The following is a rough transcript which has not been revised by The Jim Rutt Show or Rufus Pollock. Please check with us before using any quotations from this transcript. Thank you.
Jim: Rufus is an entrepreneur, activist, and author, as well as a long-term Zen practitioner. He is passionate about finding wiser, weller ways to live together. He wants his child and all children to live in a world of love, abundance, and wisdom. Wouldn’t that be nice? Rufus has founded several successful for-profit and nonprofit initiatives—unsuccessful ones too, haven’t we all—including Life Itself, Open Knowledge Foundation, and Datatopian. His 2018 book, Open Revolution, is about making a radically fairer and freer information age. Welcome, Rufus.
Rufus: Well, thank you, Jim, for having me. It’s lovely to be here.
Jim: So let’s talk about the arc of your development and your interests. Again, I could see it following my own arc to some degree, which is that at first, you thought information will make us free. As I mentioned, I started out in the online world in 1980 where I worked for The Source, the world’s first consumer online service. We passionately believed that more accessible and more accurate information couldn’t be anything but wonderful for citizenship. That there would be a renaissance of democracy and culture and everything else. And I suspect you had a similar view at one point.
Rufus: Yeah. I mean, I grew up actually on a farm, which is unusual, but I was very curious since I was a kid. I also quite early on had some kind of, I guess you’d say, social justice feeling. I didn’t get on that well on the playground. I actually realize now, later in my life, that I’m probably on the autistic spectrum. I wasn’t great at always getting on with other kids. And part of that though was a real realization. I do remember this kind of epiphany. I was about eight or nine. There was a kind of bully boy who was picking on the others—maybe me a little bit, but maybe others. I was like, well, if we all stood together, you know, this person would be powerless. But of course, I did not successfully persuade everyone to stand with me.
Really early on, I both wanted this aspect of fairness—like, the world was unjust in this way, maybe to me in some ways, obviously, as a child, but more like I could see it in the world around me. I remember seeing pictures of famines in the late eighties on television and being told about them at school. The part that also struck me was how did these deep changes happen? How did we have a world where there was no bullying in the playground? I started to think about these things even as a teenager, and I was also quite a keen student of history. So I had these two loves really intellectually in my life, which were mathematics and history. And both of them I feel are about patterning. I also love Ursula Le Guin—the master patterner in the Wizard of Earthsea, you know? This idea of patterning and of seeing the patterns of the world, not that they’re exact, not that you can exactly predict, but you can learn from them.
And so that was leading me really to look for things where there were long levers. What are ways of making society better that you can really have a lot of leverage on? And maybe mistakenly—and I kind of fell into it, to be honest—I got into information. Who owns the information age? You know, late nineties, early two thousands, the Internet had just arrived in a mass way. And who was going to own this world? How was it going to be regulated and controlled? I got into that. I got into activism there, and I got into starting the Open Knowledge Foundation. And long story short, I think there were some real successes, but I still believe in that work, so I wrote the book Open Revolution. And what I was seeing was maybe open knowledge does not make open minds, in a nutshell. It was like, okay, you could have all this information available, but does it actually make democracy better, or does it actually make a real difference societally without some shift in our consciousness, in our culture, in our institutions at some deeper level?
Jim: And I’ve pondered this question myself. Why is it that the world seems to have gone insane despite having access to the greatest thoughts ever thunk? You can pull down all the Greeks in either Greek or Latin or English or any other language you want. People have the ability to talk to each other in various granularities, and yet you look at our politics and our culture and it seems to have become substantially worse. And one wonders about that and wonders if some of it may not be some basic limits of human information processing—that we are overwhelmed with interrupts. Think about the hunter-gatherer days where we spent 95 percent of our evolutionary history, and there’s a certain amount of stuff going on. Somebody had to respond in real time. A jaguar jumps out in the bush, you better have the ability to do something about that. But you weren’t pinged with literally hundreds and perhaps thousands of interrupts per day. Do you want these cookies or not? And I suspect that part of the decay of sense-making has been just too many interrupts, irrespective of what the content is.
Rufus: Yes. I think that’s a really good point. What I would call sometimes the info-veganism point, which is just as we have too many calories in the form of sugar and processed foods and we were adapted for a world where there wasn’t much sugar to eat, similarly, we were adapted for a world where there wasn’t as much sugary information around, and we are kind of information obese.
I guess for me, you asked about my journey—I also quite early on got quite interested in psychedelics as a teenager, basically because I was reading a psychopharmacology textbook in the school library. For whatever reason, I was quite a curious child reading different things. I was not at all into drugs or anything like that. I read this book and it had this whole section on psychedelics, and I thought, wow, what’s that? I went and did more research—pre-Internet days, which meant you had to buy books. And long story short, I got quite interested also in consciousness and then in Zen and meditation.
I say that because that was the other side of the story for me. Maybe there was a little bit of a failure of what one had imagined would be the benefits of more information and so on—that we’d all be better, more rational, more sensible. But on the other hand, I had all this kind of teaching from Buddhism that even before the information age, humans weren’t nearly as rational as you thought. If you did meditation and you looked at your own life, it suddenly became a lot more present to me that I didn’t do what I really wanted. There were a lot of times, crudely, where I wanted to go to bed but I watched television, or I saw other people doing things, or just suffering. Classic examples where I would get into fights with people I loved. And normally, you do that and that’s normal as a human being. But as I started to practice meditation and at least read the teachings of Buddhism and others, it was like, oh, there’s this whole stream of wisdom tradition that is now getting connected with modern cognitive science, but which had taught the rider and the horse analogy—that the rational brain thinks it’s in charge, but actually it’s the elephant that’s really deciding what’s happening.
And so that was the other part of this, which was that the wisdom gap, as I would now term it, had been growing. We have these incredible technologies. We have these incredibly complex societies, but we still basically have stone age brains. We still have stone age minds. And how could we address that wisdom gap was becoming much more pressing to me in thinking about things.
The other thing I would say is that I always felt an awareness of history, which is actually very neglected, funny enough, in a technological age. It’s almost good to not know too much history because then you can be more bold—like, no one’s done this before, which was very helpful to me. So for example, you ask about what’s happening in the world today, and I actually think there’s a really useful analogy—not exactly the same, but an analogy—which is, okay, if you go back to the printing press, so 1450, Gutenberg is inventing a printing press, which is a revolutionary information technology that is disseminated to the world. Well, what you actually get in the sixteenth and seventeenth century is these massive religious wars in Europe, which the printing press may even have contributed to because it allowed Protestants to disseminate their ideas. And I think a little bit of what’s going on today is we have a civilizational clash on that magnitude.
It’s partly coincidental that that’s also when the information age took off, but partly not. And so just like the printing press and its usage was representative of the birth of modernity—and that led to a huge fight—you say a breakdown of sense-making. Well, imagine you’re in 1517. Luther’s writing his theses in the fifteen twenties. The whole way you made sense of the world for a thousand years had been that you listened to the Catholic church and you listened to the king, and suddenly people are coming along and saying, no, don’t listen to the Catholic church. You have to teach yourself literacy and read this book in English or German or whatever. You have to read the Bible yourself. That level of radical shift in the ground of sense-making is partly what’s also going on today.
