The Cost of Rebellion

There is a cost to everything: every act, every decision, every passive avoidance, every active conflict. All of it comes with a cost. That cost might be hidden, it might be delayed, or it might be obvious and show up immediately as feedback, but nothing is free.

A sign of maturity and wisdom is not only having enough practical knowledge to count up the cost in material and immediate terms, but also to have enough lived experience to recognize whether or not the cost is worth bearing–emotionally, psychologically, or spiritually.

Books are tools that help readers attain practical knowledge. But they also help readers count the cost of decisions not yet made. To posses the curiosity about the world and the people in it; to have the desire to pick up the book that might answer such curiosity; then to read, absorb, and apply the lessons from that book to the accounting of the cost of an action in the world outside the book’s timeframe, purview, and even context. These acts collectively guided us down the path toward and through counting the cost of individual and collective decisions. And our guides used to be wise sherpas, teachers, and leaders.

We may indeed be on the cusp–if not already entering–a post-literate West. But we long ago dismissed, minimized, or abandoned the voices and wisdom of the sherpas, teachers, leaders, and guides who had the authority–based in deep lived experience and practical assessment of consequences and results–to guide us through counting the cost of our decisions. In our rebellious and individualistic age, we arrogantly forgot to count the cost of leaving them behind.

Soon, the piper is coming to collect his payment. And there is always a payment due.

Clowns in Cars on the Information Superhighway

The act of driving our cars, in the real world, whether in Europe, North America, South America, Asia, or anywhere else, is a collaborative act. Whether we are driving in straight lines, on curved roads, or even negotiating roundabouts. Which, before I go much further, are not my personal favorite.

But I digress.

The infrastructure of roads is simple, from the paving to the stoplights to the sidewalks for pedestrians. The problems really come with the cars and other vehicles on the road. And, of course, the drivers. Every driver in every vehicle is doing their own thing: Some are driving attentively. Some are distracted by their phones, or the radio, or the conversations with other passengers in the vehicle. And some are driving angry. In a rage about a circumstance that happened before they decided to pilot a 2,000 + pound vehicle collaboratively on the road with other people.

Why am I building up talking about driving, the roads, and vehicles?

Well, because on the Internet, what we used to euphemistically call the Information Superhighway, we have drivers with vehicles. Their vehicles might be social media accounts, email accounts, business accounts, blogs, or other services, but the users are driving their vehicles with a variety of mindsets, attitudes, and approaches. And while it is appropriate to urge people to behave better and drive their vehicles more conscientiously, the fact of the matter is that there are many cars on the information superhighway that are full of clowns.

Those of us who aren’t clowns shouldn’t be surprised when we get into a fender-bender on the Information Superhighway with one of these clown cars, which are usually garishly outfitted, and that when we angrily jerk open the door, clowns inevitably fall out.

Clowns aren’t ever there to help another person.

They may be there to entertain, to gaslight, to troll, or to creep an observer out, but they aren’t there to help. And, as humanity approaches fifty years of this glorious communication infrastructure known as the Internet, people would do well to modify their expectations of clowns' behaviors. And get better at spotting–and avoiding–both the clown cars and the wrecks they create.

Honestly Seeking Truth

We are over two thousand years on the other side of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead, and the question that Pontius Pilate asked Jesus in His sham trial still echoes down to our time: “What is Truth?” This ironic question, of course, is a variation of the deceptive question posed by the serpent in the Garden of Eden in the Book of Genesis to the woman, Eve, “Did God really say…”

Are we honestly interested in Truth, or are we comfortable with making assertions that sound as if they have the weight of argument behind them, but are really a million miles wide and about an inch deep?

This is a question worth pondering the answer to before communicating–whether online, offline, in real life, or even just with ourselves. If we are not interested in discovering, refuting, examining, or advocating for the Truth, then we are probably wasting everyone’s time with publishing our thoughts.

A marketer once pointed out years ago in his blog that, “When everyone can publish, everyone will,” and a blogger more recently made the point in her blog that, “Some thoughts should die indoors.”

Choose wisely after you’ve decided if you’re honestly seeking the Truth.

