It's Moloch, dear self-flagellating souls!

A systems concept for fathoming WTF is going on in the world, which you might like to know about

Why don’t we just stop?

Why don’t we just not get sucked into social media, not use filters, not dye out our greys, not work jobs that we hate just so that we can send our kids to posh schools (when we could instead put our energies into lobbying for better public schools)? Why don’t we just stop?

Why compete to make AI that could kill us? As in, all of us? Why build algorithms that damage kids and the social fabric? Why don’t the powers-that-be just stop (instead of calling for flimsy pauses)?

It’s because we can’t.

The system has us handcuffed to a particular kind of systemic, race-to-the-bottom death spiral that some folk are calling Moloch, after a God in the Hebrew Bible who rewarded child sacrifice with victories in war.

I first came across the term about three years ago. But recently I’ve found myself using it as an interesting lens for viewing what is going on in and around us. Bare minimum, it’s got me moving a few more rows back from the cinema screen. Today, I figured I’d do a brief overview of the concept, to add to the picture we’re building here in this community, and to open up the discussion broader and more compassionately.

Which is our aim, right?

Image: Rajesh Rajput

Allen Ginsberg wrote a poem in the sixties, called Howl, that describes Moloch.

It starts:

I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,

dragging themselves through the negro streets at dawn looking for an angry fix,

It then describes this downward trajectory that we become trapped in when our self-interest is left to run rampant, without the checks and balances of a modulated society:

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 who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!

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

When faced with a world seemingly gone mad, we tend to seek culprits and scapegoats. We grasp at conspiracies, we “follow the money”. Is it Pfizer, Bill Gates, capitalism? What is the original thing? Is humanity inherently unable to respect what we have been gifted?

But many of us here, I think, have the palpable sense that the problem is… all of it, all of us and none of us. It’s almost like there is some other force at play that overrides our agency.

This is Moloch.

Per the Hebrew myth, Moloch is a faceless force that sees us all sacrifice what we hold dear as a collective to an end that leaves us all categorically fucked. It’s a systemic monster that pits people against each other in a zero-sum game, a race to the grim bottom.

Moloch looks like…

Here are some examples to explain how it works:

• You’re at a concert and someone at the front stands up to get a better view. Which makes everyone behind them also stand up. Everyone competes to get a better view. In the end, everyone is left having to stand for the entire concert. Everyone loses.

• Psychiatrist and Substacker Scott Alexander Astral Codex Ten explains how The Two-Income Trap is another example.

  Sufficiently intense competition for suburban houses in good school districts meant that people had to throw away lots of other values – time at home with their children, financial security – to optimize for house-buying-ability or else be consigned to the ghetto.

  From a god’s-eye-view, if everyone agrees not to take on a second job to help win their competition for nice houses, then everyone will get exactly as nice a house as they did before, but only have to work one job. From within the system, absent a government literally willing to ban second jobs, everyone who doesn’t get one will be left behind.

• I’d add that the private school imperative is another.

  I touch on this idea of not being able to stop and being tethered (Lemming-style) to the system in This One Wild and Precious Life:

  “Yeah, and all that getting ahead business,” said my brother Pete during a visit with my nephew and niece. “You don’t have time to question anything if you’re flat out getting ahead.” Pete has always had a knack for seeing things from steep slants. Then he added, “Sarah, what a horrible concept – getting ahead. What are you getting ahead of? It’s the people around you, neighbours and friends, and at their expense.” My goodness, yes.

A picture of my brother Pete, right, in his “good shirt” to break up this long slab of text. My sis-in-law Janka left, and my intense nephew Emil sporting the “Wilson glare”

• Liv Boeree atWinWin, a former poker champion explains explains how beauty filters are Moloch at play in this video:

• The nuclear arms race that saw the world compete to produce technology to ultimately kill us all 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. But the grim, dumb race to the bottom, to this weird stand-off we still find ourselves in, expended trillions of dollars and rubles and has left the world under a radioactive shadow. It left us all fucked.

We. Just. Can’t. Stop.

We’ve (mostly) all watched Oppenheimer. We know that the US couldn’t stop the atomic race, not if the Nazis didn’t. Same with the nuclear race. Once the race is entered, no one can stop because stopping sees you lose. But not stopping sees us all lose.

The AI race is following this exact same trajectory. You’ve no doubt heard the refrain, “but if we don’t get there first, the (more irresponsible) Chinese will”.

When we are engaged in the Moloch death-spiral we will see, and even understand, what is going on. We will call for an AI pause, we will lament the despair of keeping up with the Joneses, but we can’t step aside from it. Who is going to sit down at the concert first? Who will put down their LLM programming tools first? Which government will ban fossil fuels, instigate a universal basic income, disband their nuclear arsenal first? To stop first is beyond a courageous step. It can require being devoid of self-interest and having the charisma and following of a guru.

Scott Alexander writes:

There’s a passage in the Principia Discordia where Malaclypse complains to the Goddess about the evils of human society. “Everyone is hurting each other, the planet is rampant with injustices, whole societies plunder groups of their own people, mothers imprison sons, children perish while brothers war.”

The Goddess answers: “What is the matter with that, if it’s what you want to do?”

Malaclypse: “But nobody wants it! Everybody hates it!”

Goddess: “Oh. Well, then stop.”

We all want to stop, but the momentum of the faceless Moloch is at our back and it has the weight of all of humanity.

What can be done?

Boeree presents a possibility for escaping Moloch’s grasp, another kind of deity she calls WinWin. (Scott Alexander gives us a similar example, the Goddess of Everything Else.) WinWin isn’t “anti-Moloch”, but something living on a higher plane, she explains. WinWin rewards competition, but only up to a point where it works to everyone’s benefit.

WinWin, she says, knows where to draw the line.

Unlike Moloch, she also rewards communication and collaboration, cutting through the noise. I’m super keen to get her on Wild to explain further…

I also have a few other ideas.

I think we can choose to be more courageous and sign up more to the idea of sacrificing security and comfort to go first.

Yes, it takes an almost kamikaze-level courage, but aren’t we bored of being small?

There are enormous benefits to stepping off the Lemming conveyor-belt first. It’s a dive into the unknown, but as some of you know, I firmly believe that those who dive into the unknown are rewarded by the benevolent flow of life. They’re gifted “angel wings” that carry them to better (more fulfilling) futures (which is nowhere close to as woo-woo as it sounds; quantum principles can be pointed to that explain it). I can vouch for the fullness of being that accompanies sticking two fingers up to the system, of choosing to live on the “shadow side of the sword”, as Virginia Woolf phrases it. (Happy to discuss this further in the comments.)

We can also gain a lot from simply seeing that it’s systemic and that there is no one to blame. In fact, we can gain everything from this vantage point because it allows us to forgive each other and work from a lot more compassion and camaraderie. My friend and spiritual elder Catherine Ingram asked this question in her viral essay Facing Extinction¹ which looks at the way complex systems have landed us where we are today:

“What if we forgave everybody everything?”

When we stop blaming, we can get on with healing, supporting, guiding, leading, shifting, doing better.

Just some ideas. I’m keen for yours. Also, put a bid of support to get Liv onto Wild. I’ll use this post to lobby her!

Sarah xx

Fittingly, my Wild podcast touches on a theme relevant to all of the above. It’s a great chat with Maggie Jackson who has just written a book - Uncertain: The Wisdom and Wonder of Being Unsure – that argues that while humans crave certainty, we actually experience a less anxious, more productive, happier life when we embrace not knowing.

1. Which she has now pulled down because she couldn’t manage the feedback. However you can read more of her work here and find copies of the pdf in corners of the web.