Motus Mentis

I’ve just run across a Twitter (okay, “X”) thread so remarkable that I’m going to unroll it for you right here. The principals are Emmett Shear, a serial Internet entrepreneur who has just been selected as CEO of OpenAI, and a science-fiction author by the name of Devon Eriksen.

How did I come across this? Well, I had just noticed an interesting post by someone calling himself “Altistoteles”, so I went to his profile page, which turned out to be an engaging collection of images and commentary by someone who clearly appreciates aesthetics and culture (I am now following his account). As I scrolled down the page, I saw that he had recommended a post by someone else called @shekfu (AKA “Shrug Life”), who had seen the thread and felt it deserved wider attention. Which it does.

So, settle in, folks. We continue below the fold.

It started on Christmas, when Shear posted this:

Im not against inheritance for children with wealthy parents.
Im in favor of inheritance for every child.
That might take spreading out say half the inheritance money each year more equitably, which seems fine (modulo enforcement).

(“Modulo enforcement”! It would be difficult for us not to notice that we are in the presence of a first-class technical mind: just the sort of expert we need to get our troubled society back on the rails.)

Aware of the importance of providing precise technical specifications for engineering projects, Mr. Shear completed his breezy redesign of our ancient traditions as follows:

If the United States took 50% the total inheritance and spread it out evenly among all ppl turning say 25, that would be $61k to each person. A far more equitable start at life for everyone, easy to administer, manifestly fair.

Easy to administer! Manifestly fair! You have to wonder how we could have missed this obvious solution throughout all of American history, but then again, we haven’t had any Silicon Valley “Thought Leaders” until quite recently, which explains it, I guess.

(At this point, one Jeremy Stamper jumped in to say “this is evil” — which of course it is. But hold on: this gets much, much better.)

Now along comes another poaster calling himself Fedaykin Reepicheep (@muaddweeb, and also well worth following; I’ve just done so):

I don’t understand why there is always an appeal to “fairness” when we discuss taking someone’s lifetime of earned money and giving it to someone else they didn’t want to give it to.

Emmet Shear responds:

Where do you think property comes from? Does it exist in the natural world, or is it a creation of government force?
Say I own some land — who says I own it? What’s the basis of my ability to exclude others from it, others who have made no agreement w me?

Enter Devon Eriksen. I am combining a linked series of posts beginning here.

Away we go:

How is this man being selected as the CEO of OpenAI, however briefly, when he is still groping in the dark, struggling to understand even the most basic of concepts behind his own civilization? Has it never occurred to him to wonder why hunter-gatherer societies don’t have a concept of personal land ownership, but agricultural societies do? All of the human technology stack is based upon investment. Not merely in the modern, financial, sense, but the investment of effort.

If I am a protohuman, using a stone as a pounding tool, I do not care if you take my stone. I will simply pick up another stone. But if I chip my stone into a spearhead, then I will not let you take my spearhead, because that would take away the effort I have invested.

From the moment humans gained the ability to build and farm, land became something they could invest effort in. And land ownership became necessary so they would do that.

All of the bullshit ya’ll think is so important: governments, laws, philosophical principles about rights, etc… these are all just tools, possible means of protecting investment. It doesn’t matter what set of tools you use, so long as they work and investments are protected. If a man can be certain his investments will not be taken away from him by parasites, thieves, and robbers, he will invest. If he is certain that they will, he will not invest. And without that investment, you have nothing. You are literally a wild animal, living as wild animals do.

If you don’t want that, you need the concept of property. It doesn’t matter where you say it “comes from”, whether that be god(s), “natural” rights, abstract philosophical concepts, whatever. And it doesn’t matter how you enforce it, whether it be laws, police, and courts, armed property owners, a high-society where people are conditioned not to steal, or all of the above. What matters is that somehow, some way, people get to keep and benefit from what they invest in. Because the alternative is universally unacceptable to us: reversion to a non-technological state of existence.

It does not matter what justifications are used for property rights. We can just make them up. In fact, that’s exactly what we did. The point is that we need to.