The Tone Police

The communication patterns between people in real life have gradually come to resemble more and more the ways in which we communicate online, mostly via social media platforms. From ghosting behavior all the way to trolling, people are transforming themselves to resemble more and more the digital platforms they use on a daily basis.

One of the more pernicious habits is the policing of tone. Tone, of course, comes across in how you as a reader–or a listener–either read or hear the words I and others write, or say. Tone itself is a weird combination of word choice, affect, and volume. Tone attendance combines all of those ingredients with the tendency of humans to make other people into avatars in their own brains. And then to proceed to project themselves and their reactions onto the avatars they have made in their own heads.

Avatars, of course, that resemble the people who are writing or talking, not even a little bit. Sure, in a personal, intimate relationship, tone policing probably makes a lot of sense as a way to keep the peace and prevent small issues from becoming larger conflicts. But in the impersonal, distant, and unknowable interactions we have with the avatars of people in online communication, tone policing makes little sense. Because you don’t know the person on the other end of the interaction. As a matter of fact, it might not even be a person. That interlocutor might be a bot, an AI, or even a hired hand from another country.

This method of communication behavior monitoring is now spilling over increasingly into the real world, in real interactions, between real people. Of course, the difference is that, in the real world, if people attempt to monitor and correct the tones of other people with whom they are not in a relationship, or in the thinnest of relationships, conflict is sure to result. Particularly when those who will not be policed meet those who do the policing.

Projection should only happen in a movie theater. Assumptions of motives without sufficient understanding of the other person in a communication interaction will inevitably lead to attempts to police the tones of others, while resisting policing of their own tones. The solution to all of this lies in putting away social media and cleaving to real relationships with real people in real life.

Thinking About William Gibson

One of the most obvious facts about the entire science-fiction genre is that its ideas, presuppositions, assumptions, and more rest on an analysis, not of the future, but of the present conditions projected forward into a fantastic future.

Which is why both dystopian science fiction (Blade Runner, most notably) and utopian science fiction (anything written by Isaac Asimov) miss the mark in describing the future we all now live in, from their perspective in the mid-20th century.

The unremarked upon challenge for science fiction writers in our time is that we need stories about the future of our present era, with its cell phones, social media, surveillance and data tracking, rising large-language models, and skepticism and mistrust of institutions and authority figures. Oh, and rockets from Elon, Bezos, and Lockheed Martin.

But we can’t get those stories–just as we can’t get tragic stories, just more reporting on tragic circumstances–because writers and artists today lack the creative vision to imagine the future and project forward, from this point today into an unknown future, in the way that Philip K. Dick, Isaac Asimov, Ray Bradbury, and William Gibson did.

And those guys had typewriters, railroads, rocket missions to the Moon, and computers that still ran on reel-to-reel tape.

We don’t need more narrative rehashes of classic science fiction describing the world we live in now. We need narrative imagination describing and providing a narrative structure for the “gee-whiz” world to come.

Fever Dreams

When the human body is sick and fighting a foreign disease element or injury, and body temperature increases as the fight for survival commences, the likelihood of a person experiencing fever dreams increases. In the past, fever dreams were tied to hallucinations, bizarre or surreal experiences, and, of course, divine visions. All of this is easy for us ontological materialists to dismiss in our time as the meaningless speculations of the uneducated and the backward, particularly because post-modern science attaches no more meaning to the occurrence of fever dreams than it does to the presence of gravity.

Which is to say, “Sure, you’ll dream when you’re ill, and those dreams will seem weird and crazy, but they possess no deeper meaning.”

And yet.

At the individual level, humans insist not only on getting fevers, but also on dreaming. And at scale in society and culture, systems get fevers and systems dream.

Such as it were.

There is meaning to these phenomena and connections to be explained and explored, particularly as we are currently in a several-trillion-dollar fever dream with new tools–a new disease element against which we have not been inoculated–being introduced by the wizards and soothsayers of Silicon Valley into our cultural, technological, economic, and even psychological systems.

