Wonderland - Season I Complete
Table of Contents:
1. Philosophy: Who Needs It? - P1: The Maze - P2: Deny - P3: Might - P4: Rely - P5: Right 2. The Metaphysics of Complexity - P1: Mathematical Efficiency - P2: Adaptation in Motion - P3: Governing Features - P4: The Metaphysics of Complexity 3. Emergence & Epistemology - P1: Aunt Hillary - P2: Critical Realism - P3: Social Science 4. Free Will, Ethics, and Religion - P1: Ant Fugue, Phew! - P2: Science, Spirituality, Sam Harris - P3: The Croak and Call - P4: Just do it, Jesus Christ, Jordan Peterson 5. Hero: Moral Ego - P1: The Gate - P2: Good Reason - P3: The Woods - P4: Personal Purpose - P5: The Plan - P6: Self Esteem - P7: The End and The Beginning 6. The Structure of Freedom - P1: Welcome to UM - P2: Anarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny - P3: Here There Be Dragons - P4: Money, Value, and Virtue - P5: The Princess in the Palace - P6: Royals, Realms, and Patchwork Politics 7. On Land - P1: Power & Protection - P2: Dealing with Dragons - P3: Within the Walls - P4: What Else to Explore 8. Protection & Police - P1: What is Protection? - P2: The Guardians - P3: The Community 9. Rights & Responsibilities - P1: The Contract - P2: Children & Dependents - P3: Becoming a Citizen 10. Commerce & Contracts - P1: Contracts - P2: Rules & Regulations - P3: Intellectual Property
1. Philosophy: Who Needs It?
Welcome to Wonderland. This series will present a cohesive philosophical framework from the bottom-up. It begins with the value of philosophy itself and then starts to explore the realms of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and morality. The second half then delves into politics and investigates the proper functions and role of government. But as the root of all ideas is philosophy, we are going to start with that. The question today being: What is philosophy? And who needs it? My answer is everyone, and I am going to try to convince you why. Let’s start off with a story...
Part One: The Maze
I want you to imagine that you are lying in a sunny field, and out of the corner of your eye you spot a flash of white. You sit up, and realize it’s a rabbit, in a waistcoat, with a pocket watch. Knowing where this story goes you chase after it, and soon find yourself tumbling down into wonderland. But, upon landing, you quickly realize it is not at all what you expected. There is no hallway full of doors, or table with instructional food. Instead, you find yourself in a completely novel place. You have wound up somewhere inside of a great hedge maze. The walls of which are too tall to climb or see over, and too dense to pass easily through. You explore a little, looking for the white rabbit, or at least, a way out, but find nothing. Just a seemingly endless array of hedges and pathways going off in every direction. You start to worry. What have I gotten myself into?
You wonder. And you look around, with three questions on your mind:
Where am I?
How can I discover it?
What should I do?
Alright. let’s pause and talk about what any of this has to do with philosophy. Now, the maze in this story is going to be a metaphor for life. And just like Alice lost in Wonderland, we have all found ourselves thrust into this big, beautiful, confusing world, and are doing our best to discover what rules govern it, what tools we can use to explore it, and what on earth we should do while we are here. The questions you must confront upon finding yourself lost in Wonderland are the same questions every person must consider living here, on earth.
Of course, some people would say that the answers are self-evident. Where am I? Well, I live in Canada. How do I know it? Oh, it’s obvious! Just look around. What should I do? Hmm, well that one is a little trickier, but, probably whatever everyone else is doing? Or, whatever I’m told? The only problem is that these answers are not very meaningful or fulfilling. They speak to the elements of our daily lives which are superficial, rather than fundamental. And they are completely unhelpful the moment you find yourself in a novel situation, like lost in a maze. This is because the conventional answers speak only to the contextual nature of the world you are living in—not the fundamental one.
Philosophy is the study of the fundamental nature of existence, of ourselves, and of our relationship to existence. You might notice that these three areas align with the three questions posed in Wonderland, and they represent the three primary domains of philosophy.
The study of the fundamental nature of existence is known as metaphysics, the answer to the question, “Where am I?” Metaphysics asks: are there firm and stable laws which regulate the universe? Or are things entirely relative and relational? Is there a consistent, coherent structure to reality? Or is everything random chaos? Does reality exist independent of our minds? Or as a product of it? The nature of your actions, attitudes, and ambitions will differ according to which set of answers you come to accept. But no matter what set of conclusions you reach, you will be confronted by a corollary question: “How do I know it?”
Epistemology is the study of our relationship to existence and how we acquire knowledge, the answer to the question, “How can I discover it?”. Epistemology asks: is it possible to acquire knowledge about the nature of reality? And if so, how? Are our senses reliable tools to navigate the world? Or are they easily influenced and impressionable? Do we learn through reason, or revelation? Are our emotions and intuitions valuable sources of information? Or are they irrational and fallible?
From these two branches, a third emerges: ethics, which is the study of ourselves and what constitutes moral action. The answer to the question “What should I do?” Ethics asks: is moral action possible, or, desirable? And if so, what does it look like?
So, if the maze is a metaphor for life, and philosophy is represented by the questions you must confront in order to escape the maze, then this story is going to demonstrate the consequences of different sets of belief. Either reality exists to be contended with, or it does not. Either we are capable of acquiring knowledge about the world, or we are not. Either we can act in a way which is purposeful and productive, or we can not. You would think that these basic yes or no questions should have obvious answers, but right now we live in a world where we can’t even get on the same page about the fundamentals. Philosophy does not represent some abstract realm of questions without consequences. You are operating by a philosophy, right now, whether you realize it or not. And the answers that you come to accept will have a direct impact not only on your course of your own life, but also the lives of people around you, and, quite possibly, the fate of the world. So, let’s return to the maze and examine some of those consequences.
Part Two: Deny
You are currently lost inside of a great hedge maze, looking for a way out. You wander around for ages, but the further you go the more vast and complex the maze seems to become. You walk for hours, not knowing if you are moving closer to, or further away from a potential escape. Or maybe you are simply caught in a loop, retracing old steps without even realizing it and making no progress whatsoever. Eventually, after a few frustrating hours, you decide to stop and have a rest, considering the strange series of events that brought you here: chasing the white rabbit down into the hole, and discovering a whole new world that seems to be ruled by neither rhyme nor reason.
Suddenly it all makes sense, you realize that you must be dreaming. Of course! There is no such thing as Wonderland, what were you thinking? I’ll just pinch myself and wake up, you decide. You spend a good five minutes trying to wake up but nothing works. You start to panic. Where am I?! You wonder once again. How did I get here? How do I get out? Can I get out? How do I know any of this is even real? None of it makes any sense! If I am not dreaming, then am I stuck in some sort of sadistic simulation? Or, maybe I have died and gone to hell, destined to an eternity of trying to escape an endless maze… like Sisyphus.
You feel trapped, helpless, hopeless, and confused. Overwhelmed by the vast and complex nature of the world you have found yourself in, you do the only thing you can do: you curl up into a ball on the ground and begin to bawl yourself. Eventually, night starts to fall, and you can feel your stomach growling with hunger. But you ignore it, you have no interest in moving or looking for food or water. You have decided to accept the inevitable and surrender yourself to the mercy of the maze. Days pass by, and, eventually, you pass out for good.
Let’s pause again. Now, this outcome might sound a bit stupid, but it represents something important: this is what happens when you refuse to accept reality on reality’s terms—when you deny a metaphysical understanding of the universe. Winding up in Wonderland without any clue what to do, the first thing you might do is question the nature of your reality. Thrust into a world that feels too overwhelming to understand, your first instinct may be to insist that it cannot be understood at all. You might want to tell yourself that you are dreaming, or living in a simulation, or any other story that exonerates you from having to discover where you are. Life is vast and complex, and it may seem easier to try to deny it, to surrender yourself to the causal forces of the universe rather than attempt to master them. But, clearly this method is not very effective. To deny existence is to become a victim to it. You are alive, you are in a maze; that means something real. You can try to avoid this truth, to make it into something different or more palatable, to avoid the responsibilities of having to think, or act. But ultimately, the consequences of reality will catch up with you. Better to try to contend with it a little, first. So, let’s try again.
Part Three: Might
You wake up back in the maze, surprised to discover that the thirst, hunger, and deterioration from the previous days has vanished. Your body seems to have returned to the state it was in when you first entered Wonderland. Renewed with new energy, and, being familiar with the plot of Groundhog Day, you decide that there must be some way to conquer the maze, since, apparently, you won’t die trying.
You choose a new strategy: instead of wandering aimlessly, you decide to pick one direct path and commit to it—no matter what gets in your way. You walk forward for a little while and pretty soon encounter a hedge. But, instead of trying to go around it, you start to force your way through it, and begin the painstaking process of ripping apart leaves and twigs and branches. Eventually you’ve created enough room that you can squeeze your body through and out, onto the other side (acquiring a few scratches along the way). However, it is not long until you encounter another hedge and have to repeat the same tedious process all over again. After a dozen more iterations of this your entire body is covered in scratches and your hands are red and raw. But you persevere—determined to make it out alive or die trying, emerging from each hedge more shredded and bloodied than the one before it as twigs catch on and tear at open wounds. But every time you grow weak and willing to surrender, you simply turn around and look at how much progress you have made, and that knowledge gives you the courage to continue.
Finally, after days without food or water, you begin to break through a hedge and reveal an open field on the other side. You joyously force your way through this last hedge and tumble out of the maze, collapsing on the other side exhausted but victorious. You decide to rest for a moment and close your eyes, enjoying your newfound freedom. Unintentionally, you drift off, and when you wake up you are overwhelmed by a sense of dread, as you realize that your wounds have healed, and you are once again back where you started, lost in the middle of the maze. But this time, the walls have turned to stone—you’re not going to get away with that again.
So, what are the philosophical implications of this second strategy? Well, you have realized the need to accept and contend with reality, rather than deny it, but you are refusing to play by the rules of the game. You have decided that the structure of the maze, the logic which dictates its form, is unimportant, since you have discovered a way to work around it. Therefore there is no need for you to acquire knowledge about the world, since you are able to manipulate its structure by sheer strength and force of will. But, as we all know, might is not right, since it is not a consistent principle. While forcing reality may reap you rewards in some circumstances, it is an unreliable tool. Your success was an accident of your environment; if the walls had been made of stone to begin with, you still be just as lost as you were in the first scenario. You have not adopted an epistemology that allows you to gain any knowledge about the rules which govern your environment. Therefore, the outcome you achieved, breaking through to that open field, was unearned. You cheated reality rather than mastered it, and this method will only get you so far. It is a bad guiding principle of behaviour since it cannot be transferred across different circumstances. People have different capacities for physical strength, and strength alone does not demonstrate moral authority; it is randomly distributed and inconsistently effective. Moreover, this brutal process of forcing reality to bend to your whims is agonizing to engage in. It does not feel right because it is not right, and it doesn’t last. We all know this. It’s like that old proverb of teaching a man to fish—if instead of learning how to fish yourself you go kill the fisherman and eat his food, but then later you go hungry since now there is no one around who knows how to fish! In other words; force is unsustainable. Failure to adopt real solutions to problems means that you will continue to encounter them. This is because you have not discovered anything meaningful about the system you are in. Breaking apart the form of the maze for your temporary success does not solve the puzzle, for you must abide by the rules of the game. Force alone is untethered to reliable knowledge or consistent principles, and is therefore not a viable solution. So, let’s go back to the maze.
Part Four: Rely
The hedges have turned to stone, and you are lost once again. You are ready to cry out at the futility of it all when you notice something else is new. Lying on the ground in front of you is a scrap of paper. You pick it up, and are shocked to discover a list of directions. A series of “left’s”, “right’s”, and “straight ahead’s” running down the length of the page. It seems like someone is trying to help you out! Elated, you immediately start racing through its prescribed path, running through the stone hallways with confidence and zeal.
However, it is not long until you encounter a problem—you reach a junction where the paper says you must go straight, but only left or right are viable options. Did you possibly miss a step? Or take a wrong turn? You try to retrace your steps, but quickly become frustrated as you realize that you have no clue when, where, or how you lost your way. Then you realize that maybe you didn’t even set off in the right direction. Since left and right are all a matter of perspective, if you had been facing the opposite way when you began you would have taken an entirely different path. You crumple the paper up in defeat, realizing that you are too far from your starting point for it to have any utility. Even if the instructions had been useful once, there is no way that you can apply them now that you are lost again.
You chuck the note aside, but as you do another one flutters down, like a gift from God. This one, instead of relative directions, contains an objective drawing: an image of a maze. Finally, a guide with real utility! Since it doesn’t matter where you start, you can always orient yourself relative to the map to figure out where you ought to go next. You study the diagram and start trying to compare it to your surroundings, looking for key junctions or defining features which could help you get your bearings. You spend a few hours walking around looking for similarities between your maze and the paper one, trying to figure out where you are in relation to the map. But every time you think you have it figured out, you take a turn and encounter some obstacle or pathway that is not accounted for in the paper analogue. Eventually, you are begrudgingly forced to admit that although you have a map of a maze, it is not a map of your maze. Any similarities are completely coincidental, and knowledge of one will not help you navigate the other.
Time to pause and analyze. If the last scenario represented a rejection of knowledge in favour of might, then this one represents the problem of trying to acquire knowledge through appeals to authority. In other words, how information can be unreliable when gained through someone else’s experience, rather than your own. It doesn’t really matter where these notes came from or how they got to you—they could have been left behind by other adventurers, or the product of divine intervention. The point is that they represent cultural norms, accepted values, and inherited knowledge. While these guides may have been viable in one time, or in one circumstance, that does not necessarily mean that they carry over to your own. This is because in order to use these tools you have to start from a certain position (like the list of directions), or in a certain context (like the map). And while the maze is a metaphor for life, there is no reason to assume that any two mazes are alike. That is to say, the things that you need to do to achieve success in your own life might be very different than the process that worked for somebody else. Maybe some role model of yours says that the key to their success is going for a run every morning and drinking a green smoothie, but repeating these habits in your own life does not guarantee that you are going to have the same outcome. Similarly, many religious beliefs and practices come from a time very different than our own, and while they may have had practical utility back then, it is important to be consistently questioning and evaluating to what extent those moral standards and norms still hold true. Systems of understanding that worked for a certain time, context, or circumstance, may very well now be outdated relics of the past. This is why blind obedience to authority is never an effective way to conduct yourself through life. You must be able to independently assess how useful or relevant a given idea is by comparing it to your objective reality. Instructions alone are not enough, we are looking for principles of solution, not prescribed paths. Let’s try again.
Part Five: Right
Upon discovering that the map will not help you any more than the note that came before it, you are once again overwhelmed by a sense of dread and frustration. “If only there was a way to find the right path!” You cry out. “All I need is one right path that would show me the way!” As you say this, an idea dawns upon you. An idea so elegant, and so simple, you are shocked you had not considered it before. What if, instead of adhering to a certain direction or form, as the notes had suggested, you adhere to a certain methodology. That is to say, a certain means of solution rather than a specific mode. To accept reality, and not attempt to deny it or wish it away. To accept the logic, the structure, the rigidity of the maze, rather than trying to cheat it through force. And to accept the uniqueness of your own circumstance, rather than trying to replicate the tactics that might have worked for others. To look for the consistent principles which will not vary depending upon the context you find yourself in.
Where am I? I am lost in a maze. How can I discover it? Through my own senses and mind. What should I do? Use the tools available to me to commit myself to the only thing I know for sure: the rule of rules. The walls of the maze. Its limitations are its structure. The only clue you need to escape the maze is the maze itself. It creates its own rules. To discover them, you need only to commit yourself to the system you have found yourself in, and follow through.
You put your right hand on the right wall of the maze and walk forward, allowing the structure itself guide you to where you need to go. It will be a long process, a tedious one, you will have to encounter every dead end in order to determine which direction will bring about a promising lead. But in doing so, you will eventually discover the way out. Strict adherence to this one consistent thread will guide you to where you need to go next. You are using the system itself to discover how you should navigate it. This is a first principle. One that works for all mazes, across all circumstances.
This is what philosophy provides. A framework that teaches you not what to think, not where to go, but how to think: the process through which you can tether yourself to reality and in doing so navigate its structure for yourself. Through the commitment to metaphysical reality and epistemological capacity, a moral duty naturally arises. Follow that thread, that tether, that wall, wherever it may lead, and in doing so you will discover the nature of the world around you and how you ought act in it.
My philosophy is committed to this principle of process: the notion of truth and our capacity for discovery. Once accepted, this premise cannot fail you. It is not based in your whims or your wants or what someone else told you, but the world exactly as it is. It is only once you have discovered this guiding principle, this thread of reasoning that pulls you forward, that you are finally able to escape the maze, and explore the rest of Wonderland.
This is what comes next. Now that I have described what philosophy is, and why you need it, I will outline what exactly my philosophy looks like. I have demonstrated why I believe metaphysics and epistemology are necessary, but I have not yet described what my personal interpretation of those domains are, only that they exist and can be known. So, in part two I will talk about metaphysics. I have a commitment to reality, but what is the process through which reality unfolds? What are the rules of the game? How does the maze acquire its structure? What are the fix and flux points which combine to give us the forms we are familiar with? My answer is complexity.
2. The Metaphysics of Complexity
Complexity theory, or the study of Complex Adaptive Systems, represents something fundamental about the nature of the universe. Once you understand how complex systems work, suddenly many areas of life will make more sense and be easier analyze. To better comprehend how these systems function, we are going to go back down the rabbit hole into Wonderland to explore by analogy. Our last chapter ended with you escaping the maze, equipped with philosophy as the tool which will help you navigate the world. This means using your own senses and mind to perceive and integrate your surroundings. But what is the fundamental nature of the universe we are trying to understand? What are the underlying mechanisms which determine what can exist? How do they work? Well, let’s explore a little...
Part One: Mathematical Efficiency
You walk out of the maze and are greeted by a vast forest. Not knowing where to go, you decide to go straight ahead until you encounter something of interest. But there isn’t really anything interesting at all, just trees. So, after a while you decide to study one of those. You plop down on the ground with your back up against a truck, looking up at the canopy of branches above you. As you examine the web of interlocking lines, you start to notice the rules which give the trees their form. How the same patterns repeat over and over again. Each branch grows, sometimes with a few offshoots, until eventually splitting up into two smaller branches. The process repeats all the way up to the top of the tree, going from one to two to four to eight and so on. Each time a split occurs, the overall proportions remain the same. You can imagine how cutting off a branch at the top of the tree would create a much smaller version of the whole, maintaining the same trunk to branch ratio. Except, of course, for the leaves.
But the leaves too, you notice, picking a fallen one up off the ground, follow the same pattern of self-similarity. The stem turns into a vein that runs down the centre of the leaf, and from that main vein smaller ones shoot off on either side, and then even smaller ones grow off of those. But then the pattern seems to be lost, as the capillaries lose their more formal arrangement and turn into seemingly random networks. But are they? As you hold the leaf up to your eyes, you notice that the dry mud cracked on the ground beneath you shares the same pattern. With the cracks, like the capillaries, always meeting at 3 or 4 point junctions, breaking up into ever smaller subsystems. Now why would this be?
As you consider this, you hear a low rumble as the skies of Wonderland quickly turn overcast and a thunderstorm begins to roll in. You watch as the first bolt of lightning shoots down. However, instead of a quick flash, the skies of Wonderland allow you to see the entire process in super-slow motion. You watch as the lightning branches down from the sky in a pattern that looks almost identical to the trees growing in the forest; with a network of leaders splitting up and trailing down in different directions. The leader that makes contact with the earth first then sends a second, much stronger bolt back up into the sky. What is going on here?
The electricity is stretching out, seeking the path of least resistance. Once connection to the ground occurs—lightning strikes. The same process is happening to determine how drying mud cracks in a way that relieves the most tension, and the capillaries on the leaves form to allow for the most efficient transportation of nutrients. So too are the trees, governed by this process which is driven by ease. Other examples include the hexagonal hives of honey bees, or soap bubbles drifting in the breeze. What you are witnessing are the manifestations of mathematics in nature. For the same reason that plants grow in Fibonacci spirals, all of the natural world operates in a way that seeks to minimize energy expenditure. Getting the most bang for your buck, if you like. This implies that many seemingly distinct phenomena are actually regulated by the same underlying drives and mechanisms. Which is why the trees, the leaves, the dried mud, and the lightning all share some similar features. The patterns that you see repeating everywhere are not accidental, but innate. This is due to a few very simple decision making rules which lead to intelligent, complex behaviour. That’s all math is really: simple rules with complex consequences. Although not comprehensive complex adaptive systems in and of themselves, manifestations of mathematics in nature provide some key insights into how complex systems work.
Part Two: Adaptation in Motion
Complex adaptive systems are composed of individual agents which interact with one another as well as their environment, giving rise to emergent behaviour which cannot be reduced to the sum its parts. They can be found almost anywhere, from the activity of ant colonies to the formation of sand dunes, flocks of birds and schools of fish. Their dynamics influence the evolution of plants and animals, interactions within ecosystems, and even the weather. And that’s only in the natural realm! Complexity is even more abundant in the social sphere. Some examples include financial markets, traffic jams, the rise and fall of culture, the evolution of language, the internet, social movements, academic citations, machine learning algorithms… It would probably be easier to list the realms of human activity that aren't governed by complex systems, rather than the ones that are. But what’s really interesting about complex systems isn’t where they are, because you can find them almost everywhere, but how they work.
I’ll explain through the classic example of an ant colony. Any complex system contains three main components: agents, drives, and signals. In an ant colony, the ants are the agents, the food they forage is the drive, and the pheromone trails they leave behind are the signals. A single forager ant will wander along until it discovers a source of food, which it then collects and brings back to the colony. But it leaves behind a pheromone trail which is then used by other ants to guide them to the food supply. As more ants harvest from the same source the signal will become stronger and recruit even more ants, until all the food is harvested. After this point, new ants that follow the trail only to discover no food will return home without leaving a signal, therefore dampening that signal over time and allowing new food sources to be discovered. Now, if all of the ants in the colony directed all of their attention to only harvesting this one resource, better, more fruitful alternatives may be overlooked. Thankfully, ants are not very intelligent, and some will wander off the beaten path, allowing for the possibility of better alternatives to be discovered. In this way, complex systems use random error to their advantage. As Nassim Taleb would say, they are antifragile. The imperfection of their agents makes them stronger, rather than weaker.
Another example of a complex system would be how memes spread. In this case, internet users are the agents, their drive is entertaining or interesting content, and the signal is how much engagement a piece of content receives. A funny meme posted to a message board like 4chan will be picked up by community members and shared to other online spaces, where the same process reoccurs on larger and larger scales until it eventually hits the front page of Reddit and is being talked about by late night hosts. Of course, a given meme doesn’t stay relevant for long, so the same cycle must keep recurring to keep up with current culture. This is why they are called complex adaptive systems. They are not static, but constantly changing and evolving in relation to a given context or environment.
I should mention that complex systems are not that same thing as complicated ones. Complicated systems have linear, 1-1 cause and effect relationships, like the inner workings of your car. There may be lots of different parts and components working together to produce a given outcome, but the parts are not interrelated. You slamming on the breaks of your car will have no impact on the motion of your steering wheel. Whereas in a complex system, it would. Complex systems are nonlinear, meaning that the agents of the system are interrelated in a way that makes causality much more difficult to follow. A small change at one point in the network can create a ripple effect which produces much larger consequences in seemingly unrelated areas.
This idea of nonlinearity has another important consequence—complex systems are entangled. Their components cannot be broken apart and studied in isolation using the methods of traditional science, for information is lost in the process. It is not just the agents that must be studied, but also the relationships between the agents. Imagine trying to understand how an ant colony operates by taking each ant and observing it in isolation—I doubt you would get very far. The interactions between the agents have meaningful consequences. While made up of individual components, the system is not simply the sum of its parts. It has certain unique, emergent characteristics.
So, how can we study complex systems if the whole is too specific, and the parts are too general? Well, they are all mediated by and subject to certain governing features. Despite taking on such different forms as social networks and sand dunes, there are consistent dynamics that all complex systems share. If we can understand one system and the mechanisms which govern its behaviour, it becomes much easier to take those insights and apply them elsewhere.
Part Three: Governing Features
Different complexity theorists all have slightly different opinions about what traits define a complex system, for their governing features often overlap and interrelate. I have selected a few key concepts to outline and define, and hopefully by understanding
these ideas you can begin to develop an intuition as to what complex adaptive systems are and how they work.
To start, complex systems are self-similar: I alluded to this concept at the beginning of the chapter back in Wonderland—the fractal-like way where the same patterns and features can be observed at different levels of analysis, zooming in or out. Trees and lightning bolts are composed of miniature versions of themselves which share the same traits. Similarly, financial markets or weather patterns can be analyzed and understood on a global scale, or by country, or by city. Each contains its own internal dynamics while simultaneously being subject to influences from the broader system it is nested inside of. You can also apply this idea to the internet, where communities are subdivided into smaller and smaller niches. For instance, you can get online and go on social media. Specifically, Tumblr. Specifically, fandom Tumblr. Specifically, the Doctor Who fandom. Specifically, Doctor Who fanfiction. Specifically, Doctor Who fanfiction set in a setting where… you get the idea. In each of these progressively smaller communities you will find that there are certain key players who are well known and carry a disproportionate amount of influence.
In fact, influence on any level of analysis follows a power law, or Pareto distribution, where 20% of the agents will account for 80% of the overall influence. It’s important to note that when I say agents here, I do not necessarily mean people. If you are looking to analyze the Amazon rainforest, then trees might be the agents, where 80% of the density is concentrated in 20% of the plants. We tend to think of normal, or bell curve distributions as being the universal default, but this is untrue. Random distributions only occur when the agents are independent from one another. So people’s heights or shoe sizes could be charted on a bell curve, but not their incomes. When agents are interdependent, like in a complex system, random distributions no longer apply. In fact, complex systems are so ubiquitous that if you are ever unsure of a statistic, you can simply make it up with a relatively high degree of accuracy. For instance, 20% of books published make up 80% of sales, 20% of cities hold 80% of the global population, 20% of roads get driven on 80% of the time… you get the idea. But why is this the case?
I like to call it the “law of gravity”, or, that which has, gains! The rich get richer. If two actors of equal talent go in for an audition and one lands the part, then they are more likely to get more acting jobs in the future. Having garnered one major role increases the odds that you land another. A book that ends up on the New York Times bestseller list is bound to sell more copies than one that doesn’t. A stronger signal, be it book sales or pheromone trails, means that more agents are likely to go down that path in the future. This is what we call a feedback loop. Understanding how these dynamics work can help us become aware of their potential shortcomings. It is completely possible for a feedback loop to start perpetuating inefficient or outdated systems. For example, the QWERTY keyboard. QWERTY is an intentionally inefficient typing system, designed back in the day of mechanical typewriters where typing too quickly could jam the keys. Now this is no longer an issue, but since everyone learned to type on QWERTY keyboards their legacy has remained, and we are all much slower typists than we could be as a result of this. Efforts to introduce better, alternative keyboards exist, but established norms can be hard to escape when we’ve all grown accustomed to a certain way of doing things. Being mindful of how feedback loops work can help us to disrupt them when necessary. But we have to know why we are disrupting them, what’s changed?
This goes back to the idea that complex systems are adaptive, meaning the behaviours of a system will adjust and change over time. This can either be in response to a shift in the system’s internal state of affairs, or the external environment. The most popular example of this is Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. A common misconception about Darwinism is that Darwin believed in “survival of the fittest”, while really what he championed is, “survival of the best suited to the environment”. This more nuanced position takes into account the fact that the environment is constantly changing and evolving. Therefore “fitness” cannot be conceptualized in a vacuum; it must exist in relation to a broader context. This process works through variation, selection, and retention. For biologists, this refers to genetic mutation, but it can also apply to ant trails, book sales, or scammy emails.
