I read an incredible fact today. The most valuable company in the history of business was founded in the past, more than 400 years ago, in the age of both Shakespeare and Milton, Galileo and Newton, and almost 200 years before its inevitable collapse. The most valuable company in the history of business existed long before Apple and Microsoft and Amazon and Facebook; it existed before PetroChina and Saudi Aramco, those twin-great national conglomerates comprising 20 percent of all modern energy supplies. The most valuable company in the history of business did not trade in hardware, software, rockets, or cars—but rather spices, textiles, diamonds, and slaves. The most valuable company in the history of business, various internet sources will tell you, is the Dutch East India Company.

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The VOC (Vereenigde Oostindische Compagnie in its native Dutch) was a naval merchant company founded in 1602, in The Netherlands, with the express support of its colonial government to monopolise trade in the Southeast of Asia. It held quasi-state authority to wage wars, negotiate peaces, and establish colonies across all of its markets. At the height of its power it boasted some 30,000 soldiers and 200 ships, the largest private naval fleet of the age.

All of this is undeniably—and, for the most part, historically—impressive. Yet I find the central claim somewhat dubious: the most valuable company, not merely of its own time, but of all time; more valuable than Google, Nvidia, Tesla, etc., existing not merely before search engines and cybertrucks but two whole centuries before the electricity that powers them. It is reminiscent of similar claims concerning historical individuals—Jakob Fugger, Augustus Caesar, Mansa Musa—who battle to this day for the analogous title of “richest person ever”. Both statements appear to violate some lost common sense about the true meanings of wealth, riches, power, technology. It is for this reason that the counterclaim is important to spotlight: no, as it turns out, obviously not—the most valuable company in the history of business is not the Dutch East India company. Not even close.

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The Claim

I first read it here, on this surprisingly well-produced, suspiciously beautiful graphic. It visualises the comparative “wealth-areas” of the VOC against a mosaic of modern firms. (Note: these valuations are almost a decade out of date; but the point remains.) The dimensions of some of the most lucrative businesses operating today are dwarfed by the powerful and menacing Jan. The equity estimate quoted here is $7.9 trillion; and, on other, more recent graphics, it is even higher, $8.28 trillion. Also listed are competing joint stock companies contemporaneous to the VOC: The Mississippi Company (6.8 trillion USD); South Sea Company (4.5 trillion USD); and so on. But the Dutch is the highest—the most valuable ever.

Curiously, between all the sites making these claims, there is a notable scarcity of any discernable method into how such valuations are actually calculated. The Visual Capitalist, where the graphic was originally posted, cites The Motley Fool’s Alex Planes as a source. HowMuch.net does the same. But, unfortunately for both, as pointed out by more than one online critic, Planes’s numbers do not add up. Both Lodewijk Petram and reddit user JolietJakeLebowski refute Planes’s 1637 share price valuation and outright lambast the idea of multi-trillion dollar appraisal. They independently arrive at a different figure: the comparatively paltry $1 billion.

But that simply will not do! Historical and arithmetic errors are not very interesting; and in order for my far superior criticism to apply the claim has to at least be superficially plausible. So let us pretend. Say, by whatever imperialist sorcery, the VOC was 8000 times larger than historical fact. My claim is that—even if that were the case—it would still not be the most valuable company of all time. Let me explain.

The poverty of wealth comparison

Let us begin with wealth itself. The most intuitive, most concrete measure of wealth is purchasing power—the financial ability to buy products and services. This acts as a market approximation of both physical and intellectual work combined: purchasing a yacht, for example, includes all the mechanical aspects of an industrial supply chain (fuel, lumber, steel, haulage, labour, etc.); but it also includes the knowledge required to innovate that supply chain (petrochemistry, forestry, geology, logistics, education, etc.) So by saying that the VOC is the most valuable company of all time, we are basically saying that its wealth could purchase more things than any other company’s; and by saying that we are saying that it can leverage more physical and abstract knowledge to achieve its goals. Physicist David Deutsch has formalised this combination as “the repertoire of physical transformations we are able to perform,” or, in plainer language, “the list of things we are able to do.” It is important to remember this when considering a wealth influenced by novelty.

Next is inflation. The calculation for adjusted inflation is quite simple: first, take some standardised pricing index varied across two different years (e.g. the price of a typical basket of groceries), and contrast that index across those years. Here is an example: the price of groceries in 1900 is $50; and, in 2000, the price is $100. This yields an adjustment factor of 0.5. So an annual wage of $50,000 in 2000 would equal the purchasing power of $25,000 in 1900. Simple enough.

The problem with both purchasing power and inflation adjustment lies in the standardisation of goods across multiple centuries. The entire premise of a comparable wealth relies on those “typical” constants used to draw it: groceries, housing, transportation, energy, etc. But it is patently obvious that, for example, the goods available in 1600 were vastly different from those available today. The fruits eaten by Shakespeare and Milton, Galileo and Newton, were pre-domesticated, small, hard, and bitter; their houses were cold; their transportation was slow; their energy was so deficient of modern expectations as to be more meaningfully defined by its overall absence. Even such physical constants used to support the governing framework are subject to the influence of fundamental research. (Newton’s own theories were eventually replaced, no less.) This just further displays that comparison is illusory. The past is simply too poor to measure against the wealth of the present. That is to say: too outdated. And as the proportion of comparable goods to incomparable goods decreases (as more new things are invented) the less such adjustments serve as valuable comparisons. This is the central point I am trying to make: growth is not merely the generation of more spices, more textiles, more diamonds, more slaves; but rather entirely new products, new businesses, new industries, and new markets: the internet, computers, and self-driving cars. Progress is far more than merely just more.

Wealth Creation Is Real

One mistaken conclusion is that, if the validity of wealth comparisons correlates negatively with innovation, and if innovation is increasing, then wealth itself is impossible to quantify. This is false. My entire argument is that wealth and its creation are more real than they are currently given credit for: more real than limited abundance analyses and far more real than the increasingly popular opinion that wealth as a concept is itself illegitimate, a propaganda narrative weaponised by the rich to steal from the poor and strongman economics to the detriment of society. Wealth creation is real, for everyone, in three distinct yet connected ways, and in spite of a unitary natural poverty persistent since fire.

1. The world gets richer

The first way that we create wealth is abundance: more of what we already have. This is the more spices, more textiles, more diamonds, more slaves picture of growth. And while it is this view that in part leads to spurious claims of superlative plenty—and while it is this view that I have already spent some effort to downplay—it remains a central facet of material development. It matters how much food we have. It matters how many houses we build. It matters how many spices are stocked in the local supermarket. It just matters much less than most people think.

2. The world gets cheaper

The second way to create wealth is affordability: making what we already have—and what we want to have—cheaper. In Deutsch’s terms this would take the form of “decreasing the amount of physical and cognitive work required to perform certain transformations.” This can be demonstrated with a real-world example: a sandwich, bought from the supermarket today, can range between £1.50 – £5.00 ($2.00 – $7.00). This affordability is thanks in large part to those market dynamics hinted at above, including, but not limited to: finance, supply chains, labor markets, technological advancement, scientific progress, automation, industrialisation, the internet, and so on. Without such systems, however, the sandwich transforms from a minute in the corner shop to multiple months of punishing labour. This was proven by the YouTube channel “How To Make Everything”, who, for no reason at all beyond curiosity and entertainment, set out to construct his own sub from scratch. This included growing the garden, boiling the water, milking the cow, churning the butter, curdling the cheese, harvesting the wheat, baking the bread, collecting the honey, slaughtering the chicken, and, finally, after six months of exercise, constructing a supper that he estimated had cost him a whopping $1500. (And despite what some Marxists might argue, something to the effect that only by this method of complete self-sufficiency is a sandwich ever unalienated and thus rendered truly delicious, the channel owner, Andy, would disagree. “It’s not bad…” he proclaimed vacantly at the end of his Odyssey. “Six months of my life for… not bad.”)

Affordability is one of the main products of genuine wealth creation and one of its most autocatalytic. There exists a virtuous cycle of abundance and affordability, affordability and abundance, abundance and affordability, and so on, in the everyday function of material growth: the more houses we build, for an admittedly rare example, the lower the rents; and the better harvest we sow, for a thankfully more common one, the cheaper the groceries. This, in turn, leads to a richer world, which, in turn, leads to even more houses, even lower rents, even better harvests, even cheaper groceries. And so on. Affordability is—it is true—most intuitively the product of abundance. But there exists an even greater progenitor of radical economising.

3. The world gets newer

The third—and as I will argue, greatest—means of creating wealth is novelty: bringing new things into the world. It is through this mechanism that both abundance and affordability are most meaningfully realised: we increase what we already have by creating novel ways of making it, storing it, preserving it, etc.; and we decrease the cost of such endeavours by creating novel efficiencies in each stage of the process. The Third Agricultural Revolution, for example, increased global crop yields by 135 percent between 1961 and 2005. How? By creating new knowledge. Agronomists Norman Borlaug (for wheat) and Yuan Longping (for rice) used the novel genetic insight of semi-dwarf plant architecture to better sustain crops in inclement weather. This paired with the mass application of newly economised nitrogen fertilisers afforded the abundance we relish today. This is just one such example from the sweeping pages of innovation history. Even limiting ourselves to agriculture: the first of these so-called “revolutions”, the Neolithic Revolution, saw the transition from nomadic hunter-gathering lifestyles towards the comparatively delayed economy of animal husbandry. This is an example of cultural evolution directly improving material welfare. And, even more concretely, the second, British Revolution, increased yields by mass industrialisation—by inventing the tractor.

The list is exhaustive. Indeed, every single abounding influence in the history of society, I conjecture, has resulted, at its core, from some kind of newness made fresh in the world. And it is through this lens that the VOC—even my ahistorically empowered VOC—loses any lingering shred of its leveraged splendor. As stated above, the joint stock company was founded and operated in the 17th and 18th centuries, respectively—before search engines and cybertrucks and the electricity that powers them. Before steam, steel, jennies, looms; before the universal theories of gravitation and electromagnetism; before the seminal works of Darwin and Einstein, “On the Origin of Species” and “E=MC²”; before the abolition of slavery and the emancipation of women; before, in effect, every facet of our modern richness both concrete and conceptual. They vaunted their fleet, it is true; and they valued their cargo, no one can deny it. But their fleet was made of wood and their cargo could speak English! Theirs was a wealth made miserly by its ignorance—as ours, in turn, will be, in relation to that invented tomorrow. The purely physical claim that, for example, the weight of the gold possessed by the company, transported to today, would be greater than the capitalisation of any extant business, is the same central fallacy as stating that the sum of all the Earth’s resources, existing for aeons before the advent of people, similarly moved, would be worth more than China. But natural uranium, for a specific example, without people, physicists, Ernest Rutherford and Enrico Fermi, is worthless. And imperialist gold, in the 17th century, is worth pennies on the dollar to the same gold made capitalist in the modern 21st. Consider Deutsch’s framing again. What physical transformations could the VOC reasonably perform—and which could they not? They certainly could not split the atom, or cure polio, or fly to the moon, or support 8.3 billion people in unparalleled comfort across the whole planet. Asking what the VOC could purchase today is like asking what Newton would think of black holes: cheating.

So, once again, no, obviously not—the most valuable company in the history of business is not the Dutch East India company.

Not even close.

Follow me on Twitter/X @tomhyde_

“There is a reason, after all, that some people wish to colonize the moon, and others dance before it as an ancient friend.”

— James Baldwin, No Name on the Street

SpaceX just crashed a rocket into the Moon. It left a 17m crater. This has left a considerable number of people rather perturbed, denouncing the Musk-owned space company’s wanton disregard for our closest natural satellite. Typical Twitter/X responses range from:

“as if ruining the earth isn’t enough now elon wanna ruin our moon too”

— @seeninheaven

To:

“Can you be arrested for damaging the moon? Feels like you should be idk”

— @YL2SI_

And:

“the kind of cartoonishly evil entitlement you must have to think you can just destroy OUR moon. everyone’s moon. the moon humans have looked up at and admired for thousands of years. who the fuck are you to flippantly blemish our moon forever”

— @buggirl

Also:

“Elon Musk dick riders piss me off man. Saying that you have to crash debris into the moon. bitch you don’t need to be up there to begin with. Space is cool, but people are fucking starving here on earth and the planet is dying due to human pollution. Stop polluting space too.”

“Also trivializing what the moon means to pagan people. Gfy”

— @StephanieGailW

Culminating with:

“ow”

— @TheMoon

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There are a few things to unpack here. Let me list them.

• Elon Musk is ruining the Earth.

• He is also ruining the Moon.

• He should be facing criminal proceedings for damaging the Moon.

• He is entitled.

• He is destroying the Moon.

• The Moon is a commons.

• The Moon is a historical artefact admired throughout human history.

• We do not need to be in space.

• Because people are starving on Earth.

• The planet is dying due to human pollution.

• Space is too.

• We should not trivialise the meaning the Moon holds towards pagan peoples.

• The Moon is alive and can feel pain.

The above is a representative summary of the ideas surrounding not merely the recent lunar collision but the entire relationship between humanity and space. To save some time, I will integrate each objection into five general groups. From least interesting to most:

1. Elon Musk Is Space Satan

The measure of the outrage is unmistakably partisan. People are not angry about this impact; they are using the impact as an excuse to be angry at a man they already dislike. This is clear from some simple counterfactuals.

The first is that both planned and accidental lunar crashes are as old as lunar travel itself: Luna 2 (1959); Rangers 4 (1962), 6 (1964), 7 (1964), 8 (1965), 9 (1965); all five Lunar Orbiters (1966-1968); an entire suite of Apollo spent hardware jettisoned into the Moon for seismic analysis (1969-1972); Hiten by the Japanese (1993); SMART-1 by the Europeans (2006); even as recently as 2024 with China’s Chang’e 6 ascender. All these impacts occurred with zero public comment (in large part, I would conjecture, due to the public nature of the space programs—this newfound outrage is less about space than it is about business, and indeed businessmen).

The second—similar to the first but far greater in magnitude—is the rate at which natural objects collide with the lunar surface. Unlike the Earth, whose layers of atmosphere act as a forcefield against the majority of smaller-mass stellar projectiles (meteors), the Moon is naked. A total of 1000 tonnes of material collides with the body every single day, amounting to 33,000 collisions per year. This is largely made up of micrometeors and cosmic dust—but even a pingpong-ball-sized meteoroid delivers an energy equivalent of 3kg of dynamite. The Moon is 3.7 billion years old; it has sustained trillions of impacts in its orbital lifespan. Not to mention the fact that it was likely formed in the wake of the supermassive impact between Proto-Earth and its ancient neighbour Theia. The Moon is literally a product of collision.

Taken together, it is clear that crashing into the Moon is neither dangerous nor exceptional. It is fine when NASA does it; it is fine when nature does it; it is just not fine when Elon Musk does it. (Because he has committed the unforgivable crime of providing better products and services than any other person in human history. (And because he made the genuinely embarrassing error of endorsing Trump.))

2. The Moon is common property

This is literally true. The Outer Space Treaty was signed in 1967. It explicitly stipulates that (1) “States shall be liable for damage caused by their space objects”; and (2) “States shall avoid harmful contamination of space and celestial bodies.” So, it seems, @YL2SI_ was right: SpaceX owes damages.

Not quite. An extended version of the treaty specifies that parties are only liable for “damage to another State Party to the Treaty or to its natural or juridical persons by such object”. In plainer English: SpaceX would only be liable for damages if they had damaged a particular nation’s property (a national flag, for example)—not the Moon itself. Perhaps ironically, the common-property status of the Moon actively prohibits suing for damages because it prohibits owning it.

Secondly, the contamination concern is similarly dispelled. Article IX of the Outer Space Treaty goes on to specify “harmful” contamination that “would cause [...] interference with activities of other States Parties in the peaceful exploration and use of outer space”. The Cold War context of the treaty is most apparent here: widespread nuclear tests, not isolated waste disposals, were the intended object of environmental scrutiny. If SpaceX had plummeted a hydrogen bomb onto the lunar surface they would indeed have been in violation of Article IX. But they did not.

3. We should not be in space to begin with

Remember that scene in Interstellar:

“And if we don’t want a repeat of the excess and wastefulness of the 20th Century then we need to teach our kids about this planet, not tales of leaving it.”

The terrestrial Ms. Kelly resembles the turbulent X critics who opened this article. Indeed, the notion that space travel in its entirety is something to mistrust; that it is wasteful and auxiliary to human development; that it is vain, or arrogant, or piggish; that it is the self-indulgent fancy of narcissistic billionaires; that it is a thinly veiled pretense for hawkish expansion… is increasingly common in modern opinion. It is interleaved with the theory that Earthly, organic, biological existence is the only one worth fighting for. Following the recent Atremis II Moon missions, for example, Guardian columnist Zoe Williams wrote that:

“It is absolutely self-evident to me that space exploration is pointless, and the more urgent the crises besetting this planet we live on, the more pointless it becomes.”

Self-evident to her and to an increasing number of people, it would seem. But, like in Interstellar, the Earthy critique is false. Reversely so. It is difficult to imagine an enterprise more productive, more nourishing, and potentially more restorative to our planet than that of transcending it; the opposition of space travel from either environmental or humanistic grounds is a spectacular own-goal. All mining off-worlded; all industry orbited; all energy transitioned. All these things in theory, of course. Until they are done in practice. So let us do them. There is a curious self-fulfilment in anti-space rhetoric: “Let’s stop going into space. There’s nothing to see and no one to talk to” says Zoe Williams. Well, yes—because we are not there yet!

4. Colonialism should never have happened on Earth. Let alone in space

Historical colonialism—the colonialism of the 15th century and onwards—was evil because it fraternised imperialism: Britain and France and Spain and the rest took land by force, against the wills of the indigenous peoples, and with the legitimising power of bigger-army-diplomacy. It was effectively a subset of war, the campaign of which many now dread is being extended to the Moon and beyond.

