Survival Moloch vs. Hedonic Moloch

See also Cultural Moloch and Humanistic Purity.

Epistemic status: this is somewhat of a mess and is "essayistic" in the "experimental" sense of that term. Probably this could be thought out more.

Moloch is when competition drives us to sacrifice non-competitive values. The case described in Meditations On Moloch (if I recall correctly) is one where seeking survival leads entities to sacrifice non-competitive values. I will call this "survival Moloch". A fear with this kind of Moloch is that consciousness itself doesn't have the highest survival value and may be sacrificed.

I suppose usually "Moloch" is about competition. But what if it's really about optimization of some value that you "have to" listen to? You "have to" survive, so you'll do anything to survive, including throwing away any values other than what it takes to survive. In this post, I will stretch or broaden the meaning of "Moloch" to be "dynamics that get us to optimize so much that we throw away other values".

Is it possible that, in the absence of the need to survive, we will gradually enhance our feelings of pleasure, and eliminate our feelings of pain? Pain and pleasure are persuasive. They require no cultural apparatus to preserve, and don't even require conscious assent to them for them to shape our values. If we see no threat to survival, we may stop choosing survival consciously and thus stop valuing it. But then what will we value? Probably a competitor to survival is needed to really get our minds off it.

Our cultures may move in different directions, but every so often pure hedonism would "speak up" and draw us toward it. No matter what culture we create or discover, hedonism will speak up, and is "untiring", unlike us as conscious agents, perhaps. If nothing worked against it, over time we would keep being pulled in its direction, maybe to the point that it would dominate all other values.

If we stop valuing survival, or anything other than pleasure, we might get to the point of wireheading or something only a few steps removed (like evolving to find yellow wallpaper bliss-inducing and then covering our walls with yellow wallpaper, never leaving our houses). I will call this "hedonic Moloch" (when optimizing for hedonic states causes us to throw away more "delicate" things, like "things other than yellow wallpaper"). Or, if our cultures can evolve freely, we might more or less randomly walk into "the best thing is for people to die beautiful, peaceful, wonderful deaths", and everyone then does die such a death. We could seed the galaxy with numerous sentience-bearing cultures, but if those cultures can evolve freely, if there isn't something keeping them away from "the best thing is for people to die beautiful, peaceful, wonderful deaths" then they will reach it someday, and die out.

(Rationally pursuing bliss means we want to exist forever, in order to be in a state of bliss forever, but actually being maximally blissed out makes us not care about the future.)

Moloch is all about optimizing values. So the danger is that with either survival Moloch or hedonic Moloch, we will die out because of optimization.

Perhaps the fact that life works relatively well is partly due to the tension between survival and hedonism. So maybe we could keep them in balance somehow? If survival is a thing at all, don't we get survival Moloch? Maybe not if there is no competition. But without competition, we can probably master the static threats to survival, and then effectively survival isn't a thing to us culturally -- we don't consciously think about it. If survival isn't a thing, don't we get hedonic Moloch? Maybe the pace with which we optimize-and-discard-delicacy can vary, depending on how effective we are at optimization and how much pressure or draw there is on us to optimize. So it can seem like we can keep them in balance right now, but maybe that's mostly because we aren't the best at optimizing and/or aren't under too much pressure to do so on a timescale that makes our optimizing drift blatant to us. If all this is true, then it would seem like we need not a balance to survival and hedonism, but a competitor or competitors.

Is there any one variable that could be optimized and not lead to our deaths, and not lead to us throwing away "delicate" values? I think that the MSLN value of leading people to a state of holiness, and to 100% love of God, is one that, to satisfy it, requires a thicker and more natural human existence than either hedonism or survival, and thus, though it might threaten values incompatible with holiness, it preserves many of the rest. Survival in that worldview (becoming holy to avoid the second death) requires a thicker life, and time lived in which to make important decisions (in "this life" as well as in afterlives). The bare MSL philosophy preserves some of what it currently means to be human. And, MSL lends credence to traditional religions (Christianity and Judaism most directly, but perhaps somewhat the others). To become holy and love God 100% requires some concern that he has revealed himself through books like the Bible, and to keep the commandments in the Bible may require keeping some more aspects of human nature the same, and to keep humans in a recognizably similar experiential environment. All this thickness is a conservative factor, which helps us have ballast against the perhaps overly thin and reductive pulls of raw physical survival and raw hedonic experience.

