Highlights from all books

The implicit conceptual model behind any unconstrained optimistic or pessimistic view of progress is that it is deterministic and automatic. According to many variants of techno-optimism or “doomerism,” progress just happens—either the Singularity arrives or civilization collapses. 5 But progress isn’t mechanistic. It is spectacularly singular and requires an explicit and unified vision of the future.

One way to think about low interest rates is that from a financial perspective, they make everything happen at once. If one dollar in 10 years is worth about as much as one dollar today, the timing of profits doesn’t matter. But everything is not what needs to happen; the bubbles and megaprojects that produce transformative innovation are specific events. Initially, these developments resist categorization because they occur before there’s even a defined category, sector, or industry for them. The atomic bomb preceded the “defense space”; the “space industry” emerged decades after Apollo; “crypto” followed Bitcoin. What does accelerate progress is a concentration of effective people working on adjacent problems.

On the contrary, policies designed to preserve or optimize abstract macroeconomic aggregates, such as “wealth” or “employment,” tend to inhibit the vital process of constant industrial revolution—which, according to Schumpeter, involves the perpetual creation and destruction of concrete, machines, material infrastructures, and industries. Consequently, “creative destruction without destruction,” “capitalism without bankruptcy,” and “risk without consequences” essentially amount to Christianity without Hell. And since Hell is not an attractive political pitch, the technocratic policies of perpetual risk suppression constantly create more systemic risk the harder they attempt to annihilate it. Naturally, eternal stagnation is preferred over economic collapse, which is not a political option. Stagnation, in other words, is a choice.

A 15th-century visitor to Constantinople, the ancient capital of a dying empire, remarked that the citizens were not obsessed with the existential threats to their lives but with obscure theological debates: “If you ask a man to change money he will tell you how the Son differs from the Father. If you ask the price of a loaf he will argue that the Son is less than the Father. If you want to know if the bath is ready you are told that the Son was made out of nothing.” A visit to a modern college campus might produce a similar observation. Higher education is now the site of an irresistible drive to moralize and politicize everything, which in turn imposes self-censorship and a risk-averse culture.

Making a decision—collapsing a range of possibilities into one actualized instance—requires taking risks. In contrast, optionality—often sustained by what Debord has called the “false choices offered by spectacular abundance”—conceals a deep risk intolerance.

In April 2023, as SpaceX prepared the experimental launch of Starship, its flagship rocket, SpaceX CEO Elon Musk lamented the “soul-sucking” process of getting all of the safety reviews and requirements that the dozen or so regulatory agencies demanded. Holding his head, Musk said, “I’m trying to figure out how we get humanity to Mars with all this bullshit.” Later, he added, “This is how civilizations decline. They quit taking risks. And when they quit taking risks, their arteries harden. Every year there are more referees and fewer doers. That’s why America could no longer build things like high-speed rail or rockets that go to the Moon. When you’ve had success for too long, you lose the desire to take risks.” 131 We need to cultivate and catalyze boldness and exuberant risk-taking, stop the decline Musk deplored, and find a way to channel our thymotic energies into something radically new. To that end, we now turn to an unexpected but highly effective vehicle for enabling just such a Promethean spirit of risk-taking: speculative bubbles.

FOMO, like many aspects of human psychology, is a bug that has evolved into a feature. It’s generally not great that we as a species exhibit herdlike behavior, of which FOMO is just one example. But such behavior also functions as a coordination mechanism. Since good bubbles function by aligning people and capital to work on the right problem at the same time, FOMO helps ensure everyone gets on board at once. If a bubble only excites people who are early in their careers, it won’t be able to marshal the institutional and financial resources necessary to reach fruition. If a bubble only grabs the attention of people who are late in their careers, it will end up constrained by existing paradigms. If a bubble excites speculators but not entrepreneurs, it will bid up assets without building anything. If a bubble only convinces founders to act, it will be starved for capital. All of these people need to participate in the bubble at the same time, and FOMO can bring them together.

Financial bubbles emerge when perception and reality diverge. When this happens, one of two things eventually occurs: either perception moves closer to reality or reality bends in the direction of perception. In the former case, bubbles can result in spectacular crashes that annihilate value and wealth. In the latter, they serve as a necessary catalyst for massive technological acceleration, as some of the bubbles we document in this book demonstrate. Nevertheless, given the potential for ruin that inevitably accompanies a bubble, some readers will remain skeptical of their value. Why not merely pursue safe, incremental progress? To address this alternative, it’s worth considering a world without financial bubbles—a world where no one gets too excited about the possibilities of the future because no one is excited about the future at all.

By contrast, in a static economy, everyone’s gain comes at someone else’s expense. Corporate profits can rise, but only if they come out of labor’s share of national income or from lower taxes, which will result in higher inflation or fewer government services. In a no- or slow-growth environment, disputes involve not how to fairly divide the spoils of winning but who will lose out. Instead of looking forward to a brighter future, people are inclined to worry about how much worse their future will be than their present, and to attribute such worsening to the behavior of others. Under such circumstances, ambitious people will be attracted to jobs that involve zero-sum games: adversarial politics, irresponsible speculation, fraud, even revolutions and coups. From this perspective, bubbles can be seen as an outlet for restless energy. They offer a domain where the Stalins, the Cesare Borgias, and other ruthless types can satisfy their ambition by participating in positive-sum games. Indeed, there is a strong, empirically documented relationship between a zero-sum mindset and the economic environment: The more adverse the economic environment, the less positive-sum the thinking becomes. Scarcity thinking kicks off a self-reinforcing doom loop, which results in more scarcity.

There’s a sense in which participating in bubbles speaks to an important aspect of the human condition. People want to transcend limitations, and a world without bubbles is a world defined by preexisting limitations. In economic terms, it’s a bit like living in the ruins of a once-advanced but now departed civilization. In his book The Decline of the West, German historian Oswald Spengler contrasted an Apollonian culture, obsessed with the present, with a Faustian culture, which looks toward the infinite and the transcendent. Bubbles are deeply Faustian. When they work, they’re a way for participants to look back and look down on the more mundane parts of the world.

In sum, Apollo was a reality-distortion field that heavily skewed perception of the program’s risks and rewards. As a consequence of this bubble-like dynamic, society’s risk tolerance increased substantially, enabling unprecedented financial and technical risk-taking. The extreme willingness to take risks, constantly reinforced by unrealistic levels of optimism, may not sound rational, but it put a man on the Moon.

Of course, decentralization isn’t inherently a good thing. It only works when valuable local knowledge—tacit knowledge—can be profitably harnessed by large groups and organizations. In other words, what’s needed is a mechanism, like prices in a free-market system, that aggregates knowledge to make it globally accessible. In the case of Apollo, handwritten notes functioned as information-aggregation mechanisms. In von Braun’s system of “Monday notes,” engineers and technicians were required to identify the most salient issues and submit a single-page note. After leaving comments in the margins, von Braun would circulate the entire annotated collection of notes within the organization. Through this informal system, everyone was able to tap into the organization’s collective knowledge and contribute solutions to each other’s problems. There was one level of centralization, with von Braun serving as the hub for information, but his role was really to highlight problems in a way that facilitated decentralized solutions.

Apollo was nothing less than an instance of the technological sublime. The Apollo 11 mission, and the technological mastery a successful Moon landing represented, elicited a cross-cultural spiritual reaction. Images from the mission were “surrounded with the aura of religion,” from the silvery Saturn V rocket, which towered against the darkness of space before it lifted off and sent the first humans to another world, to the Apollo 8 crew’s reading from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve 1968, to Armstrong’s footprints on the lunar surface. In the 20th century, the experience of the technological sublime was a recurrent phenomenon in America—think of the interstate highway system, the Hoover Dam, the Manhattan skyline, the atomic bomb, the jet airplane, or the Golden Gate Bridge. After Apollo, that experience essentially vanished.

