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The Two Great Evils and the Hammer of Infinite Power by Glen Allport Exclusive to STR September 13, 2006 There
are two great and ancient evils in this world, and the beginnings of a
Power that will either amplify or help diminish them. The
first of these evils is widespread emotional
damage (neurosis) – the underlying human cause of violence,
addictions, racism, child abuse, intentional cruelty, inner misery, and
inappropriate and damaging behavior of all types. Neurosis is also a major
factor, directly and indirectly, in physical problems such as cancer and
heart disease. The foundations of neurosis lie almost entirely in
childhood, infancy, and even in the womb: “sensitive dependence on early
conditions” is a powerful
human reality. (The link is to
an article by Dr. Vincent J. Felitti on the large Adverse Childhood
Experiences Study, with eye-opening data, charts, and relevant insight on
this topic; highly recommended. PDF). The
second evil is systematic
initiated coercion, which means, for the most part, the State.
When Lord Acton pointed out that “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely,” he was talking about government, which is to
say: about the widespread use of
initiated coercion to run societies. All types of coercive government,
including monarchy, democracy, socialism, communism, oligarchy, military
dictatorship, etc., initiate coercion against individuals and justify this
aggression with what can fairly be described as lies and fairy tales
(“the divine right of kings,” “majority rule,” “will of the
people,” “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and so on). Coercive
governments can appear to work well for a time, but eventually the
corruption and erosion of wealth inherent to such arrangements overwhelm
even the benefits to favored groups, no matter how well-run or well-intentioned
a government may be. The
Hammer of Infinite Power is, of course, 21st
century technology, which will grow powerful and subtle enough in
the next few decades that “infinite”
will seem a reasonable description. Hammers can be used to create or
to destroy, and how this hammer
is used may determine whether humanity lives or dies. The coming of the
Hammer is the reason scientists like Stephen
Hawking, Martin
Rees, and Bill
Joy are so worried about our future.
The
Two Great Evils are connected, and feed upon each other. The
Hammer is indifferent to health or sickness, love or hate, freedom or
tyranny; it merely exists, to be used as people decide.*
How people decide to use technology (or anything else) depends largely
upon how emotionally healthy people and societies are; health leads to
healthy choices, sickness leads to unhealthy choices. Unhealthy
choices include war, death camps, and prison gulags; they include nuclear,
biological, and (coming soon) nano
weapons. Unhealthy choices also include the use of coercion to fund or
implement otherwise
positive goals and programs; the coercion (even if only for funding)
causes harm, no matter what the intent. Emotional damage makes it more
difficult to see such things clearly, because neurosis is,
in a very real sense, the
misperception of reality. The
second of the Great Evils (coercive government) helps to perpetuate and
hugely empower the first. That is, government coercion – “violence in
a latent state”, as Herbert Spencer put it – creates
emotional damage in millions of victims and empowers
emotional damage to create more harm by putting armies as well as
coercively-funded judicial, police, and bureaucratic powers in the hands
of people who are, almost by definition, power-hungry and otherwise
emotionally damaged. Systematic
initiated coercion does nothing positive in return for all the harm it
causes, because whatever needs
doing can be done – better and more efficiently – by civilized,
non-coercive means. Consider, for example, the starvation
and famine
so common in overly-controlled economies versus any American supermarket,
or the corruption, expense, and danger of government regulation (such as
the American USDA
and FDA)
versus the transparency and efficiency of market regulation (Underwriters
Labs, for instance). The
wide swaths of emotional damage
caused by government action (and not only from the obvious examples, like
death camps or war) help perpetuate neurosis as the default condition of
mankind. But speaking of death camps and war: how much emotional damage
among the survivors resulted from more
than a quarter-billion government murders in the Twentieth Century?
