We don’t want to go back to the way this was. After all, we can’t imagine that sort of life. Our ancestors could cause they did the same thing as their parents which was the same as their parents and so on. Every path forward has risks and dangers. It always has been this way. But we know with certainty that the current trajectory of the result is really going to hurt without some sort of course correction. Today, there is a choice. Perhaps the answer is a middle road. Not to go back to the way things were and not to stay on the path we are on. To go in a new direction with something that is recognizable but new.
As we slowly strip away inconvenience, we also lose the part of our lives where we find joy and meaning in the struggle. There is no personal satisfaction in heading straight to Go and collecting 200 dollars.
Values are subjective, personal, emotional, and arguable. We can debate all day about what kind of values humans should share.
Principles are completely different. Principles are objective, factual, and self-evident because they are indisputable in nature. Principles are what we can point to and should all agree upon as the basis for building values.
If you want to prove yourself right, you can find the information to support the claim. We don’t have an information shortage, what we lack is a way to interpret it.
If you want are open, however, to be wrong, you are now opening the door to learn something new.
If we don’t believe there is a path to fixing the climate then we just accept the outcome.
If we don’t believe there is a path to making things better, then we just accept things as they are.
Without a path forward, we stay put.
For most of human history up to this point, everything made was custom. The Singer Sewing machine at that time was perhaps the most complicated item mass-produced. Every part of the Singer Sewing Machine, every bolt, every nut, every gear, was all custom-made. This meant if it broke, you had to recreate that nut used from that particular machine. There was no such thing as interchangeable parts. Screws were not universal. Nothing could be mass-produced until there was standardization in place. This all changed in the mid-eighteenth century when a French artillerist named Jean-Baptiste Vaquette de Gribeauval was experimenting with ways to make artillery parts interchangeable. By standardizing how cannons and shells were produced, The Gribeauval System changed the course of history by assisting French armies in the French Revolutionary War and Napoleonic Wars. Honoré Blanc, a French gunsmith, saw what Gribeauval was doing and applied the same techniques to muskets. When Blanc tried to convince the craftsman to try standardizing production, he was met with resistance. Craftsmen and manufacturers were skeptical about the process and even more worried that if standardization could work their jobs and future would be in jeopardy.
So Blanc eventually meets none other than Thomas Jefferson who immediately sees the potential of this process. Jefferson tries to recruit and relocate Blanc to the U.S. who turns him down. Instead, Jefferson eventually came back to the United States, lobbied for the idea, and secured the funding with George Washington’s stamp of approval. Before you know it, in 1798 a contract was issued to Eli Whitney for 12,000 muskets to be built under the new system of standardization. Interchangeable parts were born.
For hundreds of thousands of years, human beings survived as hunter-gatherers. Small tribes roam the land to forage and kill their prey to survive. Then about 12,000 years ago, dubbed the Neolithic Revolution, was the first time agriculture began to pop up. Arguably, the first massive demonstration of human being’s existence investing in a future not yet realized. The phenomenon of agriculture has been argued up and down about why humans began to farm. In fact, discoveries in this field have shown that farming made human life much more difficult than hunting and gathering. One of the leading ideas of why humans would do this is simply that they didn’t make a choice. After a few generations, the choice had already been made. You were born into farming and so you became a farmer. This is the power of lock-in. That once we have established an order of doing things around here, we fall in line to reinforce the status quo. The friction to change is too great and so you stay with what you know and what you got. It is what our biology has programmed us to do. To fit in with the culture and the people around us, to seek approval from your parents and peers. This worked for a long time and, as author Jared Diamond has famously pointed out, human history looked something like this:
- Humans invent a new technology such as farming.
- Which leads to an increase in food supply.
- Which then leads to a spike in population.
- Which then leaves some humans to live a more comfortable life.
- Which would lead to exploration, technology, or trade.
- Which would increase the spread of viruses and bacteria.
- Which would increase immunity.
- Which would lead to a spike in population.
- Which would lead to more guns, germs, and steel.
This is obviously oversimplified but you get the point. As technology grew, so did food supplies, and as food supplies grew so did populations which would lead to more of all these things.
Deregulation and the financialization of capital since the 1980s have run their course for 40 years and now we continue to see one financial crisis after another. This is nothing new throughout human history. We have seen this play out over and over again. The difference was that we saw these play out over 500-year cycles and now we are seeing multiple collapses in less than a couple decades. Money, like most concepts, is just an invention of our imagination. A promise that we can all agree upon. It is no different than these symbols on this page. When we put them on paper, it means something because we all agree it does. We can imagine different things. But the power lies not in just those that maintain the illusion of control but with the power of lock-in. The longer we hold on to the systems of old, we harder it will be to change things. This is why we continue our reliance on things such as oil and gas products, even though we know they pollute the planet.
This is the heart of the contradiction of being human. There are things that are totally true and cannot be proven. The paradoxical nature of our existence. We can show with equations what and how things work that directly contradicts how we perceive the world around us. In 1955, Einstein had written a letter addressed to Michael Besso’s family, a dear friend of his, after his death. In it, Einstein wrote:
“Now he has again preceded me a little in parting from this strange world. This has no importance. For people like us who believe in physics, the separation between past, present, and future has only the importance of an admittedly tenacious illusion.” —Albert Einstein, Condolence Letter, 1955
I take comfort in the fact that what we don’t know far outweighs what we do. So much so, we don’t even know the right questions to ask. The answers to our greatest questions will forever be out of reach. It doesn’t mean that humans should stop exploring. We just need to accept that the tension of knowing the secrets of the universe will never be fully understood and to focus on what we do know and what we can understand to achieve a life of meaning.
Author, James Carse, wrote an important book in 1986 called Finite and Infinite Games. In it, Carse points out that there are two types of games that human beings like to play. There are finite games and infinite games.
We play finite games all the time. For example, when the car next to you is racing through the intersection to beat the red light. Soccer is a finite game. And so is a presidential election. These would all be an example of a finite game. There are three distinct characteristics of finite games. You play finite games to win, they are made to end, and they have boundaries.
On the flip side, you have the infinite game. The purpose of the infinite game is to keep playing. You don’t play to win. When you throw a ball to your four-year-old, you don’t throw it as hard as you can so they will quit. No, you throw the ball to them so that they will throw it back.
Democracy, Capitalism, Nuclear Arms Races, and Climate Change are all games based on scarcity. They have played as a zero-sum game meaning if I win someone else has to lose. It has been played like a finite game for centuries. Not because we have to but because of the rules we decided to play with. Finite players will seek power while infinite are mastering self-sufficiency. Finite games in nature also “theatrical, necessitating an audience” while infinite games are “dramatic, involving participants.”
Carse wrote, “The infinite game—there is only one—includes any authentic interaction, from touching to culture, that changes rules, plays with boundaries, and exists solely for the purpose of continuing the game.“ Some rules in our culture are important in the sense that they enable humans to be human. Speeding through a school zone is against the law because of culture we decided that it is worth slowing down in areas where children tend to congregate. We don’t want dead kids. At the same time, we can bring our humanity into the system, the rules don’t need to be spelled out for every situation that arises—only when we understand which game we are playing.
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