Josh Haas's Web Log

One of the first serious essays I remember studying in my philosophy classes in school was called “The Normativity of Instrumental Reason”. I thought it was a cool phrase. It means, basically, where does reason — logic — get the power to make things right or wrong?

Instrumental reason is the kind of reason like, “I want A. A requires that I do B. So I should do B.” I want a nice apartment. Getting a nice apartment requires money. Investment bankers make a lot of money. Therefore, I should be an investment banker.

Here’s the money quote from Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance:

Phaedrus went a different path from the idea of individual, personal Quality decisions. I think it was a wrong one, but perhaps if I were in his circumstances I would go his way too. He felt that the solution started with a new philosophy, or he saw it as even broader than that—a new spiritual rationality—in which the ugliness and the loneliness and the spiritual blankness of dualistic technological reason would become illogical. Reason was no longer to be “value free.” Reason was to be subordinate, logically, to Quality, and he was sure he would find the cause of its not being so back among the ancient Greeks, whose mythos had endowed our culture with the tendency underlying all the evil of our technology, the tendency to do what is “reasonable” even when it isn’t any good. That was the root of the whole thing. Right there. I said a long time ago that he was in pursuit of the ghost of reason. This is what I meant.

Instrumental reason is dualist, subject-object thinking. I, Josh, want nice apartment, therefore I Josh get money to get nice apartment. The argument Zen and… makes is that drawing this line between me, the observer with goals, and the world, the object of my desires, is sick. It’s a diseased way of seeing the world. It leads to spiritual emptiness.

It’s a spiritually empty perspective because, where do values come from in the first place? How do we know what we want and don’t want? From the objective point of view, the rational agent must somehow evolve these desires herself, and then, by careful studying of natural laws, learn to manipulate her surroundings to bring them into being. Set goal. Achieve goal. Munch.

Other people, from this perspective, are also objects — they’re out there mixed in with the buildings and cars and other external manifestations we have to deal with. They’re animate clods of meat, sometimes useful and sometimes a hindrance for achieving our goals. Of course, then we look in the mirror, and we see that we’re also a clod of meat. And like other people are, sometimes we’re useful and sometimes we’re a hindrance to ourselves getting what we want.

And what do we want? Meat wants to protect itself. Meat wants to be safe, to stay alive, to consume other meats for sustenance and not be consumed itself.

Meat builds fortresses. Meat buys iPhones. Meat paves the roads and fights the diseases and reads the evening news and makes the world a safe, sterile place for meat to grow in. Meat is very, very smart.

The point Zen and… is making is that as smart as instrumental reason is, it’s a limited kind of smart, because it can’t evolve its goals. Where do values come from in the first place? How do we know what we want and don’t want? If we let our guards down, if we let some objectivity leak away and blur the lines between the actor and the acted-on, sometimes wants appear by themselves. By merging ourselves with the things around us we become concerned with their integrity. We start appreciating beauty, we start caring for people and places and things.

It’s a much messier process because it involves collapsing the wall between ends and means. When the means are the ends, or shape the ends, we’re driving without knowing where we’re going. We might have an idea, but the idea becomes changed in the execution of it, because that’s the point of having an idea in the first place.

Here’s a quote from today’s front page of TechCrunch:

Facebook is not the only company to invest in development of products that take better advantage of the Android homescreen. South Korean messaging app KakaoTalk also recently announced its intentions to release a rival Android launcher. And now, Highland Capital, Andreessen Horowitz and others have invested $1.8 million into Aviate, an ex-Googler backed intelligent homescreen for Android…

To me, this is a very ugly quote. I went to TechCrunch thinking I would find an example of an ugly quote there, and I found one very quickly. There are probably much uglier ones I could find if I put more time into looking for ugly things (which can actually be a form of beauty in and of itself).

We are making an economic transition from a world where the dictate of instrumental logic is to go into finance to a world where the dictate of instrumental logic is to go into technology. To me this is an interesting transition because technology culture overlaps with maker culture, and maker culture actually understands that “good” is a product of the process, not just the destination. However, I read quotes like the TechCrunch one above and it makes me sad, because it means the poison is in the tech world too.

From a non-dualistic point of view, the concept of making money becomes something that requires thought. What is money? It’s a social contract to give each other gifts of goods and services. It’s a debt that other people owe us. So “making money” means, getting the system to agree it’s indebted to us, to get it to agree that we should be a beneficiary of the nice things that the system produces.

From that vantage point, it seems strange to care about making money without caring about the system that makes the money worthwhile. This can be dramatically illustrated by looking at systems that stopped working, such as Weimar Germany during hyperinflation, or Rwanda during genocide. When an insane homeless person owes you a million dollars, that debt is not worth very much.

So when I hear talk in the startup world of “killing it”, “making it rain”, “big exits”, “valuations”, and all the other terminology of plunder, I feel like people must be thinking instrumentally, as opposed to holistically. From a practical standpoint, you can buy an awful lot of nice cars and apartments and dinners before the system becomes so insane and so homeless that it all dries up. But from an aesthetic, moral standpoint, how can you feel good about pursuing those things without simultaneously thinking about how to make the system a little less crazy, a little happier, a little wealthier? If you love someone, it would be odd behavior indeed to do them a favor, and then go around talking about how much they owe you now… but that’s what people on sites like TechCrunch do every day.

I feel like most questions in modern philosophy come down to the tension between these two hard-to-reconcile observations:

1. Consciousness seems to be a material phenomenon.

2. The material world seems to be a conscious phenomenon.

What I mean by the former is that consciousness comes from brains, and brains can be picked apart and dissected into the lower level physical concepts of chemistry and physics.  There is a lot of strong evidence that thinking is fundamentally a physical process; it doesn’t merely just “hang out” around the brain.  For instance, getting drunk… if thinking wasn’t physical, how could alcohol, a chemical, affect it?

We’ve learned a lot about how consciousness works via scientific inquiry.   We can cut open someone’s brain, tickle a nerve, and have them report sensations of warm or red or whatever.  We can watch a babies brain develop in utero, going from a couple unconnected neurons sending signals randomly to cohering into a full human mind.  We can talk about the evolution of consciousness in the context of natural selection and cultural change.

It’s very hard to argue against the statement that consciousness is a material phenomenon without willful denial of a lot of life experience.  Notions of the “soul” as somehow distinct from the body seem naive when every component of what we think of as soul — personality, logic, memory, emotion — are expressed through a time-bound series of mental reactions that can be disrupted or modified by physical stimuli.

