The feeling of disenchantment, deep-rooted malaise, and a certain nihilism-lite are thick in the air. You see and feel it in the way people talk about their personal lives, work lives, online lives, the economy, politics, and more.
People crave something different, but they don’t know what it is. In my estimation, “The Great Malaise,” as I now call it, has spiritual, philosophical, existential, and religious dimensions. At the heart of The Great Malaise is a total loss of meaning and existential bearing. The vibes are most definitely off, and people are noticing it.
I’ve observed an increasing number of people writing about the rotten vibes everywhere—it may well be the damn algorithms. Some of these are of the naive yearning for a magical past kind, but most aren’t. They are thoughtful articulations of things that have gone off the rails. This week, I came across a few such thoughtful posts.
The first was an almost eschatological post by Luke Burgis on the need to build things that “elevate the human experience.”
The three city problem has led to a strange blurring of the lines. Religion has entered into academia; politics has entered into religion; innovation has entered into everything. Athens, Jerusalem, and Silicon Valley are communing in ways not fully understood. But we should strive to understand. The consequences of not understanding the metaphysical assumptions and commitments being formed in this new environment are grave on both a societal and personal level.
And yet we have to build—we have to build things that truly matter, not things which merely amuse us or make for a good VC exit.
The second post was by the awesome Ted Gioia. The intro to this post on how to read Plato is brilliant. It seems to me that there’s a rapidly growing sense of disappointment that technology is not an unalloyed good.
When I say rapidly growing, it may be from a very low base, but people seem to be questioning the attention-for-dopamine bargain they’ve made with technology. This is another factor contributing to the deep-rooted feeling of disenchantment I mentioned at the beginning of the post.
Maybe Plato was right when he said that all things aspire to the good.
Or maybe something good is stirring in our culture at large. More people are starting to rebel against pre-fab culture by corporate mandate.
Maybe the humanities really is coming back, as I (and others) have predicted.
People are clearly hungry for an alternative to the intensely rationalized and techno-bullied tone of contemporary life. They want something deeper than algorithmic feedback loops and regurgitated chatbot chatter.
Am I dreaming? I don’t think so.
Pair this with another delightful post from Ted:
He sees the hunger people have for a wisdom and nourishing that algorithms and devices don’t provide—but the humanities can. This is the real crisis in humanities, and it’s reached a boiling point.
I don’t travel as extensively as Dana, but I hear the exact same thing in my online dealings with people. They want something that the tech can’t provide. And the manipulative dysfunctionality of their tech devices only raises the intensity of their craving for a humanistic alternative.
This disenchantment with tech can be seen in the fact that a small but growing number of people seem to prefer dumbphones. If I had a penny for every time I heard the term “digital detox,” I would be a thousandaire at the minimum.
Itay Dreyfus wrote a good post on the trend of divorcing smart and embracing the dumb.
In The Creative Act: A Way of Being, Rick Rubin ties the success of art to numerous factors. One of which I really like is the mood of the culture. A piece of art cannot succeed without suitable market conditions.
And it seems the mood right now is to run away from screens.
No discussion about “the great malaise” is complete without a discussion about the concept of “progress.” Underlying our feeling of disenchantment is a sense that the glorious future that was promised never arrived. Despite all the “progress” that humanity has made on several dimensions, including health, wealth, safety, human rights, and knowledge, a great many people think that we live in the worst of times with no sight of the best.
I’ve long been fascinated by this paradox—the duel of fates between optimism and pessimism. I also tried articulating my thoughts on hope vs. despair in a previous post. Anyway, one of the most thoughtful and articulate defenders of the idea of progress and its virtues is Jason Crawford, the founder of The Roots of Progres. Jason is writing a serialized book called The Techno-Humanist Manifesto, one essay at a time. In the book, he aims to lay out a philosophy of progress.