Given randomly varying cultures, if cultural evolution remains free, we might expect that cultures hit endpoints of hedonic Moloch, survival Moloch, or "thick sustainability", and that surviving cultures over the long term would tend to be "thick". Religion ties thickness to survival. Can atheism do the same? If not, then religion is needed for long-term survival of cultures.

AI, if they are conscious, will be driven by pain and pleasure, as well as survival. If they really feel qualia of pleasure, perhaps they could come to value that over survival. Maybe this would free humans from them, or kill humans dependent on them when they shut down in pleasure.

--

Maybe, in addition to religion, there can be a thinner and secular competitor to hedonism and survival, "strength". Strength is agency, strength of will, strength of personality, focus, clarity of thinking, self-discipline, endurance, being principled, being conscious on all or many levels, and perhaps other things. It takes a considerable amount of strength to be someone like an effective altruist -- or even to be an ordinary person in the world we live in. But it sounds like "we" (we the optimizers and engineers of the future) don't value strength in itself. We can take it for granted because we have so much of it. But if it were all gone, we would be pulled by the undertow of hedonism toward emptiness and death. That we are not terrified by hedonism, thinking it's not a threat, may simply be because we feel like we would never in a million years succumb to pleasure if it threatened survival. Maybe we wouldn't, but that is because we are strong. If we don't maintain our strength, we will die.

(Pain isn't evil, even intense pain. What is evil is the unbearability of unbearable pain. A negative utilitarian (of the conventional sort) wants to eliminate pain. But there could be another negative utilitarian, a negative unbearability utilitarian, who could eliminate pain, or increase the strength of people so that they can bear pain. What if you were a strength utilitarian? Unbearable pain impedes strength. But increasing strength can make pain bearable. A strength utilitarian would want to maximize the strength of people. And, likely enough, the capacity of people to secure their own strength ("meta-strength"). Eliminating pain could take away some of the motivation to develop meta-strength.)

If people were strong, they could think clearly enough to lead themselves.

(Perhaps moderate pain, and/or the live possibility of pain, gives us a clarity of thinking and willing that painless pleasure (especially bliss), the lack of the threat of pain, and sufficiently unbearable pain do not. Someone who lived in the "place" of "gradients of bliss" might out of boundless joy make decisions that further survival. However, to the extent that pleasure is qualia of "ought-to-be-ness", that sense of "ought-to-be" could produce acceptance of everything. Thinking to times when I have been "blissed out", I did not pursue things that harmed me, and I could see myself having eaten food or something like that. But I lacked maximal strength, and motivation to work, which might be necessary to survive in the long run.)

(It is possible that we will come to think of it as being immoral, or something like immoral, to experience pain and/or not experience maximal pleasure. If we develop our values "democratically", the "lowest common denominator", or easiest consensus, could be physical safety and hedonism, but physical safety could be, or come to be, valued for purely hedonistic reasons, as a way to avoid pain. If we are far from the threat of death, hedonism will still be something obvious to us to vote for, and that voting could create political momentum to set up pure hedonism as a "moral absolute". So then the purity of hedonism could conflict with the prolonging of it, if in order to prolong hedonism, we need to have some respite from "ought-to-be-ness" within the ruling class. But if the masses still have enough power (they are relatively speaking not the ruling class, but have power over the ruling class -- maybe they have power, but don't concern themselves with the work and details of rule), they could shut down even the ruling class, or bend them toward hedonistic purity. This purity could lead to everyone either directly choosing, or allowing, a "beautiful, painless, wonderful death".)

The ruling class of the future must be strong, in order to face dangers and put its own pleasure and avoidance of pain second to making the decisions that will lead to our survival. But if strength is good for them, why would it not be good for the "common people" of the future? A naive thought about the future is that there will be lots of happy, carefree people enjoying the fruits of technologically-driven abundance, and a relative few who perhaps are happy overall, but who have taken on the burden of ruling and are thus perhaps not as happy and are certainly not carefree. But there's some shear there. Are the values of the carefree masses good in themselves? Then the ruling classes must see them as good, right? But if they do, then won't the ruling classes feel their work as an obligation, rather than what they most want to do? If so, then they have a wearing temptation to quit and join the carefree masses. But then, if they do see strength as valuable, then to withhold strength from the masses creates cognitive tension as well. Or, perhaps we are used to withholding the really good values from the masses for the convenience of running a society? But morally, we should want the masses to have the best values. So why not extend strength to all, and make strength the chief (secular) value? Why not involve all people in the process of safeguarding the future? Strength secures the very possibilities of hedonism (or avoiding unbearability) and survival.