Rapid advances in hardware and software, while ensuring the good fortune of the industry, didn’t guarantee that any single participant could passively maintain market share. Every player had to relentlessly catch each new wave of advances. A 70-year logarithmic chart makes advances in chip density look like a smooth process, but each advance was a discrete, step-function change. Companies that were even a few months early or late would miss out on sales but would still bear the fixed cost of research and development as well as their capital expenditures.

Markets—and, by extension, bubbles—“channel the competitive spirit into constructive efforts instead of exacerbating it to the point of physical violence.” Instead of achieving order through violent and ritualistic sacrifice, a more peaceful, albeit similarly ritualistic, “spontaneous order” (to use economist Friedrich Hayek’s phrase) emerges.

Markets perform a similar function to religions in another, more literal sense. The translation of future cash flows into a present asset price is just another way of reconciling the demands of the eternal future with the here and now. Therefore, markets—these sublime machines that synthesize beliefs and aggregate them into prices—instantiate a secularized version of the sacred.

Each historical phase of speculative exuberance we’ve looked at was driven not by abstract forces but by high-agency personalities. Their thymotic drive seems to represent the apex of human agency—new energies are released, humans are launched into space, novel industries emerge. Bubbles, then, fuse agency with destiny.

Bubbles are simultaneously technologically deterministic and socially constructivist in nature. They only work if the new product is physically possible, but they also rely on discrete choices by specific people.

Each bubble we’ve discussed was fundamentally driven by a definite or constrained vision of a future that was radically different from the present. Bubbles can therefore be understood as mechanisms to reorient the present toward the future; they are materializations of futuristic visions in the present.

bubbles have a skewed risk-reward structure. The upside from being right and early is multiples of the cost of being wrong. Moreover, there’s a psychic benefit to trying to build something unique alongside a team of true believers, even if it ends up failing. Investments can vaporize in an instant, but the memory of being part of a tiny band of people trying to change the world, and feeling for a time like it’s succeeding, is timeless.

Whereas superstitions are “merely false beliefs,” philosopher Nick Land explains, “hyperstitions—by their very existence as ideas—function causally to bring about their own reality.” We can therefore think of bubbles as “reality distortion fields” that warp reality to their underlying vision.

the yearning for transcendence, redemption, and salvation from the “iron cage” of soulless rationality remains an irrepressible historical constant.

Today, a lack of transcendent vision is the ultimate source of the crisis of meaning and the techno-economic and cultural stagnation that inflicts the West. But nascent bubbles in sectors like space exploration, AI, and renewable energy offer promise that this transcendent impulse has not entirely disappeared. We’re by no means suggesting that the visionary technologists who realize the breakthroughs of the future all need to be deeply committed Christian believers. 396 But we predict that they will most likely exhibit a deeply spiritual—and, in some cases, explicitly religious—impulse toward realizing and participating in something transcendent. They will be attracted to a Promethean vision that transcends the limitations of the present and rationalizes the sacrifices and risk-taking its actualization demands. What is truly scarce are not natural resources or new ideas but the human will and courage to unlock nature’s intrinsic superabundance. There are no limits to growth, only the growth of limits. Scarcity isn’t a built-in feature of our world; the universe produces more energy and offers more matter than we could ever desire to capture, convert, and consume.

In a 2018 talk, Peter Thiel asked, “What aspects of technology are actually charismatic? Where there is a good story—[a] story about technology making the world a better place. It needs to be real, needs to be a viable business, but at least [it needs to be] something that inspires people, motivates people in the company, and has a transcendent mission.” Another name for what Thiel here refers to as “charismatic technologies” is the sublime.

Tolstoy stood at the opposite pole to all this. He believed that only by patient empirical observation could any knowledge be obtained; that this knowledge is always inadequate, that simple people often know the truth better than learned men, because their observation of men and nature is less clouded by empty theories, and not because they are inspired vehicles of the divine afflatus.

Consequently the fuller our knowledge of facts and of their connections the more difficult to conceive alternatives; the clearer and more exact the terms – or categories – in which we conceive and describe the world, the more fixed our world structure, the less ‘free’ acts seem. To know these limits, both of imagination and, ultimately, of thought itself, is to come face to face with the ‘inexorable’ unifying pattern of the world; to realise our identity with it, to submit to it, is to find truth and peace. This is not mere oriental fatalism, nor the mechanistic determinism of the celebrated German materialists of the day, Büchner and Vogt, or Moleschott, admired so deeply by the revolutionary ‘nihilists’ of Tolstoy’s generation in Russia; nor is it a yearning for mystical illumination or integration. It is scrupulously empirical, rational, tough-minded and realistic. But its emotional cause is a passionate desire for a monistic vision of life on the part of a fox bitterly intent upon seeing in the manner of a hedgehog.

Opposed as Tolstoy and Maistre were – one the apostle of the gospel that all men are brothers, the other the cold defender of the claims of violence, blind sacrifice, and eternal suffering – they were united by inability to escape from the same tragic paradox: they were both by nature sharp-eyed foxes, inescapably aware of sheer, de facto differences which divide and forces which disrupt the human world, observers utterly incapable of being deceived by the many subtle devices, the unifying systems and faiths and sciences, by which the superficial or the desperate sought to conceal the chaos from themselves and from one another. Both looked for a harmonious universe, but everywhere found war and disorder, which no attempt to cheat, however heavily disguised, could even begin to hide; and so, in a condition of final despair, offered to throw away the terrible weapons of criticism with which both, but particularly Tolstoy, were over-generously endowed, in favour of the single great vision, something too indivisibly simple and remote from normal intellectual processes to be assailable by the instruments of reason, and therefore, perhaps, offering a path to peace and salvation.

I think that you truly believe that I prefer foxes to hedgehogs, but this is not so. No greater poet than Dante, no greater philosopher than Plato, no profounder novelist than Dostoevsky exists; yet, of course, they seem to me to have been hedgehogs, and although I do think that they were fanatical unitarians – and that this can lead to disastrous consequences in social, personal and political life – this is the price that may be paid for forms of genius which may well be profounder than any other. I may have more personal sympathy with foxes; I may think that they are politically more enlightened, tolerant and humane; but this does not imply they are otherwise more valuable – if such comparisons of incommensurables make sense at all.

It was popular to interpret the decline of GCA as an allegory about Japan’s rise and America’s fall. Some analysts saw evidence of a broader manufacturing decay that started in steel, then afflicted cars, and was now spreading to high-tech industries. In 1987, Nobel Prize−winning MIT economist Robert Solow, who pioneered the study of productivity and economic growth, argued that the chip industry suffered from an “unstable structure,” with employees job hopping between firms and companies declining to invest in their workers. Prominent economist Robert Reich lamented the “paper entrepreneurialism” in Silicon Valley, which he thought focused too much on the search for prestige and affluence rather than technical advances.

The USSR’s “copy it” strategy had actually benefitted the United States, guaranteeing the Soviets faced a continued technological lag. In 1985, the CIA conducted a study of Soviet microprocessors and found that the USSR produced replicas of Intel and Motorola chips like clockwork. They were always half a decade behind.

The Persian Gulf War was the first major test of Perry’s

As Bill Perry watched the Persian Gulf War unfold, he knew laser-guided bombs were just one of dozens of military systems that had been revolutionized by integrated circuits, enabling better surveillance, communication, and computing power. The Persian Gulf War was the first major test of Perry’s “offset strategy,” which had been devised after the Vietnam War but never deployed in a sizeable battle. In the years after Vietnam, the U.S. military had talked about its new capabilities, but many people didn’t take them seriously. Military leaders like General William Westmoreland, who commanded American forces in Vietnam, promised that future battlefields would be automated. But the Vietnam War had gone disastrously despite America’s wide technological advantage over the North Vietnamese.

