today philanthropy and patronage in the USA still contributes some $7 billion a year to science performed in American Research Universities - some 30% of the overall funding https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w18146/w18146.pdf
Murray seems to be writing in a tone that suggests regret that Federal science funding seems to be declining as compared to private philanthropy. Whatever the case individual gift giving to research in the physical sciences is indeed, according to her report,  a very tiny fraction of the overall philanthropic donations received by “the sciences” broadly (see the final page of the report).

Government funding for pure scientific research (via committee-controlled bureaucratic application processes) is a rather new factor in “knowledge creation” alongside the existence of peer review through publications in journals. Many may well see this duo as the very means by which scientific knowledge is generated: government grants funding research intended for publication and review in prestigious journals. Or if it is not the sole means of making a breakthrough in pure science then it is, at a minimum, the gold standard for being taken seriously. But even were that true, it does not show that the history of science prior to this recent taxpayer funded “industry” of scientific research and publication was especially worse at making progress. Indeed all signs are it was not: there is something to the scientist working in relative solitude funded through the generosity of a patron and therefore there is something to that relationship between the wealthy and the intellectuals*. It has been shown to achieve great things not merely of mutual benefit but of benefit to everyone.

*(insofar as these represent distinct categories - there exist a not insignificant number occupying the intersection of these sets, of course.)

What entrepreneurs have tended to do, and no government seems able to emulate much less manage, is foster a funding model in harmony with pure scientific research: open ended, subject to sudden u-turn changes in specific aims and not accountable to periodic assessments of how they are “meeting KPIs” or otherwise demonstrating “good progress toward the stated goals”. Governments by their very nature should be bureaucratic: the money they spend should (i.e morally must) be adequately accounted for and explained to the tax payers. And so it is we have a system in place that all scientists who have ever been involved in a race for research funding are familiar with: administrative hurdles consuming the time and energy of scientific minds who must turn colleagues into competitors for a very limited pool of resources. 

Governments and electorates rightly demand specific and worthwhile aims be outlined and, in time, some demonstration of progress towards the stated aims anytime money is awarded from the public purse. But as we have seen: this is at odds in many ways to fundamental science. An “aim”, if it is not going to be so general as to be synonymous with a “hope” needs to be specific. It needs to provide some vision of what the conclusion will look like. It is the “point” of things. But for many scientists working at the very fringe of what is known, “the point” of their work is often only honestly explained as satisfying their own curiosity: solving a problem they personally find interesting. This is not going to wash when it comes to politicians and bureaucratic committees much less those engaged in the daily grind of tedious labour to pay the taxes funding the whole system. 

“But I’m not interested in physics – let alone working in part to help pay for someone else to sit on their backside making up more of it” – they might innocently conclude - as is their right. And these days who can blame the broader population of those not fortunate enough to have found their own way into some kind of creative enterprise where they build a personal body of work that might reasonably be described one day as a “legacy” for not wanting to pay taxes to fund those who have? For anyone not so fortunate, the idea any amount of tax money is used to fund research not directly related to life saving essentials (like medical research) seems like government grants for academic vanity projects (for those already occupying some of the desirable, privileged positions in society). That may all be unfair of them: but plumbers, builders, miners and hair dressers exhausted on their feet at the end of hour 12 of day 6 of the week from hell would be saints not to begrudge the lifestyles of most knowledge economy “workers” such as research scientists. Such a system is obviously ripe for the historic communist critique of it: just why do some seem to be trapped working (in part at least) so some others can be paid to do exactly what they want? If scientists are going to be paid with tax money they had better tell us exactly what the point is – and the point had better be able to describe the obvious practical applications that will follow.

Which would seem to rule out the most fundamental and pure scientific research. At a bare minimum. And yet – the most historically important discoveries come not from groups deciding what seems practically important now but rather it comes from scientists free to work on problems they are personally interested in. And it should be completely fine for others to say: good for you. It’s wonderful you are interested in that. But I don’t think I should have to help fund it.

Alan Turing was personally interested in the esoteric foundations of mathematics: what could and could not in theory be calculated. It was a side effect and not “the point” of his work that in retrospect his discoveries laid the foundations of an entire discipline: computer science - and so illuminated the way to the technology of the information age. Astrophysicist Martin Ryle wanted to improve the resolution of radio telescopes to see distant galaxies so he proposed and demonstrated the efficacy of “aperture synthesis” which upgraded interferometry techniques. Presented to a government committee today he may have been knocked back: no one could have known that very same technique would be used to improve images from magnetic resonance imaging devices used in medical diagnosis. 

Granted, it is no simple thing for a curious, energetic and brilliant scientist to find a sympathetic like-mind in industry to fund their research which has no obvious technological application.  All the arguments about “spin offs” and leaving a legacy are well known – and may work as well on an individual millionaire as a committee of government bureaucrats. Scientists – especially physicists and perhaps especially astrophysicists have a particularly difficult road in this respect exceeded perhaps only by theoretical physicists (or pure mathematicians). “What is the point of this?” or “Who cares?” or “How will this help us solve our most pressing problems on Earth? There is enough to worry about here with viruses, cancer, climate change and other disasters. Black holes and quasars are, by your own admission far too far away to affect us here at all.”

The point here is: astronomers like many intellectuals have interests but their interests seem to the man-on-the-street rather like the interests of the philosopher, painter, playwrite or poet: luxuries of the privileged. Never-mind the fallaciousness of the argument, never-mind the often barely concealed internecine war of aggression by the pure physicists upon the philosophers and poets. To the plumbers, police and even politicians – these areas of human diversion are just that. They are not pressing. And we may ask: why can’t they just be hobbies? What are we paying these people for? Reasonable questions with completely reasonable answers that are often utterly unknown to those doing the paying (the tax payers).

So one would expect that out of self interest, scientists – like other intellectuals (poets and philosophers alike) would be rather more eager to keep on side all those with the means to really boost and broaden the impact of their work. Which is why today it is so bizarre when we reflect upon some intellectual cultures, just how the wealthy are spoken of. And not merely in confines of private grumblings around a workplace lunch table – but publicly – in full view and seemingly with pride. The wealthy are reviled by many as it is but astonishingly in many respects and so sadly many who might otherwise benefit from their largesse. Intellectuals, the dominant part of academia are politically active socialists. Of course this is uncontroversial. Almost all who have any connection to academia know this. And it makes sense: the university sector is far and away in many places heavily funded by the state. So praise for state bureaucracy comes easy to those who benefit from it. Why should it be otherwise? 

The most wealthy among us have accomplished things in recent decades (as they always have done) that their own governments make lofty promises about and almost never deliver. Governments promise improvements in systems of schooling and education. But it was the technologists and entrepreneurs who actually delivered a global revolution in learning through an almost universally affordable means of educating and improving everyone no matter their age through free video content, podcasts, books, courses and free or near-free audio books and other technology. Designed and delivered not by government committee but by Apple, Microsoft, Google and Amazon (to name just the prominent few). Traditional schooling and university is rapidly becoming redundant – a relic, a centuries old system serving now solely (in many ways) as little more than a formal culture of credentialing where (despite their protestations) so much educational ballast is utterly superfluous to the process of learning. In many cases the ballast is completely antagonistic to the ostensive purpose of it all. The technology and content now freely (or near freely) available allows engagement coupled with “just in time” rapidity that means the schooling and university systems taking advantage of the internet revolution is rather like having a modern fully functional Airbus jet used solely for the purpose of ferrying passengers from one terminal to the other, on the ground, at the same airport.
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As we have seen, historically there has been until recently a tradition that fostered an affinity, if not friendship, among scientists and the wealthy. Especially the inventor who became super rich because scientists, like inventors, innovate. They each share a love of technology and progress, knowledge and pushing civilization forward. There’s that and there’s the philanthropy. At least some (it could be most) of the super rich are super generous and keenly aware of the benefits and rewards of science. But rather often they focus on what they think they can predict is likely to be an investment that will turn a profit: cutting edge materials science, nanotechnology, fusion technology, quantum computation, medical science of any kind and so on. So scientists can suddenly find they can help to create wealth personally, corporately (perhaps for thousands of small time shareholders) and even to the level of civilization. So the wealthy and the scientists have had a polite agreement of sorts. Financial fuel exchanged for the fruits of the research. Natural collaborators. 

But there are unfortunate exceptions in the modern day. One is astronomy and one reason may be that astronomy of the observational and theoretical kinds is near to pure mathematics: exploring a space of objects and fascinating truths in reality applicable no doubt to radical changes in our deepest ideas and possibly affecting even distant fields and a crucial part of some radically transformative future technology but never able to show any *immediate* way that what it provides is something to “productise”. It’s super refined techniques (like Michael Murphy’s way to measure fine structure: https://astronomy.swin.edu.au/~mmurphy/research/are-natures-laws-really-universal/) should be expected to one day - maybe years but maybe centuries from now - be vital for the operation of what is then a household item. But no one can know that today. Whatever the case astronomers miss out on the best funding and have little reason to meet with venture capitalists and investors. 

So over time: they’ve taken it personally. And it may not be a quirk of astronomy (it may be the same with chemistry and zoology too…though I doubt it) to have public disdain for the prominent wealthy but they have a particular bee in their bonnet and it’s doubly strange because it has infected one thing especially: what used to be their enthusiasm for everything space science.

I am not an astronomer. I am not part of “the community of astronomers”. I don’t publish papers, I lack a PhD, I don’t work in any allied technical field and cannot even say “astronomers” form any significant part of my own social circle. Which all needs to be said before I stick my neck out on the following: 

As little more than an enthusiastic amateur for the last few decades who took an undergrad degree focussing on astronomy and later a Masters in it, I have an arms-distant familiarity with the field – less than any actual astronomer – but more than most lay people. I am an enthusiastic follower (and generally a fan) of experts in the field and the public facing social media “community” of astronomers. Before, since and during formal learning about astronomy, I’ve read (& collected!) many of the popular science books published by astronomers – those few in “the community” who are able to do so after gaining prominence among their peers. Astronomy, as a rule when compared to most other sciences, seems to attract “a type” that *also* often *likes to lecture* and so many astronomers can become in short order confident media performers. Two reasons astronomy is unique in this is:

1.             The media likes astronomy news as “fluff” pieces. They are rather like those “human interest” stories used to break up the bad news. If there have been one too many stories that week about fire fighters rescuing a kitten from a drain then it can be the turn of the team of researchers finding another “Earth like planet” not so far away to be cut and pasted between covid updates and the UN’s latest sanctions. 
2.             The tradition of prominent astronomers-as-voice-of-science. Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” was not just science through the lens of astronomy but reason and rationality itself. When there is a panel discussion involving politicians and businesspeople, the “token scientist” is rather often (though not always) an astrophysicist. Less contaminated, perhaps, with an obvious political ideology they can still be relied upon for the standard intellectual takes on climate change policy, the (anti)facility of religion and necessary role of the state in science education, funding and innovation.

