But is there any reform that could remedy this organisational flaw, or is the cycle to be our destiny? To answer this, let’s first explain Quigley’s theory in detail. Then, we will apply it to modern society. Finally, we will discuss what it might take to create some kind of immune system against institutionalisation, and the role Metasophism might play in this.

Quigley’s theory of institutionalisation

In his book The Evolution of Civilisations, Quigley argued that a society’s life cycle consists of seven stages: mixture, gestation, expansion, age of conflict, universal empire, decay, and invasion. He designated the “institutionalization of instruments” as the key factor causing a civilization to stagnate, enter an age of conflict, and eventually fail.

Quigley’s “instrument” could be an organisation such as a priesthood, a practice such as slavery, a governing system such as feudalism, or an economic system such as capitalism and its variants. Each instrument is created to fulfil some purpose that initially helps the society become wealthier. But eventually, the instrument seeks to ensure its own survival, wealth and power: the process Quigley called institutionalisation. At this stage, it is no longer an instrument, but an institution in Quigley’s terminology.

The institution now values its own interests above those of the broader society, thereby damaging the prosperity of the whole. Once this happens, the society (or specific actors within it) can either circumvent or reform the institution. In practice, Quigley offers many more examples of circumvention—we’ll explore these later. But a society could also suffer reaction: where the vested interests succeed in entrenching their power, condemning the society to decline.

Instruments of expansion in history

Of the various stages proposed by Quigley, the most relevant is the stage of expansion. This is marked by growth in wealth, knowledge, population, and production. But what is it that kicks off this process? For Quigley, three conditions need to be present for an instrument to effect an expansion of civilisation:

1. Accumulation of surplus

2. An incentive to invent

3. The surplus is used to pay for or use new inventions

The incentive to invent he sees as being something of a cultural trait, not something that arises due to a challenge as Arnold Toynbee argued.

The question then is how does an instrument start to accumulate a surplus, and who is responsible for investing it. Some examples are helpful here.

Mesopotamia

Let’s take Quigley’s speculative discussion of the very first civilisation: Mesopotamia. The surplus-generating organisation was the Sumerian priesthood. How did this priesthood arise? According to Quigley, someone investigated astronomical and weather cycles, and eventually learned how to foretell the flood. They exchanged this valuable information for tribute, which resulted in a surplus.

This surplus was later invested in other activities such as irrigation, in turn providing evidence that it was worthwhile to belong to the new society. Other Mesopotamian inventions such as the plow, the wheeled cart, the brick, the arch, city life, pottery manufacture and metal smelting had a similar effect.

Unfortunately, Quigley does not provide many citations making it hard to evaluate where this information comes from.

Canaanite Civilisation

Another example supplied by Quigley is the Canaanite civilisation, which was based in areas along the Eastern and Southern Mediterranean. This expanded through commercial capitalism, which he defined as the system within which profits are pursued through the geographic exchange of goods. But this instrument became an institution when the pursuit of profit led to monopolisation and the rise of a commercial oligarchy. As expansion through economic means became strangled, the society began to expand through political means such as conflict.

Classical Civilisation

He next addresses the Greco-Roman civilisation. Here he claims that Classical society expanded through the use of slavery. Furthermore, he claims this eventually hindered productivity growth once the owners turned absentee, as slaves had little incentive to improve the productivity of the estates. To support this, he cites Pliny noting that agricultural output per area was greater on family farms.

Slavery is also portrayed by him as something which was essential to the formation of classical civilisation, as the culture of classical civilization was built by people with leisure, and this leisure was the result of slavery. These people were also city dwellers at a time when the city had little economic function.

According to Quigley, while struggles over this issue eventually destroyed Classical society, any solution in the form of another instrument of expansion would probably have meant the end of that society anyway.

The West: circumvention and reform

Origins of feudalism

Finally, he turns to the West. Western civilisation partly emerged from the mixture of new technology such as cavalry and horseshoe. This resulted in a new social organisation in the form of knights and castles, which was then paired with Christianity. The knight provided protection and the serf provided the food. But the knight had more power which resulted in him extracting more than was necessary from the serf. This resulted in a surplus under the control of the knight.

How was the surplus invested? Agricultural expansion was initiated by draining or clearing wastelands and forests. Such work was also done by monastic groups. The surplus also kicked off demand for luxury goods and therefore long distance trade (p.345). Such goods included “furs, honey, wax, and later hemp, tar, and even lumber.” This in turn created the town-living middle class as commerce required literacy, in turn laying the ground for new types of culture.

Feudalism was circumvented

While in early feudalism the fact that the knight could not beat the castle meant that central power was difficult to enforce, eventually the growing effectiveness of siege warfare reduced the effectiveness of the castle and made the average political unit larger. Guns and artillery later favoured even more centralisation.

Therefore feudalism became obsolete as a system, being replaced militarily by mercenary men-at-arms, and politically by the bourgeoisie and the clergy. Three centuries of expansion ended in around 1274.

But even after its obsolescence, the fundamental structure of feudalism was left in place. This instance of circumvention is best illustrated by looking at the example of England.

The king was left covered with honors, but the task of governing England was taken over by Parliament and ultimately by a committee of Parliament. The Lord Warden of the Cinq Ports has a brilliant uniform and a drafty castle, but the task of guarding the seas of England was given to the Royal Navy in the sixteenth century. The Earl Marshal of England is left with titles and social prestige and still manages the coronation, but the job of leading the army was given to a commander in chief.

Capitalism as an instrument of expansion

After feudalism in the West, the history of instruments is largely a story of different versions of capitalism.

Feudalism was replaced by commercial capitalism. This eventually became institutionalised into municipal mercantilism which lasted from about 1270 to 1440. He defines this as a system where the interests of the consumer are prioritised. For example, it put restrictions on exports but not imports, and regulated crafts to ensure high quality.

Municipal mercantilism would eventually fall due to a new period of circumvention arising from enlarged markets coming about via improvements in communications and transport. This also involved a shift from Mediterranean commerce to the Atlantic. This new geographical scope opened up the way for dynastic monarchies to intervene and regulate economic affairs:

“As a consequence of the inability of municipal authorities to regulate the newer, larger markets created by improved transportation and communications, this task was taken over by the emerging dynastic monarchies…This newer economic regulation by dynastic monarchies is known as state mercantilism. It aimed to protect traders rather than consumers or producers. Much of the expansion of the second period of expansion arose from its efforts… By the eighteenth century, state mercantilism had become in its turn a structure of vested interests serving to hamper economic life rather than to help it.”

State mercantilism would eventually be reformed and superseded by industrial capitalism, which is different from commercial capitalism as it is marked more by the production of goods to generate profit rather than simply the exchange of goods. Quigley is not exactly clear on how this reform process took place. It could have been an intellectual victory through the work of Adam Smith and others. Alternatively, it may have been due to power moving from the British Crown to Parliament.

Industrial capitalism he portrays as slowly falling prey to financial capitalism. But finance he portrays as self-defeating, eventually leading to the rise of monopoly capitalism at around 1930.

“To ensure continued banking control of these firms, bankers used such mechanisms as interlocking directorships, holding companies, consolidations, and controlled banking services. But these methods of banking control, by reducing competition between firms, made it possible to seek profits by raising prices rather than by decreasing costs and thus made it possible for such firms to become self-financing of their own capital needs and, accordingly, to be freed from banking control.”

But by the time of the ascendency of monopoly capitalism, the society was already in an age of conflict.

An age of conflict arises when a society that is used to growth no longer has it. He broadly sees there as being three ages of conflict in the history of the West, starting at 1300, 1650 and 1900 respectively (see p. 165). One could quite easily contest these dates; he muddies the waters slightly by saying that often one part of a civilization could be one stage behind another. Even still, I find it difficult to accept the 1650 date, as at this point the English Civil War, the Anglo Spanish War, and the religious wars in France and Germany virtually just came to an end. Rather, it would be easier to point to it as an end point, epitomised by the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia. But that there was an age of conflict ending at that point cannot really be denied.

How does he characterise an age of conflict, apart from the obvious interstate conflict dimension?

“All the characteristics of an age of irrationality began to appear on all sides—increased gambling, increased smoking, the growing use of alcohol and narcotics, a growing obsession with sex and with perversions of sex, an increasing mania for speed, for nervous tension, and for noise; above all, perhaps, a growing tendency to regard violence as a solution for all problems, be they domestic, social, economic, ideological, or international. All these characteristics of any Age of Conflict are too obvious to require further comment. They arose, as is usual in an Age of Conflict, because the organizational patterns of our culture ceased to function as instruments but had become institutionalized. ”

By the 60s, he also saw monopoly capitalism as having transitioned to a pluralist system composed of different blocs:

“These blocs came to include: (1) finance, (2) heavy industry, (3) light industry, (4) commercial and service groups (such as real estate), (5) civil servants, (6) the armed services, (7) labor, (8) farmers, (9) transportation, and others. If any one or several of these blocs become too obviously exploitative of the others, the others form an alignment to pressurize the government in another direction. The chief consequence of such alignments and pressures has been to increase government spending and thus to increase inflation.”

Even though the book was written many decades ago, Quigley's model provides us with a potentially powerful lens for interrogating our present situation. Let's examine the current landscape through this theoretical framework.

Where are we today?

Among the countries of the West, only the United States and some Eastern European countries are enjoying high growth rates. In most of Europe, growth is quite low or non-existent. We just saw above the point Quigley made about government spending increases: have government bureaucracies themselves become an institution?

Government bureaucracies have interests that are distinct from the people they claim to serve. It’s unlikely that all government departments fulfil their function well, given what we know about human competence and fallibility.

This is even more true given that there are few precedents for the government bureaucracy being so large—the former Communist states are one exception probably, another is the Minoan society of which we know relatively little. A great deal of activity is bound up with increasing tax revenues, which can then be mobilised to provide additional bribes to different groups of voters. It recalls how the later Roman Emperors had to successively bribe the soldiers in order to obtain power.

Even if the size of the state is part of the problem, simply cutting it will not likely be a solution given the tendency of capitalism to institutionalise. The money would likely end up in the financial system—and financial capitalism has clearly emerged from the grave, given that it now has power at a level far greater than it had in the post war period especially in the UK and the US. But is it an institution or an instrument?

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Is finance capitalism institutionalised?

First, it is fairly uncontested that the financial sector has taken on a level of importance that it has perhaps never had. This is clearly shown in the graph below. Private equity now controls so many companies that around 12 percent of US workers work for a private equity company. Index funds can throw out board members of companies like Exxon.

The question then is whether it is negatively affecting growth. At this stage, it is useful to recall our three criteria for an instrument of expansion: that there should be a surplus, an incentive to invent, and that the surplus is used to pay for new inventions. One could argue that the modern financial industry acts on all three in a negative way.

Does finance reduce productivity?

Empirical data seems to indicate that, past a certain point, growth in finance lowers productivity. According to researchers at the Bank of International Settlements, looking at data from over twenty countries over a period of 30 years “there is a robust, economically meaningful, negative correlation between productivity and financial sector growth. We also find that causality likely runs from financial sector growth to real economic growth.”

Why is this the case? According to the authors, “finance tends to favour relatively low productivity industries as such industries usually own assets that are relatively easy to pledge as collateral. So as finance grows, the sectoral composition of the economy changes in a way that drives aggregate total factor productivity down”. In Quigley’s terms, that means the surplus given to finance to allocate is not being used to pay for new inventions in that way it could be.

The incentive to invent may also be weakened. Finance attracts talent from other sectors. Some numbers indicate that “almost 1/3 of the 33,000 employers working full-time at Goldman Sachs are engineers and programmers, and roughly one fifth of new physics graduates accept a job in the financial sector, which is more than those who go to work in high-tech industries”.

It’s far easier to make a great fortune by going into finance than by doing something new, if one has good educational credentials. Why figure out a new way of generating wealth when you can manage and/or skim off the wealth that has already been generated?