To many people in Silicon Valley, Sanders’s romantic attachment to fabs seemed as out of touch as his macho swagger. The new class of CEOs who took over America’s semiconductor firms in the 2000s and 2010s tended to speak the language of MBAs as well as PhDs, chatting casually about capex and margins with Wall Street analysts on quarterly earnings calls. By most measures this new generation of executive talent was far more professional than the chemists and physicists who’d built Silicon Valley. But they often seemed stale in comparison to the giants who preceded them. An era of wild wagers on impossible technologies was being superseded by something more organized, professionalized, and rationalized. Bet-the-house gambles were replaced by calculated risk management. It was hard to escape the sense that something was lost in the process.

Since his earliest days at Apple, Steve Jobs had thought deeply about the relationship between software and hardware. In 1980, when his hair nearly reached his shoulders and his mustache covered his upper lip, Jobs gave a lecture that asked, “What is software?” “The only thing I can think of,” he answered, “is software is something that is changing too rapidly, or you don’t exactly know what you want yet, or you didn’t have time to get it into hardware.”

Historically, as we shall see, innovations have tended to come from networks more than from hierarchies. The problem is that networks are not easily directed ‘towards a common objective … that requires concentration of resources in space and time within large organizations, like armies, bureaucracies, large factories, vertically organized corporations’.6 Networks may be spontaneously creative but they are not strategic.

In Sergio Leone’s epic spaghetti western The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Clint Eastwood and Eli Wallach are hunting for stolen Confederate gold. The treasure, they discover, is buried under a headstone in a huge Civil War cemetery. Unfortunately, they have no idea which headstone. Having earlier taken the precaution of emptying Wallach’s revolver, Eastwood turns to him and utters the immortal lines: ‘You see, in this world there’s two kinds of people, my friend. Those with loaded guns. And those who dig. You dig.’ This is a modern example of an ancient truth. For most of history, life has been hierarchical. A few have enjoyed the privileges that come from monopolizing violence. Everyone else has dug.

Besides the permanent associations which are established by law under the names of townships, cities, and counties, a vast number of others are formed and maintained by the agency of private individuals. The citizen of the United States is taught from infancy to rely upon his own exertions in order to resist the evils and the difficulties of life; he looks upon the social authority with an eye of mistrust and anxiety, and he claims its assistance only when he is unable to do without it … In the United States associations are established to promote the public safety, commerce, industry, morality, and religion. There is no end which the human will despairs of attaining through the combined power of individuals united into a society.

The problem was that, no matter how much he wrapped himself in the trappings of legitimate rule, appropriating Egyptian, Roman and Habsburg regalia and iconography, Napoleon could never achieve the one thing upon which hierarchical systems of rule ultimately depend (and insist upon): legitimacy.

A key reason for the British Empire’s scale and durability, then, was the relatively light touch of the central authority. Though its theory was hierarchical – indeed, like John Buchan, Victorian racial theorists ranked mankind according to inherited levels of intelligence – its practice was to delegate considerable power to local rulers and private networks. Unlike Napoleon’s short-lived European empire, the British Empire was not run by a micro-managing genius, but by a club of gentlemanly amateurs, whose seemingly effortless superiority depended on the unsung strivings of local agents and native collaborators.

In most history, success is over-represented, for the victors out-write the losers. In the history of networks, the opposite often applies. Successful networks evade public attention; unsuccessful ones attract it, and it is their notoriety, rather than their achievement, that leads to their over-representation.

nothing except infectious political and physical diseases. What they possess today, they have by a very large extent gained at the cost of the less astute German nation by the most reprehensible manipulations. Today we are merely paying this people what it deserves … [T]he German nation was, thanks to the inflation instigated and carried through by Jews, deprived of the entire savings which it had accumulated in years of honest work … We are resolved to prevent the settlement in our country

Not until the 1970s did it begin to become apparent that, in peacetime, even the best-laid plans were liable to descend into a quagmire of stagflation and corruption. High-modernist planning wreaked all kinds of havoc in its heyday, from the collectivization of Soviet agriculture to the building of Brasilia and the compulsory ujamaa villages in Tanzania. Yet it could always survive such catastrophes, if only because their effect was to kill off any kind of opposition. It was in its decrepitude that the planned system could be challenged.

The problem for the planners was that a hierarchical system that had been well-suited to the activity of total war – an activity characterized by monopsony, as the state is the sole buyer, and standardization, as destruction is much simpler than production – was wholly unsuited to a consumer society. Those who had fought in the world wars had been promised prosperity as well as victory. In practice, that could be achieved only if millions of households were freed to make billions of choices, to which hundreds of thousands of firms could respond.

As Hayek observed, ‘To maintain that we must deliberately plan modern society because it has become so complex is therefore paradoxical, and the result of a complete misunderstanding … The fact is, rather, that we can preserve an order of such complexity … only indirectly by enforcing and improving the rules conductive to the formation of a spontaneous order.’

As Walter Powell pointed out in an illuminating 1990 article, the growth of business networks at both the national and international level represented something more than simply the triumph of markets over the hierarchical corporation. ‘In markets,’ he argued, ‘the standard strategy is to drive the hardest possible bargain on the immediate exchange. In networks, the preferred option is often creating indebtedness and reliance over the long haul’:

Congress passed the Communications Decency Act of 1996 – its first attempt to regulate Internet communications by imposing fines for the publication online of obscene language – it was appropriate that the Valley’s response was written (as an email) by the former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow.13 His ‘Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace’ was addressed to the ‘Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel’: I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We have no elected government, nor are we likely to have one, so I address you with no greater authority than that with which liberty itself always speaks. I declare the global social space we are building to be naturally independent of the tyrannies you seek to impose on us. You have no moral right to rule us nor do you possess any methods of enforcement we have true reason to fear … Cyberspace does not lie within your borders. Do not think that you can build it, as though it were a public construction project. You cannot. It is an act of nature and it grows itself through our collective actions … Cyberspace consists of transactions, relationships, and thought itself, arrayed like a standing wave in the web of our communications … We are creating a world that all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity. Your legal concepts of property, expression, identity, movement, and context do not apply to us … [Your] increasingly hostile and colonial measures place us in the same position as those previous lovers of freedom and self-determination who had to reject the authorities of distant, uninformed powers.

In the words of David D. Clark, the Internet’s chief protocol architect: ‘We reject kings, presidents, and voting. We believe in: rough consensus and running code.’

a breakdown of relations between Russia and the West, based on mutual incomprehension and made possible by: a collapse of European hard power, due to the inability of modern European leaders to accept that diplomacy without the credible threat of force is just hot air;

When emerging technologies that give rise to wealth do not advance the broader public interest, trouble often follows. Put differently, the decadence of a culture or civilization, and indeed its ruling class, will be forgiven only if that culture is capable of delivering economic growth and security for the public. In this way, the willingness of the engineering and scientific communities to come to the aid of the nation has been vital not only to the legitimacy of the private sector but to the durability of political institutions across the West.

A generation of founders cloaked themselves in the rhetoric of lofty and ambitious purpose—indeed their rallying cry to change the world has grown lifeless from overuse—but often raised enormous amounts of capital and hired legions of talented engineers merely to build photo-sharing apps and chat interfaces for the modern consumer. A skepticism of government work and national ambition took hold in the Valley. The grand, collectivist experiments of the earlier part of the twentieth century were discarded in favor of a narrow attentiveness to the desires and needs of the individual. The market rewarded shallow engagement with the potential of technology, as startup after startup catered to the whims of late capitalist culture without any interest in constructing the technical infrastructure that would address our most significant challenges as a nation. The age of social media platforms and food delivery apps had arrived. Medical breakthroughs, education reform, and military advances would have to wait.

Our entire defense establishment and military procurement complex were built to supply soldiers for a type of war—on grand battlefields and with clashes of masses of humans—that may never again be fought. This next era of conflict will be won or lost with software. One age of deterrence, the atomic age, is ending, and a new era of deterrence built on AI is set to begin. The risk, however, is that we think we have already won.