Now it is true that few of these “voices of science” become, somewhat poetically, “stars” in their own right. Perhaps the only descendants of Carl Sagan to rival the great astronomy communicator himself today would be Neil deGrasse Tyson and Brian Cox. Though the former is from astronomy, the latter is actually a particle physicist but one would barely notice from titles like “Wonders of The Solar System” and “Wonders of The Universe” among his oeuvre. If there is to be a “celebrity culture” at this particular epoch within our Enlightenment, then if there are to be such people of disproportionate influence, astronomers are as good as any others perhaps and maybe even better than some within constraints set by a cultural paradigm with a deference to fame for its own sake. 

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Once the night sky itself had me hooked as a child, it was initially books I turned to for understanding. Introductory books about astronomy never need to embellish for effect. Titles such as “The Solar System”, “The Universe” and in one case simply “Space” were enticing, mysterious and vertigo inducing. Astronomy tragics remember their first telescope, they remember those early read and read again and again and again books. And of course we remember our first encounters with one celebrity scientist or other who appeared on the television. I was just a little too young to be personally inspired by Carl Sagan. For me it was physicist Paul Davies who, when I was in my teens, was living and teaching in Australia and for a time our most prominent scientist and science communicator (Davies was and remains excellent, but “Australian Science Celebrity” could reasonably have applied to Davies at the time and perhaps only one other. It was a very thin bench compared to today). Like those who went on to be professional astrophysicists, I began by enrolling into a BSc (Physics and Astronomy) and if nothing else, learned how one could in theory keep up with the latest in astronomy, even if in practise one could not. Chiefly this entails keeping one distracted eye on “astrophysics news” by scanning abstracts of AJ and ApJ (The Astronomical Journal and The Astrophysical Journal respectively) and of course by now and again checking in with the astro-ph arXiv of pre-prints (roughly: a repository of each and every journal’s published, submitted, draft and in some cases rejected papers. Roughly speaking, as I say: even the arXiv has standards (that in theory are set well below that of official journals much less the very top tier AJ/ApJ). All of which is to say I am a poor imitation of the real thing - nothing like a genuine professional astronomer/astrophysicist but with perhaps a passing familiarity of the fundamental content and state of play in the subject and vicarious “observer status” position in terms of astronomy outreach and online “astro” culture for what it is. On Twitter I’ve kept an alter purely for the purpose of curating a (private to me) list of astronomers as a means of following news updates in astronomy more effectively. That was the theory and certainly when astronomy makes the media, lists of professionals are an excellent way to check, criticise and correct bad takes where need be from talking science heads on television. But those times are rare. Astro-twitter is very “academia” heavy. Yes, there are excellent amateurs out there on Twitter. There are prominent astronomy-communicators working outside the university system. But the far more major segment of astro-twitter are Professors, Researchers, students and graduate students. Every subculture, by definition, has its own unique standout features to any outsider. What immediately is obvious to me – outside academia – are the complaints made about the job. This observation may simply be a feature of all academics with class commitments and have nothing whatsoever to do with astronomy per se. However, public complaints about emails appear periodically – often on Mondays. Always during holidays. This is followed closely by (legitimate) frustrated tweets about the process required to secure funding for a research project, complaints about the publication policies of professional journals and complaints about coding difficulties and software malfunctions - not to mention public complaints about their very own employers (the university administrators). This is all for the good, in my opinion. Youngsters passionately romanticising an academic career have a real-time insight into the psychological state of both junior and senior academics and what the job really entails away from university promotional material. But all of that is utterly orthogonal to a more important observation.


The politics. 


Putting aside the universal frustration about completing the administration necessary to justify their own continued employment (some version of which almost defines the term “white colour job” in all but the most innovative silicon-valley type institutions) astronomers on Twitter are an exceedingly homogenous culture of professionals. And while this may not be, by any means, unique to astronomy – it is especially pronounced within it. And it is, relatively speaking, new and notable. New as in: woke new. Astronomers on average are woke. It is not universal but it is not uncommon for astronomers, as of early 2022, to fully embrace the most trope and extreme of the woke signals: pronouns and diversity flags are in their bios are just the start. Their favoured political issues are, essentially, synonymous with those of most green parties around the world. Climate Change is a chief concern, followed closely by all things “diversity, inclusion and equity” and to complete the trendy trifecta: an economic perspective that embraces anti-capitalism and pro-socialism. Now some of this may have been there for decades in astronomy. I don’t know: but I didn’t notice (by which I mean: it was not noticeable) and that is the point. The astronomers who lectured me, broadly speaking, were, well: “professional” - on topic and seemingly apolitical. 

Whatever was trendy in politics at the time just was not on the menu during lectures, labs and tutorials. I wouldn’t have had a clue how a professor, lecturer or tutor voted or what social issues they were interested in. There simply was no time (much less any interest) during lectures, labs and tutes. And at first, online, it was not obvious that the community of astronomers was at all “just like you’d expect from university employees”. They posted about astronomy or other kinds of science. But something changed around 2016 like so much else. The online culture of astronomers became highly politicised. There was little debate from what I could tell among those who belonged because there was no one to debate. There was universal agreement. Some views were obviously simply wrong according to “community standards” in astronomy – like Brexit. The exist of Britain from the EU could only be bad for science as a whole and in particular astronomy. From there, as is now recent history, vocal (and in some cases vitriolic) posts from Professors and PhDs in Astronomy attesting to their feelings – about Brexit, then Trump, then Greta and swiftly the flood gates opened entirely. University employed astronomers (almost all of them) became champions for the new woke collectivism. And with that came something necessarily tied to all that but nonetheless new and jarring all the same: the anti-capitalism trope: a comfort in publicly professing one’s disdain or dislike of the wealthy.


What washed over online-astro culture? Why was the ground there so very fertile for febrile political posturing? Is astronomy special in terms of the sciences? It is – and there are many factors. Among them are: 


1.    Jobs are very hard to come by in astronomy and extremely precarious to keep hold of. The majority with formal training in astronomy will not be employed directly in research astronomy. They will work instead in physics education more broadly, education more broadly than that, outreach of one form or another (for a particular university, for a science foundation or government “STEM” program) or they will find more lucrative (but perhaps less fulfilling) work in industry where their coding, mathematical/statistics proficiency or possibly just impressive PhD in Astrophysics and other signs of technical capacity make them attractive as consultants, developers, advisors, venture development and strategy analysts and so on and on. If one manages to make it through the system that culls so many fellow hopefuls, one becomes a little fearful of the system itself for it is cruel.


2.    Astronomers online almost always find themselves comfortably taking on the 2020s version of “science communicator” – the social media science “influencer”. Gather a reasonable following, have a Youtube channel, or podcast, or blog or appear on some other podcasts and soon you may find yourself the go-to astronomer for the local radio station, then perhaps television station and perhaps a spot somewhere on a national broadcaster. You now have clout. People value your opinion. You should have one and it must be acceptable. As in business, promotions in academia cannot entirely ignore one’s social media presence. Taxation funds the university. It funds the better part of your research and all of your salary. Why would you ever support the side promising to cut it? (And why go to the hassle of social ostracisation by being counter-culture?)


3.    Related to “2” – as an astrophysicist you are by default an intellectual. You are part of the elite. Astrophysics in particular is very impressive in a way even geophysics is not – much less geology. Or anything related to biology. You know enough about quantum physics that to a layperson you may as well be a quantum physicist. Or a mathematician. Or a climate scientist. So you have informed, evidence based opinions on climate policy. And hence politics. So you know enough about economics. And history. And philosophy. And how to think logically and critically (so you’ve been told) – like a scientist. Of course it is to be expected you and your collegues agree on these matters for they are highly qualified astrophysicists too. Of course you will reach the right conclusions while “low information” lay people are going to make mistakes because they do not understand the science.

This explains the inexorable pull upon an entire culture of astronomers online who, seemingly in lock step, began to agree about next-to-everything politically. Everyone agreed about the importance of diversity. There could be no diversity of opinion on diversity. Astronomy rushed into systems of rectifying wrongs in proportions of populations “not identifying as males” working in astrophysics. Equality had to be enforced by ensuring some were given advantages when seeking positions or promotions which considered one’s cultural background or sexuality. And so it went as it did in many other disciplines and indeed many other industries outside academia and education. But none of this seemed quite so grating as the swift slide into cynicism about innovation…when it came from the wealthy. 

Now anti-capitalism is a mainstay of academia. Why should anyone be surprised at this? No doubt faculties of humanities, arts, social sciences, economics – even business (but not always graduate MBA programs) are going to lean left, even far left and green and woke. Where’s the mystery? There is no mystery but in astronomy somewhat more than perhaps elsewhere there has been historically a culture of patronage on the one hand and on the other a mutual respect for those entrepreneurs and technologists with whom they shared a “geeky” love of computers and rockets.

In this article I am taking a stance of not calling out any particular academic by name - ​although it is tempting to cut and paste some of the vitriol that is ripe for the taking out there from professional astronomers about Elon Musk. But it takes little time to compare Tweets made about the billionaire by some prominent gainfully employed academic astronomers in 2014 or thereabouts and today. They move very swiftly from the broadly positive (if they say anything at all) to negative. Musk earned more ire from the astronomy community than any other billionaire precisely because of his Starlink satellite project all because of an extremely parochial concern of astronomers and so, seemingly on a dime, the entire community (more or less) turned against this particular use of space science and technological innovation and indeed seemed to broaden itself out to target the billionaire space race altogether. The lack of love shown by astronomers today (broadly speaking) for the new millenium’s commercial space race is awfully telling of this bias against not merely the wealthy but business and free markets. 
 
