Why can’t a bunch of people show up to an abandoned town with their Starlink internet, to sow the seeds of a new civilization? What’s stopping this from happening?
The temptation is real. These places give you a roof over your head for free. All you have to do is move in. The barrier to entry is tantalizingly low. You can collect your tech salary from anywhere. Maybe you can code at night while doing manual labor during the day? But why here? Who should join? How should we even conceptualize what it means to build a new society?
Do we want to be ambitious enough to take over the world?
Yes.
One of the most obvious reasons to break away is technology. All the red tape puts a damper on ambitious projects. And this, in part, was the inspiration behind Walt Disney’s Tomorrowland, and why he almost became a nuclear power.
But why not go into the mountains and deserts? This is the story of westward expansion, and the Mormons of Utah.
One of the hardest things in any intentional community is not manufacturing skill or the creative drive. You can have your buildings along with your Jonestown massacre. The two are not mutually exclusive.
You can have a side of precision German engineering with your self-destructive Nazi cult. It’s important to believe in something, but not just anything. And if the tech powerhouse of Germany can be captured by a man synonymous with pure evil, then engineering capability is no guarantee of success.
It makes sense from both first principles and empirically, that science and engineering isn’t everything. Advanced math is useless to small disparate tribes. To create an industrial society, a large coordinated population is the key. And our top religions have survived social collapse quite well.
If religion is a disease, it’s benign enough to not kill the host—even in moments of human desperation.
But eschewing science and math for faith-based healing is also a fool’s errand. You cannot pray a problem away.
What we want is what we’ve seen in the western world: a flywheel where advances in science and technology can be made because of the tight social cohesion. Having technology sit precariously atop of a barely functioning social order is dangerous. Technology eats at the social fabric. It abstracts the cow into a homogenous meat patty.
And it turns the chicken back into a dinosaur:
Technology does the same to human relationships. It abstracts them away. You quickly find yourself navigating the cogs of the industrial machine. Everything is pre-packaged: instead of having conversations, you listen to podcast. Instead of talking things through with your closest friends, you get a therapist.
Advanced technology rips our social fabric.
We shouldn’t take the success for granted.
I would submit that we’ve forgotten how the engine of our civilization works. If it blows a gasket, we won’t know how to fix it.
We’ve got people who can name all the parts of the engine, but lack the tacit knowledge necessary to fix it—something Samo Burja talks a lot about. And fixing the engine of civilization is just the start. We need people who know how to assemble the thing from raw materials.
We need social technology. If you try to define an iPhone, you’ll have a hard time. It’s a communication device, but it’s also a handheld computer, a map, a calendar, and a portable movie theater. Fundamental social technologies are like the Turing machines of society. They are the simple engines on which every other thing is built. Is there a social engine that’s like this?
The ultimate political tool for social order is force.
You coordinate because if you didn’t, someone with a gun will make sure you do. To the anarchist and the libertarian, taxation is theft, and official government is nothing more than a successful protection racketeering operation. Technology gives the state tools for it to have asymmetric power over you.
We want technology. We want stability. We don’t want to end up like North Korea, though. They’ve got a stable equilibrium, but they’re in hell.
While guns provide the stick, religion provides the carrot.
Ideally, you have a bottom-up system that serves as an attractor to create social order. American religious leaders have forgotten this role of religion.
The idea of pairing religion and state force is an especially combustible combination. Your religion will deteriorate because people will believe whatever the guy with the gun tells them to believe, not what makes sense. Forget sound doctrine. People want to live, and if accepting Jesus will get the guy with the gun off your neck, you’d be stupid to not comply.
But step back. Religion + government? Haven’t we seen something like this before? Isn’t that Islam? The West is unique in maintaining separation, however thin, between the two. To Jesus, the secular authorities aren’t your friends. But you should obey them, and even go the extra mile for them.
Religion can spread via crusade, but the essence of religion should not be the sword, but the heart. You want people to want to work together, and you want them to choose to live according to a set of principles that results in everyone being better off.
The state benefits from religion because a state that doesn’t need to micro-manage its populace is a state that can 1) grow and extend its reach more organically, and 2) can expend less effort in maintaining internal cohesion.
There’s temptation to combine faith and force. Our natural course is toward entropy. Religion aims to protect us from the forbidden fruit: the appearance of good, or even truths we’re not ready to handle. But by using force, religion shows it’s weak hand: that the alternate narrative is more compelling. At its best, religion is an open hand, not a closed fist.
But entropy also extends its hand. Those with entropic lives risk swallowing you up with them. Maybe you help them. But if you’re outnumbered, engaging with them is a dangerous proposition.
Two schools of thought that come to mind. The Old Testament urges you flee from entropy. Moses fled Egypt. You run to the mountains when the inhabitants of a lush city wants to gang-rape your male house guests. The New Testament, however, urges you to turn the other cheek. The two views are at odds.
Those in power will assume you’ll eventually retaliate, that you’ll make a mistake in your desperation, and do something nasty. But what if you just take it to the point of death? This would undermine their authority. If an innocent man can be killed, what hope is there for anyone else? Jesus made latent injustice palpable.
The reason why we desire some escape or some new society is that we believe the current system is wrong in some way. We might believe that “the man” has it in for us. And Jesus took it upon himself to prove that, no, your intuition isn’t wrong. The people in charge would return evil for good. They’re not in charge because they deserve it. And if you threatened their authority, they would have you killed, no matter how right you might be.