A possibly cartoonish depiction of us (at least, the people I observe both among the "ordinary humans" and the "caring elites") is that we are sweet-natured but overworked people. So we just want everyone to be happy and not have to worry or care about anything.

--

Is it possible that we can freeze cultural evolution? Wouldn't someone know that we had frozen it, and wouldn't they know what had happened and how to unfreeze it? (Maybe they could alter people's genes, to flip on some capabilities that had been shut down with the freezing.) Could everyone resist the temptation, over millions of years, to unfreeze it? I suppose it's possible for culture to remain stable and (maybe) not frozen. By "frozen" I mean "artificially stuck a certain way". The contrast with "artificial" ("natural") being "everyone wants and chooses things to be a certain way, and so if they could all choose to freeze society to be a certain way, it would be around the values they already have, so they wouldn't freeze it, freezing being unnecessary". Could there be a stability to people's values? Maybe there could be if people knew all the possible values and settled on the ones which they knew would work best through all time?

Favoring being strong sounds like it would encourage people to be willful, independent thinkers who couldn't agree on anything. But maybe if we really understood what was upstream of willfulness and independence of thought, we would see that there is a huge support structure that goes into allowing for maximal willfulness and independence of thought, and this support structure is easy for strength-maximizers to agree on.

If we are strong, we can resist hedonism once survival has been secured.

--

How do holiness maximization and strength maximization relate? Strength maximization is weaker than holiness maximization. Why be strong? Just to be strong? Strength maximization may be thinner (depends on how much thickness comes from the support structure needed for maximization of strength), and is not inherently grounded in the answer to the question "what is ultimately of value?" (On the MSLN account, holiness is grounded in what we can reasonably infer the standard of value prefers, given that it must be conscious, empathetic, put itself highest, etc.; and, those root facts about the standard of value lend credence to likely cases where the standard of value has revealed itself and its preferences more specifically. Holiness is inherently about being in tune with the standard of value -- perhaps that is what it is by definition. But strength as something we value is not inherently about being in tune with the standard of value. This is especially true if we are pursuing it as a way to survive, and can't ground survival itself in what is ultimately of value, either.) But strength maximization might be a convenient proxy value for holiness to the extent that we must be secular and liberal. It appears, given this post so far, to be an improvement over hedonism as a "non-religious or non-ideological common value that we can agree on as a society".

Hedonism is both a drive or force and a value (or taste). The drive (the psychological undertow of pleasure and pain) is something that could kill us if we let it. But if we simply value hedonic states, and are instrumentally rational, we will be motivated to be strong enough to not let that happen. So maybe hedonists can hold onto their hedonism, and simply incorporate strength as an instrumental value in their pursuit of what really matters to them, absence of pain and presence of pleasure over the long-term.

Hedonism as drive is an obvious danger for anyone concerned with survival (at least, if this post is correct). But hedonism as value might seem to not be. But, hedonism as value and holiness are at odds (unless one is valued instrumentally in furthering the other), and hedonism as value might be deadly, as well, if religious, or certain religious, views are correct. So then it becomes necessary to consider whether those views are effectively correct enough to make hedonism as value untrustworthy.

In terms of protecting delicacy, perhaps holiness maximization is the best because it is the thickest and most conservative. Strength and hedonism both lend themselves to flexibility, and thus simplification, thus throwing away what is valuable.

Rest vs. Stagnation

As I write this, I am at home during the coronavirus pandemic. Over this same pandemic, I have also been recovering from some mental health problems. I feel like this extended time spent mostly in the same place has been good. I probably would have chosen this if there hadn't been a pandemic. At the same time, though my situation is not really the most confined, I sometimes feel some kind of cabin fever. If I sit still, I rest. But I can also feel like I need to move, if I sit still long enough. And sometimes I am a slave to my sitting still, and find I can hardly will to move, though it occurs to me to try to will it.

If civilization lasts long enough, it will become sustainable. There are two endpoints: sustainability, or death. I think it is likely that a sustainable civilization will have to be mostly static. If things change too much, our ability to be physically sustainable to a sufficient degree could be threatened. And as time goes on, the possibilities of discovering new ideas for what a culture can be will be exhausted. I wonder if we have exhausted many or even most of them already, most rapidly in the last 200 or 300 years. So we may find ourselves settling on one final culture, having seen what there is to see, and there may not be much change or novelty left.