Our current societal fever dreams possess significance up and down the meaning hierarchy that goes beyond the banal or the easily dismissed. It’s up to leaders to have the wisdom of the sages and the ages, to explain the significance of our societal fever dreams to us. And when they can’t, we all wake up collectively confused and mistrusting the next time another disease element is introduced into the larger body politic.

Leading in the Post-Literate West

Much of my career, such as it has been, has consisted of teaching, writing, training, researching, and thinking about what makes people leaders, why we follow people in the first place, and once we become leaders, how we can become better. It’s not exactly the sexiest career, but it pays (some) of the bills.

For me, thinking, reading, and writing sit at the bottom of every act a person who leads commits to. Decisions can’t be made, and choices can’t move from idea to practicality without those three acts. Followers can’t be ethically guided, and enemies can’t be accurately identified, confronted, and, in some cases, defeated. Without a robust practice of thinking, reading, and writing, leadership becomes a buzzword and a marketing term rather than an act that changes people and can change the world.

However, in America, and the West overall, I suspect, we have either entered, or are entering, a post-literate world, as defined by Rose Horowitz of_ The Atlantic_ in the long excerpt below:

“For the August issue of The Atlantic, I investigated what our society will look like as reading vanishes for all but the smallest sliver of Americans. The share of Americans who read a book or an article on any given day has fallen by 40 percent over the past two decades. In 2022, fewer than half of all adults had read a book of any kind in the prior year. Only 38 percent had read a novel or a short story. One historian I spoke with described reading as a ‘niche hobby, like stamp collecting or growing orchids.’ And its disappearance shows no signs of slowing down.

“Humans spent millennia communicating only by voice. The advent of reading and writing transformed society. It altered people’s consciousness and politics, along with the intellectual feats they were capable of. The decline of reading will bring about changes of the same magnitude. It will affect how we think, how our elected leaders campaign and govern, what skills our culture values, and even how we tell the history of our civilization. If we look closely, we can see that these changes have already begun.

“This shift is often referred to as a literacy crisis. But that’s not quite right. Americans can still read. Paradoxically, they might be reading more words than ever before. People’s lives are filled with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, and Instagram captions. But these snippets of text have crowded out the time necessary for sustained reading of complex texts. And over time, people have lost the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s post­literate.”

Here’s my harsh prediction: In a post-literate America, both leaders and followers will struggle not only with comprehension of hard ideas, but also with being unable even to ask the types of questions that lead to formulating the initial hard ideas in the first place. Combine this fact with evidence of the Iron Triangle of Arrogance–where people not only genuinely believe wrong information and facts, but also shout them at louder and louder decibels via every channel they can broadcast them, because correction would require a change in identity, rather than just a change of mind–and a post-literate, American electorate will be fooled often and taken for a ride frequently.

Future leaders will not only be literate–they will be able to read the words on the page of those hoary old relics called books–but they will also know what the words mean, what the author meant, and what those words mean for their post-literate followers. Followers who will have a lot of text in their brains, but very little comprehension or wisdom in their hearts.

Behold, what a brave new world we are entering, folks, and behold all the people in it.

The Sandlot Problem

There is a moment in the 1993 film, The Sandlot, where one of the characters declares a pause in the shenanigans the young men are embarking upon in order to retrieve a baseball that has landed in the yard opposite the sandlot where they play pickup baseball every day.

He declares, with all the weight of an exasperated grown-up, “I think we’ve gone off the rails here. I really blame myself.”

And of course, the reason the line works as a joke is that no adult ever says that, much less thinks it about themselves when a project “goes off the rails.” The other reason it works is that every adult thinks this about another adult and blames them when a project “goes off the rails.”

It takes the innocence of a child to call a pause, take on some accountability, and return to the drawing board.

In every project you’ve ever been on, there have been opportunities to engage in the way that Tommy Timmons did in that iconic film, and there will be more in the future.

All you have to be is brave enough to say the words out loud.

Pursuing Happiness

We used to understand that the pursuit of happiness entailed the possibility that you very well might not get happiness.