And so I think there are these analogies in history, and those things can coincide. You can have something that’s changing economically and socially—like this explosion of potential, the printing press or the Internet—coinciding with this civilizational clash, which then leads to a lot of other stuff that seems to be regressive. Well, certainly we’re seeing that outcome.
Jim: And also, comparing the age of Luther to the age of today—there were ideas in play, but there were only a few. Today, you can tune into any formulation you want, from transhumanism to flat earthers to the manosphere to pretty much any nihilist. Anything you want is on offer. And so the problem of distinguishing good stuff from garbage has become more than exponentially more difficult than in 1520.
Rufus: I mean, if you go to the English Civil War in the sixteen fifties, you have this plethora of Protestant sects—from the Quakers to the Levelers. You got all of this stuff going on. I don’t want to compare it exactly. I’m just saying that humans have gone through these moments of bewilderment. And normally, part of the issue is that most of us don’t actually work everything out for ourselves. We have this huge trust apparatus. And for example, in the twentieth century, that reached its culmination in basically science and academia. The university, which is the great institution of modernity—around for almost a thousand years, really in its current form about eight hundred years—had reached this apotheosis. And rather than “in God we trust,” it was “in science we trust.”
And what you’re seeing in a way in the last thirty to fifty years is a bit of a disintegration of that, culminating in what we’ve been seeing. Now there are good and bad things about that breakdown. But what I’m saying is just like the breakdown of trust in the Catholic church in Western Europe, the breakdown in our faith in science and technology and rational bureaucracy also leaves us adrift, because we used to trust someone. I could listen to the chief medical officer. I could listen to the president. But people don’t really trust those authority institutions anymore, and then they’re sort of adrift.
That level of deracination—take away the roots, your basis of how you make sense—is very destabilizing. But it happens at these moments when there’s a real clash over where epistemic authority comes from. Where does knowledge come from? Where does true knowledge come from? Does it come from science? Does it come from religion, or does it come from somewhere else? These moments, which we’re going through right now as we reach really the end of modernity, are incredibly destabilizing. And it will take a while, I think, before the dust settles. Who determines who is a man? Is it science that says you’re male or female? Is it culture? Or is it myself—I decide I’m a woman or I decide I’m a man? Where does this epistemic and ontological authority come from? And we are in a highly pluralistic world as these things go.
Jim: There are no firm authorities that apply to everybody. And is that good or is that bad? That’s an interesting question.
Rufus: Well, I think—and I want to acknowledge the ancestors here—you yourself have talked about complexity science, but also the work of Wilber and the Integral tradition, which is a kind of distillation. Going back to Habermas, the world of complete plurality in views is not sustainable because we need to coordinate and have some ground for reaching consensus. And what we see without that is these bitter culture wars. The question is, how do we rebuild that? And how do we rebuild it not by going back to the simplistic certainty of modernity where there was science and reason and we just knew what was true, but how do we go forward into something richer that includes reason, that includes science, but at the same time allows space for the transcendent, for that which is transrational?
I think that will happen, but it could take years or decades for that renewal to happen, just as what happened when the Catholic church broke down. It took centuries before science came to basically dominate epistemically and take over from revealed religion. And even today, as we know in the United States, there are significant groups that still reject the epistemic authority of science—might be half or close to it—who go for creationism or something like that. So it takes real time for a culture to switch. We’re very early in really the takeover of postmodernism as a cultural form. And whether you like it or not—and there are many critiques of postmodernism we could talk about, of this issue of there being no ground to stand on—how do we build anew? How do we incorporate those insights, for example, of Buddhism or other teachings which go beyond classic science, but with science? How do we have a marriage of reason and spirit rather than simply rejecting one or the other?
Jim: Let’s go back to something you said earlier, which I think this is a perfect setup for, which is wisdom. To your mind, what is wisdom?
Rufus: First of all, I think wisdom is a capacity that is most manifest when you see it done. It’s like saying, what is it to ride a bike? You have to kind of see someone riding a bike. I’m going to give a slightly different answer and maybe start with a concrete example. The best version of what I mean by wisdom—and it is an analogy—is this guy Christopher Alexander, who is an architect. Do you know the Pattern Language as well?
Jim: Yes. And do you know The Nature of Order, which is the masterwork, the full volume? Yes, I have that book.
Rufus: Okay. So The Nature of Order—Alexander is trying to do something that’s really exactly an answer, by the way, to what comes after postmodernism. It’s a really good example because postmodernism infects architecture really early on. Architecture gets taken over by postmodernism, and Alexander is against that. And Alexander says some key things that relate to wisdom.
Let me just tell the story of Alexander, and I’ll answer your question. So Alexander says a couple of things. The companion book to A Pattern Language—because he has this series in the seventies—is called The Timeless Way of Building. And in The Timeless Way of Building, Alexander says something really controversial for the modern world and for the postmodern world. He says, in a way, beauty is real—or rather more precisely, wholeness and the living is real. There are spaces that have the quality of being more whole or more living compared to other spaces. And this is not a matter of opinion. Unlike modernism or postmodernism where taste is subjective, he’s like, no. Of course there’s subjective taste and differences and so on. But deep down, there are spaces and places we build—and also places in nature—that have this quality more or less of being alive, being whole, being free.
Jim: Flourishing. That’s the word I love. Flourishing.
Rufus: Exactly. And what’s beautiful is at the very beginning of The Timeless Way of Building, he lists out about nine qualities. He says no one of these is exactly this quality that has no name. It is a quality without a name. And you cannot name it, but you can point to it. And so he’s doing several things. First of all, he’s reasserting that value is real. This is a huge point both going beyond modernity and postmodernity. There is an up. The way I like to say it, there’s a mountain and there is up, even if we cannot see the summit. No one of us has truth. No one of us has perfect beauty, but we can feel things that have more of this quality or less of it. So that’s point one.
And secondly, he is incorporating reason. Alexander studied mathematics at Cambridge University. He got, I think, one of the first or one of the only PhDs in architecture from Harvard. But he’s a mathematician, and so he’s quite interested in using reason. He also enumerates these qualities of buildings that have this. But he also, in the final book of The Nature of Order, the fourth book, he says, listen, I have to be honest with you. I’ve gone through this whole book trying to prove, almost using reason. But I am also going to say this goes beyond reason, and there’s something almost spiritual—there’s a kind of ability to sense these spaces that have this quality that goes beyond anything I could write down or say.
So why does this relate to wisdom? What Alexander is doing is saying this is a quality that people who are skilled in this can create in buildings and built environments—this quality of wholeness and beauty. So similarly, wisdom has this thing. I think the key elements of wisdom are, first, you have valuception—you can sense the good. Now that can be talked about, it can be reasoned about, but it transcends reason. At some point, there’s a question of judgment that somehow—I don’t want to say it’s not spiritual, but it goes beyond language—of sensing what’s the direction of the good. Should I eat this piece of chocolate cake? I can reason about it, but there’s a sense deep down whether it’s good for me or not good for me.
