What makes them universal is that any human being, in any culture, has the rational capacity to justify these values from their own self-experience. Anyone can adopt a "theoretical attitude" that enables them to suspend the cultural realities they have grown up with, critique them, and arrive at ideas (theories) that hold across time and place. This is the basis for both a science and an ethics that can be shared among different peoples. The actual implementations and applications of that universal science and those universal ethics may of course differ profoundly between different communities.
A lot of big talk recently from people appointing themselves defenders of “the West” and “Western values.”
This is identity politics, which I generally find to be useful for little other than provoking conflict. But I will say that a belief in universal human rights, liberty, and self-determination are deeply “Western” values. The great thing is, they are also “Eastern” values and “Northern” values and “Southern” values—because they are universal.
Universalism does not mean you’re not from somewhere. It means you are translating universal values into the cultural practices, norms, and languages of wherever you are from. Any people can make universal values their own. Human rights, liberty, and self-determination don’t look the same everywhere—and that is the beauty of human freedom. People can define and redefine what their values mean based on their own local contexts and needs.
It is vitally important for world peace that the peoples of the world embrace universal values without demanding that they look the same everywhere. This means less big talk about values and more living them.
We can do this! 🌎🌍🌏🗺️
Civilization is constituted by the productive tension between:
1. Platform/state/law
and
2. Frontier/wilderness/possibility
The great danger we are facing now as a species is attempts to extend Platforms to every known surface of experience.
Whether it’s centrally-controlled money, or centrally-controlled AI, or centrally-controlled violence, what they have in common is the attempt to foreclose in advance the possibility of alternatives, of different ways of being, thinking, organizing, and doing. And it is the contestation between alternatives that generates the possibility of progress.
This is not to say that platforms are bad as such and we should get rid of them. Rather, it’s to say that platforms can only be of service to humanity if they are continuously parochialized by actual humans imagining and living otherwise in the SPACES (terrestrial, virtual, interpersonal, imaginative) that the platform does not comprehend.
Introducing Symbolic Deduction Engines
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphageometry-an-olympiad-level-ai-system-for-geometry/
Some (rare) societies like the “idea” of entrepreneurship. This is good and must be preserved.
But even in these societies, people rarely like *actual* entrepreneurs.
The criticisms of actual entrepreneurs are endless: wild; pushy; demanding; controlling; obsessive; insensitive; scary; crazy; idiotic; violent; sociopathic.
That’s no coincidence. It takes a special kind of person to face a “wall of rejection” day after day for years and still find the strength continue. To face head-on the minuscule likelihood of actually succeeding and still put all their skin in the game. To choose to be David going toe-to-toe against the Goliath of whatever they’re working to disrupt.
Entrepreneurs are precious people. Doesn’t mean they should be worshipped; doesn’t mean they’re right about even most things. It just means that they are the tip of the spear of a certain kind of material human progress.
Without entrepreneurs, everything slows down. The status quo metastasizes. Cultural imagination stagnates.
We should do what we can as a society to make sure the flame of entrepreneurship is never extinguished. Even—especially—if we don’t “like” it.
https://unherd.com/2024/01/why-american-cities-are-squalid/
Greay piece. This is the same faulty design logic I found operating in the public school system:
“A removal of resources for the majority, because of concerns over ‘misuse’ by less than 1% of residents.”
As a result, the supposedly “bad kids” end up getting most of the attention and resources. Even when policies, curricula, classrooms, and equipment are designed to “prevent” them from “doing bad things”, the meta-message is that they are still being designed *for* them (well, not for them as humans, but for them as “bad people”)—and not for anyone else.
This is the paradox of policing culture: you end up fixating on the very thing you’re trying to “eliminate.” And then it multiplies because it’s being perversely incentivized. People like attention, even when it’s negative.
In short, negative attention rewards and reinforces bad behavior. Changing this dynamic requires a fundamental shift in mindset.
The debate, as always, hinges on what is meant by “national emergency” and “the U.S. is under imminent attack.”
Hawks would have you believe that any violence against any American asset anywhere in the world is a “national emergency” that authorizes the President to commit unlimited resources and perpetrate unlimited violence without regard for the will of Congress and the American people.