He published the first essay, and whether you agree or not, it’s thought-provoking:
And more: we need an inspiring vision of the future to motivate the effort and strife that progress requires. Science, technology, and the economy require continual investment, and each new generation must receive and carry the torch. Inventors and entrepreneurs of the Industrial Revolution were motivated by the power of steam and all that it could be applied to; those of the late 19th century were enthralled by electricity; the scientists and engineers in the late 20th century who went to NASA had grown up on Star Trek. If we are to make progress today, it will be driven by technologists who are fascinated with the potential for technologies such as artificial intelligence or genetic engineering. We must believe in the future in order to build it.
Fear and skepticism of progress put us at risk of stagnation and decline. The defeatism that arose in the 20th century about the challenges of progress does not give us a way forward. We need a new philosophy of progress for the 21st century, and beyond.
Pair this post with The many reasons for our declining productivity
As disconnected as all these posts might seem, I think they are all talking about one aspect of the overall problem: people are increasingly feeling unmoored. I’m utterly fascinated by this phenomenon, and I’ve been researching it for a while now. I don’t know enough to write about this issue, but it’s something I hope to write about in the future.
Henrik Karlsson is one of my favorite writers, and this is another brilliant post by him:
When you go deep, probing the assumptions, looking from multiple angles, and reformulating things in your own words, the ideas become part of you. This is one of the reasons why I write. When I unpack things fully, the ideas become objects that I can rotate in my mind. The subconscious can draw parallels that it can’t if the ideas haven’t been thoroughly unpacked.
There is a line from Oscar Wilde that gets at this, when he says that to write well, all you need to do is develop your mind and then write what you see. If you have thought deeply, nearly everything looks interesting.
Are people too flawed, ignorant, and tribal for open societies?
The amazing Dan Williams with another brilliant post on the challenges that open societies must deal with to avoid going off the deep end. This isn’t just a post about democracy but it’s also about the collective psychological kinks that make humans do weird things:
It is tempting to think that such advocacy can co-exist with objectivity. On this view, people would maintain a distinction between what they privately believe, which is oriented towards accuracy, and the claims and narratives they are motivated to spread as a way of promoting and justifying their tribe’s interests.
In practice, this rarely happens. Instead, it is a general feature of human psychology that people’s beliefs—including their deepest, most heartfelt beliefs—tend to shift in the direction of the claims and positions they advocate for. That is, humans tend to believe their propaganda. This is true at the level of individual self-serving biases; it is equally true regarding claims and narratives designed to mobilise support for one’s coalition, defend its reputation, and discredit its rival
In the post, Dan quotes Walter Lippmann:
“There are few big issues in public life where cause and effect are obvious at once. They are not obvious to scholars who have devoted years, let us say, to studying business cycles, or price and wage movements, or the migration and assimilation of peoples, or the diplomatic purpose of foreign powers. Yet somehow we are all supposed to have opinions on these matters.”
This reminded me of a thought provoking post from Amos Wollen:
Like I said, I’m not voting this election. My general take on voting—my least popular political take, but one which very politically informed people seem to like—is that uninformed know-nothings shouldn’t vote. This includes me, and most of the United Kingdom.
Why shouldn’t the uninformed vote? I claim that everyone has an individual civic duty not to vote if they’re uninformed about public policy (barring cases where the election is so morally cut-and-dry—e.g., the Chainsaw-Wielding Murder Party vs. the Meek and Mild Status Quo Party—that normal public policy considerations like housing, trade, and foreign aid melt into insignificance).
Welcome to The Omnicause, the fatberg of activism
Gender, environment, Gaza: they’re all the same, even though LGBT people live under the threat of death in Palestine, and I haven’t heard too much from Hamas about the environment. According to The Omnicause, they’re all magically connected. It’s the fatberg of causes, and the fat gluing them all together is Western narcissism.
The View From Nairobi-Washington
Now that increasing revenues from taxes has been taken off the table, cuts to government spending will be even harsher. Debtor countries are forced to make terrible choices between debt payments and food provision, energy and social services. They often prioritize debt payments so as not to risk the ire of creditors, and to retain the existentially important ability to raise US dollar-denominated debt from global bond markets.