How The Hell Do We Keep Losing Psychic Wars
And why civilization doesn't get to hold on to its victories
You see me now, a veteran of a thousand psychic wars
I've been livin' on the edge so long where the winds of limbo roar
And I'm young enough to look at and far too old to see
All the scars are on the inside
I'm not sure that there's anything left to me
The best song about the state of our collective consciousness in 2020 was written by Michael Moorcock and Eric Bloom in 1981. It’s called Veteran of the Psychic Wars, and if you haven’t heard it — treat yourself! There is no avoiding the Psychic Wars anymore. You are fighting, I am fighting, and we are currently losing, as I’m sure you’ve noticed. Classic liberalism — the idea that people with different convictions can have productive conversations and work together — has been replaced by hyperpolarization and purity checks. The Internet, a tool which allows everybody to have a voice, has somehow morphed into a radicalization machine. Capitalism, the best way of lifting people out of poverty, has been subverted to prioritize rent seeking over innovation.
Don't let these shakes go on, it's time we had a break from it
It's time we had some leave
We've been livin' in the flames, we've been eatin' up our brains
Oh, please, don't let these shakes go on
Throughout history we’ve made these incredible advances, but we just can’t seem to hold on to the ground we gain. We haven’t lost any of the tools — we still have the scientific method, Bayesian thinking, instant worldwide communication, incredible art mediums, open source — but any ground we gain in the Psychic Wars, we slowly lose over time.
Who are these “We”? I’m not talking about any kind of movement with a name — no named movement can keep its purity for decades, let alone centuries. There were some of us in the French enlightenment, in the hippie circles in the 60s, online in the 90s. Today you can find some of us fighting the bureaucratization of science, designing cryptoutopias, working on AI safety or even just pushing back against the rising level of vitriol on social media. We are the people In Favor of Niceness, Community, and Civilization.
We’ve always had the intellectual and technological edges — and yet… And yet we keep losing. How the hell do we keep losing? There’s only one way to explain it:
We’re not playing bloody chess here.
In every area of the struggle, you have an opponent, so it seems to be a standard game like chess. In chess, there is a winner and a loser. Sometimes you even get to finish a game. But if you take a step back and look at the larger picture — this game is nothing like chess. We’re playing tower defense.
For those unfamiliar with the genre, you build a base with some towers that shoot at enemies storming your gates. At some point the enemies will overwhelm you; the objective of the game is to last as long as possible.
There is no winning for us. The enemy we are fighting is not whoever is currently attacking the thing you care about — it’s entropy. Systems trend to disorder without more energy. When you build something nice, it may seem that you are only fighting those who presently object to you building nice things. But also you are entering a war with the unforeseeable future, the myriad of ways in which others will seek to subvert the thing you build for their own ends, general decay, and the future cultural context, which doesn’t even exist yet, but which will be used to discredit you. What that amounts to is this: we can build nice things, but we cannot keep them. Whatever ground we gain will be taken away by chaos, corruption and decay.
You ask me why I'm weary, why I can't speak to you
You blame me for my silence, say it's time I changed and grew
But the war's still going on, dear, and there's no end that I know
And I can't say if we're ever
I can't say if we're ever gonna be free
This sounds pessimistic on the surface, but I think it’s better parsed as a huge relief. By realizing that victory is impossible, we can set goals that are attainable — goals that we can achieve and feel happy about, instead of continually banging our collective heads on the unyielding wall of entropy, feeling like we’re constantly losing. What are the attainable goals in this tower defense world?
Pick a battleground where you have an advantage. F.A. Hayek got it when he spoke about money: “I don’t believe we shall ever have a good money again before we take the thing out of the hands of government, that is, we can’t take them violently out of the hands of government, all we can do is by some sly roundabout way introduce something they can’t stop.” Similar principles apply everywhere. Individuals are agile; corruption is heavy. We are inherently ahead in everything new, and behind in everything where corruption and decay have had time to seep in. Know this when picking your battles.
Build something cool! Don’t expect it to be the end-all. There is no end-all. Don’t expect it to be perfect — everything we build will be tarnished in time. But we do get to build it, and it gets to be AWESOME for a while. Relish it while it lasts.
Realize once it’s built that you need to play defense. Few of us get to build things. Fewer still get to build more than one. Realize that whatever you build is going to be washed away by the tides of time, but that you can reinforce it and make it last — at least through your lifetime. Prepare for every eventuality. Make it as resilient as you can — it won’t make you win, but it might make sure you never live to see your creations lose.
This is the step that people most often forget, so please, please keep it in mind. With time, without realizing it, most of us switch to The Other Side. We don’t mean to, but we become comfortable, rusty, and static. We dampen things around us. Pete Townshend, of The Who fame, summed it up the best: when his bandmate confessed that he doesn’t understand rap, Pete replied “It’s not our job to understand it. It’s our job to get the fuck out of the way.” There is a saying that science progresses one funeral at a time — make sure that young people aren’t blocked by waiting for yours.
You see me now, a veteran of a thousand psychic wars
My energy's spent at last and my armor is destroyed
I have used up all my weapons and I'm helpless and bereaved
Wounds are all I'm made of
Did I hear you say that this is victory?
Just discovered your blog, and particularly enjoyed this post. I personally think a lot about antifragility and how to build it into systems and lives to maximize long-term gains, but this feels like an interesting counterpoint to the Inevitable March of Progress. Maybe there's an argument to be made for focusing on short-term wins.
It should be noted that part of the point of liberalism is stability, because it's supposed to lower the stakes of disputes. (This idea is described on several Slate Star Codex posts, e.g. part 2.5 of https://slatestarcodex.com/2013/10/20/the-anti-reactionary-faq/ and part 3 of https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/02/23/in-favor-of-niceness-community-and-civilization/ .) However, the basic idea you're describing, that entropy makes an entirely stable system impossible and makes it difficult to preserve any system in the long term, is clearly true.