However, it’s equally hard to argue against the second statement, that the material world seems to be a conscious phenomenon.  Absolutely everything we think we know about the world is because we have experienced it as sensory; we see things, we hear things, we touch things, we smell things.  As many people have pointed out, we could all be living in the Matrix, and we wouldn’t know the difference.

I would go as far as to say we don’t really know what the word “exists” means outside the concept of consciousness.  When I say the cup on the table exists, I mean that I can touch it and feel it, and if I close my eyes and look again, I’ve come to expect from past experience that it will still be there to touch and feel.  That’s why “If a tree falls in a forest and no one hears it, does it make a sound?” persists as the exemplary meaningless philosophical question, because we have no access to whatever “underlying reality” there is that would permit us to definitively give a yes or no answer.  What possible scientific experiment would permit us to put that question to rest?

The current mainstream view these days in the academic and scientific communities seems to be an acceptance of 1 — that consciousness is physical — and a denial of 2 — that the physical world is conscious.  The story is that since the beginning of time, there have been these things (electrons, quarks, what have you) whizzing around in an empty universe, and that eventually they came together and evolved themselves into human beings.  In this story, consciousness isn’t structurally important to the nature of reality; it’s just one more phenomenon in a universe full of interesting phenomenon.

There’s an act of faith involved in this story, which is the belief in the reality of matter and energy outside of the presence of human observers.  The faith comes from the fact that when we do  experiments, nature behaves in a way that’s far more consistent and complex than limited human minds could conceive of on their own, which certainly suggests there is something out there outside of our own heads.

The act of faith doesn’t seem problematic to me.  There’s no reason to think that we’d be able to know for sure about reality, without taking something on faith, and faith in the existence of scientific law seems to justify itself by the almost magical accomplishments of science and engineering.

What does seem problematic is that it leaves a big unanswered question — where are we, the observer, in this story?  The scientific description of the universe as matter and energy interacting in a law-like manner explains everything that we perceive except for our perception of it.

One explanation I’ve heard is that the first-person perspective is “illusory”, in the sense that we trick ourselves into believing we’re conscious.  There’s a lot of scientific evidence that consciousness is a constructed phenomenon, a story that we tell ourselves after the fact.  You might say “I decided to pick up the cup”, but scans of your brain shows that your arm started moving before the thought entered your conscious awareness.

I have no doubt this is true, but it’s still not an explanation.  An “illusion” is a concept that presupposed a first-person observer who gets tricked by evidence that misleads her from the underlying reality.  But in this case, we’re saying that the existence of the first-person observer is itself the trick.  What does that even mean?  Who’s getting tricked?

It seems perverse to end up with a story that says that our primary evidence — I see, I feel, I hear — isn’t real, and instead reality is this totally unobservable thing that gives rise to our primary evidence.  I’m not sure how to express this objection rigorously, but there seems to be a fundamental incompleteness to any theory that discredits the evidence on which it is based.

So anyway, we have these two views of looking at the universe — first that there is this primary, unexplainable thing called consciousness, and the physical world can be described in terms of patterns as observed conscious phenomenon, and second that there is this primary, unexplainable thing called the material world, and consciousness can be described in terms of patterns that the world gives rise to.  Both seem true, and irreconcilable with each other.

I think the state of the problem right now is that we really just don’t know, and that a lot of writing on this subject is the attempt of papering over the not-knowing with stuff that sounds good.

There are interesting cultural divides related to this, as well — sympathy towards view 1 vs view 2 seems to be one of the big cleavage points in the American political landscape right now, with the secular on one side of the line and the religious on the other.

I’m not terribly sympathetic to a solution to this dilemma that tries to throw out view 1 or a solution that tries to throw out view 2.  My sense is that both views are grounded in something pretty fundamental about human experience, so arguing that one of them is just wrong and the other is right is going to lead to a broken philosophical system.

The third alternative is to argue that this way of framing the problem is incorrect.  This is another trend in thought which I think is more promising.  The basic thing is to say that the distinction between reality and experience — consciousness and the world — is what is illusory, the artificial creation of a subject-object dualist perspective.  Rather, it’s two different ways of describing the same unified thing, that being reality / consciousness / god / the universe.  This way of resolving the problem comes out of Eastern thought.  I’ve been re-reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance which one well-known attempt to address Western-framed questions through the lens of Eastern metaphysics.  My college thesis was in the same vein.

Although something seems more “right” to me about this third approach, I feel like writing in that space hasn’t really done a a good job answering what the relationship between consciousness as a physical phenomenon to consciousness as an experiential one really is.

We understand the physical side of consciousness much better now than the Zen monks did back when they were sitting around thinking non-dualistic thoughts back in the day.  We don’t have a complete story for how consciousness works, but we can now say some meaningful things about it: it’s a computational feedback process that involves forming representations of things in the world, including representations of itself.  This quality of self-representation seems to be the thing that makes consciousness so weirdly unlike most other physical phenomenon in the way it picks up and magnifies complexity, leading to things such as language, art, ability to build rocket ships, etc.

So if a monist metaphysics is true, I wouldn’t really expect to be able to give a written explanation that describes in objective terms how the whole thing works.  Rather, I would expect that the only way I could achieve a sense of understanding is to erase the distinction between myself as the person asking the question, and the phenomenon I’m trying to understand, thus forming an explanatory circuit with me in the middle of it.  That’s largely the purpose of meditation and similar spiritual practices — to get one’s mind to a state where you can actually experience understanding as opposed to being stuck in the rational, intellectualizing place where understanding is impossible.

The interesting question is whether there is degrees of understanding even in a place of non-seperation from the universe.  The way that spiritual traditions describe it, it’s kind of, you have the perspective, or you don’t.  But a lot of people entering that mind frame didn’t understand computer science, cognitive science, etc.  Can you actually practice cognitive science from a state of enlightenment?  What does such a science look like?  It would have to be inherently value-oriented instead of objective.  (That’s largely the point of Zen and the Art of Motercycle Maintenance  insofar as I understand it — that traditional, objective thinking misses the importance of having values in one’s relationship to the universe.  Where “values” basically come down to saying, this is good, I want things this way, i.e., understanding and wanting things to be a certain way as being intrinsically one process instead of the instrumental reasoning that’s more traditional in Western thought — i.e., 1. I want this, and 2. this is how the universe is, so 3. this is what I should do).

Okay, I’m starting to ramble here, so I’m cutting this post off for now.  I think that last paragraph is probably three blog posts or maybe a book before it even starts to make sense.