The ability to develop the tools required to deploy force against an opponent, combined with a credible threat to use such force, is often the foundation of any effective negotiation with an adversary. The underlying cause of our cultural hesitation to openly pursue technical superiority may be our collective sense that we have already won. But the certainty with which many believed that history had come to an end, and that Western liberal democracy had emerged in permanent victory after the struggles of the twentieth century, is as dangerous as it is pervasive.

“To be coercive, violence has to be anticipated,” he wrote in the 1960s as the United States grappled with its military escalation in Vietnam. “The power to hurt is bargaining power. To exploit it is diplomacy—vicious diplomacy, but diplomacy.” The virtue of Schelling’s version of realism was its unsentimental disentanglement of the moral from the strategic. As he made clear, “War is always a bargaining process.” Before one engages with the justice or injustice of a policy, it is necessary to understand one’s leverage or lack thereof in a negotiation, armed or otherwise. The contemporary approach to international affairs too often assumes, either explicitly or implicitly, that the correctness of one’s views from a moral or ethical perspective precludes the need to engage with the more distasteful and fundamental question of relative power with respect to a geopolitical opponent, and specifically which party has a superior ability to inflict harm on the other.

For many, the security that we enjoy is a background fact or feature of existence so foundational that it merits no explanation. These engineers inhabit a world without trade-offs, ideological or economic.

The preconditions for a durable peace often come only from a credible threat of war.

And for nations that hold themselves to a far higher moral standard than their adversaries when it comes to the use of force, even technical parity with an enemy is insufficient. A weapons system in the hands of an ethical society, and one rightly wary of its use, will act as an effective deterrent only if it is far more powerful than the capability of an adversary who would not hesitate to kill the innocent.

“there are no rules without someone to enforce them.”

The appeal of pacifism is that it satisfies our instinctive empathy for the powerless.

The allure of pacifism, and a potential retreat from deterrence, is that it relieves us of the need to navigate among the difficult and imperfect trade-offs that the world presents.

“To defend myself, I must restrain power with freedom, even if the temporary beneficiaries are the enemies of freedom,”

His wife reportedly asked Nixon, affecting a certain naïveté, faux or otherwise, “Why do you have to tell people how little we have and how much we owe?” Her husband replied that politicians were destined to “live in a goldfish bowl.” But the systematic elimination of private spaces, even for our public figures, has consequences, and ultimately further incentivizes only those given to theatrics, and who crave a stage, to run for office.

The systematic expression and investigation of one’s own beliefs—the essential purpose of genuine education—remain our best defense against the mind becoming a product or vehicle for the ambitions of another.

The broader risk for any country is that elite power structures harden and calcify.

In Baltzell’s view, an aristocracy driven by talent is an essential feature of any republic. The challenge is ensuring that such aristocracies remain open to new members and do not descend into mere caste structures, which close their ranks along racial or religious lines.

The antiseptic nature of modern discourse, dominated by an unwavering commitment to justice but deeply wary when it comes to substantive positions on the good life, is a product of our own reluctance, and indeed fear, to offend, to alienate, and to risk the disapproval of the crowd. Yet there is too much that lies “beyond justice,” in the words of Ágnes Heller, the Hungarian philosopher born in Budapest in 1929. As Heller writes, “Justice is the skeleton: the good life is the flesh and blood.”

The substantive triumph of Orientalism was its exposing to a broad audience the extent to which the telling of history, the act of summation and synthesis into narrative from disparate strands of detail and fact, was not itself a neutral, disinterested act, but rather an exercise of power in the world

Hawke’s character, Jesse, offers the familiar challenge to the traps of consumption and to materialist desire. “I just feel like I’m designed to be slightly dissatisfied with everything,” he says, wistfully. “I satisfy one desire, and it just agitates another.” Celine, played by Delpy, responds, winning the exchange: “But I feel really alive when I want something…. Wanting, whether it’s intimacy with another person or a new pair of shoes, is kind of beautiful. I like that we have those ever-renewing desires.”

The bees that Lindauer and others since have studied do not incorporate caste-based social hierarchies in order to address the enormous collective action challenges that they face, but rather distribute autonomy to as great a degree as possible to the fringes—the scouts—of their organization. The individuals at the periphery of a group, who often have the latest and most valuable information regarding the suitability of potential nesting sites, and can take into account shifting conditions, are the ones who cast their ballots by dancing for the group. The swarm organizes itself around the problem at hand.

The modern enterprise is often too quick to avoid such friction. We have today privileged a kind of ease in corporate life, a culture of agreeableness that can move institutions away, not toward, creative output. The impulse—indeed rush—to smooth over any hint of conflict within businesses and government agencies is misguided, leaving many with the misimpression that a life of ease awaits and rewarding those whose principal desire is the approval of others. As the comedian John Mulaney has said, “Likability is a jail.”

that is the seed of an engineering culture. It is essential that the engineer—whether of the mechanical world, the digital, or even perhaps the written—descend from his or her tower of theory into the morass of actual details as they exist, not as they have been theorized to be.

It is essential that the engineer—whether of the mechanical world, the digital, or even perhaps the written—descend from his or her tower of theory into the morass of actual details as they exist, not as they have been theorized to be. One must, as the American philosopher John Dewey wrote in his essay “Pragmatic America” in 1922, “get down from noble aloofness into the muddy stream of concrete things.”

As Lucian Freud, the German-born figurative painter, perhaps the most enduring of the twentieth century, put it, “I try to paint what is actually there.” The act of observation, of looking closely while suspending judgment—taking the facts in and resisting the urge to impose one’s view on them—sits at the heart of any engineering culture, including ours.

And the reconstruction of a technological republic will, among other things, require the rebuilding of an ownership society, a founder culture that came from tech but has the potential to reshape government, where nobody is entrusted with leadership who does not have a stake in their own success.

We are perhaps right to recoil at the summary abandonment of the unnamed “African mask” in favor of the white marble of the Apollo. But should we be left with no means of discerning between art that moves us forward, ideas that advance humanity’s cause, and those that do not? The risk is that our fear to pronounce, to speak, to prefer, has left us without direction and confidence when it comes to marshaling our shared resources and talents. Fear has led us to recoil and shrink our sense of the possible,

We are perhaps right to recoil at the summary abandonment of the unnamed “African mask” in favor of the white marble of the Apollo. But should we be left with no means of discerning between art that moves us forward, ideas that advance humanity’s cause, and those that do not? The risk is that our fear to pronounce, to speak, to prefer, has left us without direction and confidence when it comes to marshaling our shared resources and talents. Fear has led us to recoil and shrink our sense of the possible, and this fear has found its way into every aspect of our lives.

Silicon Valley remains one of the few places in the world where individuals of low birth, to use a phrase of the constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, can own something substantial and participate in the upside of their labor, rather than remain cogs, even

Silicon Valley remains one of the few places in the world where individuals of low birth, to use a phrase of the constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, can own something substantial and participate in the upside of their labor, rather than remain cogs, even if often highly paid cogs, in the ventures of another.

Silicon Valley remains one of the few places in the world where individuals of low birth, to use a phrase of the constitutional law scholar Akhil Reed Amar, can own something substantial and participate in the upside of their labor, rather than remain cogs, even if often highly paid cogs, in the ventures of another. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, a talented graduate could perhaps join Goldman Sachs, which was a pioneer of partnership compensation models, or perhaps a white-shoe law firm, where attorneys shared the profits, and risk, of their work. But those experiments have essentially withered; such firms still attract talented and ambitious minds, but they are paid salaries, often high ones, but salaries nonetheless. The upside of the endeavors and creative energy of labor is captured by the capitalists.