How finance drives short-termism

But even leaving aside the possibility that finance damages productivity by misallocating capital and labour, more pernicious may be the rise of management by metric, and short-termism. Publicly listed firms set their strategies and timelines so that they are appealing to the markets, which mostly means a short-term horizon.

In the words of Peter Drucker, “everyone who has worked with American management can testify that the need to satisfy the pension fund manager’s quest for higher earnings next quarter, together with the panicky fear of the raider, constantly pushes top managements toward decisions they know to be costly, if not suicidal, mistakes.”

This view is corroborated by a study of 400 CFOs of large U.S. public companies in which almost 80 percent of them said that they would “sacrifice economic value for the firm in order to meet that quarter’s earnings expectations”.

Therefore, it seems that a good case can be made that finance negatively affects all three of the societal surplus, the incentive to invent, and that the surplus is used to pay for new inventions.

Of course, finance has a positive role in allocation savings to investments. But the larger it becomes, the greater its ability to profit by altering the environment to its favour instead of simply providing services to others. In that sense, there is something inevitable about finance capitalism: as a society succeeds, savings build up and this eventually finds its way into banks or financial intermediaries. Eventually, the power of the sector is too great for it to remain a simple modest instrument. And they act to ensure their own interest, even at the expense of society.

What this means is that to resolve the problem of civilizational cycles we will need to envisage some way of managing the surplus that does not recreate the problems of financial capitalism.

Institutionalisation is a general problem and needs a general solution

At this point, one may be tempted to propose some kind of new financial firm, resistant to institutionalization. This would be a mistake because institutionalization is a general problem with organisations and firms, and therefore the solution should be somewhat general: what we need is a new type of firm, which the financial institution would be but once instantiation of.

The general nature of this problem is well illustrated by how the most damaging vested interests vary by country. In Italy, lawyers and the judicial system generally are a vested interest, benefiting from long legal procedures which hold back business. Notaries in Germany get fees which are excessive compared to other countries, for functions that are not even necessary. The US healthcare sector is the standout vested interest in the US, spending more than any other sector on lobbying in 2023.

At this stage, it is interesting to ask what are the factors that allow an instrument to become an institution.

Firms and entire sectors find it easy to lobby governments: essentially, wealth is used to buy power, for example through campaign funding or offering politicians and civil servants employment—the so-called revolving door.

Second, firms and sectors manipulate the public through public relations and lobbying. This is often not so difficult, because the public have only a cursory understanding of most issues, and some sectors such as finance are fiendishly complex. In such areas, it is very hard for detractors to identify abuses because the mechanisms involved can be arcane, such as in the area of financial regulation.

What we have here is a lack of the classical virtues. There is a lack of sophrosyne, which relates to self-control and abstention. There is a manifest lack of honesty.

The reason for this is that people see no reason to display such virtues. The societal definition of success is in most cases related to individual wealth and power. Their objective, or telos in virtue ethics terms, is normally not any concept of the societal good.

It should not be surprising that the telos of firms and individuals is not related to the telos for society, for there is no societal telos. In fact, liberalism prides itself on there not being one, believing that it is up to the individual to figure that out. But even if this is a necessary compromise, it gives a moral license to institutionalisation at a firm level. While democratic mechanisms should provide a way to circumvent that in theory, in practise, there is public relations, lobbying and the revolving door as described above.

Can we conceive of any way forward to even partly immunise a firm against institutionalisation?

An immune system against institutionalisation

To reiterate, institutionalisation is when an organisation becomes focussed on money or power, to the neglect of the social role it originally satisfied. Here we have a close mapping with the problem which virtue ethics addresses: namely keeping people from being overly preoccupied with the external goods of money power and fame, and instead helping them cultivate the virtues that allows them to perform their given role well.

In a previous essay on “The Truth-Seeking Economy” I discussed how virtue ethics and Metasophism could reform capitalism by introducing the truth-seeking firm, part of a co-operative including consumers and other firms. The telos this firm would be committed to would be the Metasophist Imperative, defined as the pursuit of knowledge in the hope that one day we may discover the meaning of life. Interestingly, this aligns very well with Quigley’s statement that the essence of Western civilisation was the belief that "truth unfolds in time through a communal process".

How did that system help bind the firm to truth-seeking? The following were the three key aspects which the co-operative would apply to the firms in its ambit:

• Mission-oriented rather than profit-oriented: Firms and the individuals in control of them should be focused on attaining the mission of the firm rather than boosting the profitability or stock price of the company.

• External evaluation of products: This then allows us to see if the firm is actually fulfilling the purpose it claims to be following, allowing us to cut through the fog of advertising. How long does a piece of equipment or clothing last? Does a given supplement actually improve your sleep quality? This involves an element of cooperation between producers and consumers, one which would be facilitated by the community organisations.

• Internal reforms to prevent promotion of vice: Before a firm can corrupt society, it must first corrupt those within it. This invariably happens because people become overly motivated by money, or the organisation initiates their moral corruption by incentivizing them to lie. We could counter this by ensuring that there exists no incentive to lie for career reasons.

But are we missing something?

There is no explicit solution to the problem of financial capitalism and short-termism mentioned earlier. For that, we would need to remove pressure for the firm to pursue short-term strategies from the outside. That means some kind of insulation from the financial markets. That could be achieved if the firm would be controlled by the co-operative (even if not owning more than 50 percent of the entity).

Another theme I did not deal with in the earlier essay was the issue of lobbying. The community could initiate a reform of lobbying as firms should not be allowed to lobby themselves. Rather, the Community itself would undertake this role. There would be a body of people working for the community, and funded by the Community, who would be charged with evaluating whether a firm is working towards the overall mission or not (and therefore possibly also of evaluating the effect of legislation). All firms would pay a certain amount to benefit from this facility.

Conclusion

A producer-consumer cooperative, operating on the principles of virtue ethics, could help avoid societal decline by making it harder for the firms within its orbit from becoming institutionalised. How? By providing an external check on such firms to ensure that they are pursuing their mission, by reforming the firm to reduce the incentives towards dishonesty, and finally by ensuring that they provide value rather than simply manipulating their environment through lobbying.

In other words, we prevent institutionalisation by binding such firms to truth-seeking. Does this help us avoid the problems affecting modern capitalism? It would certainly reduce the incentives for firms to embrace short-termism, because this would be flagged in the deterioration of their product or service. The information from external testing would also provide an alternative to advertising—making it less effective in the process.

Furthermore, it would help us recast lobbying in a more socially-beneficial mold. Over time, if the number of firms in the cooperative becomes significant, we would have an economic base that would allow us to even provide a new model of financial institution, challenging the heart of financial capitalism itself.

The real promise of this system extends beyond merely reforming individual firms or sectors. By entrenching a culture of truth-seeking in the habits and expectations of individuals, it offers a chance to finally break the cycle of civilizational decline that Quigley documented throughout history.

Modern capitalism elicits vice from employees and customers alike. The advertising-based business model of social media harvests people's attention by inciting anger and envy. Within many large organisations, honesty hinders self-advancement. Moreover, a short-term focus on “external goods” such as profitability can often damage firms by hollowing out expertise or compromising quality.

For those who reject socialism, is there any alternative to this system? This essay argues that a framework of virtue ethics that has as its objective the discovery of knowledge can help us design a new form of capitalism where truth-seeking becomes profitable. The key proposal is to experiment with a new kind of firm, embedded within an institutional structure to bind the firm to the truth and help it become a place where information is not corrupted by power, meaning that one is less incentivised to be dishonest. This is a prerequisite for the firm to become a place where the virtues can be practiced.

Such an institutional structure, or cooperative, would introduce continuous testing and comparison of certain products. It could also experiment with internal reforms to reduce sycophancy and groupthink within a firm, thereby increasing the quality of reasoning. One such reform could concern how personnel are selected for promotions, to curtail any possibility of ingratiation of favouritism being used to obtain patronage.

Importantly, the responsibility for such reforms would not come under the purview of management, as the ultimate intent of these changes would be to ensure that management does not subordinate truth to their own interests.

Instead of asking businesses to sacrifice profit for truth, this system aims to create an environment where truth-seeking becomes a competitive advantage. Businesses within the cooperative could benefit from lower cost of customer acquisition and lower research and development costs. Within the firm, the emphasis on truth-seeking could also improve decision-making and avoid costly mistakes, improving productivity and lowering prices, meaning no economic sacrifice on the customer's part either.

Finally, the essay discusses how a civic movement aiming to do the above could grow over time and reward the members who contribute to such growth. Importantly, in order to succeed, the community would not need to attract mass support: only around 4 percent of the population could be needed for this proposal to work.

Has capitalism, once a force for good, become a vehicle for vice? A trillion dollars is spent annually on advertising1, much of which is manipulative rather than simply educative. Worse yet is that in order to attract this advertising spend, platforms reward content that grabs attention. Expressing moral outrage gets more likes on Twitter, so posters are effectively conditioned to generate discord2. So-called thirst traps get more engagement on Instagram, conditioning people to generate lust. That is before we even discuss envy. That the marriage of the internet and capitalism has amplified the classical vices is surely beyond doubt.

How bureaucratic politics can kill honesty 

But this is not the only way modern capitalism propagates vice. Within large firms and organisations, the virtuous will often find themselves hobbled in the quest to get ahead. Consider the following quote from the book Moral Mazes, claiming to summarise the fundamental rules of bureaucratic life:

(1) You never go around your boss. (2) You tell your boss what he wants to hear, even when your boss claims that he wants dissenting views. (3) If your boss wants something dropped, you drop it. (4) You are sensitive to your boss’s wishes so that you anticipate what he wants; you don’t force him, in other words, to act as boss. (5) Your job is not to report something that your boss does not want reported, but rather to cover it up. You do what your job requires, and you keep your mouth shut. (p. 109-110)

Despite that being a cynical passage that does not apply to all managers, most politically-alert corporate workers will be aware of some of these “rules”. A strong case can therefore be made that the corporate firm often elicits vice from those both within and without.

Government is not a solution

The instinct of many at this point is to make some appeal for a public policy that could purport to solve the issue. However, governmental institutions suffer from many of the same problems we just looked at. Political parties are usually hierarchies, the leader is the boss, and key individuals quickly learn the five rules stated above. Those who do not will be mavericks to whom insiders will not willingly award power. This critique is not limited to democratic structures; authoritarian structures are worse as even more power is concentrated at the top.

Moreover, in order to win the support of the public, politicians often implicitly endorse greed either through offering debt-funded tax cuts or spending increases targeted at those who already have enough. Politics will not be able stem the wave of vice so long as it remains a source of it; a situation that shows little sign of changing anytime soon.

This does not mean that we need to give up—far from it. For the purpose of this essay is to show that a framework of virtue ethics that has as its telos or objective the discovery of knowledge can help us design a new form of capitalism. The key proposal is to experiment with a new kind of firm, embedded within an institutional structure that binds the firm to truth-seeking and helps it become a place where information is not corrupted by power. In such an environment, one would have less of an incentive to be dishonest. This is a prerequisite for making the firm become a place where the virtues can be practiced.

Such an institutional structure would organise continuous testing and comparison of certain products by customers, essentially becoming a kind of joint producer-consumer cooperative. It could also experiment with internal reforms to reduce sycophancy and groupthink within a firm, thereby increasing the quality of reasoning. One such reform could concern how personnel are selected for promotions, to curtail any possibility of ingratiation being used to obtain patronage.

But why is virtue ethics an apt framework upon which to build such a system? Simply put, virtue ethics offers a compelling explanation for why humanity has essentially groomed itself to spread vice. To see how, let’s start with a look into the thought of one prominent virtue ethicist, and his criticism of modern morality: moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, emeritus Professor at the University of Notre Dame.