For hawks, the recognized ability of specific military assets to defend themselves if attacked is not good enough: the full power of the American state must immediately be committed to war of undefined scope in the event of any “provocation”. We’ve lost the concepts of local response, of local diplomacy, and limited use of power. We’re acting like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, swinging around our wand of power with no discipline and no strategy.
This is not sustainable, materially or diplomatically. If everything is an “emergency,” then nothing is an emergency. A permanent state of emergency is a permanent police state. And it is simply impossible for any country to impose a permanent police state on the world forever.
The ultimate risk management strategy is truth.
Let people and things show you what they are. Don’t ignore the evidence, and get better at interpreting it.
If you suppress truth to “minimize risk,” you may succeed in making things look smooth for a while—until the unsustainable charade comes crashing down catastrophically.
It’s not crony capitalism or mercantilism that sustains and uplifts billions. Parceling out monopolies and privileges is not how social mobility is achieved. People must have the freedom to invent, to disrupt, to unsettle settled hierarchies. That is how progress accelerates.
Luke Gromen nails it. Many people would rather be certain that they will lose money slowly (by pretending monetary debasement doesn't exist) than take slightly more risk to make money slowly (by waiting through volatility).
This is a fundamentally fear-based approach to life. It is also the mindset inculcated and rewarded by the fiat standard.
The ability to take reasoned risks is the backbone of all economic growth. And there is no such thing as certain preservation of wealth. If you refuse all risk, eventually even what you have will be taken from you.
#Bitcoin
I like when people clearly state what their assumptions are so that those assumptions can be directly engaged.
The purpose of the University has been much-debated. I’ve thought and written a lot about it myself. Some believe Universities are more about character formation; others believe Universities are only valuable if they teach directly marketable skills. These two purposes are often in tension, if not opposed.
But at the end of the day, the simplest and most challenging purpose of the University is the search for truth. Seeking truth is what differentiates the University from a vocational program, or a finishing school, or a “prep” school for whatever social roles students will go on to play.
Seeking truth is a character disposition and a set of skills, but it doesn’t translate neatly onto a resume, and it will not “get you a job”—in the academy or anywhere else.
The world of Diogenes and the world of Alexander are not the same. One is not better or worse than the other, but a lot of confusion and heartache can be avoided if we explain to young people that the time they spend learning is not a liquid asset that they can just convert at will into employment or salary.
Truth is either its own reward for you, or it isn’t. If it isn’t, the University (at its best) is not the institution for you.
I want to take a minute to respond to @elonmusk ‘s claim that the difficulty of mining #bitcoin on Mars is some kind of limitation of the protocol.
I want to start with love. Moonshots (or Mars-shots) are amazing scientific and technological stretch goals for humanity. They are motivating fundamental innovation that is a net positive for the species. I have genuine love for @SpaceX and the industry of private space flight. I commend Musk for facing and overcoming countless personal, institutional, and political obstacles to push forward a truly civilizational project. Onward! 🚀
BUT—but. There is no way we approach anything even approximating “societies” on other planets for a *very* long time. These are not habitable worlds. The process of space colonization will be horrific—most people in the early waves will die, and often in unimaginably terrible ways that will make gunshots seem quick and humane by comparison. People will suffer from previously unknown and uncurable diseases as they attempt to live in environments they are not physiologically adapted to. Every scrap of normalcy experienced by humans in space will be an expensive and formidable technical and logistical achievement, subject to the possibility of complete destruction at the slightest malfunction.
When human colonization of other planets does occur, it will likely be first and foremost by militaries (with attendant violent conflict over territory and resources) and, then, by hard industrial operations, who will lay the groundwork (at great human cost) for potential civilian habitation only after extensive and bloody trial and error.
The fact that something will be “difficult on Mars” is a trivial claim because in fact absolutely *everything* will be difficult on Mars. And whatever we build there will take many human generations and cost a vast amount of treasure.
There is absolutely no substitute for Earth, the planet on which human beings evolved and to whose environment we are uniquely adapted. We’re gonna need to rely on this place for a very long time.