The second quality of wisdom is the ability to do sense-making, to discern the direction to act towards that good. Like King Solomon—do I give the baby to that woman or that woman? What kind of actions would I take to discern the truth? By saying to this woman, hey, I’m going to cut your baby in half, and the woman whose baby it really is will say, no, no, give it to the other woman, and then he will know. So there’s that part.
And the third part of wisdom is the ability to act once you’ve discerned that path. So if you like, it’s this kind of valuception—sensing the good, determining the path towards the good, and then being able to act on it—a kind of ability of will or capacity. And that question of wisdom applies both to individuals, and it can apply to groups. You can go from collective intelligence, which I think has that aspect of sense-making. But what turns collective intelligence into collective wisdom is that ability to sense the good collectively and particularly act together towards the good.
That brings me all the way back. Where did this quest begin? I was obsessed with collective action problems. I went and became an economist. All of the issues I could see related often back to collective action problems—from the climate crisis to the way we did intellectual property rights in the information age, which was often captured by special interests. And the question was, how have humans gotten better at solving collective action problems? And they’ve rarely done it by having better information. They’ve done it by developing their collective culture to imagine a larger “we,” largely. They’ve started to think that I am the same as you—and you see this in very obvious ways where, as humans, we culturally hijack a genetic aspect, which is that I care about my brother and sister, to care about larger groups. So famously, the French Revolution—I’m going to address you as brother citizen or sister citizen. In monastics, you talk about this is my brother, this is my sister. Why do we use that language? Because in doing so, we use this deep genetic caring for kin to enlarge our area of care.
And that relates back into wisdom. How do you actually do these things? How do you become wiser? Well, that’s another whole question.
Jim: Yeah. I like that framework quite a bit. And I also like the fact that you’ve put action into the equation. I often, when someone asks me what wisdom is, just say quite simply, making good decisions. And I think what you add, which is good, is making good decisions in the context of a definition of up, so that the results of the decisions—or at least our intent of the decision—is to move up the graph of goodness essentially.
Then I’ll also add another thing. Both you and I are interested in complexity as a domain. And something I’ve added to my own perception of wisdom over the last three or four years is that the rational realm works well in the complicated spaces, but is much less efficacious in the complex domain. And when we encounter the complex domain, then we ought to delegate our decision-making to our intuitions. Our intuitions have been evolved for three and a half billion years to make good decisions under systems of complexity, and trying to force the rational into understanding what to do in the realm of the complex will often give you bad results. So for instance, on how to have a forest be healthy and rich and nourishing, I much more trust my intuition than I do some spreadsheet analysis on what the optimal food web ought to look like in this forest.
And learning how to—because now part of the error of postmodernism is to say, we’re not going to use the rational scheme at all. That’s crazy. Some of the more extreme hippie-dippie woo-woos say we’re going to do nothing but intuition. In reality, wisdom is knowing when to use what tool, when making what class of decisions, when confronted with what kind of systems, so as—I’m going to add your piece to this—to move upward in the goodness gradient.
Rufus: Exactly. And these points—I suppose one thing I’d say is that in order to actually do several of those things, both the valuception, both to perceive good, and often to have this intuitive skill, requires a certain cultivation sometimes of inner stillness or other things. One of the things I’m very inspired and influenced by is Thich Nhat Hanh and the Plum Village tradition. Thich Nhat Hanh is so fascinating because he’s this great Zen Buddhist teacher, but he’s integrating East and West. He’s also incredibly intelligent. He went to Princeton. He’s very curious. And one of the things I always found fascinating was that he went to Google quite a bit at some points and taught there—some of the Googlers were really interested.
At one point, I think this story is important: he is there and he’s saying, listen, we should put a mindfulness bell on people’s phones. They were like, what should we do for mindfulness? He’s like, well, you can install a notification bell. And the energy is like, oh, this is great. And they’re like, yeah, we’ll create an option for that. And Thich Nhat Hanh is like, no, no, no—not an option. It’s compulsory. And whether you agree with that or not, the point was that the engineers said, no, we can’t do that. People have to be able to choose. Thich Nhat Hanh says, what are you talking about? Most people can’t choose. He’s not saying I know better, but he’s saying, I can’t choose. It really takes deep practice and reflection—whether you’re talking about Buddhist meditation or any practice you’re doing—to really have clarity of choice, to really know what you want. That is actually really hard.
I can look at my life and think of how I’ve even spent years of my life doing things that I look back on and think, I didn’t even really want to do that. I spent years trying to become an academic. And when I actually left academia—I was a fellow at Cambridge for a while—I was like, oh my god, I’m so much happier. I should have realized I never wanted to be an academic. But I was like, well, it was my family or our society which told me, oh, it’s a really good idea to pursue that career path. That’s how I get value. And so to really see in our hearts, to really feel what is the good for ourselves, for our family, for our society, takes real stillness and clarity of spirit, I think.
And that’s why I also see this kind of integration, which is that that’s also true not just for the valuception, but it’s also true to use that intuition that you’re describing. When do I really want to use what skill? Who do I delegate my sense-making authority to? When do I need to be responsible myself for choices or understanding? These are very deep qualities that mix together reason, and in the best case, integrate reason and something that’s more than reason into something—a very special kind of quality that we could call wisdom, I think, at least in part.
Jim: Yeah. I like that a lot. Let me follow up because this is actually not even in my notes today. We’re going to go off to the wild blue yonder.
You mentioned how difficult it is to individually get these insights and make these kinds of structures in our brains. It’s true. Most people never do it. And I would suggest that culture, correctly thought of, is essentially a scaffolding for those folks who can’t, won’t, or don’t do it themselves—at its best. I mean, culture can be horrible. There was a Nazi culture. There was an Aztec culture. So there’s no guarantee that culture is good at all. But one can imagine culture being the shorthand for people to be able to just adapt, to be able to make wise decisions. Culture at its best.
And I do believe there’s insufficient attention to cultural construction in the social change world. Institutions on one side and individuals on the other. And in reality, culture is the sea that they both swim in. And it’s one of the reasons why in the Game B world these days, we’re strongly promoting the idea of membranes—build small pockets that have a different culture entirely than the outside world, and that culture provides a scaffolding for individual smart thinking and smart action that most people aren’t going to get to on their own.
Rufus: Absolutely, Jim. I think you’re right on several levels in these points. So first of all, it’s a base point that most of us are not very smart—not just like, you know, for the people who can’t. And this is something Joseph Henrich and many other colleagues now, this kind of emerging cultural evolution science that has been really emerging properly in the last twenty to forty years—I mean, there were precursors before, but it’s really showing that we’re not the smart ape, we’re the imitation ape. What really distinguishes humans is our ability to copy and imitate others, and therefore have this huge web of collective intelligence where often I’m not figuring something out really even by intelligence but by chance. But once I do figure something out, I can share that with others—whether it’s this food is safe to eat, or here’s a way to find water, or here’s a way to navigate something on your iPhone. So that point is really, really important.
