A case against self-interest

“Capitalism is the biggest con­spir­acy.” That was going to be the title of this post – a reac­tionary sen­tence that has buzzed in my skull for sev­eral weeks now. 

(Note: this was writ­ten in… May? In November, I dis­cov­ered a designer who did some very impres­sive covers for the Jacobin mag­a­zine, and that was one of the head­lines. So I some­how pla­gia­rised a social­ist catch­phrase, I guess?)

The thought grew into a day­dream, ren­dered as one of those long­form video essays we’ve all been con­sum­ing. But I’m not sure if those make me think. I fear that I use them to get a shal­low grasp of inter­est­ing ideas, with min­i­mum effort.

This is going to be quite video-essay-ish though? That’s a default flavour now, prob­a­bly. (Though a 33-minute run­time impresses nobody.) But the notepad is easier to wield than the video editor – and read­ing is a more delib­er­ate expe­ri­ence than screengazing. 

Also, I will try to refine and con­dense every thought. I will prune digres­sions, and resist the urge to hyper­link every ref­er­ence that comes to mind. (Link-surf­ing wastes almost as much of my time as YouTube does; I won’t do the same thing to you.) I will take my time and build coher­ent sec­tions, and an actual conclusion.

If I do an okay job, it may be a lot to take in. Feel free to pause and reflect, or just step away. In a nut­shell, I end up on the idea that we are wast­ing time trying to make sense of this world, until we sur­ren­der to God in us. If either of these con­cepts dis­agrees with you, please use your discretion.

Head

Defining con­spir­acy

‘Conspiracy’ has become such a buzz­word. It actu­ally just means that a group of people are work­ing together to seek a pri­vate inter­est. But their goal likely works against the inter­ests of another group or indi­vid­ual, so the con­spir­a­tors try to keep things dark.

Guy Fawkes and his friends con­spired for England to return to Catholicism. The Boston Tea Party group con­spired against tar­iffs from Great Britain. Guy Fawkes hid his name; the Tea Party masked their nation­al­ity. It would be sim­pler to com­pare the two if one hadn’t suc­ceeded, but the ele­ments are the same: col­lu­sion, secrecy, crime – all for pri­vate interest.

Dispensing with interaction

By some penal codes, you are in a con­spir­acy with a third party if both of you con­spire with one second party. The main thing is the agree­ment, and the shared inter­est. (When people talk about ‘cabals,’ they seem to think that every member needs to know who the others are. Actually, it is much safer if nobody does. The Ku Klux Klan is a good example.)

The cap­i­tal­ist model tries to sim­plify all of our deal­ings, by assum­ing that every person has only one real inter­est – their own. The ‘invis­i­ble hand’ of the market bal­ances things out by making you lose a lot if you won’t com­pro­mise a little. No real trust is required, and inter­ac­tions can be abstract. Groups can com­pete or depend on each other, and be entirely unaware of the fact.

Capitalism is simply the most hands-off way to allow pri­vate inter­ests to co-exist. The market should stop us from burn­ing the whole system down; all we need to do is keep get­ting ours.

Set up for scale

This def­i­n­i­tion leaves out all men­tion of profit and money, because money is just a way of keep­ing score. It is a simple abstrac­tion of real-world power; maybe more real­is­tic than stocks or credit, but even that is debat­able. Real power is your abil­ity to dic­tate terms, and get what you want.

Capitalism is just an ideal model for an infi­nitely scal­able con­spir­acy. You can con­spire with the market with­out know­ing about me; I can do like­wise. We can both get ours, and the market will do the housekeeping.

Many of us feel that OpenAI should have con­sulted us – or our gov­ern­ments, at least – before releas­ing their world-chang­ing inven­tion. But Henry Ford didn’t ask how soci­ety felt about ending the horse-driven era, and Gutenberg didn’t worry about the total dis­rup­tion of knowl­edge trans­fer. They left it to the market to figure things out.

Silicon Valley will do like­wise. Everyone does. I get mine, you get yours.

The vital role of punishment

To sur­vive, a cap­i­tal­ist econ­omy must make sure that imbal­ance is ‘unsus­tain­able’. Profiteers should be cut out, and monop­o­lies should fall apart. Free com­pe­ti­tion cre­ates self-reg­u­la­tion – people just keep shop­ping for a better deal, even from within a cartel. Outside reg­u­la­tion only appears if the market loses this nat­ural balance.