All of this to say: our terrestrial protocols will be just fine for many generations to come. And they will evolve as needed if needed, as all mission-critical technologies do.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/1055948/value-euro-since-2000/
Let’s see how the @ecb is doing in what it itself declares to be its “main task”: “to maintain the euro’s purchasing power”:
“Goods and services in the Eurozone are 39% more expensive today than they were twenty years ago.” (That is a conservative estimate.)
Minimum wage was worth the equivalent of $25 per hour in 1963.
That is the cost of inflation.
Price floors don’t offset the costs of regulatory compliance and long-term loss of profits for producers, and they disincentivize competitive market entry that would lower commodity prices for consumers in the long-term.
So, the perceived short-term advantages of price controls for both producers and domestic consumers of commodities make doing away with price controls politically costly.
This is the eternal conundrum of political economy: consistently solving for short-term benefit, over the long run, makes life worse for everyone.
We have inherited a culturally-dominant ideology that private currencies are always unstable and lead to financial crises. In fact, history has shown that the opposite has often been true. Private currencies have often been remarkably stable and sound—and as a result, they were key opponents that governments had to defeat as they sought to fund growing expenses (most pressingly, war) by monopolizing currency issue.
Financial crises have actually tended to happen as a result of both public and private-sector folly converging together in a self-reinforcing spiral. Finger-pointing in this as in all other matters tends to reflect an abdication of responsibility. Governments in particular must be held responsible because they create the legal and military game conditions that incentivize good and bad behavior by private actors.
Stories help us understand the world and our place in it. Those in power seek to control historical narratives so they can shape the self-understandings of countless people in ways that serve them. The reason we (at least, some of us) study history is to tell better—that is, truer—stories.
“The coin is a delicate meter of civil, social, and moral changes.”
- Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Wealth” (1860)
A lot of people look at increased government intervention into economies worldwide and conclude that a “spectre of communism” is once again haunting the world.
But it’s not communism on the horizon—it’s mercantilism.
We’ve lost the ability to tell the difference because for the past two hundred years the fight over political economy has been some flavor of “laissez-faire” vs. “socialism”. All “collectivist” economic motives have been associated with some form of socialism or communism. Mercantilism was so decisively demolished by what we now call “neoclassical” economics that no one even really thinks to study it anymore.
Yet mercantilism was the prevailing doctrine of political economy in early modern Europe (Renaissance until the late 18th/19th century).
The premise of mercantilism is simple: The economy exists to strengthen the state in its competition with other states. The people benefit as an indirect result of an economically strong state, because a strong state can more effectively defend them against invasion and insurrection.
The early modern period was a time of incessant, brutal warfare in Europe, both within and between states. Border wars, religious wars, dynastic wars of succession—these blighted every generation. The death toll was horrific. Elites were heavily harmed by these conflicts, because the nobility was a hereditary military class. As a result, strengthening the military power of the state became their strong preoccupation.
Our global return to a mercantilist mindset (which we can call “economic nationalism” today) thus suggests that we are once again heading into an age of war. For all its drawbacks, global free trade—championed in the early modern period by neoclassical and laissez-faith economists—does, in fact, contribute to peace.
Humanity doesn’t have to go down the mercantilist rabbit hole again, but we will unless leaders (economists, philosophers, military leaders, politicians) emerge who can guide us to better pastures.
European anthropologists strove to understand what "the human" is in both its unity and its diversity precisely at a moment in which humanity was homogenizing--linguistically, culturally, and politically--as it never had before.
Anthropology--the study the human (the anthropos)--has a complicated relationship with itself.
The field crystallized in the 19th century at the confluence of several historical, political, and scientific moments:
- The discovery of evolution, including human evolution, in the fossil record and in the direct observation of natural selection, which called into question religious origin stories
- The expansion of European colonialism across the world, which placed extraordinarily different people in extended contact with one another
- The rise of nationalism in Europe, which drove cultural and linguistic homogenization within European countries (i.e. created "state cultures" that wiped out less politically powerful local dialects, forms of dress, and religious practices)
- The rapid extinction of countless languages and folk cultures worldwide as a result of both European and non-European conquests and genocides, accelerated by the technologically-enabled growth of state power