In a certain group, I drew open the proposition that the world is a sad place to be in. Everyone jumped up to correct me that that was not true. Before they could suggest that my life might have been miserable, I clarified that I meant the future seemed to be bleak. Surprisingly, many shared the sentiment of a bleaker future, and a certain lady went on to say that after her first child, she was not sure if she should give birth to another one in a world like ours!
A bleak view of the world is not what I want to believe in. It is the equivalent of fighting for oxygen in the world of ideas when there’s less fresh air to breathe. Giving in to a depressive worldview is an intellectual defeat. Many philosophers have risen out of commiseration of shared misery.
Meditations On Moloch on one reading would be just that: yet more reasons why the world is rotten from the inside. The insurmountable omnipresent god of distraction, Moloch, at whose fingertips we keep playing the drum of life. The metaphor is that our considerable failure to do the right thing systematically is akin to the prophetic failure to restrict the worship of Moloch. In order words, no matter what we do, we’re bound to fail and succumb to lure, greed, and self-interests 🙁.
We fail at a system level because everyone works in their self-interest. Everyone working for their self-interest can only have so much consideration for the greater good of society. Thus, individual gains will leak through every social effort.
Consider this.
Imagine a capitalist in a cutthroat industry. He employs workers in a sweatshop to sew garments, which he sells at minimal profit. Maybe he would like to pay his workers more, or give them nicer working conditions. But he can’t, because that would raise the price of his products and he would be outcompeted by his cheaper rivals and go bankrupt. Maybe many of his rivals are nice people who would like to pay their workers more, but unless they have some kind of ironclad guarantee that none of them are going to defect by undercutting their prices they can’t do it.
This sums up Scott Alexander’s dilemma with capitalism. Even with the greatest goodwill, coordination problems, self-interest, and simply individual freedoms will get in the way of the best outcome. And that is “Moloch” doing its work.
In a race for survival,
Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.
In his essay, he provides many examples of how Moloch’s poison eats into every bit and part of our society where, though the society consists of us, we don’t technically operate for our long-term best interest. That is interest beyond the personal, selfish, and individualistic.
Incentivized Towards Predetermined Motivations
Perhaps it is true. Our individual paths, actions, and identity formations will lead us to do not the best outcome for the group but for the individual incentives.
As an employer, my best interest (in the ultimate sense) would be to have slave workers. Workers who work without any pay. Elizabeth Anderson actually thinks that our current work culture is a controlling structure (like slavedoms) where employers rule pervasively into our private lives. She calls it private government. Maybe slavedom evolved into private government.
But if it is indeed true that individual incentives trump collective incentives and the best-case outcome, then the question remains: where did our values go? Have we lost our values along the way?
Perhaps suggesting a valueless world is not any less outrageous as to say individual incentives alone will drive the equation.
I don’t think Scott thinks the world is valueless. Instead, he would perhaps consider that we have excellent values, but Moloch is getting in the way of them reaching their true potential.
But the question still remains: where did the values go?
Values Didn’t Go Anywhere, We’ve Value Wars
Scott’s dilemma, for example, with capitalism is precisely the problem of the degradation of values. And it doesn’t help that capitalism encourages it.
In our times, Value Wars are common. We have lots of values. Consider the abortion right debate, the non-binary debate, left vs. right-wing, globalism vs. national identity, immigration vs. locals, developed vs. developing countries, cultured vs. uncultured, woke vs. anti-woke, cancel culture vs. deluge of expression, social media vs. those in the real world.
I would argue we live in a century with the most values humanity has ever possibly had!
Our society has quite capably turned into a value-producing machine. And these values are not fluff. They are real. In the last 20 years, 30 countries have made same-sex marriage legal. Most ancient-era humans would think we’ve lost our minds. They would also be shocked that many developed countries, if not most, have more foreigners than locals—for example, the UAE.
This is not normal human behaviour. We broke thousands of years of traditions in a few decades. As animalistic as we can be, breaking group-think and coming out of tribalism—including the Peninsular Arabs who still form real tribes—and spitting on homophobia is purely a marvel of what the last 20 years of Value Wars of this century have achieved.
Reaching Equilibrium
Contrary to pessimism and to Moloch, in fact, I am more inclined to believe that we’re reaching an equilibrium with the value wars.
With the rising wealth of the giant Asian nations of India and China, we have reached a multi-polar world. Small nations, like Qatar, have considerable political power. Something unimaginable in the Cold War era. With this multi-polarity of nations, more humans can now posit their values in just proportion. This will never be perfect. But at least the voices of more nations count as opposed to only the superpowers of the world.
It is not so much the sharing of power that is contributing. Rather, it is the shared burden of criticism that comes with power which is contributing. Though the United States is enormously powerful, it is also the one most criticized and studied. With criticism or a greater propensity for it, I believe, we reach a greater equilibrium.
The world of extremes is dying. This means mellowing down who we are as citizens, people, and countries. This stabilization of the world and the ongoing value wars do mean that we’re spending more time figuring out the gaps created by Moloch and will work for a better world. (If you think the world has not been getting better and is not going to be any better, check out Max Roser’s Our World in Data).
Though values are a powerful tool to incentivize away from solely individualistic determination, it is not enough. We have to incentivize the group benefit at an individual level so that values—something transitory—alone don’t drive our motivations.