Any trans­ac­tion can work with­out trust or pos­i­tive incen­tives, if the invis­i­ble hand can make self­ish strate­gies unprof­itable. For exam­ple: you may believe that my coun­try does­n’t deserve to exist, but your desire to destroy us must over­come a con­crete assur­ance of your own destruc­tion. This has kept the world intact when all other forms of nego­ta­tion failed. If it does­n’t pay, it prob­a­bly won’t happen.

Reaction is not a solution

Capitalism does its job so well that its biggest rival just ends up remix­ing it. If you accept the idea that money is just a way of keep­ing track of power, then com­mu­nism does not take away pri­vate inter­ests. People keep com­pet­ing for resources, pref­er­ence and pro­mo­tion; the state is simply a less invis­i­ble hand.

Every com­mu­nist state in his­tory lever­ages mis­trust and betrayal among the pro­le­tariat. The model itself relates to cap­i­tal­ism as much as it does to com­mu­nal­ism. Also, com­mu­nist states can have cap­i­tal­ist ele­ments within them. The gov­ern­ment often does, the people always do: there is always a black market.

Self-inter­est all the way down

Even fur­ther… I’ll make another sweep­ing state­ment; please help me find a rebut­tal for it. Every econ­omy has an under­world, and those are always profit-driven.

If this claim holds up, then extreme self-inter­est auto­mat­i­cally chooses cap­i­tal­ism. Its con­trol also goes back to the invis­i­ble hand: to deter crime, we make sure that it does­n’t pay. Around the world, neg­a­tive behav­iours are mostly being man­aged with neg­a­tive incen­tives, from whips to carbon credits.

To sum up: cap­i­tal­ism isn’t an inno­va­tion. It ratio­nal­izes and encodes a human ten­dency that is dif­fi­cult to evade. People didn’t wait for econ­o­mists to tell them how to be self­ish; we just received the pleas­ant news that every­thing works out for the best in the end, if we all just keep get­ting ours.

Body

Investment mind­set

For many years, when­ever people asked me about my weird approach to busi­ness, I ref­er­enced The Godfather. Specifically, the idea that indebt­ed­ness is worth more than money. When you invest to earn a favour, you get higher returns than any cash-for-cash loan.

I used this mis­guided exam­ple because it was easier than admit­ting how dis­il­lu­sioned I felt about profit. I didn’t want to share how I stole family money when I was 10 or 11. How dirty I felt when I realised I didn’t ever think of those I was hurt­ing… How I promised myself that this ‘get mine’ com­pul­sion could never dic­tate my actions, ever again. So instead I told people that I was making hard-headed, manip­u­la­tive invest­ments, like Don Vito.

Somehow though, I did not com­pare myself to John Gotti, or Al Capone. Those were clearly broken people who never out­grew the inse­cu­rity of grow­ing up hungry and despised. Similarly, the gang­ster rap­pers who drew from the Mafia myth – they were just poi­son­ing their com­mu­ni­ties in their des­per­a­tion to get out of the ghetto. I never saw any­thing empow­er­ing about big chains, gun-strapped entourages, or dental nesteggs. Those were just signs of the soul-eating inse­cu­rity that I was trying to transcend.

Celebrating dis­rup­tion

But our soci­ety likes to reclaim the leg­ends of the shadow econ­omy as soon as we can sep­a­rate them from their grue­some ori­gins. From Capone to Walter White, we keep spot­light­ing under­dogs who find a novel way to get theirs – even if the market cor­rec­tions come with body bags. They are just people “doing what it takes to sur­vive” – but why does it take this to survive?

Nobody should have to sell toxins to lift them­selves up – but it would take a lot of work to fix this. We would need better soci­eties; fairer ways to learn, grow, and dream; health­ier ways to play and thrive. Under cap­i­tal­ism, our invis­i­ble hand would need to take on some con­crete mass, and inten­tion­ally pri­or­i­tize these goals. But can it even do that?

The social push and pull

Our cap­i­tal­ist soci­ety does try to teach moral behav­iour, even in the mar­ket­place. Hyper-cap­i­tal­ist man­u­als tell you that suc­cess requires a cus­tomer-first mind­set. Lone-wolf entre­pre­neurs offer exple­tive-laden hot takes about young guns who don’t ‘pay their dues’. Therapists advise us to embrace com­mu­nity and for­give­ness, if only as an exer­cise in self-care.