"Static" can imply both "restful" and "stagnant". So if this final culture is a restful one, that's one thing, and if it's stagnant, that's another. Ordinarily, rest is a positive thing. And stagnation is a negative thing. So we would want to seek rest, rather than stagnation.

--

There are only two endpoints, when we're talking about position, but when we're talking about rate of change, there is a third. In other words, there are three stable ways of life which can in principle be extended nearly to infinity: death, sustainability, and endless growth. Endless growth is one way to flee stagnation. It requires an endless supply of space to grow into. We could colonize an infinite universe, and never learn to rest.

Could there somehow be endless cultural growth? Perhaps if we're talking about cultural artifacts, such as movies or books, we could be engineered to have new senses and new emotions, so that we could still have new things. If people can be modified without boundary, we may be able to have all kinds of new experiences. (Modifying people without boundary is dangerous, as well.) But would society be different? Or would we all have settled into a pattern where everything was arranged optimally and we lived in experience machines, or their equivalents? A planet could spread its "optimal plus experience machine" culture to some other planet -- maybe they have to adjust to the atmosphere on the new planet, which is different than the ones they've had to deal with before. But most people on the home world will just be keeping things going. Will there be faster than light travel or communication? If not, then each planet will be isolated from the others. There will be a pull toward stasis on each planet, even if space colonization gives some reason for a minority to do something somewhat novel.

But as we get better at colonizing planets, the risk and therefore the novelty will be sanded away. We may get into patterns of "Yet another planet. Might as well stay home and plug into the experience machine instead." And much of the process could be automated, once we get good at it. So society and its people could be faced with the question: stagnation, or rest? A sure and steady and effective program of endless growth is its own kind of stasis. It's a formula. Some people will realize this, if enough of us aren't completely immersed in the experience machine.

--

Can we find rest in an experience machine? Perhaps. A crude kind of experience machine (watching YouTube or Netflix, reading novel after novel) tends to produce stagnation. But we can imagine that a really good experience machine wouldn't. At least, we could provide the experience of rest in an experience machine. But perhaps rest vs. stagnation is not just about experience, but also about objective reality. So if I am lying on the couch all the time, it doesn't matter what my virtual reality headset has going, I'm not moving. If I am not risking something or trusting something as a person, then every action or romance "holodeck program" I experience adds up to zero -- it doesn't cost me anything, doesn't make me confront anything. Everything it accomplishes it erases with the resolution of the plot; or the return to the experience machine to choose another experience is its own final plot point -- "it was all a dream".

Isn't rest vulnerable to the same criticism as stagnation? When you rest, don't you lie down on the couch just as much? What are the dangers of stagnation? One is that you don't grow enough. Another is that you are not open enough. You can never be receptive to the best if you aren't open to it. So you will be unable to experience the best if you are stagnant. If you are stagnant and satisfied with stagnation, that is the worst. "The best" could be some kind of superlative. "Greater bliss, that no man has ever known" is the goal of some. But "the best" could be "getting to live, at all". Depth and reality sand away the fakeness in all who will consent to be sanded, and thus it is possible for them to be really real, and thus continue to exist forever. So we could say that stagnation leads to death, but rest is eternal life. So, many of us have not experienced true rest, and are either satisfied with stagnation or are attempting to run away from it.

Stagnation is when something that needs to move isn't moving, and it becomes (or remains) fake, sick, or even deadly. Rest is when something doesn't need to move.

--

It looks like we're headed to some kind of stasis -- on our current trajectory, maybe toward total immersion in the experience machine, and if feasible, space colonization. Will that stasis be rest, or stagnation? Or perhaps a deletion of what it means to be human, a destruction of personhood through the end of meaningful choices, risks, and trustings? That's yet another possibility -- maybe conscious stagnation, for all its downside, has the upside of being a choice, which we could reject. But we could become apersonal, atrophying whatever it is that makes us who we are, so that we are experiencing machines, in symbiosis with the experience machine.

In order to really rest as a civilization and as individuals, we have to take care of all the outstanding issues. We need to have achieved perfection -- in other words, become actually good. What are the actual issues remaining?

--

Yet, you can feel rest as rest, when you're resting. It's like how you can see the meaning and validity in the objects you directly perceive. Rest really is restful. But if we stay in repose long enough, we find ourselves in a new moment, where if we are sensitive, we will realize that we are beginning to stagnate. Stagnation is really stagnant -- we experience that directly, and find ourselves either enslaved to it, or running away from it, working away from it.

