The Most Hellish Scenario of the Meta-Crisis
Hey beautiful people,
A reminder that tomorrow we will be collectively journalling at 8 AM ET on the following question:
How do we become wise?
I am really looking forward to seeing what journal entries emerge from this. You can RSVP here:
Collective Journaling: The Collective Question Edition w/ Peter Limberg. September 27th @ 8:00 AM ET. 90 mins. Patreon event.
Events for the week of September 27th-October 3rd:
Collective Journaling w/ Peter Limberg and Co-Hosts. Daily @ 8:00 AM ET. Patreon event. 90 mins.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Second Tuesday @ 3:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
McLuhan and the Lost Art of Sensemaking w/ Mark Stahlman. September 28th @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Demystifying Wisdom w/ Igor Grossmann. September 28th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Uncertainment Lounge: Thriving in Uncertainty Together w/ Lisa Norton. September 30th @ 6:00 PM ET. RSVP here.
Collective Presencing w/ Ria Baeck and Co-Hosts. Every Second Friday @ 12:00 PM ET. RSVP here. 90 mins.
Stoic Breath w/ Steve Beattie. Every Sunday @ 10:00 AM ET. RSVP here. 60 mins.
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September 26th, 2021
I reference this thing called the meta-crisis often in these journals. I have seen others refer to this thing as the mega-crisis, poly-crisis, or omni-crisis. The Club of Rome, probably the first modern group to write about this, labeled it the Problematique. Most simply, The Situation is the phrase Peter Jones uses.
The meta-crisis. A confluence of our collective problems, or to use more big fancy terms: the confluence of our existential risks, suffering risks, wicked problems, super wicked problems, and what Patrick Ryan calls existential ultracatastrophies. Basically, the collective shit show of all the things that could make us go extinct or lead us to a hellish existence.
The Club of Rome’s 1970 The Predicament of Mankind: A Quest for Structured Responses to Growing Worldwide Complexities and Uncertainties lists 49 of what the paper calls Continuous Critical Problems. To get a sense of some, here are the first ten on the list…
Explosive population growth with consequent escalation of social, economic, and other problems.
Widespread poverty throughout the world.
Increase in the production, destructive capacity, and accessibility of all weapons of war.
Uncontrolled urban spread.
Generalized and growing malnutrition.
Persistence of widespread illiteracy.
Expanding mechanization and bureaucratization of almost all human activity.
Growing inequalities in the distribution of wealth throughout the world.
Insufficient and irrationally organized medical care.
Hardening discrimination against minorities.
Amongst the 49 listed also include: alienation of the youth, environmental deterioration, widespread unemployment, and failure to evolve new value systems. They even gesture to “affluenza,” the dis-ease of being too wealthy.
Nick Bostrom and the rest of the existential risk (x-risk) community are the go-to people to understand all of the risks situated in the meta-crisis. They break things into natural risks and anthropogenic risks. The former are risks posed by nature, such as a natural pandemic (one originating from nature), and the latter are risks posed by us, such as a bioengineered pandemic (one originating from a lab).
A list of some of the x-risks Bostrom mentions: deliberate misuse of nanotechnology, runaway global warming, badly programmed superintelligence, and even a simulation shutdown. When addressing x-risks you cannot look at them in isolation, because solely addressing one may amplify another, as I wrote previously: The challenge with x-risks is the existential whack-a-mole happening on a global scale. When you attempt to knock one risk out, another one will pop up.
I have spoken about this at an Interintellect salon, arguing that Stoicism is the best philosophy to respond to the meta-crisis. A Stoic practice that is helpful here is called “negative visualization.” This is where you visualize a worst-case scenario happening, to emotionally and intellectually prepare for the worse thing to happen. This often frees one up from maladaptive fear. Engaging in negative visualizations towards facets of the meta-crisis is what French philosopher Jean-Pierre Dupuy calls “enlightened doomsaying.”
When you start engaging in enlightened doomsaying, you’ll need to process our most likely outcome: we are going to go extinct, as Phil Torres writes in his book, Morality, Foresight & Human Flourishing: An Introduction to Existential Risks: About 99.9 percent of all species that have ever existed on Earth have gone extinct, and the average mammal survives for only about 2.5 million years. As Carl Sagan put it, “Extinction is the rule. Survival is the exception.”
There are things worse than extinction though. I’ll get to that in a moment.