Right now, here is how it works.  Developer has an idea for an app.  App requires a server.  Developer rents a server, hosts that app.  Developer builds company around app.  Builds company because hosting is expensive and time consuming.  You have to worry about the app going down.   Sometimes the company takes off.  Sometimes the company fails.  Okay usually the company fails.  App dies.  Code is usually never heard from again.

Read the tweets of @Pinboard for deep insight into this life cycle.

Anyway, this is much sadness.  Because app equals company, app requires business model.  Business model is a damper on creativity.  It also generally mandates closed source, because hard to compete as a company without something proprietary.

Exception to this rule is desktop apps.  There are good open source desktop apps that evolve without a company.  Why?  Because you don’t need a server.  Developer can release code into wild, support for as long as she wants.  If code is loved, others will improve it.  Makes it easy to be a developer, you can do it in your free time.  So, linux exists, and all the apps that live on the linux desktop.

But no one wants desktop apps.  Desktop apps are terrible.  Apps should live on the internet, and be free.  Apps should be built in html5+css+javascript, which is the best toolkit for building GUIs ever invented (if you don’t believe me, build stuff in objective-c, .NET, and swing for a bit, and see how much you miss html — infinite nested boxes FTW!!!)  (if you still don’t believe me, make sure you’re using coffeescript and jquery to build your javascript).

So how about this.  Everyone has their own app server.  App server is super-easy to set up, don’t have to know anything about technology.  Tech people can host their own server, non-techy people can pay a techy company to host one for them.  Server lives at my-name-domain.com.  Server has a one-click-install page where you can download + upgrade apps.  Server offers simple API for apps to use to store data on the server, talk to other apps on the same server, talk to other apps on different servers, share system resources, etc.

Developers no longer responsible for hosting their own apps.  Developers can make apps open source, can fork each other’s apps at will.  One-click-install page could talk straight to GitHub.

Result: renaissance in high-quality open source web apps.  Easy to build and release and modify and improve, all open.

Result: more control for individuals.  You have your personal server with your favorite email app, your favorite blog app, your favorite status-update app, link-sharing app, file-sharing app, etc.  All your data is on your own server, you own it.  You can be as a paranoid or as permissive about privacy and security as you want.  Highly technical users can customize their individual app environments, and run personal code easily.  You don’t need ifttt if all your stuff is on the same box and the box is totally under your control.

Anyway, this is obviously an awesome future.  I will probably have to build it as a spin-off to Bubble once Bubble is more self-sufficient.  Unless someone wants to take it on right now!

A couple observations:

• The 1990s were a largely optimistic decade in terms of the economy and the sense that the world was going in a good direction. That optimism is largely replaced by pessimism. Everyone generally agrees that things are a mess, although a precise definition of what the mess is is controversial.
   
• The economy is undergoing a transition away from physical labor towards jobs that involve working with ideas. This is a disruptive transition, likely on par with the industrial revolution in terms of changing the life of the average worker, and at this point there is no general agreement on what society will look like coming out the other side.

Most people I think would more or less agree with this. What gets controversial is what to do about it.

There are two major schools of thought as regards to the right policy course to deal with these issues. The first major school is to get out of the way of the free markets and let the “invisible hand” of capitalism do its work. The second major school of thought is to temper the free markets via some combination of wealth redistribution and regulation.

(There are of course other ideas out there. One I think is important is a focus on creating educational systems that will help workers through the transition, which I think is possible common ground for the above two positions. Then there’s also more extreme forms of redistribution such as Marxist ideas that reject the free market altogether, but I think that’s largely been discredited since there are no real examples of successful Marxist economies).

I’m not a fan of either major school of thought. I see them as more closely related to each other than is generally perceived. Extremists on both sides call each other a lot of names and believe that if only the other side didn’t exist, everything would be okay. Howver, both the regulate-and-redistribute partisans and the free-market advocates have something important in common: they both see capitalism as the primary engine of wealth creation. Their difference is that some of them want to let that engine rev at max RPMs while the other side believes we’ll get better mileage if we take it back a few notches.

I think what we really need to help us through the transition to an information economy is a second engine. To use a dumb analogy, I feel like we’re flying in a 747 where only the left wing engine is turned on. What I want to talk about here is what the second engine might be, and how to press the ignition switch.

Before going there, though, let’s talk about what capitalism gets right. Capitalism has been wildly successful in terms of creating wealth. I think the majority of its success can be attributed to two of its attributes:

• Freedom and decentralization of control
• Following the grain of human nature

First, capitalist systems are decentralized; each individual is free to choose how they want to contribute to society. This is very efficient, since each individual is better informed about their own circumstances than, say, a central government. But more importantly, it means people are free to try out crazy ideas. No one tells you, “nope, you aren’t allowed to do that, you’re supposed to be laboring on the farm this month.” Since most really really good ideas start out sounding a little crazy, this is a radically important advantage.

Second, capitalism follows the grain of human nature instead of cutting against it. Capitalism doesn’t try to get people to do things they don’t want to do. Instead, it creates incentives so that people do want to do things beneficial to society (in theory, anyway). One of the deep conenctions to human psychology that capitalism takes advantage of is that people like scoring points and winning. By given people counters in the form of money, they get concrete, visceral feedback on whether they are “winning” or “losing” the capitalism game. As anyone who designs games knows, this kind of feedback is very important, and people voluntarily seek it out, especially when there’s an understanding that getting a high score is rewarded.

Because of these properties, capitalism is a very stable system; people voluntarily participate in it without having to be coerced or motivated. This is important, because it is easy to say “if everyone did X or Y, we’d all be better off”, but if not everyone in the world agrees with you (and they never do!), what you get is political gridlock, people shouting at each other, or violence, instead of results. Capitalism has managed to survive for hundreds of years of history precisely because it is not arrogant. It doesn’t tell anyone what to do, it just offers them incentives.

My belief is that capitalism is probably one of the best possible systems for a low-technology, resource-limited society to adopt to transform itself into a high technology, abundant society. I am coming to believe, however, that it is a terrible system for a high-technology, abundant society to continue transforming into a just, stable, and creatively-free society.

The basic problem is that in a low-technology world, value creation is closely tied to physical goods and hands-on services. In a high-technology world, value creation is the generation of ideas and information: a hit song, a software algorithm, a fertilizer formula.

Physical goods have the following properties that work well with capitalism:

 

• The cost to produce them approximates their value. Physical goods that are easier to produce are more plentiful and therefore less valuable; goods that are harder to produce are less plentiful are therefore more valuable. Cost and value can diverge, but they’re in the same general ballpark.
   