On the other hand, we have some advo­cates who seem to say that empa­thy and sup­port isn’t only mis­guided, but actu­ally an unhelp­ful response to dis­abil­ity and neu­ro­di­ver­gence. Differently-abled people still excel at pro­duc­tion; there­fore, any dif­fer­ence should be over­looked… Thankfully there are other voices who offer more nuance on agency and exclu­sion, but this nar­ra­tive was just so strange to me.

As cap­i­tal­ism grows, it is more will­ing to acco­mo­date any­thing. Even overtly anti­so­cial behav­iour can trans­late to suc­cess: our soci­ety, indus­try, and pol­i­tics all reward socio­pathic ten­den­cies. Our enter­tain­ment spot­light seems to cel­e­brate big egos.

New com­mons, new tragedies

And then we have the inter­net: a per­fect throne for the proper noun of Scale. The smart money is going to those who can find new needs to be met with a hastily built, easily broken solu­tion – billed monthly, if pos­si­ble. Everything (and every­one) is brand­ing; brand­ing is every­thing. Now you can fulfil your self-inter­est by lit­er­ally sell­ing me a story. The real wonder is, why does anyone do any­thing else?

The insan­ity of purpose

We begin this life out­side the trans­ac­tional frame of mind, and the world rarely gets all its hard knocks in before we are set in our ways. As a result, flesh-bound, baby values keep sab­o­tag­ing our market focus.

People stay in dead-end indus­tries and jobs, doing vital work with zero upside. Some get so excited when they find a good thing, that they forget to ensure that they can monop­o­lize its access. The public domain has sur­vived many eras in which the market decided that it was a hin­drance. A healthy per­cent­age of the time, human beings will actively over­look their self-inter­est in the pas­sion of doing some­thing worthwhile.

Examples / cau­tion­ary tales

The Wright Brothers built a busi­ness around their faulty air­craft design, and vig­or­ously sued patent infringers; we call them pio­neers. Matthew Boulton, who described a better aileron system four decades before them, is forgotton.

Banting, Best and Schwarz is not a famil­iar name from Big Pharma. It’s prob­a­bly because they gave away their patent for extract­ing insulin, saying that “it belongs to the world.” But when­ever their process is refined or replaced, some­one makes a fortune.

The three biggest modern com­puter oper­at­ing sys­tems derive a lot of their struc­ture from the Berkeley Software Distribution, which recre­ated the Unix plat­form with a per­mis­sive license. The pre­cur­sor of MacOS was largely based on BSD; Windows also used its code. The BSD unit itself had to shut down when they were sued by Bell Labs, the makers of Unix.

Vocational edu­ca­tion teach­ers typ­i­cally get paid less than those who teach STEM sub­jects. Preschool teach­ers also earn below median salary for the edu­ca­tion sector.

How is that bad?

This is such a hard ques­tion to answer. And I think the chal­lenge of ‘prove me wrong’ has too much power in our world. It allows me to just put any­thing out, and leave it to the market (or the com­mons) to refine it.

If it were my respon­si­bil­ity to make sure that things are true before saying them, then ‘prove me wrong’ would be a deser­tion of duty. I would have to coöper­ate with the com­mons, and ask for its input.

Okay; what would be better?

A system when every­body gets to eat would be great. Because life is pre­cious to us. We could self­ishly decide to only value our indi­vid­ual lives; instead we gen­er­ally agree that all life is pre­cious, and should be pre­served. There are laws against stand­ing idly by when another life is in danger.

Conveniently, we leave the market to decide is dan­ger­ous to qual­ity of life, and what is fair. It might be great if every­one could eat – but on the flip­side, we don’t want to make lazi­ness ‘pay’. So we have another moral that says that “you need to work for your bread”. That some­how trans­lates into “you can earn better bread, based on the impact of your work.” And from that we arrive at, “you can get the best bread if you’re clever about it.”

Why is there bad bread to begin with? Because of self-inter­est. Why do we need to dis­in­cen­tivize lazi­ness, even against the all-impor­tant goal of pre­serv­ing life? Self-inter­est. As a result, the market accepts a real­ity in which some may work hard to stay just barely alive – or nour­ished, but unful­filled. Nobody can feel that this is a better real­ity than one in which qual­ity of life is uni­ver­sally high… But again, self-interest.