And I think also at these deeper levels, culture is not only this kind of how-to. It’s also this worldview. What who do I go to? Who has knowledge authority? Who is knowledgeable in my world? Who should I listen to? How is the world basically put together? These are things that I would call worldviews, and which I say make up cultural paradigms. So when we talk about culture, we can often think, oh, there’s German culture, there’s French culture—they cook differently, they speak different languages. But at this deeper level, there are these core worldview assumptions that I use the term cultural paradigm for. Others use different terms for this, but they underlie, for example, are we fundamentally individuals or do we somehow really exist relationally? Where does truth come from? Does it come from God? Does it come from science? Does it come from somewhere else? These core assumptions, which most of us never even think about, are coming from our cultures.
So that’s point one. And then we could say a lot more about that, because what it leads me and others to be very interested in at Life Itself and the other projects is the central role that cultural evolution can play in civilizational shifts. We don’t have to wait for everyone to become a Buddha or really wise to have shifts, because there’s this aspect where culture is kind of downloaded as a child from what’s around you. If that changes, you can have a lot of change without me having to have done all the work myself. And most people aren’t going to do the work.
Jim: The history is that there are some pioneers that think it through, and then this new paradigm resonates with people and gets adopted. We look at the movement to Christianity as an example. Starts out as a little seed and it propagates because it’s attractive for various reasons in the context it lives in.
Rufus: Exactly. Or like women’s rights or slavery. We didn’t have to have lots of people sit down and go, I’m really going to think through whether there are certain people who are just naturally born to be slaves or whether everyone’s actually equal. Some pioneers could do stuff. They could persuade, maybe even initially the elite, and they pass laws. And then everyone’s like, yeah, I don’t think legal slavery is a good idea anymore. Or more recently, gay marriage—you have a very rapid dissemination of an assumption that a hundred years ago was ludicrous to most people and is now, I think, wonderfully widely adopted.
So what I’m saying is that, first of all, you’re right. There’s this huge shortcut that’s possible. It can obviously be hijacked in bad ways too, but that’s possible. The second point was about pockets—the membrane. And so this is something at Life Itself and with the Second Renaissance initiative we’re very interested in, because you’re right. New civilizational paradigms, new things—for example, to go back to your point about wisdom, what would a culture that was really able to integrate reason and the transrational really look like? It would have to have new systems of authority where, just as we say this person’s a really good scientist, we’d be saying, oh, this person’s really wise. There’d be networks of trust, of authority, and validation. That’s not going to emerge everywhere. It’s going to emerge in pockets where we get to a pioneer and something new possibly emerges—we don’t even plan it, but something emerges unintentionally or accidentally, and then it can spread. That’s really crucial.
And I think one of the things—and this is a bit of an aside—is a bit of an irony of late modernity. It’s something Christopher Alexander also talks about, funny enough, which is that we’ve gotten much more rigid. As societies decay—and it happens in the decay phase of many civilizations—everything gets very rigid. So for example, right now, if I want to set up my own school here in France, it’s really hard. If you want to go and build your own little village, it’s actually gotten really hard. There’s a lot of calcification. And so one of the challenges at the moment is how do we allow more space for cultural experimentation? And one of the difficulties is sometimes it will be abused. Some groups will do things we don’t like, but it will also allow space for a lot of things we could like. It’s a tough trade-off. But one of the things that I think is sometimes difficult for progressives to accept is that if we allow more charter schools or whatever it is you don’t like, it does allow for many flowers to bloom and for us to then discover things. Whereas if we’re very uniform and like, oh, it’s all going to be this way, we don’t see a lot of this experimentation that we could do culturally and societally.
Jim: I often refer to the idea of widespread membranics under coherent pluralism as a search in high-dimensional design space for how to live. And that is the one clearly good thing that came from the Enlightenment—to say, let’s be suspicious of arbitrary authority that tells us how to live the good life, and let us explore alternative ways to live the good life. In some sense, the idea of many, many membranes is an even more radical way of allowing multiple experiments with multiple knob settings. And then of course, we also talk about having a horizontal information bus so what works and what doesn’t can become more and more widespread. And like in many convergent evolutions, you may well see these membranes approaching each other in terms of how they define the good life. And it will actually in some ways tell us, is there a single or a small set of settings, or is there not? And it’s completely legitimate for people to live in different ways. So I think that’s a hugely important way of knocking up the conceptualization one higher level—that it’s a search in a space that we don’t know the answers to.
Rufus: Exactly. And this is something we have done at Life Itself—we want to think about that, and it’s important in our experience as well, how do we integrate theory and practice. So we’ve got these points here of like, well, we want to do more experiments. Well, like yourself, we have done several of these conscious co-livings. We’ve had hubs where people have lived for years or months in Berlin, here in Southwest France, in London.
I think one of the things just to emphasize again is that enabling that requires not only a kind of societal institutional allowance—so for example, The US is actually quite different in a good way in that it’s very easy to homeschool, but in Europe it’s very difficult to do homeschooling or to set up alternate schools. Those things really matter if you want to create a different kind of community. The other one is basically land costs and competition for land. To do these things, you might want to not operate in exactly the same economic system that we have today.
Let me get very concrete. Our experience of running hubs, where somewhere between five and twenty people might be living and experimenting with new ways of doing things—it’s quite difficult if someone’s having to work forty hours a week or more in the conventional economy, because that often doesn’t allow a lot of the time that they would need in the community to make decisions or just experiment with new cultural practices, relational practices. How do we solve conflicts in a different way? How do we start businesses in a different way?
And that’s a real issue. How do you create—maybe not financial freedom, but a hundred years ago, there was very cheap land in some places. Now land is very expensive. So people very practically have this challenge, which is I want to go and experiment, but if I’m still working forty hours a week in the conventional economy, it’s not going to go very well. So there’s this kind of tension. And so these are some of the things I think very practically at the moment that I think about—like, how could we enable this? So for example, it didn’t work out yet at Life Itself with others, but could you create real estate funds? You’d still own the land, but could you, for example, buy land and offer relatively low rents—so the yield on that is not classic real estate investment, but it’s still there—and then enable groups to start doing this?
Because if you look at why groups like this fail to start, it’s basically one is money, second is interpersonal breakdown, which happens before or after—and that happens in startups too. And I guess the third is a cultural thing—hey, you’re all hippies, are you going to all have free sex? No. You could do lots of other things in communities. So I think both of us have this real interest in having more of what I would call experimental pockets of coherence where people are trying out new ways of building businesses, living together, working together, bringing up children, being wiser. And we want to enable many more of those. In the moment, there are quite a few challenges, as I’ve seen over the last decade of our experiments with that.
Jim: This is an area of huge interest of mine right now. As we start moving Game B from theory to practice, I’ve delayed that move—or at least recommended people not try it, even though some have gone ahead anyway, almost all of whom have failed because they haven’t gotten those things right.
One of the shorthands I use is that a membrane has to work. And this actually comes from where I got the concept of membranes initially, which was by analogy from the origin of life. We believe life has basically three components: an information component encoded in DNA and then implemented with RNA; a metabolism, which processes energy and creates energy from raw materials and/or from sunlight; and a membrane to keep the concentrations high enough and regulated with the right concentrations for the other two things to happen. This is why the origin of life is still a head-scratcher. Did one of them come first? Some people say membranes came first. Some say metabolism came first. Some say the information processing came first. My suspicion—and I wouldn’t put a lot of money on this—is that the three had to coevolve together, that you needed them all. You need the membrane to get enough interactions to create both the metabolism and the information realm. You need the information realm to preserve the metabolism between generations. And you needed the membrane to allow the more complicated system to bring in its nutrients and expel its toxins. So it’s really hard to see how you got there unless all three coevolved.