• Putting more effort into producing physical goods pays off fairly linearly in terms of additional value created. If you double the amount of time you spend making pots, the number of pots you have is more-or-less doubled. Likewise, as you do a better job at making them, the value of each pot increases, but while a good pot might sell for two times or even a hundred times more than a bad pot, it generally won’t be worth a million times more (Qing dynasty vases notwithstanding).
   
• If you give up a physical good, you don’t have it any more. This means that trading physical goods is generally a fair exchange, in that both parties lose something and both parties gain something.
   

These properties result in the traditional analogy of “free market competition”. This phrase gets used a lot, but let’s actually think about the visual metaphor. A “free market” connotes an open space where people can walk around as equals, buying and selling from each other. “Competition” connotes a sporting event, friendly rivalry where people try to best each other according to a given set of ground rules. In a low-tech world, this analogy is fairly on the mark. While there’s never truly been a “level playing field” in human society (i.e., it matters what family you get born into, what gender you are, etc.), in a low-tech world, capitalism does more or less tend to create an environment where the harder you work, the better you do.

This is not true in a high tech world. Technology changes the basic way value works:

• The cost to produce ideas / information does not approximate its value. Rather, a single person working by herself for a few weeks can write a song that gets broadcast to a billion people overnight. A small tweak in an agricultural system can produce millions more heads of corn.
   
• Therefore, spending additional effort producing ideas does not have a linear scaling effect on the value you create. Rather, value tends to fluctuate wildly depending on market circumstances. For instance, if you had the second-best social network idea, it’s worth a million times less than Facebook. A great dress design in the hands of an independent clothing designer might lead to $10,000 in revenue; that same design produced by H&M might be worth a few million.
   
• If you give up a piece of information, you still have it. If I copy my music collection and give it to you, I can still listen to all my music just as easily.
   

This creates an entirely different “market” dynamic. Unlike low-tech capitalism, high-tech capitalism is not a competition in the way the Olympics is. It is a competition the way that World War II was.

The winners in a high-tech economy are the people with the right vision at the right place at the right time. As technology advances, the value of labor decreases, because jobs that can be filled with interchangeable people are also the jobs most likely to be automated away. Outside of the service industry, there is ruthless pressure to move towards higher-and-higher skilled roles, as the lower skill-rungs keep on getting replaced by computers. Increasingly, the only successful people are going to be those who are un-interchangeable; the entrepreneurs, the artists, the idea-generators. In a country with 300 million people, it’s hard to imagine everyone succeeding on such a path.

Competition in a world like this is brutal and all-or-nothing. Slight differences in starting position can have exponential impacts. Hard work and effort can still pay off, but not equally for everyone.

There is an increasing sense that we live in an unfair society. The wealth gap between the richest and poorest has diverged from historical norms. People realize at an intuitive level that when a CEO of a successful company plays “capitalism”, they are playing a totally different game than when a sales clerk plays “capitalism”. A CEO is not a sales clerk who worked harder. The old “worked his way up from the mailroom” story is just not realistic in a high tech economy.

My concern is for what happens to people when they move from a world of polite, fair competition to total economic war. I don’t want to live in a world where the choice is either to just get by, and hope I can afford healthcare and rent, or play to win big. I want there to be a middle path, but it’s getting increasingly narrow. I’m playing the game myself — I started a technology company and I’m trying to make it successful — but I’m worried about what kind of a world technology and capitalism will create together. Amazon.com, a company that I admire in a lot of respects, is a classic example of this. This is what it’s like to live in the world they are building if you aren’t a technologist: I Was a Warehouse Wage Slave.

I think that these concerns can be blunted, but not eliminated, in a capitalist system. We can smooth out the wealth disparity by increasing the amount of redistribution we do. We can regulate to make sure that people on the bottom of the system have at least a basically humane life. And we can increase the fairness via better systems of education, to lessen the impact of your starting point in life on your eventual outcome. However, as technology advances, I think the trend of big winners and big losers will only accelerate. Even if the winners give more and more of their earnings away, it still leads to a weird two-caste society where a small set of people drive the engine, and everyone else is along for the ride. That’s not a society I want to be a part of.

What I imagine instead is a society where we turn on a second engine of economic growth, one that more people can participate in. This second engine is economic collaboration, as differentiated from economic competition.

Collaboration, unlike competition, can work in an imbalanced setting. Even if you’re in a much stronger position than me, we might still both be better off working together than going on our own. In a competitive economy, the weak are irrelevant, whereas in a collaborative economy, “weakness” does not preclude participation. Relative power dynamics (e.g. ownership of capital) are not as important if the question is how can people best help each other.

Collaboration is inherently suited for an economy of ideas. Ideas tend to build off each other. The very properties that make them difficult to fit into capitalism are the same properties that make them work in a collaborative setting. The fact that you can give an idea away and still have it yourself is a disadvantage if you’re trying to sell it, but it’s an advantage if your goal is to share it. (The experience of the music industry watching their “analog dollars” turn into “digital pennies” is a good example of the clash between capitalism and technology).

So it is not a coincidence that one of the most successful examples of a collaboration economy is happening on the technological frontier. In the software industry, traditional capitalist organizations play a big role in driving forward growth, but increasingly, advances have come from the open source community, which operates based on collaboration. People help each other write code and give it away their code for free, and are compensated by the respect and esteem of their peers.

It is important to understand that this compensation is not a fuzzy, abstract thing. Rather, someone’s standing in the community can be evaluated very concretely, by looking at a couple of well-known websites. For instance, most people evaluating a software developer for a job will look at what projects they have contributed to on GitHub, and check what their reputation score is on the knowledge-exchange website Stack Overflow. These metrics translate into high-paying job offers (or in the case of this this recent Kickstarter project, directly into cash).

Although this collaboration economy is promising, right now it’s limited. It’s missing a key piece for it to fully come to life and play an equal role with capitalism in creating growth.

Let’s recall the two big things capitalism gets right: freedom / decentralization, and going with the grain of human nature. Collaboration economies are already nailing the first element. The open-source ecosystem is as free as a market can be; people have total discretion in their choice of with whom and on what to work. The best efforts tend to attract talent, since there’s no reputation to be gained working on something valueless. The invisible hand is effective and hard at work.

The second element, inherent motivation, is more of a problem. For a professional software developer, contributing to open source is a smart career move. But the reputational benefits of working on open source are limited to within the technology community. In contrast, doing work for pay helps you in society at large. The grocer down the street recognizes dollars; she doesn’t recognize github commits. So the selfish benefit of playing the collaboration game is limited. Most open-source developers still need a day job to pay the bills.