There are lit­er­ally bil­lions of useful, hard­work­ing people who lack busi­ness acumen. If a garbage col­lec­tor con­sol­i­dates and maneou­vres their way up to run a fleet of garbage col­lec­tors, we buy their ghost­writ­ten auto­bi­ogra­phies. What hap­pens to the dili­gent but unimag­i­na­tive garbage col­lec­tors under them? Should their access be lim­ited to neces­si­ties, to punish them for their lack of entre­pre­neur­ship? Why?

Well, why not?

Everything above was writ­ten in June; it’s now October… Well, let’s see what happens.

This ques­tion is basi­cally the same as “prove me wrong”, but let’s go with it. Why not: because entre­pre­neur­ship isn’t like any other work. Production, logis­tics and account­ing serve people. Supervision helps those people to col­lab­o­rate. What does entre­pre­neur­ship do, exactly – beyond wear­ing these other hats when necessary?

People won’t just get on board to bring a worthy idea to life; they ask, “What is in it for me?” An entre­pre­neur tells them. Some others will try to sab­o­tage or steal the idea; the entre­pre­neur resists them. Sometimes the idea can col­lide against other inter­ests, public or pri­vate; the entre­pre­neur pushes them away. If things go bad (as they often do, in a com­pe­ti­tion-driven world) the entre­pre­neur basi­cally agrees to let every­body – work­ers and investors – renounce all respon­si­bil­ity and save themselves.

What is the con­nect­ing thread through all these roles? Self-inter­est and com­pe­ti­tion. That is the domain of the entre­pre­neur. Entrepreuners serve as the liai­son between the work­ers and the invis­i­ble hand. And which side has the entre­pre­neur in its pocket? Each of us must answer that ques­tion pri­vately, but our cap­i­tal­ist world gen­er­ally assumes that it is the market that pays our entrepreneurs.

If you don’t accept that idea, then you must feel for them. If entre­pre­neurs are your cham­pi­ons, why would you demand guar­an­teed returns, and leave the risk to them?

Actually, even if you don’t – if, for exam­ple, you agree to work with­out salary in bad times – you might be called a chump. (If you invest with­out demand­ing profit, you are an angel, at the very least… but maybe a chump too.) Entrepreneurs are sup­posed to take the bul­lets; that’s what the market pays them for.

So if we only expect sig­nif­i­cant suc­cess for those who serve the market and take its falls, then we are saying that the invis­i­ble hand is the one hold­ing all the power. Then it isn’t a butler. It is the landlord.

Is that a problem?

Me asking you, now. Does that sound bad to you? If you just don’t buy the argu­ment, that’s fine – I’d be glad to find out why. (My ratio­nale is based on what I know of lever­ag­ing and market inequalities.)

If, on the other hand, it does not sound like a prob­lem, then you might not be track­ing with me. The real case I am making, is that the invis­i­ble hand is actu­ally self-inter­est. Your desire is link­ing up to mine, and some­how enslav­ing us both. And the real money goes to the one who will do the most to serve this spirit.

A ridicu­lous hypothetical

Think of this: how long would you stay in your cur­rent role (not employer) if it didn’t pay? That tells us some­thing, but not too much. You have respon­si­bil­i­ties, you’d prob­a­bly try some­thing else to stay alive. But try this: how long would you work in your cur­rent role if all your needs were guar­an­teed, regardless?

Did you think to ask what I mean by needs? Let’s say: food, hous­ing, infra­struc­ture, and health. Does that make you jump back to look at the pre­vi­ous ques­tion again?

You do deserve good things in life; we all do. What good things are we leav­ing off the list? Travel? Fashion? Entertainment? See if you can make a short list. And then think about what that list would mean, if every­body else also has all their needs guaranteed.

How many com­mer­cial dri­vers keep dri­ving? How many nan­nies keep tend­ing other peo­ple’s chil­dren? How many trash col­lec­tors remain at their duties?

What does your favourite hol­i­day des­ti­na­tion look like, if nobody needs your tourist busi­ness to stay alive? What does fash­ion cost with­out sweat­shops – and who grows cotton for the love of it? Would arena events still exist, and what would they charge if all infra­struc­ture was freely built – and every­body in the whole chain was there because they have a pas­sion for sports or arts? And no scalpers!

Would there be scalpers in this world though? Do you think pric­ing preda­tors would stop if we gave them gro­ceries and free health­care? What about thieves?