Astronomers have traditionally loved rockets & space science. They will praise NASA for almost anything (and broadly speaking – rightly so). Kids who grow up looking at the heavens grow up loving rockets too. It must be confusing for children looking to their astronomy heroes to see them complaining about rockets and satellites.

Astronomers on social media now, if they are to mention Elon Musk at all (or the modern space race) conform to a unique social pressure: that which dictates the *politics* of their community: namely the wider dominant academic culture of our time. And the academic culture of our time almost never rises to praise the pioneers of space science *this time*. The normative response to any billionaire’s space-science project receives disinterest (at best) or denigration. It is sad to see. Even now, with SpaceX satellites providing additional capacity for the people of Ukraine to avoid being “cut off” from the world by Russian aggression goes unnoticed by the broad community of astronomers across the world. They still will not praise it. They have only complaints about the technology. The silence is not deafening as such because (fortunately) the attitude of most astronomers does not translate to the attitude of most people not indoctrinated by a reflexive skepticism of billionaires. They - the broader community - do see virtue and praise it when it happens.

One might object: well it is rather below the belt to criticise astronomers for not foreseeing peaceful virtuous applications of Starlink technology in wartime. But anyone paying attention knew that Starlink would be a method to deliver internet to people too remote to access mobile let alone cable or landline internet of any kind. Australia is a perfect case in point where vast emptiness and exceedingly low population density in some places means the possibility of satellite internet is an absolute game changer for isolated individuals and communities. Surely that alone is enough for astronomers to problem solve? And this too is a problem with pessimism. When Starlink was first launched the almost unanimous cry from the community of astronomers was how Starlink was destroying the “seeing” – or the clarity of the sky. Ruining long exposure imaging and just otherwise making the jobs of astronomers more difficult if not impossible. Again, I am no professional astronomer. I may be utterly ignorant of how certain physical laws do indeed mean that progress in astronomy in certain ways is now impossible given the existence of Starlink satellites. But absent that explanation I can only imagine the problem is soluble. Satellites have always interrupted the images taken by the observatories of astronomers. They have work-arounds – they have methods of subtraction. Yes, it’s more work, but the non-astronomers of planet Earth have been, from any reasonable perspective, rather generous in many ways in supporting astronomers. Keeping them, as it were in “refractors, reflectors and processors”. Astronomy is an expensive business. Some of the world’s most powerful supercomputers are devoted to simulating astrophysical phenomena. At great expense we place telescopes in the most remote places where few other structures are built (see the aforementioned Keck observatory) and in some situations where no other structures exist (from Voyager probes now at the edge of the solar system to probes on Mars and recently space telescopes). There must be give and take. The pristine night skies of planet Earth cannot be expected to remain spotless forever, nor should it be thought that the best place to observe the cosmos is from Earth through an atmosphere. Hence the space telescopes. The James West Space telescope is said to have cost $10 billion. That’s a rather lot of a money to justify to a skeptical tax paying public who paid for it.

One wonders if the community of astronomers, instead of becoming a veritable cacophony of criticism, instead took the route of petitioning Elon Musk or Starlink with a proposal to fund another space telescope to make up for any interruptions to their work? Starlink appears to have gone to great lengths to reduce the impact of their satellites on astronomy to “preserve the night sky”: https://www.spacex.com/updates/#starlink-update-04-28-2020  

The online presence that represents astronomy and astronomers on social media does appear to any outside observer to be a close knit and rather unified culture. This may give some insight into the broader community of astronomers – the majority of whom may not have a presence on (for example) Twitter. Astronomers share information generously – research data, expertise, telescope time. They are, of course, collegial and professional and provide a wealth of inspiration to young people fascinated by what is still the king of the sciences: it is the most majestic. It is the most awe inspiring. It is both gateway drug to and stage for all other sciences. So astronomers have that advertising advantage: it is prima facie thrilling: something molecular biology, industrial chemistry and geology (even in the form of vulcanology) cannot approach. But what it has always struggled with is: practicality. And that means investing in it can be a challenge. So surely, as a community, astronomers should not want to alienate any potential sources of investment?

Does this mean astronomers online cannot be political? Of course not. The issue here is the quirky self-destructive niche area of politics astronomers seem to be captured by: disdain for the wealthy and in particular disdain for Elon Musk. But not only is criticism of wealth, business and billionaires against the very self interest of astronomers themselves: it’s against everyone else’s interest too. Alienation of potential investors in astronomy does not help astronomy. And astronomy really does help everyone. Criticism of technological progress like Starlink because of an exceedingly “inside baseball” inconvenience seems narrow minded. It is the worst thing someone actually concerned with the well being of the greatest number.

I considered for about 20 seconds whether or not to do a quick survey of a random 100 astronomers on Twitter by searching their feeds for references to “Musk” and graphing the results into “Entirely Negative” “Overwhelmingly Negative” “Predominantly Negative” “Even Handed” “Predominantly Positive” and so on – but this is less informative for the curious reader to try this themselves because the actual tweets from astronomers on Twitter about Elon Musk are revealing. As I hinted at, there is a category of (it must be admitted, older) astronomers who made positive remarks about Musk back when it seemed he was more focussed upon green energy. And Neil deGrasse Tyson – the world’s most famous astrophysicist has only ever said positive things about the Tesla billionaire. But with Starlink astronomers turned on Musk and billionaires broadly. They are relatively silent for now as the war in Ukraine rages. But the anti-wealth socialist memeplex that directs the culture in which astronomers find themselves will rear its head again. And that is a shame. Because the wealthy might like to support astronomers. But not if astronomers don’t support them. This is not an appeal for astronomers to “remain in their lane” by any stretch. It is a call for them to think more critically about politics. There are too many who have swung not merely left but far left. There have even been calls recently on Twitter for more astronomers to be “verified”. And why? They seek authority - they have bought into the “trusted sources” narrative and demand that they be trusted in particular as experts on science “for the health of public discourse”. This is not counter culture: this is straight out of the social media giant, left leaning political ideology playbook. Collectivists are concerned for collectives. But that is quite different to being concerned with the well being of the greatest number. Concern for the well being of a collective is not identical to well being for the greatest number. “Healthy public discourse” is something like: discourse that does not challenge the prevailing “official” (usually political) narrative.

What we need to preserve is a tradition of criticism. A way of holding up ideas to the light and finding fault with them so that we can move forward. We do not need experts in astronomy falling back on the authority of their credentials. We do not want them to be parochially concerned about whether one advance in space science (like starlink) is a solution that generates absolutely zero additional problems (like satellite transits on deep space images) - we want them to be champions of progress and champions of those who make progress. So it would be far better for them - and everyone - were they enthusiastic supporters of the Elon Musk’s of the world. Sure: criticise Musk’s ideas too if and when deserved. But not because of his politics or wealth or because his attempt to bring internet technology to places it could not be had before affects your narrow but personal research project. Astronomers and the wealthy have a tradition of working together as benefactors and patrons in large part because they share a deep similarity: they are radically transforming our view of the world and our place in it. Sometimes they are coming from very different places and it seems their goals are not entirely aligned. But they are the catalysts in culture for change and especially for change in the right direction which we call progress. It is time for astronomers to hold fire on Elon Musk and the other billionaires. Perhaps when they do they might be surprised at the dawning of a new age of patronage. But the patrons have to be met halfway: and not with brickbats.

There are "meetings of minds" one waits for. When Sam Harris chatted to David Deutsch. When Douglas Murray speaks to Jordan Peterson. It's where people align seemingly very closely and then we find those small places where they disagree. So I have hoped for the day to see Daniel Hannan in conversation with Yaron Brook publicly and, finally, it happened. Their conversation is here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZNgldAKAjUc but at 1 hour 45 minutes I guess many won’t persevere. So I took some notes. With them, appropriately, was the director of the Adam Smith Institute in the UK, Eamonn Butler.

My notes here are not quotations for the most part. They are a summary of what was said - and not all of what was said. Simply what, for me, constituted some highlights. The three speakers each take turns speaking and then there is a question time at the end where it was good to see, especially, Daniel and Yaron tease out some very minor differences. I have heard Yaron say before that he “was not sure” what to think about Brexit. I always found that curious given it was clearly, to my mind, about free trade *with the rest of the world* rather than being stuck inside the protectionist EU (putting aside issues of sovereignty with a supra-national government that devalued the individual). So it was good to see Daniel explain some of that here. 

Here are my notes:

Eamonn Butler

Tribalism is about being aligned with a group. Boris Johnson said that New Zealand and the UK are as close as any two countries. So it’s not about proximity anymore.

Eamonn speaks about different ways in which we can divide up the world into tribes: national, supra national, more local or more or less ethnic. 

Tribalism works against trade in examples like the EU blocking trade with the UK. Tribalism can be against trade. Comparing this to UK, Canada and Australia trade agreement - tribalism there seems to foster trade. It can make people open. (My note: is it “tribal” or is it a common system of similar institutions?)

Recently: France was quite visceral in its objection to the UK/USA/Australia defence agreement. That’s bad tribalism.

Daniel Hannan

Engels and Dickens did damage to the folk memory of The British about their economic history. The truth was and is that with development things get better. Always. Never worse. Industrialisation is better and preferable to agrarian societies.

Progress and steady improvement leads to transitional phases in underdeveloped countries that from our lofty positions may not always “look pretty”.

Hannan mentions well-meaning *altruists* at 27 mins 50 secs and you can see Yaron’s ears prick up in real time.

29 mins in: Hannan invokes evolutionary psychology and our “hunter gatherer brain” and “Palaeolithic instincts”. But does say all of that is exaggerated. But he continues to insist we are “designed for” tribalism.

Food security is best secured by buying from a variety of global sources. It is insecure to buy it from a single place.

Free trade and individualism have to be invented.

Maybe we are in an “interglacial” of free trade between two super long periods of tribalism and socialism.

Invoking Hannah Ardent: Every generation is invaded by barbarians. We call them children.

So they need to learn (he says taught) about the importance of reason and the individual.

Hannan calls the distinction between Ayn Rand’s objectivism and anarcho-capitalism “the narcissism of small differences”. (Cheeky!)

Concludes on a point that “woke” sensibilities like “white guilt” are not new. Look in the Bible: it’s full of examples of collective guilt of that kind. Most societies ever have acted this way: we should not be surprised (we should probably have better responses by now!)