Why did modern morality fail

For MacIntyre, modern “moral language is used to manipulate attitudes, choices, or decisions”, and moral culture has become a theatre of illusions where moral rhetoric is used to mask arbitrary choices. In short, morality is not a constraint on elites, but rather a tool they use to advance their own interests. How did this come to be? For MacIntyre, the enlightenment project has left us with a range of different moral frameworks, but no moral standard with which to choose them. This has given elites an ability to pick and choose moral frameworks depending on what is convenient at the time:

MacIntyre’s critique routinely cites the contradictory moral principles adopted by the allies in the second world war. Britain invoked a Kantian reason for declaring war on Germany: that Hitler could not be allowed to invade his neighbours. But the bombing of Dresden (which for a Kantian involved the treatment of people as a means to an end, something that should never be countenanced) was justified under consequentialist or utilitarian arguments: to bring the war to a swift end.3

Incoherent morality leads people to focus on self-interest

Given that there is no communal vision of what is good, people are left to pursue their own interest. With few exceptions, this has resulted in people pursuing what MacIntyre refers to as external goods: money, power, prestige, and fame. What we eventually get is a “society as nothing more than an arena in which individuals seek to secure what is useful or agreeable to them” rather than a “community united in a shared vision of the good for man (as prior to and independent of any summing of individual interests) and a consequent shared practice of the virtues”4.

External goods vs. internal goods 

For MacIntyre, it is the practice of virtues that keeps an individual from being preoccupied with external goods. Virtues help people fulfil their role or purpose in life (their telos) by helping them access the goods that are internal to practices. What is an example of an internal good? MacIntyre offers the example of a chess player. Where the external goods to chess are prize money and possibly fame, the internal goods relate to things such as knowledge of strategies and analytical skill: things you can judge only after becoming proficient in chess. In contrast, one could get external goods by doing a range of other activities: finance, showbusiness, law, and so on.

Alternatively, we could think of an academic, whose role is to generate knowledge. The external goods of being an academic are income and prestige. The internal goods would relate to being an effective teacher, being well-versed in the literature and producing rigorous studies that somehow contribute to society’s knowledge.

Internal and external goods can be in conflict. We know of many cases where academics engage in p-hacking or even data fraud in order to get publishable findings. Conflict is also introduced when academics are paid by vested interests to produce reports: how this affected the economics profession in the period prior to the 2007-2008 financial crisis was highlighted by the Oscar-winning documentary Inside Job, which depicted how some economists were paid by the financial industry to produce reports to cast the sector in a favourable light. In both the above examples an internal good—rigour—has been sacrificed at the altar of prestige and income. 

Implications for the firm

But we can also consider an example at a different scale: that of a company. Take the example of Boeing. The internal goods relate to the reliability and quality of the planes they produce, a reflection of the skill and knowledge of the employees. The external goods are revenue, profit, and the stock price. From around 2005 onwards, an explicit strategy was adopted to prioritise external goods relative to internal goods. 

This resulted in the ostracism of engineers who cared too much about the integrity of the planes and not enough about the stock price, along with a refusal to let such engineers work on the 787 Dreamliner5. Instead, much of this work was outsourced to suppliers, some without engineering departments. 

The result was indeed a rise in Boeing’s stock price, but a fall in their engineering reputation. For example, KLM complained that quality control for one delivery was "way below acceptable standards”, while others complained about delays in deliveries6.

This is a specific example of a general phenomenon to prioritise stock price, especially by linking executive compensation to increases thereof. In fact, it seems that the financialisation of capitalism implies a broad decision to sacrifice internal goods for short-term profit, even if that hollows out companies in the long-run. 

In contrast, a virtue ethics framework could play an important role in addressing the damaging effects of short-termism, by ensuring that we focus on building and retaining our long-standing skills and capabilities, rather than sacrificing these for transient external goods.

Virtue Ethics as solution?

The framework of virtue ethics therefore gives us a powerful lens to interpret the modern economy and why in some aspects it seems to go awry. But before we can apply it to the economy, we need to outline what the actual framework involves. 

What makes a virtue a virtue?

How does MacIntyre decide whether something is a virtue? It must satisfy three conditions:

1. Necessary to achieve the goods internal to practices;

2. Contributes to the good of a whole life;

3. Relates to the pursuit of a good for human beings, the conception of which can only be elaborated and possessed within an ongoing social tradition

One such virtue is constancy. This is the virtue whereby a human life follows a single narrative, where the individual wills one purpose: the individual’s telos. Having this kind of narrative could help the individual overcome challenges and make hard but right decisions. As Nietzsche once said, “he who has a why to live for can bear almost any how”. Without such a personal narrative, it is easier to understand why someone would sacrifice the interests of society for their own benefit: after all, why sacrifice something for others who would never themselves sacrifice something for you?

Another key virtue is phronesis. This is knowing how to exercise judgement in particular cases. This virtue is a prerequisite for the other virtues to be consistently applied as the “very same action which would in one situation be liberality could in another be prodigality and in a third meanness.”

A third is sophrosyne, which is the ability to control one’s passions and therefore refrain from abusing power.

Taken together with others, these virtues could help individuals self-regulate, as they would know how their role fits into the broader frame of society and act accordingly. They would know why they do something, so ethics would not be just about following a list of rules.

But the virtues only make sense in a virtue ethics framework if the end or function of the community is described—this is the telos. Moreover, because the virtues represent habits, they also need a community in which they can be practised. This relates to the third condition mentioned above: what is the common good, or telos, that the community is pursuing?

What is the telos?

For Aristotle, the telos was eudaimonia. This term cannot be directly translated to happiness but rather connotes a combination of blessedness, happiness, and prosperity. How does one attain this? According to Aristotle, where a being has a function, then what is good for that being is whatever helps it perform this function well. For Aristotle, the function of humans is to reason, as this is what is specific to us and differentiates us from other beings. To attain eudaimonia is then to attain a state of reasoning well.

While MacIntyre initially proposed a telos that “the good life for man is the life spent in seeking for the good life for man”, he would later convert to Catholicism after being convinced of the merits of the Thomist teleology.

MacIntyre is also rather restrictive regarding the environments in today’s world which he sees as being arenas where the virtues can develop. Rejecting the nation-state as a theatre where the virtues can be developed, he instead offers quasi-historical examples of such communities:

fishing communities in New England over the past hundred and fifty years . . . Welsh mining communities [instantiating] a way of life informed by the ethics of work at the coal face, by a passion for the goods of choral singing and of rugby football and by the virtues of trade union struggle against first coal-owners and then the state . . . farming cooperatives in Donegal, Mayan towns in Guatemala and Mexico, some city-states from a more distant past.7

One might then wonder how MacIntyre sees society changing to overcome the wave of vice. This is more or less left by him as an exercise to the reader near the end of After Virtue:

What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.8

But what if we want virtue ethics to solve the problems we have here and today, which means competing with the current system both materially and psychologically? Localism cannot compete against capitalism with its global markets and value chain, so we’ll need to devise a new strategy. What would it take for a new community to compete with capitalism? It would need to: 

1. Create firms where the virtues can be practised

2. Somehow endow such firms with a competitive advantage against non-community firms

3. Be able to bootstrap itself without needing support from wealthy patrons or the government

In the following section, we will discuss such a strategy to create a constellation of firms and organisations where the virtues can be practised.

Designing a new community

When creating a community inspired by the principle of virtue ethics, the first question is what the common purpose of this community must be?

For this, we return to Aristotle, who said that the telos of a human is to reason well. However, this “function argument” has commonly been considered a fallacy, as he is deriving an ought from an is. Can we have a formulation of a telos that does not suffer from such a problem? And which also does not require a leap of faith, which MacIntyre took when converting to Catholicism?

The Metasophist Imperative

In previous work, I proposed the Metasophist Imperative as a telos: that the goal for humanity should be to acquire knowledge, in the hope that at some point we may definitively and conclusively determine what the meaning of life, or the purpose of this universe, actually is. The word “Metasophist” indicates that this imperative requires us to integrate the knowledge of different worldviews, perhaps even going so far as to incubate them.

The argument for adopting such a telos is as follows. Either there exists an objective concept of good, or not. If not, then we are in a world of moral nihilism. Nothing can be criticised on moral grounds, for there are none. But if there is an objective good, then we should try to figure out what that is, even if we are unsure about our capacity to do so.

There is no leap of faith here, simply an admission of uncertainty paired with an ambition to overcome it. Having such a mission definitively aligns the community with the search for truth, while being open to different views on what the meaning of life is. This also aligns well with the original Aristotelian telos: although we reject Aristotle’s biological teleology, we preserve the emphasis on reasoning well which is a prerequisite for a search for truth.

Is this simply another version of consequentialism? Not really: different worldviews will have different opinions on what constitutes valuable knowledge. And we don’t know which worldviews, present or future, will prove key to realising this telos. For this and other reasons, consequences in the context of knowledge are prohibitively difficult to calculate, so it makes more sense to focus on the character that will lead people to sincerely search for the truth. But what kind of character is this?

Members of the community oriented towards the Metasophist Imperative should have humility in order to recognise the legitimacy of different approaches to the telos; constancy in the sense that they themselves are aligned with it; and phronesis so that they can adapt their tradition and are not slavishly in thrall to it. Humility also has a key role: there will be disagreement about the truth within the community, so one needs to accept one might be wrong therefore remain committed to the truth-seeking mission and the mechanisms needed to do that. Such individuals will then be better placed to decide the different visions to be pursued and traditions to be preserved.

What are the implications of this telos for firms and individuals? We earlier mentioned that virtue requires consistent practice. Such consistent practice is not possible in a world replete with corporate and media entities eliciting vice for short-term ends. Therefore, we will need to reinvent the firm into a place where the individual can practise the virtues. The ultimate objective would be to create a new constellation of Metasophist firms that can survive and expand over time by beating today’s organisations at their own game.

The Metasophist firm

Earlier we discussed how firms generate vice through manipulative advertising and internal power dynamics. The solution could involve nesting firms within a community, and requiring them to follow a code to avoid or at least mitigate such dynamics. But what would such a code involve? And would it enable them to withstand their competitors?

Trustworthy information as an alternative to advertising

Let’s consider one tractable problem: firms making misleading claims regarding products. This can be addressed in two ways: verifying the quality of production, and by testing how such products do when in the hands of the customer. Take a product like supplements. We care about the production so that there are no impurities in the product, and to ensure that it is what it claims to be.

But even if the product is fully reliable in terms of its inputs, there is still a question of whether it will have the effects the firm claims it can have. Will that toothpaste really whiten your teeth? Will that supplement really improve your sleep quality? In the latter case, this could be tested by a community using devices such as wearables, allowing us to see:

1. Whether a supplement works for a given individual (as opposed to for a group on average)

2. What are the chances that it works for a given person

3. Which brands produce the supplements that are most likely to work

4. Are there other effects which are unstated

I have already built an initial version of this system—if it gains enough users, it could be the first Metasophist firm, the profits from which could be used to start other such firms.

The advantage of relying on wearables is that testing is relatively cheap. Initially, the community could focus on products and attributes where testing can easily be done with this system. As the community gets larger, more challenging testing can be taken on.

Of course, different products would require different types of tests; for example, we may be interested in durability for items like electronics. That would also apply for candles, but in that case we could also be interested in how they affect air quality.

Such evaluative practices would help us to test the quality of products that would themselves be produced by the community. The result could be the creation of a trustworthy brand or seal of quality assurance, which could be granted to Metasophist firms i.e. firms that are part of the Metasophist community.

But what other practices might such firms be subject to? Now we turn to the other internal reforms.

Patronage as a source of vice

We previously discussed how large organisations corrupt, because personal advancement sometimes requires excessive deference to those in power. Is it possible to create a functional firm where all authority is not entirely vested in the top, so that one would never need lie or conceal just to remain in favour with one’s superiors?

This probably requires a dilution or even a separation of powers, where one’s career progression does not hinge on being on favourable terms with some specific individual or group. How could this be implemented? We could alter the CEO role such that this person is responsible for everything except for who gets promotions. Instead, a Community Representative would be responsible for ensuring the separation of powers within the organisation, for example by ensuring a framework like the following:

1. Promotions could be allocated using a combination of:

   1. A board of externals

   2. Some metrics used to measure employee performance

   3. Verified work portfolios

   4. Input from fellow employees

   5. A mixture of the above 

2. The Community Representative should not have any personal say in the decision or the selection, as they could then be in a position to extract favours, reproducing the problem we want to solve. Even worse, they could become an alternative pole of power as others would seek their favour to boost their chances of promotion.