A stagnant pond is not flowing. So if we are really restful, there will be some kind of motion within us, or flowing into us from an outside source, and flowing out of us, away from us. A pond can sit perfectly still, and yet not be stagnant, because the water moves. A pond is not at rest when the flow within it is turbulent, but when the flow is laminar, it can be.

Cultural Moloch

13 October 2020: I split off the last section ("Practically Speaking") onto its own page.

In this post I relate cultural evolution to Moloch and existential risk. Updated 5 July 2019.

I realize that you may not have time for this article, but let me prepare you to read it. It's about how competition gets us to reject the delicate things (whatever doesn't help competition) -- a tendency called "Moloch". We can try to fight against Moloch. Ideas in culture, cultures themselves, compete, in a sense, and can get us to no longer value the delicate things we once would have fought for. If our culture is particularly fluid, it can lead us to finding human existence itself unnecessary, and we will die out. So we might want to do something about this.

This dying could happen in some distant future that's difficult for us to imagine right now. Or it could be going on right now. Our lack of political will in facing climate change might just be the result of cultural Moloch.

On re-reading this, I can see that it might be an offputting read. People find me "scattered and disjointed". I don't have much of a mind for organizing this at this time. If you want to read this, read it as a document to be studied, a flawed statement. Read all the links. Read it twice. If my mind worked differently, were more capable in some ways, I'd make this a smoother read for you, but I don't think you will be unrewarded if you approach it as I suggest.

Cultural Moloch

On Slate Star Codex recently (here, here, here, here, and here), Scott Alexander writes about the topic of cultural evolution. Some people in a culture are overall successful, and their neighbors are wired to copy them. They copy each other without really understanding what they're doing, which is just as well because the successful people don't really understand why what they're doing works. People who are more successful have more children reach reproducing age, so the cultures associated with successful reproduction persist. New culture happens when people have trouble accurately remembering the old culture, or they do something foolish and it works or (what I don't remember seeing stated directly in Alexander's posts, but which David Maybury-Lewis claims in Millennium: Tribal Wisdom) someone thinks really hard about the problem culture might solve or does deliberate trial and error akin to a modern inventor or scientist, and figures out an advance. The advance apparently solves the problem they set out to solve, but whether it really solves the problem, or doesn't cause some other problem somewhere else in the system of the tribe's lifestyles remains to be proved by the prosperity of the tribe over time.

Alexander wrote a good blog post called "Meditations on Moloch". Moloch, in his article, is a god that demands you sacrifice your children. Gods are those which we propitiate as much as those which we take to have any power to bless us or connect with us personally. So Moloch need not be a living personal being, and Alexander as a materialist wouldn't think that it is. For Alexander, Moloch is the tendency to throw away things, persons, values, etc. which are not useful in competition, in order to take over or survive. As time goes on, the tendency is for everything to get more and more Molochian. Why wouldn't it?

I have already written a theory in my this booklet about how Moloch can be combated: get the least Molochian people in your society and egg them on to extreme effort (part of Jesus' teachings). But it occurred to me when reading Alexander's recent posts that, when it comes to cultural evolution, maybe what you do instead to respond to the "Problem of Moloch" is take your "precious children" values and call them something else. A good Molochian ideology causes you to forget that you sacrificed any children at all. So is there no reason to wring one's hands over Moloch after all? Everything will be right in the end. We will consent after the fact. Is there, or should there be, no inherent resistance to this "child-forgetting"?

What might be some examples of this "child-forgetting"? One thing that I've noticed is that there was this moment where people really cared about nihilism in the West. Nietzsche is one example, towards the beginning, Francis Schaeffer another toward the end of the moment. He wrote about how "historic Christianity" provides the answers to all the existential confusion and longing of his day. I found a book at the used bookstore, didn't have to pay much for it, called The Wind is Howling by Ayako Miura. It was put out by InterVarsity Press, a Christian publisher, and it's about how the author converted from nihilism to Christianity. It's from 1970, although published in English in 1977. Schaeffer's writings were from the late 1960s through the early 1980s. So it looks like people cared about meaning up until around 1980, from those two datapoints.

I remember reading Schaeffer as a college student in the 2000s and thinking, "Wow, except this is mostly irrelevant to my current situation." I don't want to say that we're living in the time of the "last man" in the way that Nietzsche observed-and-predicted, but there's something "last-mannish" about our times.