The entrepreneurs of Silicon Valley do not lack idealism; indeed, they often appear to be brimming with it. But it is thin and can wither under even the slightest scrutiny. The legions of young founders have for decades now routinely claimed that they aspire to change the world. Yet such claims have grown meaningless from overuse. This cloak of idealism was put on in order to relieve these young founders of the need to develop anything approaching a more substantial worldview. And the nation-state itself, the most effective means of collective organization in pursuit of a shared purpose that the world has ever known, was cast aside as an obstacle to progress.

For Strauss, the contemporary social scientist had rejected values in favor of a search for truth and convinced himself that such a distinction was possible. But it was this “indifference to any goal, or of aimlessness and drifting,” as Strauss put it, that is the seed of our current nihilism as a culture.

Although it is best when people have considerable knowledge and experience using a particular product—knowledge in the head— the designer can put sufficient cues into the design—knowledge in the world—that good performance results even in the absence of previous knowledge.

Knowledge how—what psychologists call procedural knowledge—is the knowledge that enables a person to be a skilled musician, to return a serve in tennis, or to move the tongue properly when saying the phrase “frightening witches.”

Knowledge of—what psychologists call declarative knowledge—includes the knowledge of facts and rules.

Experts minimize the need for conscious reasoning. Philosopher and mathematician Alfred North Whitehead stated this principle over a century ago:           It is a profoundly erroneous truism, repeated by all copy-books and by eminent people when they are making speeches, that we should cultivate the habit of thinking of what we are doing. The precise opposite is the case. Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking about them. (Alfred North Whitehead, 1911.)

As we move away from many physical aids, such as printed books and magazines, paper notes, and calendars, much of what we use today as knowledge in the world will become invisible. Yes, it will all be available on display screens, but unless the screens always show this material, we will have added to the burden of memory in the head. We may not have to remember all the details of the information stored away for us, but we will have to remember that it is there, that it needs to be redisplayed at the appropriate time for use or for reminding.

The sociologist Erving Goffman calls the social constraints on acceptable behavior “frames,” and he shows how they govern behavior even when a person is in a novel situation or novel culture. Danger awaits those who deliberately violate the frames of a culture.

Standards simplify life for everyone. At the same time, they tend to hinder future development. And, as discussed in Chapter 6, there are often difficult political struggles in finding common agreement. Nonetheless, when all else fails, standards are the way to proceed.

Bath and kitchen faucet design ought to be simple, but can violate many design principles, including:        •  Visible affordances and signifiers        •  Discoverability        •  Immediacy of feedback Finally, many violate the principle of desperation:        •  If all else fails, standardize. Standardization is indeed the fundamental principle of desperation: when no other solution appears possible, simply design everything the same way, so people only have to learn once.

Put the knowledge required to operate the technology in the world. Don’t require that all the knowledge must be in the head. Allow for efficient operation when people have learned all the requirements, when they are experts who can perform without the knowledge in the world, but make it possible for non-experts to use the knowledge in the world. This will also help experts who need to perform a rare, infrequently performed operation or return to the technology after a prolonged absence.

Engineers and businesspeople are trained to solve problems. Designers are trained to discover the real problems. A brilliant solution to the wrong problem can be worse than no solution at all: solve the correct problem.

The power of the unaided mind is highly overrated. Without external aids, deep, sustained reasoning is difficult. Unaided memory, thought, and reasoning are all limited in power. Human intelligence is highly flexible and adaptive, superb at inventing procedures and objects that overcome its own limits. The real powers come from devising external aids that enhance cognitive abilities.

I dream of the power of individuals, whether alone or in small groups, to unleash their creative spirits, their imagination, and their talents to develop a wide range of innovation. New technologies promise to make this possible. Now, for the first time in history, individuals can share their ideas, their thoughts and dreams. They can produce their own products, their own services, and make these available to anyone in the world. All can be their own master, exercising whatever special talents and interests they may have. What drives this dream? The rise of small, efficient tools that empower individuals.

I dream of a renaissance of talent, where people are empowered to create, to use their skills and talents. Some may wish for the safety and security of working for organizations. Some may wish to start new enterprises. Some may do this as hobbies. Some may band together into small groups and cooperatives, the better to assemble the variety of skills required by modern technology, to help share their knowledge, to teach one another, and to assemble the critical mass that will always be needed, even for small projects. Some may hire themselves out to provide the necessary skills required of large projects, while still keeping their own freedom and authority.

empty colors dance and ignored their content. Mentally, he was holding up his problem, turning it one way and then the other, not even looking for an answer. It was a simple mental exercise. Look at the facts without judgment: Havelock was an Earther. Havelock was in a portside bar again and looking for a fight. Havelock was his partner. Statement after statement, fact after fact, facet after facet. He didn’t try to put them in order or make some kind of narrative out of them; that would all come later. Now it was enough to wash the day’s cases out of his head and get ready for the immediate situation. By the time the tube reached his station, he felt centered. Like he was walking on his whole foot, was how he’d described it, back when he had anyone to describe it to.

The beautiful thing about losing your illusions, he thought, was that you got to stop pretending. All the years he’d told himself that he was respected, that he was good at his job, that all his sacrifices had been made for a reason fell away and left him with the clear, unmuddied knowledge that he was a functional alcoholic who had pared away everything good in his own life to make room for anesthetic. Shaddid thought he was a joke. Muss thought he was the price she paid not to sleep with someone she didn’t like. The only one who might have any respect for him at all was Havelock, an Earther. It was peaceful, in its way. He could stop making the effort to keep up appearances. If he stayed in bed listening to the alarm drone, he was just living up to expectations. No shame in that.

Posthuman. It was a word that came up in the media every five or six years, and it meant different things every time. Neural regrowth hormone? Posthuman. Sex robots with inbuilt pseudo intelligence? Posthuman. Self-optimizing network routing? Posthuman. It was a word from advertising copy, breathless and empty, and all he’d ever thought it really meant was that the people using it had a limited imagination about what exactly humans were capable of.

Maybe Miller had gotten it wrong from the start, and the divide between the Belt and the inner planets was something besides politics and resource management. He knew as well as anyone that the Belt offered a harder, more dangerous life than Mars or Earth provided. And yet it called these people—the best people—out of humanity’s gravity wells to cast themselves into the darkness. The impulse to explore, to stretch, to leave home. To go as far as possible out into the universe

Mars would survive, for a while. Pockets of the Belt would hold out even longer, probably. They had a culture of making do, surviving on scraps, living on the bleeding edge of their resources. But in the end, without Earth, everything would eventually die. Humans had been out of the gravity well a long time. Long enough to have developed the technology to cut that umbilical cord, but they’d just never bothered to do it. Stagnant. Humanity, for all its desire to fling itself into every livable pocket it could reach, had become stagnant. Satisfied to fly around in ships built half a century before, using technology that hadn’t changed in longer than that.

“I’m afraid,” she said. “Don’t be,” he said. “I don’t know what’s going to happen,” she said. “No one ever does. And, look, you don’t have to do this alone,” he said.

“And you’ll tell them about him, right?” Holden said. “Miller. He deserves the credit.” “The Belter who went back into Eros of his own free will in order to save Earth? You’re damn right I’m going to tell them about him.” “Not ‘the Belter.’ Him. Josephus Aloisus Miller.” Holden had stopped eating the free strawberries. Fred crossed his arms. “You’ve been reading up,” Fred said. “Yeah. Well. I didn’t know him all that well.” “Neither did anybody else,” Fred said, and then softened a little. “I know it’s hard, but we don’t need a real man with a complex life. We need a symbol of the Belt. An icon.” “Sir,” the secretary said. “We really do need to go now.” “That’s what got us here,” Holden said. “Icons. Symbols. People without names. All of those Protogen scientists were thinking about biomass and populations. Not Mary who worked in supply and raised flowers in her spare time. None of them killed her.”