40 mins in: we are not defined by ancestry in the West (or hitherto have not been). This needs to be taught. We need to do the job of civilising and this should be what schools and universities are for. But actually educational institutions are teaching the opposite. 

Most societies have not taught the elevation of the individual: it is therefore precious and worth protecting in the West.

Oxford University used to demand that you take an oath that transubstantiation was not real. That was 200 years ago. But today the unconscious bias test serves the same purpose. They are examples of intolerance.

We see personal autonomy receding. We will miss it when it’s gone.

Yaron Brook

Daniel gave a fantastic description of our material abundance. Other places around the world recognise this in us. It’s a tragedy that we here in the West do not appreciate it.

Why do we have prosperity and abundance? What are the causes? Why don’t other places have it? It is Enlightenment ideas.

Now we are teaching the opposite. But what are the key ideas in the Enlightenment? I agree with Daniel: what we have now is an aberration. It is not the norm. It is the thinkers of the Enlightenment to whom we owe the debt. What are the main ideas?

1. The idea that reason is our means of knowledge. We can explain the world through science. Truth does not come from revelation - either religious or Platonic. It is not wise men or books: but that the truth comes from a methodology. This distinguishes between truth and falsity and good versus evil. That we have the capacity to learn the truth is massively liberating. 250+ years ago you could not choose your job or who you married. Reason gives you choice.
2. The sanctity of the individual. The crucial importance of the individual as the moral unit. Decisions are made by individuals - and not authorities. We have individual rights. The purpose of government is supposed to secure those rights - but otherwise leave you alone to make your own choices. This is the achievement of thousands of years of philosophy and broke the chains of tribalism. Achievement is then to rise as an individual - no matter the colour of your skin or any other superficial characteristic.

Unfortunately since the Enlightenment these ideas have been under attack from - often German intellectuals (Marx, Shoppenhaur, the postmodernists). Even in the 19th century people were longing for little villages. And ideas that promoted the supremacy of the tribe and the leaders of the tribe lead to mindlessness. You don’t have to think - the leaders will think for you. And this is now promoted by university professors. And this is often written in sophisticated, but intelligible language.

It is not enough to explain to people economic theory. It needs to be rooted in deeper notions about the individual. People think now that the tribe can make decisions: but it cannot. It cannot think. Only individuals can. Our job is to defend reason and individualism.

Questions

Daniel Hannan - remarks on Brexit. People want Brexit to fail in Britain so they seem not to want trade deals. The Anglosphere has a way of looking at the world with shared institutions that raise the individual above the collective and the rules over the rulers - common law and so forth - are not predicated on tribalism or ethnic background. Common Law countries in the British tradition - including Israel, Singapore, Hong Kong (until recently) - have an easier time to trade because the same laws and accountancy and that sort of thing work to facilitate things. Hopefully Britain will raise is eyes once more to more distant horizons now Brexit is done.

Question: Where do your rights come from and how does it happen? Is it nationality? After Brexit some people wanted to rejoin Ireland so they could be in the EU. Thoughts?

Eamonn Butler: Yes, some people in Britain like to claim Irish heritage. These things can be important to people.

Yaron Brook: Yes, for most people blood is thicker than water. But what should be thicker is ideas. Trade agreements focussed on ideas are what is important: not heritage. I feel at home wherever I go. It does not matter where you come from. Individuals pursuing their own self interest is what America is about. Brexit should allow the UK to be more free. 

Daniel: There were no barriers in Europe with the EU but there were more barriers everywhere else. Let me defend the nation state. The alternative to it is not an objectivist anarchy capitalist paradise. There is no ideal - just as there is no pure socialist state. The most illiberal ideaologies - communism, religious fundamentalism - all believe they are bigger than the nation state. Why did Iran take over the US embassy that time? To send the signal that we do not recognise your world order: we recognise a higher cause beyond the nation state. It is worth making the practical case that - eg in WW2 -allied forces argued for all nations. Question: why isn’t Austria in a worst mess? It does all the bad things but it’s still doing well.

Audience member (Austrian) - I moved to Switzerland because statists are in control of 50% of the economy and the top tax rate is over 55%. Yet it’s still a sort of free market economy that succeeds due to small individual companies that manage to work within. You’ve heard of Red Bull, Glock, Schwarzkopf, etc. Some Austrian companies have 99% world market share - but some are leaving.

Yaron: Atlas holds up those economies. Same thing happens in California. I’m not opposed to the nation state and it depends on whether the nation protects individual rights. Rights come simply from being human. And whether nation states protect individual rights or not is the measure.

Question from the moderator about “buy American”. Is it as destructive as tariffs?

Daniel: Well it’s not as destructive but it’s still crazy. If you want to buy an inferior product but it makes you feel patriotic, who am I to stop you? As Yaron said: everyone seemed to “turn on a dime” over the incorrect notion that America was getting poorer just because it had a trade deficit. Economist are alarmed by trade deficits. But there is no correlation between deficits and growth. Hannan says he has a deficit with the pubs in his area. Sometimes they even dump goods on him: who is getting the raw end of the deal then? Why are low priced goods regarded as a swindle? Again: people in British parliament seem to want trade deals to fail just to show Brexit fails. Eg: some parliamentarians want the UK not to be “flooded by cheap food” by - for example - free trade with Australia. All these policies make countries more poor. 


Question from the moderator to Yaron: Is it harder to get rid of tribalism in epistemology because the expertise to judge the truth is not widely available? Eg: I cannot do the research myself - it’s too hard - so what I’ll do is choose which authority to trust? And maybe they make an assessment on the authority’s intentions?

Yaron: No - it’s not getting harder. We can get second opinions and do research on line. It’s easier than ever. It’s where politics intervenes that we start to think “Who thinks this?”. In the US some people ask their doctor how they vote. That’s really sick. There are food awards now that do not judge the quality of the food at the restaurant alone, but also how equitable and so on the food or the restaurant is. So everything is getting politicised and this is a consequence of big government. Why does a government have a position on covid? It should merely isolate people who test positive and protect us. Other than this: leave us alone. The private sector can distribute vaccines better: look at how amazon distributes everything else. And compare this to how government distributes one single thing: a few vaccines (my addition: and for free!). Why is social media politicised? Because government gets involved. It’s almost like we live in unlimited government: there are no bounds where government won’t go. So it’s not complexity but politics.


Do you think Trump has set a status quo for trade policy?


Yaron: Yes. The people who believe in free trade are largely silent in congress. Both the left and right in the USA are anti-free trade. Trump was pro-tarrif against everyone it seems: our allies as well as our enemies. You might not get elected today in America if you advocated free trade.
Daniel: It is good that the UK is dropping unscientific checks on travellers. The US is yet to do this. US has many prohibitions against countries travelling to them and this is because Biden, following Trump, realises that there is a substantial proportion of the population in the USA that doesn’t mind borders being shut as a general principle (not merely as a response to the virus).


A speech/meandering question about tribalism that was not clear from the audience.


Daniel: Again: we are the exception. Tribalism is the rule. But even in an advanced Western society if your relative is an accountant in many cases you’d still consult him. Do you recall the first line of The Godfather: “I believe in America”. In that opening scene the Godfather himself demands fielty to his tribe. The name of the person asking for help was called “Amerigo Boneserra” - which means “Goodbye America”.


Yaron: I agree completely. We have the rule of the law or the semblance of it but we are descending into tribalism. Let’s not go back to that: let’s not go back to a Mafia economy. We know the benefits of abandoning tribalism and we are seemingly giving that up. Financial markets are not a casino - they play a crucial role in our prosperity. None of our wealth would exist without them. 


A question about mandating vaccines. Does this cause suspicion?

Yaron: I don’t trust the vaccine because of what the FDA or any politician says. I trust it because the expert scientists say.

Daniel: If you’re mandating something for the health of others: that’s no good. The vaccines are good at keeping you alive and out of intensive care. But they do not stop you getting or spreading the virus so the argument for compulsion and passports seems to go up in smoke.


A tariff question.


Daniel: The most common trade barrier is a tariff. Uganda cannot easily sell to the EU because of tariffs. Eg: they cannot easily sell vanilla because France sets the “standards” but they are always about a cartel wanting to preserve a monopoly. I thought companies did not want regulation but in the EU parliament I was lobbied constantly. And it was always about trying to put rivals out of business - but they tried to sell it as protecting the public. 


Question: In New Hampshire they have a free state project. What are the chances of success?

Yaron: Zero chance of this happening. This “free New Hamphire” thing has been going on for 20 years. It’s a fantasy. The USA will not allow states to leave. Personal income is not taxed in one place on Earth and it’s Puerto Rico.

Daniel: Yes, no chance it will happen. But it’s always best to have more local decisions. We should devolve power to local self government as far as we can. Bring government closer to the electorate to make it more accountable.

The Kookaburra’s laugh and chirp of the rainbow lorikeet seem far louder as the sun rises these days: there is no traffic on the road to drown them out in the dewy morning. It is winter and the first light in the sky does not tinge the inky black of the sky until about 6:30am. Few are awake to hear or see any of this now. Sydney is in lockdown. It is the third week of the second lockdown and there is no indication when it will be lifted. The traffic is gone, a line of taxis wait at the rank outside the station for passengers that won't come: few are permitted to travel outside of a prescribed radius around where they live. It is 18 months since the pandemic began yet things are worse than ever. Everyone senses this lockdown is different because we were promised it would not - could not - happen again.

New South Wales, the largest state in Australia, weathered 2020 as well as any place in Australia which, as a nation, weathered the pandemic as well as anywhere in the world. It is an island after all and that offers some advantages; the sparse population offers still more. The culture of the place - the way backyards are often large and houses separated one from another by the “quarter acre block” coupled with how people tend to keep to themselves anyway (it is a dark but running joke that so many do not know their neighbours well) almost suggests that sometime in ancient history the people experienced a similar catastrophe and learned then to social distance. It is as if the echoes of that long forgotten lesson still reverberate in the memes that shape our society; as if all our systems and community structures have just been waiting, long in preparation for it to happen again.