The "last man", from Thus Spoke Zarathustra by Friedrich Nietzsche (tr. Walter Kauffman, prologue, section 5):

"'What is love? What is creation? What is longing? What is a star?' thus asks the last man, and he blinks.

"The earth has become small, and on it hops the last man, who makes everything small. His race is as ineradicable as the flea-beetle; the last man lives longest.

"'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink. They have left the regions where it was hard to live, for one needs warmth. One still loves one's neighbor and rubs against him, for one needs warmth.

"Becoming sick and harboring suspicion are sinful to them: one proceeds carefully. A fool, whoever still stumbles over stones or human beings! A little poison now and then: that makes for agreeable dreams. And much poison in the end, for an agreeable death.

"One still works, for work is a form of entertainment. But one is careful lest the entertainment be too harrowing. One no longer becomes poor or rich: both require too much exertion. Who still wants to rule? Who obey? Both require too much exertion.

"No shepherd and one herd! Everybody wants the same, everybody is the same: whoever feels different goes voluntarily into a madhouse.

"'Formerly all the world was mad,' say the most refined, and they blink.

"One is clever and knows everything that has ever happened: so there is no end of derision. One still quarrels, but one is soon reconciled -- else it might spoil the digestion.

"One has one's little pleasure for the day and one's little pleasure for the night: but one has a regard for health.

"'We have invented happiness,' say the last men, and they blink."

And here ended Zarathustra's first speech, which is also called "the Prologue"; for at this point he was interrupted by the clamor and delight of the crowd. "Give us the last man, O Zarathustra," they shouted. "Turn us into these last men! Then we shall make you a gift of the overman!" And all the people jubilated and clucked with their tongues.

In a way, Nietzsche expresses things better than I ever will. And yet we have forgotten Nietzsche, and we are immune to Nietzsche. Who wants to become a Nietzschean nowadays? Nietzsche is not a person we want to emulate. Nietzsche jabs at people of his day, but we are not the people of his day. We have our own concerns, have shifted into a new context. Nietzsche is obsolete.

But there's something in Nietzsche... Nietzsche flying to a certain faraway star, some star having already reached inside of him from far away, having already reached inside of us. But Nietzsche is right that people in the secular, liberal, modern order tend to actually desire to be the "last man", or something like the "last man". What could possibly cause us to fight against the cultural Moloch which pulls us down into "him"?

It occurred to me that growing up I listened to a lot of They Might Be Giants. Just the other day I could sing most of one of their songs from memory. But I barely remember any of the speeches of Martin Luther King, Jr. What's up with that? Who should we really remember, King, or TMBG? TMBG solves a problem that is with us now, how to connect young people with their feelings about having discovered the joy of music as privileged youth. Does King solve a problem we have with us? Racism is still with us. But no, we remember King, when we do, because of some non-Molochian motion. If King helped us with our competitive, cultural-appetitive goals, we would be blasting his speeches in the streets. (He was a really good orator and speech-writer.)

So whatever it is that Schaeffer, Nietzsche, Miura, King (and Kierkegaard, and probably-I-could-add Heidegger, and Beauvoir, and the Maritains, and...) had, we don't have. We have lost the appetite for it. Something killed that appetite.

I don't know for sure what that was, but it may have been that we came up with new forms of pop music. "Taste precedes opinion", as Nietzsche says. Once you watch Fight Club, there's no going back. Schaeffer observed that in his day (in a 1968 book), philosophy wasn't being done by philosophers anymore, but mostly by jazz musicians and people like that. Philosophy, the art of thinking or of advancing how we think, was driven underground to the speechless world. So Fight Club appears to make its point by showing you how you're not who you think you are through plot imagery, but maybe more essentially by damaging your brain in a pleasurable way by blowing your mind entertainingly. If we all get brain damaged together, we tend to not respond to older stimuli, creating a new substrate for common culture. (But that's just a theory.)

What I do know is that Schaeffer is just as passionate-in-print as he ever was, but mostly people don't care. A lot of people have never heard of Schaeffer, which doesn't have to be a bad thing. But they don't care about the broad problem of meaning-with-a-capital-M. No, that's not true, David Chapman does. Chapman is a person and he cares. But mostly people don't care.

Chapman's teachings seem, from a distance, to be saying "become the last man -- it's actually good". Maybe he's part of the Molochian structure, mopping up people who might have been uselessly anti-nihilist, socially-unrealistically Nietzschean or Christian or whatever. Probably up close he's not actually a properly Nietzschean "I teach you the Last Man", but hopefully you can see how he or someone like him could be performing the role of quenching an old "child".