A bot that has been programmed to send emails soliciting money will probably vary the types of messages it sends, and then generate more messages depending on which style is the most successful. As people learn not to trust mysterious messages from Nigerian princes, the program will then have to adjust its behaviour and employ new tactics. That being said, there are certain attractor states in all complex systems that adaptations will gravitate towards. In the realm of evolutionary biology, camouflage is a strong example of this. Certain patterns and colorings will consistently crop up in insects, amphibians, and other animals. Despite coming from dramatically different evolutionary trajectories, some adaptations contain universal utility. Although again, advantages always exist in relation to a given environment. In some circumstances, a multiplicity of equally viable attractors is possible, while other contexts demand a singular solution. An example of this may be the path you take to cut through a forest. Depending upon the obstacles at hand, there might be one ideal path which is clearly the most efficient, or there might be a few different options that are all equally viable.
As was said earlier, complex systems are nonlinear, meaning that the size of an effect can be much greater than the initial cause. Consider how a rock jostled from the right nook on a steep cliff will cause an avalanche, or the straw that broke the camel’s back. There are certain tipping points in complex systems where a small, seemingly irrelevant push will create very large consequences. You might have heard of this phenomenon referred to as the butterfly effect, where it is said that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings can cause hurricanes; or how some small difference in initial conditions can produce dramatically different outcomes. This is because, due to the feedback loops mentioned earlier, a minor cause can compound into much greater consequences. Maybe a single wandering north discovers a food supply which ensures that the colony having enough food to survive the winter. Or maybe one upvote on a meme makes the difference between it going viral or never being seen again. We like to think that the influence of our actions is limited to ourselves, but complexity theory suggests that the stakes may be far greater than you could possibly imagine.
Complex systems form from the bottom-up, meaning they are driven by the simple decisions of individual agents. If you have ever wondered how flocks of birds or schools of fish move in such beautiful patterns, here is your answer. There is no head bird or fish that is calling the shots, each one is simply reacting to the movement of its neighbors while maintaining a certain speed and distance. These simple decision making rules are what compound and lead to complex outcomes. A great example of this is how researchers have started using slime mold to map roadways. This unique type of mold will, like ant colonies, spread out and create networks in relation to available food sources. A team of researchers took oat flakes and arranged them in a pattern that mimicked cities surrounding Tokyo. Within a few hours, the slime mold had spread throughout the flakes and taken on a shape that looked nearly identical to Tokyo's subway system. This subway system had been meticulously designed by a team of expert engineers, and yet some unintelligent slime mold was able to replicate their results with an amazing degree of accuracy. Without any centralized control or planning, an organized, efficient outcome was achieved. But how is this possible?
This leads us to the final and arguably most interesting component of complexity, which is that complex adaptive systems have emergent characteristics which cannot be reduced to the sum of their parts. Often, this emergence can look like some form of intelligence or hierarchical control. But you will not find these qualities within the individual agents—they only come to exist through the relationships and interactions between them. However, once these features emerge, they come to possess their own unique causal power. We understand this pretty intuitively in terms of culture; there is no government body or top-down control determining what music, food, or fashion is going to be popular. Our preferences are determined by the people around us. Once a certain fashion trend or fad food takes hold, it then starts to influence the behaviour of individuals. Causality begins to work in two directions. People make culture, but culture also makes people. This phenomena of emergence has lots if interesting implications when it comes to understanding consciousness, but more on that later. Now that I’ve outlined some governing features of complex systems, hopefully you are beginning to develop an intuition for what they are and how they work.
Part Four: The Metaphysics of Complexity
So, to tie all of this back to metaphysics. I do not wish to argue that all aspects of reality are innately complex adaptive systems, but they do consistently give rise to increasingly complex behaviour. They are anti-entropic, meaning they produce order out of chaos. They become more organized and more structured as time goes on, rather than less. And they can be found almost everywhere, both in the natural and the social realm. Understanding how these systems work increases our capacity to think critically about the environments we find ourselves in—the mechanisms that brought about their creation as well as possible shifts that could lead to their collapse. There are consistent rules at play, but they result in contingent and ever-changing outcomes. For this reason, an emphasis on complex thinking illustrates how any truth claim always exists in relation to a given context. But these truths emerge out of, and are regulated by, certain higher order mechanisms which are governed by consistent principles. This is the case I want to argue, especially because I think it has extremely interesting implications when it comes to what I call nesting objectivism and relativism.
If you recall, in the last chapter I described metaphysics as asking, “are there firm and stable laws which regulate the universe? Or are things entirely relative and relational? Is there a consistent, coherent structure to reality? Or is everything random chaos?” These questions essentially boil down to the timeless debate between objectivism and relativism. Now, the beautiful answer that an understanding of complexity provides is: both. There is fix, and there is flux. If you like, you can reframe these two seemingly contradictory stances in terms of the Taoist concept of Yin and Yang, chaos and order. Knowing “the Way” requires being able to traverse the fine line down the middle, straddling both extremes. There is no rigid, consistent, perfect Platonic form, but there are certain rules which govern how and why any given form manifests (although these motives may not necessarily be identifiable through so many entangled threads). Thinking complexly demands much more nuance than most interpretations of reality, precisely because things can never be boiled down to simply either/or. There are both objective truths and relative contexts at play.
My ultimate metaphysical argument is that we must focus on the broader processes which determine how reality manifests, rather than any particular manifestation. Specific structures matter too, of course, since they represent the very real constrains that you must learn to navigate, but they are much more context and path dependent than the meta-structures which determine their form. To go back to the metaphor of the maze, the particular form of your maze isn't as relevant as the rules which govern all mazes. The solution should allow you to navigate any given maze successfully. Understanding the underlying generative rules is always going to be more valuable than mastering a specific materialization. I think we have a natural intuition for this idea—concept formation is all about abstracting away from specifics towards more general principles. What makes a video go viral? Why does a tree take on a certain form? We are not interested in the reasons underlying any specific instance, but the mechanisms which are consistently at work upon repeated iterations.
Employing complex thinking is an extremely useful analytical tool, especially in social studies where natural scientific methodologies are no longer viable. For instance, try evaluating a truth claim like, “pink is a girl’s color”. Well, we all know this be true and untrue simultaneously. Obviously no color has innate, objectively gendered traits; 150 years ago light blue was the popular color associated with girls. However, we can trace an objective (although complex) path through history, fashion, and advertising to determine how, “pink is for girls” came to be a “true” statement.
Another example would be how everyone learns in history class how the assassination of Franz Ferdinand kicked off the start of World War I. You could conceptualize this event as a “tipping point” that set off a domino chain of reactions producing an effect much greater than the initial cause. The consequences of the Treaty of Versailles put Germany in a much weaker economic position, causing a growing support for the Nationalist Socialist Party years later. But linking Franz Ferdinand’s assassination directly to the Holocaust is much trickier. There were many underlying causes for the Nazi’s rise to power, and history is rife with competing interpretations as to which events held more causal power in determining a given outcome. Maybe the Holocaust was an “attractor state” which would have happened irrespective of the assassination, it’s impossible to know—there are too many entangled threads.
Martha will forever be my favorite Doctor Who companion because she understood this notion of causal complexity on her first time travel adventure, expressing concern that stepping on a leaf may lead to a compounding series of unintended consequences. Later in the show, the Doctor reveals that this is not an issue since there are fix and flux points in time. I think this statement gets at the heart of the idea I am trying to express here. In any system there are going to be certain attractor states which are inevitable products of the systems themselves, and other areas full of wiggle room. The notion that pink is for girls most likely falls into the latter category; it is probably a path dependent outcome which wouldn’t continue to arise upon repeated iterations. Understanding how these processes unfold allows us to try to evaluate which is which in a given situation. Another gendered truth claim is that, on average, women are more interested in people, whereas men are more interested in things. This idea can help explain why men and women tend to have different career interests. In societies that have done the most to promote gender equality, these differences are heightened rather than diminished. This would suggest that these differences are not the result of path dependent feedback loops, but instead the product of hundreds of thousands of years of evolutionary psychology—an attractor state signifying a much deeper truth.
In the broadest of strokes, I wish to posit that the notion that “truth” always exists in relation to a given environment, which itself is constantly shifting and evolving. But there are consistent rules which dictate a contingent structure; reality evolves through complex dynamics. Relativists, or postmodernists, emphasize how truth claims are contextual, and ever-changing. While objectivists, or realists, are interested in the consistent rules which cause a given truth claim to emerge. They are both attending to only one half of a much bigger picture. We must be able to synthesize and acknowledge how both of these forces work in tandem simultaneously. Neither can exist in isolation, for they are two parts of a greater whole.
So where do we go from here? If my metaphysics is grounded in complexity, then what implications does that have for epistemology? How can and should we go about acquiring knowledge? Well, as was said earlier, a special feature of complex systems is that they posses emergent characteristics. This concept of emergence has dramatic implications on what we are capable of knowing. The philosophy of science is then of utmost importance, and critical realism is a philosophical approach that I believe deals with these issues most persuasively. So, in the next installment I will begin to unpack critical realism and discuss what implications it has on scientific inquiry.
3. Emergence & Epistemology
Critical realism is a philosophical system which is concerned with the philosophy of science, or epistemology. Essentially, what we can know and how we can know it. Are our senses reliable tools to navigate the world? Or do they represent only one small part of a much larger picture? Can reality be studied through materialist, scientific methods? Or does such a reductionist view of the world obfuscate the truth rather than reveal it? These are the sorts of questions this chapter shall explore. But first, let’s pick up from where we left off in Wonderland. It was a thunderstorm, remember?
Part One: Aunt Hillary
From your spot under the tree you watch as the storm slowly comes to an end and the skies begin to clear again. The sun comes out, and you watch the forest come alive. You spot an ant trail on the ground next to you, trailing off into the woods, and you decide to follow it; hoping it might lead you to something interesting. You follow the trail as it connects back to a series of progressively larger and larger ones, until you are essentially following an ant highway, with hundreds of thousands of ants all marching in the same direction. They must be going back to the colony, you think. But instead of a hill, the parade of ants leads you to a little cottage tucked away in small clearing in the woods, with ant trails coming from all sorts of different directions and congregating at this central location. Tentatively, you tip-toe over their criss-crossing paths and approach the door of the cottage. But before you can raise your hand to knock, the door swings open, and you are greeted by a cheerful old woman.
“Oh, hello dearie!” She says. “Come inside, I’ve been expecting you!”
“I’m sorry, but who are you?” You ask.
“Oh, just call me Aunt Hillary,” she replies with a grin, ushering you inside towards a seat by the fire and handing you a hot cup of tea. “I’m glad to see you got my message,”
she says as you settle in.
“Your message?” You ask. She shoots you a wink but says nothing.
“What are all of those ants doing outside of your house?” You inquire.
“Oh, I’m sorry! I thought you understood,” she replies. “I’m Aunt Hillary, and this is the ant hill.”
“Oh! So they’re your ants?”
“Well, only to the extent that the cells in your body are “your” cells. I didn’t choose to have them, nor do I have much control over them, but they make me who I am, yes.”
“I’m confused,” you say. “You’re not an ant.”
“No, I’m not,” she replies. “No more than you are a collection of chemicals and cells, but that is what you’re made of, isn’t it?”
“I guess I hadn’t thought about it that way,” you say, taking a sip of your tea. “But how can you be made of ants if the ants are all outside while you’re sitting in here?”
“Oh child,” Aunt Hillary chides. “You forget that you are in Wonderland and here, looks can be deceiving. Here, look,” she says, gesturing to an open book. “Tell me what you see.”
“Looks like a dialogue of some sort,” you say as you examine the page. “Seems like the title of this chapter is ‘Ant Fugue’.”
“Quite right,” says Aunt Hillary. “A story written by a good friend of mine in fact, concerning this very topic. I can try to imitate some main themes of his for you now, if you like. You wish to know how I can exist independent from the ants which give me my form? Then first try considering where in this book the story resides.”
“Well, the words obviously.”
“Is that so? Not the letters?”
“Well, no, because the letters on their own don’t have any meaning. They have to be put into words in order to make sense.”
“And then the words are arranged into..?”
“...Sentences. Alright, I guess I see what you mean. It’s not just the words that matter, but the order in which they’re placed.”
“Precisely. Just as the same letters can be rearranged to create different words, the same words can be rearranged to create different sentences. It’s not just the parts that matter, but the relationships between them. The words on their own don’t have any more meaning than the letters do—they are symbols. And those symbols must be arranged into sentences in order to convey an idea, ideas which are then compiled into paragraphs and chapters to tell a story. But what happens if I were to remove an adjective from a sentence in the text. Would it be the same story, or a different one?”
“Well, I can’t imagine what difference a single adjective would make. So I’m inclined to say it’s the same.”
“So then the ideas, to some extent, exist outside of the words which create them, do they not? If, for instance, a hundred people were asked to tell the story of Hansel and Gretel, I’m sure each version would be a little bit different, but the main plot point and characters would stay the same. Just like how a translated version of this book would carry the same contents while being composed of entirely different characters. The medium is not the message.”
“Oh, I get it,” you reply. “The story somehow exists in a realm which is outside of and separate from the things which make up its telling. It’s not material, but conceptual.”
“Exactly!” Says Aunt Hillary with an approving smile. “And you and I are no different. The letters on that page are like the neurons in your brain, or the ants in my colony. Taken in isolation they possess no intelligence or agency, they are simply firing or foraging; playing their small part in a much larger picture. But just how letters come together to form words, neurons fire in clusters which activate symbols in your mind, and my ants operate in castes to perform different duties for the colony. However, they are as unaware of me as I am of them. They may make us what we are, but what we are is more than what we are made of. Your subjective experience of being is not the firing of neurons, but the manipulation of symbols. At some point along the way, you, as an emergent entity, came to possess an agency which can act upon the very things which make it up. Aunt Hillary is just an idea, and yet in some ways I am more real than the ants themselves. I control their behaviour, but I don’t exist in a material sense any more than you do. You are not simply a series of electrochemical signals, otherwise what role would your consciousness play? You are an active agent. And that agency is not simply a product of your neurons or your nature or your nurture. It is something new, something more. So the reason why I can sit here and drink tea with you while my ants roam around outside is the same reason why you can sit here and drink tea with me, while all of your neurons are stuck inside of your brain. You are not in your head, yet that is where you came from. So, where are you? What are you?”
Throughout Aunt Hillary's explanation you feel yourself overwhelmed by a wave of dizziness and dread. “I… I don’t feel so good,” you say, getting up abruptly from your spot by the fire and placing the teacup down on the table. In a distant daze you turn to walk out of the cabin and back, out, into the woods.
Part Two: Critical Realism
The central idea I am trying to convey through this ant fugue, inspired by Douglas Hofstadter's dialogue of the same name, is that reality exists in stratified layers. Each one emerging out of, yet not being reducible to, the one that came before. If you like, you can think of this in terms of different areas of inquiry. Mathematics leads to physics, physics to chemistry, chemistry to biology, and biology to psychology. At the most basic level, the firing of neurons in our brain is simply a collection of chemical computations, but that certainly isn’t what the subjective experience of consciousness feels like. We can use mathematics to describe neurology, but psychology is clearly a lot more complex than a series of equations. You cannot use mathematical models to predict psychological behaviour. Roy Bhaskar, the father of critical realism, described this phenomenon with the words, “it is true that the path of my pen does not violate any laws of physics, but it is not determined by any either.” So, how can we construct a view of reality that accounts for this uncertainty?
Critical realism is a philosophical system that was designed by Roy Bhaskar to deal with the implications of emergence, in terms of both what is and also what we can know. In philosophy, these are the domains of ontology and epistemology. Bhaskar’s critique
of modern science is that it prioritizes epistemology over ontology: emphasizing the ways in which we acquire knowledge while overlooking the fact that there may be some limitations to what is knowable through empirical methods. If reality contains emergent layers, then there is no reason to assume that all of it must be confined to the material realm. As Aunt Hillary demonstrates, the relationships between things can be just as, or even more important, than the things themselves. There may be aspects of reality which exist in a causal sense, but not a material one.
In other words, critical realists believe in an objective reality, but they acknowledge the fact that our ability to acquire knowledge is constrained. What we can know is limited, relative, and often context-dependent. Although the knowledge we gain about the world does speak to real truths, they are approximations rather than absolutes. It’s like that parable about the blind men and the elephant, wherein a group of blind men encounter an elephant and—being unfamiliar with its form—each touch a different part of the animal, leading them to come to different conclusions about the whole. The blind man who touches a tusk is going to have a very different interpretation than the man who touches the trunk. Each one of their subjective experiences is correct, just not comprehensive. The information they perceive must be situated inside of a broader explanatory framework. What we observe represents only a small part of what is, and what is represents only a tiny portion of what could be.
For Bhaskar, these are the realms of the real, actual, and empirical. “The empirical” is concerned with that which you directly perceive, the information provided to you through your senses or innovations in technology. The things you see, taste, touch, hear, and smell, as well as data collected through machines such as brain scans, mass spectrometers, or other material measures. “The actual” refers to that which exists, regardless of if it have been directly observed or not. So the ant colony, or your subjective experience of consciousness would fall into this category. A brain scan can’t tell you the thoughts running through your head any more than an inventory of ants can tell you anything about the colony that they are a part of. There are certain aspects of reality which may exist on the ontological level, but they cannot be observed through empirical methods. Finally, is the domain of “the real”, which is concerned with metaphysics and the casual mechanisms and consistent structures which generate events. This would be complexity theory, as discussed in the previous chapter. “The real” doesn’t care about who, what, when or where, only how and why. You can think of an iceberg as a useful metaphor. “The empirical” is the tip of the iceberg, which sticks out above the water and is easily observed. “The actual” is the rest of the iceberg, hidden underwater, out of sight and out of mind. And “the real” are the generative mechanisms which caused the iceberg to form in the first place—the physical, chemical, and mathematical characteristics which would cause any iceberg to form, not just the one you are currently observing.
So, if the empirical is only one aspect of a much larger picture, how are we to gain insight into the nonmaterial, non-observable realms? Well, there is an important distinction in definitions I want to draw your attention to. There is a difference between empiricism and epistemology. Epistemology is concerned with what we know and how we can know it. Whereas empiricism is focused exclusively on knowledge obtained through sensory experience. Traditional scientific methodologies emphasize that which is measurable, material, and empirical. But this limited formulation leaves out the fact that valuable information can also be gained through our minds. It is not enough to merely experience things, those experiences must also be integrated into a comprehensive whole, which requires moving beyond the empirical and towards the domains of the ontological and metaphysical. This is the key insight a critical realist approach provides: our sensory knowledge may be limited, but our minds still allow us to make meaningful inferences.
This is what is known as abductive, or retroductive reasoning. Unlike deduction, which goes from the general to the particular, or induction, which attempts to go from the particular to the general, retroduction implies a regression (rather than a progression) in causal thinking. It is a form of inferential reasoning where events are explained by postulating and identifying the potential mechanisms which are capable of producing them. It’s how a detective pieces together clues at a crime scene: DNA is collected, interviews are conducted, testimonies are corroborated, and criminals are profiled. No one piece of evidence is enough to tell the whole story, a “big picture” interpretation is required to integrate all of the various clues successfully. The goal is to develop an account of reality that carries the most explanatory power, but a number of different methodologies are available to draw from. It’s not just the hard evidence that matters, and a lack of evidence doesn’t automatically mean someone is innocent. Motives and meaningful relationships between actors must also be considered. So if that’s the case, how does a detective know whodunnit?
This brings us to the final tenet of critical realism, which is “judgemental rationality”, a term developed to represent the idea that although a variety of methods are available to acquire information, we need not embrace relativism as we attempt to assess reality.
Our understanding of the world may be limited, but truth is objective. Therefore there must be some consistent criteria we can use to evaluate the likelihood of a theory. To return to our detective example, a good theory is one which takes into account all of the available clues and information to provide a compelling chronicle of events. The best descriptions provide the most explanatory power while being able to withstand criticism and critique. For instance, if a piece of DNA evidence is found at the scene of a crime but the suspect has an airtight alibi, then there must be some alternative explanation as to how it got there. There may be conflicting clues, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t one true series of events which caused all of them to come about. What we want is a theory that integrates all available evidence most persuasively, and these theories can be refined and developed over time as new information is acquired. The point is that we are capable of exercising rational judgement and being persuaded by the best argument. However, this rational capacity is dependent upon what sort of evidence is provided to support a given claim, as well as the explanatory frameworks being used to contextualize available information. Evidence alone is not enough, interpretation matters too! So what implications does a philosophy of critical realism have on how we acquire knowledge?
Part Three: Social Science
I’ve got a bone to pick with social sciences, and I’m going to take this opportunity to air my grievances. But first, what do I mean when I say “science”? I am referring specifically to information acquired through the scientific method. This being the standardized process of collecting and analyzing data to generate predictive results, usually by using experiments wherein variables can be controlled and manipulated to identify cause and effect relationships. In the natural world, this process has worked quite well. Physicists, chemists, and biologists have all been able to use scientific experiments to gain meaningful knowledge about the natural world, and we have the scientific method to thank for much of the progress we seen in the past few hundred years. So it makes sense that social theorists would try to replicate the success of science in the social realm. And replicate they have! These days psychological, sociological, and political research is dominated by studies, charts, and statistics. They make up the basis of university textbooks, social theories, and political debate. There’s only one problem—I don’t think it’s working. Let me give you some examples…
Starting with statistics; these are numerical measures of some social variable, usually collected through census data or large scale surveys. People love using statistics to make an argument. We’re all familiar with the numbers associated with things like the wage gap, wealth inequality, or police brutality. The only problem is that statistics alone don’t actually say anything meaningful about the phenomena they describe. They must be contextualized into a broader framework that allows you to make sense of them. For instance, the same piece of evidence—that women make $0.77 for every dollar a man makes—could be used to support feminist arguments demonstrating sexism in the work place, or an evolutionary psychologist’s position that men and women have different career interests. It doesn’t actually matter what the statistic is, analysis comes from how it’s framed. The fact that the top 1% of income earners hold 50% of the wealth is, in and of itself, a value-neutral statement. However, if you start with the assumption that wealth should be normally distributed, this fact is going to seem like an indication of a dysfunctional economy. Whereas if you’re familiar with how complex systems tend towards 80/20 distributions, then you’ll know that income inequality actually means the system is working as expected. The question remains as to if this is a desirable state of affairs, but these conclusions cannot be reached through statistical analysis alone.
The second model often employed by the social sciences is correlational research; where one takes two data sets and analyzes them to try to infer a causal relationship. As many know, the problem with correlations is that while any causal relationship can be demonstrated through correlational data, correlation alone does indicate causation.
Even when two variables are related, this may be due to a third factor that hasn’t been accounted for, or both variables may be indirect measures of one underlying cause. Moreover, the vast majority of correlational research is used to confirm commonsense inferences rather than to discover surprising associations. For instance, some study that demonstrates a positive correlation between reading and vocabulary size isn’t conducting groundbreaking research, it’s simply “scienceifying” a fact that anyone could have told you for free. This overemphasis on applying scientific methods to commonsense knowledge isn’t actually doing science, it’s just wasting time. The scientific method isn’t valuable because it confirms information we already know, its utility comes from its ability to reveal unexpected relationships, which can only be achieved through the OG scientific method—experimentation.
Hopefully you already know that experiments work by systematically controlling and manipulating variables in order to detect cause and effect relationships. This works extremely well in closed systems (which is what natural science tends to study), but completely falls apart when applied to social ones. This occurs due to the object of inquiry. As it turns out, people are much different than rocks, rats, or nuclear reactors. We are conscious agents, and the content of our mind matters. Memories, experiences, and expectations all play a meaningful role in determining our behaviour. You can’t conduct the same experiment on the same person twice, and you can’t compare results between subjects, either. Controlling for external sociological factors doesn’t diminish psychological or biological ones—it amplifies them. Even if you were to come up with some unethical scenario where you take identical twins and raise them in a lab so you could conduct experiments without any potential confounds, the highly controlled nature of the study would make the results ungeneralizable to the general population! People are complex systems, meaning our behaviour is motivated by a plurality of factors that cannot easily be disentangled.
There is a fundamental difference in kind which separates the social world from the natural realm. People are self-interpreting and value-oriented agents. Not only do a multiplicity of factors motivate any given decision, but people are often highly unaware of what these factors are or could be. Practicing social science requires operationalizing variables which are, by definition, subjective and context dependent. Unlike objective qualities like weight or temperature, there is no way to measure a concept such as happiness or anxiety, nevermind a metric that would allow you to compare subjective experiences across individuals. Unlike the natural sciences, wherein the objects of inquiry are independent from the aspirations of the researcher, social science both defines and influences social reality. Consider the increased discussion about mental health over the past decade or two. The rise in conversations about mental health causes people to introspect and potentially identify mental health issues in themselves, causing reports of mental health problems to increase and more people to be discussing it. The analysis becomes a self-perpetuating feedback loop.
Another problem of social science is that it is impossible to isolate any phenomena down to a simple cause and effect relationship between two variables. Experiments relies upon “closed systems”, wherein one variable can be manipulated at a time while controlling for all others. Being able to exercise perfect control over passive agents is what allows the scientific method to produce predictive and replicable results. People, however, are much more complex than the objects of natural scientific study. Their actions are informed by a lifetime of experiences, expectations, interpretations, and biological mechanisms. It would be highly unethical to conduct a study which would attempt to control for all of these factors, and even then people have unique genetic predispositions which would only be augmented by controlling for all other variables. Given the near infinite amount of potential confounds at play, is becomes impossible to falsify a given claim. For a scientific theory to be valid it must be disprovable, however a theory tested through social research can always attribute failure to the existence of a confounding variable to justify an unfavourable result.
While many social scientists would readily admit that their findings are not nearly as precise, predictive, or objective as their natural scientific counterparts, few recognize that their research may actually be doing more harm than good. There is a disconnect between the philosophy of social science, which recognizes this fundamental difference in kind, and the practice of social science, which remains committed to a scientific ideal. The problem with social science is that it seeks to draw direct, 1:1 causal relationships between phenomena, rather than examining how a complex set of interactions lead to the emergence of social behaviour. There is never one absolute, universal law at play, and any attempt to define such rules is only a partial truth which overlooks how a multiplicity of factors are required to shape social action. Therefore, any fact distilled from social research threatens to oversimplify and obscure the more nuanced aspects of social reality.
This is not to suggest that there are never any causal relationships that exist between social factors, but they are never all encompassing. Correlations represent averages, rather than consistent absolutes. Personal agency and belief simply influence too much of the picture. Take an issue like the use of corporal punishment on children; physically reprimanding them for bad behaviour. Nowadays it is generally accepted that this is not productive, bad for a child's psyche, and does more harm than good. However, there are still millions of people who were abused as children and went on to have successful lives, some of whom would attribute their resilience as directly due to their rough childhood. Although you can’t conduct a scientific experiment to prove that empirically, it makes sense intuitively. Acquiring the tools to overcome adversity makes us stronger and better at dealing with later obstacles. But clearly this principle doesn’t apply to everyone. It is entirely dependent upon the child and their personal capacity to redirect struggle into success. This could be from genetic predispositions, social factors, or internal ones. Maybe reading a certain book is all it took for someone
to begin reclaiming and integrating their experience. The point is that any number of factors could or could not play a role in shaping human behaviour. While one person may find massive success in spite of their upbringing, another might end up with a slew of mental health, attachment, and addiction issues.
On the flip side, too much care and coddling can also result in adults that are not well equipped to deal with the world as they grow older. Children raised by overprotective, helicopter parents are also more at risk to experience anxiety and depression later on in life. A lack of personal responsibility, autonomy, and agency isn’t good for anyone either. You’ll notice that I may be using facts derived through social research, certain correlations and relationships, but I am situating them inside of a broader explanatory framework. And I am not trying to argue that any one behaviour consistently leads to a given result. Alternatively, I am trying to demonstrate that different upbringings all along the social continuum, from extremely negligent to extremely overbearing, can have positive, negative, and neutral outcomes. It always depends upon the individual, their life story and lived experience. Certain factors may make a person more or less likely to result in a given outcome, but there are always going to be stories of people who gained more maturity and resolve due to the exact same reasons. Personal agency and experience is always the main driving force behind any series of behaviours. You can never use one to derive the other; the relationships are always complex, entangled, and interrelated.