But the modern Australia of towns separated by long thin roads and sprawling suburbs of brick homes with desert-red terracotta roofs bordered by head high wooden fence palings is not that old and experienced. It is young and only by happy coincidence is the physical and social fabric of the place almost intelligently designed for a pandemic. Socially many in the larger cities tend to keep to themselves anyway and physically have always been distanced by the luxury of vast open space. But as a young nation, perhaps peculiarly to outsiders, we seem to suffer from the unfortunate inability some youngsters are indoctrinated with: to look only to their elders for what is right and good rather than thinking for themselves. So Australia typically looks to…almost anyone else in the developed world. To the United States or to Great Britain or elsewhere for the “correct” thing to do. No matter that the density of Great Britain is 281 people per square kilometre (Australia’s is around 100 times less than that at around 3 per square kilometre) nor that the population of the United States sits at 330 million - with Australia less than a tenth of that at under 30 million. And never mind that there is little in China's means of socially organising that we should wish to model ourselves after. Australia is not comparable to many other places in the world. But it is, culturally and institutionally, sometimes overly uncomfortable in uncertainty and thus uncomfortable about making its own decisions. We need someone else to do it first or tell us what to do.

And yet, though this was the norm for most of my life, an astonishing thing happened in 2020 when this crisis commenced. In New South Wales, in particular, under the leadership of its Premier Gladys Berejiklian we barely locked down and when we did, for a brief time, she said it would be for the last time. We rejoiced and were even proud to some extent that our Premier, unlike so many others, was not reactionary and distanced herself from any odour of authoritarianism. And as recently as May this year she said again “'We made sure that we had the systems in place to be able to weather whatever came our way so that we would never go into lockdown again.” See https://www.theaustralian.com.au/inquirer/coronavirus-gold-standards-lose-lustre-in-light-of-human-error/news-story/e6d2786fee88b82e76b5bb240fd1280b for more on that. So: excellent. The reassurance of “systems” that had proven themselves robust in the face of a crisis: tested and passed.

And yet, we have locked down. Harder than ever. Though this time a significant number of the vulnerable are vaccinated (around 76% of the over 70s for example and climbing: https://www.health.gov.au/initiatives-and-programs/covid-19-vaccines/australias-covid-19-vaccine-rollout#daily-report ) and we have learned to social distance more than ever (like that was ever much of a problem) and mask up and wash hands and so on and so forth to “stop the spread”; nevertheless there have been collective cases of amnesia from the “leaders”, gas lighting from the media and broad panic by some in the populace who spend too much time looking at the globe and looking to overseas rather than looking to their locales. They become more interested in pushing a political agenda caught up (as too many are on social media) in hyperbole.

In Australia it is, perhaps, unfortunate that the conservatives are in power both federally and at the state level and that means there is now almost no opposition whatsoever in our Parliaments to authoritarianism. After all the other side - the ostensible opposition - would never say we need “less government intervention”. So it is the worst of slippery slopes. The “conservative” government takes away some freedoms, imposes some restrictions and the Westminster opposition says….? Do more!

Though now, in mid 2021 compared to early 2020 we are all in a far better position to each, individually, take care of ourselves and each other and though we have the knowledge and technology and health care capacity across the nation and in each state to ensure everything is better despite an “outbreak” of proportions no country in Europe nor state in America would recognise as anything but “good numbers and news” - we are told it is bad. Really bad. Terrifying. The worst. Each day at 11am the Premier flanked by the hectoring, overzealous and hyperbolic Health Minister Brad Hazzard (yes, really, the person responsible for the "health" of the state is called "Hazzard"), the (though I am sure she is a lovely person and no doubt competent, nevertheless) condescending Chief Health Officer Kerry Chant (or a subordinate) and at least one senior member of the now (sadly) frightening-to-the-average-citizen NSW Police Force, all stand before the assembled media excitedly for an hour or more like a religious ceremony and pontificate to the public about what they have or have not done correctly in the previous 24 hours - and how best to atone.

While the Premier and Chief Health Officer will give case numbers each day (there are rarely any deaths or intensive care admissions to report and when there are, no details are given beyond their age - we learn nothing about comorbidities - and of course we learn nothing about other numbers to put things in perspective and context like, for example any mention of the 400,000 or so who each year are admitted to hospital for other infectious diseases in our state alone), the Deputy Commissioner of Police will inform the populace about how many infringement notices and fines have been issued. The headline is always the numbers, but the real story is the rules, judgements, "breaches" and punishments. You get the message. Do what you are told. You cannot think for yourself. We do that for you now.

It is all too reminiscent of some parody of a school assembly in some modern retelling of a scene from a Dickensian novel. The Headmistress, tapping a cane menacingly and informing the all students the dance is cancelled, the chief disciplinarian by her side - veins bulging and bullying - telling the fearful but compliant they already had their last warning. This time everyone is being kept in. And there will be SILENCE!!

It is farcical and it would be comical if it were not so seriously dystopian. It is neither play nor parody. The Premier insisted people not socialise and not leave the house for any reason not essential. A day later she was herself photographed getting coffee with a friend, unmasked. This is completely consistent with her colleague to our north in Queensland where the Premier there made it clear there could be no non-essential travel to or from her state and within the week she was flying back and forth to the Tokyo games for a photo opportunity. Perhaps the pinnacle of all this, this time around, is our state Chief Health Officer telling us in sombre tones that even if social distanced, fully masked and fully vaccinated - if one should come across a friend in the supermarket while shopping for essentials on the “one trip permitted per day per household” - one should not, under any circumstances, engage in a conversation. Now is not the time to be friendly (quote:) “Whilst it is in human nature to engage in conversation with others, to be friendly, unfortunately, this is not the time to do that.” For curious readers here is a link queued to the spot where our Chief Health Officer has that "friendly advice" on how not to be friendly: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NVFLdnDEjaI&t=390s But is that true? Has there not been a better time to be friendly to the people so horribly affected by decisions they had no part in and have no power to do anything about? We all understand it. We all get it. But we also know that masked, social distanced, vaccinated people are safe. What is not safe is this kind of social experimentation. We are already seeing people insisting on masking themselves (and perhaps others) even when fully vaccinated themselves in a community which itself is highly vaccinated. There are people for whom the mere suggestion of being anti-social by an authority - especially a medical authority - will be enough to start them down a path towards not only severe psychological distress over time but physical ill health as they go to greater measures to avoid an infection they are unlikely to get from a virus unlikely to cause them much harm. 

For all other people they should, if they are afraid, stay indoors. But that is not most people.

Politicians and bureaucrats - especially in Australia but I guess across the globe - have been engaged for some 18 months now in single factor analysis (the number of covid cases) while hectoring people with basic stuff everyone already knows. The repetition of the same lessons that have been running for 18 months now mean that new information is lost in the noise and whatever scientific reasons there were for the medical prescriptions to physical distance, mask and avoid others now become signs of virtue and ways of deeming others as thinking or unthinking; caring or uncaring.

Everyone knows about masks and distancing and vaccines and we are still being beaten about the ears with the same thing by the same people day on day on day. There is nothing new and no one needs to now hear any of this. It is condescending, patronising and fear mongering and engendering in the population a suspicion that never existed before.  One opinion - the government opinion - is regarded as “official” and hence correct and so other opinions - even when coming from highly qualified experts are rarely heard let alone taken seriously, explored and debated. Any opinion outside the exceedingly narrow "advice" of the chief health officers are labelled either unscientific or uncaring. It is almost unknown to hear a contrasting view on the government channel ("Our" ABC) and extremely rare to hear it on any commercial network.

And yet it is now abundantly clear the governments of the world have been singularly ineffective and largely irrelevant to the case numbers and deaths no matter what their policy. There is no correlation between how hard a country locked down and how bad their case numbers. It is now thought that Florida which barely had any restrictions did better than New York which had heavy restrictions and "locked down" in terms of deaths and case numbers - including per capita. Some dispute the numbers. But even if it's close - no one argues New York did better. And yet on that other metric - the economic and well being metric - Florida is light years ahead.

The WHO Coronavirus “dashboard” provides up to date numbers in a convenient table for cases and deaths across the globe. See here: https://covid19.who.int/table  (It tends to take a while to load for some reason). By any objective measure the USA has performed worst with a mixture among the states of locking down hard vs barely at all with no clear relationship between states who did and did not lockdown. India, Brazil, Russia, The UK and the rest of Europe led by France, Spain, Italy and Turkey with much of Europe and South America not far behind. Whatever these governments did failed by the metric that there have been millions of cases and in many of those cases tens (or even hundreds) of thousands of deaths per country. Australia presently ranks 131 in the table of 239 rows and there have not even been 1000 deaths (and the deaths that did occur, occurred in and around Melbourne in the colder southern part of the country). The governments of the world, no matter what their policies, have seemingly had almost zero impact on the virus - except in some cases to make it worse by concentrating people indoors where the virus is known to spread more rapidly, and encourage people NOT to leave their homes and thus go into the outdoors where we know transmission is far less likely to occur. A "government" as a single entity acts like a single dictatorial person making mistakes but not just for one person: for everyone. The real effect their decisions have made, beyond that which has just been mentioned is not on the virus but to varying degrees on lives and livelihoods destroyed by policies of "lockdown". Lockdowns to varying degrees destroyed businesses and thus lives. We know suicide and depression has spiked but in Australia at least the government is not yet forthcoming with the numbers and the media is seemingly not interested in pursuing this line of inquiry.

Some nations went hard with these lockdowns. Some not so hard. And all of them have to one extent or another experienced terrible effects from the virus as well as the economic impacts which has exacerbated the former rather than helped it (and lowered our economic resilience in the face of future serious national and global problems). The governments have been unable to control the virus with their sledgehammers: the only thing that governments have had under their control are their economies - and control really is the word. When they have placed regulations on us via lockdown it has hurt people - individuals and businesses. It has done nothing for covid. It has controlled the ability of people to earn, flourish to some extent and build their personal resilience to the virus. And that resilience comes across a number of metrics: psychological by being able to go about their lives and rely upon themselves and not welfare cheques from government, financial: by being able to continue to earn for themselves and their families, physical: by being able to continue to participate in sport, go to the gym, remain active, social: by being able to go out and talk to each other in their own local communities and develop plans and strategies within their own local communities about how best to help each other in a time such as this - and in many cases to use local specialised and cultural "best practise" knowledge about what is to be done during an outbreak of a virus. I know my Korean friends had ideas early on and one needed only to do a little research about what other ​developed Asian countries do to know that Chinese-Wuhan style lockdowns were not the way to go and that inter-generational living such as in Italy, or the cooler air and limited sunlight of Britain or the high density social culture of Spain were all risk factors.

