I LOVE HUMAN BEINGS. REALLY. Pretty much all of them. On the other hand, I have

I LOVE HUMAN BEINGS. REALLY.

Pretty much all of them. On the other hand, I have a job to do. And that job is to disabuse people of a certain category of myths that stipulate that the high trust society and the economic rewards that come from it, can persist if we dismantle the ‘rules’ that are the product of over four millennia of accumulated uncomfortable, but necessary truths.

And I must do this because our system of government, and our economy, and much of our five hundred year experiment, is very close to collapsing for the reasons that all civilizations collapse: (a) overextension (b) excessive credit (c) loss of founding moral narrative (d) failure of calculative systems that assist in cooperation and coordination while maintaining individual incentives.

Dark ages are not uncommon in man’s history. There is no reason that we could not have another. Or even something less catastrophic, like revolution, or descent into malignant tyranny.

But something is very surely going to happen in the next twenty years. And that is the end of the west as a people, as a civilization, predicated on the mythology of the enlightenment.

Perhaps as some progressives fantasize, technology will save us. But hope is not a strategy and faith is not a tactic.

SO it is left to those of us who will face uncomfortable truths, to construct the calculative sciences – the new means of cooperation and incentives – that allow us to preserve that aspect of the high trust society, at least in a caste or nation, such that innovation can persist, despite the collapse of the failure to create an Aristocracy of Everybody.