I want to be clear that when I talk about social science, I am specifically referring to research that seeks to demonstrate causal relationships between two socially defined variables. There is plenty of room for meaningful scientific research to be conducted in the realms of biology and neurology. We can conduct brain imaging research that correlates different regions with mental states, or test phenomena like reaction times and memory. This type of research is still more difficult because of the confounding social and psychological factors at play, but at least it’s tethered to objective measures of reality. Cognitive psychology studies suggest that our working memory consists of 7 units, plus or minus two. But our minds are like a muscle; the more we practice a task the better at it we become. Waitresses who work without notepads probably have a better working memory than your average Joe, and there are master memorizers who can commit an entire deck of cards to memory within minutes. There may be norms, but there are also always meaningful exceptions. Psychology lacks the absolute laws like there are in mathematics, physics, chemistry or biology. An unwatered plant will die, I’ve heard that e=mc^2, and two plus two definitely make four. In the social world, there are no such definite rules; the more abstract the concepts become the more room there is for uncertainty and interpretation.
The emphasis on establishing facts rather than explanations reduces much of social discourse to who can provide the most empirical evidence to support their claims. However, as I alluded to earlier, this approach puts the empirical cart before the ontological horse; forgetting the need for a comprehensive theory wherein social knowledge can be situated. The legitimacy of the facts produced by social science can always be called into question, an alternative explanation is always available, meaning factual findings hold little persuasive power over their theoretical opposition. Any statistic cited in a social debate can easily be dismissed as inaccurate, incomplete, or inconsequential. For instance, in a discussion between the merits of capitalism versus communism, both sides would insist that a true version of their economic vision has never been tried. Therefore they would not be persuaded by appeals to available evidence unless it supports their case. Ultimately, it is our values which inform our interpretation of the world, scientific evidence is only used as an anchor to legitimize our beliefs. Feelings don’t care about your facts.
This position was first introduced to me by philosopher Charles Taylor, and I believe it is of central importance. He proposed that the intelligibility of any argument relies upon shared value orientations. We must appeal to peoples emotional intuitions if we wish to persuade them of a certain view. For instance, I find it unlikely that anyone would support an economic system that leads to mass starvation of millions of people. If communism or capitalism is more likely to result in that is a different question, but at least we have established a shared goal for further discussion. We can explore how we acquired these fundamental principles later, but first we must recognize how we are all motivated by certain value orientations. People are more likely to be persuaded by arguments that appeal to reason and shared ideals, rather than simply citing facts sourced through supposedly scientific studies.
This circles back to the critical realist notion that we should emphasize explanatory power over empirical evidence. The proof is in the pudding when it comes to lived experience. If you can’t have a conversation with someone and meet them where they are at, recognizing their subjective interpretations and feelings, you’re not going to convince anyone of anything. People may be wrong in their baseline assumptions, but that is why it is important to first establish where you agree to act as scaffolding to build off of. These starting points can come from anywhere; appeals to empiricism, meaningful interpretation, or first principles. The point is that we want to focus on developing theories, not facts. A good theory integrates facts, but a collection of facts do not make a theory. In fact, a good theory can stand on its merits and predictive power alone—it doesn’t need to have any empirical evidence in order to be true.
Historically, this has always been the case. Social theory was communicated through stories and religion, wherein principles of human nature were expressed as narratives that convey morals and relationships between ideas. Our cultural heritage is full of folktales, adages and anecdotes. Although these stories may not be empirically true, they speak to deep social and psychological truths that we intuitively pick up on and are able to understand. People are meaning and value-oriented agents, our minds haven’t evolved to process the facts and figures derived through scientific research. Moral reasoning isn’t based off of calculations, but associations, and there’s nothing wrong with that. The ultimate goal of social inquiry is to develop ideas that allow us to better understand the world around us and how to act in a way which is purposeful and productive. This knowledge comes in many forms, from philosophy to psychology,
politics, or poetry. Domains based not just in ideas, but ideals. But where do these ideals come from? How can one make the leap from facts to values? How do our moral understandings and intuitions arise out of a material world? Well, that is what will be explored in the next chapter, where we dive into free will, and religion.
4. Free Will, Ethics, and Religion
Why Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson Disagree
Having covered philosophy, metaphysics, and epistemology, this is the chapter where we tackle ethics. Specifically, where do our ethical intuitions come from? Given what is and what we can know, what should we do? In other words, how can facts lead to values? The chapter is subtitled, “Why Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson Disagree” because I believe there is an issue which lies at the crux of our ethical interpretations which is often overlooked; this being the timeless tension between free will and determinism. It’s a topic these two intellectual influences of mine have discussed at great lengths on podcasts and panels throughout the years, but I don’t think either of them get it quite right. They consistently talk past one another and seem unable to reconcile their fundamental difference of view. In this section I want to try to resolve that tension by showing how both of their positions go on to guide ethical reasoning and inform religious belief—hopefully providing some new insights along the way. To get started, let’s pick up where we left off in Wonderland...
Part One: Ant Fugue, Phew!
You hear the sound of marching. It fills you up like a crescendo, this swell in goose-step. In your mind’s eye you see an endless ant hill that goes off to infinity in all directions, with row upon row of worker ants marching in straight lines in quick succession, traversing the crests and slopes of the sand dunes. The scene reminds you of something you’ve seen before: hieroglyphs of ancient Egyptian slaves hauling heavy loads uphill. An endless, unforgiving task, immortalized in the sandstone carvings of yesteryear. You are overwhelmed by the sense of an immense eternity. Your eyes fill with red and you wake up to a loud pounding in your ears, fading to a distant echo as you regain your senses. Where are you? You peel your eyes open in the blistering sun and are blinded by radiance as splashes of water spray through the air. You are lying on your back on the bank of some babbling brook in the middle of the woods. How did you get here? You wonder. The last thing you remember was… Aunt Hillary.
You feel a swell in your skull as the pounding returns once more. You look around for a sign of the cottage but see nothing. The forest here seems different, darker, thicker. You have an eerie feeling that it’s been hours since your conversation at the cabin. Your legs are sore, as if you’ve been walking for quite a while, and you notice a collection of scratches and bruises that weren’t there before. Is it possible you lost time? Acquired a bout of accidental amnesia? How would one define such dissociative delirium? A funk of functional forgetfulness known as… Oh, a fugue, of course. You have a hazy memory of the book Aunt Hillary had shown you, with the words “Ant Fugue” written across the top of the chapter. Suddenly the strange series of events seemed suspiciously contrived. What could have triggered such an episode? You try to recall the conversation you had at the cottage. Aunt Hillary had been telling you something… what was it again? “The neurons in your brain are like the ants in my colony. Taken in isolation they possess no intelligence or agency, they are simply firing or foraging; playing their small part in a much larger picture… So where are you? What are you?” If not your neurons or your nature or your nurture? How can you be anything more than the things you are made of?
Right. It was this idea that had first sent blood rushing to your ears and formed a knot in the centre of your stomach. You had a vision of the moment of your conception as like the flick of a domino, leading you down a long chain of events that brought you to be here, now. Born as a baby with certain genetic and psychological predispositions, raised by your parents, influenced by friends and family, shaped by society… At what point did agency ever enter the picture? Did it? How could it have? You didn’t choose any of this. All the choices you ever made were influenced by things you didn’t. Sure, maybe you got straight A’s in school, but you didn’t choose to be intelligent any more than you chose the colour of your hair. If you weren’t, would your failures be any more your fault than your successes? Surely if you had been born into someone else's body you would, by all logical consequence, be that person. There isn’t any meaningful standard to discriminate who you are now to who you could be if placed in someone else's shoes. Is there even any “you” that you could be referring to? Strip away all of those influences and experiences, and what’s left? Who’s home? How can you say that you are acting in the world, when really the world acted upon you first? Anything you could choose to do was determined by a million things you didn’t. So how can you say the choice was yours? All of your wants and wills were entirely predetermined. And what are you without them? Was there ever any you to begin with?
You start to again feel overwhelmed by a sense of existential horror. You realize that you aren’t in control of your next thought or action any more than a droplet of water controls its path downstream. It is simply fulfilling a prophecy that was set in motion by the grooves of the forest floor. You grasp aimlessly at psychological straws, trying to concoct some sort of standard that would allow you to prove your agency. But each moment a thought arises it is immediately dismissed as being predetermined. You can’t escape your mind any more than you can escape the world which built it. The pounding in your head returns with a vengeance and you can feel your breath begin to quicken as your mind races. You’re hyperventilating. A panic attack seems inevitable until you suddenly recall a series of breathing exercises you learned in a course on meditation. In through the nose, out through the mouth. Deep, shaky breaths. You try precariously to pull your focus away from the internal ego hemorrhaging and back out into the world, listening to the sound of the surrounding forest. The wind in the trees, the babbling the brook, the birdsong… Bringing your attention to the present moment. Breathing in and out.
Ahh, that’s better. In this quiet state of awareness there is no need for agency. By emptying your conscious mind out like a cup, you allow the world to fill you to the brim. No need to think, or act, just be here now.
Part Two: Science, Spirituality, Sam Harris
The dream of the infinite ant colony is actually one I used to have as a child. What made it so memorable was that I would always wake up and continue to hear a loud pounding in my head for a few minutes after. It was completely overwhelming and outside of my control, like I had been pulled into another world that lingered into my waking life. At the time I didn’t think it had anything to do with consciousness or determinism, but it’s an incredibly apt metaphor for the subject of this chapter, which is determinism. The ants symbolize infinite, interacting lines of causal progression, which stretch back to the beginning of time and far into the distant future. As was explained earlier, they work the exact same way your brain does. From a materialist, scientific point of view, there is no strong distinction between the two. The entire universe unfolds as one great big complex system, and you are a part of that equation.
It has always been evident to me that this must be the case. I was raised without any religious influences that would suggest I possess a soul which allows me to act independent of the outside world. Whatever you decide to do is, by neural necessity, the only thing you could have done in a given situation. However, you can’t possibly be aware of all of the causes that are working to promote a given effect. Whatever decision ultimately arises in your mind is there for myriad reasons, both conscious and unconscious. For instance, when you are deciding what to eat at a restaurant, how many potential factors could be motivating your choice? Price, preference, placement on the menu, the weather, what you ate earlier that day, who you’re eating with… Maybe something else entirely! Maybe a little bit of all those things. You might think that you ordered it by your own free will, and could just have easily ordered something else. But the simple fact that you made the choice you did proves that there was some small causal factor that tipped the scales in a certain direction. Even when you are making a decision that is seemingly random, like picking a number between 1-100, some neural pathways are going to activate in your brain that cause you to say “67” rather than “76”. You don’t have to be aware of what these processes are for them to be acting in the background. You will still have the subjective experience that you are in charge of your actions (because you are), but the choices that you ultimately make will be, by definition, the only choice you could have made. It’s impossible to concoct a situation where you could rewind the clock and choose to act differently according to the exact same set of inputs.
That’s all I’m going to say in terms of explaining determinism. If you’re not already familiar with the concept then it can be a little bit difficult to unpack, and other thinkers have already done a much better job than I ever could at laying out the basics. If you’re still a skeptic, I would recommend checking out one of Sam Harris’ lectures on Youtube—he dives pretty deep into the common objections people raise. However for the purposes of this chapter I’m going to accept determinism as a basic premise and then go from there. I don’t think you can justify a belief in free will without appeals to God or the experience of agency. As was already mentioned, the illusion of free will can exist without mapping on to neurological reality. I think any scientifically-minded, intellectually honest person will have a tough time arguing against this basic principle. The laws of the universe leave no room for individual agency. At the atomic level, everything is simply a giant physics equation unfolding. All of your thoughts and actions are beholden to forces outside of your control. In fact, the notion of acting “freely”—that is, independent of external causes—actually becomes unintelligible. What would it mean to act without causal motivation for doing so? If your actions were random rather than reactionary, would that actually make them any more meaningful? I don’t think so.
Sam Harris, outside of being a notable atheist, determinist, and neurologist, is also very interested in consciousness, spirituality, and meditation. His book, Waking Up, is about how people can have spiritual experiences without religion, primarily though experimentation with meditation or psychedelics. If you spend some time studying Eastern religions, you will start to see the connections between these ideas. Personally,
I am a big fan of Baba Ram Dass and his book Be Here Now. Ram Dass, formerly known as Richard Alpert, was a professor of psychology at Harvard University in the 1960s, and pioneered much of the early experimental research with psychedelics. His fascination with and craving for the spiritual experiences induced by psychedelics eventually drove him East, to India. In the Himalayas he found a Hindu guru who gave him his new name, Ram Dass, and eventually he brought the lessons he learned back West. However, the philosophy he describes goes beyond just Hinduism. It invokes Buddhism, Taoism, Sufism, and even Christianity; demonstrating how different aspects of all sorts of faiths speak to the same underlying systems of understanding.
One key message that is especially emphasized in Eastern traditions is the idea that you are an entirely determined being. If you could zoom out, and see your life from a God’s eye point of view, you would see that you are propelled by the universe in a certain direction; like a moth to a flame. Certain drives and pulls will act upon you throughout your life in often unexpected ways. Although this process is inevitable, it cannot be forced. It is impossible to expedite the process, or jump ahead from where you are currently situated. Like a caterpillar transforming into a butterfly, or a snake shedding its skin, everything must happen in its own time. There is work to be done, and lessons to be learned. An ethical insight unique to this determinist framework is that it offers eternal patience and forgiveness. There is recognition of the fact that people act the way they do because of events outside of their control. Therefore, we should exercise empathy and compassion, seeking to understand the circumstances that brought about a person’s behaviour, rather than antagonize or chastise them for it.
The notion of determinism exists in Christianity too, in the form of predestination, but they are a little bit different. Western, Abrahamic, monotheistic religions tend to view God as a great, omniscient, omnipotent creator; invoking the image of a sentient being up in the sky who is calling the shots and pulling the strings. However, this doesn’t carry over to Eastern schools of thought, where God is conceptualized as a causal, creative force that can be found in everything, rather than existing outside of the material realm. There is an emphasis on holism over dualism, with a focus on how everything in life is interconnected and interrelated. Therefore there is no meaningful distinction between you and the rest of the world. You are operating in harmony as part of a much broader system. This makes sense from a complexity point of view; you can conceptualize the entire universe as one great pattern unfolding and interacting with itself. In fact, the goal of enlightenment is to transcend dualism—Zen Buddhism is holism to its logical extreme. Its central claim is that the world cannot be divided: all boundaries and differences are an illusion. If you’ve taken psychedelics before then you may have experienced the profound feeling of oneness and universal harmony that these philosophies describe. Similar states of consciousness can be achieved in total sobriety—they are simply more elusive.
The ethical takeaway here is that not only are our lives entirely predetermined, but they are also deeply interconnected. The actions you take are like the flapping of a butterfly’s wings; they have consequences which ripple out into the world in ways far greater than you could possibly imagine. This is where the concept of karma comes from, or the biblical idea that you reap what you sow. What you put out into the world has a way of coming back to you. I don’t mean this on a conceptual level, but a literal one. The patterns of causality are sewn into the very fabric of reality; it is impossible to extricate yourself from the environment you find yourself in. We are all connected, for better or for worse, and we can only move as fast as we all move. It is impossible to “get ahead” and exist in an ideal bubble isolated from the rest of reality. The ethical implications of this have clearly communitarian values. What is good for others is also good for you and vice versa—it all feeds back into the same system.
The final aspect of Eastern religion I want to touch upon is ego. You may have heard people describe the phenomenon of “ego death” that results from deep meditation or taking psychedelics. This refers to the state of consciousness that arises when one has lost all attachments and sense of self: all the stories you tell yourself about who you are and what you think or want. This shift in awareness allows one to be completely content in the present moment, without any concern for past or future predicament. Many philosophers have observed that the reason children are so happy is because they constantly exist in this state of being. They aren’t worried about what they did last week or what happens tomorrow, and they aren’t seeking external validation from the world in the same way adults do. Grown ups walk around with funny ideas in their head about needing a new raise, new car, or new house and then being happy, rather than realizing that they can be content with the world as it is right now. Eastern belief suggests that desires themselves are what lead to unhappiness: the moment a given goal is achieved, a new one must rise to replace it. The idea is that constantly wanting rather than being is what produces so much psychological stress and dissatisfaction.
However, it doesn’t have to be this way. It is possible to detach from your experience of ego. While you may have been formed by a certain set of experiences, you are by no means beholden to them. Your sense of self is, to some extent, an illusion. The notion of an “I” who has certain inalienable qualities and characteristics only has as much stock as you put in it. And it is possible to have awareness without attachment. For instance, the unpleasantness of being too hot or cold will only be amplified the more attention you pay to it. But, with practice, you can learn to experience undesirable states of being without the added emotional distress. David Blaine is a great Western example of this, having done many extreme feats of physical endurance and suffering minimal adverse effects. He has subjected himself to extreme periods of pain, sleep deprivation, starvation, asphyxiation, and much else. In the East, there are stories of monks who spend their entire lives training to withstand intense fasts, temperatures, and physical forces that would be otherwise impossible and seem superhuman.
So, how is it possible? Well, this brings us back to the beginning of the chapter and the idea of practicing awareness without attachment, otherwise known as meditation. Learning to notice your thoughts, feelings, and emotions as something that exist outside of and separate from yourself. This practice has many practical uses that can be applied to daily life as well. As we saw in the forest, focusing on the world around you can prevent panic attacks as well as other states of psychological duress. Sam Harris likes to use the example of road rage: instead of existing in an angry, irritable state as a response to a situation you have no control over, you can simply go up one level of awareness and watch as the emotions pass through you. However, you don’t have to be in the emotions, it is possible to observe them without attachment. The same principle applies to pain or discomfort. There is always a deep, calm, consistent centre that you can learn to access regardless of external circumstance.
The best example I have encountered for practicing mindfulness comes from Duncan Trussel’s mother, in his Netflix show Midnight Gospel. She describes getting present as a practice that is available to anyone, at any time. Even if you have nothing else, you can always get present in yourself. I encourage you to try it now. Close your eyes and slowly shift your focus to the feeling of your body. See if you can sense the inside of your hand, that feeling that exists under your skin. What is it like? Warm? Numb? A little tingly? Now, gently let your attention go up your arm. See if you can sense your arm from the inside, fingertip to armpit. Take your time… What about both arms at once? Can you feel your hands and elbows simultaneously? Now add in your legs, focusing purely on the feeling of your body. It’s not easy to do! It takes conscious, controlled effort. You must pull your awareness away from your mind and into your body. The next thing you can do, while still sensing your hands and limbs, is to listen. Keep your eyes closed and your body in focus, and just let the world come to you. What do you hear…?
Part Three: The Croak and Call
*Ribbit*
The sound startles you to your senses. You peel open your eyes to spot a frog sitting by the brook on a large rock a few feet in front of you. Staring straight into your eyes, it raises a non existent eyebrow.
“You gonna sit around all day or what?” He asks.
“I’m meditating,” you reply.
“Well, you’ve been sitting there for hours now. Don’t you wanna explore a little? Come on kid, you’re in Wonderland. This is a once in a lifetime opportunity!”
“I don’t need anything though,” you say. “I’m happy to just sit here and let the world wash over me. It’s quite liberating in fact, you should try it.”
“I don’t get you humans. What’s the point in all that freedom if you’re not using it for anything?”
“Well that’s just it, see? I’m not free. Anything I could wish or want or do is just a product of a long chain of events that came before me. So long as I’m not free I’d rather not delude myself into thinking otherwise. So I’ll just sit here, thanks, and wait until I get a sign from the universe that I should be doing something different.”
The frog clears his throat, “downstream from here is a little village that is being harassed by a dragon. They need a hero to come and slay it.”
“That’s nice,” you say. “I hope one comes soon,” and you return to your breathing exercises.
“Look bucko, wasn’t the whole reason for coming to Wonderland the fact that you wanted to go on an adventure? Where’s the fun in doing nothing?”
“Desire begets desire,” you say. You’re pleased with yourself, it sounds like some ancient Buddhist wisdom. “It’s true, I may have come here looking for an adventure, but in the process I learned something much more meaningful. I am not really here at all. All I am is a bunch of attachments. Lose your attachments and you lose yourself, and then you can just be. No need for anything else. I’ll forgive you for not understanding me, everyone learns in their own time—you can’t help it.”
“You realize you haven’t actually freed yourself from anything, right?” Says the frog. “Your desires have simply turned into a desire for no desires. Nothing’s actually changed. You’re still stuck in that same deterministic loop that brought you here. You cant escape it by not doing anything, because doing nothing is still doing something.”
“Well, what do you think I should do?” You snap.
“What I think both doesn’t matter, and matters more than anything,” says the frog.
“What do you mean?” Now he’s got you interested.
“Well you’re right about determinism. I don’t have control over my actions any more than—” he pauses to catch a fly out of the air. “— any more than you do. But what you do also depends on what you have decided to do, and the whole world feeds those decisions. So I won’t blame you for accepting determinism any more than you would blame me for not doing so. It’s all a matter of perspective, see?”
“I’m confused,” you say.
“Well, look here. Let’s pretend you forgot about all this determinism nonsense for a moment and I told you that the world is your oyster and you can do anything you want, what would you do?”
“Why I... I would go slay that dragon!”
“So then, why don’t you?”
“Because I’m not a hero. And like I said, I don’t actually have any control over what I do. Things just happen to me and then I react the only way I know how. So I guess if some wizard popped out of nowhere and trained me to be a dragon slayer then I could fight it. But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Unless you…?”
“Oh no, I’m just a regular old frog. You can give me a kiss to make sure if you like, but I won’t be training you in dragon slaying anytime soon.”
“So then what’s the use?” You lament.
“What’s the use indeed. What is useful to you? If you want to go on an adventure then the only thing stopping you is yourself. But so long as you choose to get in your own way, you won’t be going anywhere”
“I feel like we are talking in circles! What control do I have over getting in my own way or not?”
“Total control—you just have to decide if you want it or not. Look, bucko, you’re right! Your life has been absolutely determined right up until this very moment. But just like all that spirituality suggests, there is something special about here and now. It’s true, you are an effect, but you also have the capacity to cause. Your consciousness exists to contend with potential and make choices. What you ultimately choose to do depends entirely on what you believe you can do. Limit your scope and you limit your potential,
but broaden your appetite and who knows what you could be capable of. As my father always told me, you miss 100% of the flies you don’t stick your tongue out at.”
“So… You’re saying I should eat flies?”
“I’m saying that beliefs beget outcomes. Causality doesn’t just work in one direction, but two. And the future will unfold in accordance with whatever you set your mind to. So be careful with what you set your sights upon. Your attention and your aim are your most valuable assets, and you will only see what you have decided to look for. Forget forgetting desire, it doesn’t need to be a detriment. Cast aside desire for desires sake, but make no mistake, desire can also be a pull, and pursuing that pull is what makes life meaningful. How else do you think a salmon makes the daring journey upstream? Or a man mounts the courage to dream a dream? If you want to change the world, you can. But first, you must change your mind.”
You consider this for a moment. “You said the village was downstream from here, right?”
The frog nods. “Are you reconsidering slaying that dragon?”
“Well, I’m not making any promises, but I’ll see what I can do,” you say, getting up from your spot by the stream.
“With that attitude, you can do anything,” replies the frog with a wink, sticking out his tongue to gobble up a nearby caterpillar.
Part Four: Just do it, Jesus Christ, Jordan Peterson
Okay, so I’m making a slippery argument. Ultimately, I am a determinist. I believe that our consciousness allows us to contend with potential and make choices, but whatever we choose to do is ultimately the only thing we could have done in that circumstance. The same inputs will always produce the same outcome. That being said, inputs matter! And philosophical frameworks that emphasize our ability to make choices will cause better choices to be made. There is a weird interaction that occurs between expectation and reality. What you believe, becomes. A “can do” attitude has very real consequences. People benefit from philosophies that emphasize their ability to make tough choices, to persevere, to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps. This idiom is intentionally paradoxical: it implies getting support or motivation from within, which is really what the concept of “free will” seeks to share, the idea that you can move yourself by your own volition, without needing an external cause. The paradox comes into play when you realize that this is possible, but only to the extent that you believe it be so.
We’ve all experienced this first thing in the morning, torn between the comfort of your bed and getting up to start the day. If you lie there thinking, “just five more minutes,” then you are almost definitely going to doze off again. But, if instead you tell yourself, “okay, on the count of three I’m going to get up. 1, 2, 3!” Then, surprise surprise, you’re much more likely to get up. This may sound painfully obvious, but it really matters. All life is is a series of decisions made moment by moment. Whatever story you tell yourself about what you are capable of doing is almost certainly going to come true. Within reason, of course. I’m not suggesting that a philosophy of mind over matter is going to allow you to lift cars or win a hot dog eating contest, but it might encourage you to run an extra mile you didn’t think you had in you. The motivational power of Nike’s “Just do it” slogan fits in nicely into this framework. When working out and on the brink of exhaustion, if you tell yourself, “I have to stop”… well, then you will. But, if you can train your mind to say “keep going,” then you will find the courage you need to continue. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy, and people benefit from philosophies which recognize this feedback loop.
This is one of the primary distinctions between Eastern and Western religions. While Eastern schools of thought emphasize determinism and a more holistic approach, Western religions favour dualism and the notion of a nonmaterial soul. Why would this be the case? Well, if your soul is something special that was given by God, then this would allow you to act independent from the material, causal world; creating the concept of free will that most of us are familiar with. I’m not going to spend any time arguing against the existence of God. We live in a more secular society than ever, and far more people are losing their faith every day than gaining it. The explanations and advances we have gained through science are just too overwhelming. When we have real answers to some of life's biggest questions, we don’t need narrative ones. Except, maybe, on this crucial issue. Materialism is destined towards determinism, and this can be quite depressing if you are unaware of the interaction between expectations and outcomes I laid out earlier. This is why I believe so many stories emphasize the power of the individual to overcome hardship and make meaningful changes in the world. These ideas are true, but they must be believed in order to be acted out. However, this does not mean that they must adopt a religious character, they can still be communicated and understood from an atheist frame.
For instance, take sayings like, “God works in mysterious ways,” or, “when he closes a door he opens a window.” These are valuable framing tools, they encourage people to see setbacks as potential opportunities rather than obstacles and stay optimistic in light of bad circumstance. You can rationally understand how beliefs like these would bring about beneficial outcomes without needing to invoke a literal conception of God as playing some crucial role. “God” is being used as a metaphorical stand-in for the universe getting in between you and your goals. And your interpretation of events like these matters! If you lose your job, or partner, these can be difficult circumstances to overcome. However, an attitude that encourages you to believe that the universe is on your side will help you make the best of a bad situation. Oftentimes some of the worst moments in our lives can lead to some of the best, and we can only see the way different causal forces influenced us after the fact. Looking back on your life I am sure you can recognize certain crucial tipping points that changed things in dramatic ways while seeming negative or insignificant at the time. We have all wondered, “if only that hadn’t happened, where would I be?” There is an implicit understanding of determinism in our life, we just generally fail to apply the same principle to the present moment.
