Transcript

No Going Back · Underthrow

0:00
SPEAKER_00: Her utopia is impossible.
0:02
SPEAKER_00: His golden age is gone.
0:04
SPEAKER_00: What if neither the future we imagine nor the past we remember is available to us?
0:09
SPEAKER_00: To see why, consider a window.
0:12
SPEAKER_00: You've heard of the Overton Window.
0:13
SPEAKER_00: It's the range of ideas the public will tolerate at a given moment.
0:17
SPEAKER_00: Inside it are the policies a politician can propose without losing the next election.
0:22
SPEAKER_00: Outside lies the unthinkable.
0:25
SPEAKER_00: Joseph Overton, a policy analyst in Michigan, sketched the idea in the 1990s.
0:30
SPEAKER_00: Activists on both sides have used it ever since.
0:33
SPEAKER_00: Shove it to the left, shove it to the right.
0:36
SPEAKER_00: Try to make the radical sound reasonable or the reasonable sound rabid.
0:40
SPEAKER_00: But the window has a blind spot.
0:42
SPEAKER_00: It only shows what people will accept politically.
0:45
SPEAKER_00: It tells us precious little about what we can build without waiting for politics.
0:50
[music]
0:58
SPEAKER_00: Doors of Possibility.
1:01
SPEAKER_00: So let me introduce another piece of architecture.
1:04
SPEAKER_00: Call it Kaufman's Doors.
1:06
SPEAKER_00: Picture a door to a room.
1:08
SPEAKER_00: You walk through it and it shuts behind you.
1:10
SPEAKER_00: There's no handle on this side.
1:12
SPEAKER_00: You can never go back through that door.
1:14
SPEAKER_00: The only way out is through another door.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: Into a room you've never seen.
1:18
SPEAKER_00: Kaufman's doors are the adjacent possible, applied to societies and how they evolve.
1:24
SPEAKER_00: So what's the adjacent possible, and who is this Kaufman fellow?
1:27
SPEAKER_00: Stuart Kaufman is a theoretical biologist.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: He spent years asking how life gets more complex, say, from proteins to people.
1:37
SPEAKER_00: His answer?
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Every system sits at the edge of what it can become next.
1:41
SPEAKER_00: A primordial soup can't just produce a human heart, much less a human.
1:46
SPEAKER_00: It can only make the molecules one catalytic reaction away.
1:50
SPEAKER_00: But each new molecule opens possibilities that did not exist just a moment before.
1:55
SPEAKER_00: The biosphere grows as each new form of life opens possibilities for what comes next.
2:01
SPEAKER_00: Kaufman calls this proximate frontier the adjacent possible.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: No way back.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Here's what that means for us.
2:12
SPEAKER_00: We cannot restore the past.
2:13
SPEAKER_00: Whether the 50s, the founding, or the gold standard, there's no going back.
2:17
SPEAKER_00: The open frontier has been paved or protected.
2:20
SPEAKER_00: And today's pioneers are looking at Mars.
2:23
SPEAKER_00: Our past rooms held different people with different motivations within different circumstances.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: And the door to each pass room closed when we left it.
2:32
SPEAKER_00: Remember, any movement that promises former glory is selling a key to a rusty antique lock.
2:38
SPEAKER_00: That said, any movement that promises a grand utopia is selling you socialist snake oil.
2:45
SPEAKER_00: Those who want a better future have to move forward through one of Kaufman's doors.
2:50
SPEAKER_00: And forward means new circumstances.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: Some will be better, some will be worse.
2:56
SPEAKER_00: We don't get to pick the temperature in the next room.
2:59
SPEAKER_00: The doors are few, and from any new room, the possibilities are limited.
3:04
SPEAKER_00: The Constrained Vision.
3:08
SPEAKER_00: Now, meet Thomas Sowell.
3:10
SPEAKER_00: In his highly influential book,
3:12
SPEAKER_00: A Conflict of Visions, Sowell describes two ways of seeing the world.
3:17
SPEAKER_00: The constrained vision sees human beings as limited,
3:20
SPEAKER_00: and every policy prescription as a trade-off.
3:22
SPEAKER_00: The unconstrained vision places greater faith in moral and intellectual perfectibility.
3:28
SPEAKER_00: A to Z.
3:35
[music]
3:59
SPEAKER_00: Freedom lovers like to think they get down with the constrained vision.
4:03
SPEAKER_00: They quote F.A.
4:04
SPEAKER_00: Hayek and warn about central planners.
4:06
SPEAKER_00: But too many are quick to draw up their own blueprints.
4:10
SPEAKER_00: Abolish the Fed by Tuesday and privatize everything by Friday.
4:14
SPEAKER_00: We'll all wake up on Monday in Libertopia.
4:17
SPEAKER_00: They imagine we can get from A to Z without ever passing through B.
4:21
SPEAKER_00: But that's just the unconstrained vision wearing a Gadsden flag.
4:26
SPEAKER_00: A free society won't be crammed through the Overton window.
4:29
SPEAKER_00: Nobody can argue a civilization into existence.
4:33
SPEAKER_00: We'll have to step through Kaufman's doors.
4:35
SPEAKER_00: Through things people can build, do, or join right now.
4:40
SPEAKER_00: Start a micro school, join a mutual aid society, or use a stable coin wallet.
4:44
SPEAKER_00: Project by project,
4:46
SPEAKER_00: with ideas,
4:47
SPEAKER_00: having sex,
4:48
SPEAKER_00: we move directionally toward our North Star, while underthrowing the powerful.
4:54
SPEAKER_00: Criticize by creating.
4:58
SPEAKER_00: No project is perfect, of course, but each creates possibilities that didn't exist before.
5:03
SPEAKER_00: That's how life did it over four billion years without a blueprint.
5:06
SPEAKER_00: And that's how we'll do it.
5:08
SPEAKER_00: So stop looking for a way into the glorious past and stop thinking you can design
5:13
SPEAKER_00: the utopian society of the future.
5:15
SPEAKER_00: We must look for the doors before us and choose wisely.
5:19
SPEAKER_00: Then we can walk through one and listen as it shuts behind us.
5:23
SPEAKER_00: There's no going back.
5:25
SPEAKER_00: The only way forward is through.
5:28
SPEAKER_00: I'm Max Borders.
5:29
SPEAKER_00: Let's criticize by creating.
5:31
[music]
5:37
SPEAKER_00: Underthrow is brought to you by Human Respect Labs,
5:40
SPEAKER_00: committed to advancing the philosophy of human respect worldwide.
5:44
SPEAKER_00: Whether you're helping spread the philosophy or building voluntary alternatives
5:48
SPEAKER_00: to political power,
5:49
SPEAKER_00: we support strong startup projects with up to $30,000 in seed funding.
5:54
SPEAKER_00: Got an idea?
5:55
SPEAKER_00: Visit humanrespectlabs.org to see if you qualify.
5:59
SPEAKER_00: That's humanrespectlabs.org.