PHILOSOPHER: Here, it would do well to recall that quote from Erich Fromm: ‘Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is.’ Without negating anything, or forcing anything, one accepts and values the person as he is. In other words, one protects, and one has concern for, another person’s dignity. Do you see where that concrete first step lies? YOUTH: No. Where? PHILOSOPHER: This is a quite logical conclusion. It lies in having concern for other people’s concerns. YOUTH: Other people’s concerns? PHILOSOPHER: For example, the children enjoy playing in a way that is completely beyond your understanding. They get absorbed with utterly inane, childish toys. Sometimes, they read books that are offensive to public order and morals and indulge in video games. You know what I am referring to, yes? YOUTH: Sure. I see such things almost every day. PHILOSOPHER: There are many parents and educators who disapprove and try to give them things that are more ‘useful’ or ‘worthwhile’. They advise against such activities, confiscate the books and toys and allow the children only what has been determined to have value. The parent does this ‘for the child’s sake’, of course. Even so, one must regard this as an act that is completely lacking in respect and that only increases the parent’s distance from the child. Because it is negating the child’s natural concerns.

PHILOSOPHER: When you look at your speech and conduct, and at other people’s speech and conduct, think about the goals that are hidden in them. This is a basic way of thinking in Adlerian psychology. YOUTH: I know—it’s ‘teleology’, right? PHILOSOPHER: Would you give a simple explanation of it? YOUTH: I will try. Regardless of what may have occurred in the past, nothing is determined by it. It does not matter if there are past traumas, either. Because human beings are not driven by past ‘causes’ but live according to present ‘goals’. Suppose, for example, the person who says, ‘My home environment was bad and that’s why I have a dark personality.’ This is a life lie. The truth is that person first has the goal of ‘I don’t want to get hurt by getting involved with other people,’ and in order to realise that goal, they choose a ‘dark personality’ that doesn’t get involved with anyone. Then, as an excuse for having themselves chosen such a personality, they bring up their past home environment. It’s something like that, right? PHILOSOPHER: Yes. Please continue. YOUTH: In other words, we are not creatures who are determined by past events. Rather, we determine our own lives according to the meaning we give to those events. PHILOSOPHER: That’s right. YOUTH: And then, you said something like this: no matter what has occurred in your life until now, it has no bearing at all on how you live your life from now on. And that you, living here and now, are the one who decides your own life. So, did I get anything wrong?

of happiness is the feeling of contribution.

PHILOSOPHER: An educator is a lonely creature. One’s students all finish school under their own power, and one isn’t praised or appreciated for one’s efforts. One does it without receiving gratitude. YOUTH: So one accepts that loneliness? PHILOSOPHER: Yes. Rather than expecting gratitude from the students, one has the feeling of contribution that one has been able to contribute to the grand objective of self-reliance. One finds happiness in the feeling of contribution. That is the only way.

PHILOSOPHER: All right. Suppose a child asks, ‘Can I go and play at my friend’s place?’ There are parents who will grant permission, ‘Of course you can,’ and then set the condition, ‘Once you’ve done your homework.’ And there are others who will simply prohibit their children from going out to play. Both are forms of conduct that put the child in a position of dependence and irresponsibility. Instead, teach the child by saying, ‘That is something you can decide on your own.’ Teach that one’s own life and one’s everyday actions are things that one determines oneself. And if deciding things requires certain ingredients—knowledge and experience, for example—then provide them. That is how educators should be.

PHILOSOPHER: To Adler, the meaning of engaging in work was simple. Work is a means of production for staying alive in our Earth’s harsh natural environments. That is to say, he thought of work as a task quite directly linked to survival. YOUTH: Hmm. Well, that’s rather banal. It’s just, ‘Work so that you can eat?’ PHILOSOPHER: Yes. When we think of surviving, of eking out a living, the fact that we humans must engage in some kind of labour is a self-evident truth.

PHILOSOPHER: Yes. Human beings do not have the choice of not believing in each other. It would be impossible for us to not cooperate and not divide up the labour. A relationship, not of cooperating because one likes that person, but of having to cooperate whether one likes it or not. You can think of it that way. YOUTH: Fascinating! No, I mean it, this is wonderful! I’m finally getting the work relationship. Division of labour is necessary for living, and mutual trust is necessary in order to carry it out. And there is no alternative. We cannot live alone, and not trusting is not an option. We have no choice but to build relationships … That’s how it is, right? PHILOSOPHER: Yes. It truly is a life task.

“Where in the annals of Western philosophy could we find a sharper antithesis to [the] restriction of ethical inquiry to a carefully selected, rigorously trained elite than in the Socrates of Plato’s earlier dialogues?”13 That’s the right way to think about Socrates; for apart from whatever specific teachings may be attributed to him, he himself was an egalitarian character—poor, ugly, and happy to talk about the most important questions with anyone at all.

Using the Socratic method yourself isn’t easier than using it in conversation. In fact it’s a good deal harder. The defects in someone else’s views are no trouble to spot. Seeing them in your own is a much tougher challenge. It is like exercise. It’s easier with a trainer, but possible to do well without one. And Socratic questioning is like physical exercise in an additional sense: it’s good for you, but doesn’t feel good when you’re doing it; in fact it’s often good for you just to the extent that it’s uncomfortable. That is why nothing is more common than intellectual obesity.

A PHILOSOPHY is often thought to mean a system of ideas that provides answers to fundamental questions. Socratic philosophy is different. It is a commitment to a process rather than to a result.

The Socratic method departs from other styles of teaching and thought, first, in this simple way: the practitioner does not lecture, does not explain, does not scold, and does not tell. The practitioner asks.

The posture of Plato as an author is of a piece with the posture of Socrates as a character. Plato never comes out and says what he thinks. He hides behind his characters and lets the reader wonder. He creates a hero who likewise states no answers but provokes people to think harder and reconsider what they believe and how they live. The implied point: we’re at our keenest when we work on a question, not after it’s answered. On every level the dialogues help us into that state and hold us there.

The practitioner of the Socratic method thinks in questions, is at home with uncertainty, and knows how to value a search that doesn’t end.

A question puts pressure on whoever receives it. If you ask questions of yourself, you are the recipient of the pressure. That’s good. Stating an opinion is roughly the opposite. It releases pressure. Pressure is uncomfortable, so most people think and talk in opinions. But the unpressured mind tends toward laxity and corruption.

Small questions also are good because they slow everything down. This matters in part just because the truth tends to be complicated. Complexity can’t be seen in a hurry. Really understanding an argument—why someone would think this or that, and whether it holds up—is like taking apart a machine and putting it back together. You have to keep track of all the little screws.

Some people (perhaps all of us sometimes) approach ideas like tourists in a museum who think they have seen all the art it contains because they have laid eyes on all the paintings. But you have to visit with a good painting at length, and more than once, and above all without hurrying, to really see what it is and what it means. Socrates looks at an idea in the way that a connoisseur looks at paintings, and he asks the listener or reader to do the same.

Socrates particularly likes to question beliefs that his discussion partners take for granted. This shows another good reason to want an adversary within your thinking. It breaks your sense of identification with the views you hold. We all have false beliefs about the world or ourselves—views that wouldn’t withstand Socratic scrutiny and don’t usually get it. They’re half-conscious ideas that we take for granted and that are kept out of view. Socratic questioning takes off the camouflage. A belief that had seemed too obvious or sacred to get grilled is put on the stand. For as long as the questioning lasts, the belief isn’t so much a part of you. It had been talking through you; now you are talking to it. Adversarial thinking separates us from our prejudices and expectations.

Notice that Socrates uses questions to get the agreement of his partner at every step. Didn’t you say this, and don’t you also think that—and don’t they conflict? This matters because it means, when the final result arrives, that Laches has contradicted himself rather than being contradicted by Socrates. He has full ownership of the problem.

