Over the course of the past year, I’ve written over three dozen essays that all focus on a single, fundamental question: if we’re so rich, why aren’t we happy? It is a profound and complicated question, and my attempt at an answer has many different strands. Here I’m going to try to weave them all together into a single, coherent narrative — the tl;dr version of “The Permanent Problem.”
Capitalism has, as you say, an almost infinite capacity for material improvement. But human happiness and contentment is a scarce resource. The limiting factor ultimately is human nature. Neither capitalism nor an other 'system' can do much about it.
Having said that, I too am sympathetic to the "broad-based DIY/hacker “counterculture” that celebrates the virtues of productive self-sufficiency" that you hope for. But I am not holding my breath. I am not one for predicting the future but my instinct is that, before any positive counter culture emerges an ugly transition would inevitably precede it. Where we are at present in the West, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
"Maybe they’re right, maybe another singularity is coming, but what’s clear enough — take a look at the chart below — is that we’re already on the other side of one."
This is a great point, one that I have not yet seen made. I begin my book with the same chart, showing the incredible explosion of what we call "progress" in the a brief period of time. I suppose the question is, when we are talking about "arcs," is progress just a brief effloresce? Perhaps humanity will, some day, create more problems than its ingenuity can resolve. Perhaps the 'mass' of those problems will overcome the forces of ingenuity, collapsing in on itself like a dying star. Is this end inevitable?
It's certainly not the future I want, but it's something I contemplate and write about quite often.
Government control of K12 is the single biggest problem. Had we had a market in education, had it been voluntary, the focus of education would have more consistently been lifelong happiness and well-being rather than consumerism and egotism. Happiness and well-being are built on healthy habits and attitudes. For many Americans, that includes religious education. For secular Americans, it includes more agency-based schools such as Montessori, Waldorf, Acton, and more recent models such as Prenda, Sora, Prisma, and the thousands of microschools popping up.
My program, The Socratic Experience, is explicitly focused on lifelong happiness and wellbeing. I teach a "Purpose" course every day based on the famous "Ikigai" diagram, the intersection of "What do you love?," "What are you good at?," "What will the world need?," and "What will the world pay for?" We also have courses on relationships and how to be an adult. We also provide a range of cool digital skills, audio engineering, video engineering, software development, animation, etc. that they love because they want to be part of the digital world.
This isn't a solution for all students, but it also isn't limited to high IQ students. We attract many creatives who do not do well in conventional school. They are happy and flourishing.
I've spent most of my life in counterculture hubs such as Santa Fe, Austin, and San Francisco, where despite the recent influxes of money, it has long been normal to do what they love. Esalen has been a shrine as long as I can remember. Lifestyle innovations such as meditation, tai chi, adventure sports, massage therapy, etc. have long been normal in these places. Not coincidentally, the latter two have been hotbeds of innovation.
I see the East coast as a late adopter to all of these trends. I'm not claiming any particular virtues for any particular path - I'm very much an advocate of a market in lifestyles. For some people a return to traditional Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim virtue traditions may be most valuable. For others it may be some mix of more contemporary lifestyle traditions - digital media gurus such as Tucker Max (now into Waldorf education) and Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic) have gone beyond making money as a way of life and into new lifestyle trends. Tech entrepreneurs have founded many of the new models of education, including Acton, Alpha, Prenda, Prisma, and Sora. They see how obsolete the old models are.
Traditional K12 is mostly a waste of time that trains children in passivity, meaninglessness, and therefore we graduate the spiritless humans we graduate. In a fully developed education market no one would pick this garbage for their children. The Permanent Problem is an artifact of government control of the most crucial period of human development.
A recent substack on this building on my decades of writing on this topic:
Again, a cogent and excellent analysis. I'll continue to beat the drum of being skeptical that the sort of local, self sustaining communities you envision will happen short of a spiritual or religious revolution.
Throughout history the coordination problem has always been extremely difficult to overcome, typically only being defeated by religion. In the modern age where we dramatically reward defecting in prisoners dilemmas and generally selfish action, that problem becomes far harder to bypass. Personally I doubt we will see any real change until institutions break down far further, or we get some sort of messiah who will pour us new wine, as Jesus would've said.
Brink, The ideas here are equally useful for addressing global climate change from a societal viewpoint, as is the direction suggested towards more local "living" on all fronts.
I like the mention of "superhuman," which for me is another way to say "uncontrollable complexity". Pairing the idea with "orientation towards market profit" sums it up. The reminder that "industrialization was a massive exercise in planning, organization, and calculation with an intensity and rigor never before seen" is fodder for my own thinking.