There is a unique insight from Eastern philosophies I want to draw your attention to: there is something special and sacred about the present moment. Your ability to make decisions is active, not passive. You don’t need to listen to the story you tell yourself about who you are—your past need not define your future. You can always choose to change yourself, to act differently, to be better. This process may be difficult, yes, but it is never impossible. This idea is highlighted by a classic narrative trope: where at the climax of a story the hero offers the villain a chance to change their ways. There is a choice that must be made that will either seal their fate as the bad guy, or offer an opportunity for redemption. The choice that the villain ultimately makes will depend on how committed they are to their villainy. If they do not want to change, or do not believe it is possible, then they will double down on their commitment to evil and become irredeemable. But, maybe the hero says something crucial that allows them to think differently and believe they can change, that makes them want to change. You can take this idea out of the fictional realm and apply the same principle to reformed criminals. Decisions always depend upon the story you tell yourself about who you are and what you are capable of.
Ultimately, I believe this is why Jordan Peterson defends religion: he recognizes that narrative power outweighs the material facts of reality, and he sees the Christian ethic as championing the causal power of the individual. This is why so much of his advice focuses on the adoption of responsibility. You must get your life straight and align your speech, thought, and action to be oriented towards the highest good you can conceive of, taking on the greatest load you can bear. This is hard work! It requires conscious effort and exertion. Lots of people avoid doing what they know they should be doing for precisely this reason. It is easier to do nothing and comfort yourself by the deterministic idea that you couldn’t possibly be doing anything else. However, this brings about a sense of guilt and shame, since we all know there is some good we could be doing which we are actively avoiding, and the consequences of that lack of action are unfathomable. Who knows how good the world could be if we were all doing what we knew we should? Avoiding responsibility is bad for your psyche, whereas voluntarily adopting it produces the best outcomes for both you and society.
So, what’s the problem with Peterson’s approach? Well, when asked during a debate whether he believes God exists, he said something interesting: “I act as if God exists.” Now, this is Jordan’s downfall. His entire belief system relies on what I call a noble lie. His philosophy follows the tradition of Plato, not Aristotle, as he believes morality cannot stand on material, rationalist grounds alone. He needs religion as a crutch to support his central claim: that Man has free will. A proposition he believes to be self-evident because of subjective experience, without any objective support. The problem with this approach is that it isn’t converting anyone. Although I ultimately agree with his conclusions in the moral realm, they are the consequence of a lie that lies at the centre of his ethic. He can’t convince atheists to support his cause without appealing to God, and it seems to me like he doesn’t truly understand the issues people take with his argument. He, as well as other conservative thinkers like Ben Shapiro, rely upon the religious notion of free will in order to support their ideas. But you can’t preach bootstrapping to an audience that believes in determinism, and blaming poor people for their problems makes you sound insensitive and arrogant, not intelligent. For many years it’s mystified me why these thinkers don’t recognize the flaws a reliance upon religion brings to their arguments, or why they are incapable of understanding what Sam Harris means when he talks about determinism. Sam, on the other hand, fails to integrate his position persuasively, so that’s what I’m going to try to do now.
Trust me when I say that I have scoured the internet for sources of Peterson talking about free will and determinism, and, to my astonishment, he consistently overlooks or misrepresents the central claim that is being made. He seems to side-step the issue by insisting that people have the capacity to make choices and this is what gives them free will, while overlooking the fact that whatever choice which is made is determined by a preexisting set of inputs—which is what a determinist is arguing. Sam, although I love him dearly, astonishes me by his failure to twist the knife in on this precise point, or point out the fact that Peterson’s entire career hinges upon implicit determinism. It’s somewhat ironic given the fact that Jordan will frequently discuss being incredibly moved by fans coming to him and explaining that their lives were in a really bad place until they encountered one of his lectures. Without being presented with compelling ideas as to how they can exert meaningful control over their lives, people will fail to do so. You can’t blame a kid for having a messy room if he never had a good influence telling him the value in cleaning it up. You can’t expect people to discover these ideas purely by their own volition—they must be exposed to them first. Some might be able to arrive at such philosophical conclusions purely from first principles, but you can’t expect that of the average person who is born into unfortunate circumstances. Again, an ethic of bootstrapping begets bootstrapping, whereas an environment that emphasizes determinism without agency leads to depression and degeneracy.
In fact, the entire notion of personal responsibility hinges on the reality that your actions have a direct impact on the lives of other people. If people are truly free agents, then what I do should have no social consequences outside of myself. I could walk around sneering at bus drivers, not tipping my server, and refusing to call my grandmother without those actions negatively affecting anyone else. But clearly, this is not the case. Rather, it is precisely because the world is deterministic and our lives are so interconnected that an individual’s actions matter so much. Although they may seem like small transgressions, these things add up. If you want to live in a happier, more positive world it is your job to go about creating it. Of course, as a server myself, if someone doesn’t tip me I try not to take it personally. But if you’ve ever been complimented by a stranger passing you by on the street, or had the car ahead of you pay for your drink at the drive through, then you will know how much difference a small act of kindness can make in brightening your day. These are small examples, but the stakes can be astronomical. Who knows who may be reading this that could be influenced to make a different decision based on the ideas discussed here? How many people will that decision impact? And who will they impact in turn? It’s all connected, it’s all a great big feedback loop. I was shocked when reading The Moral Landscape to discover that determinism wasn’t central to Sam Harris’s thesis. So this essay is my attempt at advancing the arguments I wished he had put forward.
Ultimately, I am a determinist. I think science makes that abundantly clear, and I don’t have any religious allegiances that would make me think otherwise. However, just because the world is deterministic does not mean that you are not capable of making meaningful choices, and the ideas that you accept regarding what you are capable of will have a direct impact on whatever it is you ultimately do. Thus, a culture that emphasizes agency and the causal power of the individual is also of central importance. These ideas don’t contradict each other; they amplify one another. The world is deeply interconnected. This means that you have the capacity to both cause, and to be caused. Reality will manifest in accordance with whatever tendency you lean into. But you don’t need God to justify this belief, it is a logical consequence of the nature of the universe. Our ethical intuitions or value orientations don’t rely upon fictions or stories—they are a product of the world exactly as it is. You can’t control other people, therefore you should be empathetic, and attempt to understand them. You might be able to persuade them of something, but only if you listen to where they are coming from and are willing to exercise patience and forgiveness. On the flip side, you are entirely in control over your actions, so you should hold yourself to a high standard. Not an impossible one (the laws of determinism apply to you too!), but an ambitious one. You should strive to work hard and pursue what is meaningful, adopting the maximum responsibility you can bear. Why? Because the higher you aim, the more you will achieve. The world unfolds in accordance with your expectations. Beliefs beget outcomes.
This is my take on ethics, broadly speaking. It may be a little unconventional, but I believe this approach is crucial for the rest of our moral and political reasoning. We need a philosophical framework that allows us to integrate free will and determinism. What I’ve tried to demonstrate in this chapter is that you are able to exert conscious control over your actions, and hopefully this understanding will encourage you to make better choices in the future. But what goals should we be aspiring towards? Sure, I can make choices, but what should I choose? What values and ideals should motivate my decisions? That’s what we shall explore that in the next chapter. If ethics is concerned with interpersonal values, then consider morality to be how those values manifest on an individual level. This chapter was the “why”, next I’ll be tackling “how”,
and diving into individualism, objectivism, and the hero’s journey.
5. Hero: Moral Ego
Ethics is about universal principles of human behaviour and how they emerge out of reality, whereas morality is concerned with what you should do specifically. It assess right and wrong behaviour on an individual level, so there is a strong psychological aspect. In my view, the right moral approach promotes better outcomes in both life and also mental and emotional wellbeing. Morality is like the glue, the how and why which give your decisions coherence, meaning and purpose. Without an integrated moral framework, you are lost and unsure—unmotivated and undisciplined—and you will experience a sense of fear and guilt that cannot be explained or gotten rid of. Even if you have a belief system that you adhere to, it is useless if you are not sure why you are committed to it. This is why I don’t think religious prescriptions are a proper substitute for moral philosophy. They may tell you what to do, but not why it is you are doing it. Whereas if you have a why, then the what will come naturally. This chapter shall explore reason, individualism, and heroism. It is inspired by ideas from Jordan Peterson, Zen Buddhism, and Stoicism, and introduces Objectivism as a vital element. So, let’s pick up from where we left off in Wonderland…
Part One: The Gate
You’ve arrived at the town. Well, the gate at least. The city is surrounded by a large, tall, stone wall. But in front of you is a green door with bronze trim, and a sign that says, “knock if you want to come in”. You give the knocker a rap, and within a snap there’s a man in front of you with a bushy moustache and a grin.
“Hi! Hello, how do you do? The name’s Tru. How can I help you?”
“Um, hi,” you say, a bit unsure. “I’m here to slay the dragon.”
“Wow! That’s fantastic news to say the least! Tell me, how do you plan on slaying the beast?”
“Um, good question. I haven’t thought about that yet. I thought maybe I could come inside and…”
“Come inside?” The guard gives you a confused look. “Why would you want to come inside? The dragon is out there, not in here!”
“Yes, well, you see, I don’t actually know where the dragon is or how to slay it. I was hoping that there would be a wizard or something here who would… you know… tell me what to do?”
Tru looks at you. “Why would you show up offering to slay a dragon when you don’t know the first thing about dragon slaying?”
“I… I don’t know! Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”
“Says who?” Asks Tru.
“Well, I… I met this frog and he told me that your town needed a hero so I—”
“Oh, so you’re some sort of hero?”
“Well, no. Not yet, but I want to become one!”
“And how’s slaying a dragon gonna help you do that?”
“Well, that’s what heroes do, isn’t it?”
“Oh no, you’ve got your cause mixed up with your effect. Some heroes slay dragons, sure. But simply slaying a dragon doesn’t make you a hero, it just makes you a dragon slayer.”
“But… I’d be helping your town. That’s heroic! …Isn’t it?”
Tru scoffs. “What’s so heroic about risking life and limb to help a town you’ve never even been to before? Why should you want to help us? Do you even know where you are?”
“Um…”
“Yes! The Town of UM, that's where you’ve come.”
“The… Town of UM? That’s dumb. I mean… What’s it from?”
“UM as in the opposite of Mu.”
“Mu who?”
“Haven’t you heard? It’s from a koan by Joshu”
“What’s a koan do?”
“Oh, I see,” says Tru, “you haven’t a clue. Koans are little riddles which are used to provoke enlightenment. A monk once asked Joshu, “does a dog have Buddha nature?” Joshu answered, “Mu”. In doing so, he unasked the question! Rendering it moot, if you will. Contrarily, it is our tradition, in the town of UM, to ask the very question you didn’t know you had raised.”
“Why?” you ask.
“Now you get the picture!” Says the guard with a grin.
“I’m confused… Can’t you just let me in?”
“I’m sorry sly, but I can’t let you in until you know why.”
“I—Why not?”
“Nice shot,” says Tru. “But that won’t do. Like I said, good reason only. That’s our gold standard.”
“But it took me all day to get here! And I’m tired and hungry. Isn’t that good reason enough?”
“And yet you haven’t enough reason to find yourself some food? I’m sorry, but the Town of UM won’t help anyone who isn’t first willing help themselves. And besides, you’re a young adventurer in tiptop shape! You’ll be alright for the night.”
“So you’re gonna make me sleep outside?!”
“Me? I’m not making you do anything. You can do whatever you like. But you better think fast, it’s getting late!” Says the guard as he closes the gate.
“Wait!” You cry, banging at the door. But Tru answers no more.
Part Two: Good Reason
Let’s talk about reason. This word has two meanings, which are often related but don’t always overlap. “Reason” can refer to both casual explanations and justifications as well as rational thought. However, “rational” too carries the same issue, as it can mean
both “rationale”, as in a reason for doing something, as well as “rational” in the typical, logical sense we are familiar with. It’s entirely possible to do things which are unreasonable or irrational while still having an identifiable reason or rationale for doing so. For instance, if I’m angry at someone and I hit them in the face, clearly this action is not very reasonable—it is emotionally motivated and makes matters worse rather than better. But at the same time, you can easily understand the reason why an angry person would want to hit someone in the face: they want to hurt them. In which case, mission accomplished! In fact, if your goal is to hurt someone and you hit them in the face, then that action is entirely rational. You wanted to create an output (their pain) and you provided the correct input (your fist). Your motives may be questionable, but the action itself is perfectly logical given your intent.
Determinism implies that people are rational actors, in the causal sense. Whatever you ultimately do is the only thing you could have done in that circumstance. But this by no means suggests that people will always do what is rational, as in most optimal. Clearly our perceptions and judgements are fallible; we are more than capable of making mistakes. Our emotions, expectations, and experiences all play a meaningful role in shaping our behaviour. But people will always do what they think is best in a given situation. Of course, hindsight is 20/20, and we might very well regret a decision after the fact. However, at the time, your actions will always be in accordance with your available knowledge and beliefs.
So there are three factors that motivate your decision-making mechanism: what you want, why you want it, and what you believe you need to do in order to achieve it. Let’s say you’ve gone to buy a car. This is the want. You talk to the dealer about your budget and needs, and he provides you with three options. One is affordable, one is environmentally conscientious, and one looks really cool. Which car is the most rational purchase? Well, it depends on why you want it, doesn’t it? The cheap one saves you money, the clean one saves the earth, and the cool one might just save your sex life. You’ll buy whatever car you believe will fulfill your goals. But there’s a catch—it may turn out that the cheap car costs more to maintain than one of the more expensive models, and you end up paying more in the long run. Or maybe the electric car actually produces more greenhouse gases than the gas guzzler. Or perhaps the girl you’re looking to impress cares less about flashy sports cars than you thought she would. All of these things are possible, and yet none of them would make your decision at the point of purchase any less rational.
You will never knowingly make a decision that produces an undesirable outcome. What constitutes “undesirable” depends on the disposition of the individual. An addict may be able to logically recognize the issues with their addiction while still rationalizing a reason to continue their abuse. They are simply acting in their short term self interest rather than long term. There’s nothing unreasonable about doing things you know you shouldn’t be doing if other incentives exist. For the addict, the undesirable outcome they want to avoid is staying sober. Why this is the case will depend on the individual. Maybe addiction runs in their family, maybe they’re depressed, maybe they’ve surrounded themselves by bad influences, maybe they just don’t care. But there is always an identifiable motive, either implicit or explicit.
Sam Harris once said that he experiences a sense of uncertainty, or randomness, when making decisions. This surprised me, since I couldn’t disagree more. I very strongly feel that there is internal logic and principles which guide my actions. I treat my life like a game of chess, with certain goals I want to achieve and certain moves I need to make in order to achieve them. I’m always thinking a few steps ahead, I always have contingency plans. If at any point someone was to stop me and ask, “why did you do that?” I could reply in an instant. Maybe it’s because I’m highly introspective, but to me the motives for my behaviour have always been entirely transparent. I don’t feel as though I act freely, I act rationally. I can always identify what causes are motivating my behaviour, both in terms of what I want and why I want it. The why is what I want to focus on in this chapter. What constitutes good reason?
Of course, this question begs another: are some reasons better than others? To which I say, yes, absolutely! I don’t believe in moral relativism. I view moral philosophy as a tool that allows you to move through life successfully. It is a code of values and rules that dictates how you respond to and act within the world. In order to be effective, it must speak to something real about the nature of reality and your relationship to it. So, by definition, some answers must be better than others. Morality is a consequence of consciousness and agency. If we were able to survive on instinct alone then there would be no need for moral reasoning. But the fact that we are capable of making choices means we need some standard through which to choose. These motives can either be consciously adopted or haphazardly accumulated.
I believe that rationality and morality are the same thing. Having “good reason” means you’ve thought things through. Your wants are not based on whim’s but why’s, and those why’s are wise. They have been carefully selected through considering both context and consequence. Reason is therefore the core value. Everything else follows from this. Why? Because you asked that question. If I say, “I value this,” and you ask why, my answer must appeal to an even greater reason, or value. It’s “why’s” all the way down. There may be lots of other values I hold dear, like honesty or forgiveness, but there will also always be situations where I would lie or refuse to forgive someone. In those particular circumstances, I would have good reason for doing so. Explanation is everything, but reasons must refer to something real. They must connect to reality in a meaningful way, otherwise they are unintelligible.
Because of this, convictions without reasons will work until challenged. Many people go through life wanting and believing things without ever introspecting as to why. Or, they settle for some surface level explanation rather than digging to the core. No one can be faulted for this—you can’t expect everyone to be first principle philosophers—but it does create problems in a society that has found its foundations on bad moral premises. Religious doctrines, for instance. The “why’s” in that circumstance end at God. There may be lots of good advice along the way that provides value, but if the foundation is rotting then how do you expect the structure to survive? This is why I prefer a morality that is baked into reality. So long as we experience existence, we
share a common ground that we can attempt to build, explain, and explore.
I’ve smuggled a little premise along with me: since people are rational—there are reasons for their behaviours and beliefs—this means that they can be reasoned with. You just have to identify where and why you disagree. Of course, some matters are entirely subjective; I’m not suggesting you can use logic to persuade a chocolate ice cream lover than vanilla is superior. And some people are closed minded; they have found a position they are comfortable with and don’t want to question it any further. Don’t waste time trying to convince someone who refuses to think. But, for those who remain open, they can be persuaded. Once you understand the rationale, or the value, in adopting a certain point of view it becomes easier to adopt. This entire section is paradoxical, as I am trying to convince you of the value of reason by appealing to your reason. Most people reject rationality because they believe it contradicts morality in some fundamental way. But I believe the exact opposite to be true: morality and rationality operate in harmony. To be moral is to be rational. Any other conception of morality denies reality. How can you make claims about how a person ought to live in the world without first acknowledging the world they are in? The context carries a collection of corollaries which must also be considered.
Part Three: The Woods
The gate clangs shut and you turn towards the woods. You realize that for the first time since entering Wonderland, you earnestly have no clue what to do. Everything up until this point was a consequence of the events which came before it. You found your way out of the maze, into the forest, followed the ants, met Aunt Hillary, fled to the stream and found the frog who sent you to meet Tru. You didn’t have to think about what you were going to do next, things just kept happening. Now you are alone with nothing but the setting sun and an empty stomach. Suddenly you recall that you’ve been in this situation before, in the maze, and you learned your lesson then: there’s no use sitting around when you’ve got a problem to solve. So, you set out into the woods once again. But this time, you’re not wandering aimlessly—your eyes are alert and your head is on a swivel—you’re looking for food.
It doesn’t take long before you find a bush with some berries which look promising, but what if they’re poisonous? You look around and spot some seeds on the ground. Then you see a squirrel who is munching on the berries and assume this means they must be safe to eat. You help yourself to a few, and they don’t taste half-bad, but the bush is nearly picked clean and you know it won’t be enough. Then you remember the stream. You can’t recall the way you came, but you listen for the sound of running water until you find your way back again. You walk downstream, searching for signs of fish. Eventually, you reach a spot where the water is deep enough and you spot a few fish swimming below. How will you catch one though? You try to snatch one with your hands, but they’re too quick. You realize that you’ll need a spear, or a stick. You spend a few minutes foraging in the forest and find a few options, but none of them are very pointy. If only you had a knife or… Oh! A stone. You look around the stream for a sharp rock, but they’ve all been made smooth by the current. If only there was one that weren't! Wait, what if you… You grab a pebble and smash is against hard stone until you produce a side with a sharp edge. Now you can carve yourself a spear. You carve up a stick real quick and pretty soon you’ve caught yourself supper. However, you’re not done yet! You’ll need a fire, and there’s not a lot of light left.
You swiftly snap your spare sticks into twigs and assemble a stack of stones into a circle, building a little tipi with the branches in the middle. You dart back into the woods to grab some crunchy leaves for kindling. It’s nearly dark, and you still need to make a spark. You take your time selecting two dry sticks to rub together, knowing that it will take a lot of friction to generate enough heat and once you start you can’t stop without losing all of your progress, so you have to be sure. Once you’re happy with your set up, you begin the process. Within seconds your hands are hot and raw, but you keep going, knowing that each second of discomfort is bringing you closer to a hot meal. In a few minutes you start to see smoke, and then the kindling catches and suddenly you have a campfire! You take a moment to beam at your creation; although it’s just a measly little fire, you can’t remember a time you’ve felt more accomplished. You skewer your fish, roast it up nice and crisp, and the first bite is the best thing you’ve ever tasted. You fall asleep by the fire feeling warm, and full, and proud.
Part Four: Personal Purpose
Morality is the realm of philosophy which is concerned with how a person ought to live. In order to live you must first survive, but one cannot survive by any means alone. Some actions bring you closer to death while some bring you further away from it. Unlike other animals, we aren’t born with a set of instincts telling us how to find food or create shelter. Our actions are not automatic; they must be consciously considered. This means that we are capable of making choices which can both help or hinder us. The standard you use to discriminate which is which is what morality is all about. What reason should guide your actions? Your own livelihood is a good place to start. A moral code of conduct that causes man to suffer and die rather than to live and prosper is malevolence in masquerade.
How does one survive? This is the problem you faced in the woods, and the solution is based on a principle you discovered back in the maze: you must use your own senses and mind, for they are the only tools available to you. You walked into the woods and searched for food. Your eyes spotted the red berries and then you used your mind to determine that they were safe to eat. The same thing happened with the stream: you thought of fishing and then listened for the sound of rushing water to guide you to where you needed to go. You had to solve problems; sharpening a spear and building a fire, and the entire time you acted with good reason. You were logical, purposeful, and methodical. Every action brought you closer to your goal. This is the moral ideal. You identified a purpose and used your reason to achieve it. In doing so, you experienced pleasure and pride, knowing you did the right thing.
The purpose of your life can be defined by no one but yourself. This is due to the same reason that you must rely upon your own senses and mind to navigate the world. No one else shares your subjective experience. No two mazes, or lives, are alike. They may be shaped by the same metaphysics, but their specific manifestations are as diverse as the individuals who occupy them. How could anyone else be a better authority on what you should do with your life? A person may be able to persuade you by appealing to your reason, but ultimately your own mind must be the final arbiter. Otherwise you are acting without good reason for doing so.
Lots of people wish to evade the responsibility of thinking by surrendering their judgment to some higher authority. They assume, “surely society must be smarter than me, a measly individual.” While this may sometimes be the case, it isn’t always. Chapter #2 explained how complex systems benefit from variation; if all of the ants in a colony followed the same path they would never discover new food. The environment isn’t stagnant but constantly changing. In order to survive, we must evolve. And you don’t get evolution without mutation—without difference.
In society, individualism is the manifestation of this same principle. Without free thinkers we would never have any progress. Galileo is a good example of this: just because the entire world believes something doesn’t mean you have to agree if you have good reason not to. Strength may exist in numbers, but knowledge rarely does. Of course, fear is a powerful motivator, and many would rather surrender their mind to the the mercy of a mob in order to escape ostracism. However, it is precisely when this happens that history goes sour, when individuals become incapable of saying “no” and knowing why they are saying it. Without a code of values, without good reason and purpose guiding your behaviour, you become susceptible to bad actors. We all sneer at the Nazi’s who said of Auschwitz, “I’m not to blame! I was just following orders!” As if forfeiting personal responsibility makes one innocent instead of accountable. Blame is an infinite regress, no one can be held answerable for your actions but you.
You must be able to think by and for yourself, independently working to further your own ends and purpose. You cannot live your life for anyone else's sake, nor should you expect anyone else to live their life for yours. The world doesn’t owe you anything. This is why the town of UM won’t let you in unless you have good reason to enter. This might feel unfair, but the fact of the matter is outside of your control. Just as you should not try to reason with someone who refuses to think, you cannot attempt to bend reality to your whims. You must learn to embrace its rules.
Alcoholics Anonymous is known for the saying, “may God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.” This sentiment can also be found in Stoicism, Objectivism, and Buddhism. It’s a simple fact of life that there is an outer world which exists outside your control and an inner realm which is entirely your domain. If you focus your energy on wishing you could effect things outside of your causal capacity, you’ll experience nothing but fear and frustration. The secret to cultivating a peaceful and pleasant state of mind is through only attending to that which you can do, and doing it.
Ram Dass once said, “I can do nothing for you but work on myself, and you can do nothing for me but work on yourself.” What he means is that all action stems from the individual. The only way you can improve the world is through improving how you act in it. The question you should be asking is not, “what can I do?” but, “what must I do?” meaning,
who should you become? In order to truly contend with reality you need to be willing to adapt and change, willing to learn and work.
A funny idea we’ve adopted is how we see work as something that should be avoided. Work requires active effort and exertion, it is by-definition something that is not easy. But this doesn’t mean it cannot be enjoyable; it depends entirely on your disposition. If you work without purpose, without good reason, then of course you will grow to resent it, for there is no meaningful “why” which makes it all worthwhile. Whereas, if you know what you want to achieve then productivity is simply part of the process. Buddhism and Objectivism both recognize how true immersion in one’s work creates total focus and clarity. You enter into a flow state where you are no longer thinking or feeling about what you’re doing, you’re simply doing it. You and the work become one. “Being and becoming” as I call it: presence that is both purposeful and productive.
Up until COVID I was a waitress, and I can’t tell you how much I miss showing up for work and losing myself in the process. Serving is like dancing; you are constantly moving from one thing to another and need to be thinking five steps ahead, updating your plan as new information comes in. I love it. It’s like a little game trying to figure out how I can do things as efficiently as possible. I have systems for everything—every move I make has been carefully calculated and considered—it’s all been optimized. And I see no reason why all work can’t be like this, whether you’re a janitor, cashier, or computer engineer. There is value in taking pride in your work, in learning to love the process and actively trying to be better at it. Instead of just getting the job done, try getting the job done well. For with proficiency comes play. It’s like learning an instrument; it may be hard work to master the basics, but once you have those down you can start having fun with it. The work must be done either way, you may as well learn to enjoy and take pride in the process.
Part Five: The Plan
You’re lying in a sunny field when suddenly you spot a flash of white. You sit up, and realize it’s a rabbit, in a waistcoat, with a pocket-watch. Knowing where this story goes you chase after it, and soon find yourself tumbling down, into Wonderland. The feeling of free-falling startles you to your senses and you wake up on the forest floor with the campfire smouldering next to you. You spend a moment hastily looking around for the white rabbit before you realize your mistake. Of course it’s not going to be here, that was just a dream! But, wait, wasn’t that exact series of events how you wound up in Wonderland in the first place? You’re shocked at how quickly you forgot your life outside of this world. Even though it’s only been a few days it feels like a lifetime. What am I doing here? You wonder. You think back on all that has happened since your arrival, how much you have learned and changed. You’re not the same person you were when you first came. You think differently now. You’re more confident, more self-assured. You have courage in your convictions—you know why you think what you think.
You know that reality must be contended with in order to survive and that it has certain rules which must be obeyed. You know that you must discover these rules for yourself, using your own senses and mind. You know that the world is controlled by complex systems, but that causality works in two directions: belief begets outcomes. The more you believe you are capable of making choices, the more choices you can make. But what should you choose? You recall the events of last night. How you went into the forest with purpose and used reason to achieve your aims. You were capable. You found food, made tools, and fire. You took care of yourself. You solved problems. You didn’t panic like before, you just did what needed to be done and enjoyed doing it.
It felt good.
You get up off of the ground and look around. With your hands on your hips you survey the surrounding forest. Okay, so you’re in Wonderland. You don’t know how or why, but so far so good. So what’s next? What do you want to do? You feel as though you could do anything you set your mind to. Oh, I know, you think. I’ll go talk to Tru. I’ve got an idea on how to get through.
Part Six: Self Esteem
An often overlooked aspect of Objectivism is its commitment to the idea that life is to be enjoyed. It is premised on the idea that every person’s life is an end in and of itself, with their own happiness as their highest purpose. It contains an intrinsic belief that life is good, to be enjoyed, and used as one sees fit. An objectivist ethic insists upon exaltation, love of life, and celebration of being. It is hungry, proud, fearless, sensual, shameless, and visceral. However, it does not embrace blind hedonism; indulgence for indulgence’s sake has no purpose outside of the present moment. It does not lead to long term health or happiness. Eating a pizza every night of the week may taste good, but deep down it doesn’t feel good. For pleasure alone is not the cause of value, it is the consequence of achieving it.