Because if Elon Musk cannot own Tesla, and Tesla cannot own land for a “gigafactory”, and someone else cannot own a lithium mine, then no self-driving cars for you. So long as we use land to produce the things we want, we must have a process for ownership of land. Otherwise, the whole tower of Jenga blocks falls down.

So the answer, @eshear, to the question “where do property rights come from?” is

WE. MADE. THEM. UP.

Because we needed them. And if we disassemble them again, we will have literally no civilization. No tech stack.

So make all the moral arguments you want for communism, or communism with extra steps, or whatever the hell it is you are arguing for. The rest of us MUST reject those arguments. We have no choice, no matter how attractive you make them. Because heeding them ends, has always ended, will always end, in disaster. Every attempt made in history to tamper with property rights has ended in disaster.

Now along comes “Nicest Snog” (@Insect_Song) with an attempt at an objection:

You’re arguing against something other than what he’s saying. You both agree that property rights are a social construct, and should be designed with a utilitarian lens, aimed for maximal human flourishing.

What’s left is a technical discussion of what that looks like.

Eriksen, with really admirable succinctness, brushes this away:

No.

Smart people disagree ON societal design. Wise people disagree WITH societal design.

Wow! That’s pretty good.

Meanwhile, one @dwightcrow has responded to Eriksen’s opening salvo, in an attempt to defend Shear:

smart people can disagree on societal design – it’s a high dimensional problem with many optima. I also despise communism. that said, I know @eshear and he’s an incredibly smart, thoughtful dude – if you’re dismissing any of his ideas completely you may be missing something.

Eriksen responds to @dwightcrow — from what I’m sure was a completely unexpected angle — with one of the best posts I’ve ever seen on Twitter :

Crow defends Shear’s idea by saying that he is a “smart, thoughtful dude”.

If you defend an idea by saying its author is smart and thoughtful, you reveal your underlying assumption that bad ideas come from stupid or thoughtless people.

That’s not so. Stupid or thoughtless people don’t have bad ideas for what Crow calls “societal design”; they have NO ideas.

The really bad ideas come from smart people.

There are hidden traps in certain IQ levels, and the largest and most dangerous one is “I can design a better society”. People fall so in love with their own intelligence that they get seduced by this one great-sounding idea they have for fixing everything or making everything better.

It is that category of idea that ends up getting millions of people killed and collapsing entire civilizations.

Everything works on paper because you assumed that people are rational actors, or that everyone has perfect market knowledge, or that prices don’t carry information, or that the chicken is a sphere (to make the math easier).

But in practice, kaboom.

People with ideas like this are doubly dangerous precisely because they are so intelligent. They are good at making just-so stories that sounds workable, and they are good at convincing others that their ideas will work.

And decades later, people are wondering why insulin costs as much as a mortgage payment.

See, society doesn’t advance through policy. It doesn’t advance with big central plan from a really smart guy, executed by hordes of minions all marching in the same direction. It advances when some dude decides to try something on his own, and 99 times out of 100, he blows himself up or goes bankrupt, but that other 1 time, it works and everyone imitates him.

All of this is why you get a lot of socialists between IQs of 115 and, say, 135. It’s not because socialism appeals to the intellect. It’s because socialism appeals to the intellectual. It presents him with the prospect of a ready source of centralized power that he can harness to solve all of society’s problems with the power of HIS massive brain and brilliant ideas, and then everyone will oooh and aaaaah over how smart he is, just like mom did when he was 7 years old and he solved a difficult math problem.

Policy ideas tend to come from people who put lots of points into intelligence and charisma, but used wisdom as a dump stat, and consequently they can understand the concept of Chesterton’s fence, but they’re also oh-so-very-good at convincing themselves that it doesn’t apply here.

So, to make myself crystal clear:

Socialism isn’t just an example of a bad idea in societal design. It is a bad idea because societal design itself is a bad idea.

At this point it was hard for me not to start pounding the table. Hear! Hear!!