It seems like the basic biological impulses that led to our thriving as a species, "Food!" "Shelter!" too easily translate into "Money". All the time we've been overlaying the qualitative values that come from being a creative and intelligent species: ethics, justice, fairness, love of learning, art, etc. But how to overcome that essential (?) connection between inbred urges towards survival and oh-so-quantifiable money is the puzzle I can't get past (nevertheless, I sense that you're on the right track.)
Major shifts in value systems have occurred with the rise of religions, ideologies like communism, the widespread academies when everyone spoke Latin and there was just less to read, and of course the enlightenment and the rise of science and hyper-rationalism. I see the main problem with culture today as fragmentation. We've naturally grown out of the old value systems, but there are just too many possibilities for replacing them. This is why my own essay on the "permanent problem" would be even less judgmental. The loss of traditional institutions was bound to happen with globalization and the world wide web (symbolized for me by the explosion of channels beyond the reliable three in the U.S., along with the decline of journalism from apex during the 20th century.)
I don't see social media so much as an opiate but as an irresistible obstacle that thwarts the mental development of young brains in terms of attention and curiosity. No one is forced to be bored any more.
In the meantime I have reservations about science and technology, which are also ultimately driven by money rather than by our higher social values. A recent New Yorker article about CRISPR gene editing (9/11/2023) had me realizing that in the best of worlds, all scientific education and every scientific research project would be driven by ethics, to the point that you couldn't be a scientist unless you were ordained and active in a rigorous, multi-disciplinary ethical community.
Thanks for the stimulating work. The language and analysis are spot-on and extremely well expressed. These issues are growing more and more important, as we're seeing some very sinister "permanent solutions" being explicitly analyzed and discussed in the media.
I share a lot of these concerns, but not the one about declining fertility. The world population in 1900 was 1.6 billion, and that was enough to fill the planet. At a net reproduction rate of 0.5, it would take us three generations (more than a century) to get back there, even without considering the impact of longer life spans. Small families are part of the solution, not part of the problem
You write "the capitalist system has developed in ways that leaves us well short of mass flourishing"
The way this is expressed implies that the absence of mass flourishing is something that was imposed by some sort of outside force. It was not. I is a political choice that was made more than half a century ago.
When large organisations compete for the top spot, be it on the battlefield or at the mall, the resulting costs are huge, and mostly borne by those whom they enlist/employ. I know competition is valuable, but can we find ways to make do with less of it?
Capitalism has, as you say, an almost infinite capacity for material improvement. But human happiness and contentment is a scarce resource. The limiting factor ultimately is human nature. Neither capitalism nor an other 'system' can do much about it.
Having said that, I too am sympathetic to the "broad-based DIY/hacker “counterculture” that celebrates the virtues of productive self-sufficiency" that you hope for. But I am not holding my breath. I am not one for predicting the future but my instinct is that, before any positive counter culture emerges an ugly transition would inevitably precede it. Where we are at present in the West, the falcon cannot hear the falconer. https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/
"Maybe they’re right, maybe another singularity is coming, but what’s clear enough — take a look at the chart below — is that we’re already on the other side of one."
This is a great point, one that I have not yet seen made. I begin my book with the same chart, showing the incredible explosion of what we call "progress" in the a brief period of time. I suppose the question is, when we are talking about "arcs," is progress just a brief effloresce? Perhaps humanity will, some day, create more problems than its ingenuity can resolve. Perhaps the 'mass' of those problems will overcome the forces of ingenuity, collapsing in on itself like a dying star. Is this end inevitable?
It's certainly not the future I want, but it's something I contemplate and write about quite often.
Government control of K12 is the single biggest problem. Had we had a market in education, had it been voluntary, the focus of education would have more consistently been lifelong happiness and well-being rather than consumerism and egotism. Happiness and well-being are built on healthy habits and attitudes. For many Americans, that includes religious education. For secular Americans, it includes more agency-based schools such as Montessori, Waldorf, Acton, and more recent models such as Prenda, Sora, Prisma, and the thousands of microschools popping up.
My program, The Socratic Experience, is explicitly focused on lifelong happiness and wellbeing. I teach a "Purpose" course every day based on the famous "Ikigai" diagram, the intersection of "What do you love?," "What are you good at?," "What will the world need?," and "What will the world pay for?" We also have courses on relationships and how to be an adult. We also provide a range of cool digital skills, audio engineering, video engineering, software development, animation, etc. that they love because they want to be part of the digital world.
This isn't a solution for all students, but it also isn't limited to high IQ students. We attract many creatives who do not do well in conventional school. They are happy and flourishing.
I've spent most of my life in counterculture hubs such as Santa Fe, Austin, and San Francisco, where despite the recent influxes of money, it has long been normal to do what they love. Esalen has been a shrine as long as I can remember. Lifestyle innovations such as meditation, tai chi, adventure sports, massage therapy, etc. have long been normal in these places. Not coincidentally, the latter two have been hotbeds of innovation.