3. The CEO or another key manager could have a veto for well-founded reasons, which would need to be justified on a factual basis.

The above list is not meant to be exhaustive, merely a way to prompt the imagination. A risk with having any one metric or system is that people could figure out some way to game it. For this reason, it might be useful to have multiple systems or procedures, with the one(s) to be used in any given situation being selected semi-randomly. The effort involved in gaming one of these would become greater compared to the expected payoff, so the amount of gaming overall should fall.

The optimal system would vary by firm size, industry, country, and so on. Such a system may be more beneficial in firms with a comfortable market position. In such firms, people are more likely to start fighting over the division of the pie, as opposed to working just to ensure that a pie exists.

The idea of having a Community Representative in a company could yield other uses. As this person is not accountable to management but rather to the Board and the Community itself, they could function as part of a general check upon management, which is sometimes prone to put its own interests above those of the firm or the general community. This means they could ensure that information is not corrupted by power.

This more general role could be used to target common firm inefficiencies by tracking the responsibility for key decisions, noting the predictions that staff make in key meetings, and gathering feedback on whether meetings in general are useful and well-prepared. Currently, management might not gather such information as it may eventually prove unflattering to them. Yet, this same information may prove vital if we wish to improve the quality of reasoning within firms.

The community representative role is designed in such a way that it is not easily corruptible. What could management or staff offer them that would incentivise them to corrupt information? A later job, perhaps—but this is something a code of conduct should forbid.

In any case, the representative should not have very much to offer; as they do not take many decisions, they should not become a power broker. Selection of procedures to set promotions is a long-term procedure, so is relatively immune from tactical short-run power plays.

Furthermore, in the long-run, there could be two or more Community Representatives, making corruption more expensive and harder to co-ordinate. Where possible, both could get non-renewable 4-year terms which would overlap by 2 years: the fact that the Representative is not a lifer would mean their opinions would count for less as their influence, if any, has an expiry date. It also means that subsequent representatives could detect unjustified or strange behaviour.

Such schemes may or may not work; ultimately they would need to be tested in reality. If they don’t work, or yield dysfunctional firms, then another path forward may emerge from the experience. The costs of trying are relatively low compared to the pay-off, which is reducing the amount of attention devoted to internal politics, and creating an environment where people are able to speak their mind without fear of damaging their chances for promotion.

Strategies to Build the Metasophist Economy

How can we bring such firms into existence such that the community, by owning or otherwise controlling them, can ensure they follow a suitable code? The following are some ways that this could be done.

1. Reclamation of purchasing power

Every day we hand over power to companies when buying goods and services. What if we could reclaim this purchasing power by setting up companies to provide common products like household products and clothing? The community would then have control over the profits, or a share thereof. This strategy could initially focus on consumer goods and ideally those that can be sent by mail, given that any idea-based community is likely to be geographically dispersed initially. However, this strategy would only work when the community is of a sufficient size. Furthermore, for such companies to be viable they would also need to sell beyond the community—some expertise in marketing would therefore be necessary.

2. Minority Leverage

A second strategy would involve something that I call the minority leverage tactic. As described by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, small minorities with strong preferences can determine decisions when nobody else cares about the outcome and compliance for the majority is cheap. That means a small but cohesive Metasophist community could leverage their purchasing power to stock the products we manage to produce from Strategy 1 in physical shops and supermarkets. However, this would only work if the community could count on the support of around 4 percent of the population in a given area.

3. Community Marketing: Organising and Rewarding Contributions

Community members themselves could market the products of the community over social media—whether by sharing content, mentioning the products online in relevant discussions, contributing to studies testing such new products, or simply buying the product themselves. 

In order to be able to reward members, the different contributions would need to be tracked in some way. Some kind of peer assessment and other measures could then see whether the contribution is genuine and effective (a bot tweeting to other bots should not be rewarded) while not breaking any rules (such as by vote manipulation on forums that ban that). What is important here is to have a system of recognition and reward that can elicit contribution from members, but does not reward members in the event that no contribution was possible or forthcoming for whatever reason.

In return for contributions, the user could get non-tradeable rights. At the same time, a certain percentage of the company corresponding to the value of the rights could be put into a common holding entity. Eventually, the holding entity would become the recipient of dividends. The rights could then be used to decide what to do with such dividends.

In this sense, the rights could be used to de-escalate disagreements that would emerge between different wings of the community. For example, if the three wings of the community each want to develop a particular type of technology, then they can allocate their rights to the project they choose.

More broadly, the rights could have several uses:

1. Carried over as an investment in future community projects 

2. Used to vote on certain matters relating to the community as a whole

3. Redeemed in return for products produced by the community

4. Redeemed for cash, at a markdown to discourage cashing out. 

Why discourage cashing out? Because the more capital under the control of the community, the more power we have in total. And the more power we have, the better we will be able to pursue the telos and bring more organisations and people into our constellation. However, a markdown might not apply in the event of an insurable event, such as a personal catastrophe. In that sense, the rights could function as a kind of insurance fund.

The First Campaign

At this stage, a number of different strategies have been outlined for developing Metasophist firms. But we have elided a key question: how do we find members in different countries in a scalable way? This is particularly important, because Metasophism in one country will probably only be marginally effective and not able to live up to its full potential. But this necessary international approach raises certain challenges.

First, messaging needs to be tailored for different societies. Metasophism may be able to solve different problems in different countries. In some countries, there may be very high levels of distrust and it may have a valuable role to play in that environment. In other countries, especially small ones, the problem could be monopolisation and crony capitalism. In another the main attraction of Metasophism would be as an alternative to short-termism driven by a financialised economy.

However this geographically-tailored messaging should not be done in a way that introduces confusions or contradictions. The ideas of Metasophism could be confused with structures that already exist. For example, the approach may be misidentified as a workers cooperative in countries where those are common. In other countries, it may be assumed that the idea is to make all companies non-profits, or to keep money within the local community—neither of which are objectives. Avoiding such misunderstandings or nipping them in the bud early is the key to reduce the risk of a possible schism, which would then drastically weaken the ability of the movement to compete with capitalism.

This calls for a designed Discourse and Outreach Programme. The idea here is to reward members for articulating the ideology in external discourse, but to do so in a way that avoids the above problems and does not incentivise spam.

This could work as follows. First, an index of problems and solutions is compiled. This indicates the core problems a society is facing, the deeper issue or cause underlying that, and how Metasophism could contribute to the solution.

For example, if we are talking about over-regulation, then the deeper cause of that is a lack of trust in business, and the solution is a trustworthy capitalism as represented by Metasophism.

Alternatively if we are talking about climate change, an aggravating factor there is people’s idea of success and meaning aligning with material consumption. Part of the solution could be an alternative way of deriving meaning in life by participating in the truth-seeking mission of Metasophism.

Or if there is a corporate scandal due to lying about product quality or some egregious case of abuse of power, mention how the truth-based governance of the Metasophist firm would avoid that. Over time, particular cases could be gathered to illustrate the difference Metasophism could make.

Second, contributors are rewarded rights for making comments. Peer assessment would ensure that people are rewarded for intelligent contributions (which would have to be logged and verifiable) that are real, relevant and rule-compliant. This also prevents gaming or farming of rights: contributions are manually verified, making farming of rights difficult (in any case, their non-tradeable nature makes any farming less attractive).

It also does not restrict speech. Members can make other claims about Metasophism, unsupported by the mapping. They simply won’t be rewarded for that.

Finally, information flow must be two-way. There could be regular meetings of contributors to discuss external criticisms and raise problems for which there is no mapped solution.

This system would have a number of advantages. It would allow us to reach into all corners of the discourse in many countries, helping us to get the scale to compete with capitalism. It would also educate our own members on the objectives and capabilities of Metasophism, helping to prevent incoherency, ideological drift, and schismatic tendencies.

Conclusion

In a stand-alone firm, there is a tension between truth and profit. This essay outlined how to alter the economic environment so that this no longer is true, at least for Metasophist firms. There are two pillars—internal and external— underlying this new environment. Both pillars need not always apply: some firms will be too small, or provide a service that cannot be tested.

The first pillar involves a firm being part of a credible truth-seeking cooperative which could give it a competitive advantage in the market. The community itself provides distribution, lowering the cost of acquiring customers. Product quality is credibly verified, helping marketing efforts, and community experiments would mean lower research and development costs.

The second pillar relates to internal reforms to improve truth-seeking: reducing costly mistakes, favouritism in promotions, sycophancy, and group-think. There could therefore be large efficiency benefits to making the firm a place where one can reason well—which cannot be done so far because it can only credibly be done through the type of community I propose in this essay.

This model could outcompete normal firms. Improved efficiency means lower costs and therefore also lower prices: consumers do not need to sacrifice to buy our goods. Moreover, employees in Metasophist enterprises would not need to be paid less: in fact, if the theory is right then they may be more productive and therefore possibly able to earn more.

And of course, the community itself is a moat: other companies cannot replicate credibly the community or the truth-seeking model, as that would require big changes in ownership which would not be accepted unless the company is under severe threat, at which point a Metasophist competitor would be well-established.

All of these points mean that the theory can actually work. Furthermore, the essay lays out a concrete way of doing this, starting at a very small scale, thereby avoiding another failure mode of big visions where they apply to an entire society at once, leaving no room for experimentation.

Starting small also means we don’t need to get thirty or forty percent of society on board to implement these ideas. It is this need for mass support that results in so many reform ideas being watered down or supplemented with electoral bribes which ultimately makes them self-defeating—a fate a Metasophist community can escape.

Do we need everyone to care about the truth? No, because we would only need around 3 to 4 percent of the population to actually succeed. Plus, the system is as attractive for what it is against as for what it is for: against materialism, nihilism, and manipulative manifestations of capitalism. The philosophy addresses causes that historically have attracted mass support.

Even if not everyone cares about the truth, they should. Plans for societal and economic reform often fail because the organisations and individuals that constitute society cannot or do not want to change their habits. True transformation requires training people to resist vice in themselves. This can be done if one has an unwavering commitment to the truth, and the dominant organisations in society are reformed to reflect this. 

The truth is an acid to vice, but a foundation for virtue. And upon this foundation, we can build the truth-seeking economy.

Practically and conceptually, there is much to discuss and do. If you are interested in following this, subscribe to the mailing list. If you already decided this is a good idea and would like to implement it as a Contributor (in the sense described above, in return for rights), please email me at themetasophist@gmail.com. 

One of the most important and actionable insights from the literature on cyclical history is the role played by finance and inequality in inducing a societal decline. Peter Turchin has discussed this, and it also comes up in Spengler and some of the histories of the late Roman Republic.

Today, I wanted to highlight how two of the chapters in the book tie into this theme.

First, I have long been of the view that the financial sector, and the existing body of financial regulation, is unnecessarily complex. This benefits both banker and regulator alike: complex regulations inhibit the entry of new banks into the market, and more regulators are needed to monitor the implementation of rules.

More generally, it also seemed to me that the fractional-reserve banking system is outdated, that it really only made sense in a world where money was scarce due to being linked to some commodity such as gold.

For this reason, I spent quite a while thinking about how one could simplify finance without throttling credit, and the best solution I found was a full-reserve banking system — that is, a system where money creation is the sole prerogative of the central bank.

But I was not happy with the various solutions proposed, so I set about synthesising them. The result is Chapter 8 of the book.

But finance is not the sole cause of inequality. Increased international trade and technological disruption can also lead to significant divergences in wealth, resulting in bitterness which can threaten the stability of whatever system of government exists.

I wanted to have a specific solution for this: one which help overcome, or at least de-escalate, the conflict between capital and labour. The result is a design for a Public Equity Fund, in which every citizen would have an account. Two key questions for any such fund are 1) how would it be capitalised? and 2) when could people withdraw or use their funds?