I was reminded of Churchill’s words to the Royal Society of Saint George, in 1933:

Historians have noticed, all down the centuries, one peculiarity of the English people which has cost them dear. We have always thrown away after a victory the greater part of the advantages we gained in the struggle. The worst difficulties from which we suffer do not come from without. They come from within. They do not come from the cottages of the wage-earners. They come from a peculiar type of brainy people always found in our country, who, if they add something to its culture, take much from its strength. Our difficulties come from the mood of unwarrantable self-abasement into which we have been cast by a powerful section of our own intellectuals. They come from the acceptance of defeatist doctrines by a large proportion of our politicians. But what have they to offer but a vague internationalism, a squalid materialism, and the promise of impossible Utopias?

I’ll confess that I had to look up the phrase “dump stat”. According to Wiktionary, it means this:

dump stat (plural dump stats) (roleplaying games) A statistic (of a player character skill or other property, etc.) where a poor value is accepted in order to allow for improved statistics in other areas. Charisma is a common dump stat for players who want to give their PCs better strength or intelligence.

Okay. At this point Shear’s legs are getting a little wobbly, but he’s still trying to keep his hands up:

You’re accusing me of socialism, when I’m advocating for a 3% overall tax increase plus redistribution. I’m not sure you’ve actually understood the scale of the proposal…again, details matter. I even agree tax burden is overall too high and I’d be down to cut other taxes.

At this point the curator, Shrug Life (@shekfu) interjects with some color commentary:

Novelist guy [that’s Eriksen] is not having it. No you’re not going to backtrack, what you said needs to be not just rejected but broken and set on fire and launched into space, which is what the novelist’s reply does:

Eriksen moves in again, sweeps away Shear’s block, and lands this mighty wallop:

Emmett, Emmett, Emmett.

I’m not “accusing you of socialism”.

I’m pointing out that you just articulated the single most Bolshevik idea ever suggested since an unemployed German intellectual, living off das kapital gains, wrote a book demanding that all investors should be murdered during a mass armed robbery.

This your idea:

Every family farm, seized by the state.

Every family business, seized by the state.

Every family home, seized by the state.

Serving the greater XXXX County area since 19XX? Not anymore, seized by the state.

Dad’s rifle collection, seized by the state.

Grandma’s wedding ring, seized by the state.

Every single person’s life work and legacy, seized by the state.

You just seriously suggested that all society’s wealth, every last scrap of it, flow not from generation to generation, but to the almighty state.

You have NO idea what would happen if this was tried or even suggested in the halls of legislature with any seriousness.

Nah, you just said to yourself, “Hey, I built a video game streaming website, how difficult could restructuring of all human society to run counter to its most basic biological drives be?”, and you actually opened your mouth and seriously suggested giving the state 100% of everything, and making it everyone’s parent.

Just another function for them to handle while they’re not busy bombing the third world to pad Raytheon’s bottom line, surreptitiously dosing Americans with LSD, or setting fire to churches full of children.

What could possibly go wrong?

Look, since those of us who didn’t max out charisma and use wisdom as a dump stat are a little bit tired of playing Statist Whack-A-Mole, where you come with insane apocalyptic suggestions for implementing totalitarianism at a faster rate than we can point out their downside potential, I’m going to put the burden of proof where it belongs… on you.

Prove this wouldn’t end in disaster.

Prove you can make this work as a voluntary program, before we allow you to even suggest it as the law of the land.

The internet estimates your net worth at $100 million. That should be enough get started. Buy a huge chunk of land somewhere and build a city. Allow people to voluntarily come and live in it, and to voluntarily leave at any time, under the condition, that if they die there, you will inherit everything they own and redistribute it to a bunch of strangers’ kids.

Run this city for five generations, not only without going broke or turning into a bloodbath or a ghost town, but with a clear history of outperforming free markets in the arenas of wealth building and technological growth.

Go for it. Put some skin in the game, instead of just sitting on the sidelines and using your wealth and fame to promote insane and terrifying ideas for destroying the lives of us ordinary people who are just trying to scrape together enough to play the bills and get by.

I tried to tell myself to be nice. I really tried. But you are sitting there casually suggesting dystopian nightmare scenarios with the puppyish enthusiasm of an out-of-touch elitist who truly thinks he can move the peasants around like chess pieces and they won’t, you know, get mad or anything.