The Stoa has been exploring the meta-crisis through many perspectival lenses: Effective Altruism, Extinction Rebellion, Doomer Optimism, post-consumerism, anarcho-primitivism, metamodernism, post-rationality, civilization redesign, etc. This has been quite intentional, as I want us Stoans to memetically circulate the meta-crisis so we can see it through a transperspectival lens.
One perspective we have not explored yet is the prepper community. I cannot remember who said this, maybe Jamie Wheal, but the line went something like this: in the near future you will not be able to tell the difference between the prepper and the sage. Basically, the wise will not only be trying to prevent worst-case scenarios, but they’ll also be prepared for them to happen. I agree with this and I think it is good to plug into the actionable wisdom of the prepper community to complement a high-level grokking of the meta-crisis.
I do geek out about learning the jargon from memetic tribes, and preppers do not disappoint here, as they have an abundance of grimly fun acronyms: SHTF (Shit Hits The Fan), ELE (Extinction Level Event), BOL (Bug Out Location), and my personal favorite, TEOTWAWKI (The End of the World as We Know It). Two of their terms nicely describe what troubles me most in the possibility space of the meta-crisis: WROL and EROL, or “Without Rule of Law” and “Excessive Rule of Law.” The former happens after a collapse scenario, while the latter happens from massive governmental overreach.
The x-risk folks muse about an EROL scenario that is quite frightening, something they call the “world in chains” scenario. The BBC had a good article on this last year, aptly titled The Grim Fate That Could Be ‘Worse Than Extinction’. From the article:
It’s called the “world in chains” scenario, where, like the preceding thought experiment, a global totalitarian government uses a novel technology to lock a majority of the world into perpetual suffering. If it sounds grim, you’d be right. But is it likely? Researchers and philosophers are beginning to ponder how it might come about – and, more importantly, what we can do to avoid it.
The article mentions Bostrom’s “singleton hypothesis,” a situation where a “singleton” emerges, which is his term for “a world order in which there is a single decision-making agency at the highest level.” Examples Bostrom includes as potential singletons in his paper What is a Singleton?: a democratic world republic, a world dictatorship, and a superintelligent machine. He thinks that the emergence of a singleton will inevitably happen, the open question is just how it will happen, and to invoke some Christian languaging, will it happen in a way that invokes a hellish or heavenly existence.
Go ahead, negatively visualize the following: a singleton emerges, perhaps some governmental system, that uses ubiquitous surveillance, algorithmic manipulation, propaganda via deepfakes, and even actual mind-reading and mind-controlling technologies, aka “psychotronic weapons,” which is closer than one might think. Sounds hellish, eh?
Not only x-risk scholars or weird Stoics like me are thinking about these hellish things; best-selling authors, along with the mega-privileged (aka the power elites) listening to them, are also thinking about them. As Yuval Harari famously warned Davos, we are “hackable animals” now, to whoever or whatever wields such powers mentioned above…
Now in the past, many governments and tyrants wanted to do it, but nobody understood biology well enough and nobody had enough computing power and data to hack millions of people. Neither the Gestapo nor the KGB could do it. But soon at least some corporations and governments will be able to systematically hack all the people. We humans should get used to the idea that we are no longer mysterious souls – we are now hackable animals. That's what we are.
So yeah, the world in chains scenario is my candidate for the most hellish scenario of the meta-crisis.
I do think it is wise for us to have this scenario in mind when modern governments take greater control. And the emergent trend seems clear: greater control will continue to be taken by governments for emergency reasons. The reason does not really seem to matter. Terrorists yesterday, a pandemic today, perhaps a “cyber pandemic” tomorrow—where some actor shuts down the internet via a cyberattack—as Klaus Schwab from the World Economic Forum creepily warned us.
With the meta-crisis in full swing, there will be no shortage of reasons for more governmental control. There is a thing called “elite panic,” where elite fear of civil disorder leads to strong command and control measures. Elite panic is a phenomenon for us to consider, as is the following question: are governments, supranational organizations, and multinational corporations, along with the power elite who influence them, beyond corruptibility?
Or a better question: are they wise?
If your gut answer is the same as mine, you’ll be compelled to respond with no. If they are indeed not wise, then how can we become wise enough during the meta-crisis, to avoid hellish scenarios, and to attain a heavenly one?
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