Op-ed: Trillions of Happy Humans? It's doable

 Trillions of Happy Humans?  It's doable.

In the future, there could be trillions of humans, far happier, healthier and more aware than we are today, spread throughout the galaxy.  The prospect is not all that inconceivable, and it rests on two simple premises.  First, that technology will be able to support it.  Second, that governments will be able to implement more sophisticated ethical systems. 

In terms of the first premise, concerning technology, the advances continue to astound us.  Given the accelerating reach of tech,  the bottleneck seems to be the second premise.  The question, then, is this:  does ‘human nature’ keep us from ethical progress?   Is it possible, at all, for a government to implement an advanced ethical system, the sort that could optimize human flourishing?

Try to imagine the impossible:  What if instead of greed (capitalism) or power lust (fascism) the primary focus of society became something truly good, such as optimized human and planetary health?

Is this even possible?

I’ve argued that ethics itself is a technology, a system of mental tools and ideas, capable of advanced forms, similar to other kinds of tech (1).  In this sense, ethics has already come quite far.  

An example is the codification of human rights, staring around the 18^th century.  One instantiation of this is the improved political status of women, including the ability to vote and attain highest offices.  We tend to forget that this is a vast change.  Preceding it were thousands of years of oppression.  The presence of universal suffrage shows that human nature is not an immoveable wall.  It does not stop culture, and thereby human behavior, from transformative leaps.

What, then, keeps ethical progress from happening?   It isn’t simply ‘human nature.’  It is, instead, a type of acculturation, which I call an “ignorance vortex.”  An ignorance vortex is a closed idea system, reinforced in a feedback loop, that transmits from generation to generation.  It also has the ability to intensify and spread.

By “closed” I mean that the idea system is capable of reinforcing itself over long periods of time, beyond the power of rational challenge.  It is immune to reason.  The result is a social doldrums in which prejudice reigns.

A basic example of an ignorance vortex is Western Catholicism in conjunction with medieval nation states.  Patriarchal beliefs were inculcated to induce fanatic worship, including rituals to transmit the beliefs to the next generation.  The effect on the brain is huge, including:  repression (walls in the mind), delusion (lying to oneself about reality), cathexis (embolic fear and hate), and malformed cognitive filters (confirmation bias).

Basically, people get  ‘programmed’ to think and behave in ways acceptable to corrupt leaders, whose goal is self-aggrandizement.  Like a computer virus, the program is ready to infect new minds exposed to it.  The hyper-malleable mind of a child would be especially susceptible.

And yet, despite the human propensity to get trapped in ignorance, we’ve made progress in the last few hundred years.  In an heroic surge, our ethics tech has managed to ride social movements on waves of rational perception.   Equality.  Gay marriage.  Earth awareness.

This should be happy news.  We can challenge the ignorance vortex.  And if we completely escape it, we can advance ad astra.  To the stars!

And yet somehow, the idea that humanity can achieve happiness and peace is completely alien to the 21^st century mind.  What’s going on?

Escaping our ignorance vortex, similar to an actual whirlpool, is a layer-by-layer process.  If you’re near the center, you have to escape multiple swirls of current. 

And so, despite great strides, we are still mired in unspeakable prejudice, violence, ignorance, and greed.  “War is hell,” and we continue, in effect, to worship war and its warlords, as we have ever since the time of ancient Sumer.  Sexism, racism, and other 'isms' rage on.

It is a depressing state of affairs, but not necessarily damning.  The problem is not that human nature makes progress impossible; it does, however, saddle us with negative tendencies.   

One of those tendencies can be expressed in the following principle:  without specialized education, many people tend to fall in line behind the worst possible leaders.  What I’m referring to is the power of charismatic tyrants to herd people into fanatic, loyal blindness.  (It doesn’t help that such tyrants do everything they can to maintain the ignorance vortex (2)).

In a future of trillions of happy humans, spotting tyrants, narcissists and demagogues will be sewn into the fabric of the culture, as much as certain religions are sewn in today.    