This is people’s lives you are talking about. Their legacy. Their entire life’s work. Literally.

And you have just proposed taking it away from them at gunpoint, and are now wondering why the response was so mean. You are completely unprepared for the hell you would unleash if this idea were taken seriously by the political class.

Does it seem to you like I am speaking dramatically? I hope so. Because I am trying to impress upon you that this is not a game. These people you are proposing to rob are actual people. They have hopes, dreams, ambitions, inner lives, friends, families.

They are not here for your amusement. Or to run little experiments with.

I hope you are just an autism-adjacent smart guy who lived in life in a wealth bubble and used wisdom as a dump stat, rather than an actual sociopath.

But, for your own sake, I am asking you to try to imagine how you sound when you casually suggest destroying millions of people’s lives, then play the victim when the response is a slightly mean tweet.

If being called clueless and out of touch hurts your feelings, imagine how other people feel when they’ve worked all their lives to create something for their kids, and you propose to take that away from them, to take it away from their children? At gunpoint?

What do you seriously think Middle America would DO if that actually happened?

Shrug Life again:

Then this chick pops up who is also an insane wordsmith apparently and asks good questions, warranting further explication by the novelist and also he keeps bringing the hammer down on CEO guy [Shear] who has long since blocked him.

“This chick” is one Bella Rudd, who offers this brief remark:

lmao, wondering if estate taxes are bad bc they make successful people (esp those w kids) rabidly opposed to taxes/gubmint in all cases.

(more importantly, devon is a great writer, you should read his novel, & emmett is cool whether or not you agree w him)

Eriksen, his opponent now crumpled at his feet, addresses the audience:

The problem isn’t Emmett in particular. It’s the entire culture he comes from.

Autism adjacent techie nerds who managed to make millions or billions off a website without ever seeing Middle America or what’s happening there are confused.

They start to move in elite circles, get lots of attention online, and they start to think about how society should be ordered to maximize some sort of vague goodity-ness.

And then their brain just treats this problem like coding a website for streaming video games. You make up a really smart plan, and write the code, and all the little components execute the code, and some new feature is added, increasing the amount goodity-ness in the world. Yay!

But societies aren’t made of components waiting for instructions. They are made of people, who have their own goals and needs. And laws aren’t computer code. They don’t make people do things. Instead, they send men with guns to kidnap people and lock them in a concrete box for years or decades.

And autistic-adjacent nerd boys who were born into the investor class don’t fully realize that. Their ability to identify with others is already stunted, and they simply cannot empathize with people they can’t see. So they say really wild stuff about how they want to change the javascript of society to add this or that feature.

It’s no different than the conversations they had in Harvard or Yale or MIT, usually while high: “Bro, like, what if we just took children at birth, and randomly assigned them to different families? Wouldn’t that end racism?” They’re not literally contemplating tearing an infant from his mother’s arms. They haven’t thought that far ahead. They’re just slinging the shit with their bros.

But when they leave college for the Silicon Valley tech bubble, it doesn’t feel all that fundamentally different, but it is. The difference is that if and when you hit it out of the park, business-wise, people, especially other powerful people, start to regard you as not only a grown-ass man, but a leader and a thinker whose opinion matters.

So when one of them, still high on the same weed he was smoking in college, says “let’s take away ALL the inheritances, put them in a big pool, and distribute them evenly”, and other autistic tech nerds listen and discuss the idea, then certain people on the other end of the country, inside the Beltway, start to rub their hands together gleefully, and drool a little bit.

They’re not autism-adjacent. They are psychopath-adjacent. They just want to get their hands on all that money, and if midwest farm families get dragged off their land by National Guardsmen, hell, that’s a bonus, because that right there is their pornography. Paying some of the peasants minimum wage to beat, shoot, and kidnap the rest is what they get off on.

So they love it when naive public figures start to experiment with totalitarian communist ideas. It normalizes these ideas. And if that happens, they are waiting to pounce.