You might be disappointed, frustrated, discouraged, defeated, or wind up rejected by the very system in which you were attempting to pursue happiness. And that system could be a family, a church, a neighborhood, or any community.

Most of the systems were known to be flawed. This was accepted. The people inside the systems were known to be flawed. This was also accepted. We used to call this the “tragedy of human existence.”

In our time, though, abundant material prosperity has fooled us into believing that we have defeated the fallen nature of the world, the systems in it, and the people operating in those systems. This belief leads to frustration, disappointment, discouragement, and feelings of defeat because material prosperity doesn’t equate to psychological and spiritual happiness.

That’s still something we will most likely not achieve perfectly, on this side of reality.

By all means, continue to pursue happiness. But acknowledge the ceiling.

Post-Industrial Heroism

The average person in our post-industrial society in the West searches in vain for opportunities to act heroically. Not because those opportunities don’t exist; they do, but because those opportunities come disguised as work.

Putting in the work that other people won’t. Doing the work to recognize that which is valuable and distinguish it from that which is not valuable. Determining how much effort to apply to solving a problem, providing value, or helping others. All of these and more are forms of work. They are also all opportunities to find the heroic and to be a hero.

Never before in human history have there been more opportunities to embrace work. And never before in human history have there been more opportunities to complain, critique, and avoid work. In a post-industrial society like the one we inhabit, the problem isn’t grinding poverty, cultural biases, or even social institutions aligning against us. The problem lies mostly in ourselves lining up against ourselves. Our personal, never-resting, internal resistance searches for excuses to avoid accurately identifying and faithfully doing the hard work that creates the situation, for the opportunity for heroism to arise.

Even with all that, there are still more opportunities than ever before to accomplish heroic acts, despite the nature of an individual’s circumstances. Overcoming has never been more possible than now.

Sports Metaphors With a High Batting Average

Sports and military metaphors dominate in both the business and start-up worlds. Such metaphors, stories, and anecdotes are an easy heuristic for explaining concepts that are hard for people who aren’t “in the game,” as it were. Of course, the plethora and misuse of such metaphors, stories, analogies, and parallels have diluted their impact over time. But that hasn’t stopped their use.

Because humans are inherently lazy and we like mental shortcuts.

The sport of baseball used to be the most popular team sport in the United States, until it was eclipsed in popularity by American football. Not to be confused with soccer, American football is a team game where one player can have a terrible day, and the team can still pull out a win. There’s a leader/manager in the quarterback position, and then there’s plenty of support staff who go unrecognized, unheralded, and unacknowledged. The game of American football is a wonderful metaphor for 20th and 21st-century corporate culture.

But baseball is fundamentally different. Not just in the fact that it is a different game that requires the mastery of a different set of skills, but also in the fact that baseball, as a game, celebrates individual achievement at the expense of the team. In baseball, an individual player can have a great game, and the team loses. But the team can still win a big game, even if an individual hitter can’t get on base to save his life. The game of baseball is a wonderful metaphor for the late 19th century and early to mid 20th century small business community culture that we have forgotten, or abandoned in our current corporatized and “financialized to the nth degree” era.

Which is why baseball has been fading in this country in popularity since the 1960s, and the lights may go out entirely within the next 100 years on that sport.

One of the greatest hitters of the 20th century was a player named Tony Gwynn. He was a right fielder who played 20 seasons in Major League Baseball for the San Diego Padres. The left-handed hitting Gwynn drove pitchers like the notorious Greg Maddux to absolute distraction by being able to “read” the stitches on the baseball as it was coming into the plate at 99 miles per hour and still hit the ball. He would regularly get on base and was a reliable .300 hitter for his entire career. This means, for every 10 at-bats, he would get on base at least 3 times, which is almost superhuman. The Major League Baseball average is .250, and the great Ted Williams is the only player to ever hit .400.

However, Tony Gwynn would have never gotten on base at all if he had never gotten into the batter’s box, set his feet, and swung the bat. And every time he did it, he memorized the patterns, not only of the ball and its movement toward the plate, but also of the pitchers and how they moved, pitched, and behaved. He was a student of the thing he was doing. He was a student of baseball. And he loved being a student of baseball.