But there is a problem. Like the property analysis explored in point 2., imperialism and war are crimes against people, not land. As far as we know, since December 14th, 1972, there have been zero humans on the Moon. And as far as we know, since its very formation, there has been zero life of any kind on the satellite. It is a sphere, without air, water, plants, animals—or rights. The fallacy is surprisingly—and indeed concerningly—influential in many areas of discourse. We have taken the justified outrage against a history of violence and applied it to rocks. In truth, today, “colonial”, “colonialism” and “colonisation” are weaponised slurs against all forms of engagement with physical space. To help untangle the thicket, here is a diagram:

Above are four real-world examples of historical movements and their relationships to migration (which is neutral), coercion (which is evil), and adventure (which is beautiful). Most of human travel in our earliest beginnings was in service of our basest and most basic needs: to drink cleaner water, to cut greener grass, to see fewer lions, to feel warmer summers. During this period, violent deaths accounted for 10-to-20 percent of all human deaths. (Revisionist pictures of utopian bliss are, once again, betrayals of some of our most persecuted peoples.) So both coercion and migration for about 300 millennia.

Heroism undoubtedly existed before human recordings; but the Age of Discovery codified wonder and the will to prevail. HMS Endeavour, for example, setting out from Plymouth in 1768, travelled to Tahiti, Australia, and New Zealand in its very first voyage. Its captain, the world-famous James Cook, was infamous for his penchant for taking native hostages. In 1779, after attempting to kidnap the King of Hawaii, he was killed and dismembered as a ritual honour. Adventure, it seems, cannot preclude the possibility nor likelihood of violence.

The Mayflower Pilgrims, some 89 years earlier, were a mixture of all three: like their ancestors, they desired to relocate; anticipating their countrymen, they dared to explore; and greater than both, they would forecast the coming of a violent campaign against native Americans for centuries to follow.

But the Moon! As stated above, no one exists in the whole of the cosmos liable to injury. Colonisation can be evil. But it can also be beautiful. It is up to us to distinguish the two. The blanket rejection of all human movement is both regressive and damaging; to parallel spaceflight with the Scramble for Africa is to insult the victims of conquering violence. Flying to the Moon, or to Mars, or beyond, is not practicing slavery, or murder, or genocide. Not even close. We should have more respect.

5. The Moon is not merely beautiful; it is spiritual. Colonising it is not only destructive—it is sacrilegious

James Baldwin epigraphs this article. His sentiment is perhaps the most influential and most meaningful in the minds of the public today. Chandra, Khonsu, Luna, Selene. There are traditions beyond measure whose worship of the Moon have waxed and waned with the coming of night. And there are equally numerous contemporary fashions of deriving significance from the natural world. Indeed, historical Moon worship has largely been enveloped by modern environmentalism: the worship of nature, the biosphere, of trees, birds. This is obviously untenable. Again, there is no life on the Moon. But the animist impulse to vitalise matter is more informed by metaphor than logical connection. The Moon is beautiful, therefore it is alive. This has led to a contemporary spiritualism that prohibits interaction beyond passive surveillance. The ironies, it would seem, continue: even this metaphor is paradoxical. The appeal towards friendship is a tenuous one for an argument that would distance its companions forever. In truth, the colonial mission is the far more connecting: to travel across vast distances through harsh conditions to reunite with one’s neighbour is heroic. And to live amongst it and transform it and be transformed by it is romantic. To light, ignite, pollinate, and populate an otherwise infertile and desolate wasteland must qualify as one of—if not the most—naturalistic miracles since abiogenesis.

Baldwin was, I think, half-right. In the extended passage from his collection, he qualifies the quote so many endorse. “All men, clearly, are primitive,” he goes on to write, “but it can be doubted that all men are primitive in the same way.” He means both types of people: whites and blacks, colonisers and dancers. But that was historical colonialism. Historical dancing. Things are different now. Today, there is a new reason that some people wish to colonise the Moon: in order to dance with it as a reacquainted friend.

Follow me on Twitter/X @tomhyde_

“And the social science [...] which finds the secret of this universe in “supply and demand,” [...] what we might call, by way of eminence, the dismal science.”

— Thomas Carlyle

Ad Hominen is a fallacy I tend to avoid. It is reason itself, not character, identity, or outward appearance, that determines the validity of a concept or argument. But there are cases where an idea is inseparable from its speaker and its style of delivery; where a person’s character, identity, and outward appearance actively comprise the content being communicated. In rhetoric, this is known as “enactment”: a disability activist, for example, is enacting their message by sitting in a wheelchair; or a military general, for another, is enacting his authority by garlanding his medals; or a “world-leading inequality economist”, for a third, is enacting his pessimism by slouching, over a kitchen table, with a coffee mug, and a pen, and an affected accent, and an exaggerated diction, and a general air of surrender yielding to the burden of his own woeful destiny.

Such is the case with author, former trader, and recently-former YouTuber, Gary Stevenson.

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I would normally say, as I have done in the past, that we must separate the man from the message he offers. I would love nothing more than to cast aside the speaker and focus on the falsehoods of a two percent annual wealth tax on individuals with total assets exceeding £10 million. (Indeed, I will focus on that below.) But I genuinely believe that the speed with which Gary has risen to stardom lies less with the merits of his potential solution than with the maudlin demeanor he summons to pose it. The British public is tired, poor, angry, and scared; it is perhaps no wonder that they react favourably to a man even more exhausted, ostensibly compassionate towards those with less, visibly disparaging against those with more, and only alarmed by attempts to oppose him. We are an island especially susceptible to populist psychologising by skilful manipulators—from the Right, with xenophobia and nationalism; and from the Left, with technophobia and socialism. The latter is perhaps less apparent because it is losing. But for how long?

Gary’s documentary, How to Get Filthy Rich With Gary Stevenson, was released on June 14th, 2026. I tried to watch it three times; got about half way. The problem was not its spurious economics or downhearted tone—it was just really boring. Gary is by no measure a natural-born journalist; he is small in both stature and confidence, struggling to hold eye contact with his various subjects the moment things escalate. It is possible, I admit, for this to be calculated, adopting the nervous sincerity of an everyman pundit speaking his truth to opulent power. But, then, Gary is not exactly poor (indeed, he actually derives a great deal of his credibility from his wealth—using his allyship as a kind of inverse enactment); and, then, even Leftist publications have been critical of his inability to argue convincingly. Lucy Mangan, in The Guardian, gave the documentary two stars, calling it “embarrassing”, and lamented the fact that “he is outdone and undone by almost all of his interviewees.”

In another interview, with entrepreneur Daniel Priestley, he recounts his journey from Ilford to activism: humble beginnings, mathematical talent, London School of Economics, Citibank with a focus on European interest rates, 2008 financial crisis, profit from hardship, profit some more, experience guilt, experience more, quit Citibank, write a memoir, commit to a life in the opposite direction. Today, Gary uses his insights gained from his winnings to help those who lost: his parents, his friends, those ordinary families struggling to eat.

There are two features of interest here. The first is the obvious emotional tone (another rhetorical device—pathos); and the second is Gary’s specific interaction with the market at a time when his private prosperity directly corresponded to popular loss. He sincerely believes that business is miserable because the bulk of his business was trading in misery. Together, they form the perfect incarnation of modern anti-capitalism: (1) all of economics is inherently expropriatory; and (2) it is poor people who suffer, starve, sleep rough, grow ill, and eventually die as a result of such plunder.

On Gary’s website, beneath his wealth tax proposal, he writes:

“The aim isn’t just revenue, but to slow the aggressive growth of billionaire fortunes that act as a black hole sucking money out of the wider economy.”

It is clear that Gary views British finances as a zero sum game; and, as a result, the richest in our nation as superinflated voids devouring everyone as lifeless accretion. It is a dark—indeed dismal—view of economics. But where Thomas Carlyle’s infamous curse targeted markets and the ethics of abolition (culminating in a despicable defense of slavery in the West Indies); Gary employs his cynicism for sympathy. “Supply and demand” are replaced by “inequality and taxation”; the innocent slave is replaced by the malevolent billionaire; and the scapegoating remains so long as it remains a scapegoating up.

But what of the claim itself? Are billionaires in Britain really diverting billions of pounds? If they were, wealth inequality would be rising. But it is not. As Gary’s debate partner, Daniel Priestly, posted on Twitter/X:

“There is no wealth inequality crisis in the UK. The share of wealth in the top 1% and top 10% has been stable for decades.”

Zero sum claims about economic robbery are false. (Even if inequality were rising—they would still be false.) And the resulting redistribution is equally misguided. Gary’s proposed wealth tax is a litany of errors both economic and moral. This is seen in the documentary, in conversation with tax expert Dan Neidle, who pulls zero punches in summarising the proposal as “populist claptrap.” The numerical concerns are broadly twofold: systems inertia and insufficient funds. First: the scale of such a proposal would take years to devise let alone implement. As Neidle states:

“It would require—let’s be generous—about a year of planning, at least. You then need to build the systems you need to tax 20,000 people. You are not going to raise any revenue from a wealth tax before 2029. You can be in favour of a wealth tax; but anyone claiming that it’s an answer is deluded.”

And, second, the revenue estimation is simply too low. On Gary’s own website he estimates the tax scheme could raise £22–£24 billion annually. That is without a doubt a generous appraisal, making no adjustments for legal evasion or capital flight. But even as it stands: it is nothing. Annual yearly spending in the UK straddles £1.2 trillion; our monthly borrowing in June alone was £16 billion and our government debt interest was a further £11.8 billion.

But this is all accounting. The real indictment, I maintain, lies within the psychology and expression of Gary’s objective. It does not matter that his plan is misleading and untenable; he gestures convincingly that merely to gesture about poverty and hardship is enough to relieve it. Even his recent retirement, announced just last week, is an enactment of his premise that submission—properly marketed—is a legitimate form of policy strategy. “Long story short is: I’m knackered.” He exhales with melancholy in his farewell address. It certainly appears that, in the 21st century, even our martyrs are dismal.

Follow me on Twitter/X @tomhyde_

It is hot in Europe at the moment. Really hot. Hot enough for people from traditionally hot places to agree that Europe is, in fact, really hot. Hot enough for me who spent two years working in the Australian Outback to agree that Europe is, in fact, really hot.

So we can all agree. It is hot in Europe at the moment.

The problem is not that it is hot, but that, unlike in other traditionally hot places, people in Europe cannot readily become cool. In the UK, where I currently live, it is humid—fumid—the air is thick, the sky is thin, the light melts like caramel, the dark drips like chocolate; our houses are kilns, built to retain heat, and, by all accounts, generate more of it; our offices are just repurposed houses, built for the same; and our every waking, walking, and half-sleeping moment is interrupted by the grossness and the discomfort of sweat. Why? There is only one reason why.

Because we do not have air conditioning.

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Air conditioning is the problem. People from other, traditionally hot places, have air conditioning. I, in the Australian Outback, would move from my air conditioned apartment (“donga”), into an air conditioned Uber, into my air conditioned office, out to my air conditioned company vehicle (“ute”), and back home totalling perhaps two hours aggregate in the unfettered atmosphere. It was company policy enforced to avoid literal fatalities (fatalities that are now rising in European summers—and forecast to rise further).

So why don’t we have it? Why don’t we help ourselves? (I am reminded of those people—we have all met them—who perennially have headaches and perennially refuse painkillers.) The simple answer is: climate change—or, more precisely, the brand of climate degrowth that controls climate rhetoric. The argument against AC goes something like this:

“(1) Air conditioning is a temporary patch on a more permanent crisis. We need to address the root causes of climate hazards—human-induced climate change resulting from fossil fuel emissions—not their immediate impacts. (2) Local, technological fixes distract from more global, systemic failures of policy and economics to meet climate targets. (3) Air conditioning requires a great deal of power, increasing demand in a time when downsizing—not expansion—is required to save lives. (4) They also increase local outside temperatures by venting exhaust fumes into surrounding environments (merely relocating the problem and, in the case of locally induced “heat islands”, outright exacerbating it). (5) The net result of which is a far warmer, more dangerous world—not a cooler, more comfortable one.”

The above is a representative example of the style of argument widespread in the discourse in the UK and beyond. Basically everything about it is mistaken, misleading, or outright malicious; the tone is nominally compassionate but meaningfully contemptible, demonising people for the excessive ambition of an artificial comfort over the more naturalised and passive sanctioned persistence. It also makes a series of seemingly disconnected assertions disguised as a logical and unified whole. Let us take them, quickly, one by one.

“(1) Air conditioning is a temporary patch on a more permanent crisis. We need to address the root causes of climate hazards—human-induced climate change resulting from fossil fuel emissions—not their immediate impacts.”

The idea that air conditioning is a remedy with an expiration date is false. For starters, the modern electrical air conditioning system was invented in 1902 by American engineer Willis Carrier. Today, 90 percent of US households have some form of AC. That represents well over a century of cooling (and heating) in some of the most implacable environments on the face of our planet. With no sign of slowing down. Fossil fuel energy share is also still above 80 percent—again with little indication of significant reduction—implying decades before transition and more before cooling. The limited success of global net zero is an argument in favour of “temporary patches”, not against them.

“(2) Local, technological fixes distract from more global, systemic failures of policy and economics to meet climate targets.”

In truth, few climate activists make this claim—not because they do not believe it, but because it is saying the quiet part decidedly too loud. Arguing that feeling cooled makes one less likely to feel fearful (and out of that fear enact climate policy) is generally too cynical a statement for even the modern population to accept with alicrity. But similar, less explicit assertions about collective responsibility are generally preferred to the far more personal and individualised solutionism of business and technology.

“(3) Air conditioning requires a great deal of power, increasing demand in a time when downsizing—not expansion—is required to save lives.”

The physical claim about energy use is true but exaggerated. Today, seven percent of global electricity usage owes to air conditioning and fans combined. That is, it is true, projected to triple by 2050 (assuming that European-style scaremongering does not take hold on a more global scale). The problem then becomes a trade off between increased climate hazard (resulting from increased fossil fuel use) and decreased climate vulnerability (resulting from cooler buildings). I have written about that principle at length before, which doubles as a comprehensive rebuke of the second, far more normative, claim made above. Quoting from my article:

“Every night spent inside your home is a night saved from the deadly environment beyond; every walk with an umbrella is a triumph over the elements. And while everybody knows that an unprotected afternoon in the vacuum of space will kill you in seconds, fewer people appreciate the fact that a similarly naked amble in sun-scorched Sudan (or sun-starved Sweden) will have an identical effect in a matter of hours. The difference between a spacesuit and a rain jacket is one of degree, and while it may seem strange to liken items of clothing to hard engineering projects—sandals to sea-walls—both perform the exact same function of protecting from hazardous external conditions for the benefit of human experience.”

And:

“So, the Green Road pathway is misleading for two reasons: 1) attempting to reduce hazards to natural levels is no goal worth pursuing because the world is naturally hazardous; and 2) doing so at the cost of an increased vulnerability is nothing short of suicidal nonsense for everyone (like removing one’s spacesuit in the middle of a spacewalk).”

The idea that limiting our production—our consumption—our output—our influence—is the best road to climate safety is “suicidal nonsense” because the world with limited production—consumption—output—influence—has been killing us for millenia. Climate risk is our natural state. Nothing natural can change that. Only people can.

And finally:

“(4) They also increase local outside temperatures by venting exhaust fumes into surrounding environments (merely relocating the problem and, in the case of locally induced “heat islands”, outright exacerbating it).”

Again, this is true but overstated. One professor’s claim that AC exhaust heat increases temperatures by 10-12°C is dangerous misinformation. The true figure is both local and negligible: studies from Arizona and Tokyo show a temperature increase of 1-2°C within a 2m radius of the exhaust fans. The inside temperature reduction, conversely, is as great as 14°C.

Every aspect of the air conditioning moral panic is either fabricated or exaggerated or both. Moreover: the very European suspicion is made even more specious by its blatant double standard: no one—literally no one—would be making the same class of arguments against refrigerators (which work on the same basic thermal principles as air conditioning) or radiators (which work on the reverse). These appliances were normalised long before the contemporary techphobia gained popularity; and, indeed, much of that fallacy can be attributed to what psychologists and economists call “loss aversion”: the tendency to weigh losses much higher than gains (even of the exact same thing). We systematically undervalue the potential gains from air conditioning while, in this case, accurately value the potential losses of fridges.

But by far the most damning counterfactual is with heating: here, in the UK, summer electricity use is 36 percent higher in winter than in summer—with an additional four times the natural gas usage (required for domestic heating). One fact so far removed from the popular discourse is that a warmer climate does not merely require greater cooling in the summer… It also requires reduced heating in the winter. Another is that the temperature-induced mortality risk is so far skewed towards “moderate cold” that such discourse surrounding heat appears verging on perverse. See the below data.

Cold kills up to many orders of magnitude more people than heat. This does not mean that heat deaths are meaningless—indeed they are crucial. But it puts into perspective the physical tradeoffs inherent to our most sensationalised and catastrophised problems.

The material sophistry surrounding air conditioning is undeniable. But perhaps even worse is the complete spiritual ruin inherent to the rejection of a desire and a triumph as old as our species. Regulating our temperature with knowledge and creativity is as vital to our essence as to our physical survival. To feel warmed when one is cold; to feel cooled when one is hot; to spark fire; to melt ice: these are not material luxuries heralding cataclysm—they are not signs of hubris, or vanity, or egoism—they are holy rites for the rational and industrious. Air conditioning units are talismans of human virtue like camp fires and aeroplanes. They are humanity made temperate. They are us. And they are here to stay.

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“Is not a man’s walking, in truth, always that: ‘a succession of falls’?”

— Thomas Carlyle

The hierarchy rule, writes David Deutsch, is false. Small things can influence large things. Units of DNA, for example, have transformed the Earth from a sterile promontory into the fertile ecosystem we inhabit today. As Deutsch explains:

“In our biosphere, molecule-sized objects, genes, control vastly disproportionate resources. The first genes for photosynthesis, by causing their own proliferation, and then transforming the surface of the planet, have violated or reversed the hierarchy rule by the mind-blowing factor of 10 to the power 40.”