Objectivism holds that man should have self-esteem, but this must be earned. It is a consequence of having confidence in your reason and purpose. We are not born with innate knowledge or values, they must be discovered and adopted for ourselves. When you act in accordance with your self-defined ideals, this makes you feel good, for you are striving towards something which you have deemed worthwhile and meaningful. You know the principles which guide your action and how you came to possess them. You’re not guided by mere whim, but self-appointed rules. So long as you adhere to your own standards, so long as you never do anything that you are not proud of, then the judgements of other people cannot hurt you. If you are faithful to yourself, then self-esteem comes from within. It does not need to be earned by the approval of others.
Nowadays, we tend to think of ego as a bad thing. “Egotistical” suggests someone who is self-righteous and self-obsessed with an inflated sense of self-worth. Even worse, it implies someone who is willing to sacrifice others as a means to their own ends, who believes that they are inherently superior. Instead of possessing pride due to the virtue of their actions, their self-esteem is unearned; it is an effect without any proper cause. This form of ego cannot survive on its own, it requires external validation from others to sustain the lie. It is shallow, status-seeking, superficial, and ultimately unsatisfying. Baseless pride must constantly work to evade reality in order to support its own self-image. But reality cannot be avoided. Not forever. Not without consequence.
Positive ego is simply your own sense of self. Your consciousness, your inner “I”, your epistemology, your sensory experience, your subjectivity. It is everything that connects
you to reality, which causes you to be something rather than nothing. A functional ego knows that reality can be mastered, but only if it is obeyed. It cultivates confidence by engaging with its perceptual and conceptual capacities. It takes no authority as higher than its own, while accepting that reality must be the final court of appeal. A good ego grows through being true to itself, by following its own reason, passion, and purpose. It ignores the opinion of others and is entirely concerned with how you view yourself.
Are you capable or culpable? Are you trying to evade reality, or have you accepted it as your only friend? If you wish to achieve any amount of success, you first must decide that you are capable. Very few victories comes without some degree of pathological self-confidence. If you don’t believe you can do it, there’s no reason why anyone else should. Superstars are egotistical in that they pursue their goals unabashedly, they won’t let anyone else tell them what they can and cannot do, they follow their own vision. However, they know they must put in the work, for dreams without actions are simple delusions. If you fail to achieve your goals, the only action available to you is to improve yourself, to work harder, to be better. Humility is required too, for you only deserve what you are willing to earn. These principles are by no means a promise for success, but they are the best possible path available. Life isn’t fair, and people don’t always get what they deserve, but morality isn’t about what life throws at you, it’s about how you react to it. As long as you stick to your own values and reasons, so long as you put in your best possible effort, then you’ll know that any failure or hardship which befalls you is not your fault; for you did everything you could have done.
So, here’s my recommendation: pursue life like you could do anything and see what becomes possible. This is what Jordan Peterson means when he talks about adopting the greatest casual load you can bear. This pursuit is both the most challenging and also the most fulfilling. And as they say, shoot for the moon and even if you miss you’ll land among the stars. Believing you can do anything and trying is always better than doing nothing at all. As was said in the previous chapter, reality unfolds in accordance with your expectations. Opportunities reveal themselves only when and where you decide to look for them. So pay attention! Look and listen, and soon you’ll start to find that there are little clues everywhere. Put your intention out into the world and it will find a way of coming back to you. This is the real purpose of prayer. When you send a little wish out into the universe and truly believe it can be fulfilled, it’s more likely to come true because you’ve opened yourself up to the possibility. This is the concept of manifestation, or law of attraction in action. These ideas work because they force you to adopt an optimistic attitude, and the broadest appetites produce the best results.
Approach life like the world is your oyster, or a single player video game. You might spawn without any items or knowledge, but there is an automatic assumption that achievement is possible—you just need to go out and explore a little. Even if you come from nothing, this doesn’t say anything about what you could be capable of. A popular trope is for the heroes of stories to start as penniless orphans, with nothing and nobody to rely on but themselves. But what makes a hero? They are independent and courageous, confident and compassionate, ambitious and industrious, resourceful and resilient. They are driven by their own principles and for their own purpose; improving themselves and the rest of the world as a consequence.
I know what you’re thinking: “Okay, I get what you’re saying. I know what I need to do. But what should I do? How do I figure out what my purpose is?” The answer is simple: start from the beginning. Where are you? Who are you? What are you working with? What are your strengths and weaknesses? Self-knowledge is the first step towards self-mastery. What limits and creates us is also the source of our power. All of us are born into an entirely unique circumstance, and this is an asset. You have a certain set of knowledge and experience that is baked into your identity. No one can compete with you on being you, so what is something only you could do? That is what you should pursue. Follow your own interests, talents, and passions, otherwise you will be outperformed. Use your own unique position to your advantage and you will find a purpose that is meaningful, that feels inevitable even, like your own personal destiny.
Determinism can either lead to either despair or heroism. You are a product of unchosen factors, yes, and you will carry those influences with you throughout your life; they make you who you are. But what you are is more than what you are made of. You do not need to be defined by, or beholden to, anything which does not serve you. What you are, what your consciousness enables, is your ability to make choices. To adapt, to overcome. Understanding why we are the way we are allows us to reinvent ourselves when necessary. This is by no means easy, but it is possible to reprogram your mind. You don’t have to be anxious or depressed if you don’t want to be, but you will continue to be that way until you choose to become otherwise. You have to learn to forgive and integrate your past, for you cannot be blamed for it. It had to be that way, the only thing you can do now is choose to move forward from it.
You do not have free will unconstrained by causality, but you do have your will; a personal conception of and relationship to life that should not be sacrificed to any other standard. “When you really want something,” so says The Alchemist, “that desire comes from the soul of the universe.” I really believe this is true. The most meaningful drives in our lives aren’t accidents, they are a consequence of our very essence. If you don’t know what you want out of life yet, that’s fine. Focus on developing yourself. Sort yourself out, clean your room, get your life in order and that way when desire or disaster comes calling, you’ll be ready for it. Only afterwards will it be obvious that things couldn’t have happened any other way.
Part Seven: The End and The Beginning
You return to the gates of UM and are surprised to spot Tru already standing outside.
“Yoo-hoo,” says Tru, “I’ve been waiting for you.”
“How’d you know I’d come back?” You ask.
“Oh, they always do,” he replies. “Now tell me, have you found your reason?”
“I think so,” you say.
“So, why should the town of UM let you in?”
“Mu,” says you, looking straight at Tru.
“Very good,” says the guard with a grin, standing aside to allow you in.
6. The Structure of Freedom
This chapter explores political theory, presented as a direct consequence of the moral philosophy outlined previously. This being that man should live his life to achieve his own ends, with his own happiness as his highest ideal and reason as his only absolute. A pretty conventional premise shared by Stoics and Objectivists alike. It rests on the simple acknowledgement that you are born into a world which you cannot control, and the only thing you can change is yourself. Moreover, the only tools available to perceive and understand the world are your own senses and mind, so one must be free to think and act for themselves. A consequence of this conclusion is that individual freedom is an ideal we should strive to emulate in our societies. I’m won’t spend any time rehashing arguments for personal liberty, as the value of difference in complex systems has already been explored in earlier chapters. If you remain unconvinced, I implore you to explore the plethora of other political philosophers who have talked this topic to death over the past few centuries. In my view, the interesting question of political philosophy is not, “is freedom a virtue?” but, “how might and must freedom be achieved?” The Structure of Freedom may sound contradictory, but it’s really the most authentic account of reality. To the extent that liberty brings about prosperity, it requires certain preconditions to survive. When we talk about the value of liberty, we do not mean complete laissez-faire, but rather live-and-let-live, and that’s an entirely different story. So, let’s explore a little…
Part One: Welcome to UM
The great green door that guards the town of UM swings open, and you are shocked by the sight that greets you. You had been expecting a modest medieval village, with dirt roads and thatched roofs and old picket fences. Instead, it is as if you have stepped
through a looking glass and been transported to a land of decadence. The plain, grey stone walls which surrounded the exterior of the city give way to a brilliant, opulent interior; like an unassuming oyster cracked open to reveal the mother of pearl within. The city is dazzling, with tall townhouses towering up into the sky and streets swept so clean that they sparkle in the sunlight. There are people everywhere—men, women, and children walking around wearing crisp cotton clothes, frequenting florists and produce carts and cafes that spill out of the storefronts and out, on to the surrounding streets. There is a joyful bustle in the air, a pleasant sense of purpose and prosperity as far as the eye can see.
You stand in the middle of street, mouth hanging open, inhaling the scent of freshly cut flowers and baked bread, taking in the spectacle. Nobody has taken any notice of you, and you’re not sure what to do until you spot a sign hanging from an emerald green post that reads, “To the Palace” with a finger pointing off into the distance. You notice at the base of the sign is a cobblestone that has been painted gold, and a few feet away is another, and then another one after that, like a shiny trail of breadcrumbs seducing you into the centre of the city. You decide to take the bait and follow the path, wondering who might rule a place as magnificent as this.
Part Two: Anarchy, Democracy, and Tyranny
The task of all political theorists is to answer three essential questions: What is government? How does it emerge? and What constitutes legitimate political power? While the first question is a simple matter of definition, the latter clearly contains a strong moral competent, which is why politics is downstream from morality and not vice-versa. Simply being born into a system does not make it any more righteous than its potential alternatives. Thinking for yourself means thinking by yourself, and if you want to tackle difficult questions concerning the structure of society, it’s best to start from first principles. I like the idea of building a system of government from a blank sheet of paper, but then one is confronted with the question of where to begin.
The social contract is a common remedy to this question. In the tradition of political philosophy, social contract theory calls upon the thinker to imagine a time before the existence of government. A state of nature, or anarchy, where every man is for himself and accountable to no one; vulnerable to the might and malevolence of any man who would seek to do him harm. In such a circumstance, it would seem only logical that over time some would elect to protect their own interests by entering into agreements with others. Surrendering some personal liberty for the sake of mutual prosperity. Thus, government is born, which is defined as an agency which possesses a monopoly on the legitimate use of authority over a given territory. Social contract theory is considered to be a moral ideal due to the fact that each member entered the union by their own volition. Of course, the problem with this theory is that it is pure fairytale. And even if it weren’t, there’s no reason why one should be bound by the agreements of their ancestors. In reality, government is any predominant system of power that you are born into, yet did not agree to. The coercion came first, not the contract. Better rip up that piece of paper, let’s try again.
The truth is that we are all born into circumstances against our will. Whether that is a state of nature, where we are vulnerable to the elements and malevolence of others, or slavery, where our lives are owned by unchosen masters, or any other political system wherein you are subject to rules you did not agree to. Oppression is the default, the expectation, not the exception. And by-definition, government is that which compels, that which has the power to act upon you against your will and without legal recourse. Anarchists insist that because of this, all political power is illegitimate, as any system of power which acts upon you against your will violates your rights as an individual. However the problem with this view is that while rights are an important conceptual tool, they are by no means a guarantee. You have no more right to rights than you do clean clothes or food or a roof over your head. Life doesn’t owe you anything, and even worse, the trend of history demonstrates that one must actively work to stay alive and preserve their liberty. The concept of “rights” are not an entitlement, but a luxury that we have grown accustomed to. You have no inherent, inalienable right to live free from
force—such an idea flies in the face of reality. It’s a nice daydream, but won’t get you far in terms of practical philosophy. What you do have a right to—a moral imperative, not a political promise—is a right to act in any way you see fit to preserve your liberty. A man born into a state of nature may make a contract with other men in an attempt to protect his livelihood. A slave born under tyranny may try to escape his oppressors. And you, born into a democracy, may seek out any political system you find preferable.
Anarchism’s fault is that it is a description of reality, not a political philosophy. All of life is inherently anarchical due to the fact that the current systems are perpetuated through power, nothing more or less. Might is right at the end of the day, maybe not morally speaking but practically so. Despite the desire to establish a global world order, all political systems emerge out of anarchy and can return to it at any moment. A political theorist that embraces anarchism is simply passing the buck, evading the difficult questions of political theory in favour of the invisible hand. But emergent solutions require structure, which is exactly what a state provides. Anarchists make the mistake of seeing the state as an inhibition of the market, rather than a logical consequence of it. A government does not acquire power out of thin air. Force must be financed, and power is perpetuated by a paying populace. So ultimately, the state can be viewed as a subscription service like any other. If you are unsatisfied with the product, simply take your business elsewhere.
You’re likely thinking it’s not that simple. We all have our grievances with current governments, but it’s not like my mailbox is full of pamphlets offering meaningful alternatives. Not yet, at least. So what’s to be done about the problem of power? How do we set about building the sort of systems we would like to see? The conventional liberal answer is that the political project must be perfected through the democratic process; a government by the people and for the people. However this creates another problem, as the democratic delusion relies upon the assumption that the whim of the collective outweighs the will of the individual. After all, how can anyone know what’s best for them? It’s probably best to let the group decide. But don’t worry, this is a free marketplace of ideas—if you have anything to say, just be sure shout it loud and clear and eventually everyone else will come to the same conclusion. The problem with this proposition is proved by its paradoxical nature: if the only way to disprove the moral sanctity of democracy is by appealing to the majority, then you’re already playing by its rules. There is absolutely no reason to assume that group consensus equals moral righteousness, and the politics of persuasion only work once one has bought into this foundational premise. Asking the people to keep the government in check simply begs the question of what will keep the people in check, and the problem of power persists. Some will insist that a constitution, or bill of rights, or other legal document will be enough to preserve political freedom. However, when the state is the final arbiter in interpreting its own laws, then it is always in its vested interest to bend words to its advantage. So if neither the people nor the state can be used to keep power in check, then how are we to resolve this puzzle?
The tension between the political left and right can be condensed into concerns over where power is concentrated, which manifests in two forms: force and finance. The right is concerned about coercion through force—they want small government and economic liberty. Whereas the left is concerned about coercion through finance—they want a government large enough to control the economy. These perspectives are two sides of the same coin, meaning the politics of power turns into a nesting issue. In any political system you see how there will always be concerns that those in power can be bought or pressured to act against the goal of good governance. If those in power can be bribed with money, then the people with money are the real ones in power. And if those in power can be threatened through force, then might becomes right and we return to the state of nature. Both of these concerns are real and seem inescapable, so what’s to be done about it?
Part Three: Here There Be Dragons
As you follow the trail of gold, venturing deeper and deeper into the city, you notice something peculiar. From the outside, the walls of UM seemed only large enough to surround a small village, but the further you walk the more you see. Parks and picnic tables, patios and poppy fields, on and on, seemingly for miles. Eventually, you stop a passerby on the street to inquire about this strange state of affairs.
“Excuse me,” you say. “Maybe I’m confused, but I could have sworn this place looked much smaller before I entered it.”
The woman laughs. “You’re new here, aren’t you?” she asks.
“Yes,” you say. “Just passing through.”
“You’re right,” she replies. “UM is bigger on the inside. Our founding father designed it that way, to keep the dragons at bay. For a town too big for its britches soon loses its riches.”
“What do you mean?” You ask.
“As you may have noticed,” she tells you, “UM is a place of abundance, of commerce and community. We attract all sorts from all over Wonderland who wish to come and enjoy the pleasantries of our way of life. As more people come, the town grows in proportion, but this can attract bad actors. So the magician who built UM cast a spell upon the enclosure, allowing the city to prosper without ever revealing its splendour.”
“But I heard that the town is being harassed by a dragon,” you say.
“Yes, it is. The dragons collect gold and jewels from all the villages in Wonderland, and in exchange they leave us alone. For dragons are lazy creatures. So long as they can threaten violence and take home a bounty for their horde they are happy. Luckily, our walls allow us to protect our real riches, and the dragons takes only a tiny portion of what we produce.”
“But why should the dragons take anything at all?” You exclaim. “That’s not fair!”
The woman shrugs. “Life isn’t fair. But things are much better here than they are elsewhere. Landlords and rent-seekers are inevitable. But before there was UM anyone with even a modicum of success would have been sought out and plundered mercilessly. At least here with have peace; and with peace comes prosperity. So it’s a small price to pay, really.”
You consider this for a moment and it seems to make sense. “Do you know how much longer until I get to the palace?” You ask. “I’ve been walking for quite a while.”
The woman points down the road to a spot of brilliant emerald on the horizon. “That’s it there,” she tells you. “But if you’re going to see the Princess, bring along a token for her time.”
“A token?” You say, a little taken aback. “But I haven’t got any money!”
“It doesn’t have to be money,” she says, “just something as a sign of good faith.” She smiles and gives you a wave goodbye, turning to take her leave.
It’s gotten late and the sun is starting to set. Now that you’re out of the main village, standing among farm fields, you have a better view of the horizon. You notice that the sky is covered in a crystal lattice you hadn’t seen before. It’s nearly imperceptible except for a few faint glimmers refracted by the sunlight. You realize that it’s not just the walls protecting UM, but a great glass dome, enclosing the town like a gemstone. That must be how the dragons remain ignorant to the wealth nested within. You look around for something suitable you could take to the Princess and eventually your eyes settle upon a field of flowers. You pause to collect a bundle of poppies before you continue towards the palace.
Part Four: Money, Value, and Virtue
I like to think of a magic as a pull from within; something from nothing. Chapter #4 demonstrated how free will can be conceptualized as a type magic by this definition, and the enchantment over UM is an extension of the same principle. The walls limit its size, but not its potential. This is an analogy for the relationship between money and prosperity. While the former may be fixed, the latter is boundless. But what does this have to do with politics? Or power? Well, as was stated earlier, force and finance are the two main means through which power manifests. We already know that might is not right from a moral standpoint, but what about money? What is money, anyhow?
Some people will try to tell you that money is the root of all evil. They would be wrong.
Money is really just a signal, nothing more or less. It is a consequence of specialization
and division of labor, allowing trade to occur efficiently by acting as an intermediary for what people want. The issue with money is that people see the signal and confuse it for a cause, rather than an effect. They assume that the goal of business is to make money, and this is partially true, but how businesses make money is through producing
something people value. It must create a product or service that people want, first.
Money can also be conceptualized as an IOU from society. When you go to work, you put in the work first and get paid later. In other words, you must create value before you a receive a token of value in exchange, which can later be cashed in for something you desire. But the value has already been generated—whether you spend your money or not. People get mad at billionaires for all the money they have sitting in their bank account, as if that wealth somehow prevents other people from generating their own. But that’s not how money works. A billionaire sitting on a stack of bills has produced an excess of value and taken only a tiny portion of what they are owed. The only damage that can occur from money being removed from the market is in a context where it is indivisible and thus prevents further exchange from occurring. Luckily, however, we’re not dealing in clamshells anymore.
Part of the beauty of Bitcoin is that it has a fixed quantity which can be subdivided indefinitely. In a closed system, deflation is desirable, for it’s a sign that more and more value is being generated—making your dollar worth more today than it was yesterday. Purchasing power is the proper measure of a prosperous populace. Just because Jeff Bezos has billions doesn’t make you any poorer. People make the mistake of assuming that because the money supply is limited, someone else having results in them having-not. This occurs because people conflate money (which is zero sum) with wealth, or prosperity, which can grow indefinitely. The walls of UM may stand firm, but this does not prevent its people from flourishing.
But money is power! You insist. You said so yourself! Surely if too much money becomes concentrated in the hands of the few then they can manipulate the system to their advantage! This may be true, but only to the extent that money may be used to purchase coercion. There is an important distinction here—money empowers, while coercion inhibits. In our current crony-capitalist system this glaring flaw is all too apparent. We all know that the corporations are in bed with the government, and this corrupt coalition of force and finance under the guise of democracy creates a worst possible outcome for everybody. However, this is not the fault of the free market. Rather, it is the result of a political system wherein rules and regulations are implemented and bent for the sake of special interests. The signal is being tampered with. But this is a bug in the system, not a feature of it.
What must be understood is that capitalism is a complex system, and money is the signal which drives the market. You don’t get emergent coordination without a reliable means of communicating information. This is why prices are so important; they provide the necessary information required to spur production. Without reliable representations of what people want and what they are willing to pay for it, the laws of supply and demand begin to break down and the system will no longer be effective. Ultimately, it is the profit motive which enables prosperity. There is money to be made
in giving people what they want, and money is also the means which allows you to do more in the future. Income inequality is therefore not only a logical consequence of complexity, but necessary if you wish to promote prosperity. Stifle the signal and the system shall remain stagnant.
The ability of individuals to accumulate capital is therefore of central importance, and this can only be accomplished when consumption lags behind production. If we only ever worked enough to keep our heads above water then our living conditions would never improve. Saving is what has transformed our productive capacity. Excess is what allows people to take risks and invest in the future, being able to opt for long term gains rather than short term satisfaction. This key feature is absent from Marx’s critique of the capitalist. Owning the means of production also means adopting all the consequences of its success or failure. While the workers wages are guaranteed, it can take decades for an owner to know if their investment was worthwhile.
A businessman or entrepreneur who makes good investments is rewarded with the ability to make more in the future. His competency is measured by the success of his enterprise. If you wish to make money you have to make something people value and provide it at scale. People get rich by developing new technology or new ideas, you simply can’t cut hair or flip burgers fast enough. Nowadays “billionaire” is used as a pejorative, but successfully orchestrating the production and distribution of products and services to the masses means you have earned the right to allocate capital. Men do not grow wealthy by accident, but through merit.
To pull from Paul Graham, up until a few centuries ago the main means of making wealth were mines, serfs, and slaves, and the only way to acquire these things was through inheritance, marriage, conquest, or confiscation. So naturally wealth has a bad reputation. It is an incredibly recent development in human history that one can earn wealth without having exploited someone else to obtain it. What brought about this change? Well, at some point in medieval Europe, merchants and manufacturers began congregating in towns. Together, they were able to stand up against their feudal lords and keep the fruits of their labor rather than being extorted for external gain. For the first time in history, the bullies stopped stealing the nerds’ lunch money. The reign of the dragons had come to a close.
The ability to acquire wealth is what incentivizes production and innovation. It takes a lot of time, risk, and grit to pursue a vision. Nobody would be willing to put in the work if there was no possibility of being able to claim the reward. Take the incentive of wealth away and technical innovation grinds to a halt. As Thomas Edison once said, “genius is 1% inspiration, and 99% perspiration.” Elon Musk has spoken about working 120 hours a week, not showering, and sleeping on the factory floor in order to keep up with production goals. Most people would not envy this position. It is only with a strong vision that such sacrifices are possible or even desirable. Musk wants to bring us to Mars, and I don’t see why anyone with less ambition should be able to stop him. In fact, we should strive for a society where the best and most productive people are as prosperous as possible, for they make life better for the rest of us. A rising tide raises all ships. What made Europe so powerful all those years ago was allowing those who generated wealth to keep it. Let those with genius and ambition keep the rewards of their work and watch as prosperity flourishes.
Part Five: The Princess in the Palace
When you arrive at the castle it’s nearly nightfall. You can’t help but experience a sense of deja-vu as you once again knock at a great green door, but this time it shines with green emerald instead of green paint. No guard answers, the door simply swings open as if of its own accord. Strange. There are no guards inside the palace either, just sparkling green emeralds everywhere you look; encrusted in the ornate columns and stained glass that decorates the interior. Your footsteps echo loudly through the empty
halls as you look around. Then, a few feet in front of you, you spot the familiar trail of gold, inset as a thick line running through the green marble floor—luring you down a long hallway and towards a brilliant white light. As you approach, the corridor gives way to a single, round, white room. The golden thread grows thicker as it nears the centre, building up and into a throne perched in the very middle. Entering the room feels like stepping inside of a pearl. The walls and floors blend together as one white sheet, curving up into a dome which is punctured by a single skylight, shining a ray of moonlight down upon the young girl who sits patiently at her post.
The Princess has long dark hair, fair skin, and a serene look on her face. She wears a simple white gown which rests just shy of her shoulders and is adorned with a single emerald amulet. There is a tall, thin crown perched atop her head, as well as two gold bands circling her brow with the letters “UM” overlaid in the middle. The girl looks at you expectantly. You remember the poppies clutched in your hand and present them to her, bending on one knee and raising the bouquet with your right hand.
“Here you are, Your Highness,” you say, a little awkwardly.
“Poppies are my favourite,” she replies, accepting them graciously. “Thank you.” She takes two large flowers and tucks them into the gold band that wraps round her head, placing one over each ear and letting the long green stems trail down her chest. An unconventional accessory, maybe, but they frame her face beautifully and give her an unexpected air of grace and maturity.
“How old are you?” You ask without thinking, blushing as you realize your rudeness.
The girl smiles. “I’ll be fourteen in May,” she tells you.
“And you’re here all alone? Shouldn’t there be someone here to protect you?”
“Protect me from what?” She asks, gazing at you inquisitively. “Why would any of my subjects wish to harm me when it is I who protect them?”
“Surely you must have enemies,” you muse.
“Oh sure,” she smiles. “Lots. That’s what the walls and guards are for. Tru would never allow anyone in who wishes to harm me,” she says firmly.
“He let me in,” you say. “I could be anyone.”
“Do you wish to harm me?” She inquires.
“Oh, no! Of course not.”
“So then what are you here for?”
You consider this for a moment. “To be honest, I’m not sure. Coming here just seemed like the right thing to do. But now that I am here I’m quite curious to know how a girl as young as you rules over a place as prosperous as this.”
“Good reason,” the Princess tells you plainly.
“That’s it?” You ask, rather taken aback.
“Yes,” she says. “That’s it.”
Part Six: Royals, Realms, and Patchwork Politics
It is my belief that the fundamental project of political philosophy is trying to resolve the problem of power. There will always be some agency exercising authority over you,
but what does legitimate power look like, and how might we go about achieving it? The problem every political philosopher must face is the fact that no institution can be made invulnerable to coercion or corruption; force or finance. Finance enables and force inhibits, but both can be used as a means for achieving the other. This puts us in a double bind if we wish to construct liberal societies, for individual liberty cannot be guaranteed, only approximated. However is it better for power to be distributed, or concentrated? The royalist solution is simple—the best way to guard against threats of force and finance is to entangle them explicitly, rather than trying to tease them apart. The question of “who watches the watcher?” begets infinite regress. Power is power, and it’s best for it to be outlined in big bold letters. By centralizing authority rather than distributing it, there can be no question as to who is calling the shots.
This idea of royalism, which I borrow from Curtis Yarvin, runs counter to all of our intuitions as to how we should structure society. How could liberty be achieved through absolute monarchy? That’s the last place you’d think to look for it. But it’s also the first place I have found a satisfying solution to the problem of power, with an answer so simple and elegant in its honesty: instead of trying to evade tyranny, embrace it whole heartedly. Coercion is inevitable, so why not make it transparent and accountable? Corruption cannot occur when power is concentrated in the hands of a single individual. Either they are doing their job well, or they are not. No need to complicate things any further. If the end you wish to achieve is individual liberty, then the best means to get there is meritocracy, nothing more or less. Ultimately what I want is good government, I don’t really care how we get there. It just so happens that the most effective systems are governed by a single individual. Any other structure of power becomes vulnerable to the aforementioned influences, and when problems arise
it’s not always obvious who’s to blame.
I can already hear your concerns:“But what if the monarch becomes malevolent? How can I know that they won’t act against my best interests?” The answer is that you can’t. No political system can promise you anything in perpetuity. You can become subject to tyranny through democracy or despotism, it makes no difference. The real question is what you should do if such circumstances were to arise. And the answer is simple—flee to anywhere else that will take you and pay the price for peace. Are you starting to see how the puzzle pieces fit together? The fundamental flaw in our traditional conception of politics is the belief that government is a force that lies outside of the free market, rather than a natural consequence of it. The state offers a service for a price like any other corporation, so there is no meaningful distinction between a monarch and a CEO.
Another word for royalism could be corporatism (or Neocameralism, as Yarvin calls it).