A lot of us stop being students after we leave school. Our love of learning is ground out of us. And our desire to have the sure and the right answer at all times is built up in us. But the world we are building of the future is not a world of reliable football players, led by a spectacularly talented and spectacularly compensated quarterback. Instead, the world of the baseball player, the world of Tony Gwynn, is the world we are preparing to enter. A world where the passion for learning, deeply, the thing you are most interested in doing, is going to be the thing that pays the most money, because in a world of LLMs, it will be the thing that will be the most scarce.

In order to become those scarce players, we need to be guiding, mentoring, coaching, and teaching the people we are leading to love learning. To love the hard parts of becoming better at a skill set every day that may take a long time to be financially rewarded. And to build a habit of curiosity and learning that no LLM can outstrip.

Seeking an Authentic Original

Before the advent of the Internet, culture was driven by derivations. Derivations of ideas, concepts, and thoughts that were once original, but then, through the impact of other people, those ideas were watered down. This was a phenomenon most nakedly seen in the creative fields, and more carefully hidden in the more materially oriented fields. But derivation from an original idea is something that human beings have been doing for a long, long time.

With the coming of the Internet, though, this process of derivation increased in speed. Because the volume of people who had the ability to publish their ideas–original or not–increased by an exponential factor. With such an increase in speed from hard-won original thought to cheaply bought derivation, the work of being an “authentic” individual, with a unique perspective, shifted from being hard, to being difficult.

And in the future, with our LLM toys and tools, this shift will move from being difficult to seeming to be impossible. As a matter of fact, this shift is already beginning to occur. This is not because we don’t have original ideas. And it isn’t because we have an avalanche of slop derivations. And it isn’t because humans are lazy and would rather play the easy, short-term game of just copying slop rather than doing the hard work of coming up with an original idea.

The shift is happening because when humans with access to mass-scale communication technology get together, it takes a while for the humans to determine what the hard work is that is scarce, and thus creates outcomes that are valuable and worth paying for. Of course, humans tend to align to the belief–stated and unstated–that what is scarce and valuable is only what is materially beneficial. But that’s not true. Nor is that particularly an original alignment.

It’s going to take a long time to figure out scarcity in a world of seeming idea abundance. And we’re going to, all the while, be searching for an original idea.

Stepping Into the Path of Pain

Some acts are easy to commit to, and others are hard. Most of how we categorize the “hardness” or “easiness” of a particular act comes down to our own individual temperaments.

We rarely address the factors involved in structuring temperament, except in a psychological sense. And even then, we do it rarely and poorly. This is because temperament is highly individualized and particularized to how identity is structured, from our biology all the way to cultural influences. The structure of individual temperament also involves examining inputs that exist down deep inside of people that we don’t like to talk about at polite cocktail parties.

Determining that which is hard and differentiating from that which is easy is a category problem in and of itself. One that requires returning to individual first principles and questioning personal bedrock assumptions in ways that emotionally, psychologically, and spiritually cause mental pain. Unfortunately, we are deep into an era of individuals avoiding, mitigating, and side-stepping all kinds of pain, from emotional pain to mental pain, in favor of doing more of that which is perceived as easy.

Figuring out, as an individual in this era, how to step directly into the path of such pain, in order to categorize and differentiate “hard” tasks from “easy” tasks, is probably the primary challenge of our denatured times.

Weight to Carry

One of the more damaging features of the cultural, social and political chaos we’ve experienced in the past twenty-five years, has been the placing of psychological, emotional, and spiritual weight onto institutional structures not designed to carry the load. Family, tradition, neighborhoods, used to be the places that carried the psychological, emotional, and spiritual loads for individuals when they could no longer carry the weight for themselves. But over the course of the last few decades–at least two generations and maybe even three–those places have eroded. Eroded in power. Eroded in prestige. Eroded in importance.