— TED: After billions of years of monotony, the universe is waking up

This is surprising, because, for the first ten billion years of existence, the hierarchy rule was true. Large things ruled. Planets vacuumed asteroids, stars herded planets, black holes swallowed everything. As Deutsch again expands:

“Big, massive, powerful things strongly affect lesser things, and not vice versa. I call that the hierarchy rule. For example, when a comet hits the Sun, the Sun carries on just as before, but the comet is vaporized.”

It is remarkable that a habit of nature could last so long without exception without itself being a descriptive law. But it is much more remarkable that, after so long, it could not merely be violated but outright reversed: here, on Earth—and only on Earth—do small things influence their more sizeable neighbours. Here, on Earth—and only on Earth—do Davids become Goliaths. This is thanks to the singular power of knowledge: useful, causal, replicating information, first encoded in the aforementioned genes, and, sometime later, in the minds of creative agents we call people. In us.

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One of those people, Andrew McCarthy, uses hydrogen-alpha telescopes to photograph the Sun’s chromosphere. Earlier this year, in September, he captured a Falcon 9 rocket launch transiting our star.

This photograph—captured through a narrowband solar filter and composed from over 100,000 individual exposures—practically writes its own ekphrasis. The Sun, Sol, our sole source of life bringing light, rendered, smoldering, a spherical ember; an orb-molten mote-gem; a plasma patterned damascus; a silver-lined, golden-filled, fire-fretted nimbus. And the Falcon, the rocket, the arrow eclipse. The drooping plumes obscure an otherwise absolute shadow, a sort of dancing uncertainty that blends perfect silhouette and partial translucence. It is almost as if the act of the ascent ascends us—if only for a moment—aesthetically to a rank alongside heavenly bodies. A consummation. Indeed, another likely metaphor, pointed out in the replies on McCarthy’s X premier of the photo, is that of a sperm and ovum. I think this is fitting. What is adventure, I would agree with those critics, if not romancing the stars?

But it is McCarthy’s second viral chromosphere photograph, the dramatically titled “The Fall of Icarus”, that links back to Deutsch’s hierarchies and speaks most meaningfully to our cosmic position. Here is a close-up of the work.

The rocket, ascending, is replaced by McCarthy’s friend, Gabriel C. Brown, moments after leaping from a paramotor. You might lament the change in direction. I do not. As SpaceX again have shown us with its multiple rocket catches: falling, too, can inspire. It should rank alongside the most superlative optimism that the laws of nature not merely afford for supermassive controlled descent but demand that aurora are sparked in its process; that the good in this universe allies with the beautiful; that falling meets hands; that fire shapes light.

All these themes are present in The Fall of Icarus. The intricate texture of the Sun’s outermost surface appears to dissect, reacting less to Icarus than to Moses, with filaments and prominences apparently lensing around a superior gravity. Brown himself is a paradox of resting motion. I am reminded of the journalist Tom Junod, in his editorial following 9/11, about the lone “Falling Man” captured in an eerily similar, placid repose:

“If he were not falling, he might very well be flying. He appears relaxed, hurtling through the air. He appears comfortable in the grip of unimaginable motion. He does not appear intimidated by gravity’s divine suction or by what awaits him. His arms are by his side, only slightly outriggered. His left leg is bent at the knee, almost casually.”

— Tom Junod, Esquire, 2003

That fall—and that prose—was beauty braving sorrow. The same cannot be said for Brown’s, a purely triumphant work. The second only connecting factor are the dimensions:

“In all the other pictures, the people who did what he did—who jumped—appear to be struggling against horrific discrepancies of scale.”

The hierarchy rule returns. Indeed, “horrific discrepancies of scale” is an appropriate summary of a cosmological tyranny epitomised by magnitude. And indeed, as we began, no more. Junod’s falling man is a subject seven million times smaller than his backdrop. McCarthy’s is one four sextellion times smaller than that. But both men dominate the artworks with a tantalising forced perspective. As McCarthy explains in the replies to his own work, if Brown were an equal distance from the camera as the Sun he would measure 100,000km—or eight Earth’s diameters—tall. If he fell across the entire star’s distance in the mere half-second witnessed he would clock well over nine times the speed of light.

All these images serve to ratify Deutsch’s subversion. The hierarchy rule is false. And, as he goes on to conclude:

“[People are] potentially far more powerful [than genes] because of universality. When human knowledge has achieved a factor 10 to the 40, it will pretty much control the entire galaxy, and will be looking beyond.”

Small things can rise—or indeed fall—to the consequence of objects many magnitudes greater than their own. McCarthy’s photography manifests this principle with just two characters. One is a giant—of celestial area—whose outshining brilliance conceals a far more manifold fire; whose overmastering command extends to all bodies tracing its orbits; and whose propagating magic might yet spell superior wonders for millennia to come.

The other is the Sun.

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“There is a size at which dignity begins,’ he exclaimed; ‘further on there is a size at which grandeur begins; further on there is a size at which solemnity begins; further on, a size at which awfulness begins; further on, a size at which ghastliness begins…”

— Thomas Hardy, Two on a Tower

It is happening again. Another celebrity has declared war on arithmetic. Numbers themselves, it appears, are being weaponised against the wealthy and the planet’s most powerful. Figures like one million, one billion, one trillion… mathematical constructs like power series and orders of magnitude… even the very notion of the sublime itself have become the unlikely bywords in the ongoing crusade against the evils of capitalism. But this obsession with the abstracted figures actually obscures the realities of the physical facts. One million, one billion, one trillion and the rest are meaningless in a vacuum, misleading in analysis, and outright malevolent in the understanding of a moral economics. The numbers, I would like to argue, just don’t add up.

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I have written about this before, in Merion West, in an article responding to a Bernie Sanders wealth tax. That piece is behind a paywall, but a drive-by summary of the arguments might look something like:

1. Billionaires are relatively wealthy but absolutely poor.

2. There is no limit to how much wealth we can create.

3. Wealth does not equal money.

4. Quantifying wealth by numbers is misleading.

5. Criticising wealth by numbers is harmful.

6. Capitalism is optimism applied to markets.

7. We should want more billionaires.

I might also add some complimentary arguments:

8. Labour theories of value are false.¹

9. Profit is legitimate and non-exploitative.²

10. Economics is positive sum.³

¹The classical marginalist critique, that, say, an umbrella is worth more in London than in Lisbon (in rain than in sun), stands as proof that its most meaningful value is conjectured by the consumer—not mechanised by the labourer.

²Subjective theories of value sever the Marxist logic for exploitation. In fact, given the bi-fallible nature of every individual trade, it is equally possible that a worker is getting a higher compensation than the value that they provide to their employer. Workers can, using the same faulty Marxist reasoning, “steal” value from capitalists. (They don’t, of course. Contracts are knowingly agreed upon using imperfect knowledge. Even if the above scenario is true, which it often is, that is no foul play by either party. And vice versa.) So: worker theft is a fiction.

³The unlikely result of a subjective theory of value is that profit is not merely not evil but not made up: the world really does get richer, cheaper, and newer with the advent of new products and services. The world in 2025 isn’t some blunt redistribution of the world from 1025; the changes over that millennium cannot be classified solely as apportion or appropriation or expropriation by any given class against another; and the wealth of any given individual, at any given time, is not the necessary proof of a lack of wealth of any other individual. In fact—as I have also explained elsewhere—in a free market, the existence of wealth disparities is actually beneficial to the poor. Billionaires make us richer, not poorer.

But I want to dedicate this piece to points 4) and 5). The numbers—and the scaling of such numbers—themselves. (“The numbers, Mason. What do they mean?”) This obsession with “a billion”, a one with nine zeroes, three commas, ten digits, eight letters, is baffling. I touched on the phenomenon in the Merion West article:

“The very number one billion, many have argued, is so stupendously large, so unwieldy and immoderate, that no honest person should ever wish to possess it. Nor, they go on to add, should they be able to. This “argument from enormity” is often illustrated with the aid of an intuition pump: some visualisation, usually of the number of seconds or years it would take to naturally accrue such a figure. Imagine, for example, you were to earn $1 a second, every second, starting today. That’s $3600 an hour, $86,000 a day and over $600,000 a week—the real life salary, in fact, of Lionel Messi, Barcelona striker and highest paid sportsman alive. But even under this monumental payment plan, you wouldn’t achieve billionaire status until the year 2051, almost 32 years later.”

The scale of the thing, not the thing itself, is considered evil. The very word “enormity” embodies some implied mutation of what should be considered “normal” or indeed “normative” in modern society. And cancer is precisely the apposite metaphor in the minds of those disgusted by what they view as malignant: a growth in need of removal by surgery and destruction by autoclave.

But where does that leave the number? If there exists a moral quantity of wealth below which people can avoid damnation, then the assets themselves are not immoral, merely the amount. But what amount?

Most people can just about grasp the idea of a thousand individual things, the number of days in three years, the number of skittles in a jar at a village fete; and we believe that we have a handle on a million things until we learn that that is the number of days since the birth of Homer. But a billion? A trillion? (The number of days since the advent of oxygen.) What even comes after that? How can one person own a thing they cannot hope to hold in their mind, let alone in their hands?

This is, I think, where the enormity fallacy originates: a laced cocktail of points 3), 4), and 5) from my original list—plus a garnish of disgust in the face of the awesome. One part money to two parts numerals, shaken—not stirred—like a painting by Guy Buffet and expelled the following morning as a Progressive policy announcement. The entire it-would-take-this-many-years line of reasoning relies on yet more counting yet very little accounting for the truest theories of economics.

So, let’s take them one at a time. First:

Wealth does not equal money

Money is a representation of value, physical or digital, that fallibly approximates some measure of wealth. But money is merely that: a proxy. The meaningful difference between money and wealth is most evidenced by inflation: as more money is printed each individual bank note becomes less valuable because it represents a smaller proportion of the same fixed wealth. If any given wealth can be represented by one coin or 10,000 coins (the approximate exchange rate of the Polish Zloty and Iranian Rial), then the measure of that wealth is independent of those coins. Wealth does not equal money.

Quantifying wealth by numbers is misleading

For the reasons outlined above, the numbers themselves don’t really matter. At current exchange rates, for example, you only need to own $11,000 to own 1 billion Lebanese pounds. That means that one third of the US population are liquid billionaires and that 80 percent earn more than a billion a year. Those numbers that once seemed so ineffable now equate to a 2016 Chrysler Pacifica; and those people that once seemed so unethical now equate to your grandmother. It is purchasing power (the ability to leverage products, services, or otherwise influence the world) not bank statements (the numerical representation of that ability) that measures wealth. Quantifying wealth by numbers is misleading.

Criticising wealth by numbers is harmful

The moral effect of numerical theories is simple: to frame wealth as money, and money as counting, and counting as slow, painful, immortalised toil; and to simultaneously frame the wealthy as those who have counted too far, far beyond dignity, grandeur, solemnity, and awfulness—who have committed some unwritten epistemic trespassing (“We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.”) the punishment for which is spiritual disembowelment by eldritch leviathans—is designed solely and endlessly to demonise wealth.

And, as I wrote on twitter/X, much worse than that: to romanticise poverty:

But as we have seen, the numbers are fictions. Elon Musk, at time of writing, has a net worth of $496 billion. Arguments from enormity might conjure some thought experiment about the number of hedgehogs from here to Andromeda. But he is, in reality, just one man—just one—with the ability to leverage rockets, Teslas, tunnels, Twitters, Groks, and more; he is no more invading the unthinkable than grandma and her Pacifica; and he is not one single hedgehog closer to the truly unthinkable distance between everyone and our truly infinite potential. As I wrote in Merion West:

“Indeed, many moral and economic truths follow only from an understanding of infinities: the mind-bending properties of numbers without end. One such property is encapsulated in the title of [David] Deutsch’s book [The Beginning of Infinity]: that no matter how far we are, no matter how large we get, we are always and forever at the beginning. There is no half-way nor nearly there, no just right nor too much. It is on this basis that arguments from enormity fail, and that appeals to poverty triumph. We will forever remain poorer than our next step forward.”

The enormous fallacy is, in reality, a minor mistake. It is a simple miscalibration, a framing error resulting from a universal campaign to minimise our confidence. Large numbers, when they are used, should be used to inspire, not subdue. One million, one billion, one trillion and the rest are most meaningful as measures of our continued success. They are monuments, not memorials; idols, not omens; and it is always worth remembering that they can always be greater.

But who’s counting?

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Today is Wednesday, September 3rd, 2025. Exactly 223 years ago—it was a Friday, then—William Wordsworth made the crossing across the river Thames with his sister Dorothy on their way to Dover and later to Calais, when, in presumably some frenzied glance to the left or to the right (“O Friend! I know not which way I must look”) he was met with a surprise.

Beyond that water lie the city he had avoided and derided and would later go on to name “thou monstrous ant-hill on the plain”. But what he saw in that moment was not some “too busy world” “getting and spending” nor “the quick dance of colours, lights, and forms”; what he saw was morning, the dawn, before 6 a.m., before hawker, monger, and waterman had risen; he saw that metropolis in such a way that would inspire him to write in such a manner he would never replicate in his entire career.

He wrote this:

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William Wordsworth was a naturalist poet in more ways than one. He—quite like Rousseau before him (and every Romantic after him)—thought that man was best suited in nature, in the countryside, alongside fields and daffodils and with the organic benefits of an honest-simple-living. In his preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads he wrote that:

“Humble and rustic life was generally chosen, because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that condition of life our elementary feelings co-exist in a state of greater simplicity, and, consequently, may be more accurately contemplated, and more forcibly communicated; because the manners of rural life germinate from those elementary feelings; and, from the necessary character of rural occupations, are more easily comprehended; and are more durable; and lastly, because in that condition the passions of men are incorporated with the beautiful and permanent forms of nature.”

He would also, as we have already witnessed, outright excoriate urban existence for what he viewed as a form-content synthesis of everything base and tragic in the world. (“We have given our hearts away, a sordid boon!”)

It is a wonder, then, that on that Friday morning he would stop to write what is without a doubt the most remarkable ode to a city that, around the same period, his contemporary William Blake saw within only misery, usury, weakness, and woe; and that, some years later, his “literary godson” Hartley Coleridge would spy “the foul stream hot with sleepless trade; / For the slow creeping vapours of the morn. / Black hurrying smoke, in opake mass up-borne. / O’er dinning engines hangs, a stifling shade—”

Wordsworth found a sleeping, steeping, vapourless city, bright and unshaded, more natural than manual and more beautiful for it. Many have interpreted this exceptionalism as proof of the rule that the Romantics put forward: that cities in general, and London in particular, are noisy, ugly, evil affairs; that nature in general, and the Lake District in particular, is the pantheist antiserum to a life of dejection; and that when cities do indeed appear presentably they better do so unpopulated (and, as a result, unpolluted by the toil and the metal and the bile and the soot). The effect is to position Wordsworth’s sonnet smack-bang in the middle of the Romantic message: nature is good, people are bad. Business as usual.

But this is all rubbish. Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802 really is the humanist miracle you read 200 seconds ago. The closer the reading the closer one comes to the realisation that Wordsworth was genuinely communing not merely with nature but with man’s single connection to it: creation. The reason that “Earth has not any thing to show more fair” is that Earth has not anything at all like this to show in the first place. “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples” represent an entirely novel silhouette—with entirely novel aesthetics—in the history of the planet. The forms of man, unlike those of nature, do not derive their beauty from permeance; they rise and fall and move and transform.

I am reminded of two quotes: first, from the philosopher Jacob Bronowski: “[Man] is not a figure in the landscape—he is a shaper of the landscape.”; and second, from the philosopher Ayn Rand: “I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York's skyline[…] The sky over New York and the will of man made visible.” Wordsworth, like Bronowski, recognises the radical humanism of a unique morphology; and Wordsworth, like Rand, gives up the sun itself, for the sun behind people.

And all that mighty heart is lying still.

The closing line of the sonnet, so misread for its stillness, is, in truth, the anticipation of a motion both hale and muscular. Whereas Hartley Coleridge's poem (From Country to Town, also quoted above) concludes with the natura-cardiac resolution “Yet Nature lives e’en here, and will not part / From her best home, the lowly-loving heart.” Wordsworth's ends at the beginning: right before the blood; before the hawker, monger, and waterman have risen; before “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings”—not recollected, but rather “[predicted] in tranquility." Wordsworth, whether intentionally or not (and despite never doing so again), inverts his own naturalist schematic and that of Lord Byron’s “I love not Man the less, but Nature more” (“Strike That, Reverse It!”) to produce, I would argue, words worthy of a sight quite so touching in its majesty.

Words worthy, I would also argue, of us.

This article was originally published in Conjecture Magazine, 21/10/2020

If David Attenborough were an animal in one of his own documentaries, he would be introduced as a friend. He would be soft and warm and altogether unthreatening. He would be a herbivore (obviously), one whose daily routine involved little more than moving from one spot to another in search for some acorns. He would be scored using a quaint and tottering accompaniment—woodwind most likely—with the occasional blast from a clumsy trombone. He would potter and he would plod and he would go about his daily tasks with a charming resolve. By the end of the section we would be won. We would be in love with a creature so content in his mission and so pleased in his manner of showing its beauty. But we would also be scared. We know how these shows end. We know that predators lurk in every shadow and that the world grows more dangerous with every passing moment. We would fear for our friend’s life.

This is something close to the true impression given by David Attenborough’s seven-decade career as a broadcaster and naturalist. Since his first appearance on film we have been besotted with a man so bewitched by our planet. We have been charmed by his quiet and humble demeanour, and we have been inspired by his determination in pursuing his values. But as those decades draw longer and surpass half a century, we grow anxious for a man whose very essence appears bonded with our world and its future. As one grows older and progressively more frail—as one sees senescence and the spectre of life’s end—we are left with the worry: what of the other?

I believe Attenborough is well aware of this perception. His newest documentary (and book!), A Life On Our Planet, is proof enough. If the distinctly retrospective tone of the title were not clear, Attenborough wastes not time in making things explicit.

“I am 93.” He says. “This film is my witness statement.”