In this view, a government is just a corporation which owns a country, holding a monopoly on authority within a certain territory. It would operate based on the model of a joint-stock corporation, where the monarch acts as a replaceable CEO. If the ruler started acting against the interest of the company—upsetting customers and jeopardizing the profits of the shareholders—they would be thrown out, and a more competent ruler would take their place. It may be that there are certain advantages to a heritable monarchy, but this would by no means be a requirement. We want nobility through ability, first and foremost.
If you can get rich through being a good ruler then there is no incentive to betray your citizens. The opportunity for corruption vanishes if those in charge are living lavish lifestyles. Why should the Princess of UM not live well if she is providing stability and security for a simple fee? The townspeople should want her to be healthy and happy. Her prosperity symbolizes the success of the city, and it is in her best interest to serve as many subjects as possible. Even those who do not have the means to pay upfront could be allowed access through some sort of payment plan or indentured servitude. It might even make sense to hire knights to fight and free the slaves of nearby villages if that would one day turn them into paying customers.
I know people will object to this formulation because of a knee-jerk reaction against capitalism. How can you claim any political system to be moral when it is based off of the profit motive? I would argue that these things are one and the same. There is money to be made from giving people what they want, so any political system that people choose to endorse through their purchasing power must be doing something right. Remember, I don’t conceptualize morality through some God’s eye view, but as an individual’s assessment of value and virtue. It’s entirely possible that you and I may wish to live in different political systems, with different rules enforced upon us and different freedoms afforded to us. I’m a meta-libertarian in that sense. If you want to live under some communist or socialist regime that’s fine, just don’t drag me into it!
This is where the concept of patchwork politics comes into play. Instead of advocating
for one political system that everyone must be subject to, why not let the free market take care of it and let people subscribe to whatever services they see fit? If you don’t like the system you are born into, simply take your business elsewhere where your values are better reflected. Instead of voting at the ballot box you would vote with your feet. There is no reason to think you should have a right to exist exactly as you please wherever you happen to be born. It’s like living at your parents house—if you don’t like playing by their rules anymore then it’s time to move out!
By reconceptualizing systems of government as competing subscription services, the social contract is reborn as a living document rather than a mere thought experiment. Entry into a new patch on the quilt would require you consenting to certain terms and conditions. You agree to follow the rules and pay your fees or perform your communal duties, and the realm promises to treat you fairly and uphold their end of the bargain. Of course, there is an inherent asymmetry here as you lack any means of enforcement should the leader go back on their word, but this is no different than the status quo. At least with the patchwork model competition between realms would promote good customer service. Any realm that abuses their power would not keep it for long. There is no economic incentive to abuse your citizens, just as there is no reason a restaurant should wish to poison my food. However, there is good reason for competing realms to intervene should one government become tyrannical. For instance, right now there is no incentive to help out the poor North Koreans, since it is all cost and no benefit, even though I’m sure the citizens would pay almost any price for freedom. It is only by introducing a profit motive that there becomes reason to spread peace and prosperity.
So, this is all fine and dandy in theory, but how does any of this map onto reality? Even if you agree that such a state of affairs would be desirable and preferable, there’s no way it’s feasible, right? Well, picture this: tomorrow morning you wake up and there is a pamphlet in your mailbox. It’s from the second richest man in the world, Elon Musk. He is announcing that he has purchased an island off the coast of America (or built a satellite in space) where he is going to establish his own sovereign nation. The leaflet includes all the relevant information as to what life on the island will look like, what rules the citizens will be subject to, and a progressive pricing model which offers a variety of different subscription services. You could live in an autonomous city with self driving cars, hyperloop tunnels, public promenades, and flower beds on every street corner, or you could opt for rural homestead where you develop the land yourself and pay a much lower premium. He says he has negotiated with all the great nations in the world to ensure the island’s protection and has a backup arsenal of his own military power should things go awry. The cost of entry to this new venture is less than you currently pay in taxes, and the benefits seem to dramatically outweigh the status quo. Would you go? I certainly would. If not, why? Maybe you have more communal values. Musk is selling a libertarian utopia, but you would prefer a system that’s a little more equitable, well, no worries! It just so happens that Bernie Sanders has made a similar announcement. Through grassroots funding he has aggregated enough capital to purchase an island off the coast of Scandinavia with much more communitarian ideals. Free housing, healthcare, and education for all, you simply need to sign up for which public service you would like to provide in exchange. If you have more leftist policy inclinations, I’m sure this would also sound preferable to the status quo. If neither of these suit your fancy, just ask yourself what sort of system would and imagine that alternative. What’s stopping any of these organizations from becoming a reality other than our belief that they can’t be? I want to change that.
This chapter did unfold as I first imagined it. I knew I was a libertarian in the moral sense, but it wasn’t obvious to me how best liberty could be achieved politically. The classical liberal vision of a small government that limits its own power, either through democratic sovereignty or judicial authority, seemed unfeasible. The people can’t be trusted to vote for liberal policies, and a piece of paper is not a reliable way to enforce them. The only alternative is anarchism, which feels empty. It may be an accurate description of reality, but it says absolutely nothing as to what should be done about it, simply passing the responsibility over to the free market. No one is persuaded by a political philosophy which promises nothing more than ambiguity. There must be a structure to liberty; a logical thread which gets us from point A to B. From anarchy to prosperity. As Yarvin says, libertarianism is like the Newtonian window of political physics—it produces reliable results only when certain preconditions have already been achieved. It is the final stage in a political hierarchy of needs, the necessary preconditions of which being peace, security, and law. Only once these fundamental needs have been met can the free market function properly. The beauty of this formulation is that it maps perfectly onto the proper functions of government: a protected border which establishes that nation’s relation to the land, a protection and police service which keeps the populace safe, and the rule of law which outlines the rights and responsibilities of the realm’s residents. Only then can the free market flourish, mediated by a court system which regulates contracts and customer disputes.
This is where my true interest lies, at the meat of the issue, in law and practical policy. I’ve explained the structure of liberty in theory, but not how it would work in practice. I can’t tell you how or when such a vision might be achieved, but I intend on building a roadmap to the best of my ability. That’s what’s next: a digital mirror for the modern prince. As a personal challenge, if nothing more. At best, a promise for what will come.
7. On Land
This chapter is the beginning of a shift in the structure and focus of this series. We are now leaving the realm of philosophy and engaging with political theory directly. So the utility of our narrative is going to dwindle if not become utterly redundant by being so literal. I’ll still use Wonderland to demonstrate my ideas, but your trip down the rabbit hole has come to a conclusion for the time being. Having ended on the note of “good reason”.
This is the answer you get from the Princess at the Palace; the secret to the prosperity of the city. Its simplicity is what makes it such an elegant solution. The beauty of royalism as a political philosophy is that it provides carte blanche authority to do as you please in terms of conceptualizing practical policy. The only measure of what is “good” is whatever works. This logical, solutions-oriented approach is much better than being bound by foggy notions of limited government or other libertarian ideals. The financial incentive is enough to encourage efficient and effective structures. Like in all markets, competition drives results. The state’s earning power is what allows it to experiment and improve over time, all it needs is a good leader at the helm. This means is someone who is able to make good decisions, but they do not necessarily need to be an authority on every subject; simply capable of delegating responsibility to those who are. As long as the goals of the realm are clear and concise, there’s no reason why even a child would be incapable of being a good ruler, or someone with no political knowledge whatsoever. Of course, it would be handy if they had a little guide laying out some guiding principles, which is exactly what a mirror for princes is for.
Part One: Power & Protection
The classical liberal view is that the state functions as a protection agency, securing certain rights and liberties for its citizens. However, this formulation represents only one part of the picture. The previous chapter demonstrates how the state is really about is power, not protection. For power is ultimately what comes out in the wash—the ability to protect is contingent upon the ability to exert control. In order for the state to provide protection successfully, it must have power first; power that can be exerted over the material world. Moreover, power isn’t some purely conceptual entity that exists independent of reality—there is a meaningful physical component that must be considered. Any ideas about law or protection must be applied to people and property which take up space. Thus, the state requires territory, a domain of sovereign authority over which it can exert control.
Anarchocapitalists insist that the state is not necessary, as individuals could simply hire competing protection agencies while operating out of a shared territory. However this proposition is nonsensical, for the desire for protection carries many corollaries which must also be considered. It’s not enough for only you to be subjected to certain laws and rules you have agreed to—in order to have security you need to know that the other people you are interacting with are subject to the same system. You cannot cooperate with people if you are playing by different rules or governed by different authorities—there needs to be coherence within a community. The idea of competing protection agencies within a shared territory means there would be no clear code of conduct regarding interactions between individuals. In order to have confidence in your protection agency, you must be operating within same system of power as your
neighbour. Otherwise at any moment they could start exerting power over you. Without a shared authority and the same governing principles, no trust can develop.
Arguably, a dyed-in-the-wool anarchocapitalist could embrace the notion of private protection agencies tomorrow simply by buying a team of blackmarket security guards
and doing as they please. Before the Town of UM was founded, a merchant could hire mercenaries to protect his person and property… but a thief could just as easily hire thugs to attack him. The only way to resolve this tension is through the creation of a secure enclosure, a “home free” where one is no longer at the mercy of any who might seek to do them harm. That is what a state should be, a place where the only authority you are subject to is one you have chosen intentionally. Without complete control over a given territory, the promise of power is pure fantasy. So the first ingredient for any coherent political philosophy is a theory of land, which is what we shall now explore.
Part Two: Dealing with Dragons
The first requirement of a successful state is absolute sovereignty over their territory. Securing the realm against external threats is the first and foremost task of our prince or princess. To quote Yarvin, “lose the patch and the realm is worthless. Everything else, even profit, must come after security.” In order to achieve peace we must first have war. If one wants independence, they must be willing to fight for it. Every plot of land in a peaceful place was once made by war, and one day may have to be defended by it. This requires power, which manifests through the two aforementioned forms: direct force, such as a strong military; or indirect force, like financial pressure and alliances. These days the United States represents the former, while its northern neighbour Canada is the latter. But how might a new nation arise under such suffocating circumstances? Well, first and foremost, the right to take up space must be asserted, not asked for.
It’s very interesting how both the far left and far right are frustrated by their inability to flee from the status quo and practice alternative political systems. The right wants to escape state tyranny and live off the land, while the left wants to escape economic tyranny and… live off the land. But one cannot simply return to the wild and live as humans have done for millennia, for all of the necessary resources to create food and shelter are legally owned by other people. The critique that capitalism forces us into wage labour is legitimate when it becomes literally impossible for citizens to extricate themselves from the system. However, as was said before—oppression is the default; a simple fact of life. Your rights are not entitlements, they must be fought for. How we achieve what we desire is where the real political theory comes into play. As I see it, there are three potential solutions…
The first is to overthrow the status quo and replace it with more desirable institutions.
The preexisting state adopts a new regime and power carries over from the previous system. Whether done democratically or by force, this is the most difficult course of action as it requires popular support in order to be successful. Since we are interested in building political systems that can prevail with minimal support, I don’t see this outcome as being very likely, but it is a possibility.
The second solution is terra nova: to flee to some newly discovered and unoccupied space to try new systems unencumbered by external threats. This is what the discovery
of America allowed a few hundred years ago, but now that all the land on earth is known and spoken for, this would only be possible by exploring space or the sea. Settling space—either on Mars or some space station—is clearly the most “far out” solution, but it benefits from the fact that if and when implemented it would be entirely independent. It might sound ridiculous at the moment, but a hundred years from now some off-planet human settlement doesn't seem entirely unlikely. The other option, constructing human settlements on the sea (also known as seasteading) seems slightly more plausible but presents its own list of challenges; such as the high cost of infrastructure and the extreme environmental vulnerabilities. However, it is an option.
The final and most feasible solution in my view is to create new power agencies inside of preexisting territories. Charter city-states, if you will. A charter city is a city wherein the governing system is defined by the city’s own charter document rather than the general law of the broader nation. Current examples of such cities include Hong Kong,
Singapore and Dubai. They are little pockets of autonomy nested inside of otherwise underdeveloped nations where political and technological innovation become possible.
The beauty of the charter solution is that it allows opportunity, creativity, and experimentation on a small scale when can then be expanded upon and replicated if it proves to be successful. The rapid development of the aforementioned cities has been instrumental in lifting millions of people out of poverty within only a few generations, and there is no reason why these same ideas can’t be applied elsewhere. Communities suffer when they are controlled by bad rules—overregulation, taxation, and corruption all inhibit growth. However, instead of fighting the uphill battle of trying to reform legacy institutions, it is far easier to simply start from scratch and lead by example. The right charter, or set of rules, will naturally attract builders, investors, and citizens who are interested in participating in and profiting from better ways to live.
Of course, the charter city-state is reliant upon and vulnerable to the broader territory it is nested inside within. This tension could be appeased through either payments or armaments, each of which present their own problems. If the sovereign arranges an alliance, or to pay an annual price for protection, this could lead to exploitation as the surrounding country may be tempted to squeeze the state for more resources as their prosperity increases. This is why the Town of UM surrounds itself with a great barrier to hide its wealth from dragons. On the other hand, a city-state that arms itself to the teeth in order to be independent must bear the cost of financing national defence, and no protections can be guaranteed in perpetuity. The threat of conquest is inevitable and inescapable. All a good leader can do is use their judgement to determine what sort of arrangement has the best chance of protecting the citizens. It seems to me that in the beginning, a new city-state would have to rely upon alliances in order to survive,
but after enough wealth amasses it might be able to finance a strong enough military to declare total autonomy. The key point is that protection of the border is of highest interest to the populace—and a good prince will prioritize doing whatever is needed to in order to maintain it. Lose the patch and the realm becomes worthless.
At the moment, the idea of starting a new system of government from scratch seems entirely unfeasible to most, but I honestly believe we’re in the middle of a revolution which we haven’t noticed yet. Improvements in transportation and communication mean that we are all now more connected than ever. Ideas and ideals can transcend all notions of national borders, cryptocurrency frees us from reliance on legacy monetary authorities, and visionary individuals can now collaborate and come together to form unconventional alliances. To those who value merit and ability, merit and ability will always find a way. So long as people desire peace and prosperity, they shall persevere—that’s what makes them such timeless truths. Reality is constantly reinventing itself. We get so caught up in our present moment we forget that all of this, our greatest nations and longest standing institutions, can rise and fall within the blink of an eye. The maps we study today aren’t going to be the same maps that exist one hundred years from now. The world is rife with opportunity, now more than ever, we just need the right entrepreneurs with enough confidence and creativity to seize it. Of course, anyone today who is earnestly interested in venturing to create new political systems will suffer much scrutiny, but as the current regimes continue to crumble and fall any viable alternative will begin to look more and more feasible. It’s not clear how much longer the current liberal norms to which we have become accustomed will continue to survive under our current governments, and it is the principles which persevere, not the regimes which implement them. Where freedom goes the people will follow.
Part Three: Within the Walls
So, this is where things get interesting. Hopefully the need for a nation to have a territory is apparent to you by now, and the few means by which territory could be acquired have been made clear. Now for the question as to what happens to the land contained within? Conventional libertarianism says that all land should be privately owned, but the private ownership of land has never made a lot of sense to me. This is because land possesses a unique quality which distinguishes it from other forms of private property. Land is a finite resource, and once owned is supposedly owned in perpetuity. This creates the obvious problem of a massive power imbalance when it comes to first-come, first-serve land ownership. The current system creates a lot of frustration due to the fact that certain people benefit disproportionately by having inherited valuable land while providing nothing of value themselves. As Thomas Paine points out, “it is always possible to go from the natural to the civilized state, but it is never possible to go from the civilized to the natural state.” Once agriculture has increased the size and density of a population, they cannot easily disperse again. Our planet now houses more people than ever, but the introduction of cultivation has also created the conditions for a new kind of poverty which did not exist before.
How did this happen? Well, I tend to like John Locke’s notion that one creates private property by mixing their labour with the land. If I’m a noble savage wandering the desert and climb a steep hill to pick an apple from a tree, that apple is now mine since I put the work in to acquire it. If I find gold in a stream and take the time to discover the source and mine it, well, it’s mine. However, the physical ground you walk upon is never part of the picture until you introduce cultivation. Clearly someone who takes the time to plant an apple orchard owns every tree, not just the apples they picked that day. Agriculture made the relationship between land and labour so explicit that it becomes hard to disentangle one from the other. Yet it’s important to remember that the value added, and therefore the ownership earned, emerges from the improvement of the earth—not the earth itself. Nobody can own the earth because nobody made it. As human beings we all share a natural right to occupy it, but not to lay claim to any part of it in perpetuity. The only way you can designate a territory as your own is by establishing a clear border and protecting it, just as jungle cats have done for millenia. Put up a fence or a wall and maintain it, and the land contained within it is yours, but only for as long as you continue to occupy and defend it.
Given that the state as a power agency is required to secure land, the notion of private property becomes patently ridiculous. All ownership is contingent upon government authority. No conquering enemy is going to look at your mortgage and go, “oh, I didn’t
realize you owned this house! My bad, I’ll just let you keep it.” Land is privately owned only to the extent that the ruler is the owner, because they are what make possession of the territory feasible in the first place! Land ownership is meaningless without the protection of the realm. Custody may be leased, but it can and should never exist in perpetuity. A lot of the issues people identify with capitalism are actually the fault of land ownership, which creates unfair monopolies and an imbalance in power before the game has even begun. This problem could easily be resolved by abolishing the concept of land ownership in perpetuity and replacing it with annual rents on the space occupy. This is an economic theory known as Georgism, and there a few ways it could be implemented.
First, however, we must explore the dynamic between government and infrastructure. In our current political systems, these ideas are always explicitly entangled—the government is responsible for building roads, bridges, sidewalks, and provides us with plumbing and electricity. However these services generally suck. Our cities crumbling,
ugly, and there is no good incentive why anyone should be invested in improving them.
This is the issue with monopolies: without competition and skin in the game, quality tends to decrease instead of improve over time. The alleged “capitalist hellscape” of endless concrete parking lots and big box stores is a byproduct not of capitalism, as its critics would have you believe, but rather a political system with no incentive to offer a better alternative. Money talks. If I could pay to live in a gated community with cobblestone streets, gardens, cafes, and not a gas station or fast food joint in sight, I would do so in a heartbeat. And there would be no shortage of developers jumping at the chance to make such fantasies a reality. The problem lies not in a lack of desire, or creativity, but the legal inhibitions which prevent such innovations from taking place.
In fact, much of the ugliness we experience in our daily lives is a direct consequence of government regulation. Our cities are built for cars. Drivers, specifically. However, cars are still a recent invention, and they aren’t going to stay in their current form for much longer—at least, not if they don’t have to. Right now there are rules requiring a certain amount of parking spaces per person in a building, forcing developers to create
parking lots and steering us away from alternative transit solutions. Similarly, the reason we don’t have tall townhouses like in Europe, which give streets a wonderful intimacy and take up space much more efficiently, is because building codes require an elevator be installed after 3 floors. Size standards written into regulations prevent people from easily constructing smaller, more affordable homes. Big box stores are taxed preferentially to retail ones… I could go on. The point is that it’s important to have enough flexibility in your system that it can evolve over time as technology develops. The current codes of conduct are constraining us more than they must.
Now that critique is out of the way, let’s explore option #1, which is a pilot or pinpoint city-state. In this model, the sovereign, ruler, president, CEO—whatever you want to call them—is building a city where the state and infrastructure are bundled together explicitly. Elon Musk might be a great candidate for constructing a city like this. He’s got autonomous vehicles, hyperloop tunnels, and solar panel technology already fully developed. All he needs are a few dozen square miles and a few billion dollars, which would be easily collected from investors once they’re sold on the city of the future. Let me paint you a picture… First of all, we’re abolishing roads. Autonomous vehicles are going to be the norm in the next few decades anyways and no one enjoys car accidents.
Instead, we are reviving the old European charm of public walkways, with occasional cyclists and commuter pods gliding by unperturbed passersby. Imagine living in a world where all six lanes of traffic, every stop sign and crosswalk and parking lot, is replaced by public paths amidst gardens and greenery. Our souls suffer in the concrete jungle, but it doesn't have to be this way.
As a developer, president Musk would charge an annual fee for citizens to enjoy the protection and pleasantries of the city. If desired, he could impose aesthetic regulations, banning billboards and boisterous neon signs and anything else deemed to be unsightly. Like in Singapore, there could be harsh penalties for littering and vandalism, keeping the city clean and citizens respectful of their surroundings. They could still buy houses and rent apartments, but instead of paying the price of the property including the cost of the land it is built upon, this would be paid separately as an annual fee. Landlords too, would have to pay the same price, thus eliminating the rent-seeking and power imbalance that comes from our current system. The state is the ultimate landlord, acting as a custodian, managing allocation, zoning, and distribution. The rent collected would go towards the protection and maintenance of the city—and every citizen would pay in proportion to the territory that they occupy.
The second option for land management and distribution abides by more classical homesteading principles—the target approach. Imagine an empty and unoccupied territory, like a hidden mountain valley or barren patch of the Nevada desert. Now imagine that some authority sets up shop in the centre, offering protection to those who might seek to settle the surrounding area. The state starts as a hub of power which allows a community to naturally emerge around it on a first come, first serve basis. Complexity theory tells us that these systems will self-organize naturally, like how Burning Man is constructed and torn down again every year while developing consistent districts and characteristics. I call this a target system because the rules and regulations imposed by the state could vary depending upon proximity to the centre. In the middle would be a more gentrified and tightly controlled downtown, while the outskirts are more like the wild west; with fewer laws and available at a lower price. Walls wouldn’t even be necessary to begin with, but some sort of defenses must inevitably emerge to engage with external threats. Once the need to territorialize occurs and firm boundaries are negotiated, the land will suddenly become constrained.
At this point it would become logical to instate a Georgist land value tax based on the quality and quantity of space occupied by the residents. The ultimate outcome remains
the same, but it’s achieved through a bottom-up instead of top-down approach, and with a much lower startup cost.
My third proposed solution is a combination of the previous two. We’ll call this the map or mixed system, which would work best for governing large swaths of land or transforming preexisting territories into royalist ones. This model is for states that contain both city centres as well as undeveloped land. The first step is to sell the cities to private companies, turning the management of their infrastructure into competing subscription services, with different rules and regulations implemented depending upon the management and the desires of their customers. The laws of the state itself would remain consistent throughout, but different people could live under different conditions which cater to their own moral or aesthetic sensibilities. Essentially, I’m proposing an added subdivision of patches within the patch, which sounds redundant until you realize that some patches may be much bigger than others. We must have a sovereign that is powerful, but how that power should be applied depends upon the desires of the individual. These needs will change over time. Many young people would rather live somewhere affordable with more diversity and uncertainty, but may prefer to transition into something more secure as they grow older and want to raise a family. The mixed model allows for multiple options to coexist simultaneously while being protected by the same power authority.
In the future we shall see a shift towards the decentralization of cities. The industrial revolution brought us together, but the technological revolution will tease us apart again. The consequences of COVID are already starting to show us this. The internet allows for information, goods, and services to travel far, fast. There is no more need to congregate when we are no longer working in factories, and business meetings can be conducted from the comfort of our own homes. I believe cities will either become global entities, like New York, London, and Paris, where tens of millions of people gather and pass through every day, or they will revert to more rural, local operations in communities of a few thousand. Places with moderate populations will quickly become obsolete, as they only provide the stress of big city life without any of the major benefits. Personally, I would much rather live in a small and well cared for community surrounded by open country than be in a large city, which only increases feelings of alienation and isolation.
If you conceptualize cities as small, well-managed towns instead of as sprawling metropolises, this mixed model begins to make sense. A few of these communities could be dotted within a given territory, each offering different services when it comes to infrastructure, rules, and regulation. The free spaces in between would still afford you the basic protection of the state, but with none of these additional costs or benefits. The advantage of an arrangement like this is that it would allow for a sort of meta-libertarianism. People could live however they see fit, voluntarily imposing rules upon themselves or stripping them away depending upon their current values and goals. The sovereign is paid to enforce these standards and charges the populace accordingly. There is nothing inherently wrong with authority, what the sovereign supplies is certainty. Power, when used properly, is a promise—nothing more or less.
The benefit of conceptualizing the sovereign as a custodian of the land is the fact that this gives the ruler free reign to run things however they like. Normally contentious libertarian issues, such as environmental protections and stipulations, are no longer a problem when it is the sovereign's responsibility to care for their territory in the best way they see fit. The creation of national parks, or the imposition of carbon taxes, would become both profitable and desirable. Laws could be implemented that require logging operations or commercial fishing to function at a replacement level. Precious oils and minerals taken from the earth could be taxed accordingly, as it is the state’s authority which allows such resources to be extracted in the first place. The protection
of wildlife and animal welfare would also be subject to sovereign authority; all aspects of the natural would would ultimately be under its jurisdiction. If the health of the environment is the responsibility of the state, it is in its vested interest to protect and conserve the land as best as possible.
Part Four: What Else to Explore
This chapter presented a comprehensive theory of land. First explaining why the state and land must go hand in hand, then exploring the possible means through which new territory could be established, and finally outlining how resources would be allocated and protected within the nation’s limits. So now what? Now that a territory has been established, what comes next? The answer is security. Once you have peace, you need protection, and that means police. Our next chapter will examine the role of protection
and police within our communities. The current institutions designed to provide us with freedom and security often make us feel even more oppressed and unsafe. I want to talk about why that is and what we can do about it.
8. Protection & Police
This chapter explores security, protection, and police. With freedom as the ultimate goal, what are the necessary foundations that a free society must be built upon? The first step is peace—territory must be acquired and protected from external threats. Once the border is secure the state must then go about establishing security within. Currently there seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction with how our police and protection services are conducted, but there is little discussion as to what could be offered as a viable alternative. Progressives want to defund the police and reallocate spending towards community services, anarchists seek to abolish them entirely, conservatives like to back the blue but often then find themselves in positions defending what are clear abuses of power. So what’s the solution? If the police cannot be trusted to protect and serve their community then there is something deeply dysfunctional about the system that needs to be corrected. The police must be a reliable source of government protection, not an additional layer of fear and antagonism. What if we reconceptualized our political structures from scratch? Regardless of how things are right now, how ought our systems operate in the future? What could and should our public protection services look like?
Part One: What is Protection?
What protection means, in a practical sense, is that the state must have secure control over its territory. This is why having a strong border is the first and foremost task of any leader. If one cannot control who is entering and exiting the state, then how can they hope to manage what happening inside it? The state is secure when it maintains a monopoly on coercion, or force, within its territory. The absolute absence of crime is an impossible goal—there will always be a few thieves and murderers in any society—but there should be no organized crime or systematic resistance to state authority. If some mob or cartel holds coercive power within the state, then the citizens can no longer rely upon the laws to be reinforced consistently or effectively. In order for the people to feel safe, the rule of law and power of state authority must be absolute.
But what can the people expect to feel safe from? What is being protected? The traditional libertarian view is based on the non-aggression principle. Essentially, it is the government’s job to intervene only as a retaliatory force. If another person threatens you or harms you or steals from you then this will merit state intervention. However, this limited conception of protection still leaves people vulnerable to many other forces which could threaten their livelihood. What if there is a house fire? Or a hurricane? Or if I injure myself and need emergency medical attention? All of these are instances where my life may be in danger and I need someone to intervene on my behalf. Protection means living in a society that protects your body from active threats and harm, not simply punishing people who may seek to do you harm.
In the event of some unforeseen circumstance, I want a government that will use its power to protect me and my possessions to the best of its ability. Police, paramedics, firefighters, and other forms of first responders all fall into this category—anyone who may need to use force to violate the rights of one citizen in order to protect the livelihood of another. Like how emergency vehicles are able to violate traffic laws to reach their destinations more quickly, or a firefighter may need to damage private property in order to save someone’s life. Police are given special powers to search, detain, and question people so they can do their jobs properly. All of these services must be government agencies since they need to have coercive power in order to protect the people. For the rules to be enforced effectively, some special class of citizens must have the right to violate them. This is the proper role of state security.