Greed is a passion

Gamblers do not just gamble for the jack­pot. They start out think­ing that way – but it isn’t easy to stop after one sig­nif­i­cant win. A fas­ci­nat­ing trend has been observed with slot machines, where the most hard­core play­ers actu­ally look annoyed when they have to pause to col­lect a hand­ful of coins. The real drive isn’t for a jack­pot, it’s for The Jackpot. And that cap­i­tal-let­tered beauty exists purely in the mind.

Thieves are not much dif­fer­ent than gam­blers. They do not typ­i­cally squir­rel their money away in trea­sury bonds. And they rarely ever retire early. (Unless they have the epiphany that there are cons that pay better, with­out the threat of jail.) Which brings us, nat­u­rally, to fast finance.

Try and pic­ture a sea­soned day-trader, the kind who is on their third vision board. Try and pic­ture a fuel-effi­cient family sedan on that vision board… There are a lot of items that fit better on there, and they are all sig­ni­fiers. Few of them are quirky or indi­vid­ual; they aren’t there to show that you are you. They show that you are Somebody.

It is a pas­sion for an ideal

Let us filter moti­va­tions for excel­lence by how often the con­cept of shar­ing comes up. As an artist, do we dream of the scream­ing fans, or of shar­ing a stage with our heroes? As a vision­ary, do we only dream of dis­rup­tion? Is there any system or value that we can plug into? Do we want to solve a prob­lem for people, or be the one who solved the problem?

I don’t have a vision board. I keep my sig­ni­fiers and cap­i­tal let­ters in my head. Not because I’d be embar­rassed to be seen with a board (I respect that last ves­tige of col­lage art) but because my cap­i­tal let­ters embar­rass me. I don’t like what they imply.

There are better ideals

I don’t think I need to jus­tify that. It is always safe to assume, when we hear some­body go, “Me, me, me,” that they actu­ally can’t hear them­selves. Because it is actu­ally very easy for self-inter­est to mas­quer­ade as gutsi­ness: I’ll show them – or need: I have to.

The fact that makes it so easy is also the truth that replaces greed as the pri­mary ideal. Even beyond the world we have built, life as we know it depends on com­pe­ti­tion. Self-preser­va­tion is only common-sense.

Actually, we do “sur­vival of the fittest” a dis­ser­vice when we label it as a theory: it is a fact. If it looks weak, you may be look­ing at it from ground level: “well, why don’t we all have tails then?”

The secret is that organ­isms aren’t in con­trol of the process. You don’t just decide what to aim for. There is an invis­i­ble hand that drives every cell to coöper­ate or rebel. That hand sets puny first-year males against a giant vet­eran, when the worst gam­bler would­n’t take that bet. The poor guy just wants to get his… He will not, but the system will. It serves the bigger pic­ture: every­thing that shows weak­ness must die.

That is where the metaphor of the ‘self­ish gene’ falls short. That system also looks sus­pect when you look at it from the micro level. The head-to-head tour­na­ment reg­u­larly lures traits to their extinc­tion – and there is pre­cious little they can do about it.

At the macro level, com­pe­ti­tion works flaw­lessly. Roses would­n’t have such per­fume if they didn’t first invest in thorns. Bees would not help the flow­ers if they didn’t pay up first. Something must die for some­thing to live!

But must it? Why though?

Foot

I don’t believe that this life is the only one. I do not even believe that it is the main one. It would be ridicu­lous of me to try to sup­port this belief with logic or empir­i­cal evi­dence, because it dis­counts every­thing here, and this life also returns the favour. One can only keep one of the two in focus, and I’ve made my choice.

That’s why I lied and told people that I was trad­ing favours like Don Corleone. If I haven’t become a fanatic, I have at least aban­doned the uni­ver­sal ideal, for an alien one.

Ideals do not make sense

Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more impor­tant than the real ones. Suppose this black pit of a king­dom of yours is the only world. Well, it strikes me as a pretty poor one. And that’s a funny thing, when you come to think of it. We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies play­ing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow. That’s why I’m going to stand by the play-world. […] Not that our lives will be very long, I should think; but that’s small loss if the world’s as dull a place as you say.

C.S. Lewis, The Silver Chair

Earlier I shared my opin­ion that self-preser­va­tion can’t be an ideal, because it is a prac­ti­cal fact. Ideals should be things to aspire for – they may be good, but def­i­nitely not no-brain­ers. We most need ideals in the space between prac­ti­cal­ity and excellence.