And so anyway, that is how I came up with this idea of membranes as the basic building block of society. The other interesting thing about how Game B or another one of these alternatives might eventually take down Game A—it’s worth understanding that life, our life, descended from a single last universal common ancestor, which was not the first life, but was relatively early life. Every single bit of life on earth—a fungus, a tree, us, a bacterium—descended from this. So it’s possible that the idea of a membrane that can reproduce and can learn and can change could grow over time exponentially and become big enough to produce a tip in the social operating system.
Rufus: And I think the analogy is really good also. Just to think of it concretely, if you’re trying to create new cultures that would have these characteristics that, for example, we describe in the Second Renaissance project—what are the features you’d like to see? I’ve described this wisdom, an ability to integrate theory and practice, an ability to maybe go beyond the individual and the collective, somehow integrate the individual and the collective. All these features. You need a membrane. You need some way of the group retaining coherence. Normally that involves, do we eat together? Do we have rituals of some kind together? Do we practice whatever our inner or outer practices are together? Then there’s the energy—if we’re not able to generate enough food or money, whatever the equivalent is of energy in the system, well, we’re not going to be sustainable. And many groups on the hippie end fail on that front. They’re not pragmatic on that front. And then there’s, as you said, the final one of information processing. Can we learn? Can we exchange information and so on?
I think these are really, really good points. One of the things I think is interesting is if you think of the last wave of intentional communities, it ended up being quite postmodern and dominated by the eco-village, which has been amazing—there are wonderful things about that. The eco aspect is a strong sign of the postmodern vision. But the next stage, I would like to say, is conscious villages—villages in which the inner dimension and this balance of reason and the transrational, the integration of these polarities, is really happening. That’s crucial.
And that’s also my experience so far—it’s often the shadows that we have personally and collectively, our lack of inner development in one way or another, my ego, which gets in the way of a lot of the experiments more even than the energetic problem of money. Without that kind of practice, that’s what really stops us. And so I think this aspect of moving to creating the membrane, like you said, almost first—the relational work. What am I doing to be able to look at my shadow? Oh, wow, Rufus, when I was a kid, this is what happened with my mom. My mom wasn’t around when I was a little kid, and so I’ve got this attachment issue, and therefore it plays out all the time. When everything goes wrong, I’m like, I don’t need anyone, I’m fine on my own. When of course I’m not. Those are the things that blow up collaborations and communities quite fast in unresolved conflict.
So if we can find ways to practice that, if we can create developmental spaces, if we can create places where we’re really cultivating these capacities and these new practices and experiments—they may also involve technology, they may involve just relational and cultural things—but if we can be innovating, discovering, and sharing, there’s real potential for breakthrough here.
Jim: We have codified this as the personal-institutional spiral. One of the things many of us have noticed is our friends go off on forty-two-day retreats, and they come back much more even-tempered and philosophical and all this. And six months later, in the cubicle farm at the insurance company, they’re pretty much back to where they were. And so if they don’t have the scaffolding around them every day that sends them signals that doing the right thing is the right thing, then they’re going to revert. Maybe two or three percent won’t. And fortunately, we have those two or three percent of hardheaded people who are willing to undergo the change on their own and don’t give a damn what the world thinks, but those people are rare. That’s not how Homo sapiens evolved. We evolved to be very well attuned to what our neighbors think of us—the status game, etcetera.
And so as I’ve been thinking about this more and more, it seems to me that there is no either/or answer. It’s got to be both more or less simultaneously. And when you talk about the institutional side, you talk about institutions that support the good work from personal change. And then further, once you have some personal change—just to your point about failure modes—you can now build different institutions because you have different kinds of people. If you have people that are still 98 percent conditioned on Game A status games, it’s really difficult to get real collaboration, especially when it comes to hard work and dirty stuff. You have to be able to change how people think about themselves and the status games they’re playing, as well as the institutions that then take advantage of those changes to scaffold even more individual change. And if you do it right, you get an upward spiral. And I would argue that Game A, particularly in the last fifty years or so, has been on a downward spiral. Our institutions make us worse as people. Being worse as people allows us to be co-opted into even worse institutions, and down we go.
Rufus: Exactly. I mean, in the metacrisis diagnosis, there are these three layers. There’s the human nature layer—we have some deep cognitive biases, we have ego, we have greed, the state of competition. And we also have good things. There are also good seeds of love, compassion, care. And then there’s a cultural paradigm level above that. And that cultural paradigm can basically, as you say, water or encourage some seeds or others. We can have a world where we’re encouraging greed, or we can have a world where we’re encouraging compassion and responsibility. And then we have the institutional and technological lever of markets and states and AI and media systems. And those three things are inter-causing and interrelating and co-evolving. But what we really need, as you say, is for human flourishing to start flourishing—we’ve got these three co-evolving domains of the inner, the cultural, and the institutional, and we need them to evolve together. I mean, this is very Integral-esque, if you like. But yeah, big plus one.
Jim: Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. Now you mentioned—and I was considering skipping it, but I think it would be interesting, particularly in the context of what we’ve been talking about so far—is that yourself and your collaborators have done an interesting job of attempting to differentiate between the poly crisis and the metacrisis. You want to take a whack at that?
Rufus: Yeah. It’s really simple. And first of all, the point of having these definitions is not some kind of philosophical dance-of-angels-on-the-head-of-a-pin debate. It’s in order to actually help us understand something important. And you brought one example—like, what is happening in the world today? Why are we witnessing an inability to address the climate crisis? Why is there the culture war?
I think the analogy I find most helpful is thinking about the early days of the HIV epidemic. What would happen is people were showing up with multi-organ failure or multiple illnesses. They might be seeing, hey, they’ve got an issue with their lungs, but they’re also getting pneumonia, and then there’s this other thing going wrong. And the early understanding was, what’s happening? And this is a bit like the poly crisis. We see the climate crisis interconnecting and exacerbating migration issues, and then migration is leading to wars, and then war is leading to more problems, and there’s drought, and there are these multiple factors interrelating. It’s very complex or even complicated. And that’s what I would call the poly crisis. There are multiple interacting crises. And they are interrelating and they are causing each other and so on.
And that can miss the underlying cause of what’s going on. The danger is that when you’re on that top level, it’s just a bit overwhelming. I mean, it’s like, what am I going to do? Yes, I get that climate change is making droughts, which is causing wars, which is causing refugee crises, and then that’s making climate change even worse because there’s no state able to implement things. Climate change causes migration. Migration causes right-wing quasi-fascist politics, which then rejects climate change.
Jim: Right. Exactly.
Rufus: And that is a valid point, and it can then just be overwhelming. Where can I intervene in this system? And also it’s a world where everything kind of causes everything else.