Cumulative consistency is more than reassuring. It leads to enlargement of your knowledge and confidence in it; it snowballs. In this way the elenchus helps along the formation of the self. It causes you to figure out what your moral conscience is made of. There is a conflict in your views; you have to decide which to keep and which to drop. It is like an inner tournament with winning and losing ideas. You understand yourself better after many rounds of it.17 The Socratic method thus helps toward fulfillment of the instruction inscribed over the entrance to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi: know thyself.18 This theory also explains how Socrates can claim that he doesn’t know anything and yet still have beliefs about hard questions—that doing wrong is worse than suffering it, or whatever else. Those beliefs aren’t quite things he knows. They just seem true to him because they’ve survived all testing so far. An argument, or an adversary, might still appear and be sharp enough to show that the claims Socrates makes don’t hold together in some way. So if consistency is the test of truth, it never settles a question once and for all. It forces you to hold views provisionally, and to always be in a state of search for more confirmation or refutation.

Callicles says it’s good if you manage to do a wrong without getting caught. Socrates gets him to agree to some other points that end up conflicting with that one, then gives this warning if Callicles can’t find a way out of the argument put in front of him: SOCRATES. If you leave it unrefuted, then I swear to you by the divine dog of the Egyptians that it’ll cause friction between you and Callicles, Callicles; there’ll be discord within you your whole life. And yet, my friend, in my opinion it’s preferable for me to be a musician with an out-of-tune lyre or a choir leader with a cacophonous choir, and it’s preferable for almost everyone in the world to find my beliefs misguided and wrong, rather than for just one person—me—to contradict and clash with myself. Gorgias 482bc This is stronger language than most of us would now use to talk about being inconsistent. It follows from the distinct way that Socrates thinks about living well. When people believe two things that can’t both be right, they’re half-asleep or half-mad. They don’t actually think anything in particular. They just imagine that they do. They lack knowledge of who they are, and so are ridiculous without realizing it.

The threat posed to the self by inconsistency should not be viewed as an obscure philosophical problem. For many people it is immediate and pressing. They live their lives in ways that are inconsistent—out of harmony, as it were—with their deeper beliefs, whatever those might be. They come to feel lost, stuck, or otherwise miserable. They wonder why. Socrates would regard those results as natural and easy to understand.

That argument might not seem impressive now, but it displays one type of response to an inconsistency: it may be explained on terms not yet fully worked out. This prospect can sometimes make it rational to persist for a while in holding two beliefs that seem to conflict, especially when the belief under challenge has the sanction of long and seemingly successful usage. How Mill put it: The majority of mankind would need to be much better cultivated than has ever yet been the case, before they can be asked to place such reliance in their own power of estimating arguments, as to give up practical principles in which they have been born and bred and which are the basis of much of the existing order of the world, at the first argumentative attack which they are not capable of logically resisting.3

The remarkable point about consistency is the power of it as a value or goal. When that value is hooked up to the mechanism of Socratic questioning, it doesn’t just annihilate. It can also be productive. It destroys a bad idea but can help confirm a sound one. It can tear down a way of life and then generate one that is better. And it is relevant to every little choice we make, not just to the big ones. The search for consistency thus makes the Socratic method useful in all sorts of situations, not just the kind we usually associate with moral philosophy.

Most of us deal with most questions without paying any attention to philosophy, at least consciously, and we don’t feel its absence. That is because it is so easy to think of philosophical questions as the kind most people can do without in their ordinary lives. A lot of academic work now described as philosophy does fit that description. But on a Socratic view, philosophy is relevant to just about everything, high and low. It isn’t a set of problems that some care about and some don’t. Philosophy means thinking carefully about whether you believe all that you say and whether it’s true. It is the effort to stay awake.

Candor. Another rule of Socratic dialogue: say what you think, not what others want to hear.17 It is a practice he claims for himself.

The one-witness rule keeps them from treating anyone else as a source of authority.22 And it’s a reminder that sound reasoning and popular reasoning are utterly different things.

Offense isn’t only a problem when it’s given and taken in fact. The risk of offense is a problem in advance because it makes people dishonest. When they are worried about the other side taking offense, they don’t say what they really think, and progress toward the truth is over. Everyone pretends to agree more than they do. That’s a common problem now, as it was then. Pushing past that fear is part of the Socratic method. It takes courage, and a commitment on both sides not to treat the dispute as personal no matter where the ideas may go.

The midwife comparison suggests a way to listen to someone else. But its more likely use, as with most of what Socrates offers, is internal. Think of it as a posture of mind when you’re looking at an idea or a hard question. You want to see the idea in full and at its best before you criticize it.

ALCIBIADES. I solemnly declare, Socrates, that I do not know what I am saying. Verily, I am in a strange state, for when you put questions to me I am of different minds in successive instants. SOCRATES. And are you not aware of the nature of this perplexity, my friend? ALCIBIADES. Indeed I am not. SOCRATES. Do you suppose that if some one were to ask you whether you have two eyes or three, or two hands or four, or anything of that sort, you would then be of different minds in successive instants? ALCIBIADES. I begin to distrust myself, but still I do not suppose that I should. SOCRATES. You would feel no doubt; and for this reason—because you would know? ALCIBIADES. I suppose so.… SOCRATES. Ask yourself; are you in any perplexity about things of which you are ignorant? You know, for example, that you know nothing about the preparation of food. ALCIBIADES. Very true. SOCRATES. And do you think and perplex yourself about the preparation of food: or do you leave that to some one who understands the art? ALCIBIADES. The latter. SOCRATES. Or if you were on a voyage, would you bewilder yourself by considering whether the rudder is to be drawn inwards or outwards, or do you leave that to the pilot, and do nothing? ALCIBIADES. It would be the concern of the pilot. SOCRATES. Then you are not perplexed about what you do not know, if you know that you do not know it? ALCIBIADES. I imagine not. SOCRATES. Do you not see, then, that mistakes in life and practice are likewise to be attributed to the ignorance which has conceit of knowledge? First Alcibiades 116e–17d

Aporetic truths. A more radical view of aporia regards it as sometimes inspiring speechlessness because you have arrived at a truth that can’t be spoken. The idea goes: there are unspeakable truths—that is, truths that defy language, and so can be called ineffable.5 Perhaps they are verbal analogues of irrational numbers. But they sometimes can be perceived without words. It may be that justice, for example, can’t be captured by a definition. But it can be encircled by the close failure of many efforts at definition. Instead of that result seeming to be a mess and therefore a failure, the mess is the thing sought. The goal of the effort at reasoning isn’t a conclusion based on the reasoning but a grasp of something larger. We learn that the truth isn’t coextensive with our ability to talk about it or with our powers of comprehension.

The value of understanding is the same whether we’re gaining it or losing it. So our attachment to whatever wisdom we have should generate an equivalent appetite for more. Put differently, your understanding is currently in a state that you would, with some progress, regard with horror. Best, then, to make haste now.

Socratic philosophy treats eudaimonia as its final goal. That word will be translated here as happiness, which is most common.1 Some say eudaimonia is better translated as well-being, or as living well. The issue arises because in English it’s natural to think of happiness as a subjective state: it means feeling good. But eudaimonia has an objective aspect. It implies a judgment from the outside that someone is doing well. It means a good life, not just a good mood; a good life is one to which felt happiness is the right response. People can enjoy themselves in despicable ways and so not be described as happy in this Greek sense even if they seem to be having a good time. The opposite of happy, on this view, wouldn’t be gloomy or depressed; it would be a word like wretched or pitiable. This way of thinking about happiness sometimes takes adjustment now (and the adjustment is useful), but it seemed ordinary in ancient times. Socrates treats the achievement of happiness, in the sense just described, as the purpose of life. Everybody wants to live well; if a philosophy leads to that result, nothing more need be said in defense of it.