Emmett Shear, in person, is probably a perfectly nice kid, if a little wet around the ears. But when he started playing with dynamite, it was necessary to quickly intervene. Humiliating him wasn’t the goal, just a necessary side effect. After all, he suffered a lot less than an orphaned 19 year old being dragged out of mom and dad’s house because it now belongs to the state.

Hopefully, in the future, he will learn to read the room, and not suggest utopian authoritarianism in the very decade that Middle America is disenfranchised, despised, and bleeding from the pocketbook because the political class has been robbing them since before they were born.

But that’s not the goal, either. The goal is to make insane totalitarian nonsense embarrassing to suggest.

Now put all that in a rhyme if you can.

And to wrap it all up, Bella Rudd obliges:

fine, fine:

there’s re-distributionist schmalz,
but implementation appalls!
as public choice theory
might seem rather dreary
whenever utopia calls!

And… curtain. The house lights come up.

But — wait! Our novelist takes the stage to address the audience once more, and to remind them of the moral of the story:

Are you a Silicon Valley super-magnate with a billion-dollar fortune, or appreciable fraction thereof?

Were you born into the investor class, with red-carpet access to Ivy League universities, and plenty of family and social circle seed money to build your business once you graduated?

Did learn entrepreneurship and business management at your parents’ knee from the moment you understood the concept?

Do you feel a vague sense of existential guilt because you realize that the world is full of talented people who didn’t get the chances you got?

DO. NOT. ADVOCATE. COMMUNISM.

Instead, see a therapist.

You could also endow some charities and scholarship funds and stuff, but most importantly, see a therapist.

Your vague existential guilt is not a call to change society. It is just your personal problem, one of the only personal problems you have.

It’s a problem that exists in your head, so you must solve it in your head, not by ruining your entire civilization just so you can feel like you are “doing something”.

The problem of lack of opportunities for talented members of the underclass has always existed (ask me how I know), and you are not going to solve it just by thinking about laws for five minutes.

It ain’t that fucking easy.

Solving society’s “forever problems” is not as simple as building a profitable website in an office in San Mateo.

Typically the only thing that permanently removes a problem from the human experience is a new piece of technology. Not a new political philosophy. And especially not an old, failed one.

Communism does not level the playing field. It sets the playing field on fire, and removes the ball.

And the middle class are not chess pieces for you to move around so you can solve your emotional problems.

You should not be ashamed of having hundreds of millions of dollars. Instead, you should be ashamed of being a fucking communist in 2023.

In 1845, there was plenty of excuse for being a communist. They didn’t know any better. They had no idea how terribly everything would go wrong, how high the mountains of corpses would be stacked.

In 2023, you have to be a lunatic. What kind of person looks at 100+ years of mass slaughter, torture, rape, starvation, and brutal totalitarian regimes, and says “yeah, but maybe we could try just a little bit of that, and see how it goes?”

We’ve seen how it goes. It goes straight to hell, without the luxury of a handbasket. The experiments are over, and the results are in.

The middle class, and the Trumpenproletariat, knows that. They know perfectly well that communist ideas will be sold under a banner of “soak the rich”, but weaponized against them, instead.

Do you think I am being rude to you? Do you feel like that’s off limits?

It’s not, and that’s the whole point. For you, this is a genteel discussion of hypotheticals. For Middle America, it’s an existential threat.

That’s why some of y’all are getting sent pictures of your front doors. Because people who live in a double-wide just outside of Topeka, Kansas have a far better grasp of the ground truth of the early 21st century than you do, and they are trying to tell you that the days of genteel discussion of hypotheticals are over, at least for a while.

Because while you putter around with abstract ideas to make society more fair, they are struggling to survive, wondering if their nation can be saved, and trying to think of ways to do so without resorting to a civil war that would rapidly turn into a Rwandan style machete party.

I don’t want that. You don’t want that. Even they don’t want that. But if you keep doing this bullshit right here, we are all going to run out of alternatives.

So will you please, for the sake of your nation, your civilization, and your families and children, please stop maxxing charisma and intelligence, and start putting some experience points into wisdom?

Thanks, all. I hope you enjoyed this as much as I did.

And to Devon Eriksen, wherever you are: very nicely done, sir.