This world, as much sense as it makes (when we focus on it) is not excel­lent. Competition, as wise a strat­egy as it is (at macro level) is inef­fi­cient. It reveals the best of many options by trying to destroy them all. It is essen­tially sub­trac­tive. But in prac­ti­cal terms, we had no choice but to embrace it: the prob­lem of scarcity has no other viable response.

If every­body gets the secret code, then nobody gets the jack­pot. If every­body gets a raise, that’s just infla­tion. If we solve dis­ease, war, and hunger, over­pop­u­la­tion becomes a press­ing prob­lem. Scarcity is scary, and very real. Anything that ignores or down­plays it, cannot claim to make good sense.

But sense is a fun­gi­ble token

But cur­rently there is a lot of excite­ment about the poten­tial of AI to rede­fine scarcity. If it goes accord­ing to plan, it will unlock new effi­cien­cies, new com­bi­na­tions – and some­day, release us from the limits of this earth. But if we banish scarcity, will com­pet­i­tive drives auto­mat­i­cally die?

We can live for­ever with gene research and nanobots. We can receive uni­ver­sal income while machines do the work. We can pick our food from pho­to­syn­the­sis panels. All won­der­ful! But do we stop steal­ing, and bul­ly­ing, and deceiv­ing one another? AI might have to create new ther­a­pies for mental com­plexes and anti­so­cial behav­iour as well.

Basically, once we start this jour­ney of what-if, every AI advo­cate sounds like a reli­gious fanatic. (Case in point, Dario Amodei’s “Machines of Loving Grace.”) In this realm of pos­si­bil­ity, my ide­al­ism is no longer a hand­i­cap. People are think­ing beyond scarcity, beyond com­pe­ti­tion – beyond even bio­log­i­cal exis­tence. Heaven is hardly more extreme.

You need faith either way

If AI can’t fulfil its promise, it will almost cer­tainly land us in a world­wide eco­nomic depres­sion. Currently, it costs as much as it helps – more, prob­a­bly. But we are swal­low­ing (or ignor­ing, or deny­ing) the real effects to envi­ron­ment, econ­omy, and soci­ety, in the hopes of the pos­si­ble future. We are ded­i­cat­ing Olympic levels of invest­ment to it, while non-AI indus­tries are left in the shad­ows. This big push, present and poten­tial, might actu­ally be the only reason why we aren’t in a depres­sion yet. But I don’t think the big play­ers are just bluff­ing. There is some crazy faith at play.

Personally: some days I believe AI is going to change the world – then I see the com­pa­nies lying and jostling for clout and market share… It’s a tall task to build the god that must some­day save you. How do you align a super-intel­li­gence, when you have com­plexes of your own?

Nobody knows – nobody even knows just why deep learn­ing works, much less how to achieve and guar­an­tee align­ment – but that does­n’t stop them. Truly impres­sive, one-foot-then-the-other faith. I might join them if I wasn’t attached already.

My faith in Christ

But thank­fully, I’m not look­ing to build my sal­va­tion. I found sal­va­tion, simply by leav­ing the battle arena. Every day that I live in peace (which is not every­day yet) is a win. And yet, resist­ing the pup­petry of greed does­n’t mean that I don’t have to work. It does­n’t even mean that I’m my own boss. I serve an invis­i­ble hand too.

Sometimes I have no idea what I can pos­si­bly hope to gain by an action. Often I research the smart approach for a thing, and then go down another route. (I was going to dig­i­tally water­mark all my con­tent, and double down on pro­mo­tion, chale.) But there is a deep free­dom in it, to a degree that I can’t describe. And I get to help this messed-up world, while look­ing ahead to a better one. I dream of the day I say good­bye to every warped moti­va­tion, and just live.

Christ in me

That would be enough reward – and yet, it is only the test. If I don’t pass, I have no busi­ness look­ing for­ward to Heaven. Have you ever won­dered what it means to have golden streets? It means that our ceil­ing is God’s floor.

This has occu­pied my mind for years now: we rarely think how much work it takes to be God. What it means to power a uni­verse. What it takes to plant and nur­ture con­scious­ness within it, and give it a path to maturity…

Because that is all that this world is, really: a sand­box. To enter into real life, we have to put com­plexes and prim­i­tive drives behind us. This is too pow­er­ful to be handed to us; gods cannot be made. We need to choose this door, and walk into it.