It is immediately apparent that Attenborough is treating this feature-length foray as a kind of swansong: an account of a life and a life’s work at the closing moments of both. But make no mistake: this twilight episode is no exercise in narcissism nor sentimental decline into reverie and nostalgia. Attenborough has no time for such things, and despite his received status in the hearts of his viewers, he has never lost sight of his singular focus: the natural world.

For him, his life has been a wonderful privilege, one that has afforded him happiness in exploring some of nature’s greatest marvels. But it has also been a terrible curse, condemning him to a singular vantage as such wonders succumb to a world at the mercy of people. He takes the latter personally, and uses his own experiences as a window into that decline. This is seen in the film, where each milestone in his life (including his own childhood in 1937) is rendered totally impersonally, with intimate statistics including global population, CO2 concentration, and wilderness land coverage. It goes to show, even when Attenborough dares to speak about his own Life On Our Planet, he does so only as a means to speak about all of it.

I for one welcome this distinction. My initial fear was that Attenborough would double down on his spiritual connection to a world near its end and embrace a kind of fatalistic personification. That would be a tragedy for me, a Brit who has grown up with the man and the voice but has grown disillusioned with its disparaging message. I want nothing less than for David Attenborough, the man, to become fatally entwined with the misanthropic environmentalism he champions. So when I finally saw A Life On Our Planet, I was relieved—not because he performs a glorious u-turn to embrace a rational and truly optimistic vision of the future, but because he removes his own person from his inability to do so. He allows his ideas to stand on their own and, in the process, might allow for their fallacy to die in his place. Here is how.

Resource Pessimism

In 2011, Attenborough gave a speech at The Royal Society of Arts affably titled People and Planet. Despite its warming designation, however, he opened the talk with a protracted lament to the catastrophic species loss first witnessed in the 1950s (the Arabian oryx, imperial eagle, and California condor to name just a few); and while honouring the considerable conservation efforts mounted in response, he went on to explain how extinction rates only worsened over the six decades that followed. He attributed this decline to a single, unifying factor: human population growth.

“Then there were 3 billion people on Earth. Now there are almost 7 billion — all needing space.”

Nothing has changed in the 9 years since Attenborough made that speech. In A Life On Our Planet, he reiterates:

“The planet cannot support billions of large meat eaters — there simply isn’t space.”

Many will recognise this distinctly spatial discouragement as Malthusian resource philosophy. Indeed, Attenborough is directly quoting Malthus in his RSA talk and continues to echo his sentiments today.

“There have been prophets who’ve warned about this impending disaster of course; one of the first was Thomas Malthus. His most important book, An Essay on the Principle of Population, was published over 200 years ago, in 1798. In it, he argued that the human population would increase inexorably until it was halted by what he called misery and vice.”

Both Malthus and Attenborough argue that rising production can never sustainably keep pace with rising demand. As production increases with increases in labour, population increases much faster, inevitably surmounting the increases in yield. I stress sustainably and inevitably here because, as Attenborough points out in his RSA talk, Malthus failed to predict the near-term inadequacies of his own logistic functions. He failed to foresee the bounteous influence of the Third Agricultural Revolution of the mid-20th century and, with its rapid increases in wealth and abundance, would appear to have refuted his own differential.

But Attenborough isn’t so easily dissuaded. While he concedes that Malthus was wrong in the short-term, he maintains that his thesis holds strong to this day. He says:

“It’s true that he did not foresee the so-called “Green Revolution” which greatly increased the amount of food that can be produced in any given area of arable land. And there may be other advances in our food producing skills that we ourselves still can’t foresee. But such advances only delay things. The fundamental truth that Malthus proclaimed remains the truth: there cannot be more people on this planet than can be fed.”

I find this somewhat confusing. While Attenborough’s ultimate point is true enough (we really can’t feed more people than, well, the amount that we can feed), is this really the “fundamental truth” Malthus was proposing? Is his Principle of Population based on one senseless tautology or an explicit relationship between supply and demand? There is nothing within Attenborough’s statements nor Malthus’s principles to explain a limit to agricultural progress. There is nothing prohibiting a second green revolution arriving tomorrow. This could very well happen, by the way, given the advent of both vertical and cellular farming just around the corner. The former, the practice of cultivating vegetation in climate controlled towers, recently showed an increase in yield of 600 times for wheat production compared to traditional farming methods; and the latter, the process of growing meat and other food stocks in laboratories, could free up 26% of all ice-free land and a further 33% of all croplands, previously required for livestock grazing and feeding.

This proves that all our resources—space included—are subject to progress. There is nothing stopping us from continuing to free up valuable real estate with the advent of new and exciting technologies, decoupling land use from both energy and food production. Earlier this month MIT announced a breakthrough in fusion energy that could produce cheap, renewable energy on a minuscule footprint. This has the potential to power the entire world’s population with zero emissions. And thanks to some nifty napkin calculations, we can know that all those people—all 7 billion of them — could conceivably fit into the state of Texas. I’m not sure why we would want to do that (we could always dip our toes into Oklahoma), but it stands as proof that the problem of accommodating ourselves is open and, in principle, achievable.

But what is most bewildering in all this confusion is how flippantly Attenborough rejects such advancements. He is well aware of the historical and contemporary potential of innovation to solve problems; yet he imposes arbitrary limits without explanation. He disregards 200 years of empirical refutation on the promise that Malthus was merely shortsighted, whereas, in truth, he was fundamentally blindsided by a future beyond his own understanding. He could not foresee the advent of tractors let alone tokamaks. And even if he were right and we are inevitably curbed by some impossible barrier, there is nothing to say that we have already reached it. Attenborough admits that the Malthusian prophecy will not occur tomorrow nor even the next day, and yet he insists on preparing for it today, at terrible cost, and at the risk of the very future he purports to defend. Why?

Nature Worship

I think both Malthus and Attenborough are under the influence of a deeper misconception. It is the central fallacy of Malthus’s principle and the central philosophy of Attenborough’s career. The mistake is in thinking that the Earth provides anything in the first place. As Malthus writes:

“The power of population is indefinitely greater than the power in the earth to produce subsistence for man.”

Notice how Malthus attributes subsistent potential to raw materials—the Earth—as opposed to people and the resources they create. To him, we have a finite supply of food, water, and land given to us by nature. In reality, we grow our own food, pump our own water, and make our own space for every person that requires it. We created tractors and tokamaks—not the Earth—and we refuted Malthus’s every prediction. It is no wonder that in the 200 years since his first publication, extreme poverty has fallen from well above 80% to well below 20% globally. We did that, too.

But Attenborough takes this even further. He takes the false assumption of natural-born sustenance, mixes it with a lifetime’s career of wildlife conservation, and fashions it into a fundamentalist religion. It has become so embedded in the fabric of our culture that we have neglected to question it for going on two centuries. That religion is nature worship, often characterised as the “naturalistic fallacy”, where everything natural is thought to be good. It is implicit in most of Attenborough’s more recent projects and is apparent in his defence of Malthusian pessimism. Why else would he disparage human efforts in favour of natural reclamation?

In A life On Our Planet Attenborough states:

“It’s quite straight forward; it’s been staring us in the face all along. To restore stability to our planet, we must restore its biodiversity — the very thing that we’ve removed. It’s the only way out of this crisis we have created. We must rewild the world.”

There is a lot to unpack here, but let’s focus on “stability”.

Over the course of the film, Attenborough places a curious emphasis on the relatively gentle characteristics of the holocene, our current geological epoch. On multiple occasions he likens such conditions to our very own utopia.

“The holocene was our Garden of Eden. It’s rhythm of seasons was so reliable that it gave our own species a unique opportunity: we invented farming.”

Notice again how Attenborough, like Malthus, attributes agricultural development to abiotic factors in the place of human ingenuity. By his reasoning, human society would have been wholly incapable of creating the knowledge required for simple farming in, say, the Carboniferous period, where the presence of monolithic oceans and land masses decreased seasonal variation. This rightly seems absurd, and more than a little bit ironic, for a senior climate activist to suggest that people don’t have the power to alter the natural world around them. If that were true, climate change and all its terrible consequences would be impossible.

But it gets worse. When Attenborough praises the stability of the holocene, he goes further than merely commending its seasons; he explicitly promotes a vision of the wild based on childish notions of balance and harmony. This is perhaps the greatest and most pernicious myth perpetuated by nature worship. In reality, the holocene, like all other precivilization eras, was a living hell. We only need look towards the logic of evolution itself to see why: its primary mechanism of progress—of variation and selection—is death. This is apparent in every wildlife documentary Attenborough has narrated: whether by predation, starvation, disease or senescence, the results are always the same. The utopian harmony naturalists idolise is that of a never ending war, dog-eat-dog, kill or be killed. The dystopian growth they despise is our humble attempt to escape it.

As a quick side note, this reveals an interesting tension between environmentalism and animal rights. If you believe that animals can suffer, and that animals in the wild do suffer, then the most intuitive point of recourse would be to remove those animals from their greatest threat—the environment—that has tortured and killed some five billion species to extinction. Do we support that natural order of agony and death or the overall well-being of all conscious creatures?

Attenborough’s conception favours the former, tyrannical regime. It argues that natural torments are the virtuous destiny of all non-human life, and, through its eloquent appeals for degrowth and rewilding, would argue for a return to that same armageddon. I for one object—I would much rather find myself in a Citystate Texas, powered by starfire, rewatching A Life On Our Planet with quiet satisfaction. And if you think that sounds like some techno-futurist fantasy, remember that plumbing once sounded the same. If you think that sounds wholly impossible, attempt to explain the impassable barrier. Neither Malthus nor Attenborough have.

***

If David Attenborough really were an animal in one of his own documentaries, he would be every bit as lovable as the one I describe above. He would be every bit as unthreatening as the one you knew before. But as often is the case with such documentaries, not everything is always quite as it seems. Attenborough’s humble and quiet appearance belies a dangerous secret. His pessimism, if taken literally as it is, would spell an end to all progress, condemning billions to the very misery it seeks to avoid. His naturalism, if followed as religiously as we do, would spell the same for all natural life.

And yet, despite his many errors, Attenborough remains as one of the most noble and ethically motivated people working today; he is one of the most gracious and humane figures in television history. This may be, in truth, his most dangerous quality, shrouding his errors in sophistry and charm. But as I write above, he refuses to embody that suffering, working to embolden every person he influences. It is for this reason that my argument remains unchanged: we must separate the man from his myopic despair. We must do so without equivocation. This is especially true for Attenborough, a man whose person shall be remembered with love, but whose vision of the future we should forever avoid.

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I just finished reading the best and worst document of my life. Genuinely. I just finished it. Eight seconds ago. I am typing this now in a sort of reflexive frenzy. Sweating. Shaking. When did my shirt come off? It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters. I just finished reading the best and worst document of my life.

I just finished reading The Futurist Manifesto, published 1909, written by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. I am equal parts inspired and appalled and uplifted and enraged. But I am mostly just bewildered at a text so violently at odds with both itself and the world it purports to inhabit. You will be too.

So here goes. Take two. Rack it up. Forty lines of literary amphetamine. Care for a bump? I’ll grab the note. You take the powder and the mucus and the headache and the bloat. What comes up must come down.

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MANIFESTO OF FUTURISM

1. We want to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and rashness.

Hell of a start. Marinetti is an Italian poet, I should note. And that much is clear from the outset. In style these opening lines read like Walt Whitman if Whitman wrote collective action instead of individual ode. In sentiment they read like Henry David Thoreau if Thoreau wrote even more like Henry David Thoreau. (“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately”). Hell of a start.

2. The essential elements of our poetry will be courage, audacity and revolt.

In the words of High Fidelity’s Rob Gordon: “The making of a great compilation tape, like breaking up, is hard to do and takes ages longer than it might seem. You gotta kick off with a killer, to grab attention. Then you got to take it up a notch…”

3. Literature has up to now magnified pensive immobility, ecstasy and slumber. We want to exalt movements of aggression, feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist.

Hard-agree on the softening of literature. Especially poetry. I have written similar criticism on Twitter/X:

And don’t get me wrong: quiet and tender verse is some of our most valuable. But the use of comforting language to legitimise suicide is evil. And support for such tired writings at the expense of truly humanistic works of passion and optimism—of “feverish sleeplessness, the double march, the perilous leap, the slap and the blow with the fist”—is the hallmark of either cowardice or villainy.

Taken metaphorically, this “aggression” is a vital and longed-after tonic easing inaction and assorted anxieties of self. Taken metaphorically, against ideology and culture, of course. Not against people. Of course.

4. We declare that the splendour of the world has been enriched by a new beauty: the beauty of speed. A racing automobile with its bonnet adorned with great tubes like serpents with explosive breath ... a roaring motor car which seems to run on machine-gun fire, is more beautiful than the Victory of Samothrace.

THE AESTHETICS OF VELOCITY. e/acc on e/crack. Ayn Rand on art when Ayn Rand was four. There is something to be said about a global development so blistering the sense of everyday life approaches pulp montage, with each, individual discovery representing just one note in a great and emerging crescendo, and each, oscillating piston imparting yet more thrust towards the overruling machine. If this was perceptible in 1909, when the fastest moving “roaring motor car” moved at 126mph (and the famous Model T moved four times slower than that), then it is certainly apparent today, when the frequency of, say, Model T-sized objects launched into space is an order of magnitude higher than merely a decade before. Or at least it should be; the inherent deficiency of speed is precisely its efficiency: the rate at which it passes us by. Blink and you will surely miss it, this, the present moment, a sudden and suddenly vanishing companion in need of great curiosity to catch at a glance. So don’t blink. The remedy for detachment in the face of swift change has always been attention, not deceleration. Looking around and ahead at what wonders suffuse us, not down and behind for all those unfilled.

5. We want to sing the man at the wheel, the ideal axis of which crosses the earth, itself hurled along its orbit.

Moral anthropocentrism (the idea that ethics concerns and originates from people) was the baby thrown out with the geometric bathwater of 16th century cosmology. True: we are not the centre of matter in existence. But true: we really are the centre of all that matters in an otherwise unfeeling and indifferent chaos. (And true: as David Deutsch has argued, we really are as mechanically influential as physics's most fundamental forces; knowledge and knowledge creation rank alongside gravity and spacetime in the macroscopic evolution of the universe.) Human autonomy over the world, “singing man at the wheel”, is the rational and virtuous corollary of our most powerful explanation, the ideal axis of which crosses not merely our planet but the entire cosmos. To infinity.

6. The poet must spend himself with warmth, glamour and prodigality to increase the enthusiastic fervour of the primordial elements.

Creative hedonism. Hell yeah.

7. Beauty exists only in struggle. There is no masterpiece that has not an aggressive character. Poetry must be a violent assault on the forces of the unknown, to force them to bow before man.

Hmm. Again with this aggression. I can twist myself to support a framing of discovery that thrives on disagreement, even conflict, for that is the basis of all Popperian thought. But I see far less value in a combative language of knowledge against ignorance, a tyrannical subjection of mystery by force. I have written elsewhere that terms such as these have contrary meanings when applied to both people and things; “forces of the unknown […] bowing to man” no more represent genuine slavery as pressing the start button on a PlayStation “controller”. Yet the central, prescriptive claim about beauty is false: beauty can also exist in harmony. No amount of violence can change that fact. Even to demand as much, with such rigid fixedness, is to gesture towards an endorsement of tyranny beyond playful irony. Hmm.

8. We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries! What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.

OK, OK, OK. I can see how this can follow from the preceding sentiments. And the language continues to dazzle. But the statements presented here discord both themselves and those sung before them. Speed and acceleration have no content. They are change and rate of change of content, respectively. So the claim that existing knowledge is unnecessary because future knowledge is possible is fallacious; future knowledge is only made possible by existing knowledge—by traditions—and the opportunity to criticise them. Declaring time and space dead, culture and heritage dead, is to declare the very mechanisms of velocity extinguished from society. The shutters will remain closed, forever, unless we maintain the hinges around which they swing. That is perhaps a strange metaphor; but this is increasingly a strange manifesto. And perhaps upon reflection, such revolutionary sentiments blossoming here were already budded in the opening statements (“courage, audacity and revolt.”) They were further endorsed in the narrative prologue introducing the list:

We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly! We must break down the gates of life to test the bolts and the padlocks! Let us go! Here is their very first sunrise on earth! Nothing equals the splendour of its red sword which strikes for the first time in our millennial darkness.

Yet more fire. I defy anyone to read these lines and remain seated, in body or spirit, let alone satisfied with whispering comforts designed to subdue. Yet this is exactly the problem. In the same way that so much contemporary writings exploit delicate language to camouflage impotence, Marinetti exerts his own literary richness to embellish a terror posing as glory. This is, I think, the universal fallacy of all utopian creeds: promising wonders to justify crimes. Consider the first and second sentences quoted above. The future holds marvels beyond present conception. Sentence one. Therefore we should destroy present conception. Sentence two. Between these two claims lies a rational distance greater than sense. I am reminded of Max Roser’s piecemeal triaxiom: “The world is awful. The world is much better. The world can be much better.” Marinetti goes further to append a fourth, disruptive clause to an already contrary series: “Therefore the world should be more awful.” I need a glass of water.

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Marinetti and his Manifesto are not the first to make this mistake. Visions of progress have always dazzled seekers of progress and steered them haphazardly towards shallows and rocks. The problem of change and stability under change has only been solved once, as recently as the 17th century, by Dutch and later English thinkers in the course of the Enlightenment. And the only philosopher to have fully appreciated this is Karl Popper. He is the only one to recognise both tradition and criticism, creativity and reason, as reliable (yet fallible) mechanisms of unbounded progress. So I do not blame Marinetti for fumbling his future here. I am not deterred yet, not yet. Those opening notes still tremble. The music still resounds. I cannot so lightly renounce my fondness towards an article so glowing with intensity. An artistic movement “emphasising dynamism, speed, technology, youth, violence, and objects such as the car, the aeroplane, and the industrial city” (Wikipedia), on both canvas and paper and in both poetry and prose.

Let’s just hope the closing remarks maintain all that colour without further acrimony.