I see the East coast as a late adopter to all of these trends. I'm not claiming any particular virtues for any particular path - I'm very much an advocate of a market in lifestyles. For some people a return to traditional Jewish, Catholic, Protestant, Hindu, Buddhist, or Muslim virtue traditions may be most valuable. For others it may be some mix of more contemporary lifestyle traditions - digital media gurus such as Tucker Max (now into Waldorf education) and Ryan Holiday (The Daily Stoic) have gone beyond making money as a way of life and into new lifestyle trends. Tech entrepreneurs have founded many of the new models of education, including Acton, Alpha, Prenda, Prisma, and Sora. They see how obsolete the old models are.
Traditional K12 is mostly a waste of time that trains children in passivity, meaninglessness, and therefore we graduate the spiritless humans we graduate. In a fully developed education market no one would pick this garbage for their children. The Permanent Problem is an artifact of government control of the most crucial period of human development.
A recent substack on this building on my decades of writing on this topic:
https://michaelstrong.substack.com/p/what-are-we-building
Again, a cogent and excellent analysis. I'll continue to beat the drum of being skeptical that the sort of local, self sustaining communities you envision will happen short of a spiritual or religious revolution.
Throughout history the coordination problem has always been extremely difficult to overcome, typically only being defeated by religion. In the modern age where we dramatically reward defecting in prisoners dilemmas and generally selfish action, that problem becomes far harder to bypass. Personally I doubt we will see any real change until institutions break down far further, or we get some sort of messiah who will pour us new wine, as Jesus would've said.
Brink, The ideas here are equally useful for addressing global climate change from a societal viewpoint, as is the direction suggested towards more local "living" on all fronts.
I like the mention of "superhuman," which for me is another way to say "uncontrollable complexity". Pairing the idea with "orientation towards market profit" sums it up. The reminder that "industrialization was a massive exercise in planning, organization, and calculation with an intensity and rigor never before seen" is fodder for my own thinking.
It seems like the basic biological impulses that led to our thriving as a species, "Food!" "Shelter!" too easily translate into "Money". All the time we've been overlaying the qualitative values that come from being a creative and intelligent species: ethics, justice, fairness, love of learning, art, etc. But how to overcome that essential (?) connection between inbred urges towards survival and oh-so-quantifiable money is the puzzle I can't get past (nevertheless, I sense that you're on the right track.)
Major shifts in value systems have occurred with the rise of religions, ideologies like communism, the widespread academies when everyone spoke Latin and there was just less to read, and of course the enlightenment and the rise of science and hyper-rationalism. I see the main problem with culture today as fragmentation. We've naturally grown out of the old value systems, but there are just too many possibilities for replacing them. This is why my own essay on the "permanent problem" would be even less judgmental. The loss of traditional institutions was bound to happen with globalization and the world wide web (symbolized for me by the explosion of channels beyond the reliable three in the U.S., along with the decline of journalism from apex during the 20th century.)
I don't see social media so much as an opiate but as an irresistible obstacle that thwarts the mental development of young brains in terms of attention and curiosity. No one is forced to be bored any more.
In the meantime I have reservations about science and technology, which are also ultimately driven by money rather than by our higher social values. A recent New Yorker article about CRISPR gene editing (9/11/2023) had me realizing that in the best of worlds, all scientific education and every scientific research project would be driven by ethics, to the point that you couldn't be a scientist unless you were ordained and active in a rigorous, multi-disciplinary ethical community.
Thanks for the stimulating work. The language and analysis are spot-on and extremely well expressed. These issues are growing more and more important, as we're seeing some very sinister "permanent solutions" being explicitly analyzed and discussed in the media.
I share a lot of these concerns, but not the one about declining fertility. The world population in 1900 was 1.6 billion, and that was enough to fill the planet. At a net reproduction rate of 0.5, it would take us three generations (more than a century) to get back there, even without considering the impact of longer life spans. Small families are part of the solution, not part of the problem
You write "the capitalist system has developed in ways that leaves us well short of mass flourishing"
The way this is expressed implies that the absence of mass flourishing is something that was imposed by some sort of outside force. It was not. I is a political choice that was made more than half a century ago.
https://mikealexander.substack.com/p/how-the-new-deal-order-fell
Another choice could have been made. Another choice could still be made today, but our rulers have no incentive to pursue this.
When large organisations compete for the top spot, be it on the battlefield or at the mall, the resulting costs are huge, and mostly borne by those whom they enlist/employ. I know competition is valuable, but can we find ways to make do with less of it?