The metacrisis—okay, that’s correct. It’s like AIDS and HIV. So the insight was like, oh, there’s this virus underlying, which is causing all of these different things. It’s causing the immune system to be weak, which is then leading to all of these different breakdowns in your body, which then are interrelating. But the story of the metacrisis—and there are different people who define the metacrisis in different ways—the way I would say it is what makes a metacrisis is that it’s a crisis layered down at the civilizational operating system level. And that operating system is the core worldviews and values that underpin a lot of the institutions, a lot of the ways that we do things, and there’s a crisis there. And that only happens about every five hundred or a thousand years.
Basically, there’s a point at which modernity is coming to an end. Modernity has been on this huge rise for about a thousand years from what was before modernity, and now it’s basically dominant in the world. But modernity is decaying. The systems that are core to modernity, like modern classic science, have been hugely successful. The modern state. And the core assumptions of modernity—rationalism, individualism, secularism, egalitarianism, and so on—these core assumptions have been amazing. They are great. And in the kind of endgame, the light becomes a shadow. So for example, one core thing of modernity was progress, particularly material progress, which was amazing. And it’s now eating the planet. Similarly, rationalism was great. But if you only think that there is narrow rationalism, then you destroy the forest. You don’t understand complexity science. You don’t really understand the need for intuition. You don’t understand the importance of meaning and purpose to human beings. We’re just atoms bumping into other atoms.
So there are these real limits. And so, to the point about the metacrisis—oh, there’s actually this HIV virus, there’s this underlying causation of all of these other factors. And we need to go down and address that, and that involves cultural evolution, that involves a paradigm shift in our civilization. So rather than running those banners which say even “systems change, not climate change,” what we really need to say is “worldview change and systems change, not climate change.” And if you don’t address the worldview, if you don’t address these invisible assumptions—often for most of us—about how the world works, where truth comes from, how we should act, then you’re going to really fail in addressing the crisis we face. So that’s the metacrisis in a nutshell: the metacrisis is a poly crisis where the issues, the roots of them, go down to the civilizational operating system worldview level.
Jim: Very good. I’ve been talking a fair bit with Brendan Graham Dempsey, and he’s done a lot of thinking and writing about worldviews. He is now saying—which I think is interesting—let me back up a little bit. Breitbart, the publisher, long since dead, used to say politics was downhill from culture. And part of that was the strategy of the right-wing culture wars—spin up culture, then get control of politics. Brendan has added to that, which is that culture is downhill from worldview. And so worldview may actually be the best lever to try to move, which then implies a culture, which then implies a politics. Does that make sense to you?
Rufus: Yes. I mean, what I call worldview—I would agree on what so-called worldviews are. These are core assumptions. Like, what’s real—ontology? Does God exist or not, probably? Where does truth come from—assumptions about epistemology? Does truth come from the church? Does it come from scientists? Does it come from some inner sense of myself? Do we all make up truth ourselves in a postmodern way? And the third one, classically in core worldview, would be basically morality or ethics. What do I value? What’s important? Is it honor? Is it success? Is it finding my own truth and being authentic to myself? Is it evolution in my consciousness and in my society? What’s most important to me?
And those things—I’m using the term civilizational paradigm. The way I think of it, maybe an analogy with fire and animals: there are lots of different kinds of mammals. There are dogs, there are cats, there are us, there are elephants, but they’re all mammals. They all have some common feature that makes them part of this part of the evolutionary tree. Similarly, you have a lot of different cultures—German, French, American, Japanese, Nigerian, Ukrainian, Australian indigenous.
Jim: We’ve got some fairly different ones.
Rufus: Right. We’ve got some very different ones. What I’m saying is they can share kind of paradigms. And so roughly in the world today, there are about three or four basic paradigms. Most countries, at least their elites, are running on a modern paradigm. Some countries are running on a premodern paradigm—for example, Iran, classically, coming from God and from a representative channeling the truth of the prophet. And then you have postmodern societies—there are a few Nordic countries maybe. And then you’ve got some indigenous societies that might be even pre-premodern in various ways. And by the way, it’s important to say these are not necessarily better. It’s not like being postmodern makes you better than being modern. Just like, is it better to be a human or an elephant or a bacterium or an ant? It’s not obviously morally better to be a human than an ant, but they are different places in the evolutionary tree and maybe in terms of complexity.
And so what I think—absolutely, what Brendan’s referring to—I would say worldview is a characteristic of the civilizational paradigm at this level below. So France and Germany and America and even China actually share a lot of the current worldview assumptions of modernity. They’re secular. They don’t think the state should be run by a church or something like that. They are, even whatever you think of communism, generally individualistic. They’re generally rational. China’s got a lot of technocracy, so does The US. They both look to scientists for authority and things like that. So this kind of point—exactly, culture, like French or German, and other things are downstream of civilizational paradigm, which is itself poorly anchored in this worldview of what we value, what’s real, where truth comes from.
Jim: Alright. I’m going to put a hardball to you. What would you suggest as a worldview for what comes next?
Rufus: Well, we actually set that out on the Second Renaissance website, which is our best effort at trying to set out a vision in an accessible way. One of the things here is these ideas are mainly coming from other people—from even from you, Jim, from Wilber, from many other ancestors who’ve contributed. But basically, there are five features compared to modernity. So you can even compare them.
So you go from reason to wisdom to the transrational. You go from material progress to, I guess I would say, cultural evolutionary progress. You don’t care so much about more GDP. You care about growing in some sense of what it means to grow as a human being. That includes wisdom, but there are other ways we grow. And we have a lot of evidence now that that’s possible even in adulthood, that we don’t just stop growing—not just physically, but we can grow in a way. You have Kegan, you have all this work on ego development, on inner development that we have now over the last fifty or sixty years. It’s really quite recent work showing how we can evolve as human beings in ourselves.
Then you also have, I guess, going beyond—I would say beyond capitalism and communism—to a new kind of economic system. What that exactly looks like is more uncertain, but I think actually open source and information is intriguing in this way, because you have for the first time in human history that the main thing we make is costlessly copyable. So we could combine the need for innovation and reward with a kind of free sharing. There are ways to combine that. So that’s three aspects.
And then we’ve got going from individualism to interbeing. What is it to really recognize the deep interwovenness of each other and of nature and the living beyond human? How do we recognize and respect that? How do we act from that in a much more collective way, but without going back? We’re not trying to go back to become ants or even pre-modern tribes. We’re not trying to dissolve back into the collective. We’re trying to take the autonomy and the individualism that we have created or evolved or developed—the individuation that Jung talks about over the last millennia—there’s a huge victory for humans that they’re not given by their village. If I’m different, I’m probably going to be killed or expelled. That I can be different, that we can go beyond patriarchy and go back into a more collective model away from the hyper-individualism that we’ve ended up in.
And again, Thich Nhat Hanh, who’s the person who came up with that phrase “interbeing” that many people speak to—it’s also like Thomas Steininger and Elizabeth Debold and many others who’ve worked on emergent dialogue and other practices that really allow us to see how could we keep our individuality but come into a collective space together, where we really can kind of enter a collective field where we really are somehow becoming one in a way, but without merging in some kind of weird way back into the goo of the collective or the communist nightmare. So that’s another one. Individualism to interbeing.