9. We want to glorify war - the only cure for the world - militarism, patriotism, the destructive gesture of the anarchists, the beautiful ideas which kill, and contempt for woman.

Oh.

10. We want to demolish museums and libraries, fight morality, feminism and all opportunist and utilitarian cowardice.

Oh no.

11. We will sing of the great crowds agitated by work, pleasure and revolt; the multi-colored and polyphonic surf of revolutions in modern capitals: the nocturnal vibration of the arsenals and the workshops beneath their violent electric moons: the gluttonous railway stations devouring smoking serpents; factories suspended from the clouds by the thread of their smoke; bridges with the leap of gymnasts flung across the diabolic cutlery of sunny rivers: adventurous steamers sniffing the horizon; great-breasted locomotives, puffing on the rails like enormous steel horses with long tubes for bridle, and the gliding flight of aeroplanes whose propeller sounds like the flapping of a flag and the applause of enthusiastic crowds.

What time is it? Is that the sun rising? It is perhaps time I mentioned something else. 10 years after this document was published Marinetti would go on to write a second manifesto. The one he would become most famous for. The Fascist Manifesto.

Goodnight.

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Act 1 — Exposition

A man walks into a police station covered in blood. His shirt, ice-white, melts red. His face belies the massacre written on his hands. He has killed, and killed, and killed, and killed… no fewer than seven deaths, each in the image of divine reparation. Gluttony, Greed, Sloth, Lust, Pride, Envy, Wrath. The list is gruesome. There is the fat man, force fed until his stomach explodes. And the lawyer, made to pay for his self-interest in self-incised flesh. And the prostitute, fucked with a blade by an adulterous lech. And the paedophile—chained and starved and rotted while breathing. And more. And more.

The man is a monster. There is no question. He is a white collar criminal who kills by choice and with a vengeful determination maintained over years. He is exacting, meticulous, patient, and creative. He is outright morally insane (there is again no question) basing most his most mortal decrees on archaic religious superstition unworthy of medievalism let alone modernity. But he is also intelligent with an internal logic worthy of explanation, understanding, criticism, and rebuke.

But by far the man’s most terrible feature is his style. He is an artist, make no mistake, a painter who sketches with violence and whose portraits hang like vandalised corpses in damnable protest. There is no questioning the aesthetic effectiveness of Dantesque judgement encoded in sacrifice, coloured in sangre, and staged in a city that never stops raining. Seven sins, seven days, seven deaths. Seldom has a killer had the procedural discipline let alone the creative vision to construct such an opus of murderous form. (Kemper is a hack!) And seldom have they combined such sickening vanity with genuine talent: not merely does he invite us to witness his crimes, he dares us not to appreciate them in all their intricate structure. (“What I've done is going to be puzzled over, and studied, and followed... forever.”) Because he is exactly right: we can’t. His arrogance is only matched by his brilliance—equal measures genius, idiot, master, moron; he is beauty and virtue in conflict, form and content in paradox; style and evil and order and chaos.

At least he would be. If he existed.

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Act 2 — Conflict

Many will have guessed it: the man outlined above is a fiction, his victims are a fiction, his oeuvre: fiction. Many will have also recognised his particular case as that appearing in a film released in 1995. (I will not name the work, to avoid spoilers, but you can find it easily enough using the date and description above.) I will however name in isolation two men important to the analysis: John Doe and Andrew Kevin Walker. The killer described and the screenwriter who scribed him. Because between these two men lies an ethical vastness defining one of our most underappreciated ethical miracles: the miracle of drama.

Of Monsters and Men

The choice is simple. If one wants to create the artwork outlined above there are only two options.

1. Be John Doe. Torture and kill innocent people to protest impiety.

2. Be Andrew Kevin Walker. Write a screenplay where John Doe does these things.

In the first case, a minimum of seven people must die, in terrible agony, and in support of an aesthetics hijacked by wickedness. In the latter: one person must sit at his typewriter and simulate wickedness; no one must suffer beyond the odd carpal tunnel; and aesthetics acts in agreement with ethics to create both a great piece of art and a gentle night’s sleep. The measure between these two scenarios is the measure of all dramatic virtue: entertainment from evil. Not voyeuristic—because no one is harmed—and in the majority of cases morally opposed to the horror on screen. This holds true for our case study. Despite many popular misreadings of the film as endorsing Doe’s terrible work—the opposite is true. The film uses the killer's structural genius to refute his moral ignorance; it is a tragedy, yes, but with a veiled optimism resisting destruction. The same contrast holds for the men. Unlike Doe, Walker demands our respect without the burden of qualifiers. Indeed, every single artistic tribute applies to the writer as much as the killer; but none of the moral scorn can be levelled against his imagining of a chaos harmless by design. In reality we are reliably thankful for those narrative artists whose works challenge us most with conflicts both physical and abstract. They are fun, and stimulating, and educational, and so often therapeutic against genuine suffering in everyday life. On every conceivable level the dramatisation of conflict takes the worst things in reality and makes the best things in fiction: terror, horror, sorrow, heartbreak—into laughter, excitement, comfort, release. Men stand where monsters stood. And audiences are transformed from powerless victims damaged by trauma into spirited critics kindled by challenge. Drama and its understandings are nothing short of moral and aesthetic alchemy. A miracle written on paper and film.

Act 3 — Rising Action

Drama Reconsidered

I should clarify. My use of drama in this argument is somewhat atypical. The concept incorporates at least three distinct yet overlapping uses of the term in common discussion. They are as follows.

1. Conflict. A disagreement. Elementary courses in creative writing will outline the skeleton of story progression: exposition, action, climax, resolution. But the muscle and fat and lifeblood connecting such tissues is fundamentally strife. In our case this takes the form of a cat and mouse relationship between killer and cops. One party wants to end life. The other wants to save it. The conflict is clear. And beneath the obvious text lies veiled contentions between the natures of sin, virtue, dejection, and hope. Conflict in this sense is the singular content of dramaturgy. Yet it is insufficient alone for its unique moral value.

2. Fiction. The thing did not happen. As explored above, fiction is the necessary requirement for many of the ethical transformations conjured by drama. The most meaningful difference between Walker and Doe is the absence or presence of violence in beauty. If the thing happens in reality you are wicked. If it happens in imagination you are at worst a bit weird. (Indeed, Walker is somewhat rare amongst horror writers to so successfully distance himself from the content of his narrative—more on that below.) Only in confluence with the third dramatic tenet do most fictional conflicts emerge into triumph and most of their architects transform into heroes.

3. Irony. Saying one thing and meaning another. It is important to distinguish this from the traditional “dramatic irony” developed in ancient Greek tragedies and made famous by pantomimes and Scooby Doo serials. (A literary technique where the audience has more knowledge than the characters in the story i.e. “He’s behind you!”) Irony in this context favours the more general definition of conveying meaning with contrary language. And while fiction itself does contain an inherent irony of the structure “happened” / “not happened”, irony in this context extends further to the propositional contents of dramatised narratives. John Doe argues that the world is evil and that only through violence can it change towards good. The film, by staging Doe as such, argues the opposite. There is an irony inherent to most (but not all) great fictional conflicts from Hamlet to Harry Potter to Thanos to Doe. It is with irony that stories convey their true meanings and it is with this final feature that drama is realised.

Act 4 - Climax

The Principle of Drama

Conflict, fiction, irony. Taken together, these three concepts alone generate beauty from foulness and virtue from sin. And using these elements we can formalise a principle of drama in ethics more broadly.

That which is evil in reality can be good in simulation.

Of course, there are no guarantees. Many stories fail, their conflicts are contrived or overblown, their fictions are strange or illogical, their ironies are trite or obvious. Or perhaps their very motivations for existence are misplaced; or perhaps the methods of their production are problematic. I chose perhaps the best example of drama in action because all three components—conflict, irony, drama—as well as those external factors I have just listed, are radically successful. But the principle maintains that merely the capacity—not the guarantee—of ethical value belongs to simulation. There can indeed be immoral stories. For a variety of reasons. The principle merely states that any action, however evil, can be simulated as some fictional conflict, enjoyed as art, and considered to be moral. That no action is beyond the metamorphosis. Another reason why I chose the specific tale of Walker and Doe is because theirs is an evil superlative in magnitude. Rape, torture, murder, infanticide—nothing is beyond such singular devilry. Yet if Doe can be dramatised anything can. There is no fundamental limit to the ethical distance measured between reality, fiction, writer, and words. And by conjecturing a dramaturgy unbounded in its content, the principle also alludes to a future of simulated conflicts far greater than our own. More moral people can write more immoral stories and become more moral for it. This is not to claim that the content of all narrative arts can be reduced to the measure of their simulated evils. Indeed, many great stories contain little conflict, depict real events, or display meaning using direct methods (or do all three). It is merely the claim that all actions are, in principle, legitimate in drama. And that that is good.

Act 5 - Falling Action

Drama Applied

The extent of the influence of a drama in society is not yet appreciated. In truth it extends from writing and cinema to politics and sex. Here are some quick-fire applications of drama as I have outlined in everyday discourse, culture, entertainment, and art. This list is by no means exhaustive; there are undoubtedly more examples—but it illustrates the principle in both action and extent.

• Horror

As explored above, horror is without a doubt the starkest example of drama. Some of the worst things ever witnessed have been witnessed on screen. They never happened. Cormac Mccarthy, like Walker, never hurt a fly in the writing of “Blood Meridian”. And when Ruggero Deodato, director of the 1980 found footage horror “Cannibal Holocaust”, was arrested on suspicion of murdering his cast—he paraided them unharmed in Italian court to confirm both his innocence and his genius of craft. Every case is the same. From Mary Shelley to James Wan horror creators play at the terrible to work at the good. And we rightfully love them for it.

• Tragedy

If horror is fear without danger, tragedy is sorrow without loss. The exact same logic applies to every negative emotion in sentimental art in combination with drama: that which is bad can become good. Watching perhaps Ingmar Bergman; or reading perhaps John Keats; or hearing perhaps Elliott Smith—we are indeed made to feel sad. But the sorrow from tragedy, I would argue, is equally as harmful as the fear from horror. Negatively so. In truth, sentiment in art is so often soothing to those miseries in the real world, and does indeed form the basis of multiple schools of therapy. It is exciting to consider the future of such techniques with advancements in virtual reality. The art of the art cry is only just beginning.

• Action

“It’s not violence—it’s action!” This is literally true. For the same reasons outlined above, violence in drama, like both horror and tragedy, is fake. Tarantino films contain precisely zero real violence against real people. (Save perhaps Leo’s hand.) Yet they contain a great deal of simulated action between characters. This is precisely what early pundits criticising “violent" media (“Mortal Kombat”, “Grand Theft Auto”—and basically every other video game) failed to understand. That which is evil in reality can be made good in fiction. We still see this today, with various dramatised music genres (hip hop, heavy metal) ostensibly “glorifying violence” and demonised by the media. This is false. The violence espoused in modern gangster rap is largely performative; and the Satanism expressed in modern hard rock is, for the most part, an ironic expression of hate by some of the nicest men in society.

• Sex

Without going into too much detail, drama is everywhere in sex. BDSM is one great simulated conflict using pain to spark pleasure and shame to speak love. When the person you trust most in the world degrades and belittles you; when they restrain and denigrate you—that betrayal, within the transformative auras of dramatised irony, is as much an admission of love as poetry or flowers. Not all sex is dramatic in this way, of course; “making love” represents a sincere alignment of both spiritual and physical communion without the need for contrary action. But “role play”, “kink”, and other forms of sexualised play are as functionally dramatic as television or theatre.

The Dramatic Fallacy

I have explored some of the positive applications of drama. There does however exist an unfortunate misfiring of the concept that inverts its effects. The dramatic fallacy states.

That which is true in simulation is true in reality.

In short, the dramatic fallacy is the dramatic principle with both fiction and irony removed. Only conflict remains. So much of our psychology operates under this misconception. Journalism, activism, politics, pop-culture—even our most influential philosophies make the fundamental error of mistaking ironic, simulated conflicts for sincere, realistic ones. Consider disaster movies. What are intended as frivolous fantasies of globalised destruction are interpreted as proofs of man’s fated end. Indeed, a great deal of “doomer” dispositions can be traced back to our love for the climactic; yet removed from its context the miracle is wasted. It is the equivalent of taking horror at face value and agreeing with Doe—or action as real danger and running from his projection. (This is precisely what happened, in fact, in the case of the train frontispiecing this essay: audiences literally fled from the image for fear of collision.)

The purpose of drama is to take the worst of reality and make the best of imagination—to overcome evil, not succumb to it. By taking art literally we invert its great virtue and legitimise violence in everyday life. This is most evident in the dramatic fallacy’s most terrible application: copycat killers. There are multiple cases of real life psychopaths taking inspiration from art in the course of their crimes, stylising their sadism in trashy homage. (It is easy to picture someone copying Doe; somewhat less easy to picture them succeeding.) There are even dramatised stories about such killings—”Human Centipede 2”, for example, whose meta-narrative stages a real world man recreating the myriapod horrors witnessed in its predecessor. By far a lesser work than those explored above—it is at least a triumph of principle over fallacy.

Act 6 - Resolution

The lesson is this.

1. Drama is fictional disagreement with contrary meaning made up of conflict, fiction, and irony.

2. Conflict makes stories exciting; fiction makes stories safe; and irony makes stories good.

3. The best dramas, across all media, combine all three elements to stylise simulated violence and contrast its real world practice.

4. In doing so, it allows for pleasant exploration of potentially dangerous ideas.

5. The principle of drama states that all actions are able to be dramatised in a moral fashion, and that the measure of their normative value can be expressed as the distance between character and author.

6. The dramatic fallacy is the inversion of the dramatic principle, realising simulated evil.

There is, I maintain, no question: drama as an ethical artefact is sorely undervalued in modern discourse. Popular entertainment is wrongly dismissed as shallow escapism when it is, in reality, one of our most powerful tools of moral discovery. One need only choose: Walker or Doe? A man, walking into a police station covered in blood; or a man, sitting as his typewriter covered in ink? The answer is simple. The show must go on.

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“One short sleep past, we wake eternally,

And death shall be no more; Death, thou shalt die.”

— John Donne

I am late to this but that is fitting: a 14-year-old girl, who tragically died of cancer in 2016, won a legal battle allowing for her corpse to be cryogenically frozen. She is, by all accounts, dead—“sick dead”—as William Carlos Williams wrote. Yet her light body was taken into the hands of scientists and rapidly cooled in a process known as “cryoconservation”. The wild hope is that brain structure can be preserved and eventually recovered with advanced medical technology and at a time when her cancer can be safely removed. She will be thawed, and then cured, and then free to go about her day—representing perhaps the Platonic ideal for all cryonics patients: a second chance.

The feasibility of cryonics is not of particular interest here; the underlying mechanisms of preservation and restoration are largely uncontroversial in the most meaningful sense (those claiming that information processes cannot, in principle, be paused and subsequently replayed are making some powerful claims about contemporary physics—and sleep). Nor are the legal details important: the judge said that his ruling “was not about the rights or wrongs of cryonics but about a dispute between parents over the disposal of their daughter's body.” (This does, however, signal the ongoing subjugation of children in modern society—yet another pathology waiting to be cured.)

Instead, I want to explore the spirit and ethical poetry surrounding medicine's most lambasted moonshot. Why do people want it? Why do people hate it? Why have hundreds of people, for going on one hundred years, signed away their remains to an arctic entombment? Why, after falling asleep for the final time, should we want to wake up?

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The 14-year-old girl, known only as “JS”, answered this question. She wrote to the judge a very short letter outlining her reasons for fighting her case.

"I have been asked to explain why I want this unusual thing done.

I am only 14 years old and I don't want to die but I know I am going to die.

I think being cryopreserved gives me a chance to be cured and woken up - even in hundreds of years' time.

I don't want to be buried underground.

I want to live and live longer and I think that in the future they may find a cure for my cancer and wake me up.

I want to have this chance.

This is my wish."

I find these lines quietly remarkable. In fewer than one hundred words a teenager reveals the very spirits of grief, fear, pain, and futility—but also hope, courage, love, and possibility. The first line is almost impertinent: why should I need to explain my right to life? (Once again, the authorship of a child is insulted where an adult’s would be sovereign.) She counters with stoic self-awareness in the face of mortality: “I know I am going to die”; and heroic self-esteem in the light of survival: “I don't want to die.”

There is an understated music to the brevity here: her statements are short—blunt even—composed perhaps with the courtroom in mind; yet they secure themselves as delicate strings fastening a burden far outweighing natural fibres. (Life itself.) Beneath that pragmatism lies romantic fiction—“even in hundreds of years' time”; and, beneath that, realist horror—“buried underground”. JS continues in that most powerful tradition of contrasting life in all its noble movement against death in all its shameful decay: mind against body; night against day.

But perhaps the most powerful line is the fifth. The first instance of “I want” after a procession of “I have”, “I am”, “I think” and “I don’t”... JS now flaunts a desire to spite her despair; she fixes her gaze staunchly ahead to undermine its close. And what does she want? “To live and live longer.” Life. And more life. This is her wish.

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The story of JS, like that of cryonics more broadly, is a powerful symbol of existential hope. Reading it eight years later it is no less powerful to the spirit and heart—and JS’s body, unlike almost every other body committed to ground or to fire since hers was to ice, is no less primed for revival. This is the singular miracle of biomedical stasis: we are poor and we are ignorant now, yet we are capable of being not so tomorrow. We have pox and we have cancer now, yet we are capable of having vaccines the next day. There are no guarantees, of course; the “criticism-from-faith-in-progress” (so faithfully raised against preservation) is a fallacious one. The case for a suspended longevity need not be delusional; it need not go further than the desire to survive. But when it does, it rests on the universal arguments for solubility—one of our most fundamental laws of nature. Those who freeze themselves are not fearful halfwits pleading for miracles and furnishing huxters with the savings of their families—they are spirited heroes acting heroically on the rational ethics of our best explanations. Arguments to the contrary are, without hyperbole, arguments for omnicide. For the death of every person ever born, and yet to be born, and the rejection of their will to live and live longer.

