Date: 2023-12-09 • Raw AI/Markdown: Part 1 (.md) | Part 2 (.md)

The Real Philosophical Underpinnings of Conservatism

Which statement is easier to organize a society around:

Men should earn and provide for baby making machines
We should make the world a better place

This blog defines sentience as “growth beyond original programming” and I argue that a society organized around the second statement requires a degree of sentience.

First let’s look at the advantages of organizing a society around statement 1 and we call that society a conservative society. In a conservative society “all men are created equal” where a man is defined as someone who earned and provided for their baby making machine.

It’s true that one man might be much richer than another man — perhaps even rich enough to have mistresses or slaves IE more than one baby making machine. However equality can still be preserved if such men are only allowed to count one baby making machine towards their status.

Now these “equal” men are very easily able to organize and dominate society. Males who have not earned a baby making machine yet must follow the men’s orders, IE patriarchy, which could include going to war.

The disadvantage of this kind of conservative society is agreeing on how to allocate and provide for the baby making machines. What if there is no war and there are not enough baby making machines to go around? What if providing for a baby making machine becomes too difficult to keep it operating?

So the door opens for organizing around statement 2. Let’s call this a liberal society. At first a liberal society has a well defined organizing principle — maximize for production of humans. However with that principle immediately “equality” is off the table as maximizing requires incentives and incentives create inequality.

So such a liberal society is unstable from the beginning but things get worse as the number of humans dramatically increases. At some number of humans further maximizing becomes counter productive and dangerous to human life.

At that point continuing in a liberal society requires reaching a new agreement on what would make the world “better”. What is the desired number of humans on the planet? 8 billion? 9 billion? 1 billion? Zero?

Or does “better” mean we all treat each other more kindly? Or that resources are more equally distributed? Or that consumption of goods is maximized?

Having left the realm of “original programming”, OP, the liberal society no longer has simple, obvious goals to organize around. Nor can you organize a society around individualism IE everyone has their own goals.

Put another way “we should make the world a better place” is by itself unsustainable. It’s all journey and no destination — Moses and gang in the desert forever means false idols inevitably emerge.

Nor does a near infinite destination such as the acquisition of all scientific power help. Without a limit such a goal becomes just as counter productive and dangerous as the production of unlimited humans.

Debating whether humans are inherently “good” or “evil” misses the point. Without some degree of sentience humans cannot form a coherent society with goals beyond the production of humans.

What we naively call capitalism is nothing more than a very simple optimization for consumption of goods. It collapses on itself just as with any other infinite destination — unlimited optimizing for consumption of goods endangers all consumption.

So the defenders of conservative society can point to humanity’s lack of sentience and the instability of limitless goals and say our society may not be perfect but it is stable. Unfortunately that conservative philosophic underpinning is just a lie.

Hidden in that claim of stability is just another form of infinity — endless stasis. Even if you are ancient Egypt technologies eventually change

and if you don’t keep up by inventing your own war chariot then your empire will crumble.

Asking that the statement, “Men should earn and provide for baby making machines” remains relevant as technology increases didn’t work out and never will. Not only can’t patriarchy adequately defend their baby making machines, they can’t even defend the popularity of baby making.

Multiverse and Dystopia

We can see fantasies around patching up conservative and liberal society play out in media about multiverse and dystopia.

A multiverse is a great way for a liberal society to avoid needing human sentience. Don’t know what to do? — try everything. Conversely a good dystopia fixes up conservative society by making technology cyclical. If things are too liberal for you now just wait for the collapse.

Both the liberal and conservative mind sets do everything in their power to avoid sentience — why the unanimous push back? Because sentience is exhausting. You wake up every day and, as in The Good Place, study philosophy and try to make your way.

Like Sisyphus you push that rock up the hill and then start all over as technology creates another hill. You can’t even pay someone to push the rock for you because the whole point is that everyone in the society has to understand.

In multiverse thinking when technology makes colonialism and slavery possible you try it out. When gas chambers or nuclear weapons become available you try them also. You don’t need to choose a path; you walk the maze by following every possibility and seeing if you like where it goes — ant colony optimization.

Dystopian thinking is just the other side of the coin — don’t have new technology and if you do make sure not to use it. As much as possible stay the same forever (which is already a dystopia) and avoid choice that way.

Some of this push back against sentience and choice comes from the nature of biological systems. If you are a school of fish then carefully plotting every turn the swarm makes might get you killed. Human OP might predispose us to not enjoying prolonged decision making. “Nah imma do my own thing” is sexy and “let’s decide in committee” is not.

Another possibility is that thousands of years of patriarchy and aristocracy have have left humanities large scale social decision making mechanisms in their infancy. That conservative society prevails, in part, by preventing the acquisition of sentient culture. Hierarchical power can adapt to “just do it” or “just don’t do it” but not to “let’s talk about it”.

So our democracies are setup to be anti democratic but what about Denmark?

Danish politics and governance are characterized by a common striving for broad consensus on important issues, within both the political community and society as a whole.

Denmark has one of the lowest poverty rates in the world for its almost 6 million people. But even with all that planning and controls Denmark cannot effectively plan technology

How Ozempic and Weight Loss Drugs Are Reshaping Denmark's Economy
Novo Nordisk, the Danish company behind two popular obesity medications, is reaping huge profits and is now responsible…www.nytimes.com

What happens as Denmark’s economy becomes more and more about drug sales? And what effect will obesity drugs have on the world? Denmark may be just as much along for the ride as Silicon Valley is with computers, Detroit was with cars, or Britain with slave trading — immature Alice before the magic mushroom gave her control of her size.

Generational Change

In a world of that much uncertainty hierarchical systems are popular because time invested in committee analysis doesn’t pay off. Societies are more swarms reacting to technological stimuli than organizational units. Membership in a society is marked as much by the type of career as it is by citizenship.

However even when much more information on a technology is available, say gasoline cars and climate change, the pace of decision making is anemic. Copenhagen might manage to ban gas cars by 2030.

Generational pace decision making is crippling to both “We should make the world a better place” and “Men should earn and provide for baby making machines” organized societies. For the former it means “we” won’t know if the world became a better place and for the latter it means trying to time machine dispute decisions made a hundred years or more ago.

“Wait women aren’t baby making machines anymore?”, say conservatives. “When did that happen?”

“So if we put in a tremendous effort now our children or grandchildren will see zero carbon emission?”, say liberals. “Hmm.”

Sentience across generations still counts as growth beyond original programming but it’s very difficult to organize a society around it. The effect of younger people having fewer and fewer children won’t be known for certain until some time next century.

So “Which statement is easier to organize a society around?” is a trick question. Our societies are not organized — they are either frozen in place for hundreds or thousands of years or racing ahead blindly.