The problem, of course, is that individuals don’t just stop needing help in carrying the loads they bear, and so, the carrying has shifted to institutions that were meant to be the last resort to carry such loads: the workplace, the government, or even the society at large. But the workplace isn’t a substitute for the support of family and friends. The government can take from one person (or group of people) through redistribution and give to another person (or group of people), but it can’t do so fairly and equitably. The society can’t take up an individual’s personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems while at the same time adjudicating everyone else’s unique issues.

This is the deep reason that all the interventions we’ve tried as a culture and a society, from the Great Society programs of the 1970s to the therapeutic language and social identity policing we do today, have not worked to produce outcomes of unity, stability, and social peace. They have instead produced chaos, disunity, and a fractured moral order.

Here’s a great irony: The people who were always emotionally, spiritually, or psychologically relegated to the edges of family, tradition, and neighborhoods, the people who always felt suffocated and “put upon” by social strictures and structures, don’t believe they’re doing great now. They moved their personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems from the edges of family, traditions, and neighborhoods, and successfully “centered” those problems in institutional spaces like the workplace, adjudicated them through government power, and talked about them endlessly in societal discourse. And the outcomes haven’t been what they long desired. Weirdly enough, there’s more social suffocation, the more open every privately held problem has become.

The solution to this is a trade-off. And a brutal one at that. Social pressure to reprivatize the personal spiritual, psychological, or emotional problems that people experience at the edges of family, tradition, and neighborhood is gradually and imperceptibly increasing. Over the next twenty-five years, the pressure to societally swing back towards what folks on the edges call “suffocation and compliance” and what the rest of us call “the center” will be enormous.

But such a swing will allow the institutions to heal from the damage of attempting to carry weight they were never structured to carry.

Every Man Did What Was Right In His Own Eyes

The Bible is full of wild stories.

Some of the wildest are in the Book of Judges in the Old Testament.

The book is a story of the transformation of Old Testament Israel from being a people and a country of promise under the rule of Yahweh through their ignominious decline as a nation-state as they chased–and were chased by–other gods. The struggle, ignominy, and decline are framed as a loss of cultural faith, a loss of national perspective, and a loss of focused tribal obedience in terms of worshipping Yahweh in the way that Yahweh commanded He be worshipped.

We moderns, in our own era, read the Book of Judges and are perplexed as to its relevance to our sophisticated, materialistic, technologically driven era, where Yahweh doesn’t even get a seat at the table of our epistemological assumptions. The relevance is there, though.

Read in purely naturalistic terms, the highs and lows in the Book of Judges map neatly to the period of cultural unraveling that took place in the United States, starting from the assassination of John F. Kennedy in 1963 and culminating in the horror of September 11, 2001. The people of the United States during that interregnum period had no earthly idea why the “center” was failing to hold, solipsism was taking hold, and “every man did what was right in his own eyes.” The seeds of the cultural chaos of that era, the unraveling, bore fruit in the chaotic cultural period following September 11th.

The period that just ended, in the United States, with the attempted assassination of our current President in July 2024.

The Book of Judges is currently closed as a salient reference point to our particular historical and cultural moment. But have no fear. It will be opened back up again in about 2060 or so.

Right around the time of the next secular unraveling.

What is Valuable?

For most of human history, the value of labor was so inexpensive that it was below cheap. This is one of the mainly unstated reasons why human slavery of all kinds flourished all over the world for as long as it did. There were a lot of extra humans, and it was too expensive to just allow them to exist. And besides, work needed to be done.

Farm work.

Building work.

Hauling work.

House work.

Fighting work.

But when the Industrial Revolution began, human labor started to become more expensive, and the value of that labor began to increase. Sure, factory labor was hard, but it was less likely to be devalued if the person running the machine knew more about how to turn out a product on a repeat basis than the guy running the business. Even if that guy had started the business by turning the product out himself.

Then, computers came along, and knowledge became specialized. And with specialization, labor tottered precariously between being expensive (after all, there are still a lot of humans around) and being cheap (after all, there is still a lot of work to be done). Add to this the fact that monetizing knowledge is hard because it tends to develop on a long timeline (20-25+ years), and you’ve got a situation where labor and knowledge have been in a weird truce for some time.