We know there are cultural and geographic components to all this. Living alone or with one other person is much safer than grandparents sharing homes with grandchildren. Getting out into the warm sun is better than staying inside a densely packed apartment building. Walking down a sparsely populated street is good. Fighting one's way through a crowd is bad. The virus spreads more easily in winter (like this is news to anyone with respect to covid and influenza viruses). Yet we are pretending so much of this knowledge is new to us: viruses spread, they spread among people living in close proximity, things get worse in winter and not allowing people to work is bad not only for the virus and economy but every single metric one can imagine from psychological well being, depression and suicide rates through to bad health outcomes with respect to every other disease or health indicator, not least of which is a person's ability to exercise and remain active and be motivated to do so and their tendency to consume a healthier diet. But this has all along been a single factor analysis (to repeat myself) with lip service only paid to economic and other health matters…or indeed any other important factor.

The Two New Classes

In Australia, as I imagine everywhere else in the developed world - among the most horrifying parts of all this has been the new class divide. For 18 months now there have been the people who each and every day have felt more and more important and critical to the good functioning of their communities as the pandemic has worn on over the last 18 months. The politicians who make the decisions and have experienced more time in front of the cameras and microphones than ever before. Everyone hanging on their every word. And upon whose word do the politicians hang? The health officials and bureaucrats who so often themselves now get to play politician, issue edicts, commands and orders of all kinds; who get to talk about "The Science which is Settled" and be "The Sole Source of Truth". And the media who, likewise, are the "real deal" (unlike all that "fake news") each day rising and ringing into work with the self important feeling of being the conduit to the otherwise uninformed masses. It is a perfectly self sustaining triumvirate of power and “essential” work: politicians, "expert" bureaucrats and journalists. No doubt their sense of self esteem, their feeling of self worth, the well being that must accompany all that, the veritable “standing up straight with your shoulders back” each morning as they positively leap out of bed to get to the next meeting or media appearance must be a truly wonderful feeling of grandiose significance to one’s own life and the lives of everyone in society. What must their family and friends think? How proud they must all be for the *important* work they are doing in these hard times.

And what about the other class? The “unessentials”? Those told their workplace and business and job is “not essential”? They are reminded each day that their work does not matter. They are a lesser kind of person. They are on a different tier in society. What they have devoted their life to: not important. Society can live without you, for now. Maybe in some weeks or months, when we’d like another night out at a restaurant - we’ll come to you. If you’re still around. And when that time comes the clothes shops that remain can open because the essentials will need a new outfit. And they’ll need their hair done. 

Many - and I count myself among the fortunate here - can indeed work from home. Essential or not we can at least feel like a functioning member of society even if “not essential”. But what about the others? The "underclass" of "unessentials"? Both not required right now and simultaneously unable to perform their duties from the comfort of their living room with fresh brewed tea and the radio playing softly? Where do they go, what do they do, how do they feel and what do they think?

How healthy is such a society when this happens? It's not happened before. This is one great sociological experiment. How can individuals affected recover psychologically from this lesson they are being taught? For those who can work from home, the more they work at home the more they feel at home. Very well. That is all to the good. One day may we all be able to do so when the world of automation really is upon us. But that day is still far off. Yet it is almost as if some already have one foot in a life inside a  simulation. And that might all be well if the mind could actually be uploaded into resilient hardware; sadly that is not our circumstance. We are, instead, plugging our all-too-human bodies into the global network with all of the pitfalls that entails and not enough of the benefits. People are trading their life not for an eternity in the Matrix but for one diluted of the richness of the physical world like some low resolution late 1920s “talkie”. There is no ludditism in these remarks: this is an admission that technology is amazing, but the physical and physically social world remains far more amazing still and we'll all be living in that primarily for a long time yet to come. Get used to it.

The day of working remotely for everyone and doing everything remotely is not here yet. Rather a vast number of us are still required to leave the house. To do manual labour. Some of us even choose to do manual labour - we enjoy gardening or building or cooking and serving and selling and so the list goes of people who are “people people”. Who live for the face to face interaction and the using of tools in the hand to craft the physical world around the rest of us. But, right now, all of those are told they too are “unessential”.

In some perversely inhuman and inhumane trick of our circumstance it is "the essential" ones who get to dictate who is essential. The essential get to feel they are truly “the essence” of society. The rest: easily discarded. Unimportant. Can we put a price on how unimportant they are? It turns out in Australia we can: $600 per week. The government will give you $600 per week. And that will form part of your taxable income. It’s not a gift. You’ll pay back a portion if you ever start earning again. And because of the tax you have been paying, you may not have much in the way of savings so that $600 per week you get while you are not earning had better go a long way towards paying your rent or mortgage (not to mention all your other expenses). If it does not: speak to your bank or landlord, you are advised. Your credit score will be destroyed, of course, and your landlord has nowhere to go if they themselves cannot afford not to have your rent coming in - but this is just the way it is for the unessentials.

I recently made a video about the clash of socialism with capitalism: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=svXLkLzDwTA. I “defended” socialism but concluded that the best defence I could make was unable to stand against the refutations against it inherent in any reasonably good explanation of capitalism. So I am logically and broadly speaking always going to tend in the direction of a party that purports to be “for” the individual more than the collective. So I should be “for” our Premier’s side of politics - for “The Liberal Party”. The other side that tends socialist in Australia is The Labor Party. I could not have imagined under what circumstances come next election I would ever vote Labor over Liberal. What could make one choose the party that explicitly endorses the more socialist authoritarian policies if one is against socialism? Only this: that the party who stands in opposition to it proves to be utterly dishonest about their supposed principles and policies. When they fail categorically to demonstrate any principle guiding their decisions and instead merely react on the advice of bureaucrats. In Australia we have, unfortunately, a preferential voting system. And while I do not know who I will put first on my ballot: I know this. The Liberal Party who last time I put first, will now be last. They, and not the virus, have caused catastrophic damage to my community: the physical, psychological and even spiritual fabric of Sydney and specifically the suburbs I know well and the people in them. Businesses are closed, never to reopen, people have left never to return. All too many now are suspicious and cruel about regulations and supposed “health” guidelines. There is a divide there that was not there in quite this stark a contrast before. The virus did not do this: the government did. Had the Premier and her cabinet insisted on following their own advice from a year ago - or just a few months ago - they would have had the support of their supporters (they will never win over their political opponents). But now they have the support of neither, it seems. Moreover precisely because it is the government who has damaged business and livelihoods people now do need government support. And this is the problem with government. But logically and morally the thing to do is to demand the government pay the people they have put out of business and out of a job. We'll need at least a few years to make those repairs. So, why not vote for the side who are more likely to give the poor people the conservatives would not allow to work anyway a chance to demonstrate they can't make things much worse. I'm fine with giving them one term. 

Strathfield is a suburb of Sydney typical of the broader city but, perhaps, for the high concentration of Korean ex pats and hence Korean businesses. We chose to live here in large part for that vibe: we had some friends near here and made some more. It is as close to community as one finds in the otherwise “naturally socially distanced” culture that is greater Sydney in large part because of that influence. Weekends often involve a walk along “Strathfield Boulevard” to any of the many Korean restaurants. Our favourites are the BBQs and our favourite among those: “The Uncles". The manager and his wife always provide us with the house soup - which was a blend of superb consistency, identical each week of kimchi, pork and tripe. If that sounds unappealing (as it might have to me) it was a deeply flavourful affair not unlike what my own grandmother’s vegetable soup tasted like. But while hers contained vegetables and no sign whatever of pork, kimchi or tripe nevertheless they both tasted so alike: so homely. One reason among many we kept going back. We knew the manager only as “Uncle” though I am sure that he was not "The Uncle" of "The Uncles". We came to know many of the young waitstaff - almost all on working holiday visas with rudimentary English. They would practise English, we our Korean. An exception was “Aamie” a naturalised Korean with perfect fluency attending the locally prestigious University of New South Wales majoring in classical music and specialising in piano. She worked weekends and some evenings to help pay her way through a full time and rigorous course. So each week we would catch up at “The Uncles”. We got to know her as well as we have come to know many of the local casual and part time employees of the local restaurants and eateries. It is a social affair not only for us, but for many local to Strathfield and people who like Korea and want a taste of it from across wider Sydney. We know many of the managers and staff by name. You know: like a typical community which, as I say, is sometimes not so typical in "naturally socially distanced" Australia. When the pandemic began the locals of Korean descent were amused and bemused in equal measure by Australia shutting down retail and restaurants rather than simply protecting the old and vigorously testing, tracing and isolating. As many advanced Asian nations did. As so many epidemiologists suggested we should so early on. As I wrote about in March of 2020: http://www.bretthall.org/corona-podcasts.html The Asian nations had seen SARS before. Like so many other governments, the Australian Federal government and their state counterparts ignored the experience of the Koreans, and Korea being Korea (they have at times called themselves a “fast follower culture”) eventually lost its nerve too and emulated what China had began and what Europe slavishly followed with: compulsory and draconian lockdowns. As many know: this was never in the pandemic playbook of democratic nations nor even the World Health Organisation’s advice. Lockdown was to be a “last resort” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2020-10-12/world-health-organization-coronavirus-lockdown-advice/12753688 Suddenly "lockdown" was among the first go to's and even more suddenly individuals could not be relied upon to look after themselves and their most vulnerable. They had to obey the central authority who made all the mistakes on their behalf. Indeed forget “relied upon” - even if a person cannot be “relied upon” to look after themselves best this is no reason to take away their individual rights to do what they think is best within the existing culture and societal structures.