Part Two: The Guardians
The rest of this chapter will focus on the role of police specifically, since it seems to be the area that needs the most improvement. No one really has any issue with state services such as firefighters or paramedics. They have one job to do and only one way to do it; put out the fire, or provide medical assistance. Police, on the other hand, are called upon to respond to all sorts of occurrences and can deal with them in myriad of ways. Their job is to enforce the law. But what sort of laws are they expected to enforce, and through what means?
I’ll be getting into the specifics of rules and regulations next chapter, but a key aspect of this theoretical political system we are designing is the idea that you can have nested layers of regulation. The state may have a libertarian attitude towards drug policy, but there may be certain subsets of communities that ban the use of drugs and alcohol all together. There is no contradiction here; the citizens simply have to be aware of where what rules apply where, and then position themselves accordingly. When exploring the role of police officers we will focus on the minimal possible requirements—what is the bare minimum they should be expected to do and why? One of the main problems with our current police system is that officers spend the majority of their time enforcing laws that need not exist in the first place. Sex work, recreational drug use, or cracking open a cold one while you walk down the street are all victimless crimes, and it shouldn’t be the job of the state to punish such behaviour. Police involvement in nonviolent crimes provides the opportunity for abuses of power which would not otherwise exist, as they get to choose who to pull over at traffic stops or who to ticket for alcohol possession. This not only wastes valuable public resources but also diminishes the role of the officer from protector to essentially a hall monitor.
Police involvement in traffic in particular may become a less salient issue as self-driving cars become the norm. You won’t be able to get a DUI, speeding, or parking ticket once autonomous vehicles rule the road. This is a good thing, as it will free police officers up from monotonous tasks and force them to focus on their actual duty, which is protecting their community. The proper role of a police officer is to respond to active harm, threats, or thefts. They are to be called upon in an emergency or to deal with a crime that has been committed. When you dial 911 you are looking for help, protection, and security. This is the officer’s primary duty.
Once you get the police out of nonviolent crime and traffic stops, this raises their bar of competency considerably. No longer are we looking for bureaucratic busybodies, but rather an elite force of highly trained individuals prepared to respond to all sorts of emergencies. The role of a police officer should be glorified; they are guardians. I borrow this term from Plato’s Republic, as it really speaks to the heart of my vision. Guardians are government agents who have been empowered to protect the populace. Like local superheroes, they must be able to take down bad guys, administer medical assistance, provide psychological support, deescalate tense situations, and rescue the occasional cat out of a tree. Becoming a guardian would take many years of training across a variety of fields, resulting in a highly coveted, highly paid, highly respected position. This solution integrates both progressive and conservative desires. Instead of having social workers and police officers who are both equipped to deal with some scenarios and not others, why not combine their roles to create a more well rounded individual who is capable of dealing with almost any crisis? Emphasizing quality over quantity also increases competitiveness within the field and makes it easier to replace officers who are abusing their power. If you want to improve quality of service, the solution is not to defund the police, but instead make their duty one that is highly coveted and respected.
How the city’s protectors use their free time would also need to change. Instead of sitting around on-call when not actively responding to a crime, they should be out in the community; walking or biking the beat. This used to be the role of police officers until they all got cars to drive around in, which strips away the interpersonal element. The purpose of community patrols should not be driving around aimlessly to establish a police presence, but actively engaging with and getting to know the community. This is the “service” component. Guardians should spend their spare time building relationships and interacting with the people they are responsible for protecting.
This could be something as simple as helping an old lady cross the road, or carrying a pregnant woman’s groceries inside. Mundane tasks like helping someone weed their garden, or playing basketball with the local kids after school. The point is not the job itself, but rather establishing a reliable presence in the community that feels familiar and trustworthy. That way, when a guardian shows up to the scene of a robbery, they may already know both the little old lady whose laptop was stolen as well as the troubled teen who took it. This makes conflict management much easier as it reduces the fear and animosity that can otherwise arise between police and the public. Contrast this with the current system where the police service a massive area and spend their free time isolated from the community—there is no sense of familiarity or safety. Both the officer and the citizen perceive the other as something foreign and uncertain. This subsequently leads to mistrust, disobedience, and escalation in police interactions. By making it a priority to focus on developing meaningful relationships within the community, this sense of otherness is reduced. The guardians are no longer outsiders, but rather a firm and friendly fixture of the neighbourhood
Part Three: The Community
This brings us to the final and most ambitious phase of the chapter: completely reworking how we conceptualize and integrate government services into our lives—and it all starts with the community centre. Last chapter described a target state as one that could arise with minimal start-up costs. A protection agency would simply need to set up shop and start selling its services to the surrounding area. All that is required
is a secure home base that the guardians can operate out of. This is how we should reconceptualize the role of police stations; as centres of protection in the community.
Imagine that instead of a major city having a few police stations that hundreds of officers operate out of, the stations are broken up into smaller access points and distributed throughout the neighbourhoods. They would occur at regular intervals at about the same frequency as public schools, with one always available within a twenty minute walk from a residential area. The number of officers operating out of each station would be determined by the surrounding population density and crime rates. Guardians from adjacent communities may be called in as backup, but generally stick to dealing with help needed in their immediate vicinity. Breaking up the current norm into smaller dispatch points also improves issues of internal accountability. If you have a problem or feel unsafe engaging with one centre you can head to another and request an internal investigation or file a complaint. All of the stations would work to keep the others in check, meaning abuses of power would be identified more easily.
Currently, police stations are dense, few, and far between. They act as central dispatch points to entire cities, with officers operating out of them but also bringing criminals back to them. People are detained, questioned, and arrested in the same place that citizens must go to feel protected. This contrast makes police stations feel inherently cold, hostile, and uninviting. They are the last place a person would want to go if seeking comfort or security. To solve this, simply separate the protection from the punishment. Criminals should be detained, questioned, and processed in a completely separate facility. The details concerning crime and punishment will be explored in a later chapter, but suffice it to say our current systems of deterrence and rehabilitation could use some improvement. The problem of what to do with criminals is a separate issue, right now we are focusing on how to protect the populace.
So, instead of police stations, community centres. What would that look like, what’s the difference? Imagine a building, or cluster of buildings, surrounded by public parks and playgrounds, flower gardens and basketball courts, about the size of a city block. The space feels safe, warm, and inviting; acting as a central hub for the community that enables interactions. There is a bulletin board outside so locals can post notices and organize events, paste flyers looking for lost pets, advertisements for garage sales, or job opportunities. There is surrounding space where people can gather, play, and relax at their leisure. Because the guardians operate out of the community centre, the surrounding area is incredibly safe; this is a place where kids where could hang out after school without supervision. On the weekends maybe a farmers market pops up, or people gather to do yoga—all the conventional stuff you would see in a public park.
The difference is that the community centre would act as a one-stop shop for all government services. Not only is the property providing public parks and playgrounds,
but the buildings nested inside would provide the basis of all necessary social services. Instead of having libraries, homeless shelters, health clinics, adoption agencies, unemployment offices, and psychological services spread throughout the city, all of these resources would be folded in to one central access point. Similar to the role of the church in medieval Europe. If you need help, information, or assistance of any sort; you can likely find it here. The centre acts as a safe haven within the community.
This isn’t how anyone thinks of social services traditionally, but once you get the idea in your head it’s rather exciting. The community centre would have a reception area which issues public documents and ID as well as providing general information and directions. There would be a soup kitchen and a place to spend the night as well as a medic and psychologist available on site. It would have a place to sit inside with free internet and computers, providing everything it needs to function as a modern library. Given that the centres would only service communities of a few thousand, rather than a few hundred thousand, it would require far fewer staff members to manage all of these services. Of course, this would vary depending upon the needs and density of the surrounding area, but a small, efficient centre could function with a receptionist, medic, psychologist, and housekeeper with the guardians providing additional support when needed.
Now, you may insist that all of these community services go against the ideals of libertarianism—after all, we want a small and efficiently run government trimmed of all unnecessary expense. So how can I suggest a system that provides parks and soup kitchens? Well, this goes back to the idea of protection discussed previously. Not just protection from others, but protection against any active threat which may do harm. In some instances, that may mean people need a safe place to spend the night, or a solid meal in their stomach. I have nothing against the idea of a social safety net, but I do take issue with people who use that net as a hammock—those who get comfortable mooching off the system long after it has helped them out of a tough spot.
Luckily, there’s an easy solution to this problem: the community centre provides its services for free with an understanding that the citizens will pay for the cost after the fact. Either through their own money, or a sponsor, or an act of service to the station. Say for some reason you find yourself homeless, penniless, and needing a safe place to stay for the night. The community centre would provide you with a hot meal, warm shower, and place to sleep. But the next morning you would need to pay it forward by participating in the upkeep of the centre in exchange for the services you have used. Maybe you’d be asked to weed the vegetable garden or sweep the floors or peel some potatoes. The point is that there needs to be an acknowledgement of the value that was provided to you which is then repaid by your own labour. This ensures people do not develop a sense of entitlement. The centre is there to protect you, yes, but it will not take care of you in perpetuity.
People that are severely mentally ill, disabled, drug addicted, or otherwise incapable of caring for themselves will need an alternative to the overnight solution. If someone needs serious help and intervention then it would be the task of the centre to connect them with a private charity or organization which is better tailored to suit their needs. The government could have its own for-profit system which rehabilitates citizens and charges them afterwards for their services, but ultimately such matters should be left to the free market.
This is a vision of how we could make meaningful changes to the roles of protection and police within our communities. Having a designated space that facilitates local interactions is incredibly important and something we are sorely lacking in modern times. Moreover, simplifying and refining the role of police as public protectors rather than arbitrary rule enforcers would do a world of good. Many of our problems stem from outdated laws and institutions and we shall not see meaningful change in our systems until we get to the root of the issue.
9. Rights & Responsibilities
“When in the Course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another, and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation. We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness—That to secure these Rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the Consent of the Governed, that whenever any form of Government becomes destructive of these Ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its Foundation on such Principles, and organizing its Powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient Causes; and accordingly all Experience hath shewn, that Mankind are more disposed to suffer, while Evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long Train of Abuses and Usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object, evinces a Design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their Right, it is their Duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future Security.”
- United States Declaration of Independence, 1776
It’s funny how these words, written nearly 250 years ago, still ring just as true today. I wanted to open this chapter with the Declaration of Independence because it perfectly summarizes the point we have reached in our political philosophy. If you don’t believe in the right to life or liberty, then return to Chapter #5 where I discuss the moral case for individual autonomy—right now we are taking this foundational principle as self evident. The Founding Fathers also assert that governments are instituted among men to secure their rights, and when they are no longer serving this end it is the right of the people to alter or abolish them—a view I share in Chapter #6. The question of how to evade tyranny is a constant threat to society; no political system is airtight, or can exist in perpetuity. However, a step in the right direction could be making the source of political power explicitly identifiable and thus easier to hold accountable. This is the formalist, or royalist proposition, which likens government to any other business; to be ran for-profit by a prudent president or prince. Chapter #7 and #8 detail how a new territory could be acquired and protected, now we must tackle the question as to what laws should be instituted, and why.
Many countries have a constitution which outlines the specific structure and function of government, but such a foundational document is not necessary for our purposes. As the Founding Fathers said, we care about liberty as an ends, but the necessary means required to achieve it are context dependant and changeable. The sovereign’s rule is absolute, meaning they have the right to change the constitution of their government at any time—they are not beholden to a piece of paper. A prince may choose to operate by a set of certain principles, by they are by no means bound by them. Ultimately, the internal constitution of an organization should be of little interest to a consumer. If you go to buy an iPhone you’re not concerned with the internal structure of Apple—which departments exist or how they are run—all you care about is having product that works as advertised. The same principle could apply just as easily to governments. As a potential customer, the only document you need be interested in is the nation’s charter; the list of rights and responsibilities that are afforded to and asked of each citizen. The rules of the game that you will be required to comply with if you wish to enter the covenant. This is what we will now explore.
Part One: The Contract
Every social contract will contain two components: rights (promises that are made to you) and responsibilities (restrictions that are imposed upon you). In order to secure certain rights you have to surrender certain freedoms and pay for the price of your protection. The government gains its legitimacy from the consent of the governed, meaning any social contract you sign should allow you the right to leave the realm with your person and property and any time. The subject’s ability to exit the contract is what keeps the state accountable, just like how a bad cell service provider can be threatened by taking your business elsewhere. Competition between services drives progress and improves quality over time, as in any other industry. The question of who will hold your business will depend upon the costs and benefits—what is being asked and expected of you.
A bill of rights is the traditional legal document which lays out the protections a country promises its citizens, the right to life and liberty normally being chief among them. The state cannot take your life, harm you, or force you to do anything you do not wish to do. However, even something this simple raises meaningful questions. What happens when someone must be detained, interrogated, or imprisoned due to a crime? As we established last chapter, the state must be able to violate the rights it seeks to protect in order to uphold the law. I believe that in any legal entanglement a citizen should retain the right to opt out entirely—go home, pack their bags, and be escorted out of the country. If somebody is convicted of a crime, why waste the time and resources punishing them when you could just throw them out? Similar to how the British used Australia as a penal colony, sending their unwanted criminals there instead of giving them the death penalty. Issues concerning crime and punishment are too complex to get into at the moment, so we will leave a pin in this point for now.
The rights to freedom of speech, religion, assembly and association all seem too self explanatory to spend much time on, but there are some interesting questions raised around fringe cases. For instance, at what point should threats to one’s wellbeing be interpreted as an intent to do harm and thus merit legal intervention? The United States does not protect “fighting words” under the first amendment as they are considered likely to incite violence. Laws against excessive stalking or harassment may also be necessary, but at what point can a person file a restraining order against another individual? What about during a viral pandemic? Can the state impose laws dictating where and when people can gather? I raise all of these questions not because I have answers to them, but to demonstrate how even seemingly simple principles can get complicated the moment you try to implement them. Ultimately such decisions, where and when they need to be made, will be up to the judgement of the sovereign.
The right to hold and acquire property is another important one; the realm protects an individual’s right to the fruits of their labour. Anything you create, purchase, or receive you are entitled to own, use, and dispose of at your leisure. Remember that I don’t believe land itself can be held as personal property, I think it should be kept under the custody of the state and leased to citizens annually. A renter could make rules as to who may enter the premises, but the state can also hold them accountable to certain standards like dictating how much pollution or extraction of resources is allowable. Property rights hold many important implications concerning commerce and contracts—there must be a way of determining ownership, certifying authenticity,
validating trade, and a whole legal system dedicated to handling disputes. We shall explore this topic more in our final chapter.
The right to privacy is another interesting topic to consider. Must someone receive consent before they can record, film, or photograph another person? Issues like this wouldn’t even have existed a few hundred years ago before advances in technology made them relevant. Instinctually, it seems pretty fair to say that one has a right to privacy only in situations where they can naturally expect it. Meaning you shouldn’t need someone’s consent to take their photo in public or record a conversation on the phone. Whereas if someone hides a camera in your house and films you without your knowledge, or a third party records a phone conversation between two people, clearly this is a violation of a very natural boundary. However, sacrificing some privacy can also dramatically improve security. Keeping satellite or video surveillance of public streets would make locating and apprehending criminals much easier, as would keeping records of fingerprints and DNA. People have dramatically different views concerning what personal information they are comfortable with the government having access to. In a patchwork, or nested regulation model, it would be possible to have systems which accommodate desires for more privacy or security simultaneously.
The right to bear arms is something that is seen as sacred in the American system, but doesn’t necessarily have a philosophical justification for carrying over into a royalist one. The notion that an armed public safeguards against a tyrannical government no longer applies when you’re explicitly designing a government to be as powerful as possible. Without the influence of democracy the character of the state should stay more or less consistent. If overnight the leader becomes tyrannical then the best thing to do is flee, not fight. If you generalize the right to bear arms to simply, “the right to own deadly things” then even more questions arise. At what quantity or concentration should the state step in to regulate the importation or manufacturing of hazardous chemicals, for instance? Can citizens own bombs or tanks or nuclear missiles if they have no intent on using them? Where do we draw the line? All of these are questions that never had to be considered until the last 100 years. Before that it was physically impossible for a single individual to do much damage before they were apprehended. Now this is no longer the case, and the state must be much more vigilant as to what they allow within their walls. There are no easy answers here, aside from probably banning civilian ownership of nuclear warheads, but the patchwork model allows for experimentation. There can be communities coexisting side by side, one allowing guns and one prohibiting them. If one model or the other seriously increases or inhibits crime then it will gain popularity and attract more citizens, demonstrating how market solutions can provide critical insights to what systems produce the most effective political outcomes.
A bill of rights will also normally stipulate certain protections and treatment under the law. For instance, the right to be secure against unreasonable search and seizure, arbitrary arrest, or detainment. If arrested you have the right to know why and seek counsel by requesting a lawyer. When charged with a crime you cannot be compelled to act as a witness against yourself, you are presumed innocent until proven guilty, and you have the right to a public trial within a reasonable amount of time. All of these principles seem fair enough, but other aspects of our legacy legal systems may be questionable, such as how effective a jury is in determining guilt, or how evidence can be deemed inadmissible even though it may be relevant to a case. Regardless of what aspects of our judicial systems should stay or go, suffice it to say that the charter should have a section outlining what is required of and owed to you when you have a run-in with the law. In addition to this, instead of legal judgements being appealed through a supreme court, any grievances with the conduct of the state could be taken up with the sovereign directly. If the prince or princess has good and fair judgement then they will attract and keep good citizens.
As the realm is in the business of protection, any disturbances to the peace can be considered both the fault and problem of the state. It is therefore only reasonable that they should compensate citizens for any damages incurred under their watch. If you are assaulted and need medical bills paid or have property that is stolen or damaged, the onus of this cost should fall upon the state for failing to do its job properly. So the government should also act as an insurance provider for damages resulting from the criminal actions of its citizens. Having skin in the game means the sovereign is incentivized to do everything they can to prevent crime, therefore increasing overall safety and wellbeing.
So far I have only spent time enumerating the rights of citizens afforded by the state, leaving aside the difficult legal questions as to what this could or should look like in practice. Now we will turn our attention to the corollary responsibilities, what is asked of you in order to afford these protections. First and foremost is the silver rule: you cannot violate the rights of others; meaning no theft, murder, or assault. This is self-evident and self-explanatory. Hopefully. It might also be reasonable to impose a sort of golden rule concerning matters of protection specifically. If you happen to identify someone in a situation that threatens their livelihood, you should have a legal obligation to alert the local authorities as soon as possible. For instance, if you happen upon someone who is drowning in a river, you don’t necessarily have to jump in and try to save them yourself, but you do have the responsibility to contact emergency services on their behalf. The same principle would also apply to reporting crimes you have witnessed, as failure to do so would make you an accessory to the offence.
The primary responsibility of the citizens is paying for the price of their protection, also known as taxation. The sovereign could collect this cost in a number of different ways; they could offer their services for a flat fee or labour, or as an overall percentage of wealth. The economic justification for taxing at a percentage rather than a flat fee is quite simple—the more value added to the state the more costly it is to protect. If a bunch of high earners come to this new nation then this makes it more vulnerable to bad actors, requiring increases in security and protective measures. The poor should not have to foot the cost of these added expenditures, as it is not their wealth that is necessitating it. If the prosperity of some citizens indirectly threatens the livelihood of others then it should be their responsibility to bear the cost.
Additional revenue could also come from annual rents on land and charging more in areas with higher regulatory standards. Part of the political model I envision is that you are purely paying the state for power, which can be implemented in any number of ways. If smaller communities wish to have strict rules regarding which substances they allow, who can enter, or how they conduct themselves within the community, that’s fine! But they must also shoulder the cost of policing these new rules. Just like a gated community or home owners association, the residents and environment are held to a higher standard and collectively they pay the price for these rules to be enforced. This is how you can have a fundamentally libertarian system which still allows for other political and social philosophies to coexist. So long as people are free to move between communities, no freedoms are being violated.
The final responsibility of the citizens are their dependents; this is any person who enters the state under the guardianship of another citizen due to the fact that they cannot legally care for themselves. Children, the elderly, and those who are severely physically or mentally disabled would all fall under this category. These are people who are reliant upon the care of another person for their protection, and if their designated guardian fails then it is the responsibility of the state to step in. Therefore there needs to be certain standards of care to protect against the possibility of neglect or abuse. This brings us to…
Part Two: Children & Dependents
Now we have two types of subjects in the state; citizens and dependents. Citizens are responsible for paying taxes, following the laws, and ensuring any dependents under their care do the same. As the dependents are at the mercy of their guardians, there needs to be certain legal protections in place to ensure that they are being cared for properly. They must receive adequate food, clothing, shelter, and access to medical care. A parent should be allowed to raise their child more or less as they see fit, but it is sometimes unclear where to draw the line between acceptable and alarming practices. For instance, to what degree should corporal punishment be allowable before it is simply considered abuse? Our moral standards now are very different than they were one hundred years ago. What about the concept of free range parenting, where children are encouraged to be independent and act with minimal parental supervision? Should a mother who leaves her 10 year old child unattended at home for a few hours be considered neglectful or admirable? Is a child who is not allowed to leave home or see friends outside of school hours the victim of strict parenting or psychological abuse? There are an endless number of scenarios you could concoct that call into question where we should draw the line, and our cultural norms of what we consider socially acceptable are constantly changing.
One of the easiest ways for the state to ensure the wellbeing of its dependents is to institute annual wellness checks. Once a year citizens would bring any dependents under their care to their local community centre for a simple interview and checkup. This would ensure that they are safe, being cared for properly, and that children are developing appropriately. This sounds foreign in comparison to our current norms, but would provide a simple way of ensuring that you don’t have kids growing up in basements without basic reading or writing abilities. The state is not obligated to provide public education, meaning that the usual apparatus used to ensure the welfare of children no longer exists, and annual check-ins are an easy way to rectify this.
So, what happens if a citizen passes away or is rendered otherwise incapable of caring for their dependent? Custody may be offered to next of kin before going on to broader society, in what would essentially be an adoption or a foster care system. Any person or organization would be free to take on the responsibilities of a dependent as a matter
of mutual agreement, and the state would continue to check in to ensure that they are being cared for adequately. By organization I essentially mean charities, assuming there will generally be public interest in funding things like orphanages, senior living facilities, and medical or psychological wards. A person who is incapable of caring for themselves and has not been accepted as a dependent by any guardian or institution would become a ward of the realm. I doubt there would be many of these in a healthy society, as most people would be cared for by friends, family, or charity. However, ultimately I am never opposed to a social safety net, if only because it appeases our moral sensibilities as consumers. The state is a profit making enterprise, meaning spending the required funds annually to ensure that the poorest and most unfortunate members of society have a safe place to stay is a small price to pay to fulfill a sense of ethical duty. I don’t think anyone would want to live in a society that throws those who are most vulnerable out to the wolves. We are inherently caring creatures, so it is only logical that our political systems should reflect this.
As a parent, there are certain additional responsibilities you have towards your child. First and foremost is the legal obligation to register all newborns at the local community centre or hospital so they can receive a birth certificate and other legal documentation. It is the duty of the state to keep track of all children so they can be accounted for and protected should the need arise. Every newborn child clearly ought to have their legal name, date of birth, next of kin, and general features documented. In exchange, the state issues the child with a unique ID, essentially a social insurance number that can be used for authentication purposes, as well as a birth certificate and potentially even a passport.
Rather than having a compulsory education curriculum, as is the current norm, parents would have much more freedom in how they can raise their children. A common core learning standard is not only too specific, but becomes outdated too quickly, especially with recent advances in technology. Whether we like it or not, computers have revolutionized how we learn and what types of knowledge are most valuable. Nobody benefits from a state that requires every child knows what the pythagorean theorem is by age thirteen. Such learning outcomes are ultimately arbitrary and completely removed from the day-to-day requirements of reality.
Instead, the state should require that children are educated to a set of much broader and more general principles. Namely, the ability to communicate (meaning read, write, and speak effectively, as well as do basic arithmetic). Outside of these minimal standards, any child raised in a home where they have access to information and learning materials such as books, videos, and the internet, should more or less be able to educate themselves. Obviously, this is not ideal, and the vast majority of children would be sent to school for a much more rigorous and conventional curriculum. But the state should only be concerned with the cases in the margins; what is the lowest possible education standard that a child can receive without ruining their ability to be a capable and prosperous member of society? A family of farmers who homeschool their children and spends the majority of their days working should have no legal requirement to teach their kids random facts about biology or world history. So long as the child is raised in a way that means they can educate themselves further if they desire to, any unconventional parenting tactics must be more or less acceptable.
The one domain where specific education should be required is on matters concerning
the structure and function of the state itself. Not to indoctrinate a bunch of children through political propaganda, but because such an understanding is necessary in order to become a citizen. Rather ironically, this is the one thing that is not currently required learning in public schools. Knowing the reasons why the government exists, what principles it was founded upon, and the rights and responsibilities of its citizens seems like essential learning. In fact, I don’t think children should be able to graduate into citizens until they demonstrate a basic understanding of the role of the state and their relationship to it.
Part Three: Becoming a Citizen
Every well considered social contract will have two components:
The conditions under which a first generation citizen or new immigrant can enter the covenant (what was just described).
The conditions through which a child born under the new regime buys into it (in our case both literally and figuratively).
At what point must a child turn into an adult and adopt the responsibilities of citizenship? We usually think of adulthood as occurring at age 18, but why is that? Why not 15? Or 25? Our prefrontal cortexes may not be fully developed until our mid 20’s, but plenty of 16 year olds have already adopted the responsibilities of working a job, raising a child, or caring for a sick parent. We all know that maturity varies by the individual, so any age of adulthood that is defined is ultimately going to be arbitrary.
My proposition is that instead of having a set year where children must become citizens, they instead have a five year window ranging from ages 17 to 21. This would allow people with all sorts of different lifestyles and living arrangements to make judgement calls according to what is most appropriate for their circumstance. Those who have matured more quickly will have the opportunity to adopt autonomy a little earlier than is currently conventional, while those who rely upon their parents for support would have a few extra years before they need to start fending for themselves.
But what does adulthood mean, exactly? Outside of having to pay taxes, becoming a citizen means that the subject can be held legally responsible and criminally liable for all of their decisions. They also gain total independence and autonomy. They are able to rent land, get married, sign legally binding contracts, enter the military, consent to surgery, and other forms of body modification such as tattoos, hormones, or piercings. Since the state is not a democracy there is no legal voting age. Issues such as when a subject can buy drugs, alcohol, pornography, and lottery tickets should be left to the discretion of the sovereign and relevant retailers. It could be citizenship dependent or standardized to a consistent age, there being persuasive arguments on both sides.
I do think that the age of consent in relation to sex in particular is something worth exploring in greater detail. This is due to the complicated relationship between sex, sex work, and pornography. Nowadays (again, because of advances in technology) people can subject themselves to sexual scenarios which are unprecedented in human history. Consenting to sex with somebody within the privacy of your own bedroom is dramatically different than consenting to sex which will be filmed, distributed, and stored online indefinitely. Therefore it is entirely reasonable to have higher age of consent laws for things like sex work and pornography, preferably around 21. Otherwise the age of consent could be set at 17 with legal exceptions made for young people within a few years of one another.
So, between 17 and 21 a dependent has the opportunity to become a citizen. However, instead of magically gaining a new set of rights and responsibilities on your 18th birthday, this would be an active process where the subject has to demonstrate an understanding of the laws and the contract they are signing. Thus reviving the social contract into a living document based on consent that is explicitly expressed rather than implicitly accepted. Acquiring citizenship would become a meaningful event just as it is for new immigrants. Subjects would be required to take a test demonstrating their knowledge of the rules of the realm. If the child chooses to reject the conditions of the contract then they would be welcome to leave the patch and live elsewhere.