And finally, going beyond secularism. I think this is the most controversial, you might say. But I think humans need something that looks like a religion. Now in modernity, that religion has kind of become capitalism and rationalism. We worship science. We just released a white paper called In Tech We Trust, whose subtitle would be “technology is god.” And if you look at what we’ve done with technology—it’s going to give us eternal life, it’s what we look to to give us the truth, it’s what we dedicate our purpose to. We’ll go to Mars. The purpose of our lives is to build, to go take over the solar system or the galaxy with von Neumann probes. With AI, we’re going to upload ourselves into the machine.
We need a religion, but the issue is we need a religion that is nondogmatic and non-oppressive and that’s pluralistic, that allows for plurality and difference. And we need that to come back into society in a more rigorous way. We want to allow for a big dream, a big vision. Because without that, we perish. There’s actually a line that we have in the Life Itself manifesto, which is from Proverbs: without a vision, the people perish. And the truth is one of the reasons we’re in the situation we are today is that we have been without a vision. Since God died two centuries ago in the West, and communism—which was a disaster in many ways, but communism was the kind of dream, the utopian dream—died fifty or sixty years ago. Very few kind of progressives really believe in classic communism anymore.
Jim: Some. Including the Chinese, by the way.
Rufus: Well, no. They’re really just fascists. They’re not really communist anymore.
Jim: Exactly.
Rufus: But my point is that we’ve been left bereft of a real vision for transformation. I think this is one of the things that, again, I would credit Wilber and others from the Integral movement with—Wilber’s point, and we call it ontological politics, which is not a great name, but the politics of being. Which is, once we see this possibility that you’re also describing in Game B—you and your colleagues—which is we can evolve as a society ontologically and institutionally. That is a dream worth giving our lives to. So suddenly, you have something. Now it’s not a naive communist dream of like, oh, we’re just going to seize the means of production and then hold hands and walk into the sunset. No. It’s not easy, but we can transform ourselves. We can transform our societies. We’ve done it before.
We once had our lives ruled by the divine right of kings. We lived in a world where if I was a peasant, my lord could come and sleep with my wife on my wedding night, or could take from me or torture me or dispossess me. We lived in a world where if I questioned the truth of the church, I was executed or tortured or expelled. That world has been transformed. That is a miracle. And miracles in that sense can happen—we should believe in utopia. And that’s why we call ourselves at Life Itself pragmatic utopians. We want to have a big vision, which we have now, that we can see that we can evolve our culture and our consciousness and our institutions. That is a dream that evolution can keep happening and can take us forward. And we need to be pragmatic about it and rooted and grounded.
Jim: Now a question, maybe a challenge. If the vision is to build a better society, for what purpose? I’m full of this tension. If we don’t get through the next hundred years, it doesn’t really matter what our longer-term vision might be as humanity. But it strikes me that from the big-picture arc—say the equivalent of going to heaven and living forever in the presence of the Almighty—producing a better social operating system seems like pretty small potatoes.
Rufus: Well, I think there are two things to say. I’m going to be straightforward. I’m a Buddhist, and my own personal experience—what I love about Buddhism is Buddhism really practiced for yourself. There is both this ability to have kind of self-transcendence. I mean, maybe I’ve only had tastes of it in my life so far, days where I’ve dwelt in that kind of space. But I think this is something Wilber really nails, which is there are two directions of, if you like, the developmental space of humanity and of consciousness. Human beings are multidimensional. Just like I could run really fast and I could be really strong—but I might just be able to run fast and not be strong—similarly, I can wake up. I’m going to use that term, which again comes from the Integral tradition, but I can wake up to my true nature and my liberation in the Buddhist sense. I can go to Nirvana in this world, in that sense of transcending the self, the three doors of liberation—selflessness, emptiness, signlessness, going beyond concepts, and aimlessness, going beyond trying to attain anything. And I can evolve my worldview and my society. And those two things are related but interdependent.
So there have been Buddhas and there have been enlightened people, you will say, for millennia. And society’s evolution, worldview evolution, and technological evolution is distinct from that. You know, Buddha lived in a world where he almost didn’t let women ordain as nuns. Even Buddha was like, well, I’m going to allow untouchables to become monks, but I’m not going to allow women. That’s an example where you could be enlightened but still be given by a worldview of your world where women just weren’t allowed to do these things. So we can evolve in both dimensions.
So if you ask what I would say as an aspiration for humanity—for me and for my own life—it is to wake up and to make an awakening society, which is one in which people are waking up and pursuing their own inner evolution in all of these different dimensions. At least waking up and growing up—waking up to my true nature and growing in terms of my level of compassion, my worldview, and so on to the maximum extent. And that evolution of society never ends. We don’t know where we could be in a thousand or a million years.
And I think one of the limits of us today is if you read science fiction, even positive science fiction—so you read Iain M. Banks, the Culture series—he can’t really imagine that we have faster-than-light travel. It’s like Star Wars. You can imagine lightsabers, but you can’t imagine that Darth Vader got therapy. You have these things like Iain M. Banks—all these people, they’re doing stuff, but it’s kind of like us but with lightsabers. We can’t imagine what it would look like to actually transform our culture. Not that we’re pessimistic, we just can’t imagine it. Many of the people in the Culture stories, at least as human beings, are still quite petty. They’re quite naive. They’re not very wise. So what I really want to imagine is a world of real sages, that we could be real sages and really joyful and happy at an unbelievable level in a way. But not because we’ve got some AI pushing our pleasure buttons, but because we have woken up to our true nature.
Jim: But I’ll come back to it. Then what? What do we do with that?
Rufus: I think one is that the mysteries of the universe are vast and great. And just continuing the deepening of our understanding—and I would even say, not just understanding but comprehending, our feeling into the magnificence and greatness of the world. I think the other is—like the Bodhisattva vow—we don’t want to stop until we try to alleviate all suffering of all living beings. We want a world where—and by suffering, I don’t mean pain, there might still be pain in a world of learning—but suffering is alleviated. So we’d like a world where, and then why not to infinity and beyond? Why not go for the light cone? Sure. But I think you want to have worked out where you really want to go, whether you really want us to expand, what is really wise for human beings.
And right now, we’re almost killing ourselves because of our inability to stop, because we always want more. We want to know more. We want to have more. And I see this even in AI, just as a side moment. Certainly in the last few months—I’m a coder—what you can do with AI is amazing. It’s kind of mind-blowing the last two or three months. There have been moments I’ve been staying up to 4 AM coding again when I haven’t done that for a long time, and I can see the grasping in me. I can see that what could easily happen—let alone superintelligence, but even with these tools—I would just want to do more. I wouldn’t be satisfied. I’d just be like, okay, now I could do more, now I want even more. And that energy has to be transformed before we can actually even know where we want to go in the universe or what we want to offer.
And I think there’s also a humility. For me, the world is deeply alive and consciousness is not just located in my head. The mysteries of our world are pretty deep, and I think we’ve only scratched the surface of what those are. And so, yeah, I mean, I would hope that in a thousand years, one of the things is that we are able to go slowly and wisely, for example, when we develop new technologies, rather than rush forward at whatever pace we can despite the risk to ourselves and the living.