Another way of putting the problem is that today’s collaboration-based economies are domain-specific. You have to be a member of a specific community to transact on your reputation. This is analogous to the problem at the dawn of capitalism: if you had wood and wanted food, and your neighbor had food but wanted pottery, you needed to find someone who had pottery but wanted wood or you were out of luck.

The solution to this dilemma is currency, a common medium of exchange that, by mutual agreement, represents economic value. Getting to this mutual agreement was a gradual process; early currencies were things deemed valuable in their own right, like abalone shells or gold; later currencies were backed by an official promise to convert them into gold. Now, currencies are backed by the reputation of the issuer; people’s belief, for instance, in the ability of the US government to follow through on its obligations.

Currency is more than just a way of facilitating interactions, however. It’s also a scoreboard. I believe that capitalism goes beyond taking advantage of self-interest to actually defining self-interest; it changes the way people understand what “success” is. For good or ill, people seek external cues to measure their worth; currency, as measured by a number on a bank statement, or in a paycheck, or a position on a Forbes list, becomes the standard that people judge themselves by.

Unfortunately, in a technological world, the scoreboard is optimizing for the wrong thing. It’s optimizing for facility at acquiring property in often-zero-sum competition, which, while beneficial in terms of unlocking innovation, is also destructive to the people caught up in it, and unsustainable in a world where the difference between first place and second place can be billions of dollars.

I’m a pragmatist. Although I think people often act for values-driven, moral reasons, I don’t think a system is long-term sustainable unless people organically want to cooperate with it, both at their worst and at their best. Inorganic, top-down solutions don’t work and don’t last. So to me, the big question is, can we do for collaboration what currency did for competition?

The starting point is asking what the fundamental unit of value is in a collaboration economy. In a competitive economy, the answer is property ownership: currency evolved out of physical property. In contrast, in a collaborative economy, the fundamental unit of value is your relationships, or social capital. It’s not what you have, it’s who you have.

The archetype of property as stored value is cave-people preparing for the winter by stockpiling food and furs. The archetype of relationships as stored value is preparing by building strong friendships with people who will help you hunt and maintain a fire. Obviously, both are important; it’s dangerous to go into the winter either friendless or food-less.

A relationship’s value, in blunt, economic terms, is the willingness of the person to help you in a time in need. At the heart of good will for a friend is the idea “if you ever need me, I will be there for you.”

Following this train of thought leads to this idea:

What if there were a system of currency that represented goodwill? Where the basic unit was backed by the promise “if you need my help, I will help you?”

I imagine, to start with, just as dollars were backed with gold, that this new currency would be backed with the promise of monetary aid. If we call the currency “goodwill”, then we could say that 1 goodwill = an obligation to help out to the amount of 1 dollar. Unlike a loan, however, the expectation is that goodwill is generally not paid back (except under situations of need), but paid forward. Thus, I can give goodwill to you, and you can give it to me, without it canceling out. In cooperative relationships, unlike competitive ones, we’re both better off by being mutually indebted.

I see goodwill as being non-transferable (except maybe in special cases such as the death of the issuer); I give out my goodwill to you; you give your own goodwill to others. Unlike money, giving goodwill away does not make you have less of it; you can issue as much as you want. There is a cost, though, in that it creates an obligation on you to the other person, so there’s incentive not to give it away insincerely.

I see goodwill being electronic and public. Physical currency doesn’t work because when you give something physical away you don’t have it any more. As the economy turns digital, so should the currency. I see it as public, because a lot of the value in being given goodwill is that others can see that you have it. So I can imagine goodwill being represented on a website or app where you can see entries like “Hannah gave 10 goodwill to Emmanuel on Thurs at 1pm; Aaron gave 15 goodwill to Emmanuel on Thurs at 2pm…” and so on.

The goal of the new game, then, is to convince people to give you goodwill by bettering their lives. The more goodwill you get, the more convincing your goodwill is to others. This is just a basic human reality; being owed a favor by someone who a lot of people owe favors to means more than being owed a favor by someone who no one is indebted to. I can imagine an algorithm like Google’s PageRank showing a summary of your overall social capital. People who have a high score benefit, because others will be eager to earn their highly valuable goodwill (just as website owners want to be linked to by popular websites more than unpopular ones). Importantly, though, even if someone isn’t particularly rich in social capital, it is still better to have their goodwill than not to have it. Unlike in a competitive economy, where winning is closer to zero-sum, there’s room for people at the margins to meaningfully participate and work their way back into the game.

This dynamic is no different than already exists in society. People help each other out in order to build networks, and influential people benefit from the freely given help of the people around them. The difference is that with a goodwill currency, the information becomes public and transparent. For instance, helping out someone in San Francisco who works as a school teacher would count favorably towards your interactions with a bunch of firemen in New York, because it would show up on your public record. (Whereas today, if the firemen don’t know the teachers, your good deed goes unrewarded).

To put it another way, people today put in effort to accumulate property (financial capital) and relationships (social capital). Financial capital, however, has an important advantage, because financial capital is measurable and liquid, whereas social capital has no commonly agreed-on medium of communication. The idea is that by making social capital more measurable and liquid, we can shift the relative value of financial to social capital. And since social capital is inherently cooperative, whereas financial capital is inherently competitive, by making social capital more prominent, we can move the economy more towards cooperation.

I don’t see money going away, at least any time soon. But I do see ideas and information, relationships and connections, becoming increasingly valuable relative to goods and services. Our current economic model is straining under this reality. The technology world is plagued by contention over “intellectual property”, which is a legal abstraction that castrates ideas to make them behave more like traditional physical property. These limitations, although understandable in a world where money is the only thing you can trade ideas for, are toxic to economic development. And as competition in the idea-space increasingly becomes winner-take-all, more and more people are becoming economically disenfranchised altogether.

Mitigating these societal strains will undoubtedly take a variety of forms. I’m worried, however, that the existing set of solutions doesn’t contain any measures that address the heart of the problem, which is that competitive capitalism isn’t the right engine of economic growth to handle technology. My hope and hypothesis is that by creating a medium for social capital, we can create a society-wide cooperative economy, leading towards a more just and more prosperous world.

I am not a policy radical. On questions such as “Should government be bigger or smaller”, I believe the answer is “it depends.”

What I am is a process radical. I believe the process of government should be radically improved to be more transparent and dialogue-driven.

I don’t feel represented by the Democratic or Republican platform, because I don’t feel that either party is committed to radically improving the process of government. I also don’t feel represented by third parties such as the Libertarian or Green or Tea party. They tend to be committed ideologically to extreme policy decisions, whereas I think the real world is complex and messy and doesn’t lend itself to one-size-fits-all answers.

I want a party that represents the process radicals, the people who are open-minded about what the right policy decision is, but want to make sure the process of making the decision is both effective and democratic.

During the recent campaign, President Obama did something amazing. He went onto reddit, an internet news and discussion site, and answered direct questions from the American people for thirty minutes. (People voted on the best questions, which rose to the top).

I think this kind of thing should happen every single day, not for thirty minutes of a multi-month campaign. I want a President who sees his job as communicating with the American people. That doesn’t mean always agreeing with them: sometimes it means persuading and educating, and sometimes it means listening.

Instead, what I see is a shield wall of press secretaries, journalists vying for access, and political propaganda that only occasionally comes down to allow a moment of genuine connection.

Communication means treating people with respect, and hoping to learn something from them even when you disagree. I find that the dialogue promoted by the major parties is the exact opposite of that. It’s acceptable in America to refer to people you disagree with as “crazy”, “evil”, or “stupid”, as long as no one who holds the opposing view is actually in the room with you.

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that at the center of every major constituency, including the Tea Party and The Occupy Wall Street movement (to pick two groups on opposing extremes), there is a core of good, intelligent, passionate human beings whose beliefs make total logical sense to them given their life experiences. I think failing to acknowledge that truth makes political progress impossible, and the contempt that many “reasonable” people have for members of these groups is infinitely more poisonous to political discourse than any specific policy agenda any of those groups advocate.

Therefore I am not interested in traditional categories of political affiliation. I have beliefs I feel strongly about, of course, but I would vote for someone who disagreed with me on some of those beliefs if she disagreed respectfully, intelligently, and with the willingness to find a solution that I could live with even if it isn’t the one I would pick myself.

So here’s the platform of the Transparency Party:
 

1. Regular, unfiltered interaction between political leaders and their constituencies. This should be in mediums that are accessible to as many people as possible, and with the opportunity for people to ask the hard questions and hold their leaders accountable. Obama going on reddit should be the norm, not the exception.
2. Absolute honesty with the American people. It is unacceptable for politicians to lie to the people who hold them accountable, just as it’s unacceptable for an employee to lie to her boss or a CEO to lie to the board. Politicians should have the right to say “I’m not going to answer that question, because…”, but the excuses need to be compelling and legitimate, and have a clearly defined expiration date.
3. Commitment to treating the political opposition as human beings. This goes beyond “bi-partisanship”, which implies that there are two opposing sides that are reluctantly negotiating with each other. It means fighting to develop a real working relationship where people brainstorm ideas rather than negotiate compromises.
4. No compromises on basic human rights. If people can’t participate because they don’t have the political or economic freedom to do so, then it doesn’t matter how democratic the political process is.
5. Simplicity and clarity in legislation. This doesn’t mean dumbing things down; it means fighting to get rid of unnecessary complexity. This makes it possible to focus on where the complexity really is necessary, and get it right.
6. Pragmatic, empirically oriented decision-making. Small, experimental programs that can then be scaled if they’re successful are preferable to big, sweeping, all-or-nothing initiatives. How a policy is implemented and executed is just as important as what the policy is.
7. Use of technology to achieve the above goals. We’re a far bigger, far more fragmented society than we were a hundred years ago, but we also have far more powerful communication tools. Government should be using the full power of the internet to connect with, educate, and learn from its citizens.

I just wrote probably the most ridiculous, and sort of awesome, code of my life to date. 10 points if you can figure out what it does and what the point of it is (and 20 points if you find a bug!)

The code exports two functions, u.bind and u.let (which is syntactic sugar for a special case of u.bind). Here’s an example / test-case of using them:

class Thing
    constructor: ->
        @x = 0
        setInterval =>
            @x += 1
            @get_x_multiplied_by.update_all()
        , 1000
   
    get_x_multiplied_by: u.bind (y) -> @x * y

a = new Thing()

u.let -> document.title = a.get_x_multiplied_by 7

And here’s the code that defines u.bind and u.let:

#u = module.exports
u = {} #for in-browser testing

u.UUID = -> (Date.now()) + 'x' + Math.round(Math.random() *1e18)

_running_bound = null

magic_number = u.UUID()

smish = (thing) ->
    if thing != null and (typeof thing) == 'object'
        if not thing[magic_number]
            thing[magic_number] = u.UUID()
        return thing[magic_number]
    else
        return (typeof thing) + thing

smush = (args...) -> 
    return (smish arg for arg in args).join('')

run_bound = (bound, fn, args) ->
    hash_key = smush args..., this
    if _running_bound
        if not bound.depends_on_me[hash_key]
            bound.depends_on_me[hash_key] = []
        if _running_bound not in bound.depends_on_me[hash_key]
            bound.depends_on_me[hash_key].push _running_bound
            
    old_running_bound = _running_bound
    _running_bound = {bound: bound, args: args, old_this: this}
    
    if bound.results_cache[hash_key] == undefined
        bound.results_cache[hash_key] = fn.apply this, args
        bound.args_cache[hash_key] = {args: args, old_this: this}
    
    _running_bound = old_running_bound
    
    return bound.results_cache[hash_key]
    

u.bind = (fn) ->
    bound = (args...) ->
        val = run_bound.call this, bound, fn, args
        return val
    
    bound.depends_on_me = {}
    bound.results_cache = {}
    bound.args_cache = {}
    
    bound.update = (args...) ->
        hash_key = smush args..., this
        delete bound.results_cache[hash_key]
        delete bound.args_cache[hash_key]
        bound.apply this, args
        
        depends = bound.depends_on_me[hash_key] ? []
        bound.depends_on_me[hash_key] = []
        for depend in depends
            depend.bound.update.apply depend.old_this, depend.args
            
    
    bound.update_all = ->
        for key, {args, old_this} of bound.args_cache
            bound.update.apply old_this, args
    
    return bound


u.let = (fn) ->
    bound = u.bind fn
    bound()

If you paste the code followed by the test case in the “try coffeescript” window of coffeescript.org, you can see it in action (watch the webpage title).

Murakami is another one of my favorite authors (especially Norwegian Wood and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle).

So I have to post this passage from a great essay on his work:

Some have found Murakami’s deployment of fantastical elements in his fiction to be fey or under-justified. His own reasoning about the practice, in a 2004 Paris Review interview with John Wray, is revealing: “We are living in a fake world; we are watching fake evening news. We are fighting a fake war. Our government is fake. But we find reality in this fake world. So our stories are the same; we are walking through fake scenes, but ourselves, as we walk through these scenes, are real. The situation is real, in the sense that it’s a commitment, it’s a true relationship.” So, too, in Murakami’s novels, events might be unnatural and outré, but the characters are as human as possible. Murakami achieves this in two ways: first, by an unrushed, tender cataloguing of small daily action (preparing “steaming food”), and second, by the lovingly humorous imagining of his characters’ inner chatter. Here is Aomame, in a moment of downtime: “That was the most she could get herself to do — stare at the ceiling. Not that the ceiling had anything of interest about it. But she couldn’t complain. Ceilings weren’t put on rooms to amuse people.”