Regarding the first question, in a previous chapter I discussed how the state or community could help convene creative clusters, who could subsequently set up companies (among other things). In that case, the Public Equity Fund could own part of the shares in return for this support. Alternative sources of revenue for the fund includes budget surpluses and seigniorage revenues.

Regarding the second question, disbursements could be allowed on certain life events e.g. graduation or marriage. The account could also be deducted when people use public services. But if the account is empty, they would still have access to those services that are currently universally provided. This is a way to disincentivise wasteful consumption of public services, while maintaining access for those in need.

If interested, you can read more here.

New Book Reviews/Summaries

‘History Has Begun’ by Bruno Maçães

The essential premise of this book is that American liberlaism is mutating into a system whereby reality is replaced with fiction. These fictions and narratives would co-exist, and nobody would try to impose them on unwilling others. The author terms this “political virtualism”. As examples of virtual politics, he identifies Trump, the New Green Deal of Ocasio-Cortez, and Wokeness. For Maçães, the common factor linking them is an emphasis on theatre, plot, and cinematic reasoning; what they all lack is a durable effect or concrete programme that outlasts the drama.

I think the lens is valid in some instances, but is not a workable model for an entire society. Maçães doesn’t outline how people with incommensurable narratives and moralities would be brought to accept the very different worldviews of others. In addition, a society entranced by the unreal will be one where problems go unsolved.

Anyway, there’s a lot more in the review (around 3,000 words) which you can find here.

‘After Virtue’ by Alasdair MacIntyre

This is a great book, highly recommended. Nevertheless, there is some vagueness regarding the proposals MacIntyre makes. I outline how Metasophism compensates for this towards the end of the summary. To give you a taste of the article, here are the first two paragraphs:

The Enlightenment project for morality has failed. The limited expertise of our governing elites cannot justify the vast power they claim. And navigating a way out of our current societal malaise requires us to resurrect an older form of morality.

That is a crude albeit faithful summary of Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue, first published in 1981. In making such claims the book has proved to be prescient: the faltering hegemony of liberalism and recurrent surges of anti-elite sentiment across the West testify to that. But can the solution to our malaise really lie in the resurrection of a form of ethics first outlined by Aristotle and later integrated into Christianity by Thomas Aquinas?

The article received nearly 900 upvotes on the philosophy subreddit and triggered a very good discussion there.

Other Posts

Can we prime people to take risk?

• This article discusses the Misattribution of Arousal.

• The idea is that people can be primed to take risk and arrange dates, albeit in different ways.

• For example, if you are about to approach a potential customer or pitch to investors, you should attribute any nervousness to just part of doing a novel task rather than interpreting it as a sign you are about to do the coming task poorly. That should increase your confidence. But of course, taking a risk does not mean that it will always be successful.

Climate: is there any hope?

• Despite some positive trends in renewable energy, action to tackle climate change is insufficient. Even under optimistic scenarios, there could be a significant and long-lasting amount of warming.

• To understand our inability to adapt, I apply Donella Meadows's framework on leverage points in complex systems. Western governing elites do not understand how to use the most powerful levers — but they can be used, as I illustrate towards the end of the article.

Daily Notes

Here are the titles of some short posts I wrote since the last email (see them on one page by clicking here):

Should asset prices be included in inflation?

Society as a symbolic action system

A lesson for would-be reformers

Why was early Christianity so obsessed with the rich?

The danger of involution

A digital euro and full-reserve banking

How many people think life is meaningless?

Thoughts on Jason Crawford’s review of “Where is my flying car?”

Redefining happiness

Handwriting boosts learning

How Metasophism takes postmodernism seriously

That’s it for now!

All the best,

Tony.

Hi everyone,

It’s been a while — with the start of term I’ve been busy. Nevertheless, I finalised and published two more chapters on the website, as well as making some notes.

At around 7,300 words, the chapters are far too long for an email, so the overviews and titles are below. If they interest you, you can click through to the website.

Over the next month, I plan to finish two book commentaries I’m writing — one on History Has Begun: The Birth of a New America by Bruno Maçães, and another on After Virtue by Alistair McIntyre. I will also try to publish at least two more chapters online.

The next email will be sent in around two to four weeks.

New Chapters

Ch. 5: How to Select an Elite

Two of the most commom modes of choosing elites are hierarchical selection and elections dominated by political parties. But these have flaws: hierarchical selection can lead to a single worldview monopolising an institution, and political parties facilitate the rise of a tribal mentality. Therefore, a new way of selection is needed. I describe a series of rounds which aim to select a conscientious, charismatic, and creative elite. This new mode aims to fulfil the following criteria:

• Non-hierarchical selection: prospective elites should never or rarely be evaluated by those senior to them in a hierarchy. Rather, this should be done by their peers or those they serve. This would help mitigate harmful tendencies which emerge in hierarchies, such as flattery, cronyism, nepotism, and the role of the similar-to-me effect in creating an ideological monoculture.

• Not organised on the basis of parties: the new elite would in various stages be selected by those who know them personally, so the organisational function of political parties (advertising, printing and distribution of campaign material) would be of no particular benefit.

Ch. 6: Media for a Metasophist Society

The Internet has undermined the business model of traditional media, by making it easier to both to replicate content and to consume it costlessly. Consequently, most quality news and analysis has been put behind a paywall, and the quality of discourse seems to have fallen.

Publicly-funded media could be a solution, but it tends to leave citizens without a choice regarding content.

In this chapter, I try to outline a new model which involves a number of different media chapters receiving a subsidy depending on how informative they are and their level of popularity. The aim is to create a media which covers the entire political spectrum, while remaining attached to reality.

Daily Notes

Here are the titles of some short posts wrote since the last email (see them on one page by clicking here):

• How much will the internet change religion…

• Education and Complexity

• In praise of the Stiff Upper Lip?

• Thoughts on cultural decadence

• Ivan Krastev on Anne Applebaum

• The causes of stagnation in physics

That’s it for now!

All the best,

Tony.

5.1 Societal Identity: How and Why?

Travelling through Europe, one is often struck by the spires, fine houses, and grand public buildings that create the skyline of the medieval city. Equally striking is the fact that few landmarks of the same calibre are being constructed today, despite society being many times wealthier. This reveals a lack of interest in creating an attractive environment, and an indifference to the future. From where did this come?

In older times, the city environment was largely created by aristocrats, wealthy merchants, the clergy, and other religious orders. The aristocrat and merchant would have identified with their genealogical line, and were not as geographically mobile as their modern equivalents. Thus we saw the construction of great houses to increase both their prestige and that of their future descendants.

Religious organisations built to honour the glory of God: an even more durable concept than family lineage. Cathedrals, churches, and monasteries were thus built to last for centuries. Projects built with a similar lifespan in mind are rarely seen today: modern motivating ideals are weaker, and besides, money that would once have been used to build is now mostly used to maintain.

But these are not the only motivations that can lead to grand buildings. A different psychological mechanism called “civic euergetism” was in operation in Ancient Rome, whereby the wealthy made an extravagant gesture to their city by funding new buildings, renovating old ones, or paying for lavish games.[60] For the wealthy, this was a norm: not to give would have been dishonourable. In return the wealthy received priesthoods, titles such as “patron of the city”, and statues and inscriptions which persist to the present day.

These examples illustrate that a society’s way of creating meaning and identity has implications for the time horizons over which decisions are made, and this visibly manifests in the urban environment. If the quality of architecture has fallen, it is because our old ways of generating solidarity have weakened or are channeled elsewhere. The Roman idea of giving to the city was replaced with the Christian idea of giving to the poor, which culminated in the welfare state. With their flock on the way out, churches are selling, not building. And the importance of the family as a source of identity has weakened with the rise of individualism and the breakdown of heritable occupations.

But the autonomous existence is not for everyone. A case in point is fanatical devotion to football teams, an imitation of identity which satisfies a need for symbolism, socialisation, and social recognition.[61] Some have even gone as far to suggest that it is a substitute religion.[62] From a Metasophist perspective, immense emotional energy invested in sports is perhaps misdirected; the triumph of your favoured team will not heal any sick or clean any streets. An exception to this is actual participation in sports, which has social and health benefits.

This will towards community is not limited to sports fans. It has also seeped into the political and intellectual debate, as people will often take and thoughtlessly defend the position of their particular tribe.

Nationalism temporarily provided an effective group identity, before it self-radicalised and sent millions to their death. The result of this is that only 25pc of people in Western Europe say they would be willing to fight for their country; this compares to a global average of 60pc, and 73pc in Turkey.[63]

If such an attitude persists in a world of nationalistic powers such as China, Europe will find it difficult to maintain what independence it still has. In the event of a trade or even a military war, more nationalistic countries will be able to bear equal pain with greater equanimity. This gives a relative economic minnow such as Russia, which has a fraction of Europe’s wealth, a psychological advantage. Consider the fact that European and American sanctions against Russia only seemed to stir nationalist sentiment there further, with the result that Putin’s approval ratings actually rose.[64] At the same time, Europe continuously wobbled on maintaining the sanctions, partly due to persistent lobbying from German and Italian business interests.[65] In the meantime, the lack of solidarity hobbles any attempt to reinvigorate our societies.

5.2 Conjuring a Transnational Identity

The key question for Metasophism is how can one create a transnational identity which inspires a high degree of solidarity, without the exclusionary element propagated by tribalism? And how could this be applied to a diverse cultural community such as Europe?

The common rebuttal at this point is that people will always prioritise their national identity over any transnational or European identity. In this view, national identities, closely associated with language, are eternal and insuperable. Such a view ignores the fact that a European identity existed before the concept of nation had even been articulated. When Europe emerged from the Dark Ages and embarked upon the Crusades, none fought for the nation, but many did for Christendom. And for a long time in the Middle Ages, the idea of Christendom was interchangeable with that of Europe.[66] Pope Pius II, for example, exhorted Christians “to drive the Turk out of Europe.” When the idea of Christendom finally fell out of fashion, its sole conceptual successor was Europe.

As for the claim that a common language is the fundamental prerequisite to both identity and democracy, the strong identity of the multilingual but efficient Swiss society nullifies this argument. In fact, identity has proved to be quite malleable throughout the ages. For example, French identity was heavily modified and deepened by the Third Republic which began in 1871.

But how does one build an identity? In his book on Britain and Ireland, Norman Davies noted that there were several pillars to British identity – namely, the Empire (and the institutions needed to manage it such as the navy), the Monarchy and Aristocracy, the Westminster Parliament, and finally the English language.

Since 1945, the Empire has dissolved and the navy has been diminished. Fewer shared experiences of foreign lands and seas bind the different peoples of the UK. In addition, the aristocracy has weakened, the powers of Westminster have been partly devolved, and the Protestant religion has lost the rallying power it derived from British contempt of continental Catholicism. The decline of most of the above institutions has coincided with the increasing assertiveness of those proclaiming an exclusive English, Scottish or Welsh identity; the prime example of this is the recent referendum in Scotland to leave the UK.

British identity thus seems to be an elastic concept, the product of shared emotions and experiences. But where these do not exist, they can be created — and so our method for creating a transnational and panethnic identity gains some definition.

Some weak common experiences exist, such as education. It is weak in the sense that it is usually regionally focused, so students do not meet people from different parts of the nation. And for many, especially those not academically inclined, secondary school education is a negative experience. What kind of programme then can we create that allows participants to get to know people from different regions and social strata, while also benefiting both them and society as a whole?

5.3 A Programme for Cultural Renewal

Past surges in creativity have generally occurred when a large number of highly creative people have clustered in a given area. This has been true for philosophers, composers, and artists.[67] The Renaissance itself is epitomised by Florence, perhaps the best example of a creative cluster.

The same pattern prevails in the modern age. The Silicon Valley cluster enables entrepreneurs to easily find investors and talent, thereby raising the survival and growth prospects of the companies based there. Such is their usefulness that many countries are today are trying to kickstart their own clusters. But few have succeeded in doing so, the one exception being Israel, which is unusually successful at creating startups. In 2015, Israel attracted the highest level of venture capital per capita in the world.[68] How did they manage this?