Violence has to stop making sense. Indulgence should lose its appeal. The idea of us/them, that pillar of self-inter­est, must crumble.

So I’m not just seek­ing peace and abun­dance. We can find those here in this broken world – at least, good secu­rity and mate­r­ial wealth come close enough… I will only feel at home in a place where scarcity and strife are dis­tant mem­o­ries. An incom­pre­hen­si­ble world, where every­body gets a crown. But only so that we can throw them down – at the feet of a lamb.

My new conspiracy

You may judge some­one who only hires from their old school, or from their social circle… But nobody com­plains that we always select for sim­i­lar ideals. I find it easy to get along with musi­cians – but even unreal talent would­n’t make me like a bully.

Every time I meet some­one who ques­tions the moti­va­tions and rewards of our world, I feel drawn to them. We may not have sim­i­lar ideas about what to do about it – but the enemy of my enemy, as the saying goes…

There are some who don’t even under­stand why they feel unsat­is­fied. My heart yearns for them – I want so much to tell them they are not crazy. But then I wonder how to put my faith into frag­ile speech, with­out it being dis­missed as irra­tional­ity or a sub­jec­tive thing. “Well, that’s you,” people say some­times. It hurts more than if they thought I was silly.

It is not just me. This world wasn’t intended to make sense. It was hardly intended at all. It merely sur­vives, warped and scarred, as the bro­ken­ness beats against it. It is good to wake up. It is good to feel a better hand tap­ping you awake. You don’t need to hustle more, or indulge more, or watch more speeches that broke the inter­net. You don’t need to recal­i­brate and learn to dream again. You can do those things, sure. But maybe you actu­ally need a dif­fer­ent dream?

I know for many people, espe­cially in this part of the world, faith is an aban­doned hope. Most of us were raised in reli­gion, and it failed us in dif­fer­ent ways, and we said no thanks – politely or oth­er­wise. Listen, if I said there is a sure­fire proof or even a check­list to follow, I’d be bluff­ing. But as I see it, we never lose all faith – not in God, not even in the econ­omy. We just dis­en­gage so we don’t get hurt. That would be fine, if it worked.

Does it?

The advan­tages of membership

It’s now February, chale.

Humanity solved a lot of press­ing prob­lems in the early days of civil­i­sa­tion. We solved agri­cul­ture, and only then could we indulge in mood-alter­ing chem­istry. We solved coöper­a­tion, which made large-scale war pos­si­ble. But every day since the human mind encoun­tered the world, it has mused upon the vast and hos­tile space that sur­rounds it, and won­dered, “Is there a point to this?” Some think this ques­tion remains unsolved – that this is one prob­lem that human­ity either failed at, or mis­un­der­stood to begin with. I think many of the approaches had a lot of poten­tial. The only real prob­lem, I would say, was how to keep them pure.

It isn’t easy to escape grav­ity. We do not mock space agen­cies for crash­ing and burn­ing, because we under­stand how heav­ily the odds are skewed against any chal­lenger of grav­ity. When we see priests toad­y­ing to tyrants, or becom­ing tyrants them­selves – that is the grav­ity of com­pe­ti­tion win­ning again. It never seemed sen­si­ble that anyone should act sur­prised at hypocrisy, when we have that pithy saying, “Talk is cheap.” Of course our mouths write checks that our lives can’t cash: the world tries to kill us on the way to the teller. But is it more effec­tive some­how to give up on the dream? Are ratio­nal­ists inca­pable of sav­agery and cor­rup­tion? Is unbe­lief an anti­dote to hatred?

I really respect athe­ists who give up the antag­o­nis­tic stance that comes nat­u­rally to in-groups; the ones who focus on doing better. Such people usu­ally say their faith is in human poten­tial. Their evi­dence is the impres­sive mon­u­ment of civil­i­sa­tion and knowl­edge that we have built in spite of our­selves. But did we build it in spite of our­selves? Isn’t this just how far com­pe­ti­tion has brought us? 

Academia came this far by appro­pri­at­ing more resources to a hal­lowed few (no lower castes, no women – no heretics, if pos­si­ble… at least, not until their ideas are inescapable.) As tech­nol­ogy advances, it hides its costs, and its vic­tims. The devel­op­ment of pol­i­tics obscures many unmarked graves. And each of these achieve­ments of civil­i­sa­tion has a mythol­ogy around it – an active mythol­ogy that experts often bemoan. Is an opti­mistic athe­ist any­thing other is an ide­al­ist, whose faith in human­ity is entirely unjustified?