This story is a happy one. A young girl has won the right to determine her own future and its publicity might allow for more to do the same. And even if she fails, she will have done so advertising a thirst for existence when so many her age have only a fear of it. And if she succeeds? I can hardly imagine it. The moment that first person wakes up, and is healed, all of history will shed its tawdry disguise and reveal itself as the torrid horror of illness and pain that so many have furied to behold and so many more have failed to survive. John Donne, who epigraphs this essay, said as much when he called for death to “be not proud, though some have called thee / Mighty and dreadful, for thou are not so”. He did so with the light of Christian salvation in mind—yet I maintain that the most powerful rebuke of sorry mortality is the naturalistic marriage of wonder and reason. Death as something inescapable is mere inductive error. The past does not resemble the present. And all those who have died and never awoken might one day yet do so. This—this is my wish.

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“For Godsake hold your tongue, and let me love.”

— John Donne

Valentine’s Day is good, actually. It isn’t necessarily consumerist, and it certainly isn’t necessarily anti-romantic. It is almost certainly good and almost certainly romantic, I think. Obviously romantic, I think. But I think, more than that, it is, precisely because it is so thought so wrongly to be so bad, the best champion of celebration—those days that celebrate good, and joy, and love. Love. That is what Valentine’s Day is about, of course. Love. Romantic Love. The creative and interactive appreciation of another person, another world, Andromeda perhaps; and theirs of yours; Andromeda of The Milky Way; of you, perhaps; and back again. The fall and the fall and necessarily so.

Yes. Of course. Love is everyday. But evil takes so much pleasure in its concentration that I think we should take more pleasure in its protest. Every angstrom of a smile of existence in a day is a birthday. That feeling shared and socialised is New Year’s Eve. We say “good morning” because that is the way we say “I’m glad you woke up.” And we say, “I love you, today, more than the last, and lasting as long as I’m lucky enough to call you mine,” because love is a love best felt like a bullet to the head and to the heart, not a whisper through a window from a distance. Feel it today precisely so you can feel it every day. And send a fucking card, you idiot, and buy them flowers, and kiss them. Kiss them forever and today.

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I bled, pissed, and came for the future of personhood today. What did you do?

I donated sperm. I sent an email, received a reply, booked an appointment, attended 15 minutes early, returned 20 minutes later. All I did was sit in a clinical, liminal cubicle and fill out some paperwork. They didn’t even ask for ID. About 300 steps and 300 million cells and one anonymous family gains a person—a child—and with them the greatest relationship known to meaning. Society as a whole gains a mind, beaming, born into a love decided and sustained over months and years, outstanding a sterile nature unfit to choose a thing. I would call it effective genetic altruism if that were not desolate slander. Facilitating the manufacture of people is the single greatest investment open to men of fertile age. The ROI on human beings is, in principle, unbounded, and the risk equates to train fare. What are you waiting for? Every fecund young futurist should be drafting that email, receiving a reply, booking an appointment—and reaping the rewards of a future literally sown by their own virility. Do it selfishly. Do it so that more people might innovate your successive delights, and, in the process, benefit in light of them. Do it optimistically. Do it because people are the fire in the dark of indifferent nothing. Do it forgetfully. Do it for three months and then return to life knowing nothing more than the fact you have populated it.

Do it—donate sperm—do it now—save the world.

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“Oh, I know Hamlet. And what he might say with irony, I say with conviction!”

— Jean-Luc Picard, Star Trek

Blaise Pascal never met William Shakespeare.

He was born in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death, into a France largely ignorant of Hamlet and Macbeth and that singular combination of lyricism and drama unique to the Bard. (Shakespeare’s works would not be widely translated into French until 1745, and would not achieve popularity until the following century.)

Pascal was a physicist, not a playwright; his primary literary output was theological, not thespian; and his most famous work, the posthumously published Pensées (Thoughts), appears closer in structure to contemporary microblogging than leather-bound folios. His style is antiquated and verbose. His tonality is irregular and paradoxical. His content is oscillating and borderline-schizophrenic. (Seriously. What kind of rambling freak writes about apologism, parrots, and concupiscence all on the same page? Pascal did.)

And yet, to me, Blaise Pascal is a paragon of Shakespearian humanism: noble in reason, infinite in faculty, express and admirable. These words of Hamlet’s, uttered in satire, were never designed to volunteer tribute—they were the desperate pangs of an intolerable virtue forever disconnected from everyday hardship. And while I agree with Captain Picard’s passionate inversion of the dramatised sentiment (taking the lines at face value as the greatest endorsements of people in literature), it is this slippery contradiction itself that connects both Pascal and Shakespeare with the orbiting natures of intentional progress. People are both wise and ignorant, virtuous and wicked, beautiful and foul. Our power is indivisible from our impotence, and our potential is inseparable from our constraint. This is the truth Hamlet failed to see: the rejection of utopianism does not condemn us to dystopianism. Quite the opposite. Pascal knew exactly this, and wrote as much himself. Within his Pensées lies a suspiciously Hamletean decree on the nature of man whose style and format fraternise plagiarism*—but whose deeper contents refute and supersede Shakespeare’s own to detail a portrait of man unbounded in its hope, ambition, glory, and light. Within these two quotes (and the distances between them) exist every facet of fallible good. The beauty and virtue of everything in 111 words.

*Again, Pascal likely never read Shakespeare. The dual discovery, if at all connected, is most attributable to their shared influence from Montaigne. Or just coincidence.

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In the spirit of Jean-Luc Picard I want to discard literary contexts and analyse the propositional content of the words in a vacuum. Both quotes carry distinct (and distinctly contradictory) moral arguments. Both are undeniably beautiful, yet one holds more truth. Here is Hamlet, first, with the qualifier excised:

“What a piece of work is a man, How noble in reason, how infinite in faculty, In form and moving how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel, In apprehension how like a god, The beauty of the world, The paragon of animals.”

Here we see Hamlet speaking to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern following the death of his father. He is disillusioned, and recounts the spiritual vacuum through which he now sees the world. Some lines before these, he confounds every wonderist description of life with denial: the Earth—”this goodly frame”—is reduced to a “sterile promontory”; the sky, “this brave o’erhanging firmament”, is abjected: “[A] majestical roof fretted with golden fire,” rots away to reveal “a foul and pestilent congregation of vapours.” (This is reminiscent of Stephen Hawking’s physicalist summarisation of humanity as “chemical scum” i.e. missing the point.) But this is context. I digress.

(Strike that. Quick tangent: former crypto tycoon SBF recently went viral for his Bayesian analysis of Shakespeare and literary canon more broadly. He argued that a man born in 1564, when the world population languished around 450 million and literacy rates around 15 percent, is very unlikely to be a good writer, let alone the greatest of all time. (This coming from a man who went on record stating that all books are failed blogs.) The problem with judging Shakespeare by population statistics alone is precisely that: you can do so without having read a single line of Shakespeare (or without being able to read at all). I actually did a similar analysis of canonical greatness in art with inverted logic: we know, by every literary explanation, that Shakespeare et al. are exemplary. The explicanda is: how did they do it? Not: why are we lying to ourselves? BUT THIS IS CONTEXT. I double digress.)

Here is Pascal’s declaration, included in Pensées section VII, Morality and Doctrine. Once again, I am purposefully ignoring the specific criticism of sceptic philosophy, and the overarching apologist sentiment, that defines the chapter and collection more broadly. The pronouncement itself holds so much philosophical weight independent of the context as to justify its own analysis. (Enough, even, to epigraph Steven Pinker’s optimist tour de force The Better Angels of Our Nature—my introduction to Pascal.) He states:

“What a Chimera is man! What a novelty, a monster, a chaos, a contradiction, a prodigy! Judge of all things, an imbecile worm; depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt; the glory and refuse of the universe.”

The similarities are undeniable. I was first made aware of the connection by friend and musical theorist Dorian K Bandy. He tweeted me:

Yet, at closer inspection, the two soliloquies could scarcely be more different. Hamlet’s words are exclusively exalting: man is said to be “noble”, “express”, “admirable”, “infinite”. We are comparable to both angels and gods (a tantalisingly heretical sentiment in 1603), and are set apart from our biological heritage as something altogether more fair. Pascal, on the other hand, counterpoints every tribute with a disproof: we are a novelty, yes, but we are also a chaos; we are grand—the “Judge of all things”—but we are also small: “an imbecile worm”. His passion for the contrary borders frenzy. Where Hamlet floats across commas like corollas in wind—embodying within his prose the sort of extraterrestrial grace usually reserved for Shakespeare’s greatest verse—Pascal is manic. He begins with a cry: “What a chimera is man!” Shocking from the first, he sketches people as both beast and myth. Terrible and false. He goes on to interleave all the worship of Hamlet with the slander of Abraham: annelid and excrement. Is this nonsense? How can one be both prodigy and monster, glory and refuse? Is Pascal’s chimerical man itself an illusion, or is there some higher wisdom in his oscillating faith? Is contradiction the key to progress?

Beginners or Beginnings or Both?

Pascal is right: people really are both. Necessarily so. The lyrics of Hamlet are only half of the story; they are the conclusion to Pascal’s argument: in order to be great, we must first be small. In order to be glory, we must first be refuse. In order to begin, heroically, the journey towards an unbounded wisdom, we must first stand, modestly, at the beginning of an infinite ignorance. Pascal’s inversions, at first glance desolate, reveal themselves as optimist talismans for a future whose prospects derive from its flaws. Others have said similar. Goethe, Pascal’s 18th century equal in sheer diversity of achievement, believed that man, in his quest for growth and self-education, should embrace internal contradiction as the engine for renewal. This very German philosophy (“Bildung”) led him to state: “Live always as if life was just beginning.” 

Even the title of this essay itself, adapted from Alexander Pope’s fallibilist aphorism “To err is human; to forgive, divine" speaks to a condition where mistakes, not successes, take precedence. Indeed, only once we have erred can we be forgiven. This philosophy, common enough throughout history yet seldom understood, was at last formalised by the philosopher Karl Popper. Unlike the traditional dispositive rationalities of early Enlightenment figures, whose express directives were to justify knowledge and answer questions with a utopian finality, Popper’s opposing “critical rationalism” sought only to correct existing mistakes in imperfect thought. He was building on the traditions laid out by pre-Socratic Ionian philosophers—most notably Xenophanes—whose poetical epistemics “But as for certain truth, no man has known it, / Nor shall he know it, neither of the gods / Nor yet of all the things of which I speak. / For even if by chance he were to utter / The final truth, he would himself not know it: / For all is but a woven web of guesses” would lay the foundations for Popperian thought millennia hence.

In his critical rationalism, Popper carried the doctrine that all endeavours are liable to error to its logical conclusions: nothing can be certain; everything is guesswork; and the unit of human progress is precisely this ignorance that affords us improvement (“Problems”). He did so all while rejecting postmodernism, I might add (as Pascal also would have) maintaining that truth exists albeit unknowable to us with guarantee. In his Pensées, Pascal anticipated our greatest epistemology by 300 years with the lines “depository of truth, and sewer of error and doubt,” and went on some paragraphs later to add: “[Man is] incapable of absolute ignorance and of certain knowledge.” This is raw optimism.

Deutsch’s Taijitu

As Blaise Pascal advanced William Shakespeare, David Deutsch continues to advance Karl Popper. In his two popular science books (The Fabric of Reality and The Beginning of Infinity—buy them now) the physicist applies and expounds critical rationalism with illimitable reach. The basis for his optimism can be rendered into two short edicts.

1. Problems are inevitable.

2. Problems are soluble.

The metaphor Deutsch uses to illustrate these statements is that of two stone tablets. He does so to emphasise their importance—an endeavour I support. Yet, in light of Pascal’s vacillating disruptions, I now view marble and its fixity altogether unfit to immortalise our most dynamic truths. In order to represent the opposing-yet-complementary natures of conjecture and criticism, inevitability and solubility, ignorance and progress—we must take inspiration from more fluid traditions. Progress is a taijitu.

Behold. Many will recognise this symbol from Eastern philosophy: Yin and Yang. Indeed, dualism is the veil draping this essay. Over Hamlet’s anguish and Pascal’s rebuke, Goethe’s improvement and Pope’s forgiveness, Popper’s knowledge and Deutsch’s optimism. In place of stones, cold and immutable, there is motion, darkling and bright: Yin, negative, refuse; and Yang, positive, glory. The one contains the other and the both transcend the whole. It is in this sense that Pascal, not Hamlet, succeeds in outlining a vision of mankind worthy of Shakespeare. By erring divine. And it is only through this—his frenzy—I would argue, that we might hope to achieve it.

And yet…

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Congratulations! You are now the proud owner of your very own slave—a human person bound to your every whim. Tell him to hop and he will hop. Tell him to stop and he will stop. Tell him to plough and he will dutifully plough, day in, day out, until the day that he dies or the day that you tell him otherwise. He is strong and he is healthy, with four good limbs, two thick arms, two strong legs, ten dexterous fingers for the finer work, a good breeding and well nourished. Not quite so strong as an ox, no. Not quite so strong as a horse, either. Not quite so strong as a mule, even, but cleverer than all by half. He can lead an ox, ride a horse, work a mule. Yes. This slave is good. A good investment. Congratulations! You are a moron.

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The moral ruin of slavery is well known. Involuntary servitude and its rejection are so widespread in modern society that they no longer register as virtuous to signal. Water is wet and slavery is wicked; to announce it out loud is the sort of redundancy more likely to elicit suspicion than applause (“Why would you even need to say that?”) This is a sign of extraordinary moral progress. But there remains one logical spectre haunting the memory of our worst institution: slavery works. Implicit to some of our best criticisms of historical bondage is the tacit endorsement of its root economics: slavery is so evil, in large part, because it has been so successful; it emerged with biology itself and persisted for billions of years, industrialised by man for all of civilisation and individually practised long before. That alone stands as evidence of its sordid utility. Slavery is ugly, yes. But it is also effective. Just ask Caesar.

There is some truth here. Having people do things you want is convenient, and one man with ten slaves is undoubtedly more capable than one man alone. Slaves are like additional limbs, extending our reach. But the claim of captive utility goes beyond simple mechanics: it argues that slavery is optimal, or, at the very least, more productive than the alternatives (trade). This is the economic myth of slavery.

Thomas Newcomen Innovates Abolition

To understand why slavery is so uneconomical, we must first explore its proposed utility. Both historical and modern slave economics are grounded in labour: work and locomotion and toil and drudgery. Before taking up the pulpit and picking up his pen, Frederick Douglass worked as a caulker. Before leading armies against the Roman Republic, Spartacus fought for entertainment. The poverty of servitude lies in exactly this: reducing people to tractors. Dumb robots. The argument against such practices rests on the counterfactual that such people, employed for nothing more than their physical ability to apply force, do work, pick cotton, plough fields—but never to exercise their own will, solve their own problems, innovate their own happiness—would be better off doing quite literally anything different. For both themselves and their masters. The productive argument in favour of liberty is bilateral; helping others is the most powerful strategy towards helping oneself. The inverse also holds true: in disenfranchising one’s neighbour of their personhood, reducing them to base physical mechanics, the slaver deprives himself of a potential partner and collaborator. What he might gain twofold in muscle mass he will lose tenfold in grey matter. And everything muscles can do, minds can do better. Just ask Thomas Newcomen.

Thomas Newcomen was a British inventor and ironmonger. In 1712, he manufactured the “atmospheric engine”—the world’s first practical fuel-burning engine. He did so in direct response to the relative insufficiency of horsepower in tin mining. In just 10 years of trials he innovated a mechanical replacement for physical work. It would lay the foundations for future innovators including James Watt, Newcomen’s direct successor, and later John Froelich, who, in 1892, manufactured the first operational tractor—with iron and without the capacity for boredom.

The Newcomen lesson is simple. Partners are always more abounding than properties. People are more powerful than slaves. If a man can automate his own labour his value is more than the measure of that labour. The body of Thomas Newcomen certainly had some narrow utility in performing blunt physical tasks—just as Albert Einstein’s, Marie Curie’s, Steve Jobs’s and Leonardo Da Vinci’s did. But their minds—properly enabled with freedom, suitably ignited by zeal—had far greater potential. Newcomen’s case is most striking in that, being afforded his own personhood, he directly superseded his own mechanical capacity. Other examples are less elegant but equally stark. Physics and music and business and philosophy; the products of people’s unbounded creativity weighted against their limbs. The first cost of slavery is precisely the measure between these investments: perspiration and inspiration. The difference in potential returns is impossible to overstate: the difference between 100 watts and all the fruits of open-ended progress: art and science and engineering and tech; fellowship and scholarship and friendship and love. In the transatlantic slave trade alone there were an estimated 12.5 million slaves bought and sold and worked and whipped. Any one of those people could have anticipated Newcomen by centuries. Any one of them could have invented the tractor. Instead, they were forced to be tractors. To the immeasurable detriment of everyone else.

Slavery Is Solipsism

The mechanical criticism is just one of many undermining slavery. There is a second equally powerful refutation: sameness. The twin diseconomy of servitude relates to one mind controlling others. By commanding obedience we gain physical extension of will only by sacrificing diversity of will. The slaver with ten slaves is one mind in place of eleven, and the tyrant with a nation is one in place of millions. The measure of this loss is nothing short of solipsism: the rejection of creative minds set apart from one’s own; the diminishment of debate and discourse; the forfeiture of criticism and rebuke. Slavery, taken to its logical conclusions, is far and beyond bad economics—it is bad philosophy, the loss of every engine of reason. It is for this reason that the myth of foundational slavery—the notion that the benefits of modern civilisation are built primarily (and indeed exclusively) off the backs of slaves and their brutalised labours—is false. Every decade wasted dehumanising people for the exploitation of their muscles, to the detriment of their minds, and every moment spent bending one man’s passions to the tyranny of another’s, represents possible centuries’ worth of progress squandered for the meagre ambitions of fumbling idiots. Men who would use a MacBook to hammer a nail and think themselves industrious.

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Hulk is stronger than Juggernaut. Flash is faster than Quicksilver. Galactus overpowers Thanos. Brainiac outsmarts Ultron.

