We can do much more together
A manifesto
I.
"Boy, we can do much more together."
These are lyrics that Sufjan Stevens keeps repeating in the 25-minute epic "Impossible Soul" from the album The Age of Adz.
Sufjan recorded The Age of Adz while suffering from a mysterious and debilitating disease. The illness allowed him to “get much more in touch with [his] physical self,” reflected in the album's themes. (Also, volcanoes, spaceships, the apocalypse...)
After much exploring, questioning, and introspecting, Sufjan comes to a conclusion. He has faced pain and death. He doesn't want to live like this anymore. He doesn't have any more time to lose. And so, he opens up to a significant other and declares: "boy, we can do much more together."
"Impossible Soul" is one of my favorite songs, and I want to believe this sentence is bigger than that.
"We can do much more together." These words have stuck with me for a while now, and I want to tell you what they could mean.
II.
About two million years ago, a monkey standing on two legs rubbed some stones together and produced a spark that would change the fate of the universe forever.
Nothing predestined the homo species for survival. Contrary to many others, it didn't have thick fur, sharp claws, or remarkable speed. Its environment was hostile, and homo had no apparent competitive advantage.
And yet, sometimes, we're just lucky.
During the Miocene, drier climatological conditions made forests rarer, and grasslands and deserts more abundant. Previously hidden from predators by trees and vegetation, primates were now easily detectable. Evolution naturally selected those who could see threats coming and thus favored standing on two legs. Bipedalism freed our hands, which means we could use them for something else. So, we started picking up rocks and sticks, and we created tools.
Funny enough, natural selection saw that members with a bigger brain could use tools better and thus get more food and repel more predators. Soon, cranial capacity was our number one competitive advantage.
Brains are a curious thing. Their primary function is to read and store information and then use it to make decisions for the whole body. Since ours were so big and smart, we could model and eventually shape our environment.
We also found that creating things that did not make immediate sense from a survival perspective was actually the right move. Art, codes, languages, religions, memes: these abstract concepts helped form close-knitted tribes better equipped against threats. We found out that together, we were stronger.
Fiction has enabled us not merely to imagine things, but to do so collectively. We can weave common myths such as the biblical creation story, the Dreamtime myths of Aboriginal Australians, and the nationalist myths of modern states. Such myths give Sapiens the unprecedented ability to cooperate flexibly in large numbers. Ants and bees can also work together in huge numbers, but they do so in a very rigid manner and only with close relatives. Wolves and chimpanzees cooperate far more flexibly than ants, but they can do so only with small numbers of other individuals that they know intimately. Sapiens can cooperate in extremely flexible ways with countless numbers of strangers.
– Yuval Noah Harari
III.
Here are some things that humanity has checked off its to-do list:
discovering mathematics
inventing vaccines
splitting the nucleus of an atom
walking on the Moon
creating the internet
opening and closing a hole in the ozone layer
cloning a sheep
finding the Higgs boson
taking a picture of a black hole
eradicating polio
I hope you get the idea: we can do a lot together. Evolution wasn't expecting us to get so ridiculously far above our animal condition.
Today, life is good. I don't mean that in an objective, everyone-is-happy way. I mean it compared to the previous ~90 billion lives before ours. Here are a few charts to support this.
Suppose you're lucky enough to live in a developed country. In that case, you have access to comfort, technologies, and life quality that even the wealthiest emperor of Rome could have only dreamt of.
These trends look good. So, is that it? Have we pretty much secured a comfortable future for everyone?
I would like to say that's true. However, when you zoom in, you notice progress has started to slow down. And new threats are looming in the background.
IV.
Progress is not linear. It's not automatic either. Sure, under the right circumstances, we can get lucky, and the condition of our entire species can improve quickly. But we have to be careful.
More than once have humans come close to extinction. You can read, for example, about the quaternary extinction and the Toba catastrophe theory. More recently, you've probably heard of lovely things called climate change or nuclear war.
But let's take a step back. Even without talking about catastrophic events, our living standards haven't been stable throughout history.
This is a chart from Cold Takes. It is not very useful since the pre-agriculture era is so much longer than everything else, but it helps paint the picture. Luckily, the author also made this chart with "cumulative lives lived" as the x-axis.
People tend to think humanity progressed linearly through the last ~3,000 years and see the industrial revolution as the "beginning of our troubles." I believe they are wrong.
The first 25 billion humans had an "okay" quality of life, with an estimated life expectancy somewhere between 22 and 33 years old. It wasn't so good for the next 50 billion. Not only did their life expectancy not increase, but levels of poverty, hunger, violence, discrimination, and oppression were probably much higher than in pre-agricultural times. This difference can be explained by the transition to bigger civilizations, non-egalitarian societies, and the rise of monotheistic religions.