Compare to my post from a month ago on Scott Pilgrim:

The fascinating thing about the graphic novels, though, is that while the formal elements are completely artificial, the content — i.e., the characters and their inner journeys — feels real. Scott and Ramona awkwardly date, they fall in love, fight, split, and get back together as they learn to be a couple, while at the same time their friends have their own challenges and breakthroughs. Mixed in with the surreal plot points are ordinary slice-of-life scenes where the characters do things like grabbing burgers and building bonfires on the beach.

It’s impossible to be a participant in this dance we call “the economy” without noticing that things are a little messed up. I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, and I’m still trying to sort it all through. I want to think out loud for a bit here, to see if anything becomes clearer.

One thing that’s really important to me on a personal level is making sure that the conversations about the economy — which really means, the conversations about how we all relate to one another — are filled with joy rather than pessimism. I feel like that’s a weird thing to say, because there’s such a deeply entrenched pessimism right now in any vaguely economic or political conversation that even mentioning the word “joy” feels out of touch. How can there be joy when so many people feel powerless and scared about the situation? It’s kind of like screaming “let them eat cake!” from the top of the Empire State Building.

Nevertheless, I’m gonna come out as pro-joy for a couple of reasons:

* There’s still a lot to be happy about. There’s always a lot to be happy about. There are things to be happy about even in the direst poverty and oppression, and for most people taking place in these conversations we’re a long way away from dire.

* I think the reason we’re on this Earth is to create and contribute, to transcend our limitations and bring amazing things into being. I don’t mean this in a flippant way at all, but I fucking love this video: Gangnam Style. Look at that dude in the elevator. I mean, come on. It restores my faith in humanity. I’m serious — the subtext for this whole thing is class conflict / economic disparity in Korea, and what we get is that dude in the elevator, and an 5-year-old busting crazy dance moves. So anyway, I feel like if we don’t deal with the big social issues of our times with joy and optimism and sense of gratitude that we get to be a part of it at all (as opposed to, say, not born in the first place), we’re kind of missing the point.

* I have this intuition that joy is an important part of the solution

Anyway, that said, optimism alone won’t make the world go round. There’s still some hard work to be done to figure out how to move forward constructively. My sense is that there’s a need for a major overhaul of our collective conventional wisdom about political / economic philosophy, since to me this feels like a “we don’t know what direction to go in” situation, not a “we know the right direction and it’s just a lot of work” situation. A lot of smarter people than me are putting their minds to it, so part of me just wants to kick back with a beer for a few years and see how it all sorts out, but that wouldn’t be very responsible now, would it?

So here’s the brain dump. These are various things that I suspect or that I have questions about:

* I don’t believe that the advancement of technology will solve our economic woes. I believe that technology increases the net wealth in society, but I think the reason people are unhappy is not that there’s not enough wealth, but that it’s not being distributed well. I think that technology, in a capitalist system, actually hurts distribution rather than helps, because it tends to create bigger and bigger winners while destroying jobs. This is obviously something I think about a lot, since what I’m doing with my life right now is advancing the state of technology. I do think tech is a good thing, though, see below.

* I don’t believe in “job creation” as a goal. I think most jobs that are getting destroyed by technology aren’t fulfilling, worthwhile uses of people’s time to begin with. Do we really want to be doing stuff that computers can do better and faster? People are upset when jobs go away, because the notion of a “job” is how we currently believe wealth should be transferred to people, but to me it’s a good thing that we’re finding ourselves in a situation where we don’t actually need the labor of the vast majority of society in order to produce everything we want to produce. There’s a reason that there’s the phrase “wage-slavery”. So it bothers me that the political rhetoric is all about “creating jobs” because that’s not the real problem — the real problem is that people are getting economically and politically disempowered because jobs used to be the proxy mechanism by which people got to participate in society.

* I suspect that we overvalue central, top-down solutions. It’s kind of weird to me that everyone blames the serving president for the economy. This is just taken at face-value; if the economy is good, president gets re-elected, if economy is bad, president gets punished. Like, really? It’s the job of one guy, who happened to win a (kind of bullshit, because honestly, do you really believe for a minute that the electoral system is at all fair or open) election, to make the country profitable? There are things that the federal government can do, such as playing with the banking system, interest rates, passing laws and stuff, but those feel like tiny levers relative to how complex and human and vast the economy is. What about me? What about you? I feel like in many ways we’re better positioned to make a difference, because we don’t have to deal with all the political bullshit that politicians have to in order not to get kicked out of office.

* I’m a believer in creation rather than consumption. Consumption is nice. Consuming basic necessities, like housing, food, medical care to some degree, is critical for survival. Consuming other stuff makes life enjoyable. But at the end of the day, I think it’s things like human relationships, physical activity outdoors, and artistic self-expression that actually make people happy. Consumption can facilitate those activities to varying degrees, but it’s not the most important thing, and can just as easily get in the way by cramming our minds with stupid content and our bodies with unnecessary garbage.

* Given all that, I’m not a big believer in capitalism. The good thing about capitalism, which is why I’m not a believer in alternatives like socialism or communism, is that by giving people control over property, it gives people the freedom to take action without getting other people’s buy-in, which I think is very important… all creative advances, all the good things in life really, come from a small group of people who have ideas that don’t make sense to anyone but themselves until years later when everyone’s like “ohhhhh… that’s what you were doing, that’s awesome!” If you have to get the central bureaucracy to sign off on everything in advance, it becomes a shitty place to live. So capitalism is great in that it creates more freedom than any other form of human organization to date. But, that doesn’t mean it’s a stable system that creates a world where people aren’t systematically disempowered. I think most likely what we need is something new, something that hasn’t been fully tried before.