Our experience of such moments makes knowledge and virtue seem to be very different things. But Socrates thought otherwise. The rest of the world are of opinion … that a man may have knowledge, and yet that the knowledge which is in him may be overmastered by anger, or pleasure, or pain, or love, or perhaps by fear,—just as if knowledge were a slave, and might be dragged about anyhow. Now is that your view? or do you think that knowledge is a noble and commanding thing, which cannot be overcome, and will not allow a man, if he only knows the difference of good and evil, to do anything which is contrary to knowledge, but that wisdom will have strength to help him? Protagoras 352bc Socrates evidently takes the latter view: if you seem to have a failure of will, it’s really a failure of knowledge. There is no such thing as akrasia.

In general when the brave feel fear, there is not disgrace in their fears, nor in their confidence when they are confident? True.… Cowards on the other hand, and likewise the rash and the mad, feel fears or cowardice which are discreditable, and can they exhibit discreditable fear or confidence from any other cause than ignorance? No.… Ignorance of what is and is not to be feared must be cowardice. [Protagoras] nodded. Well, courage is the opposite of cowardice. He agreed. And knowledge of what is and is not to be feared is the opposite of ignorance of these things. He nodded again. Which is cowardice. Here he assented with great reluctance. Therefore knowledge of what is and is not to be feared is courage. Protagoras 360bd

There is a sense among parents that kids should have limits set on things they want, because they want it and regardless of what that thing is. I call this sense that it is wrong for a child to satisfy their wants the Greedy Child Fallacy.

Those who worry about the algorithms used by today’s tech companies need to tell us how their algorithms are fundamentally different from all of these prior advances in persuasion. Tech’s critics like to say it’s the sheer number of users, or the precision of the fine-tuning, or that it’s embedded in our devices, or that the algorithms are designed from psychological research. But the question remains: At what point do any of these features suddenly take control of our minds and actions?

Boredom is bad for the same reasons pain is bad. Both indicate suffering. Both indicate a problem that needs solving. And neither is a virtue in its own right. We wouldn’t arbitrarily expose a child to pain with the argument that pain is an inevitable part of life that they need to “learn to deal with.” Such cruelty teaches children that, not only are we indifferent to their suffering, but they should accept their suffering as well. Instead, when a child comes to us in pain, we always investigate why, partly for our own peace of mind, but also to give the child context to understand the pain. When we ourselves understand that the injury is minor, we explain to the child that it will heal, and this understanding is soothing. And of course we take a few steps to mitigate the pain and prevent it from happening again. We should apply the same basic process for all suffering, including boredom. All suffering is caused by some form of ignorance, and it can be mitigated and outright prevented by some form of knowledge. All of parenting can be summarized as supplying the child with the knowledge to reduce their own suffering.

Rules and limits are often enforced to “make kids understand” certain hard truths about the world, such as that you can’t always get what you want, or that life isn’t fair. In reality, rule enforcement can’t teach about the world. As we’ve already seen, the enforcement of rules and limitations diverts the focus away from the problem itself and toward the parent and whatever contrived consequences the parent is willing to impose. Rules are confusing.

The goal is for children to be free of limitations set upon them by external “authorities” of knowledge. But that’s not to say we pretend they are totally free from constraints. We want them to operate within the constraints of the natural world. Indeed, they have no choice but to accept gravity and the hardness of concrete. And we want them to operate within some of the constraints of the interpersonal world. Specifically, there are two kinds of good interpersonal constraints: Other people’s boundaries. We don’t want kids to think they can demand anything they want from others. Constraints that they accept voluntarily, such as the rules of a game or conventions of politeness. In general, we want kids to understand the natural world, to respect other people’s boundaries, and to accept the interpersonal constraints they understand, and reject those that they don’t.

The real question for parents transitioning to no rules is not if, but when. Is a sudden change at eighteen years old really a good idea? It’s relatively common for even the most seemingly well-adjusted college freshman to fall apart in some way, drop out, and think themselves to have started real life as a failure, saddled with debt and disappointment. Relative to this dramatic phase change that we all take for granted, is it so radical to wean a child off of rules completely prior to leaving the home?

Human knowledge growth is likewise the story of solving an endless sequence of problems through a process of variation and selection. But with human knowledge, the problems are not limited to survival—they can be about anything, either in the real world or imagined. And instead of mutation, the engine of variation is conjecture, or creative guesswork. Selection consists of, first, criticizing all of our candidate guesses and, second, choosing only the guess that seems to work best. Often, this involves actually trying out the guess in the real world to see if it solves the problem in question.

Taking Children Seriously is simply the recognition that, in the realm of parenting, the source of knowledge does not determine its validity, that knowledge does not require authoritarian justification. On the contrary, knowledge creation is an entirely egalitarian enterprise—anyone’s conjecture might solve the problem at hand, anyone’s criticism might be reason to choose one path over another. Kids’ ideas are just as valid as adults’, and they should be taken seriously and accounted for in any solution to any conflict.

The bucket theory of knowledge isn’t just partially wrong, it is completely wrong. All new knowledge comes from within and none from without. Knowledge is always created, never consumed. Therefore, creativity is central to all understanding.

influential than features like gravity or mass. Our ability to cause any physically possible transformation means that we can impact anything and everything we care about for the better, from home life to the subcultures to which we belong to how we organize society. It’s not wishful thinking to say that our choices and values must account for the existence of people more so than any other living thing. For instance, if we develop moon colonies, we can easily keep dolphins out of it. But there is no way to keep the actions of earthbound people out of it. A single person down on earth could develop any number of things that affect the moon colony, such as a new political theory, or a new technology, or a new form of entertainment. If you care about something, you must also care about people, because people will think up things that could come to affect it. Knowledge creators have consequences for the entire universe, and that gives us cosmic significance. Since children are fully capable of creating knowledge, they are full-status people who are just as cosmically significant as adults.

Our ability to cause any physically possible transformation means that we can impact anything and everything we care about for the better, from home life to the subcultures to which we belong to how we organize society. It’s not wishful thinking to say that our choices and values must account for the existence of people more so than any other living thing. For instance, if we develop moon colonies, we can easily keep dolphins out of it. But there is no way to keep the actions of earthbound people out of it. A single person down on earth could develop any number of things that affect the moon colony, such as a new political theory, or a new technology, or a new form of entertainment. If you care about something, you must also care about people, because people will think up things that could come to affect it. Knowledge creators have consequences for the entire universe, and that gives us cosmic significance. Since children are fully capable of creating knowledge, they are full-status people who are just as cosmically significant as adults.

Despite our ancestors’ pervasive efforts to stifle innovation, ancient people eventually formed cities, achieved technological successes, and established institutions such as mature religions, nation-states, and sophisticated traditions of language and art. But even then, the dominant mode of knowledge transfer focused on preservation and stasis rather than improvement and dynamism. Early civilizations thought that all knowledge came from the past, a fixed quantity that could only decay over generations if the people weren’t too careful. The present time was always considered a Fallen Age.

If, on the other hand, children get a taste of true freedom from the beginning, if they get enjoyment out of solving their own problems in their own way and orient themselves toward interests that don’t conform with the majority, then this will need to be driven (often beaten) out of them. This may explain why many adults are so quick to crack down on things that kids find particularly enjoyable. Having an outsized amount of fun almost universally signals a straying from the static norms. Conformity is almost never wildly fun. This is especially true when the source of enjoyment is new, such as a novel form of food, technology, or media. A simple rule of stasis is to be watchful and stamp out excessive enjoyment among children.

There is no reason a voluntary apprentice model can’t be restored and updated for the modern world. Education could focus on real-world training around genuine interests in a way that is guided by providing value to others. College graduates, on the other hand, often enter adulthood hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt. This debt forces them to narrow their options to uninspiring jobs rather than taking risks on starting new ventures that might solve problems in novel ways and raise the prosperity of everyone. Instead, college graduates are incentivized to play it safe, to never experiment, and to accept a middling quality of life. This overall outlook—a life of low expectations, where the main virtues are persistence and conformity rather than dynamism—gets passed onto their children as a tragic holdover from the static societies of yesteryear.