The trick lies in the way their system of conscription brings together talented people to develop new technologies. In Israel, all non-Arab citizens above the age of 18 are conscripted into the army for at least two years. In Europe, conscription has negative connotations, not least because it can be a boring experience. In Israel, however, allocation is determined by the aptitude of the conscript. For example, those most skilled in computer science and technology are assigned to Unit 8200. These talented individuals are formed into teams and given missions, which can sometimes involve developing a technology to address a specific problem identified by the military. The training instills valuable skills. For example, determination, improvisation, and innovation are fostered by the mission-oriented culture which dictates that the objective must be reached, no matter the resources or difficulties.[69] Officers are also taught leadership and intensive teamwork skills. After completing their service, many go on to establish companies using the knowledge and networks they gained during their time in the military.

The benefits of this system go beyond military and culture. For example, one study found that mandatory military duty increases the life expectancy of Israeli men by 3.6 years. As a result Israeli men are in the top five of OECD countries in terms of life expectancy.[70] This arises from pushing a large number of young adults though an intensive programme of physical exercise at just the age where people tend to stop exercising. The incidence of diseases caused by a lack of exercise, such as cardiovascular and cerebrovascular disease and certain types of cancers, has fallen. So even if service takes up a few years of an Israeli’s life, it compensates them at the end, with significant healthcare savings to the Israeli state in the meanwhile.

Were a similar system to be established in Europe and the US, minus the military dimension, the potential benefits could be immense. To address the specific challenges of the West it must elevate the potential of the individual; amplify the level of innovation of each country; and generate emotional ties across the different classes, regions, and ethnicities in society. We could call this programme the Metasophist Youth Fellowship.

The new education system outlined in the previous chapter would allow us to see where each person has the greatest potential. Then, the service should bring them together to undertake common or related tasks. How would such tasks be decided? For projects of a technological nature, tasks could be determined by whatever great projects of the day the society is attempting. For example, say society wants to develop robotics for space exploration and mining.

Such technology would require advances in a number of different areas and co-ordination across a number of teams. For example, setting up a fully automatised robotic supply chain would involve robots mining and refining material, and using 3D printing in order to build new components or robots. These new robots would then be used to increase the throughput of the supply chain or for some other manufacturing activity. Small discrete projects in this space, on Earth, could be used as a way to introduce the young to the relevant technology, and get them thinking about the needed breakthroughs.

This programme could also be applied to many other fields, such as culture. Just as cinema was enabled by the invention of the motion picture, could the emergence of new technologies such as the hologram and virtual reality means there are new art combinations to be made? If such a cluster were to be created, then it would require a mixture of technologists and artists. Depending on their nature, the projects to be worked on need not be decided by the state or from the top, but could be decided by the participants themselves. How the latter could be facilitated is discussed in the next chapter.

The above projects are quite cognitive; the interests of those more oriented towards the practical must also be facilitated. For example, those interested in healthcare could work in a hospital, perhaps in another country to make the experience more interesting.

We must also decide where such clusters should be put. It is possible that cities in decline could become the target. If new businesses arose from these clusters, they could regenerate downtrodden regions and cities — something achieved with difficulty in our liberal economic system.

Finally, in order to participate effectively members would need to be at least sixteen to eighteen years old; prior to this their knowledge may not be sufficient. For some projects, they will need to be even older. This raises the question of what should be done for those younger?

Youth Development

Many of the key markers of a declining society — lack of social integration, delinquent behaviour, and addiction — arise in youth. Oftentimes, such problems can seem intractable, and tired approaches such as informing people about the dangers seems to have no impact. But there is a way forward, as has been demonstrated in the example of Iceland where the ideas of American psychologist Harvey Milkman were applied.[71]

The essential idea of the Youth in Iceland programme was to give children and teenagers ways to get natural highs, so they would not need to resort to the artificial highs created by substances. They offered to teach children anything they wanted; music, dance, martial arts, or sport. In addition, they were taught other life skills. Parents were encouraged to spend a certain quantity of time with their children.

The effects were impressive. The number of fourteen and fifteen year-olds who reported often spending time with their parents doubled between 1997 and 2012, from 23 percent to 46 percent, while the percentage participating in organised sports at least four times a week increased from 24 percent to 42 percent. More importantly, for the same group, the percentage who had been drunk in the last month fell from 42 percent in 1998 to 5 percent in 2016. The number who had ever used cannabis went from 17 percent to 7 percent, and those smoking daily decreased from 23 percent to 3 percent.

Going further, the enhanced education system would allow us to offer an even greater variety of activities. For all of those who have indicated a certain interest in a certain area — whether it be creating miniature robots or composing pieces of music — over the summer months they could be brought together to work on projects of common interest. This could be used as a preliminary and screening stage for the more advanced clusters detailed earlier. This could even be done on a pan-European or pan-Western basis, allowing the participants to exchange cultural insights.

However, this system has potential in one other area. Given the wide range of activities to be undertaken, it can serve as a way select, test, and train the future leaders for society: the subject of the next chapter.

Endnotes

[60] Peter Brown. Through the Eye of a Needle: Wealth, the Fall of Rome, and the Making of Christianity in the West, 350-550 AD. Princeton University Press, 2012, p.62

[61] Pedro Dionasio, Carmo Leal, and Luiz Moutinho. “Fandom affiliation and tribal behaviour: a sports marketing application”. In: Qualitative Market Research: An In- ternational Journal 11.1 (2008), pp. 17–39. URL: https://doi.org/10.1108/13522750810845531

[62] François Fulconis and Gilles Pache. “Football passion as a religion: the four dimensions of a sacred experience”. In: Society and Business Review 9.2 (2014), pp. 166–185. DOI: 10.1108/SBR-09-2013-0064. URL: https://doi.org/10.1108/SBR-09-2013-0064

[63] Sophie Kirby. “Would you be willing to die for your country?” In: Deutsche Welle (May 2015). URL: https://www.dw.com/en/would-you-be-willing-to-die-for-your-country/a-18487089

[64] Andreas Beyer and Benno Zogg. “Time to Ease Sanctions on Russia”. In: CSS Policy Perspectives (2018). URL: http://www.css.ethz.ch/content/dam/ethz/special-interest/gess/cis/center-for-securities-studies/pdfs/PP6-4_2018.pdf

[65] https://carnegieeurope.eu/strategiceurope/63706

[66] Dennis Hay. Europe: The Emergence of an Idea. The Edinburgh University Press, 1957

[67] John O’Hagan and Alan Walsh. “Historical Migration and Geographic Clustering of Prominent Western Philosophers”. In: Homo Oeconomicus: Journal of Behavioral and Institutional Economics 34.1 (Apr. 2017), pp. 11–32. URL: https://ideas.repec.org/a/spr/homoec/v34y2017i1d10.1007_s41412-016-0033-0.html

[68] John McKenna. “Israel is a tech titan. These 5 charts explain its startup success.” https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/05/tiny-israel-is-a-tech-titan-these-5-charts-explain-its-startup-success/. Accessed: 2018-10-12. 2017

[69] Dan Senor and Saul Singer. “What Next for the Start-Up Nation?.” In: Wilson Quarterly 34.3 (2010), pp. 62–66. ISSN: 03633276. URL: http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=52106658&site=ehost-live

[70] Alex Weinreb. “Why Is Israel’s Life Expectancy So High?” In: State of the Nation Report: Society, Economy and Policy in Israel. Ed. by Avi Weiss. Jerusalem: Taub Center for Social Policy Studies in Israel, 2016, pp. 437–461

[71] Emma Young. “Iceland knows how to stop teen substance abuse but the rest of the world isn’t listening”. In: Mosaic Science (Jan. 2017). URL: https://mosaicscience.com/story/iceland-prevent-teen-substance-abuse/

The University may seem to be a curious place to start when designing a new socio-political system. I do so for three reasons.

First, given that we have a clear albeit provisional definition of good, the next logical step is to re-examine ethics and policies with a view to seeing what best furthers the Metasophist Imperative. This is a gargantuan task, too big for any individual to do alone. Indeed, it would require the commitment and knowledge of many.

In the modern age there has never been such an organised effort to decide what is good, because there has never been widespread agreement on what good actually means. So what form should such an effort take? For this, I would like to propose a new discipline called metasophy, whose role would be to integrate the knowledge of all other disciplines. The development of this discipline we would entrust to a new institution, the Metasophist University.

But this would not be the sole function of this new university. Its second objective would be to help everyone find their true calling in life, a task which requires an accessible and effective education system. It is only by experimenting and dabbling that you can discover your true aptitude in a given area. This must be facilitated at as early as the teenage years, as later the pressure to define a career rises, a pressure inimical to playful creativity. This process we will outline for this purpose also lays the basis for systems developed in subsequent chapters.

Third, there is a concern that academia has become overly specialised, which hinders creativity. Moreover, as one’s career progress in academia is linked to the the number of publications and citations received, there is a skew towards incremental progress at the cost of ground-breaking but long-term and risky research.[53] As we will discuss, this could also be due to established researchers getting control over top journals, academic positions, and research grants. This same group would resist new directions in the field, as their own relevance could be undermined. New selection processes should thus be experimented with, and one such process will be proposed in the chapter on the selection of elites. Appying this process in academia will be the third objective of this university.

For now, let us examine the first of these objectives: the form and purpose of metasophy.

4.1 The Role of Metasophy

Imagine we want to judge whether a particular pesticide is good or not. Such a judgement would at least require us to know the effect of:

1. The pesticide on human fertility, cancer rates and other illnesses

2. Cancer incidence on healthcare costs

3. Pesticides on agricultural productivity

4. Higher agricultural productivity on the economy

Clearly, metasophy would then be a field whose role is to integrate and evaluate the research findings from a wide range of different disciplines. This is not done by any discipline currently, even though it is necessary to make good societal decisions.

Such an approach is badly needed, as today many academic papers slide quickly into obscurity — this is a significant waste of knowledge and effort. Moreover, countless analyses have been run using public data such as that available from the International Monetary Fund or various central banks. Yet once run and published, it takes a great deal of effort for others to replicate or update the results. We need a better approach.

First, such studies need to be linked automatically. If you wanted to see whether pesticides were in fact good, there would be a significant amount of manual work involved in connecting these studies together. The only way to address this would be if there were a common system on which all studies and the data they use should be uploaded. This system must be curated in such a way that it becomes easy to find different studies, to compare them, to update them, and to allow for different studies to be connected in such a way that we can come to provisional judgements on whether something is good or not.

With the development of tools such as the Open Science Framework, such a world is already coming much closer. Furthermore, as the research community can already predict which studies are most likely to be successfully replicated, we could also imagining introducing prediction markets in order to see which studies are most likely to be successfully replicated in other contexts.[54]

Integrating the studies in one system could also rectify a major bias in the system whereby academics publish unreliable studies in order to raise their overall publication count. For example, one project attempted to replicate twenty-one experiments published in Science or Nature, and discovered that just thirteen were replicable.[55] By making replication easier, our new system would make errors harder to conceal.

If studies uploaded to the system are more likely to be used and cited, then more academics will upload to it over time. Eventually gaps would be noticed, and academics (and even non-academics) could then be able to fill those in. Naturally there will be gaps that cannot be filled by quantitative studies. Theory could offer a substitute, but the wisdom of crowds could also be helpful. The manner of doing this will be described in a later chapter.

The greatest advantage of this approach to morality is that it will make our entire moral system more nimble when reacting to changing circumstances. Consider the way popular opinions become entrenched, such as the belief that free trade is good. Public discourse, once it reaches a conclusion, simplifies itself by holding fast to that same conclusion. With metasophy, the relationships underlying such beliefs would be under constant revision and elaboration, especially when they are politically contested. If the weakness of civilisation partly rests in moral hysteresis — a slowness in abandoning outdated moral beliefs — then this system will form part of the cure.