That number is in addition to
the deaths from war. All of those deaths are also in addition to the maimings
and rapes
and torture
and years of
unjust imprisonment
(and so many other horrifying crimes) that governments and their agents
inflicted upon innocents in the same period. In
short, the power wielded by government creates and exacerbates emotional
damage (neurosis) in millions of people. In turn, this widespread
neurosis ensures that government power is often put directly to evil use,
and is sought after by the most ambitious and cruel among us. Governments
are often run by outright psychopaths
– Stalin, Pol Pot, Idi Amin, Mao, and Saddam Hussein are only a few of
the better-known examples from recent history; see any newspaper for more
– and soon, these institutions of coercion will wield powers that are
unimaginable today. For that matter, much of this power will be available
to small groups and – as one scientist put it – “individual
weirdos with the mindset of people who now design computer viruses.” There
is no doubt that the Hammer of Infinite Power is coming; the leading edge is already here. It smote That
leaves us with this: a world filled with emotionally damaged humans under
the thumb of despots and coercive systems, on its way to near-infinite
levels of technological power. Many
observers agree that we cannot expect a halt or even a slowing of the
march to the Singularity (the term
popularized by Kurzweil, Vinge,
and others for, in particular, the coming of superhuman machine
intelligence), so the question becomes: can we survive it? Can we refrain
from destroying ourselves
after grasping the Hammer of Infinite Power? We
will have a far better chance to survive if we can diminish the Two Great
Evils beforehand. Now
or Never We
can no longer defer creating a more free and compassionate world. If we
hope to survive, we must reduce government power and
improve the lives of pregnant mothers, infants, and children. The reason
is simple: a free and healthy world is the only
world compatible with a human future. The
good news is that such a world is also exactly what we were born for. The
scent and sound and feel of this
world, and the powerful need for it, slumbers within us, an eternal
presence at the core of our being. As every newborn knows
the need for its mother – not intellectually, but more deeply than
intellect can reach – each of us also knows, and needs, the world I can
only call Love,
freedom, and connection with others are what
we expect, what we crave, what we are born for. We spend our lives
hiding from our own disappointment at their lack. It
is time to address that disappointment, by actually making the human world
as we need it to be. Such dramatic change sounds impossible, but of course
the world changes anyway. In any case, what purpose does the freedom
movement have otherwise? This
may be less audacious than it sounds. Technology has already helped (as
well as hindered) the creation of a more human and humane world; the
dramatic reduction in death by infectious disease is an example of how the
Hammer – or even its faint, incoming shadow – can dramatically improve
the world. Other examples are all around us; the internet, to name only
one, has helped people connect with one another, created dramatic market
efficiencies, and both decentralized and expanded access to information,
even as oppressive governments have worked to dim its power. The
guiding light for healthy choices in use of technology – and for healthy
behavior generally – is emotional health,
the more widespread the better. The social fabric that best enables
healthy human choices is freedom
infused with love and compassion; that is, a society that rigorously
guards against the initiation of coercion (by government or otherwise) and
which gives every new life the best possible chance to be treated with
respect, love, and compassion. Without
enough love in society (without enough emotional health, in other words),
no social or political structure can prevent evil from blossoming. When
large numbers of people in a society are without a sense of connection to
others, outright horrors become all too likely.
Love
is necessary for another reason: the market
requires and functions via love and respect. A healthy, honest market
involves people dealing with each other on a voluntary basis, without
coercion or substitutes for coercion such as fraud. Participants must
respect each other as human beings for this to work; nothing, including
laws, can long prevent criminal misbehavior among a group that lacks a
widespread sense of empathy, compassion, and respect. Without love, it all
falls apart. Where
does the love come from? Once
again: from the earliest
time of life. People get a sense of compassion and connection to
others during infancy and childhood, or
not at all. This is why religions have largely failed: telling adults
to “Love thy neighbor” can have only limited effectiveness.**
The
freedom movement has failed for precisely the same reason: the movement
has not fully grasped that love and freedom require each other, and
that love requires proper and compassionate treatment of the young.
Without both love and freedom at
high levels in a society, neither quality survives for long. Conclusion For
thousands of years, mankind has lived – often in great and needless
misery – with what I have called the Two Great Evils: widespread
emotional damage and initiated coercion. I
do not believe we will live with those evils much longer, because life
itself (and certainly anything one might term “civilized life”) may be
impossible when near-ubiquitous tyranny and emotional damage are empowered
by extremely
advanced technology. We are well into the early stages of such a
disaster, and the pace will quicken dramatically from here. Love
and freedom are neither strangers nor at odds with each other. Love and
freedom are the yin
and yang that, together, will be our only salvation – if we
understand this in time and act accordingly. Notes: *
Machine intelligence will eventually be making most of the decisions about
how “our” technological power is used. A healthier world would at
least have a chance to program the forerunners of these machines in a
manner more in tune with human survival. That may not be enough, but
it’s no argument against working for a more free and healthy world now,
while we still can. **
I believe that Jesus’ teachings about children and about love would have
been enough to make Christianity far more successful in these terms, had
Jesus’ followers only applied those teachings more consistently,
especially in their treatment of the young. Consider Matthew 18:1 – 18:3
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