For about 11,000 years, life was pretty miserable. And then, another set of lucky conditions favored the appearance of thinkers like Descartes, Leibniz, and Bacon. Francis Bacon is the father of the modern scientific method. He told us that to understand nature, we should formulate a hypothesis, devise an experiment to test it, and use the results to draw conclusions. It sounds obvious in hindsight, but it took us almost forever to start doing this.
[...] Man, by seeking knowledge of nature, can reach power over it – and thus reestablish the "Empire of Man over creation", which had been lost by the Fall together with man's original purity. In this way [...], would mankind be raised above conditions of helplessness, poverty, and mystery, while coming into a condition of peace, prosperity, and security.
This scientific method triggered the scientific revolution, which in turn laid the foundations for the industrial revolution at the end of the 18th century. It's impossible to overstate how much the industrial revolution has improved humanity's living conditions. Medicine, electricity, population growth, art, comfort, understanding... All of these wouldn't be the same without the last 200 years.
But what it giveth, it can take away.
Look again at this graph.
In statistics, the last 200 years would be considered an outlier, random noise. They are not significant on the scale of humanity's lifetime. There could be regression toward the mean anytime soon. And the industrial revolution has given us the tools to do just that. A nuclear war, dramatic climate change, or a lab leak could send us back to prehistory.
Assuming none of that happens, there are still causes for concern.
In the USA, the leader of the free world and a historical driver of growth and progress, the median real wage has been stagnating since the 1970s. That's worrying, as it shows we've maybe hit a glass ceiling in terms of growth.
Here are a few other facts:
Every year 300,000 women die from pregnancy-related causes. This means that on an average day, 830 mothers die.
Almost a quarter of the world population – 23% – live in autocratic regimes.
3.7% of all children die before they are five years old. This means there are 5.2 million children every year, and on an average day, the world sees 14,200 child deaths.
At least 5 million people die every year because of fossil fuels when there are safer, cheaper, and better alternatives ready.
Each year since 1975, obesity has increased or stayed the same in every single country.
80 billion animals are slaughtered for meat every year.
8 billion tonnes of plastic waste enter the oceans every year.
One third of freshwater species are threatened with extinction.
I don't know how you can look at these numbers and not feel a fire burning your insides.
I don't believe in conspiracies, nor that people are genuinely evil. I believe that we can do a lot together. But I also believe that almost everything is broken. Half of our political leaders don't know basic statistics. They're probably not evil lizardmen, but they're also probably not able to solve anything.
"Human beings cannot comprehend very large or very small numbers. It would be useful for us to acknowledge that fact." – Daniel Kahneman
We keep fighting with our neighbors over petty things. We want our tribe to win in whatever culture war is raging at the moment. We're always more polarized and divided. So much so that we forget to look at the numbers and the problems left to solve. We can do much more together, but only if we want to.
V.
It's easy to be pessimistic in a world dominated by news of riots, terrorism, climate change, and war. I don't know anyone around me who's truly optimistic about the future. That's tragic because we need people to believe in a good future in order to make it happen. If we don't think change is possible, we'll never try to change things.
Yet, progress is possible. It has happened, and it's still happening. Don't look at events; look at trends: things are indeed getting better! But there's so much more we can do together. And we can't just rely on lucky conditions. We need to have the ambition to make it happen.
Try telling one of the first 50 billion humans that we are able to send people to the freaking moon. They will tell you it's impossible and you're probably crazy. Their mind can not even begin to imagine how to do that. Now, think: what are the things we think are impossible?
Let's end suffering! Let's defeat death! Let's conquer stars and meet other civilizations! Let's make mind-bending art!
I don't know exactly how to get there, but I'm pretty sure thinking it can be done is the first step. And it's not like we were stuck; there are still many low-hanging fruits to pick:
We can donate money more effectively and save more lives with effective altruism.
We can vote more rationally by using score or approval voting systems.
We can use prediction markets to make better decisions.
We can invest in nuclear power to cut energy costs and environmental pollution.
We can make crime fall, intelligence rise, and economies prosper by getting rid of lead.
We can boost innovation by protecting intellectual property and offering more tax incentives for research and development.
We can use land more efficiently and improve economies with georgism.
We can be kinder to ourselves and each other with mindfulness, psychedelics, and gratitude.
Unfortunately, we often get stuck because of the status quo bias, "a preference for the maintenance of one's current or previous state of affairs, or a preference to not undertake any action to change this current or previous state." The river is scary to cross; we dread escaping our comfort zone. And that's a shame because there are wonders on the other side.
We can do much more together.
By far, the most important word in this sentence is together. No one can build pyramids or fly to the Moon alone. These are collective efforts, made possible by the work and the knowledge of our civilization and all the ones before.
I don't know how to make people stop fighting, and I wouldn't trust anyone who claims they do. Instead of specific people, follow ideals: progress, reason, science, love. They've got us this far. They can take us a lot further.
Thanks to Sprint, Orphée, and Victor for reading drafts of this.
Tl;dr, OpenAI version:
