We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed ... with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness
The opening to the preamble of the United States declaration is a beautiful piece of writing. It is noble, stirring, and maybe even loving. It is not, however, a rational statement.
Throughout history there have been myriad views on the nature of the world and how people should act. Many articulated with great force and poetry. In surveying these can we say that the equality of all people and their ultimate right to life and liberty has been universally self-evident? Certainly not.
Even to the authors of the declaration who were well versed in the history of Sparta, Rome, the Bible, and the society they saw around them it would have been clear that these views were neither universal nor timeless nor obvious. However, despite their irrationality, they were a set of propositions that when stated boldly seemed to speak to something profound for the audience at the time and still speak to many in the Western world today.
Generally, the irrational things that people believe are self-evident can provide a lot of insight. One of my favourite questions to ask in interviews, borrowed from Tyler Cowen, is: "What is something irrational that you believe?". It's a close cousin of Peter Thiel's famous question: "What important truth do very few people agree with you on?". The lovely thing in both cases is that even if the interviewee knows the question is coming it's almost impossible to prepare for it.
When I ask this most people try to dodge with something that is in fact backed by rational argument but not regularly discussed or worse they manage to say something that’s irrational but banal. When someone says something real though, and is willing to state it with force as if it were self-evident, it's a source of pure joy. Even if I disagree it provides a glimpse into an exhilarating energetic worldview.
Marc Andressen’s Assertions
Marc Andreesen has made it a habit of surfing the zeitgeist in deeply compelling ways. He coined the phrase “software is eating the world" and his essay “It's time to build” released a month into the pandemic galvanised a cadre of young people looking for a sense of optimism. A couple weeks ago he put out the Techno-Optimist Manifesto. Like his previous pieces this one has similarly caused a lot of interest.
Similar to the U.S. Declaration, Marc Andreessen's Techno-Optimist Manifesto presents a set of audacious claims as if they were undeniable. They open a series of fascinating questions and a window on a worldview. To pick on three:
“The only perpetual source of growth is technology."
In a toy model of the world you can think of economic output as the result of how you organise three things: labour (i.e. people), land (i.e. resources), and technology. Growth comes from increasing how much you have of each.
The nature of physical reality means that there are hard limits to our ability to increase the population or to uncover more resources. However, the upper limit for creating technology is indefinite as such it presents an option for ‘perpetual' growth.
Unfortunately though, the key to this argument - that the future potential for technology is limitless - is also what makes the proposition less tenable.
In Cat's Cradle Kurt Vonegut imagines a scientist who is trying to solve the problem of mud. Mud is annoying for everyone but especially tricky for soldiers trying to get from one place to another. One day the scientist strikes upon an idea for to finally solve this problem once and for all - he calls this soloution ice-nine:
"...suppose, young man, that one Marine had with him a tiny capsule containing a seed of ice-nine, a new way for the atoms of water to stack and lock, to freeze. If that Marine threw that seed into the nearest puddle...?"
"The puddle would freeze?" I guessed.
"And all the muck around the puddle?"
"It would freeze?"
"And all the puddles in the frozen muck?"
"They would freeze?"
"And the pools and the streams in the frozen muck?"
"They would freeze?"
"You bet they would !" He cried. "And the United States Marines would rise from the swamp and march on!"
There is however one problem with this idea. The freezing would never stop. Eventually all of the water in the world would contract this freezing disease and be locked up forever. Not long after in the novel the scientist succeeds in creating ice-nine. The book concludes when a piece is accidentally dropped in the ocean and the world freezes1.
The assumption that the potential technological solutions are unlimited leads on one side to a justified belief in technology as a perpetual source of growth yet on the other hand it leads with equal inevitability to a belief in the possibility of creating ice-nine or something of similar world ending capability.
“Free markets are the most effective way to organize a technological economy...The market naturally disciplines"
The free market is a wonderous thing. The free exchange of goods, ideas and information allows for people to act in a way they think is moral and open and make a profit while doing so.
Seeing this and enamoured with how it functions some people have come to see the invisible hand of the market as not just powerful but benevolent.
Many have come to believe, often following Friedrich Hayek, that we have no better mechanisms for determining the price of a good - and therefore organising our economies then by letting people bid on it. In this view the factors that need to go into a price are simply too complex and decentralised. So, the process always needs to be bottom up, facilitated by a market.
The problem with this belief is that it is demonstrably untrue. In fact the increase of people in a free market can lead to more volatility in the price of a good and mean it is less tied to reality. This is clearly visible every time there is a bubble whether in housing or in crypto but it is even true in more direct ways.
To take one example, there is a strong argument that the spike in food prices leading to the Arab Spring was caused directly by the deregulation of speculation in the food market in the Commodity Futures Modernization Act of 2000. When the speculators entered the system it lead to more positive feedback loops and non-equilibrium prices. This in turn meaning that the price of food could spike even when supply was in fact abundant.
So the market may sometimes naturally discipline but that it does so is definitively not universal and it is hardly self-evident.
"The techno-capital machine works for us."
Andreessen first introduces the term techno-capital machine like this:
"Combine technology and markets and you get what Nick Land has termed the techno-capital machine, the engine of perpetual material creation, growth, and abundance."
I’d never heard of Nick Land before this post so I had to look him up. If anyone is interested it seems that this blog post is a good introduction to his worldview and his - very romantic - way of writing.
For Nick Land the “techno-capital machine” is a kind of spirit that is slowly bringing about ever more of itself in a positive feedback loop. It definitively does not work for us. Instead he sees our role as choosing to slow down or speed up this natural and inevitable process. His answer is that we should be accelerating this process in a kind of Marxist dialectic. If we go faster then we can hasten in a more utopian world from the other side of the techno-capital machines collapsing under its own weight.
The fact that the same term techno-capitalist machine can hold such vastly different meanings for two people seems to make it clear enough that this claim is far from the unquestionable axiom it purports to be.
So, the essay is full of irrational claims put forth boldly as statements of self-evident truths. But lots of manifesto’s are like that and many like the Declaration of Independence have been able to garner significant support. The response to this piece however has been mixed at best. Some have come out in favour though always with their own caveats and equally many appear to disagree. What’s the problem?
The Necessary Coherence of Our Irrational Worldviews
Let’s go back to the declaration. I was a bit cheeky at the beginning. I actually removed a very important line.
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.
The claims of the Declaration of Independence are irrational but they are backed up with an assertion about the nature of the universe that places things in a coherent frame.
Mark Andreesen's claims are irrational. That's ok. In fact it’s laudable. Irrational claims are behind all of the most energetic and creative aspects of human life. However, Andressen’s claims are also 'secular' in an extreme sense. They are put forward out of a view from nowhere that doesn’t actually exist.
This means that these views are both irrational and incoherent. They do not hold together as part of a set of principles that makes sense of why the world should be this way. As such they lack the beauty needed to hold in the imagination, quicken the heart, and ignite the soul.
I actually have a lot of sympathy for Techno-Optimism and share many of Andreesen’s priors. Ultimately though without a coherent narrative to back it up the manifesto rings hollow.
All of our energy comes from the irrational things we believe that we are willing to assert as self-evident aspects of the universe. If these things fit together in a coherent worldview they become something we can cultivate faith in similar to a maths proof consistently rederived from first principles. Without this kind of internal harmony we will struggle to accept the full kind of life that our irrational beliefs compel us towards.
If the idea of ice-nine scares you then you definitely shouldn't read about prions.