 The Uncles is closed forever now: only the facade remains. I expect there are a few in Strathfield that are sad to see such a stalwart institution of the local restaurant strip gone. I recall birthdays there and it was often the first place I recommended when people asked where to go in Strathfield for Korean food. Their choice of Wagyu beef was second to none and they did sliced smoked duck with honey mustard sauce that now we cannot find anywhere else. We heard the manager and his wife returned to Korea. Like so many other businesses the lights of The Uncles went dark never to be turned on again and the hustle and bustle, the smoke and smells are gone. The once vibrant strip of Strathfield Boulevard is not only missing restaurants that stood for many years but it is quiet enough to hear the native bird calls from trees in nearby streets. Our friends who run one of the local hair dressing salons were, even before this latest lockdown, struggling to meet the lease on their premisses alongside the wages of their employees and despite providing face shields and masks to all customers (who also all signed in using the government mandated tracing app) it was, none of it, enough. Hairdressers are shuttered now too. Putting aside the lease on the business premisses, how the home mortgage or rent is paid by any of them and how many of the casual staff can be kept is anyone’s guess. Maybe things will come roaring back? Maybe the local economy is like a coiled tiger? But maybe also an economy is not just an average or a total: but it is made up of individual businesses and lives and dreams and creativity and effort. I have the luxury to sit and hope, comfortable in my optimism about those general economic trends. But what damage has been done to individuals and their capacity to think well of themselves and what could again happen at any moment? I care for individuals in my community more than I care about gross economic metrics. Australia might overall do very well but if my community barely recovers, or recovers in a way that makes things seem unrecognisable, that is no win.

Tonight the Tokyo Olympics begin and everyone across the globe is united not only by sport but by their awareness (to almost the same degree) of exactly the same things: the rules and mandates, the masks and the menace. New cultural norms have descended upon us: some of lasting benefit, some of lasting hurt and harm. But so often so many are just aware of the averages and totals: the numbers in aggregates. The individuals are lost in the noise, the trees are lost in the forest: lost not directly to the virus but to the fallout from the decisions. It was not their mistake to make. The government and experts wanted to keep them safe from a single factor that could possibly have directly affected their lives (or not) in a society driven by fear of a virus which has become a fear of one’s fellows. The collective now matters far more than individual choices. We’ll all know in retrospect, one presumes. For good or ill many now realise: what they want matters not just less than that of the elites: it matters not at all because you’re either essential or non essential. Important or expendable.

The kookaburras continue to laugh in the early morning from one of the trees overlooking the empty road on which the shell of The Uncles now stands. Beside it, another Korean BBQ has closed and is boarded up: moving to a new premise recently made vacant by yet another BBQ going completely out of business around the corner. Multiple restaurants are now closed never to reopen in Strathfield alone but this is a pattern repeated across the some 900 suburbs in Greater Sydney. While the owners and workers at The Uncles Korean BBQ restaurant in Strathfield were not close personal friends, as much as anyone in one’s local suburb - we came to know each other well. We talked almost everyday as we passed one another (I live just off the restaurant strip) and come the weekend we would catch up together on that week; I would get a free soft drink, they would get a tip. They’re gone now. Some have returned to Korea. Some line up to apply for government benefits. Many, on working holiday or study visas do not qualify for government help. I have the emptiness of the shopfront to look into as I listen to the kookaburras laughing. The now unemployed workers have, I suppose, a far darker void to fill having learned now how “unessential” this society has taught them they are.

The world is underpopulated. We need more people. We should be thought of first and foremost as creators - not consumers. As individuals we are defined by what we create - not what we consume.

Besides, there is nothing to consume until it is first created anyway.

It is we, and we alone, that will find the solutions tomorrow to the problems of today - and solutions are only found through creativity. But creativity is limited precisely to the number of minds focussed on any given problem at any given time. The bottleneck is the finite number of minds - creative minds. Artificial General Intelligence is, for now, just a theoretical dream. Fears that vast numbers will starve or go unemployed and live lives worse than their ancestors are just that: fears. They are not reality. That pessimism about people is driven by a kind of phobia itself a product of propaganda that has worked to indoctrinate generations now. The dogma of anti-human sentiment has lead us to conclude generation after generation that we are the problem; and as the problem the more of us there are, the worse it is. Therefore the world is overpopulated and we are destroying it by existing with our pollution. This vision of the world - call it environmentalism - is far closer to true if you take seriously as guiding principles the negation of each of those claims:

People are not the problem. They are the solution.
The more of us there are, the better things become.
The world is underpopulated.

The more of us there are, the better the world becomes because only people can find the solutions to the problems.

Absent people there are, in a sense, no “problems” - just events literally no one understands one after another. It might well be thought that a changing environment is a “problem” for an animal or plant. But absent people, what happens to animals and plants is entirely dictated by their environment. They cannot think their way out of their circumstance. They are completely a product of their environments; they live or die purely based upon whether they "fit" the environment or not. Their genes survive or fail to survive given the accident of mutations fitting the organism to the environment or not. And if the environment changes too much too fast, the organism does not survive and perhaps neither does the species over time. And the environment is in a constant state of flux: that is the only constant; constant change. There will always be extreme weather. There will always be natural disasters and as time goes on we must expect even cosmic disasters will loom. We cannot foresee the future. There is a disaster coming which, if we are not here in large, wealthy, powerful numbers, will destroy life on Earth or at least radically transform the biosphere.

The only thing that can change of of this is us. Only we can detect the problem ahead of time; ahead of the deadly impact. To do this we must create knowledge - we must explain the world around us and understand what lethal natural forces threaten the existence of life on this planet - including ours. To do this we need creative people - far more of them - working on their own individual problems. Because any one of those may turn out to reveal a deeper problem that could affect us all; that could affect civilisation. So we need more people. 

Two existential dangers loom: the threats of anti-humanism and relentless pessimism. If people continue to become convinced we humans are the problem and not the solution, if they continue to feel so certain that the world is condemned because people in the pursuit of energy, technology and resources, they will argue for slower growth. They will increasingly impoverish developing populations and even developed populations. They will reduce the increased rate of wealth creation and will train their elders to indoctrinate their youngsters with even more perverse versions of these dogmas.

It is time we became as passionate as they are. It is time we turned to praising people - lifting them up - reminding them they as individuals are sacred creators; explainers of the universe around them. They are cosmically significant. The Earth is merely the first step. Not only is there a Planet B, there are Planets C, D, E, F, G, H and Infinity. There is the inhospitable to be made hospitable - by us. As we have done on this planet over and again. We must create knowledge faster - and that takes energy. And we need lots more energy more cheaply to everyone. We need more people. People are the most amazing things in the universe. 

We need more of them.

For more on this, see http://www.bretthall.org/cosmological-economics.html or the video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VlcQ4ZFKrKk

Sam Seder debated Yaron Brook on free markets (broadly speaking). The debate is here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=exHYiLDLq4E

The debate was very friendly - so I don’t know why the thumbnail chosen tries to make Yaron look angry and intense (he wasn't, it was all quite relaxed) and Sam look as if he’s bored or dealing with an ignoramus: 

Here are some time stamps and my reflections on things.
Around 8 mins 30sec: Sam basically argues the government confers rights on people. Yaron argues the case that we are born with rights and the role of the government is to protect them.
I’d say: Rights exist ontologically: they are there in reality. We come to understand these rights better over time. 
The relationship between courts and rights is isomorphic with the relationship between scientists and the physical world. The former explains and interprets the latter. But the latter exist independently of whether anyone knows about them. Coming to know about them takes effort and does not detract from their actual independent existence. It is not the government that creates rights for people anymore than it creates electrons or trees.

Mins:Secs (approximate)

10:30 - Yaron explains the role of government is settling properly rights disputes.

11:00: Sam suggests that *because* courts (the government) makes the decision in a property rights dispute that therefore they create the rights. 
My comment: this is the error of conflating what exists with our knowledge of it. Ontology vs epistemology.

19:30 Sam argues that we owe something to the government because they built infrastructure. Yaron points out that they should not have and in an ideal world would not.
My comment: when they do, the infrastructure is worse. Toll roads are better than free roads. If all roads were private there would be motivation to fix the potholes that otherwise go years without repair (for example). Yaron also observes that great technological advances like electricity and the steam engine did not require large government funding projects.

22:00 Sam suggests that slavery is a product of free markets. Yaron explains that slavery is a moral abomination - which is the main thing - but besides it was not economically the best thing anyway. It wasn't good for the people employing slaves (morally or economically, ultimately) and certainly not for the broader society.
My comment: Those slaves are people (as if this needs to be said) - and capitalism is a system for the free interactions between people and those people would have contributed much more to “the economy” and to wealth creation broadly if they were engaged in free contracts as capitalism says is morally right. Wealth creation today without slaves proceeds faster than in places that keep slaves. Slavery only happens when governments intervene with laws that deny the inherent human rights of people rather than protecting those rights.

23:30 Sam continues to bring up slavery each time Yaron agrees it's terrible and has nothing to do with what he is arguing.
My comment: The line taken by Sam is incongruous because Yaron is arguing for free markets. Free markets is about freedom *for everyone*. You need a government - a central authority - to deem slavery as a good. It is not a product of free markets - it is the opposite. But anyway: they both disagree with slavery - it is a moot point.

25:40 Sam argues the internet is proof government investment is sometimes needed to give us nice things. My comment: This is reminiscent of Neil deGrasse Tyson’s claim that *only* an entity like NASA could have done space travel. Yet now there are many private companies doing it. Imagine how much sooner we might have got to the moon if taxes were way lower and innovation therefore faster in the early 20th century?

26:30: Yaron and Sam debate the extent to which covid vaccines can be attributed to government funding. My comment: absent government imposts - regulations and taxation - of the pharmaceutical industry and government/socialist maligning of “the profit motive” and the entire industry: we’d have had these vaccines sooner. Maybe decades ago we’d have had covid vaccines *for the common cold* that could have helped with Covid-19.
Yaron says the government was an obstacle at every moment: private enterprise could not develop tests like they wanted to. Centrally planned vaccinations are worse than free markets.

29:45: Yaron: Government is nothing but force/coercion. It is only justified in self defence. It should not be involved in determining what research is done, what gets built, what gets funded and so on.

31:00 Sam brings up roads and the postal service. He says private corporations are “only for profit”. There exist medical interventions which are only available to a small number. Yaron talks about certain medications being regulated by government - eg anti-arthritis drugs taken off the market because the FDA deems the 10% increase in heart disease is too great a risk rather than leaving this decision between the patient and their doctor.
My comment: The drug being referred to is perhaps called Bextra: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valdecoxib But later they say it’s Vioxx. It seems the FDA has done this sort of thing over and again. Taken a drug off the market when they say the side effects are too bad for ANYONE to risk. But why can't we evaluate risk ourselves? Isn't that what we do in most situations? What food to buy and consume? Whether, to what extent and how we choose to drive in cars? To engage in sports that may be dangerous? To engage in bungee jumping or not? Hiking or not? Mountain climbing? Life is risky. Medicines can be risky. Why should the government be the thing that determines what level of risk is acceptable? How can they know? They are just error prone fallible people like the rest of us. Indeed more so, in some sense, as their "problem situation" is not ours - they do not have the relevant knowledge the individual is using in their context to assess the risk given their personal circumstances. 

