The Age of Leverage
The common thread of human progress across the mastering of materials, the industrial revolution, the information and intelligence ages is scaling our leverage to control nature to impose our order on it. The ages in our history were just milestones that are culminating in the age of leverage, which will actualize us in homo deus.
Leverage highlights the differences in competence and consequent outcomes. This will intensify the long time struggle between individualists and collectivists. It started as the morality of the hero versus the morality of self restraint
The morality of the hero finds virtue and honor in greatness, which comes from winning conflict. It is a continuous self assertion of individual superiority driven by the imperative to excel above others. The natural hierarchy that emerges from outdoing others highlights the differences in ability.
Leverage strongly increases the ability to outdo others, especially those who do not know how to use leverage to their advantage. This is why it will create a greater gap of both ability and outcomes.
The morality of self restraint finds virtue in moral superiority, which acts as an alibi for their mediocrity and avoidance of conflict. Mediocrity is safer than talent because it implies never being better than anybody else and benefiting the collective. Surpassing others implies feeling sorry for humiliation and offense.
It lies in aversion to change and its risk. The way to be better than others is by virtue signaling moral superiority rather than competence. Which means that who is better is an offense to who is less willing and capable and one must protect them from injustice. Because they are afraid of change they prefer inertia default and static world.
It is the morality of self restraint that denigrates ambition as some greedy naive adolescent desire for anarchy. but in the end the imitating majority always follows the innovating minority. That minority emerges from the mass. They are the outliers.
If we want more outliers, by the law of large numbers, we need to have a bigger population. Which means that one of the utilities of the mass is to allow the emergence of these elite outliers. This is the minority which aggregates the majority of resources becaues they become the most capable, knowledgeable. They scale by power selection.
The morality of restraint seems to imply that aggregation is dishonest at best and brutal by default. But in fact those resources are aggregate because they were given to them. they did not steal. capitalism is a voting machine where investors, suppliers, employees and customers are the voters.
Each time they decide to invest, work and choose your products they are voting you. This is how resources are aggregated to be better employed. Because who is able to be voted for a long time must be capable and knowledgeable, so resources are better used by them for all.
The restraint team seems to forget that in meritocracy equality of opportunity does not mean equality of outcome. they also assume every game is a zero sum game, to get wealthy you must take from the poor. But they seem to not see that it is natural for the outcome distribution to not be equal, but that doesn’t mean it’s unjust. natural things that are bad to humans are attributed as injustice, the problem is the cause of such injustice, which is nature and not humans.
Looking at the capability distributions and impact distributions of a few organizations and a few people inside them follow a power law distribution. Few entities are responsible for almost all the change. this is also true of ideas, species and other life forms. aggregation is what nature rewards. Nature isjust a system, just like economics, and it doesn’t solve ideological problems of morality.
the outlier individuals generate novelty, push the boundaries of what is possible and redefine the limits for all. They lead and elevate humanity. Civilization advances only when we let builders build. When we allow them to create their own value system. This is how they can create conflict, progress and change.
In fact it is not only honorable to pursue power but also necessary. the current state of the world is the set of past and present winners in the competing world views. power allows you to express your world view.
if you think you have a good view of how it should be, then you should bet others want it too and aggregate power to make you vision compete against the others. because the people who have power will push their own agenda. So if you want to make a difference you have the moral obligation to pursue power.
Notes
[0] General note. This is not an economic treatise but a quick observation of morality and outcomes. This is why I have not mentioned that leverage increases power to do good and bad. And I am not saying that since one has the moral obligation to pursue power then any action is justified, we go back to the classic the end justifies the means, that is not what I am saying. I am not implying that the system is completely meritocratic since it is obvious that as an entity acquires power it can use that power to raise the entry bar for others, stifle competition, create lock in, and this is still without considering structural constraints some people have. But that is beyond the purpose of this short essay.