* There are some ideas floating around out there about what that new thing might look like. For instance, “reputation economies” or “gift economies”, where the idea is that everyone contributes as much as they can, and the reward for contributing is social rather than economic. It involves creating a bunch of norms around generosity, community, caring, etc. I don’t know if it works in practice or not. I’m definitely intrigued, though. The argument for why it hasn’t happened historically but could happen now is that a gift economy is an economy of abundance; it doesn’t work well for situations where there is resource scarcity, because it doesn’t adequately punish people who aren’t doing their part. But in a world where there’s enough to go around and we can survive having some freeloaders, and it’s okay to merely punish them by not inviting them to the cool parties, vs making them starve to death, then it might be stable. And it’s better at distribution than capitalism, because the people who end up in positions where they can produce a lot have incentives to share the wealth freely. And it’s better at distribution than various forms of taxation -> social programs schemes, because I think taking wealth from people at implicit gunpoint isn’t very socially healthy, especially when the people you’re taking it from probably correlate to some degree (and it is just some degree — but it’s also a non-negligable degree — and I feel like 90% of the political conflict with the occupy-wall-street vs wall-street thing comes down to bickering over how much of a degree it is, but let’s just agree that it’s somewhere between “none” and “completely”) with the people who’ve built the systems that create a lot of the wealth in the first place. I think everyone would be happier if people gave it away, if that was the social norm, as opposed to “let’s hire lawyers and do tax evasion!” which is kind of how it works today (well, sometimes it’s “let’s buy the federal government and rewrite the entire legal structure”, which works too).

* But just to emphasize the point again, I don’t know if this will work. I don’t think anyone knows what will work. A lot of people have very strong opinions about what should be done! But I tend to trust the people who have more questions than answers….

* I have a half-formed thought about the conflict between freedom and love. There’s something very freeing about the notion that you don’t have to do business with anyone you don’t want to do business with. That’s why capitalism is great for freedom. But on the other hand, there’s also something good about saying, “look, I’m stuck with these people, I gotta make it work!” That’s kind of the basis of family to some degree. I think the world situation is more like the latter, in that we’re all stuck on this ball of dirt in space, and we share the same air and land and natural resources. But there’s also an element to the former, in that it’s a really big ball of dirt, and we can move around, and I think there are very good things about the former that I don’t want to give up, even though I think there are also very good things about the latter. Again, this is kind of a half-formed thought….

So anyway. That’s kind of what’s on my mind about the economy right now. If I were to pick one take-away from the above mess, it would be: “don’t be a hater.” There are hard problems, and it’s confusing, but I feel like if we go in it with the attitude of taking responsibility, not blaming other people, and just enjoying the fact that we’re alive and get to worry about these kinds of things at all, it will all work out somehow. (Or not, and we all die in some kind of societal meltdown, but you know what, that’s okay too).

The difference between a fun-but-forgettable book and a great book is that a great book resolves some struggle in the author’s heart. It might not have a happy answer or an easy solution, but it takes a source of confusion and pain in the author’s world, and takes a stand about what it is or what it means.

Take The Great Gatsby for instance. Each character in the book arguably represents a different response to the crisis that F. Scott Fitzgerald saw in the world around him, namely that his contemporaries had lost faith in enlightenment values following World War I. He believed they were living empty lives of conspicuous consumption, hurting themselves and others. In writing The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald transformed that feeling from one man’s impression into a cultural truth, giving it iconic weight that continues to have force eighty-seven years later.

Tom Buchanan is a character in the book, a former star college football player who’s now rich, powerful, and morally lost. Fitzgerald writes, “Tom would drift on forever seeking, a little wistfully, for the dramatic turbulence of some irrecoverable football game.” Without rules, goal posts, and an opposing team, Tom doesn’t know what to do with himself. He acquires trophy horses, trophy cars, and a trophy wife, but he’s still dissatisfied.

The protagonist of the Scott Pilgrim graphic novels, by Bryan Lee O’Malley, is sort of a Tom Buchanan for our generation. He’s a hipster everyman, or at least, an every-man-child. Funded by his wealthy parents and roommate, he’s unemployed and spends his time sleeping, playing video games, and practicing with his indie rock band. Like Tom, Scott yearns for a remembered clarity of purpose, although in his case, it’s memories of playing games like Bomberman, Sonic the Hedgehog, or The Legend of Zelda.

Scott Pilgrim is about Scott’s quest to grow up, in a world that’s okay with him staying a child. It’s about what it means to be an adult in a post-modern society, one where relativism, self-reference, and irony have eroded faith in any kind of external standards or norms. I would argue that Scott Pilgrim is significant because it goes beyond post-modernism by asserting that there is an answer to “okay, so then what?” O’Malley takes a stand that even in our fractured, post-everything, been-there-done-that world, there’s still an “up” to grow into.
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Okay, here it is:

“I can be happy independent of my external circumstances.”

I think basically you can derive the main practical benefits of any form of organized spiritual system from this one concept. A few thoughts:

If you really believe this, your overall level of fear and stress will be pretty low, because it is hard to threaten you if you believe you can be happy in spite of bad things happening to you. Conversely, if you don’t believe this, things that are very distant from you such as a policy wonk making a gloomy economic forecast can seem like a direct personal threat.

On that note, I think a lot of religious teachings on generosity and compassion boil down to this in practice. If you feel secure, it’s easy to be generous even if you don’t have much, whereas if you feel insecure, it’s hard to be generous even if you’re rich. Happy people tend to make other people around them happy.

One of the cool things about this religion is that its truth is self-fulfilling. Believing it is a very happy thought, so the more you believe it, the more true it is. (And likewise, disbelieving it is a scary, threatening thought, so the more you disbelieve it, the less true it is).

I’m generally not okay believing in things that I don’t have good reason to think are true, but I think believing self-fulfilling truths is acceptable. Basically, I think you’re okay as long as you’re aware that you’re making a deliberate choice, and you acknowledge that someone who chooses the opposite isn’t wrong in any absolute sense.

As well as being theologically sound and personally liberating, I think this religion has useful practical consequences. I find that, paradoxically, being okay with not solving a problem makes it much easier to solve the problem. It gives you the freedom to step back and consider alternatives that you wouldn’t look at if you have a solve-it-or-die mentality. So although I suppose one could take the attitude that, because I’m happy regardless of external circumstances, I can let the world around me go to hell, I think if you choose to take a proactive, I want-to-make-the-world-a-better-place attitude, this religion helps rather than hinders you.

That said, I do think that when you start applying this thinking to the world around you, it changes your approach to things. It leads to more patient, incremental problem-solving, as opposed to sweeping, all-or-nothing efforts. It also leads to radically greater humility about your opinions, since in my experience a strong need to feel that you’re right is symptomatic of a fear of losing control. The real world is an incredibly complex place, far beyond our theoretical capacity to understand it, and that’s very scary if you’re not secure in your own happiness.

I’m not sure if this is a proselytizing religion. Can you imagine someone going door-to-door promoting it? Shouting it out on the street? Maybe some day. Maybe you!