But now, since the advent of the Internet, knowledge is perceived as being cheap. And since knowledge is cheap, human labor must return to the forefront in value. Except that the LLMs combined with robotics will render both labor and knowledge increasingly inexpensive, but also unevenly.

So, how can humans differentiate themselves from both knowledge and labor in order to create value for other humans and to accomplish all the work that (still) needs to be done in the world?

I don’t have the answer to that question, nor does anyone else.

I know what the answers aren’t. And Universal Basic Income–or money for just hanging around and existing–is not one of them. I also know that human creativity, unbound from both knowledge and labor, is a petri dish in which all the old spiritual and psychological diseases that still beset us as a species will grow and flourish in unprecedented ways. I also know that the smartest people in the world don’t have any other answers to the question either.

We are all in this together now.

Selling Someone Out

Betraying a person’s confidence to gain personal advantage, and yet not being sure why you are doing it and what end it serves, is where the erosion of trust begins.

And once trust in a high-trust society, bound by traditions, family bonds, and the surety of community, is riven by such erosion, the beginning of social chaos is not far behind.

But a society that is eroding in trust can survive chaos, adapt to it, and emerge on the other side with a different sort of trust schema altogether by individuals refusing to play the game of selling out their principles, their values, or their relationships. It’s a lot of psychological, moral, and emotional weight for individuals to carry during times of chaos, when it seems as though every bond around them is fraying, tearing, and breaking.

But it’s only the act of buying in that works to preserve, not what was in the past, but the circumstances–fragile though they may be–for a different, and potentially better, future. Otherwise, the Hobbesian war of “all against all” breaks out and then nothing worth preserving remains.

And it’s monstrously difficult to cobble together a high-trust society again out of nothing.

The Limits of Witness and Understanding

When we observe an event, whether the observation occurs in real life or online, we cannot truly be sure of what we have seen. Over the last quarter-century, we have built a genuine, skeptical panopticon online, where everyone knows that everyone is seeking to market to everyone else. Thus, we live–with increasing comfort–the conclusion that there cannot be truth from the systems in the box in our hands and on our desks.

There are people who will claim that both the panopticon construction and comfort with a lack of belief in reality have always been with us and are nothing new and nothing to be alarmed at. These same people blithely declare that “Technologies don’t change people. Technologies just reveal who people always were.” I believe the marketer and social media hustler, Gary Vaynerchuk, once loudly declared that in some video I saw of him on YouTube.

What is missed in such superficial analysis is the erosion of witness and the erosion of understanding. If we cannot understand what we are seeing, how are we to make any critical decisions, engage in critical analysis, or make an impact if our internal ability to discern the external discourse is constantly in question? The answer is, of course, we can make those decisions, and we then outsource the decision-making and the hard parts of witnessing events in the world to people with titles, positions, and authority. Many of whom aren’t any better at observing and analyzing than you or I are.

Sure, there are experts. But collectively, we have built a social panopticon that may have started with the best intentions of opening up all of our eyes to see more. And has wound up closing our eyes to the things of value that needed to be observed to be maintained by everybody, and not just “experts” with titles, degrees, positions, and fancy PR firms.

We live in a time where everyone has more data points about everyone else than ever before, and yet, we know much less than people who came before us about each other than ever before.

That’s not just a problem of technology.

Old Ideas

There are old ideas—and “old” just means “ideas we don’t think will ‘work’ in whatever cultural, economic, or political ordering is in vogue now”—that sometimes need new traction.

Ideas fall out of favor for a variety of reasons that reflect cultural evolution. When this evolution reaches a standstill (or when going forward seems scarier than standing still), old ideas from the past tend to return.

Unfortunately, the speed of the Internet has convinced humanity (at least in some places on the globe) that the speed of cultural evolution should match the speed with which an individual can order a latte from their phone. That’s never happened. Cultural evolution may seem to be faster in our time because of the ever-present nature of Internet communication, but in reality, cultural adoption of new ideas still takes at least twenty years. Or, the time it takes for a new generation of people to be born, raised, and mature enough to begin to assert themselves on reality.

Here’s a list of some old ideas that are still relevant, regardless of how quickly we all may think that society is culturally evolving:

Love your enemies.