Jim: Yeah. And AI is a perfect example, which I’ve been pondering a bit and talking to people a fair bit about. In fact, I have a weekly call with some of the AI industry insiders talking about these things. And from the perspective of the arc of the universe, whether humanity reaches artificial superintelligence in 2028 or in the year 2100 doesn’t matter.
Rufus: No. What matters is we make—actually, yes. And if we took our time,
Jim: our chances of blowing it are much, much smaller. However—this is one of the two or three central Game B analyses. This one from Daniel Schmachtenberger, which he got from Scott Alexander—the Moloch idea, the multipolar trap.
Rufus: These are collective action problems. These are exactly arms races, which are old, old problems.
Jim: Yeah. And let’s just apply this directly to the AI situation. I see it as three nested multipolar traps which drive AI. First is OpenAI wants to beat Anthropic, and Google wants to beat both of them to make more money—or just frankly for the ego of Sam. I think Sam is more interested in ego than he is in money, probably, though he likes money too, obviously. So that’s number one, but it’s only number one.
Number two is in a financialized capitalist society, all companies are constantly in competition for investment capital. The pension funds, the sovereign wealth funds, the mutual funds—they’re all trying to optimize return. In fact, they’re even more psychopathically oriented to increasing return than the companies are, because that’s all they have. They don’t add any value other than return. They don’t build anything. They don’t do anything. And so there’s an intense competition at that level which forces even more optimization from the companies because they’re competing for the capital one level up.
And then the third level that applies to AI for sure, and to some other technologies but not all, is the geopolitical multipolar trap. How many times have I heard, including from some very smart people—I don’t know, wise people—well, if we don’t do it, the Chinese will, and we can’t let that happen.
Rufus: I came from an economics background, and I’d also done policy activism around intellectual property—I’d done floor fights in the European Parliament that I actually won, which is very, very rare, to reject the software patents directive in 2005. So I’d seen from very early on—and even as I said from being a nine-year-old—collective action problems. This was my obsession in a way. And this is also what led me to cultural evolution. Because if you ask yourself, well, how in human history have we solved collective action problems like this? What has been the engine of our cooperation? Well, the kind of deep answer is there have been these deep cultural changes that have happened. And I think the most common engine of them—not the only engine—has been war. So basically, the intergroup competition—classic evolutionary biology now, and I think Peter Turchin sets it out very well, he’s got a book about this—it’s certainly the case that when groups are competing, obviously if any given group can cooperate better internally, that makes it better, particularly at fighting, but a variety of other things. And this is what you see tested through lots of stories through human history—the Athenian hoplites who had to stand together to fight the Persians or whatever.
And so what that leads to is normally some stories—like either what we value in a society as being loyal or brave or things like that. Or in Christianity, other stories where basically there’s some large group of believers that you’ll go to heaven if you do these things. And we have had these incredible cultural evolutionary breakthroughs, including in the modern state. One of the breakthroughs in the French Revolution was they could raise an army like never before. Previously, no peasant really wanted to fight for the king that much. I mean, you could force them and you could pay mercenaries, but there were limits on the size of your army. Suddenly in the French Revolution, I’m a citizen. I’m fighting to protect the revolution. And so you could have this levée en masse, the largest armies ever put in the field before, and that’s also a big engine of democracies. It’s hard to fight for a dictatorship, or at least traditionally it was—nationalism.
So why do I say all of this? The true answer—it’s a difficult answer—is there aren’t really a lot of shortcuts. It’s why our podcast is called Over the Mountains. Because there’s this moment in The Lord of the Rings where they’re like, hey, we need to go to Mount Doom. Do we go over the mountains? And then there’s this big problem. They’re like, oh, there’s a shortcut. We’ll go through the halls under the mountains. And of course, it’s kind of a disaster. And in normal books, by the way, it would have been game over. Gandalf was taken out by the Balrog. It would have been the end of the series, but of course he’s resurrected. But what I’m trying to say is we, at this moment, tend to be desperate for shortcuts.
And there is an answer, which is we have had breakthroughs to new levels of human cooperation. And that has happened, and it can happen in this case where we could see the need for humans to really come together at a planetary level. It’s the next level of human cooperation. We’ve gotten to the state level, but we need to go another level to the level of the planet as a whole. The difficulty has been that normally groups have gotten bigger by fighting other groups—The US versus the Chinese or the Russians or whatever. And at this point, we can’t do that anymore.
Now the one irony about AI—and I don’t want to demonize AI—but the point I would make is AI is an other. And if people were to say, oh, this is a threat to humanity, it could be the one thing that would unite people. And I don’t in any way joke, but I would say at the moment, tragically, given the state of humanity, given our current levels of wisdom, almost the best thing that could happen is there’d be some AI error in The US and China fairly simultaneously that led to some significant accident. And that would be a catalyst for cooperation on AI regulation and other things.
But that very simply has almost been my journey—from saying, okay, I care about making the world better. That leads to collective action problems. Most ways of making the world a lot better that aren’t just capitalism and markets involve collective action. And then your question is, how have we gotten better at collective action in human history? And the answer is we have created a larger “we.” We have gone from the small group to the tribe, to the mini-state, the bigger state, and so on. And that is what we need at this moment in human history.
Jim: Alright. On that relatively hopeful note, any final things you want to say today?
Rufus: I mean, I haven’t mentioned the Second Renaissance much at all, but if you’re interested in these things, the Second Renaissance project—I think that can be linked maybe in the show notes—secondrenaissance.net is where a lot of this vision and these ideas are, and it’s a project that’s initiated by Life Itself but collaborating with many others to try and start this kind of movement. And the name is just to try and make something accessible, to say we need a civilizational renewal on the scale of the last Renaissance in the West. And this is not Eurocentric. It will happen all over the world in different places. We need that.
And I guess this is a point both of darkness—there’s the metacrisis, there is this aspect that we are facing very profound risk and challenges, most obviously because of this wisdom gap, because our technological powers have so exceeded our ability to manage them. And those powers put in danger ourselves and our planet and the living. And at the same time, there is hope. Why we call it the Second Renaissance and not the metacrisis project is because renewal and regeneration is possible, and there is hope. And it does take us to come together like never before, both at the local level in creating these pockets—these membranes of renewal—and at a kind of global level, almost interwoven and simultaneous. And that’s the dream of my lifetime and for my children and for others here at Life Itself.
I know I’m today representing Life Itself, and I should say there are many others involved, including my cofounder Sylvie and Liam and others. But yeah, this is what we are dedicated to. And please come join us. That’s not just us, but the others. There are others now acting on these things. You are not alone if these things resonate with you. Come and participate. Come and join in. Come and take action. The time is now.
Jim: Well said. Rufus Pollock, I really want to thank you for an extremely interesting conversation today.
Rufus: Oh, Jim, I’ve loved it. So much appreciation to you, so much. Also, acknowledgment to you and other colleagues at Game B and the other projects. You’ve been real ancestors of what’s happening at the moment. So thank you so much for that, and contributors to it and actors right now in it. So yeah, real love to you and to everyone else in this kind of community.
Jim: Well, thanks a lot.