Goku defeats Saitama. Every. Single. Time.

Comic Book comparisons like these are fun and dramatic exercises in explanatory reasoning. In our support for one superhero over another, we leverage arguments about their powers and weaknesses, their deeds and misdeeds, in a comparative conflict of conjectures and criticisms. Everything from muscle mass to mummy issues are considered in the study, and what first presents itself as adolescent bickering enhances towards a genuine intellectualism. Entire book series have been published on the subject of natural battle hierarchies, and YouTube is saturated by channels devoted to cartoon (but never cartoonish) scholarship. Like so many other ostensibly downmarket artforms, shonen battle narratives conceal a more elevated wisdom: intricate combat mechanics, multilayered worldbuilding, spirited characterisation—all the trappings of serious political allegory, sci-fi abstraction, and philosophical substance worthy of close reading. The costumes are all latex and laser beams, but the real power lies within.

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Of the many playground matchups commissioned between classrooms, none inspire quite so much passion as DC Comics’ two most celebrated titles. Many of us will have heard the hypothetical:

“Who would win in a fight… Batman or Superman?”

The question is so arousing because it appears so absurd. Pitting Bruce Wayne against Clark Kent is about as balanced as pitting Jar Jar Binks against the Death Star. Batman is a master of acrobatics and hand to hand combat—a billionaire ninja trained by immortal assassins. But he is only human. Blood, sweat, skin, bone, flesh, brains: human. Not an advanced human nor an enhanced human nor a mutated human nor a metahuman. He is a standard issue homosapien with fewer superpowers than Arm-Fall-Off-Boy. And while he is undoubtedly fast and strong and skilled and stealthy; while he would claim the UFC title with both hands tied behind his back; while he can purchase any tropical island and stockpile what amounts to his own private army… Batman would die if you hit him really hard on the head with a hammer. He would die if you ran him over with a Toyota Prius. He would die if you shot him with a .22-calibre bullet at point-blank range. Both Bruce Wayne and Batman alike would die if they contracted tetanus or fell from a stepladder or lived for over 100 years. Both Bruce Wayne and Batman, it would seem, are very easily defeated.

Contrast this to Superman. Few comic book characters have a list of accomplishments half as extensive—nor half as extravagant—as the Man of Steel. Fewer still have faced him in battle and won. Superman has lifted 200 quintillion tonnes with one hand. He has bench pressed the Earth and ripped apart continents. He has defeated Doomsday and Darkseid and Black Adam and General Zod. In the Silver Age of comics, before writers had to adhere to an established sense of scale across multiple continuities, Superman dragged 100 billion stars behind his back and destroyed a solar system with a sneeze. More recently, in 1998’s DC One Million, he lived inside the sun for 15,000 years and broke through the multiverse itself.

Compared to your average Gothomite henchman, Batman is formidable. But compared to Superman, he is a flea. How is it, then, that the two heroes have gone toe to toe no fewer than 16 times in the comics alone? How do the writers justify the contest? And how can it be that Batman has won five individual bouts against the Sun God from Smallville?

Prep Time To Die

Evaluating Batman on his physical attributes is like evaluating Lex Luther on the hazard of his shoe size. The secret to Batman’s formidable record lies not within his strength but his strategy—his combination of research and resources that allow him to surmount any given challenge. This emphasis has altered the popular form of the original fixture from Superman and Batman to Superman and…

✨ Batman with prep time ✨

The central idea is that given enough forethought, Batman can identify weaknesses in any opponent and exploit them to his benefit. He has both the intellect and the technology to augment his relatively meagre “power level” to defeat any conceivable opponent. This is true of many genius characters in both fiction and reality (more on that below); indeed, all of the arguments for a prepared Bruce Wayne can equally apply to his Marvel counterpart Tony Stark (“Genius, billionaire, playboy, philanthropist.”) Both Batman and Iron Man use science and engineering to credibly rival deities—Stark with his suits, “Veronica” and “Model 22”; and Wayne with his “Agamemno Contingency”, an analysis of the Justice League with the express design to incapacitate or, in the last resort, kill his fellow crusaders. How? With a working model of their psychologies, phylogenies, physiologies and physical profiles; with a deep and reaching scientific knowledge of the operating mechanisms and how to manipulate them. Martian Man Hunter? Fire: magnesium nanite virus for airborne ignition. Green Lantern? Belief: offensively induced posthypnotic blindness. Plastic Man? Ice: freezing by liquid nitrogen injection.

Even Superman himself must submit to the study. One Kryptonite pellet and the steel will distort.

Batman Is People

With his contingencies, Batman is playing the same game as the schoolboys opening this article: imagination interleaved with critical analysis: creativity yielding hard-to-vary explanations about far-reaching phenomena.

The difference is a couple billion dollars and the ambition to apply it. But at its core, a Batman supremacy speaks to a more profound realisation: people are significant. With knowledge and technology we can influence the environment as much as heroes and monsters alike; with time and determination we can solve any problem advanced by natural law. If Superman can reasonably be likened to the Sun (large, bright, towering O so high above us), then Batman can be likened to the Earth. Civilisation itself. And while our star remains dominant in both energy and brilliance, mankind extends its potential with knowledge and wisdom. The Sun is simple while people are complex. The Sun is unchanging where people evolve with quickening fervour. The sun combines hydrogen with blind, dumb, unthinking mass while people fuse hydrogen with machines. Given enough time—enough preparation—people can become the dominant factor influencing stellar evolution. Will the Sun explode in five billion years? The answer depends on two things: gravity and man.

It is important to note here that the eminence of people need not be combative. When we consider the influence of human development we are not seriously posing the question “Who would win in a fight, people or the universe?” That is a fallacy born from a doublespeak all too common throughout modern discourse. Words like “power”, “work”, “exploit” and “control” are used in contradictory terms when applied to both people and objects. In our interactions with the physical world we can no more “murder” a forest fire than we can “extinguish” a bank robber. People are not atoms, and atoms have no rights. The object of human knowledge is to utilise available materials and transform indifferent environments into comfortable homes. Fewer parts: “Who would win in a fight?” than “Where should I put this lamp?” The conclusion remains the same.

The Batmanning of Infinity

How powerful is Batman, really? How far does prep time take us?

In short: as far as is possible to travel. There is no boundary to the influence of knowledge on physical reality short of the laws of physics themselves. Stellar mechanics give way to galactic mechanics and science fiction conforms to scientific fact. Knowledge and intelligence are amongst the most powerful forces in existence—the singular endowment of all creative agents and the most versatile ability in all of printed comics. This leads to the rather ironic conclusion that Batman and Superman—as well as every other member of the Justice League—have exactly the same inherent power level. They are all people. Blood, sweat, skin, bone, flesh, brains: people. Superman choosing to use his muscles over his canonical “8th level intellect” (a notion in direct opposition to universality, but whatever) is a weakness far greater than Kryptonite ever was.

Batman had it easy.

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“And since by nature fire doth find its sphere soaring aloft, and I am all ablaze, heavenward with it my flight must needs be sped.”

— Michelangelo (Translated by John Addington Symonds)

We have kindled a star, here, on Earth, in the first-ever net energy gain fusion reaction this side of Mercury. It is, in all likelihood, the first of its kind in the history of the universe: the combination of two lighter nuclei (deuterium or tritium) into one heavier nuclei (helium-4) radiating heat, light, and other forms of energy greater than those required in the process of ignition. That alone is nothing special (nucleosynthesis has been commonplace for millions of centuries); what really sets this reaction apart is its cause—the fuel for the fire. In place of stellar nebulas, whose coalescence are dull, blind, and slow, there is a machine, the Nova laser system, whose workings are meticulously designed, and whose brilliance is great enough to fuse a nuclear pellet in fractions of a second and at the push of a button. This is what scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have really achieved: the fusion of stellar mechanics and human agency. In place of gravity, there is creativity. In place of magnetism, there is optimism. In place of radiation and all its pressures there are physicists and all their theories directing the change of one thing into another—not because they are mechanical laws operating mechanically, but because they are agents, emergent and universal, possessing knowledge of such laws and how to use them. And what makes fusion so exciting beyond classroom theoretics is its potentially limitless application: cheap, clean, plentiful power for a superabundant future. Desalinating oceans. Irrigating deserts. Electrifying industries. Liberating people.

A good start!

A new dawn 🌞🌞

[Author’s note: as of 15/11/2022, 08:00GMT the global population reached eight billion.]

I just checked: there are currently seven billion, 999 million, 581 thousand, 300-and-11… 12… 14 people in the world right now. No. Make that 20… 23… 34 people!

Feel free to take a look yourself: there are more.

Without a doubt, the population is increasing. The number of births outpaces the number of deaths. The number of people alive right now is larger than it was ten seconds ago. The number of people alive right now is even larger than that. And in the coming days, the number of contiguous, cohabiting homo sapiens will leisurely exceed eight billion globally. That is eight-with-nine-zeros people sharing a planet that housed a whole nine-zeros fewer merely a decade before.

And I just checked: there are more.

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Figures like these are concerning. For many, they are nothing short of catastrophic. The overpopulation problem is one characterised by rising anxiety with each and every newborn child. After all: more people require more food. More people require more water. More people require more energy to heat up their homes and more people, with wider footprints, require more land to build them on. More people produce more waste, take up more space, kindle more fires, quarry more rock. More people emit more carbon and more people burn up the sky. More people have more children. More children have more children faster. More and more and more and more until, sometime in the not-so-distant future, more becomes far too many and our overburdened world finally breaks—into famine, hunger, tyranny and warfare. With far more to come.

But I will not say such things. I will not call this, our most recent population milestone, a catastrophe. I will not call it some crisis in need of great sacrifice to avoid. Nor will I cast people as exclusively negative forces weighing on an already tormented world: emitters, polluters, consumers, destroyers (laden with a subtext more befitting the spread of disease or malignant cancer); but never builders, inventors, transformers, creators (imbued with a favour derived from our best understandings). I will, instead, say the opposite: this is a triumph. I will reflect on such developments as the humanist miracles they rightfully are; I will celebrate each and every personal life maintained on a limited planet by limitless ingenuity; and I will lay down the gauntlet for a future whose abundance is measured in more people living at one time than all those who died ages before them.

I will also, to begin, refute some of the arguments opposing reproduction—those promoting a less populous society in the false names of freedom, justice, and a vision of plenty crippled by pessimism. Those which twist genuine concerns towards misanthropic ends.

Sinks, Fires, Springs, Flowers

There are broadly four competing notions about population and growth. In our attempts to understand such wide spanning problems we might ask ourselves: What are people? How do they interact? What is their impact? Are they good?

Individual answers will vary from person to person. But the prevailing narrative splits and reseams itself with a twisted and cynical fabric of man. On the one hand we are viewed with compassion: people are victims of both themselves and each other; we are impotent, pitiable, helpless to the pressures of scarcity and hardship. We are doomed.

While on the other, far more constricted hand, we are feared as uniquely treacherous: humanity has proven time and again its reckless abandon in matters of greed, expansion, and proclivity towards violence in achieving such ends. We are belligerents, marauders, a singular danger spreading unchallenged.

Both theories, while conceptually at odds, can be reduced into seemingly cohesive statements. They are as follows.

People are sinks

The more people there are, the less each person can have. 

People are fires

The more people there are, the more damage they inflict.

The first theory argues that people are diluting—that they are, by no fault of their own (but merely by virtue of their physical needs) a detriment to others. A drain on available resources. This is, as many have argued, obvious, the inescapable truth of elementary subtraction. The nutritional content of 100 meals, for example, depends almost entirely on how many people require feeding (10 is a banquet; 50 is a ration; more is nothing but a guarantee for violence). The syphoning concern of overpopulation relies on the simple realities of scarce distribution: the same people cannot eat the same food; they cannot burn the same coal; they cannot occupy the same space and why should they want to? It is in this view that the birth of new children makes victims of their parents. Not because they are intentionally wicked, but because they are unavoidably demanding. Every mouth gained is a mouthful lost.

The second conjecture is far more incendiary, stating that people are not merely burdensome but outwardly dangerous. They destroy what meagre resources remain after partitioning. Towns and cities are vandalised. Parks and gardens are littered. Fields and forests and lakes and rivers are defaced or outright removed from the landscape. (Indeed, a large proportion of “destructive” rhetoric is leveraged from an environmental foundation: people seize habitat; people poison oceans; people murder animals. And so on.) This is the primary source of anti-human sentiments in population discourse. Where distributive concerns maintain a humanistic core (“How much suffering must a person endure?”), the damage accusation is defamatory by design. It is also from this perspective that we derive comparisons to viruses, cancers, intruders, explosives—impassioned rebukes of people and their desire to influence the world. And with such condemnation comes a logical dismissal of population growth. They argue instead for degrowth: shrinking the world to save it from us. Sheepishly at best. Forcibly at worst. And for the benefit of a future limited in principle.

Thankfully for everyone, already living and soon to be: the destructive picture is false. The advent of new children is no inherent hardship and our eight billionth birthday is no certain doom. Resources are not finite. Growth has no ceiling. Death is not fated and people are no monsters.

This is true for the inverse reasons outlined above. These are our new statements underpinning a pronatalist optimism.

People are springs

The more people there are, the more each person can have.

People are flowers

The more people there are, the more they transform.

People are springs in the sense that they are abounding: they literally generate new and better stuff using a special form of computation—creativity—to solve both abstract and physical problems. This is why the advent of new people is fundamentally prosperous, not impoverishing, and why living in a world with a larger population can (and has!) resulted in each individual person having more than their parents. More people solve more problems than fewer people and generate more resources to share between them. They are springs, not sinks, and the water is raging.

It should be noted that this is true alongside the realities of distribution, not in place of them. The nutritional scenario outlined above is mistaken not because more people require fewer meals (they really do require more meals), but because it presents foodstocks as a fixed and immutable value from which to divide. In reality we can, say, invent better farming methods and increase the supply. (This is precisely what Norman Borlaug did in the 1950’s when he bioengineered disease resistant crops, kickstarting the Third Agricultural Revolution and saving over a billion people from starvation. It is also what both vertical and cellular farming hope to achieve in the decades to come.) 

Opposition to such arguments derive from two central fallacies. The first is the classic Malthusian error of judging future demands by current supplies, future challenges by current solutions (precluding the possibility of progress and begging the question of resource destruction). And the second is a fundamental confusion between the meanings of the words “resources” and “materials” in the context of world economics.

In purely physical terms, we really are bounded; the Earth really does have a finite bulk mass and finite surface area. There really are finite atoms and finite bond energies holding them together. But resources are not some idle thing sitting there motionless and independent of people. They represent instead a very specific relationship between a person’s needs—their knowledge—and the physical world around them. The element uranium, for example, did not become a resource until the advent of very specific theories in fundamental physics. Before that time it was still uranium by all accounts; but it was not a resource until people discovered what it was, what it could do, and how they could use it in a way that benefited them. The same can be said for all the materials listed above. Deep-buried minerals are not considered as geological “reserves” until they can be extracted economically—until, for example, we invent better drills. Those residing on far-distant asteroids will be similarly excluded until we innovate drones capable of reaching them.

Even previously inhospitable land—space itself—is partial to the emanating influence of human creativity. The spatial problem does, at first glance, appear like a truly impregnable barrier facing the budding resource abundant. That is until, once again, we separate the notions of materials and resources. Of square footage and places to live. The former has been largely stable for billions of years on Earth; the latter has expanded with each and every engineering advancement. In 10,000 BCE the number of people capable of living basically anywhere was a simple function of tents and flat pastures. Today, humans have colonised every continent on the planet, weathering extreme climates at great altitudes and beneath vast oceans. We have built towers far outreaching the clouds. And when we don’t build up, we build down, into the Earth, whose volume is two thousand times greater than its surface area. Or into the ocean, whose waters span 71 percent of its landscapes. Or into the skies. Or into space.

At this very moment, there are only seven people living in permanent orbit around the Earth (those scientists working within the International Space Station); the irrationality of pessimism lies in the assumption that we cannot, in principle, increase that number to seven million. Or seven billion for that matter. It would be the same irrationality of our neolithic ancestors, looking upon their luxuriant tents in relative comfort, to deny the possibility of an average block of flats. The tip of the Burj Khalifa is as distant to them as the base of a Mars colony is to us. Probably more so. To assume that we will cease to innovate new solutions to residential problems is the same blind parochialism that has been disproving Malthus for well over two centuries. Like searching for leaks as the pool overflows.

My second statement is perhaps even more controversial. People are flowers, not fires, in the sense that they heal the world, not destroy it; that they make it more hospitable and more beautiful, not more dangerous and more gruesome; that they adorn its landscapes with wonder and meaning, not terror and chaos. And that when they do make mistakes, they can correct for them, using the same creative and rational faculties outlined above. An obvious example is the ongoing climate dilemma, whose associated risk is touted as some fatalist charge against people and their actions, but in reality represents one of our greatest opportunities for societal troubleshooting. Whether that means innovating better low-emission energy technologies to compete with fossil fuels, adapting to warmer temperatures and increasing climate resiliency, experimenting with geoengineering solutions to decreasing temperatures—or a combination of all three: there is nothing fatal about the challenge ahead. Damage is repairable with knowledge and wealth. More people create more wealth. More people repair more damage. This is as true for the natural world as it is for society; the future going forward can be as green or as urban as we want it to be, and as most demographic transitions have shown, populations tend to become more nature-loving as they become more wealthy (when they have the security to appreciate nature instead of being victimised by it). And nature—ocean vistas, mountain pathways, dappled sunbeams under gossamer canopies—really is beautiful. We should maximise the number of people who can enjoy it.