The overall objective will be to compile a Metasopher’s taxonomy: for anything that may interest someone from a moral perspective, they would be able to look it up in the taxonomy see whether it is classed as good or bad, how this may vary across contexts, and what factors contribute to that decision. Moreover, if the Community achieves sufficient scale to have numerous chapters, then each chapter should develop its own taxonomy. We would therefore allow for multiple sub-worldviews to develop, avoiding the problems identified by Pareto and Toynbee discussed in previous chapters.

Thus we have set out the main task of our Metasophist University. But education in the West is far from perfect, and our new university will have other roles. First, however, we must catalogue the flaws to be remedied.

4.2 Flaws in Modern Education

The flaws of the current system are many.

First, access to quality education is limited and often expensive in many countries. In the UK average student debt for recent graduates is around US$44,000, while even in tuition free Sweden it is in the range of US$20,000.[56] This latter number ignores the cost to the taxpayer from the wastage incurred by the same introductory courses being taught in multiple universities. Moreover, many courses are not taught by experts in the domain. The result can often be an underwhelming educational experience.

Second, there is significant variation in the form of assessment. People doing the same course in different universities will not only have a different educational experience, they will also sit a different exam graded with varying degrees of generosity. Given the unreliability of the grade as an indicator of quality, people come to rely on university reputation as a way to distinguish quality. But places at reputable institutions are scarce, meaning that there is bound to be a certain inequality in outcomes.

Third, a uniform pace is forced on people with very different capacities: for some the class will be too fast, and for others too slow. To avoid excessive failure rates, faculty will tend to adapt the pace and difficulty to suit the abilities of the average and weaker students. Those who should go faster or into more depth are not sufficiently pushed to do so. This problem presumably persists until postgraduate level.

Fourth, many are not sure what they wish to do before they enter university. The fact that many people spend a year of their lives and a significant amount of money to studying a subject they later abandon is a waste if the same could be done earlier.

However, the greatest flaw with education is that it homogenises the students. By reducing diversity, it stifles creativity. It achieves this as follows.

First, in order to progress in your career, you need to obtain references. In order to avoid displeasing one’s professors with the subsequent risk of a poor reference or job market recommendation, the risk-averse will avoid expressing opinions likely to be frowned upon. They may even unknowingly choose or tailor their work with a view to impressing their superiors. This a particualr example of a general phenomenon, whereby people at the bottom of a hierarchy will tend to emulate those at the top — to flatter them, in the hope of later being favoured by them. But creativity requires going against the status quo, and that won’t be favoured by a top-down hierarchy. The long-run result will be increasing domination of the field by those of a given worldview, which could be ideological, theoretical, or methodological.

For example, according to one study, law professors are far less conservative than practising lawyers; 15% of law professors are conservative whereas 35% of lawyers are.[57] But it would be a mistake to think that this just affects conservative voices. Economics suffers from two problems: a lack of pluralism regarding methodology (which left-wing voices tended to complain about), and the internalisation of a certain technocratic disposition (because of the intimate professional links with central banks, governments, etc.) which discourages anything that could be seen as radical.

The cost of such dynamics is illustrated by one study which found that innovative biomedical research is more likely to be published after the death of a leading figure in the field.[58] The authors find some evidence that this patterns is likely to be true in fields with tight-knit networks or narrow methodologies.

It is important to note that the issue here is not hierarchy generally, but specifically where the process of selection is controlled by those at the top. You could have a hierarchy where selection is more algorithmic, based for example on peer assessment. I discuss one possible scheme along these lines in the chapter on the selection and training of elites.

On this note, the modern university can unintentionally create an elite with a uniform set of values and desires. This point was raised by Dan Wang based on the Mimetic Theory of René Girard.[59] According to this theory, people imitate each other not just in mannerisms but also desires. The more similar people are, the more intense such imitation will be. If students start to imitate each other’s desires, they will end up trying to get into the same types of careers.

Thus we see intense competition for jobs in a small number of sectors such as consulting and finance, with other sectors being starved of talent. This creates a monolithic elite, as people in the same occupations will have the same economic interests. Having the same interests then spills over into having the same values or approximate political beliefs. The basis is then set for the elites vs. the people conflict which does so much to undermine a society.

One solution to this problem would be to provide people with the tools to fashion an individualised education, avoiding the standard and rigid curricula that can be found in many (but not all) university systems. How to do this we will now discuss.

4.3 Reimagining the University

First, it is important to note that there are two types of educational needs. For people who are eager to learn, content simply needs to be provided. For those who do not enjoy the learning process, rewards and disincentives are probably needed.

But willingness to learn depends on the subject under consideration; most likely everyone has a certain subject in which they would be especially interested, even those with little interest in academics. But limited subject choice before the age of eighteen means that one never has the chance to be exposed to whatever this area is.

One objective of this university must be to identify this special penchant. A questionnaire could be used to recommend ten or more modules to the student. This should take place at the earliest age possible in order to maximise engagement in school — the age of twelve for example. From this time on, two to three hours of school time per week could be set aside to these subjects.

But how does one provide such a range of subjects in secondary school? This shall be the responsibility of the University – providing a range of modules which can be used in secondary and third level education, or approving already existing modules (such as those provided by Coursera and other MOOC providers). Exams in controlled environments could then be offered on these subjects, allowing us to accredit the increasing array of modules that are offered online.

Furthermore, this would allow us to identify the most talented students in a given area at a very young age — an essential input for a system to be designed in a later chapter. But because this system outlined here is targeted at secondary school students, currently existing MOOCs may not be suitable in terms of quality or the prior knowledge expected of the students. We would therefore need our own process to produce such modules and ensure that they are of the highest quality.

Creating High Quality Online Modules

First of all, a range of modules such as “Introduction to Economics” could be identified, along with the syllabus for each course. For each module five lecturers or experts would be selected to prepare a course. This number could be lower for less popular courses. They will initially receive a fixed fee for their effort, and will collectively decide on the syllabus and the exams.

Once prepared, students would be allocated randomly to the five different modules. All students would sit a common examination at the end of the year. The average results and student reviews for each course would then become public information. On the basis of this information, students the following year will select which online module they would like to follow.

After the first year, the professors would receive a payment depending on the number of students who have decided to follow their course to incentivise high quality teaching. As students would surely select courses based on the result, lecturers would experiment with features such as in-video quizzes or flashcards to make sure that students understand the key concepts.

Using such modules, it would be possible for students to quickly determine what would be their favoured course of study at university. But we should even go further. Imagine a student has done five university-level economics courses – he should then be able to skip them at university.

As more and more modules are offered within the system, it may be possible for our university to offer entire degrees online. Such degrees could be cheap but of high quality, accessible but highly recognised.

As the student body grows, we could also allow different chapters within the Community to propose different curricula. We would therefore ensure diversity regarding the ideological and methodological content of courses.

This new system creates a wide range of possibilities. For example, one possible critique of the above would be that some courses require certain prerequisites, such as calculus and algebra. However, such mathematics courses could also be modularised and offered online.

Benefits of this system

First of all, this system allows students to go through education faster. For some, this will mean more time for creative pursuits before finally committing to a career. Others will enter the job market, and start paying taxes, sooner. It is thus not difficult to imagine that there could be some monetary incentive for the early completion of a degree.

Second, it would break down the Girardian dynamic where students are studying the same subjects at the same time, and are generally undifferentiated. People will become much more diverse in the type of subjects they have studied. It would also be easy to expand this system to accommodate those in adult education. Finally, it would help attain equality of opportunity within the West, as it would partially equalise the quality of education each child has access to.

But the greatest advantage of this system is that it would allow us to identify everyone’s greatest talent at a very young age. This would allow us to bring them together and give them the chance to work on common projects. Exactly how to achieve this is outlined in the next chapter.

Endnotes

[53] Jay Bhattacharya and Mikko Packalen. Stagnation and Scientific Incentives. Working Paper 26752. National Bureau of Economic Research, Feb. 2020. DOI: 10.3386/w26752. URL: http://www.nber.org/papers/w26752

[54] Colin F. Camerer et al. “Evaluating the replicability of social science experiments in Nature and Science between 2010 and 2015”. In: Nature Human Behaviour 2.9 (2018), pp. 637–644. ISSN: 2397-3374. URL: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-018-0399-z

[55] Hannah Devlin. “Attempt to replicate major social scientific findings of past decade fails”. In: The Guardian (Aug. 2018). URL: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/aug/27/attempt-to-replicate-major-social- scientific-findings-of-past-decade-fails

[56] Joseph Chamie. “Student Debt Rising Worldwide”. In: Yale Global (May 2017). URL: https://yaleglobal.yale.edu/content/student-debt-rising-worldwide

[57] Adam Bonica et al. “The Legal Academy’s Ideological Uniformity”. In: Coase-Sandor Working Paper Series in Law and Economics 806 (2017). URL: https://chicagounbound.uchicago.edu/law_and_economics/827/

[58] Pierre Azoulay, Christian Fons-Rosen, and Joshua S. Graff Zivin. “Does Science Advance One Funeral at a Time?” In: American Economic Review 109.8 (Aug. 2019), pp. 2889–2920. URL: https://www.aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/aer.20161574

[59] Dan Wang. Violence and the Sacred: College as an incubator of Girardian terror. https://danwang.co/college-girardian-terror/. Accessed: 2018-07-02. 2017

Morality in Flux

When one glances back at the disaster for Europe that was the twentieth century, who are the prime candidates for blame?

A straightforward mind would blame the Communist and Fascist ideologies for the havoc they wreaked upon Europe. The logical conclusion could be that all extremist ideologies, defined as anything that deviates from mainstream liberalism, ought to be opposed.

A more subtle mind would perhaps blame nationalism more generally rather than just its hyper-concentrated fascist form. Had it not been for nationalist sentiment, we would not have had the kind of nation-states that triggered and sustained the two World Wars.

A reactionary or monarchist could very well agree with all the above, and note that it was the French revolution and its associated ideas of human rights, universal enfranchisement, and nationalism which paved the way for the nation-at-war romanticism epitomised by the levée en masse. Someone taking an even longer view would say that the decline in religious belief -- already rather advanced among the intelligentsia by the mid-eighteenth century -- left an emotional and moral vacuum to be filled by the new secular religions of nationalism, socialism and humanitarianism.

Untested secular religions are risky for the society that adopts them. For example, the adoption of nationalism exposed society to the risk of adopting hyper-nationalism and the subsequent exclusion of those who were not considered to be part of the nation. Moreover, nationalism tended to be a self-propagating force and therefore an agent of instability. French nationalism during the French revolution provoked French expansion into Germany, and the French presence there sparked a German nationalism. When German nationalism resulted in French defeat during the Franco-Prussian War and the annexation of Alsace-Lorraine, French nationalism hardened into French revanchism, while Germany become even more militaristic as the Prussian ethos seeped through the new empire. Both factors led to World War One, with the crescendo of nationalism coming thereafter in the form of fascism. As the emotional spiral led to physical conflagration and ultimately national depletion, we can say that nationalism is unstable.

It is not just secular religions which are unstable: normal ones can be too. For example, the stability of Christianity has been questioned many times. John Wesley, the English cleric and theologian who founded Methodism, wondered if:

... true scriptural Christianity has a tendency, in process of time, to undermine and destroy itself? For wherever true Christianity spreads, it must cause diligence and frugality, which in the natural course of things, must beget riches! And riches naturally beget pride, love of the world, and every temper that is destructive of Christianity. (Causes of the inefficacy of Christianity, Works VII: 290).

We already discussed in the previous chapter how modern liberalism is unstable, as it does not have any features immunising it against the pathologies of excessive sacralisation, narration, and exaggeration. Such features are also lacking in its nationalist and Woke rivals. But what would such features look like? And how can they be implemented? Answering such questions will take a few chapters -- so let us start with the basic principles.  

Principles of Metasophism

What is good? This fundamental question — which every ideology should have answer for — is almost impossible to answer without knowing the meaning of life itself. And if one is limited to fact and reason, then we must admit that the meaning of life is unknown for now.

However, our ignorance of the meaning of life does not imply that there is no good to achieve. If life has meaning, then the priority for humanity is to discover what it is, or to survive until a point at which it may be revealed.