Do good to (and for) those who would seek to do wrong to you.

Practice humility and grace.

Live your life according to a set of values, ethics, and morals that you can explain when the rubber meets the road.

Help others who are not as fortunate as you to get what they need to live..

Be interested, open, and caring about another person’s story so that you can grow as they grow.

Listen more than you talk—either with your hands or your mouth.

There are a few others, but you get the idea. When an old idea returns to prominence, we often say that it is “an idea whose time has come.”

Of course, for ideas as old as the ones above (and many others, I’m sure that you could think of), their time never really left.

Universal Basic Conflict

Granting every working-age member of a population a stipend of money per month, per year, for the rest of their lives will do little to mitigate the two states it’s designed to relieve: human avarice and envy, and a lack of meaningful employment opportunities. No matter how much the AI technologists promise that such schemes will, in some utopian future society, we will never arrive at.

Jealousy (of people), envy (of things), and avarice (the desire to acquire more) are human emotions that aren’t often acknowledged as the darker motivators for people to engage with work. All of these emotions, along with vanity and pride (all emotions grounded in negative storytelling), are typically at the bottom of many people’s motivations to chase money, status, titles, honor, and respect. And because they’re all lurking in the basement of every human heart, the materialist rationalist utopians among us are inevitably surprised when they manifest as genuine, but irrational, resistance to the desire for a Universal Basic Income-driven future.

A fellow named Dostoyevsky, however, put words to what the technologists can’t seem to name, around 160 years ago, in a pre-Industrial Revolution, agrarian monarchial society:

“Now I ask you: What can be expected of man since he is being endowed with such strange qualities? Shower upon him every earthly blessing, drown him in a sea of happiness, so that nothing but bubbles of bliss can be seen on the surface; give him economic prosperity, such that he would have nothing else to do but sleep, eat cakes, and busy himself with the continuation of the species, and even then, out of sheer ingratitude, sheer spite, man will play you a nasty trick. He would even risk his cakes and would deliberately desire the most fatal rubbish, the most uneconomical absurdity, simply to introduce into all this positive good sense his fatal fantastic element.” ~ Notes From Underground, Part One, Chapter Eight

In our post-modern society, the era of “make-work” is over. And it’s been over for a while. But the thing is, we have also arrived at the end of the hangover from the end of the Industrial Revolution, so the era of “we financialize human effort in just a little bit better ways” is also about to be over with the dominance of LLMs that can do all that average make-work better and financialize it faster.

This is a real problem because, under the scheme that has built the last 125 years of scalable economic systems, meaningful employment was typically not found at the beginning of the employment ladder in minimum wage positions for many people. But now, even those rungs of the ladder are being hewn away. Without addressing both a lack of meaningful work opportunities for people at the beginning of their careers and the inherent built-in drivers toward accomplishing goals and earning money, all the Universal Basic Income in the world will only serve to exacerbate conflict, providing enough impetus for people to engage in conflict en masse. Because without work, idle hands will surely “…play you a nasty trick.”

Work provides spiritual, psychological, and emotional meaning for many people. But because those intangible outcomes don’t appear anywhere on a spreadsheet, they are either discounted as being meaningless or not even considered in the first place. A universal basic income does nothing to address any of those needs, emotions, or drivers in people. As a matter of fact, such schemes spit in the face of human motivators and dare the human being to do something about it. History proves that’s a negotiation human beings are fine with accepting the consequences of. And just declaring “Game on” doesn’t quite do justice to what will surely result from such schemes.

Human truth and what lurks deeply in the dark human heart are fundamentally what defeat all UBI schemes, whether from the State, from businesses, or even from our current crop of techno-utopians, drunk on AI outputs. Such proposed schemes really come down to giving people money, hoping to cure the deep disease of the human heart and the human spirit without ever engaging in performing the uncomfortable surgery of examining–and acknowledging–much deeper and darker motivations. You know. Those ones that have always lived deeply in the human soul, where even the state and technology cannot reach.

This is a sure recipe for universal basic conflict. And at scale.