Let me address another dangerous propensity of human nature.  Maybe the strongest objection to the claim that we can advance our ethics tech comes from cynicism.  We humans will throw others under the bus, so this line of argument goes, to help ourselves and those we (selfishly) love get ahead.

Cynicism has been debated since the ancient Greeks.  One problem with the view that we’re all selfish is that the label then loses meaning.  If it applies to everyone, it is incapable of distinction.  Another problem, albeit related, is that it is not a falsifiable theory.  No matter how unselfish a certain person may look, the cynic can always say, "Well, they are selfish down below." 

Cynicism is a common presence in movies, though curiously it is usually reserved for the villain.  Here are some bits from the movie Shutter Island, written by Laeta Kalogridis:

Warden: … God loves violence.

Teddy Daniels: I... I hadn't noticed.

Warden: Sure you have. Why else would there be so much of it? It's in us. It's what we are. We wage war, we burn sacrifices, and pillage and plunder and tear at the flesh of our brothers. And why? Because God gave us violence to wage in his honor.

Teddy Daniels: I thought God gave us moral order.

Warden: There's no moral order as pure as this storm. There's no moral order at all. There's just this: can my violence conquer yours?

Another cynical argument is that human monstrosity is brought to the surface in harsh conditions:

Warden: You're as violent as they come [spoken to Teddy Daniels]. I know this, because I'm as violent as they come. If the constraints of society were lifted, and I was all that stood between you and a meal, you would crack my skull with a rock and eat my meaty parts. Wouldn't you?

In the first excerpt, there are two arguments.  A religious one and an empirical one .  The latter points out that violence has always been integral to human life.  However, both of these arguments can be countered with the concept of the ignorance vortex.  Unhealthy patterns repeat, not because they are inevitable, but rather because of unhealthy acculturation.  

Change the culture, change the behavior.

In the second excerpt, the argument is that humans act in monstrous ways, when it comes down to basic survival.  We will murder, if necessary, to feed our family.  Fundamentally, we’re all thugs.

For the purposes of argument, I am simply willing to grant the premise.  When starving, and if required, many people will murder others to feed their families.

But what does this prove?  Only that when we are pushed to physiological extremes, and backed into a specific contextual corner, we snap.  However, a question rarely asked in the movies is this:  how would humans act toward each other if society made them secure in their basic needs?  No worries about food, no worries about shelter.  Universal basic income.  Free education and healthcare, including mental healthcare.  

In this scenario, I am inclined to predict a tremendous amount of cooperation, fellowship, and kindness.  If you beat an animal it gets violent.  If you treat it well, you create a positive relationship.  

Kindness, too, can create feedback loops that reinforce kindness.    

Indeed, today’s therapists and psychologists have access to in-depth knowledge of techniques that foster “emotional competence”--skill at recognizing and working with one’s emotions.  What if everyone learned this skill as part of their basic upbringing, built into the culture?

Compare that to our upbringing today.  Violent rolemodels are the norm, at least for boys, who simultaneously are taught to divorce themselves from their tender emotions.  Shallow materialism actively seeks to create insecure, neurotic consumers who crave short term fixes through purchasing products.

What if all the energy--the money, effort and psychology--that marketing firms channel to make people unhealthy was redirected to engender health, both physical and mental?

If trillions of humans do someday exist across the galaxy, it will only be because we succeeded in advancing our ethics tech.  The ethics tech we have today is primitive and fatal.  Machismo and violence will lead to World War III, which will be the end of us.

However, if the trillions of happy humans come to be, they will be grateful to us for somehow making it through this dismal, barbaric time.  Their lives, after all, will be wonderful.  They might also shake their heads at our stupidity, our backwardness, and our folly, all the misery we inflict on each other and ourselves, including the worst of atrocities and genocide. 

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(1) http://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2023/10/op-ed.html

(2) https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2017/04/ignorance-as-capital.html

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This piece needs editing, but I wanted to get it up on Thanksgiving.   Given its length, I will probably edit it slowly over a number of days or weeks.  Thanks for reading.