dire need for social reform

Look at the history of all mass social traumas. (Rise and fall of feudalism etc.) You will see that they are all preceded by transformative technological and economic disruptions and followed by transformative social and spiritual reforms.

We are going through a similar trauma at the moment. These structural changes can be hard to see while you are inside them since they manifest themselves in myriad of details. However when you go back to evaluate what happened, the picture is always crystal clear. (This evaluation can not be conducted right after the dust settles. You literally need some distance to see what really happened.)

Today we have entered into a new phase in the development of the next layer of complexity within the grand narrative of life. (To understand what I mean, read Emergence of Life post.) This new technological wave is slowly unfolding, but it is probably on par with the industrial revolution, perhaps even a couple of magnitudes more powerful. Long story short, our centralized digital brain has finally emerged. (i.e. The multi-cloud layer linking up all cloud-based computation and storage resources.) This development has already started to have massive effects on our psyches via the infiltration of social media and the penetration of artificial intelligence into our everyday lives. Artists and writers have felt the zeitgeist and are responding to it by writing books and shooting movies to raise social awareness about the oncoming possible consequences of the new technologies.

Clearly, the emergence of the next life forms is a vastly complicated, non-linear process. Nature is giving birth to something new through us and naturally we are the ones who are most affected by this traumatic unfolding.

Today, society as we know it is literally falling apart:

• Friendship has evolved into an unrecognizable form.

• Our lives have become so complex (a natural side effect of the emergence) and we expect so much from our life partners that the notion of marriage has morphed into an all-or-nothing form. Divorce rates are skyrocketing, and the whole institution is crumbling under immense weight.

• Our schools are extremely out-of-date and nobody seems to have the balls, persistence and the vision to reform them. (Hint: Handing out more screens will not solve the problem.) We are not preparing our kids for the challenges they will be facing when they grow up. In fact, we are not even preparing them for today’s challenges. The situation is so ridiculous that I sincerely believe that we would be better off by turning the entire thing off.

• Our economic and social safety nets are insufficient to cope with the oncoming technological wave. People are feeling left-behind and depressed, especially since our current macro structures are implicitly asking them to derive the meaning of life from their jobs. (Hint: Handing out more money will not solve the problem.) Only after the epic rise of China (with its top-down, long-term-thinking, centralized, globally-optimized decision making mechanisms) have the business elites in United States recognized that they actually have social obligations, beyond maximizing shareholder value.

And the list goes on…

We need to speed up, otherwise our social reforms will not be able catch up with the increasing speed and magnitude of technological changes. Make no mistake, technology will not slow down for us. Emergence of the next level of life forms is an unstoppable process. If this process collapses, we, as humanity, will collapse along with it. In other words, if we can not give rise to these new life forms, evolution will promptly get rid of us and try again. (Human-level minds will re-emerge somehow, somewhen, somewhere.)

So what are we doing now? Are we reforming?

No.

What type of leaders do you need for preaching social progress and propagating social reform? You need liberal leaders. What have our liberal leader done? They fucked up badly, really really badly. Now conservatism is coming back with full force everywhere. People are fleeing back to safety, falling back onto old notions, closing down on themselves, against each other and towards new ideas. And they have every right to do so, because they feel betrayed. They can not pinpoint exactly what went wrong, but they feel that the elites have not done their jobs. And they are absolutely right. Elites chose to mind their own business and think of their own pockets. Most still feel no sense of duty towards the society. If they felt any, we would not be in this shit situation today, regressing back in time while technology is marching ahead with no stop in sight.

It will probably take another 20 years before the society gives another chance to liberal progressives and opens up to new social reforms. Again, make no mistake, liberals have done this to themselves. They can not cry it out. They need to change. In a world where a substantial majority of the graduates of the most revered university (Harvard College) chooses to pursue careers in investment banking and consulting, in a world where the most revered technology leader (Elon Musk) sees salvation of humanity through a fantasy colonization of Mars, common people will obviously feel betrayed. Our best brains need to be socially conscious. Our best leaders need to be morally sensible. If they will not do the job, society will look elsewhere, just as they are doing now.

There is an immense psychological distress at the moment. People who are supposed to save us are clueless. They do not have any spiritual strength to deal with this new (self-induced) massive attack on our social infrastructures and well-beings.

• Most define their lives through their work, which will soon mostly be rendered irrelevant by artificial intelligence. These ones are hopeless.

• Some define their lives through their children. These ones will be sacrificing the spiritual health of the children to salvage their own, by making the children serve their own psychological needs.

• Some, as expected, seek help from science. But the psychologists are clueless about questions of meaning. They have even less of an idea about the deep structural evolutionary causative factors that have led to this mess.

As I said at the beginning, all technological shocks have to be followed by spiritual transformations. We literally need to ask again to ourselves what it means to be a human being. To do this at scale, we need a new set of spiritual leaders who can guide us through this new mess we created. Religion should evolve to stay relevant. Our educated elite is no longer governed by any higher values simply because they can not find any religious doctrines they can resonate with. (Doctrines meant to be addressed to uneducated masses living two thousand years ago will not do the job.)

What may be salvaging us today is a few glitters of basic humanistic instincts, here and there, a few good people with good common sense in some high level offices. But this is clearly not enough. You can not solve the greater social challenges we are facing today simply by throwing more love at them. Of course, empathy is necessary for revising and building the superstructures we need, but it is not enough by itself. (It is not even enough in quantity at the moment.)

Salvation will not happen by going to Mars. It will happen through a deep understanding of how evolution works, and through a guided progressive social reform that is not out-of-touch with the new challenges of our times.

My biggest worry is that we are slowing down too much today. Do you know what happens when spiritual guidance and principles of social self-governance fail to keep up with technological progress? Bad decisions and eventually wars! Darkness takes over, and humanity gets hammered until it realigns its values and understands its real priorities.

“The saddest aspect of life right now is that science gathers knowledge faster than society gathers wisdom.”

- Isaac Asimov

Why do we always have to go through the hard way? We need to understand that this game is getting exponentially more dangerous. We are not playing with swords any more. After the next world war, there may not be another “phoenix rising from its ashes” story. Of course, as I said before, nature will always rise from its ashes and keep constructing greater complexities and autonomies, but that does not necessarily have to involve us.