And are they not more impres­sive for the fact? Their oppo­si­tion to the cur­rents of this real­ity, the way of all flesh, is based on abstract hopes that their mech­a­nisms of enquiry do not sup­port. I could not do that myself.

I know because I tried.

I much prefer having my com­pass set to Heaven. When I am con­fronted by my own weak­ness, I draw strength from out­side myself. When people dis­ap­point, I refo­cus on the essence within every heart, the soul that winces in shame at our frailty. When noth­ing seems to jus­tify living for another day, I com­fort myself that every hours is a step toward eter­nity. Where others con­tem­plate the unex­plored galax­ies, or the unborn, ide­alised future – I sing about a world beyond striving.

It is just easier.

Especially because there have been many lights ahead of me, who have been dili­gently weed­ing out the atavism of com­pe­ti­tion from this faith. “When you pray, say: ‘our Father.’ ” “The king­dom of God is within you.” “If I say every­thing that a man or angel can, but I do not love, I am nothing.” 

Jesus and Paul, the people who said these pro­found things, lived in a day when wor­ship was about killing, and pol­i­tics was about con­quest. Marriage rites still sim­u­lated kid­nap­ping! This soft way was any­thing but a no-brainer. So much so that, after they died (vio­lently) their ideals were almost entirely recolonised by the logic of this world. That was to be expected, of course. For one thing, they weren’t big on cer­e­mony and spec­ta­cle, with­out which dis­trac­tions this faith is almost too impos­ing to tackle. Turning my heart back to this orig­i­nal way has been my sal­va­tion – and yet there is a lot of fric­tion at every step.

“But we have not come to the moun­tain that could not be touched.” Paul again. “We have gath­ered, all together, to the moun­tain of the living God… unto a blood that, unlike that of Abel, does not accuse.” Abel was pretty right­eous. He just cried out when he was killed. Is that not justice?

“Yet he did not open his mouth. He went, like a lamb, to his death.” This scrip­ture is sacred to the Christian faith. This is why the reward of our wor­ship will be to lay down every crown.

Are we living up to it? Not in the slight­est. Would we do better if we forgot about it? I strug­gle to see how that makes sense – unless it is proven that piety works like an anorexia of nec­es­sary evils, and we are more prone to binge­ing after every fit of abstention.

That isn’t my expe­ri­ence, though. I am mea­sur­ably better for this faith. I learned to get out of my head, and engage with the people around me. I learned to stop accept­ing dark­ness as a fact; to seek out and amplify light. I learned to smile, and hope, and work, and for­give. To bear big dis­ap­point­ments with more grace than I could muster, before, for smaller ones. To shoul­der more daunt­ing tasks with less expec­ta­tion of reward. To resist the over­mas­ter­ing fevers of anger, and panic. This faith has quite lit­er­ally saved me.

I promise you, I did not plan to get all woo here. I actu­ally lost my focus – which was: a rea­soned analy­sis of com­pe­ti­tion – I usu­ally do, when I tune in to this faith. That’s kind of how it works. And yet some­how I do better work in the world, when I shift my gaze? My cre­ativ­ity holds less ego, even.

But anyway. Now that I have gone all ‘come to Jesus’, not sure how to pivot back to the orig­i­nal theme. Thank you, by the way, for perserver­ing so far. If you skipped to check if I get back on topic, I under­stand… and I apol­o­gise. (I’ll go back and add a hint in the intro, so you can’t say I didn’t warn you.)

I think I’ve said every­thing I can about the crazi­ness we live in. It feels more useful to focus on the idea that this world of strife is just a big mis­take that we to learn from, and there is a bigger love all around it, and we belong to that love. And all the suf­fer­ing we feel, and all the injus­tice we see, will def­i­nitely end. And we have the power to antic­i­pate its ending, and live in that love, right now. And even when we think we cannot, that love is press­ing on us, and that is why the world does not make sense. (Because it would make sense, if we would just fully accept its logic.) And that love is real, and present, and active, and joyful, and ours. Not just to expe­ri­ence, but to embody. Our very own.

And it has a name, which we must own as well.

Jesus.