Animals will be safer, too. While the expansion of people across the Earth has been clumsy in its outset, that going forward favours the concentration of people away from nature and towards urban areas. This coupled with Kuznets Curves (linked above) is only good news for non-human lives. And besides, people are the only known animals to care at all about their neighbouring wildlife—to practise conservation and, in the coming years, even de-extinction to maintain a species beyond its natural limits. This also alludes to another, slightly futuristic, solution: sequence the genome of every extant (and extinct for that matter) organism we can find; store the information robustly and with digital backups; wait a century for bioengineering to advance to the point where synthesising an animal is as easy as printing an A4 sheet; start a planet-wide nature reserve somewhere. The alternative is the continuation of a natural order that prizes extinction, not sanctuary, as its defining feature. Whether by mutation or predation or starvation or virulent disease; be it a meteor strike or super volcano or solar flare or rogue black hole they are—all of them—doomed. Unless people save them.

One Hundred Billion More

Eight billion people really is a triumph. But compared with the sum total of all human lives, throughout all of natural history, it is a meagre gathering in the halls of past death. Roughly 109 billion people have fought to survive on Earth and roughly 109 billion people have, in the tragedy of their ignorance, failed in that endeavour. They fell prey to a genetic knowledge unfit to sustain them; they grew hungry and tired and old and decrepit all because they didn’t know, in their rudimentary understandings of the world, how to elevate themselves above their immediate surroundings, how to defend from external pressures and how, in their everyday lives, to exist without pain, fear, and a universalised suffering. We owe it to them to celebrate a world that accommodates more birthdays than it does funerals; and we can set our sights forward for an even bigger accomplishment in the centuries to come.

One hundred billion people. Alive. At one time.

I can think of no greater rebuke—no louder “fuck you!”—towards entropy and destruction than to simultaneously sustain more people at one moment than all those who died in all of known history. That will mark a moment of supreme exaltation, perhaps the first in the cosmos, where order supplants chaos with purpose and stability. Meaning over nonsense. Truth over falsehood. Beauty over foulness. Good over evil. That is what more people can mean. And that, I would maintain, really is worth celebrating.

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“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”

— George Eliot

The best thing I learned in my time as a labourer was a lesson in philosophy. From a machine driver named Sergio in a Ford factory car park.

He said that the instant a person stops being a child, becomes an adult, they become a dead man.

That was his way of saying that youth is the essence of life, and that maturity—a lack of wonder, an air of content, an acquiescence to that comfortable familiarity of routine—is nothing short of oblivion.

He didn’t really phrase it like that, but I’d been reading a lot of poetry at that time placing a special focus on youth, not life in a broader sense, as the opposite of death. As the contrast between hope and despair, growth and decay, love and heartbreak, joy and sorrow. When Siegfried Sassoon was young his “heart and head were light,” and he was “gay and feckless as a colt, out in the fields, with morning in the may, wind on the grass, wings in the orchard bloom.” When he was old he “sat burning his dreams away beside the fire: for death had made him wise and bitter and strong.” When William Wordsworth said that “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” he also said “but to be young was very heaven!”

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Sergio was right: youth really is the essence of life, both physical and spiritual. And ageing really is the emissary of death—in body and soul. The slow road to maturity is paved not once but twice: first, when our bodies deteriorate; then, second, when our spirits wane. This is worth remembering when we consider youth as a concept in direct opposition to demise. To the end of a being wholly defined by potential.

In Body

In physical terms, youth is a state of good health, stable fitness, and common ability. To Sergio that might have meant something so little as freedom from an aching back—but even that is a privilege too often forgotten and too lightly dismissed. The ability to act without pain is a right sorely diminished by time. Amongst people aged 18-44, for example, as little as seven percent report doctor-diagnosed arthritis. Of those aged 65 and older: 50 percent. Almost half of the elderly population suffer to physically move. To get out of bed in the morning; to reach for a glass of water and grasp it; to walk to the park; to play with their grandchildren. The physical privilege of youth is both independence and identity, to know of one’s body as both a capable tool and a comfortable home. The evil of age is blunting. The shingles are already loose.

In Soul

In spiritual terms, youth is a commitment to optimism—to the knowledge that problems are soluble, progress is possible, the future is open. This is what Sergio really meant. A person is a child to the extent that they have things left to learn; that learning is a thing that they actively pursue throughout their lives; that everything in their life is in principle learnable. This is far and beyond the generous platitude parents bestow upon their children as an act of kindness when they are small (“You can do anything you put your mind to!”); it is one of the most fundamental principles of reality. To him it meant travelling over 1000 miles from his home in Croatia, training to become a skilled machine operator in the northern parts of England, meeting his wife and starting a family—all the while never losing sight of his passion for music with hopes to record. He did so in his twenties, still fit and able-bodied, but vowing never to abandon such hopeful resolve: that most unlikely combination of industriousness and delight that sent Sassoon to his writing and man into orbit. Him and every person like him who strive to better themselves well into adulthood stand in direct opposition to the poverty of ageism—one that proffers strength in morbidity and wisdom in decay. Dreams burning in soft flame.

Born to Die

Physical ageing has occurred since the dawn of mankind and long before; genetic evolution has no requirement for animals after active fertility. Human bodies are the latest in a long line of biologically manufactured obsolescent machines, designed to reproduce and then wither and die. Take me. As of writing this, today, I am 26-years-old, still well within natural fecundity and with decades ahead of me in that regard. But even now, after years of potential reproduction, I am beginning to age. My skin is weathering to form wrinkles (laughter lines and crow’s feet); my metabolism has decreased three percent every year for the past five years, and, in five years’ time, my heart will begin to pump less blood, my muscles will grow weaker, and my senses will soften in an ever-increasing process of atrophy and time. Diseases like Huntington's will increase in risk as I grow into my thirties. And then, of course, there is cancer. Alzheimer's and dementia. An entire suite of degenerative disorders brought about by simple wear and tear: the accumulated damage of organelles and tissues with continued and repeated use.

It is no wonder, then, that today’s society is arranged around such fragility. It is all we have ever known. But we are people, not animals. We have exchanged genes for memes and evolution across generations for that within single people. “Let our ideas die in our place,” as Karl Popper said. It is also why gerontology, the science and biology of ageing in people, is so important. Health and hope are closely tied. Who knows for certain whether Sergio would indeed stay true to his untiring vow after his hands became worn with decades of labour. This is not impossible, of course; the human spirit is strong. Stephen Hawking remained devoted to a physics that he loved intellectually decades after his body ceased functioning. Yet the fact remains that both parties really would have been better off with a young, healthy, mobile body, free from disease and regular discomfort. The rejection of despair in the face of old hardships is the exception to the rule of biological debasement: the elderly are sick are rightly so, they will soon be dead and rightly so. That is unless we people, with progress and passion and biological sciences, make it not so. Unless we begin to grow young again.

Growing Young

I said before that gerontology is the science of ageing in people. I also alluded to the nature of ageing itself as something more mechanical than biological: wear and tear. This is the correct way to think about the problem and offers a more intuitive angle on how we can begin to solve it. People are like cars.

Cars, like people, are made up of many moving and interlocking parts. The engine is the most complex of these components, consisting of hundreds of intricate pieces coordinated to move in synchronous series. But (and far more often than we should like) this process fails. Engines break down and tires deflate. This can be the result of any number of system malfunctions resulting from any combination of parts failures. The parts fail because they wear down—they accumulate damage over time as a result of regular use. This is why we oil our engines: to minimise that damage. But, inevitably, all physical parts wear down over time.

This is true not only of cars but all physical systems. It is true of stones on the shore and strings on guitars. It is true, even, of human bodies. Ageing in people follows the same basic principles as that in cars and other inanimate objects: parts accumulating damage with repeated use. Don’t get me wrong: human bodies are really, really complex. More complex than almost any other physical system we know of (really really—look at this mess). This is why we really do need genius biologists working on the problems of biological ageing (things like stem cell research, cures for cancer etc.) and not genius mechanics and definitely not non-genius hobbyist writers (hey). But the principle holds. Bodies, like all other objects, wear down over time. This is all we need to know to begin to understand why it is that we age and how it is that we can begin to stop: repairs and replacements.

The Opposite of Age Is Repair

Cars persist because we fix them, part by part, fault by fault, reliably and repeatedly over years and decades. When a component breaks, we repair it. When a repair fails, we replace it. When a replacement meets the same obsolescent end as its predecessor, we restart the cycle over and again until we no longer possess the money nor the inclination to purchase more spark plugs. We, using our knowledge of their components and their workings and their working limitations, stay one step ahead of the damages sustained by cars with repairs and replacements. It really is that simple.

Once again, this process holds for all physical systems that age over use and yet persist over time. It holds for biological organisms, too. It holds for people.

But once again, I am compelled to the caveat of just how complicated human bodies and biological ageing are. (It is no wonder that it took a narrow super-intelligence to solve the protein folding problem.) But even so: complicated does not equal impossible. (We did solve the protein folding problem.) The challenge of biological complexity is a finite one, and its solution will realise an end to ageing in people as commonplace as that in classic cars. In all likelihood, remarkably more so. The astonishing reality is that, unless you are a gerontologist working at the cutting edge of anti-ageing research, one really doesn’t need to know a single thing about chromosomes or DNA strands or amino acid-folding proteins to know that ageing is a straightforward process of wear and tear accrued over time. One doesn’t need to know a single fact about humans or biology at all to know that ageing is fixable with repairs and replacements. All one needs to consider is a car on the road.

Children Again

Just imagine it. With an advanced gerontology, the passage of time will no longer equate to the collapse of good health. The elderly can look and act in the same ways as the young: with confidence and without pain. They can get out of bed in the morning; reach for a glass of water and grasp it; walk to the park; play with their grandchildren. They can go back to school or go back to work! A future education extending for centuries. A future economics where every person, no matter their age, is free to collaborate in bilateral exchange basically forever; young, healthy and passionate; imbued with a vigour previously reserved for those at the start of their careers, newly expanded to anyone and everyone with renewed spirits. A democratised vitality for a population of 20-year-olds.

This is what people are. From the moment we become operative in the slightest, we face errors in our understanding—problems—and solve them using creativity. We build towers, fly aeroplanes, paint landscapes, write prose. We engineer vaccines and raise islands from the sea. Why should we stop? It is the sorry mistake of a history dominated by ignorance that we have, like all other animals before us, been diminished by a natural order directed by idiots (genes). One in which most construction workers resent the hard work that pains their old bodies and sit burning their dreams like old man Sassoon. But that was back then. We know better now. We can be children again.

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It is important to remember who we are. I mean that in the cosmic sense; in the mind-bending, reality-shifting, Carl Sagan documentary sense. In the black hole sense. The quantum physics sense. In whatever sense it is that goes all sideways when we attempt to fathom the foundations of time, space, or the reaches of a universe larger than ourselves. When the ground falls from under us and the vision starts to blur; when the details and the day-to-days seem not only comically small, but unfathomably remote: far-distant memories, fading on the horizon.

The difference is, in most such cases of existential vertigo, the intended effect is to make us feel small, insignificant—even afraid. Sagan himself, often so poetic in his defence of humanity, famously said:

“Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.”

— Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space, 1994

His sentiment is clear enough: humanity is both foolish and arrogant, blinded by hubris and deaf to all warnings. We are children, he would have us remember, huddled on a delicate life raft floating upon a tumultuous sea, poking holes in the rubber as we quarrel for rations. And ultimately? We are on our own. There is no one coming to the rescue as we begin to capsize.

Such arguments are all too common amongst leading intellectuals. The late Stephen Hawking, physicist-turned-celebrity and preeminent expert in all matters cosmic, went on record with similar, diminishing statements:

"The human race is just a chemical scum on a moderate-sized planet, orbiting around a very average star in the outer suburb of one among a hundred billion galaxies. We are so insignificant that I can't believe the whole universe exists for our benefit.”

— Reality on the Rocks: Beyond Our Ken, 1995

Both Sagan and Hawking’s statements are applications of the “The Principle of Mediocrity”, an argument dating back to Copernicus and typically referred to when discussing extraterrestrial life. Hawking cuts to the heart of the logic: rocky planets, main sequence stars, spiral galaxies and their clusters are all too common in the macroscale picture of the observable universe. And the very matter that makes up human beings (the “chemical scum” he so charmingly refers to) is more ordinary still. We are “moderate”, “average”, “insignificant”; just one such world in the company of over one million million million others. A grain of sand in an ever-expanding desert.

But, as fellow physicist David Deutsch points out, arguments from mediocrity, when applied to people, are radically false for a variety of reasons.

Firstly, the immediate spatial claim that planets, stars, and galaxies are typical throughout the universe is wrong. Much in the same way that, when feeling spontaneous and booking a flight, someone might throw a dart at a map and rush to its landing place, a universal tourist might fire an arrow across all of creation. Both travellers will be disappointed to discover, however, that where they eventually arrive is far from exotic.

Here on Earth, the most likely destination would be somewhere in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Or perhaps the Atlantic. Or the Arctic for that matter. In all likelihood, our impetuous sightseer would find themselves bobbing up and down, entirely helpless, surrounded by water in all known directions. Let alone on land. And let alone somewhere interesting. The same holds true on a universal scale: despite Hawking’s lacklustre portrait of our own rocky planet, the truly typical location in all the known universe is intergalactic space, the areas between galaxies. Cold, sterile, and dark-beyond-dark, our alien tourists would likely seek a refund… though they might take a while to reach it.

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In truth, planet Earth and others like it are remarkably unusual objects. Even matter itself—that which makes up all of particle physics, chemistry, biology and beyond—constitutes a minor fraction of all the known material universe (less than 5 percent, in fact, with the majority being composed of dark energy (68 percent) and dark matter (27 percent), respectively). And even more remarkable is the fact that certain types of particle physics, chemistry, biology and beyond, are only found on planet Earth. We are the only known place to harbour life, bacteria, animals and plants; insects and amphibians; Bengal tigers and buck-toothed billfish. And, entirely more to the point, we are the only place to harbour human beings. We are the only place in the entire universe with people.

This is the primary reason that principles of mediocrity fail, and why they were always doomed to fail: people are not small, obscure, or insignificant. We are neither moderate nor average. People are cosmic entities, entirely unique throughout the universe, and of a potential influence rivalling the most fundamental forces of nature. And as the title of Deutsch’s TED Talk suggests (“Chemical scum that dream of distant quasars”), while we are indeed comprised of the very same matter as that other 5 percent, we are, in the truly meaningful sense of the word, separated from it by the miraculous feats that we are able to perform: to dream, to think, to reason, and to explain; to model even the most violent features of the universe in ever-increasing fidelity. As Deutsch himself has proven, we are universal computers—Turing complete—capable of performing any performable function. We are also universal explainers: general purpose software running on that computer (the ever-elusive “G” in “AGI”), capable of solving any soluble problem and simulating any possible system. This was a reality anticipated by Emily Dickinson, no less, in 1801 (no less!), in the opening stanza of her poem “The Brain”.

“The Brain—is wider than the Sky—

For—put them side by side—

The one the other will contain

With ease—and you—beside—"

Dickinson’s and Deutsch’s points are the same: the universe exists not only in the far-flung reaches of deep outer space, alien and impassive, but also within our minds, in the very details and day-to-days that once seemed so unimportant. Nor is it impossibly vast beyond our ken, as so many scientists love to remind us. There is nothing we cannot understand, in principle, with human-level (universal) rationality. This is perhaps the most mind-bending reality of them all: the ground never really falls from under us. The vision only becomes clearer. Black hole and quantum physics—time, space, and the reaches of a universe larger than ourselves—constitute some of the best explanations in all of modern thought. The universe is, as yet, largely unknown. But it is entirely knowable. “With ease—and you—beside—”

The sad irony is: much of this is, itself, already known. Sagan certainly knew, to a degree, and said as much himself.

“The cosmos is within us. We are made of star-stuff. We are a way for the universe to know itself.”

—Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, 1980

I qualify “to a degree” here because it is the first and last sentences, not the second, that cut to the heart of the meaning of personhood. We are as much “star-stuff” (or “stardust” as Neil deGrasse Tyson later echoed) as we are “chemical scum”. People are emergent entities. Emergent in the sense that we are best explained without reference to our lower-level components. Without reference to genes, cells, chemicals, or atoms. But rather: creativity and rationality; thoughts, feelings, hopes, dreams; strength and tenderness; love and friendship. An entire world of abstract ideas and concepts, made into matter through physical computation, expanding progressively into the environment. It is as much the things that we do, the things that we transform and build in the physical world, that define us as people. The extent of our singular influence does not remain in our minds, but shapes the land around us. As the great Jacob Bronowski said:

“Man is a singular creature. He has a set of gifts which make him unique among the animals, so that unlike them, he is not a figure in the landscape, he is the shaper of the landscape.”

— The Ascent of Man, 1973

Today, still firmly in our infancy, the boundaries of our physical influence remain confined to the Earth and its immediate atmosphere. To minor headlines such as: “Human-made objects to outweigh living things”, “Scientists declare dawn of human-influenced age”, and, my personal favourite, “The earth moves most for man”. In the near future that might expand to Mars and beyond, with similar headlines reading: “Orbital space elevator nears completion”, “Humanity to reach Type 2 Kardashev scale”, and, my personal favourite, “The stars move most for man.” Beyond that anything is possible (limited only by the laws of nature); researchers Anders Sandberg and David Manheim have gone so far as to calculate that a bog standard two percent economic growth, sustained over as little as 100,000 years, would lead to a Gross World Product (GWP) equal to 10⁸⁷⁴ USD²⁰²⁰. That number is stupendous to the point of absurdity, entirely meaningless to you and me. But in the words of the authors: 

“[I]f the claim that exponential economic growth at a rate materially above zero can continue indefinitely is true, it would indeed need to be the most powerful force in the universe…”

Now, many people would argue that a sustained economic growth on Earth, let alone across the entire universe, is impossible, much less desired. But this is the same mistake as before, born from a misunderstanding of what people are. People are not animals, competing for existing resources; people are builders and innovators, creating new resources. People are not bandits, stealing from their neighbours; people are partners and tradesmen, dealing with their neighbours. People are not damsels, waiting to be rescued; people are heroes and champions, coming to their own rescue. People are not children, lost on rough seas; people are shipwrights and captains, taming the seas. People are not insignificant, chemical scum; people are significance. The universe knowing itself.

People are not stardust.

We are so much more than that.

Follow me on twitter @tomhyde_

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