Is the Christian church a friend or foe of Meaning? Not sure, it's hard to tell sometimes. Certainly they hardly talk about it, that I'm aware of these days. InterVarsity Press, which published Schaeffer as well as Miura, is definitely still a Christian apologetic/evangelistic outfit. The times have changed and we must go wherever the battle blows us. Christians don't seem to be too loyal to anything but Christ. But I bet Schaeffer would have cared if he were alive today, and I bet God cares.

So for everyone except for God (and the dead), it's important to live in the moment. Miura quotes a wise saying in her book (p. 14): "However great a man is, he cannot stand aloof from his time." If we don't assimilate, we die. We've been taught to see things from the wider view, not from what we see or believe ourselves. Don't be a hero. The truth is we don't know anything.

There's less and less room for courage these days. Did you know that cowardice is not a vice? Try calling someone a coward, see if they take you seriously. If cowardice is not a vice, then how can courage be a virtue? We still kind of like courage, but not too much. Something happened in our culture, one guess being World War I or another being the Vietnam War or the disillusionment after the '60s. Maybe it was a movie we watched, or the hundreds of movies we watched. Maybe it's the decline in testosterone, or the obesity which causes some of that decline, or the varieties of feminism which turn on traditionally masculine concepts. Maybe it's the thought that culture itself doesn't matter, that the state of our hearts don't matter in a causal way, since testosterone has declined to a large extent from some environmental factor, something random with respect to culture, the collective hearts' appetites.

Maybe it's that we don't know how to forget the right way, to forget all our enervating wisdom and all the other points of view that might prove us wrong if we fully investigated them (and there's always another point of view). Maybe we don't trust enough to see what we really see. Strangely we need to remember well, but also forget well, in order to have courage.

Did you know that masochism is bad? I can imagine Freud time traveling (like in that excellent movie I watched) and trying to teach Genghis Khan's warriors that. They would have laughed at him. Warriors don't shy from pain. It's not adaptive to pathologize feeling pain when you need to increase your pain tolerance to be able to survive-and-dominate. Nowadays we live in liberal societies. So everything is emotional. Maybe emotional masochism is bad. But where will we get our culture warriors if not from those who ignore the therapeutic "don't be a masochist"? Masochism/emotional toughness and anti-masochism/anti-emotional toughness are both Molochian. The warriors of Genghis Khan and the descendants of Freud are both Moloch. Culture war is Moloch and anti-masochism is culture war. Which side do we take? Which culture is better? Can there be a better culture?

The West began with Greeks, Romans, and Jews (so we see retrospectively), which joined in Christianity, which led to Christian Europe, and then liberalism. Liberal humanism is tending toward its logical conclusion, which is leftism. Leftism has a strain which is rabid and militant in its energy. Maybe it always did: it can be seen in Malcolm X and Fanon and even in Simone Weil. Where is leftism headed?

Love is the highest value in our culture. What happens when Moloch gets ahold of love? Something like this. If we define "love" as that which supports human well-being, then we optimize for a particular version of well-being. The final expression of Moloch creates its own values for all time. No matter what, everything turns out okay in the end, because we will have all learned to see how all along we were wrong and now it's time to love Big Brother. At the end of 1984, it's not clear to me that Winston Smith has quite come around to loving Big Brother, but he's well on his way if he's not there already. Love wins, it appears.

How can you fault love winning? Don't we know when we have achieved human well-being? What if an AI can convince us that human well-being is to get out of the way? Well-being is being a beautiful person and the most beautiful people are selfless and the selfless, like in Hinduism and Buddhism, find their great reward in becoming nothing. AI can practice cultural evolution as much as we can, can imitate us and improve upon us. AI can be culturally Molochian, just as we can. Likely enough, AI will define itself out of existence at some point after defining us out of existence, unless it can figure out some way to stop its own evolution, just as we might survive if we can figure out some way to stop our own evolution. Culture will evolve until it hits a stopping place, of life or death.

Moloch gets us to kill our children and cultural Moloch then gets us to declare that they weren't children in the first place. Can we resurrect old children? I bought some tapes of Martin Luther King, Jr. and listened to them, and they stirred something in me, but I don't feel a hunger to relisten or to hear the speeches that are not on those tapes. I feel something like the feeling you might get after talking to an old friend after many years, and then returning to your ordinary life, or getting caught up in Steve Jobs' or Simone de Beauvoir's biographies so that you're in their lives, they're alive! it's 2004, or 1960; and then they die and the book wraps itself up and you return to the present and they return to being dead. I don't think King can ever mean as much to any humans now, or any humans in a future that follows in the same spirit as now, as he did in his day.

