If life feels like a zero-sum race to the bottom, that's because it is

But there's a joyful lining to such a truth. Chapter 10 in this collapse book series explains...(and this crazy project starts to get some momentum!)

As I flagged in the Metacrisis chapter and from the outset of this book serialisation (in the Collapse chapter), I think it’s important that we get some kind of material or theoretical understanding of what the hell is going on around us so that we can then start to imagine, embody and role-model a “new normal”, or “post-normal” is perhaps the better wording.

To remind everyone, as I wrote in the Collapse chapter:

“For those of us feeling the dissonance, whose souls know the centre can no longer hold, who are losing friends and feeling awkward at barbeques, we absolutely need to understand what’s happening. We need the framing. We need to find our coordinates to see where our agency, our beingness, our humanity fits in.”

And…

“We need to really play around with this surreal ‘certainty that something here makes sense’ as, Vaclav Havel wrote.”

So this chapter will outline one more framing crucial to making sense of our predicament. We will then use this framing, and the others we’ve covered in the pulsing fashion I refer to, to answer a question that comes up repeatedly here (which will be in tomorrow’s post - I’ve had to divide things in two because she’s a long’un.)

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You’re new here? You can start at the beginning and navigate around using this Table of Contents if you like. The audio version is at the bottom, available only to paid subscribers. Ditto the conversation in the comments section where we workshop things together in real time.

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MOLOCH

“Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks!

Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!

Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!…

Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!”

- Allen Ginsberg, Howl

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I have another paradoxical, mind-warping framing that I have found very useful on this journey. When I got my head around it, the heavy bricks of information tumbling frantically from the sky slotted into a Tetris-esque order in my head. And, oddly, I found myself experiencing a profound joy. Or maybe I’d even call it fun.

It’s the game theory concept of “moloch”, named after a God in the Hebrew Bible who rewarded child sacrifice with a war victory¹.

Indeed, moloch is an invisible “force” that arises in competitive scenarios that sees us give away or destroy what we hold dear in exchange for a short-term gain that, ultimately, leaves us all categorically fucked.

A benign example: You’re at a concert. Someone in the front row decides to sacrifice their comfort and stand up to get a better view. This, of course, forces everyone behind them to also stand up. Soon enough the room is standing, competing to get a better view. The upshot? Everyone has to stand for the entire concert. Everyone loses.

Moloch explains why and how we just can’t stop doing insane, zero-sum, self-destructive things that wind us all up in a horrible race to the bottom. It’s (perfectly, absolutely, tragically) because… We. Just. Can’t. In a competition system - which is what our civilisation has become - moloch emerges, mostly without our noticing, and becomes a force greater than our individual or collective will.

In gaming parlance, it forces our hand.

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Another example of moloch is the way parents sacrifice the wellbeing of the family unit to work ridiculously long hours in jobs (perhaps second and third jobs) they hate so that they can send their kids to the fancy private school. They say they’re doing it so that their kids can “get ahead”². As more parents do this, of course, the good-enough local public school suffers - its funding is squeezed, the best teachers leave, talented students have to migrate and so on. No parent wants their kid to be the only one left at the (now) sub-standard public school, and so everyone is drawn into the crazy, Jones-chasing race to the bottom.

From a god’s eye view, if all the parents agreed to just stop and perhaps put their time and care into making the local public school great, then everyone would win. Every kid would be “getting ahead”, they would not be travelling an hour on the bus each day to the fancy school, they would not be fed elitist ideals (required to justify exorbitant private school fees), and they would have more time with their (better adjusted) parents.

But, alas… moloch.

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The nuclear arms race, which saw the world compete to produce technology that could wipe us all out, is peak moloch. By 1985 the US and the USSR had produced 63,000 weapons - enough to flatten every major city on Earth and plunge the rest of us into a nuclear winter. Of course, neither country could actually use the weapons because the destruction would be mutual, wouldn’t it. But this grim stand-off we still find ourselves in, expended trillions of dollars and rubles and has left the world under a radioactive shadow. It’s left us all fucked.

The atomic race worked the same way. The US couldn’t stop, not if the Nazis didn’t.

Same with burning fossil fuels. No nation state is going to put up their hand to go first in materially committing to the Paris Agreement they signed. Not if no one else does.

Staying glued to social media when we really do know it's feeding a chaos-making beast is also moloch at play.

Ditto using beauty filters on Instagram when we know it's creating impossible aesthetic ideals.

You get the picture?

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Once the competition is entered, no one can stop because stopping sees you lose. But not stopping sees us all lose. 

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A lot of commentators and collapse aware types can get stumped by, or fully doom-dog in the face of, moloch. If it’s all so inevitable, and if no one can stand up to the invisible force of it, what can be done? Do we just give in to the game?

When I first encountered the theory, I was seduced by the beautifully neat explainer it provided for what was going on around me. Soon, though, I experienced a doom-dog turn, and, for the first time on this journey, felt a desperate helplessness. I fought it (the helplessness). I dug deeper (I feel a responsibility to; you too?). And I came across the work of former world poker champion and game theorist Liv Boeree.