The Upheaval
A meditation on hubris.
We are living in a moment of great upheaval. And I might suggest to my former friends in Silicon Valley that their historical legacies are very much in question.
I don’t think people are psychologically prepared for what’s coming. And by that, I don’t just mean the average person trying to navigate their daily life under increasingly authoritarian conditions.
I mean the comfortable elite.
But look at you. You’re standing at the edge of existence itself. Perhaps you think that’s rhetorical flourish. It’s not. It’s literally true. You are balancing atop the most delicate alignment of forces—forces that physicists have mapped, that we’ve used our cognitive gifts to understand. These forces don’t just act upon us. They aren’t just what make us up. We are these forces. Your consciousness dances precariously at the top of them, on a small rocky planet orbiting a star. It’s preposterous that we are here. Yet here we are.
And in this preposterous existence that we share, on this unlikely planet, you’ve built for yourselves an even more precarious thing: a bubble of comfort so complete, so insulated, that you’ve forgotten you’re standing on anything at all. You think your wealth is solid ground. You think your influence is permanent. You think the systems that elevated you will continue elevating you indefinitely, that the moral narratives that justified your accumulation will continue justifying it, that history—if you think about history at all—will remember you as you remember yourselves.
This is delusion at cosmic scale.
The delusion blinds you to some troubling truths. First among them, that most people see you deluded, exactly as I describe. Deluded in the notion that you are virtuous. That you should be respected. That someone would criticize you in your station, would only do so out of jealousy. That we would only do so out of envy for your empty, materialistic life.
You should be disabused of this.
We are not mad at you because of your yacht. Although it is gauche. We’re mad that you would hollow out the meaning of our existence, so that it may become a fleet.
I don’t want to take away your yacht. Although, some of my friends do. Some of my friends would be uncomfortable about such a notion. Where would such a thing end? I will say this, though: I am not your advocate. Don’t expect sermons from me on the sanctity of property. You can find whatever brand of advocate for that. The people at Reason Magazine will be on standby for that. The truth is, I don’t hate libertarians. I like a lot of them, personally. I just think them naive on the question of power.
Property. The summum bonum of right-libertarian thought.
I’ve wrestled with trying to understand why elevating this social institution into the realm of metaphysics, of ethical justification itself, is so appealing to libertarians. There seem to be several schools of thought here.
Some, like the modern robber barons, see it as convenient self-justification. A sophisticated framework that happens to conclude their accumulation is not just permissible but virtuous.
Others genuinely fear the slippery slope: if you can redistribute some property, why not all? If the state can tax, what prevents total confiscation? This fear isn’t entirely unreasonable, but it mistakes a practical question about degree for a metaphysical principle requiring absolute protection.
And still others, and this might be the most telling, insist that they exist distinct from the institutions of social life. That they are self-made. That their wealth reflects only their effort, untouched by the commons that educated them, the infrastructure that enabled them, the legal systems that protected them, the workers who built for them.
This is petulance elevated to philosophy. A need for one’s own ego to control the material world according to personal aesthetics, while denying the social foundation that made control possible.
A pile of dirt. Inanimate matter.
But you seek to animate it, dont you?
You love machines so much, that you would have everything become them.
If this sounds like moral condemnation, that’s because it is.
I don’t want to be a machine in your world. I’ve been talking to some of my fellow citizens, and I reckon they don’t want to be, either.
You’ve made them lonely. The right to participate sits behind a terms of service agreement.
They say this is better. The customer service is far better than the DMV.
And then one day you violate the terms of service. Perhaps you said something the algorithm didn’t like. Perhaps you organized something that threatened the wrong interests. Perhaps you simply became inconvenient.
And you’re gone. Deleted. Erased from the platforms where participation happens, where community exists, where economic life is increasingly conducted. No hearing. No appeal. No due process. Just the quiet, efficient execution of a contract you never actually negotiated, enforced by a party that holds all the power.
The DMV might be slow. But they can’t simply delete you for being inconvenient.
Speaking of inconvenient. I’m sure you find these words so. Both, that I would have the audicity to write them, and that people would deign to agree with them. But now I’ve done it. Uh-oh.
You’re going to regret accommodating all of this, I promise you. The people are angry. They really are.
You’re trying to work out the variables. Will Vance take over? Will he be able to consolidate control, and will our hard work of buying into his good graces give us protection from these angry humans of lower vibrations?
It’s quite the choice. If you swing at the people, you best not miss.
The hour is late.
The people grow restless.
And the long gaze of posterity watches from the future.
Tick, tock.
Go Deeper into the Circus
Sam and the Magical Money Tree
Sam pays taxes. Has for thirty years. Works hard, plays by the rules, does the right thing. Sam isn’t looking for a handout—just wants the basics to work. Roads without potholes. Schools that aren’t falling apart. Maybe a healthcare system that doesn’t bankrupt you if you get cancer.
Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British law valued property over people. That is why you could get transported to Australia for stealing a loaf of bread. Steal much more and your prospects were even more dramatic.
Self-made wealth at minimum depends on the laws not only of property but also of contract, and on their judicial enforcement. Let alone all the freebies and subsidies, like favourable tax laws.
And, of course, in the end you die, if you are lucky in a bed, after illness has diminished your power, depleted your fortune, and narrowed your horizons to the three feet on either side of your hospital bed. Whether your hospital bed is in a palace or in a windowless cubicle in a noisy ward, the view is much the same, and the prospect about as pleasing.
I personally would have appreciated greater fortune and less illness, but there are real compensations in adversity, and not just schadenfreude at the comical obtuseness of the selfish among the wealthy. Though that is um, fun too. You also get some perspective, develop your curiosity about the world, and learn more empathy for the less fortunate. And you realise that such knowledge is, in sober truth, where the treasure actually is.
While I have lived in a state where the DMV met the stereotype, it’s far from universal. In 10 years with the DMV in Virginia and 13 years in Kentucky where it’s the county clerks office that handles vehicle registration, I’ve met consistently helpful staff who put most business phone support to shame. Public servants in the truest sense.