There are thus two concepts of good on which this philosophy is based. First, a concept of absolute good which is unknowable and therefore unachievable until we know the meaning of life. Second, a concept of provisional good which states that whatever helps us to attain our objective of discovering the meaning of life is desirable.

For those who would devote themselves to such a mission, the priorities are clear: first, ensure the continued expansion of knowledge about our physical and social universe.

Second, preserve and entrench human civilisation, for if civilisation were to endure a trauma such as that which befell the Roman Empire, then much knowledge would be lost, and our mission would suffer a severe and possibly irreversible setback. The first objective complements the second, as knowledge is necessary for long-term human survival in order to have the technology to ward off threats such as a catastrophic asteroid strike or even a gamma-ray burst.

Thus, the basis for the philosophy I call Metasophism is derived. Why this name?

“Meta” can mean a subject that analyses another one at a more abstract or higher level. As sophía is the Greek word for wisdom, Metasophism indicates a philosophy that encompasses and integrates the wisdom emanating from other political philosophies and even different academic disciplines.[51] It is capitalised because ultimately, in order to work, it requires the formation of a single community comprised of different chapters, the structure and function of which we will discuss throughout the rest of the book. We shall now outline the properties of Metasophism that would enable it to serve such an integrating purpose.

The Metasophist Imperative

The fundamental principle of Metasophism is that the current mission for humanity should be to acquire knowledge with the goal of discovering the meaning of life. This will be termed the Metasophist Imperative. Whatever furthers this mission we consider as provisionally good, and whatever damages this mission is provisionally bad.

Search for truth

If a society is to discover the meaning of life, or survive long enough to do so, then a true picture of the world and emerging challenges is necessary. Metasophism is thus likely to avoid the pitfall into which many other philosophies and ideologies fall into whereby the truth is often suppressed or ignored when it contradicts the tenets of the ideology. For example, in the Soviet Union, information surrounding the success of Western capitalism in delivering higher living standards was concealed.

In our own day, many examples abound, but one being the manner in which the German media failed to report information surrounding events in Cologne on New Year's Eve 2015, probably so as to uphold support for the liberal immigration policy which the government later quietly abandoned.[50] Creating a diverse and well-funded media, free from domination of the state and financial interests, will thus be a priority for Metasophism. This will be discussed in a later chapter.

Inherently democratic

Metasophism mandates democracy for two reasons.

First, democracy forces a government to react to the problems faced by people. Without democracy, a government may become detached from reality, and society may in the meanwhile become enamoured by another philosophy -- the resulting revolution would then overturn a Metasophist system in the event it became established. Moreover, the autocratic alternative to democracy usually becomes the refuge of the uncreative, the incompetent, and the corrupt, none of whom have any role in leading a government.

Second, in order to form an accurate view of reality, it is necessary to gather information from as many sources as possible. Regular elections provide incentives and disincentives to the governing elite to gather and act on this information.

Universality

Metasophism makes a universal declaration of what is good, and is therefore a universal ideology. In theory, it has a message applicable to every society. This is a desirable trait, as universal ideologies and religions such as Christianity, Islam, and communism seem to be more attractive and thus more durable than non-universal ideologies.

However, while the above religions and ideologies are termed universal, this is perhaps not literally true: if they only make claims about humanity, and not about other potentially intelligent species, they are universal only if we restrain our notion of the universe to humanity — a questionable proposition.

In contrast, Metasophism is truly universal as the Metasophist Imperative does not just apply to humanity, but to intelligent life in general. To appreciate the universality of Metasophism, consider the following test: if a severe asteroid strike happened to planet Earth before humans evolved which prevented future life, is that good, bad, or meaningless? For a Metasophist, this is clearly bad, as the development of conscious life and therefore the probability of discovering and realising good is reduced. For human-centred ideologies and religions though, it is not easy to arrive at a conclusion, as there are no humans around to which harm has been done. This indicates that such ideologies are not literally universal, despite their claims to be.

However, despite this strong theoretical universality, the idea of the Imperative might only appeal to societies in a postmodern condition, as traditional societies may not really be attracted to the search for meaning inherent to Metasophism.

Adaptability

Just as a society must adapt to survive, so must an ideology: technological and social development renders laws that were just unjust, and vice versa. Metasophism provides a way to judge what is good and bad from first principles.

Any philosophy that cannot do this is destined to render the society dysfunctional. While the difficulty Islamic societies have in adapting to the modern world is a case in point, Islam is not alone on this front as history is littered with such defunct ideologies.

Two live cases of this happening are liberal humanitarianism (as discussed earlier) and Christianity. The design of these religion-ideologies may be such that they are simply not capable of adapting without negating their source of authority in the eyes of their most ardent followers.

Catholicism is in such a situation. Many Westerners no longer look to it for guidance as it condemns practices they now hold sacrosanct, such as the right to abortion. But according to the Cathechism of the Catholic Church, its teaching on abortion is unchangeable. Even if the Catholic Church abandoned its position on abortion, this would most likely not reverse a decline rooted in the post-Reformation Wars of Religion, which encouraged thinkers such as John Locke into looking for sources of moral authority other than religion. It was at this time that liberalism began to form, with its earliest principle being religious toleration.

The sacralisation of certain ideas played a role in the decline of Christianity in another way. As Charles Talyor argues in A Secular Age, faith was often identified with doctrines such as the idea that the Earth was created in 4004 B.C., and the biblical drama of Fall, Incarnation and Redemption.[52] The easy refutability of such doctrines led people to reject the all of Christianity, including more defensible ideas such as the existence of God. Whether the religion could have done better by explicitly declaring untenable tenets to be metaphors is uncertain. Once established, their removal would always have been difficult.

Metasophism can escape such problems because the Imperative stated above is the only sacred principle. Everything else can be questioned. In this way, we may be able to avoid the trap identified by Toynbee whereby excessive sacralisation hinders the ability of society to adapt to new circumstances. 

Completeness

Metasophism has the potential to be not just universal, but complete. This means that it is possible in theory to classify all events or actions as good or bad. This is a favourable aspect, as for a political philosophy to stay relevant over the long-run it must be applicable to all situations. If it is not universally applicable, then at some point it will become irrelevant and forgotten, which would undermine our mission of equipping civilisation with a philosophy to guide it through all situations.

A corollary of completeness is that there is an optimal set of laws for every society. This optimal set of laws changes over time, and can vary by region. For example, a country surrounded by hostile neighbours may find it optimal to have a large army funded by higher taxes. In contrast, an island-society in the middle of an ocean would find such an expenditure to be a waste.

Finally, the complete nature of Metasophism means that it can serve as a moral compass for the individual in a fast-changing society. Many moral systems do not trust people to interpret for themselves what is good, preferring to prescribe a list of rules. People are not taught how to reason morally, which leaves society fragile. This philosophy remedies this problem by giving people a common point of reference on which to build their own moral reasoning.

An Integrating Ideology

A major strength of Metasophism is its capacity to integrate the thinking of other ideologies into it. Why is this?

First, as we do not have a correct understanding of how the world works, there can thus be honest disagreement about whether a certain action is good or not. Consider for instance the issue of drug-taking. This is an issue upon which a Metasophist could perhaps take either side.

For instance, a conservative would state that drugs harm the cognitive abilities of a person, resulting in lower academic performance and lower life outcomes in the long-run. On the other hand, a liberal may say that it is an aid to relaxation, and therefore allows one to perform better and be more creative. Which of the two effects dominate — and if they indeed hold — is largely an empirical question. While there is different literature supporting both sides of the issue, it tends to be distrusted as one will easily ascribe political bias to a result which clashes with one’s worldview.

A conflict such as this could be resolved by representatives from both sides committing to accept the results of a certain type of study or experiment, the design having been agreed beforehand, and the executors of which are neutral on the issue. This would help dispel the fuzzy morality and discord which currently prevails.

A similar type of logic applies to the question of the environment. From a Metasophist perspective, environmental protection is essential because the destruction of the environment can endanger the very survival of society itself. However, there are costs to protecting the environment: lower economic growth means less investment in technology and research. The role of Metasophism would then be to internalise this debate and give it a more rigorous form.

Perhaps some ideologies, like libertarianism, would be harder for Metasophism to integrate. If you simply believe in maximising freedom, then you might not want to prioritise maximising knowledge or the probability humanity will survive. The framing will be rejected. But in practice, libertarians often make appeals to other types of moral frameworks when trying to win over those of other persuasions. No doubt they would be able to argue how freedom would help with the Metasophist mission -- and certainly, it has a significant role to play.

And what about the difference between Metasophism and utilitarianism, the underlying framework of economic liberalism? Utilitarianism is the ideology whereby the objective is to maximise the sum or average of total societal happiness. Most economists use this heuristic when making any type of normative judgement. But from a Metasophist perspective, happiness is not something to pursue in and of itself. As a signal, it can be gamed, for example by taking drugs or eating sugary snacks. Consider the case where we have an invention which makes people very happy, such as a simulator in which one enters a sort of personal nirvana, where only pleasure is experienced but no knowledge is produced. This is optimal for a pure utilitarian, but highly undesirable for a Metasophist.

However, the question of which religions and ideologies would be able to reconcile themselves with Metasophism can only be answered by time. If one truly believes that one’s religion represents the truth, then there should be no conflict with Metasophism which sets its greatest aim as the revelation of the truth. In this sense, let us consider the case regarding the relationship of Metasophism to Christianity. For this, we only need to refer to an eminent authority on Christianity: Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI. In his 2006 Regensburg speech, he said that "the will to be obedient to the truth ... embodies an attitude which belongs to the essential decisions of the Christian spirit."[53] Thus there is some common ground between Metasophism and Christianity. 

But what of those influenced by other outlooks, such as a nationalist worldview? Let us assume that a nationalist believes that the survival of his nation is of the greatest importance. The only way such a claim could be justified is if your nation is sublimely good. But if our nationalist adheres to the limits of fact and logic, then he must see that the only demonstrably good mission is the discovery of the truth. Therefore, for the nationalist claim to be justified, the nation in question would need to adopt Metasophism.

What then is the difference between nationalism and Metasophism? In contrast to a nationalist, a Metasophist should value people not by their ethnicity, but rather by the likelihood that they will contribute to the common mission. This would allow us to emulate the useful symbolism of civic nationalism, which encapsulates many of the desirable features of nationalism -- societal solidarity, a mission around which a nation can be unified -- without excluding people from different regions or ethnicities. In this way, the basis for a global community could be laid.

Furthermore, a Metasophist outlook enables us to attach a positive value to different cultures and peoples even if they do not share our mission explicitly. This is because diversity in culture leads to diversity in governance and laws, raising the probability that an ideal solution to the challenges of the day already exists or would be found.

Now the inevitable question arises -- how to implement this philosophy? The first task is that of building a moral system on the imperative outlined above. How can such a task be organised? This is the subject of the next chapter.

Endnotes

[50] “Meta” can also mean after or beyond. Sophism originally meant a method of teaching involving philosophy and rhetoric aimed at young noblemen seeking political office in Ancient Greece. Plato condemned the Sophists who performed such teaching for their use of fallacious reasoning, giving a more general meaning to sophism as the use of specious reasoning in order to convince people to undertake a certain action. In this sense, Metasophism can thus mean a philosophy that comes after relativistic sophism of the age we are in, as from a Metasophist perspective, all those who make moral claims with an unclear or faulty definition of good are sophists.

[51] Kate Connolly. “Tensions rise in Germany over handling of mass sexual assaults in Cologne”. In: The Guardian (2016). URL: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jan/06/tensions-rise-in-germany-over-handling-of-mass-sexual-assaults-in-cologne

[52] Charles Taylor. A Secular Age (p. 365). Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition. 

[53] Benedict XVI. Faith, Reason and the University: Memories and Reflections. URL: http://w2.vatican.va/content/benedict-xvi/en/speeches/2006/september/documents/hf_ben-xvi_spe_20060912_university-regensburg.html Accessed: 2018-07-02. 2006