Anyone who reaches 21 years of age and is either mentally or physically unable to pass the citizenship test would remain a dependent and become the legal responsibility of their parents or a loved one. If nobody is willing to care for them then they would become a ward of the state who would find appropriate living arrangements for them. There is a small social safety net but it’s only available to those who actually need it. Hopefully as modern medicine and technology develops the portion of the population with severe disabilities will continue to diminish. This also gives the state a financial incentive to fund projects researching treatment and prevention. Disabled dependents who can be rehabilitated create the best outcome both for them and also the sovereign,
who now has another potential customer.
It’s important to emphasize that all of the principles I’ve laid out here represent only one possible set of solutions from a minimalist, libertarian perspective. Obviously competing patches or even sub-communities and cities within the realm could abide by different rule structures that support more communitarian values. My goal here was to lay out what I believe to be the minimal requirements for a successful state, which still allows for additional layers of complexity or regulation to be added on top. This chapter was concerned with the relationship between citizens and the state. The next will tackle the legal relationships between citizens in form of commerce and contracts. Now that we have established the philosophical and practical foundations for a free society, what implications will this have on trade and agreements between individuals? That’s what we will be explore in the final chapter of this season.
10. Commerce & Contracts
Our final chapter is concerned with commerce and contracts, representing the domain
of free trade and agreements made between individuals—the last step in our political hierarchy of needs. First was the need to establish a territory, second to secure it from internal threats, third to instate a system of law and order, and finally free trade can flourish. Skip a step in the process and you will find a state that is motivated by money but corrupt to its core and contaminated by contradictions. Anticapitalist mentalities usually identify a meaningful fault in the system, but mistakenly attribute this failure to free trade rather than one of the underlying political substructures it is built upon. For instance, Chapter #6 proposed a political model of land rental which would get rid of rent seeking, monopolist practices as well as allow for meaningful environmental protections. Similar arguments will be made in this chapter concerning the domain of intellectual property. The previous chapter was concerned with the laws regulating the relationship between citizen and state, this one shall explore the rules governing relationships between citizens. Trade and contracts are voluntary agreements we enter
into with other people, and the assumptions implicit in these interactions need to be identified and protected if we wish to have a prosperous society. That is our current task. I’ll be splitting the domains of our discussion into three categories: contracts, rules and regulations, and intellectual property.
Part One: Contracts
For the purposes of this text, a contract can be considered any legally enforced promise or agreement made between individuals. Marriage, for instance, is a type of contract. You legally enter into a special type of relationship with another person which grants certain rights and privileges. A married couple is treated as a familial unit under the law, therefore spouses can make medical decisions on behalf of their partner and couples will often pool wealth and resources. The state shouldn’t have any say in defining what marriage is or who can get married, it is simply a specific sort of agreement made between citizens. Different couples will have different ideas about exactly how unified they want to be—this is why people have prenups and wills to determine how wealth will be allocated. Familial law is about mediating the rules of relationships between individuals. Divorce and child custody arrangements are also essentially contracts which is the state is legally required to enforce.
Contracts in business are no different; establishing guarantees about how operations are to be run and how resources will be distributed. There must be a legal way of codifying this and holding others accountable to promises in order for people to make meaningful investments. The ability to hold someone to their word is how we can develop trust and operate with a degree of confidence and certainty. A country that does not enforce its contracts will be rife with chaos and deception without any incentive for people to follow through on their promises.
Similarly, when you purchase a product from a business, you are engaging in a sort of contract. If a microwave is advertised with a 5 year warranty, or juice as made with organic lemons, there is an assumption that these claims are true and there will be some legal recourse available if the sellers are caught in a lie. All trade is essentially a type of contract, an agreement of X in exchange for Y. If I pay for a bag of potatoes with fake money, or if the potatoes you sell me are actually turnips, then the terms of the agreement have been violated. In order for the government to protect these transactions they must be recorded. There needs to be a means of determining if a sale is legitimate by knowing where and when it took place. Exchanges that occur “under the table” as private arrangements between individuals have no way of being legally protected or enforced any more than a pinky promise.
This is the purpose of receipts, a record of the transaction that can be used to keep customers and businesses accountable. If I buy lemonade from some kids on the street and it makes me sick there is no option for legal recourse without proof of purchase. Most of the time we don’t mind paying cash for small stake purchases, but if you’re buying a new car you’re probably better off with a record of the sale in case something goes wrong. The money supply itself should be controlled by the government, but the state does need to be able to follow a paper trail, or blockchain, when necessary. The problem with conceptualizing trade as a type of contract is that the terms of the agreement are implicit rather than explicit. Buying lemonade from kids on the street carries the assumption that it is safe to drink and not made out of lemon scented hand wipes, but it’s not like they have signed a document attesting to this fact. This brings us to the need for….
Part Two: Rules & Regulations
Our current political systems come prepackaged with what must be hundreds of thousands of regulations imposed upon businesses and consumers to protect their wellbeing; restaurants have strict food storage, sanitization, and service standards; building codes delineate what and how things must be constructed; even hairdressing cannot be performed without proper training and qualifications. The problem with this status quo is that the principles of protection are prescriptive rather than prohibitive. Instead of imposing a simple rule such as, “restaurants cannot serve food that is unsafe to eat,” businesses have a laundry list of standards and practices they must abide by if they even want to open their doors. Ingredients must be stored in certain containers at specific temperatures, surfaces must be sanitized every so-many minutes, every aspect of the process has been regulated to the teeth, removing any possibility for risk or uncertainty.
This creates unfair and false barriers to entry. No longer is the priority protecting customers from known harm, but preventing even the potential occurrence of a minor one. The massive amount of restrictions and requirements imposed upon businesses before they can even open for business means that only wealthy, pre-established players are easily able to participate in the marketplace. There are all sorts of silly health and safety laws that increase costs and hassle to businesses while providing little-to-no benefit to consumers. The Canadian Food Retail and Food Services Code is a 120 page document that would render anything prepared in your typical home kitchen unsuitable for sale. Contrast this with the streets of Mexico where you can buy a taco from some back alley vendor for less than a dollar. Ingredients are kept in coolers and prepared in the open air, right next to oncoming traffic. However the products are still delicious and customers come back day after day without concern for their health or safety. Small businesses can’t get their start when they are being held to the same standard as industry giants and commercial kitchens. And if a customer is happy to adopt the risk of a street taco, why should the government be able to stop them?
My proposition is that we base rules in principles rather than prescriptions. In other words, look for the implicit assumptions underlying any agreement and only punish violations of those precepts. For instance, if purchasing something involves the inherent assumption that one is not being lied to about the nature of the product. Claims made on packaging about being peanut free or made with 100% orange juice need to be reliable and verifiable. Of course, there are always workarounds, such as burgers being advertised as “made with organic beef” (but not entirely). Consumers need to be aware of such exploits if they wish to make informed purchasing decisions, but these verbal slights of hand should not be considered fraud, only bad sales tactics.
The notion that the product you are purchasing will not harm you is another implicit assumption in most business transactions. Food should be safe to eat, a hotel free from bedbugs, and a recently constructed home should not collapse under normal environmental strain. The concept of harm is a little more difficult to define as often negative outcomes are the result of negligence rather than malevolence. Sometimes we don’t know that a commonly accepted product is harmful until more research has occurred, like the commercial use of lead paint and asbestos in construction projects, or the leaching of toxic chemicals from plastic packaging into food. Immediate harm matters, but so do the compounding effect of long term exposure to something that seems otherwise innocuous. I believe that the government should only be able to intervene in areas where there is always an associated cost to no added benefit. Thus, a state could justifiably ban chemicals that are known to be toxic except for instances where their use is appropriately regulated.
If something does go wrong, it can be difficult to determine if this is the result of accident or intention. A highly controlled commercial kitchen can make a mistake and cause a bout of food poisoning just as easily as an independent taco stand. No number of rules matter if they are not being enforced, and accidents and oversights are inevitable. If it is discovered that a common chemical is toxic, no single individual can be held accountable for using it in their business. If a bridge collapses because a builder made a mistake, this is a tragedy, but not caused by criminal action—accidents will happen with or without rules to prevent them. Intention is the real problem, like a building company knowingly watering down their cement mix in order to lower costs and subsequently producing a less reliable product. Actions like this are akin to fraud, for the customer isn’t getting what they paid for. However, what if a construction company determined a way to water down their concrete to no ill effect? Creating a product that is cheaper and more efficient than its predecessor? How can we discriminate between negligence, disobedience, and innovation?
Ultimately, I adopt the “innocent until proven guilty” stance to regulatory efforts. Unless a business practice or product has been demonstrated to consistently cause harm, producers should be able to do as they please. Remember, I’m conceptualizing a society wherein rules and regulations can be layered with increasing complexity. When describing laws in absolutes I am always addressing the minimalist, wild west state of affairs. You can always make something more safe. Currently we are seeking the minimum conditions needed to produce an environment of individual freedom. If I want to hire some guy to build me a shabby little shack with a stack of hammers, nails, and two-by-fours, should this be allowed if I am knowingly adopting the risk? My answer is yes.
There still can and should be independent regulatory bodies that hold companies and businesses to certain standards of practice. The street taco stands should be as free as possible, however the vast majority of food services would voluntarily adopt and comply with higher regulatory conditions. But these rules do not need to come from government agencies! Notions of what constitutes best practice are best determined by members of the industry themselves. There could be some independent bureaus of “high quality food certification” that conduct restaurant inspections and ensure that food is being prepared in accordance with their standards. These agencies would also be competing amongst themselves in the free market. Different certification services may have different things they look for in terms of abiding by principles of health and safety, animal welfare, or sustainability. Instead of all food services being held to the same set of standards, consumers could find a regulatory body that represents their values and seek out restaurants that have received their certification. The restaurants would subsequently have an incentive to pay for routine inspections since this would increase their customer base. Maybe search services like Google would decide to only list restaurants if they meet certain regulatory conditions, thereby not risking sending their users to a shady establishment. Essentially, by placing the onus of regulation upon those with actual skin in the game, customers receive a better product while also allowing for small start-ups to survive in the margins.
The same principle applies to occupational licensing. Instead of the state determining what constitutes a qualified hairdresser or dentist, such certifications would be granted by people actually operating in the field. A group of hairdressers could decide that their members be trained to a certain standard and advertise this alongside their services, but not every person who wants to cut hair needs to operate in accordance with these principles. Unlicensed hair dressers or tattoo artists should still be able to make a living if they can find customers who want them. Now, if someone lies to you about their certification status this is akin to fraud. A person or business who falsely claims having been approved of by a regulatory body is committing a criminal act and should be punished accordingly.
Technically, a system such as this would allow for the possibility of lousy certification and regulatory agencies to emerge, ones that hold businesses and practitioners to silly standards while still allowing them to advertise as approved by so-and-so. Ultimately, knowing which agencies are good and reliable would be a responsibility that falls upon
the consumer. Somebody simply being certified is no longer what matters but certified
by whom. Some agencies would have the equivalent of a Michelin star, communicating extremely high quality service by trained professionals, whereas others would be about
as persuasive as a pizza shop that advertises itself as “grandma’s favourite.” This may be true, but it doesn’t mean much to your average consumer. Individuals would have to determine which popular regulatory agencies best align with their values and seek out businesses which have earned their approval. Over time, certain practices would become more and more ubiquitous based on consumer demand, encouraging a heightening of standards through free market competition.
Essentially, I am suggesting a regulatory system wherein the only rule enforced by the government is “do not lie”. So long as consumers have access to reliable information they can make informed purchasing decisions. If a business falsely advertises a certification that they have not earned, or if an agency erroneously approves of a business which violates their standards of practice, they must be held criminally culpable for the consequences. Regulatory bodies would therefore have a vested interest in ensuring the accuracy of their assessments since they would be legally responsible for any oversights.
However, lies aren’t the only potential issue, deception matters too! Any instance wherein a consumer is tricked into doing something they wouldn’t otherwise do is a cause for concern. Therefore there needs to be a reliable legal means of certifying authenticity. Market participants shouldn’t be able to steal the identities of or impersonate other vendors. This is the purpose of trademark laws—a legal means of certifying the relationship between product and seller. If I buy a bottle of Coke or a Big Mac from McDonalds, I can be assured that the products are being manufactured and distributed by the same company. Competitors can’t rip off Coca-Cola packaging as doing so may confuse the consumer, causing them to buy a different product than the one they wanted. Trademark laws aren’t designed to prevent other people from using an asset, they are actually intended for sellers to be able to voluntarily identify themselves as the authentic source of a product or service. They exist to protect consumers, not producers.
Part Three: Intellectual Property
The reason I mention trademarks is because usually they are lumped in with other forms of intellectual property, although the role that they play is functionally different.
A trademark is essentially a certification of relation, a legal guarantee that X product comes from Y source, which is extremely important if people are to navigate market systems effectively. Intellectual property, on the other hand, is about ownership, not authenticity. Patents and copyrights exist to protect producers, not consumers. They offer a legal means of gaining monopoly power over an idea, and I believe they are entirely illegitimate.
Now, this is a controversial opinion, especially among libertarians who typically consider IP to be the cornerstone of what makes profit and innovation possible in the first place. However I believe this is a mischaracterization, and intellectual property laws actually produce a lot more harm than good. Just like how land ownership can create unfair and unearned monopoly power that exacerbates wealth inequality, IP is a gross misapplication of capitalism rather than a desirable feature of it.
The conventional defence of IP is that creations of the mind are a product of labour, and since man has a natural right to the fruits of his labour this necessarily includes creative works of art or inventions of the mind. Simple enough, but the problem with this approach is that it is a misapplication of the concept of property. The only reason we have property rights in the first place is because of scarcity. Conflict over limited resources introduces the need for rules which will mediate disputes over their use. If we lived in a world of infinite abundance then there would be no need for ownership since anything you want you could be easily obtained. The problem of scarcity is part of what brings about the need for political institutions in the first place, and property rights are an effective means of determining who gets to control what resources. But when it comes to matters of the mind, no such limitations exist. Copying something is not the same thing as stealing it. Theft shifts control over limited resources whereas copying simply adds to the supply. Because there can be no shortage of information or ideas, there is no need for property rights to apply to intellectual pursuits. Introducing the concept of intellectual property creates an artificial scarcity which need not exist, and which can only be propagated through political power.
You cannot own an idea. All concepts are a consequence of those that came before them. New genres of music arise out of amalgamations of old ones, new types of food emerge where cultures collide; all of human innovation is a product of ideas having sex. Nothing is wholly original and all creative work is derivative, for it is impossible to have inspiration without influence. And this is a good thing! As human beings we have a massive multicultural canon which is constantly being enriched by new ideas and new perspectives. We thrive from collaboration. So where did this intellectual property idea come from?
It’s a common misconception that copyright laws were introduced as a means of ensuring that writers can profit off of their work. The truth is that when the printing press was invented, only a small, government controlled guild had the power to publish and distribute written works. It wasn’t until 1710 that the Statute of Anne was passed by British parliament, granting authors the right to control the printing of their
books. There was never actually a time when information could be published and circulated freely. The Copyright Act just substituted one set of unfair monopolistic practices for a slightly better one. The 1623 Statue of Monopolies did the same thing in the realm of patents, transferring what had been indefinite government control over patents to a definite (14 year) private monopoly. This may have been the lesser of two evils at the time, but this does not imply that such a state of affairs is thus desirable.
In the few hundred years since intellectual property laws were first implemented they have seen some dramatic changes. When the Copyright Act was introduced to America in 1790, the terms lasted 28 years, twice what it was in England. Nowadays copyright lasts the lifetime of the creator plus 70 years, or 95 years if the work was commissioned
by an employer. The copyright on Steamboat Willie, the 1928 animated Disney short which first featured Mickey Mouse, is set to expire in 2024, nearly 100 years after the original work was created. This is after Disney has lobbied the government three separate times to ensure that Mickey did not enter the public domain.
What is going on here? It seems like the implementation of copyright law has strayed far from its original purpose. They are no longer about allowing creators temporary control over who reproduces their work, but instead protecting the interests of large media corporations. Owning a lucrative copyright asset allows companies to turn a profit without adding anything of value themselves. Whatever royalties are being made from Steamboat Willie are certainly not going to the men who originally produced
the animation. Copyright term extension acts also have the unfortunate consequence of creating orphan works. When Disney extends copyright law they are doing it across the board, not just for that particular property. This means that any creative project produced within the past 100 years cannot be distributed without permission from the copyright holder, causing hundreds of thousands of songs and stories to fade out of print and into obscurity despite the fact that there may still be many people who would happily pay for product. In order to protect the profits of a few hits, copyright extensions cause the vast majority of other creative work to go extinct in the process.
Patent protections pose a parallel problem. There is a general assumption that patents are good since they reward industry innovators and incentivize new inventions by granting monopoly power over a particular product. However, historically what ends up happening is that patents impede progress rather than promote it. For instance, in the 1700s when steam power was just being popularized, James Watts applied for a patent on a superior engine design. Despite this, or in fact because of it, most of the progress in steam engine design occurred after Watts’ patent expired, not during its duration. Why? Well, by holding monopoly power over the superior system, Watt’s lacked any financial incentive to develop his product even further. His patent may have protected him from potential competitors, but patents also prohibited him from collaborating with other innovators. If inefficiency in the steam engine could only be resolved by using technologies protected by other patent holders, the entire industry would have to sit and wait for them to expire before it could make meaningful change. Two good inventions can’t be used in tandem to maximize output if patents are held by opposing owners. Even if conclusions are arrived at independently or through different mechanisms, it’s the outcome that is patent protected, not the process.
The Wright brothers share a similar story, who refused to develop their airplane while preventing others from doing the same. When someone has monopoly power they have
little incentive to improve the cost or quality of the product they produced. Patent protections tend to keep prices high and slow the adoption of otherwise socially valuable technologies. These legal protections hamper growth rather than accelerate it. What’s worse is that patents cover independent discovery of the same ideas, meaning innovators can be punished by no fault of their own if they aren’t the first to the patent office with a new product. Most great technological advances are attractor states which are reached more or less simultaneously by multiple people within a short window of time. Things like the invention of the lightbulb or telephone usually had a few thinkers working on the project concurrently, however only one receives popular credit for the invention because they were first to receive a patent for it.
Matters are made even worse when you begin to examine how patent policies can be abused to prevent newcomers from even entering an industry. Patent pooling is the practice of a few large corporations deciding to share their patents among themselves, making it incredibly easy for them to innovate and share valuable ideas while preventing others from doing the same. Alternatively, patent thickets are used to prevent competition in an industry by filing useless patents which must be carefully sidestepped and avoided by any burgeoning business. It’s essentially the equivalent of a competitive cold war—companies will spend money on defensive patents that they have no intention of using only so that they can blackmail innovative firms when the opportunity presents itself to extract a quick buck. What’s even more insane is the practice of submarine patents; patents that are filed in secret for a technology that may not even exist yet. All that the patent holder has to do is wait for an innovator to come along who has a useful application for the idea, then the submarine surfaces and they can demand licensing fees for a product they had no role in making!
I expound endlessly on the ways patent laws are used and abused by big businesses to prevent small startups from ever standing a chance. Most new firms have to resign themselves to being one-idea companies; producing something new and valuable once before immediately being bought out by a larger business. There is no longer any incentive or ability to compete, the best a small company can do is find something new
to feed the big guys and then get the hell out of their way. What’s worse is that patents are considered legitimate until proven otherwise, meaning that a patent holder can file
fraudulent claims and tie their competitors up in legal battles without having to risk anything of consequence themselves. Those who are wealthy and powerful can easily withstand a lawsuit while the same legal fees would put a small start up out of business. Patent laws almost seem designed to protect large corporations while leaving little left for the rest of us.
Okay, but what about drug companies? Surely there are some circumstances where patent protections allow for industry innovations which would otherwise not be possible. Right? Well, let’s consider something like the AIDS crisis in Africa. The drugs required to treat the virus are cheap to produce and in great demand overseas, but pharmaceutical companies charge enormous premiums in order to reap larger profits in Western countries. The companies don’t want to sell their medicine for less in Africa, though they could afford to do so, because this runs the risk of a parallel market emerging out of Africa that resells the cheap product to the West, thus undercutting the company’s profits. This creates a situation of artificial scarcity: there is both supply and demand, but because one company gets to control who they sell to and for how much, millions of people are getting needlessly sick. This isn’t the fault of capitalism, it’s the fault of patent protections which are acting as an unnecessary bug in the system.
Maybe you agree with that patents present some problems but still believe that copyright protections are more or less a good idea, perhaps with a lower term limit. However, I maintain that it’s better to abolish the concept of copyright entirely, if only because copyright laws still present the opportunity for abuse of power by controlling the flow of information. For instance, Scientologists have been able to use copyright claims to take down websites that are critical of the church because they referenced copywritten material. In the early 2000s a similar tactic was used to suppress negative information about the security of American voting machines. Copyright laws allow companies to use takedown notices to censor and repress information they would rather not have available as public knowledge.
Aside from exploits in the system, the entire concept of copyright is built on shaky foundations. As was said at the start of this section, the notion of private property is predicated upon scarcity. So when it comes to intellectual and creative endeavours that can be freely reproduced, why should anyone else be able to artificially limit that resource? “To protect the creators!” is the conventional answer. Artists need a reliable method to profit off of their work and if their creations can be replicated by anyone then this reduces their value. But it’s not like copying is the only or best way to profit from an artistic endeavour. Instead of authors relying upon royalties from book sales, what if they simply received a flat fee up front? This used to be the conventional way authors were paid and no one had any problem with it. In fact, there was a time when the United States freely printed foreign publications without paying the copyright fees that were required in England. Yet English authors would often make more money
selling their works in the United States than they did back home collecting royalties. This is because American publishers prioritized quantity over quality. They would buy a manuscript from an English author and then flood the market with cheaply made paperbacks. The availability of affordable books in America lead to an increase in literacy and subsequently more authors and more demand for books. This feedback loop created a more educated populace due to the fact that information could flow freely through the system. Artificial barriers that impede that flow are bad for both consumers and producers.
Of course, if an author is just selling the initial manuscript of their text then this means they miss out on any additional profits if the book turns out to be a bestseller. But at the same time, not relying upon royalties as a main source of income means that even if the book does poorly the author still has a guaranteed paycheque, while the publishing company must eat the cost. If they do happen to write a best seller, that means later works produced will be valued more highly and can be priced accordingly. The notion that an artist must be mostly or even remotely dependent upon royalties in order to make a living ignores the numerous other ways that creators can turn a profit.
Anything involving live appearances of authors, artists, or performers will always be scarce. The majority of a film’s revenue is made at its initial release in theatres. And there are many other ways to monetize tours, talk show appearances, autographs and merchandise. The online community is a great showcase of innovative ways creators can profit from a product that is free. Either through advertisements or subscription services, people tend to feel some responsibility to support artists whose work they appreciate. This is why artistic exposure is always preferable to obscurity. Most musicians would pay money to have their song play on the radio or be featured in a big movie, since this attracts an audience. Even if the first set of eyes or ears aren’t paying for it, they may expose the product others who will.
It’s worth noting that there is a meaningful difference between copying something and claiming it as your own. We can have a system without IP while maintaining the concept of artistic ownership. To falsely claim that you are the creator of a stolen work
is tantamount to fraud. To reproduce the contents of a book while changing the title or author is an act of deception, but reprinting an existing text while crediting the original creator should be allowed. Personally, I have posted some poems online and it would be strange to walk into a bookshop and see them being sold on a shelf. It would make me angry if someone else was pretending to have written them, but if they were published as a curated collection of anonymous poems found on the internet I think that would be rather charming. Not being compensated for your creative work isn’t the best, but it’s not like I was going to any effort to publish them either, so I can’t pretend to have lost money if it’s somebody else who put in work to make it profitable.
There has been some drama in the past where it is discovered that a large company is copying and commercially selling art that was found online without compensating the creators. Unfortunately, this is something that would be technically allowable in my system, but hopefully not generally desirable from an optics standpoint. If an artist discovers that their work is being appropriated for profit by some big company, they should take to social media and call for a boycott. Most of the time companies see the value in paying for original designs—if only so they have access to a better quality file. When it comes to sales there could also be ways of signalling when the profits from a product directly support an artist, such as a special sticker for physical items and a blockchain signature for digital ones.
Contracts made between creators and vendors would also help protect product use and distribution to some extent. A filmmaker could sell his movie to a cinema on the condition that they do not duplicate or share any copies of the file, thus ensuring they can profit from an audience. An inventor could take her design to a manufacturer and offer priority access to its use in exchange for company stock or royalties on each sale. If that manufacturer doesn’t accept her deal then a competitor will, for most of the profit made from a product comes from whomever is first to market. The first mover in any industry always has an advantage. Name-brand drugs are generally preferred to their generic counterparts simply because they feel more familiar. A publishing house knows that the vast majority of book sales come from the first few weeks of its release.
A copycat cannot replicate success by imitation because imitation of success suggests that someone else has already profited. You can’t make much money trying to reprint bestsellers because they have already been sold—anyone who comes along afterwards is just grabbing crumbs up off the floor.
The difficulty with instating meaningful change to IP law is the fact that the majority of global trade is dependent upon agreeing to certain international copyright treaties. Even if a smaller developing country would benefit from not enforcing IP protections, doing so would disqualify them from global trade which they are likely reliant upon. Meanwhile, countries with strong IP laws will attract creators and innovators since they believe they can make a greater profit. For a country to survive that does not offer conventional IP protection it would need to be incredibly self-sufficient and offer incentives in other areas that would make the trade-off worthwhile. What is really needed is a global shift in attitude about what intellectual property is and if it should even exist in the first place. This series is called Wonderland for a reason. We are focusing on philosophical oughts in order to determine how best to fix what is. The reason I am such an advocate for first principles thinking is that often it isn’t obvious what features of a system are helping or hurting it. In order to disentangle causes and effects it’s best to start by thinking from the bottom up so to avoid any contradictions.
My main goal throughout this series has been philosophical rigour and consistency. The problem of practical application is a separate issue. However, I hope you can appreciate me taking the time to tease these topics apart—if only as an intellectual exercise. Personally, I am a little more idealistic. I think we are often so caught up in the current and conflicts of day to day life that we forget that all of our biggest and most powerful institutions are a mere blink of the eye in relation to the rest of human history. Nothing that exists now need carry into the future unless we want it to, and ideas that aren’t sustainable will naturally weed themselves out over time. So I am incredibly optimistic for the future. I think that political theory always necessarily predates practice since people need a roadmap telling them where to go and why. Haphazard attempts at change without a unifying theory or set of principles is bound to produce more problems than solutions. That’s why I like engaging with the abstract rather than the everyday. For me, the ideas and ideals feel more real than their chaotic implementation, since at least in theory I can have logical consistency. Issues of practical policy are often clouded by the bad foundations upon which they are built, so it isn’t obvious what changes will make things better or worse. I think the best solution to our problems is to lead by example, and the possibility of micro-nations present an exciting opportunity to experiment with potential political models. If an idea works then it will naturally spread over time, which is why truth and utility go hand in hand. The only thing inhibiting our capacity for growth and change is the belief that it isn’t possible. My aim with this series is to demonstrate that it is.
I hope you’ve enjoyed our journey down the rabbit hole, and I would love to hear any feedback you have to share. This series of mine is finally complete, but there is always more to come. If you would like to keep up with me and find out what I’m up to or when I release next, please subscribe to this series and follow me on X or Instagram. If you wish to share your thoughts, you can email me at janeblooms8@gmail.com, or leave a comment below.
Thank you so much for visiting Wonderland.
Wonderland is a free publication that outlines a philosophy and political vision for the 22nd century. To support my work and receive updates on new posts, sign up for a free or paid subscription.
What a wonderful journey! Extremely ambitious but clear and beautifully crafted. Curious to hear more thoughts on education. On to season II
I'm curious...will you be making Season 1 and Season 2 into ebook or paperback format?