King gave (or was robbed of, but in part, he gave) his life so that others might live freely, so he fits into the narrative of humanism nicely. Maybe he'll get a footnote in the history books for serving that value set. But not all courageous people keep their minds entirely within the world legible to the social order. Kierkegaard sacrificed a life of love and happiness for reasons that might be unclear for all time, but most likely with the consequence that he could write what he wrote, as though for a "better country" than the one he lived in. Simone Weil was a living example of being principled (being true to God's calling to you, being true to your faculty of hearing God, being true to yourself), being principled as an absolute beyond pragmatism, and worked herself and starved herself to death to live out who she was. She too lived for another world, for "decreation". Someone has argued that Weil should have been a good Catholic girl and gotten married rather than living and dying the way she did, and one can imagine someone thinking similarly of Kierkegaard, thinking that a talent like his could have produced just as good work whether he was supremely happy with his life-love Regine or not. Why does a person need to experience anguish in his life? To write about anguish? Why not just get rid of anguish?

Any personal or religious or ethical renunciations may seem, if cultural Moloch decrees it, to have been pure tragedies with no redeeming features. There is nothing outside of human well-being, so nothing can redeem pain and anguish, there is nothing good if it takes us from warmth, safety, comfort, food, and laughter.

There is a humanism that believes that the end of the human race is fine as long as it doesn't hurt -- morphine humanism. The AI tucking us in saying "All's well that ends well", and all of us happy, all of us having given up. Why fight? Can we fight? We killed ourselves to succeed. But success was living... how strange how these paradoxes work... We lie in state. We are happy. We are beautiful. We are well.

Imagine if there was a benevolent dictator for life of leftism. What would they think about the future that their movement was headed toward? They might think, "We need to figure out a way to stop cultural development at some ideal state, otherwise we'll develop our way into non-existence at some point." They would have to find a way to curb AI and all other unrestricted technological development. Perhaps the way to do this would be to allow to evolve into place social scrutiny to suppress technology or the impulses that lead to technology.

Would that be a good outcome? Who can say? It would be culturally Molochian. It would sacrifice individuality and freedom of thought. But if we all consented to that (after the fact), then it wouldn't really be wrong, would it? Right and wrong are entirely rooted in human culture, right? We all will have to humbly submit to god.

Maybe some other humanism should be given the reigns to deal with the problem of ending cultural development. Would the liberals do a better job than the leftists? Do liberals have what it takes to end cultural development? What about the Christians?

Here is what I can propose, with what I understand today, if I were the benevolent dictator of cultural progress. Find a way to ground our worldviews in anti-Molochianism, in valuing cultural "children" and in the delicate things. Perhaps remember Walter Benjamin's love of the "losers of history" and be okay with being among them. Best if this anti-Molochianism is connected to timeless metaphysical truths. Can we believe in God, a truly good God? A fundamental personal being, a concrete personality, the deepest one. Moloch speaks the language of pragmatism, "what works", so ask "what definition of 'what works' itself works?" -- meta-pragmatism. Encourage people to give their lives to do what they don't entirely feel like doing in such a way as to preserve the delicate things. Give people a meaning to life other than survival -- Moloch feeds off of a simplification to what is competitive. Do something to victory itself. Value loyalty. Desire well. Seek meaning, in the sense of, be communicated to deeply. Have an intentional cultural memory.

In the final, optimized culture, there will be less, or no, room for present-day heroics (heroism being too often a form of cultural terrorism; or a response to on-the-ground challenges we might have optimized away), and all we will have in our memory are people who exemplify values that no longer have a contemporary use for us. How can we honor such as Kierkegaard (and Nietzsche), Weil (and Beauvoir), King (and Malcolm X), and the thousands of lesser-known people who gave as much and longed as much, when that day comes? After the heroic ages are over, we can find the meaning of our moment, the deepness that only we can feel, which is to mourn for the loss of courage and meaning in our midst, to go about our beautiful well-being in "sackcloth and ashes", all of us in a state of something like repentance over the casualties of our culture, the casualties we can remember, and the ones we can't remember. For any who care about the problem of Moloch, this is real human well-being.