In terms of Sam's complaint that some interventions are only available to small numbers of people: someone has to pay to begin with. Either we force everyone to pay or let billionaries/the wealthy pay *first* so that then the price comes down. Like the history of computing and space travel. The history of medicine is a history of new treatments first being expensive and then quickly rising "to scale" such that the price decreases. Government getting involved slows all this down.


34:00 Sam brings up the opiod epidemic. Yaron says all drugs should be legal and if you want to abuse them, that’s on you. Sam says the companies deceived doctors about how addictive the drugs are. My comment: we are all beings of reason. Reason is not deployed best by central authorities. People need to correct their own errors. Yaron: people need to be taught to take personal responsibility. The FDA causes corruption among doctors... 
My comment: ...because they are effectively outsourcing their critical thinking so that if the FDA says something is “safe” then they think this means it’s completely safe. They aren’t looking at the evidence that they are trained to look at and some might say is their duty to read, consult and evaluate.

38:00. Sam asks how people can get reliable information about the danger of a drug, after all if you google "mRNA vaccines" a lot of information is there telling you it’s unsafe. Yaron says: use your mind.
My comment: Yes, there are ways of evaluating information. People should take personal responsibility. It’s not like tomorrow we can eliminate the FDA. We need to slowly undo it and have society learn how to check sources. Also: you can have private enterprise check some of this stuff if you yourself have a good explanation about the methods of that private enterprise. Eg: there exists something in Australia called “Choice Magazine”. It’s not a government run thing - but it evaluates goods and services for a subscription fee. Ideally there would be lots of competing organisations that evaluate the safety and efficacy of things so that one central authority (like an FDA) on the one hand doesn't make mistakes on behalf of everyone and thus risk hurting everyone when they do err and on the other hand do not have authority to bring police action against those who disagree with their claims of risk, safety and so on. 

38:30 Sam argues that the FDA is needed because people can’t be experts in everything.
My comment: indeed. But this is not an argument for an authority. The FDA is just as prone to mistakes and bad incentives as anything else. Either we have a plurality of approaches to knowledge or we have centralised authorities. I would prefer multiple approaches.

Yaron: it should not be up to the central authority to give thumbs up or thumbs down.

Sam says that absent the FDA one would “trust” pharmaceutical companies.

My comment: I sense both Yaron and Sam see value in “trust” as a metric for evaluating knowledge..at least sometimes (like when you lack the knowledge yourself and need to turn to an expert). Namely: can you trust the source? Of course neither are for a Popperian view of knowledge as being objective (not about feelings or personal "certainty" or "confidence" and critical. Namely: that it's never about sources. It is about identifying and correcting errors - that way you make progress. People who think there are other kinds of epistemology get into long debates about which source is reliable and which source has more authority or which source contains "the truth" and so on. But if you give up the question of: by what authority can we deem this as the best source of knowledge (which, by the way includes our senses - because they too are fallible) then what we focus on is evaluating claims by the means of identifying errors. And once those errors are identified then we can correct them. Once we correct them we have made progress and generated some knowledge we did not have before and at no point did we have to argue over who had a more reliable source. We just concluded, for the purpose of some discussion, that this claim contained errors that this one did not. Correcting errors means we converge on the truth and can come to an agreement until such time as a new problem arises.

42:00 Yaron and Sam debate the building collapse in Miami. Sam blames the private construction. Yaron brings up government building inspectors that went into that building multiple times and said it was safe. The point is: nothing can perfectly guard against error but at least the private company is incentivised not to kill its customers. There is no incentive for a government inspector to be exceedingly careful. Yaron asks: who has an interest in the building not collapsing? The building owners have a much greater incentive. The insurance company also has huge incentives. Yaron rightly says: errors are going to happen. Quite right: what is the best way to identify and correct errors? People with an interest (“skin in the game”) or a busy regulator who has 10 buildings a day to check.

46:00 Sam says that the difference between him and Yaron morally is that he, Sam, thinks it the job of society to mitigate the suffering of others. Yaron says: yes - that is a difference. Yaron thinks it fine if YOU want to help “society” but when you then claim the force of the government over me to coerce me into helping you help society - that’s wrong. You are then imposing your values (about which we have a dispute) on me. Yaron’s perspective is: that is wrong.
I would just add: if one cannot persuade by argument, this is no reason to insist force must then be used. But Sam would say some things are more important. And this is where the force always comes in. Socialists cannot win the argument by persuasion and so this is why they resort to force. Capitalism simply says: persuade me (to purchase your good or service) - under no circumstances force me to hand over money to a product, service provider or cause without convincing me first. Socialists bring a gun to the table and say "Is this convincing enough?".

49:00 They return to the issue of a drug being banned by the FDA. Yaron says it should always be between him and his doctor to evaluate the risks and benefits. Sam says “but you’re smarter than most people”. Yaron disagrees and says he has a higher opinion of others.
My comment: this is a deep point of difference rarely explored. Those on the left have a terribly low opinion of their fellows. They fear others make terrible mistakes and the government has a duty to prevent them making errors. Thus we have “safetyism” - they rope off areas around small bumps in the ground, they put warning signs at the entrance to national parks, they think it good that the “experts” in authority in the government deem things safe or not because the average person is too stupid to think for themselves. The fact is “we are all equal in our infinite ignorance” and only differ in the small bits of knowledge we do have. But we can always make errors. Including the government authorities. So in that situation it is always better to have a plurality of approaches to any situation than to have the authority deem one approach as the true approach. The case of what drugs should or should not be legal to take is exactly that. It is strange, therefore, where the left will argue for the liberalisation of marijuana or even other recreational drugs but insist that medicines which might have some risk be heavily regulated or banned. Is Sam for banning marijuana? Or even aspirin given then number of deaths each year? About 21 people die per million doses of aspirin: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16086703/#:~:text=Death%20rate%20attributed%20to%20NSAID,to%20low%2Ddose%20aspirin%20use.

50:00 they finish in a very civil and friendly way. 

Afterwards: Sam (now joined by his co-host) are fixated on the idea that drug and building regulation is proof positive the government is needed. They miss the point that even with the government regulation people die from drugs and building collapses and ignore Yaron’s argument that in part this could be attributed to people becoming too lazy in their thinking, forgoing personal responsibility and not thinking more carefully because they think the government makes errors at a rate less than individuals do. I would say that although institutions contain knowledge - often inexplicit- about how to ensure society runs smoothly while undergoing rapid change, this does not refute Yaron’s claim because in the case of regulations of buildings and drugs it is not in the interest of companies to kill or injure their customers.

Sam makes fun of the notion that people *should* “bone up” on medicines, learning about evaluating data and so on. Is it that silly? He is making fun of people being expected to learn about things that might have a major effect on their life. For example: learning about the side effects of medicines they are prescribed. Sam almost seems to talk himself out of his own position at 52:00mins where he pretends to be a doctor telling a patient that “3 out of 100 people who take this have a heart attack - here it is!”. But isn’t that precisely what happens? We would then look into those 3 people. Were they elderly? The other 97, were they cured of whatever ailed them? Etc. None of this seems an argument for the government being involved. Why “the government”? Why not other researchers? Again: why isn’t it just you and your doctor talking about the risks and making a judgement. Why should it be a bureaucrat who has never met you or know your situation be making a judgment long ago about what is best for you now? Sam almost seems to get this.

52:40: Sam says “Folks you’ve got a lot of reading to do.” This is a swipe at Yaron for telling people to take personal responsibility. Again, as if "you've got a lot of reading to do" means there is too much to know, you cannot possibly know everything. But - once more - it presumes the people in the government have done the reading (reliably!) and are better placed to evaluate for all circumstances and they are less prone to error. They are not. Indeed because they have no personal interest, they might not be focussed on the relevant information.

Slavery is brought up again. They talk about exploiting free labor. It is almost always the case that socialists think slavery is a product of capitalism. They do not understand that capitalism is the opposite to slavery. Capitalism is the theory that markets be free - that there is no coercion and that individuals can trade without coercion between each other. Slavery is coercion. It is taking a person and denying them the capacity to engage freely in the market. It is astonishing that the opposite to capitalism is said to be identical to it. It reminds me of people who claim critical rationalism is “dogmatic”. The very epistemology that refutes dogma is said to be identical to it. It is just like describing abstinence as a sexual position or starving yourself as an ideal form of nutrition. Capitalism is freedom. Socialism is the economic system where you must someones do work only for the benefit of someone else. That is far closer to slavery. Slavery is where you always and only work for someone else - it’s never voluntary. Socialism is where at least some of the hours or days you work each week are for paying taxes. Some of the money you earn is not for you - it’s for someone else. There is nothing voluntary about it. You cannot leave the system. It is, therefore, a compulsory non-voluntary system. Capitalism is where you work and the fruits of that work - your earnings - you keep. All of it. And you can leave anytime. You are not compelled to do things you don’t want to. You freely enter into an agreement - a contract. 

Sam makes some remarks on morality. He says that libertarianism is about denying empathy or concern with human suffering. Sam talks about how if people choose to not get health insurance then under Yaron’s ideas those people would die. Yes. But in that world people would come to learn you need to have health insurance. It’s rather like “if you don’t buy food and water you’ll die of starvation”. Yes. What should we have? Government force feeding people because they are too ignorant to take care of it themselves? But, by the way, in the very rare cases people cannot feed themselves, private charities do indeed help people. Even in systems with “universal health care” (or something like it) not everything is covered and in those cases then private charities do indeed come to fill in the gaps. Wouldn’t it be better if everyone was taxed less so that if you did become aware of a serious condition you had that then you would have the money saved because you’d not spent the last 20 or 30 years paying other people’s healthcare via your taxes?

Sam has a swipe at Yaron in the last minute about not going into depth on anything. I think this was an unfair comment and only undermines his otherwise good, friendly and honest encounter throughout the discussion.