Men of Conscience

“Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron’s cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.” — C.S. Lewis

1

We wanted flying cars, instead we got Men of Conscience. These are self-appointed moralists who have no sense of boundary and no sense of satiety. They assume an obligation to do “the right thing” because they maintain the belief they are morally superior to both who they oppose and to whom they serve. They tend to focus on conspicuous issues because attention feeds their drive. Who becomes a Man of Conscience? Well it depends. In my view, they’re typically “known quantities” outside their fields, which means they’ve done something to build a name for themselves. In most cases, they are career politicians who accrue media spotlight over the years and sort of just become fixtures that you expect to see in the news. In rare cases, business magnets—I mean magnates—veer out of the private sector and skid onto the enlightened path. In any case, anyone well known with a penchant for applause is at risk for becoming a Man or Woman of Conscience.

I think this is a big problem.

In Zero To One, Peter Thiel discusses the idea of definite and indefinite optimism, with the former being a crystallized understanding why the future’s going to be amazing, and the latter being ambiguous expectation that the “line goes up”. Conversely, definite and indefinite pessimism refer to respective levels of certainty that things will get worse. For example, if you set out to cure a disease, you have definite optimism (high clarity); if a policymaker worries China will economically kneecap the USA, he has indefinite pessimism (low clarity).

Men of Conscience are drawn towards indefinite pessimism because it yields more applause. That means they (policymakers, businessmen, scientists) are drawn away from a place of definite optimism. It’s a lot easier to get an applause for “there are too many genders!!” than “we are going to cure cardiovascular disease”. You don’t need to be a utilitarian to see that >2 genders and a cure to heart disease is better than 2 genders and rampant heart disease. These people are holding back the flourishing of humanity because they shift our focus from the advancement of technology to the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy.

Elon Musk is a notable Men of Conscience member: his sloppy election interference is seemingly justified by his need to obtain whatever “the greater good” means to him. Elon, buoyed up by likes and retweets, is emboldened by people who want his approval. That’s how the Men of Conscience operate: an inner ring that obsessively focuses on trivial stuff that fails to move the needle for mankind.

Like Elon, Kamala Harris and Gavin Newsom are both members, too. Remember when Harris announced her plans to tax unrealized gains? Or remember when Newsom signed a bill into law banning voter ID? Those were mind-bogglingly dumb decisions. Maybe one could explain the rationale behind taxing unrealized capital gains, but banning the requirement of voter ID would be hand-wavy at best. Something in Harris’s and Newsom’s minds is misfiring: they believe they’re acting for some greater good, but they fail to consider the negative externalities. Similarly, Justin Trudeau has demonstrated his pathological conscience: to solve the housing crisis he proposed taxing seniors who got “lucky” and bought cheap houses 30 years ago. This is just one instance of the cost of Trudeau’s moral cupidity on Canadians; and since he recently resigned, he won’t be the one paying the price. It’s the policymaker equivalent of dining and dashing: eat your applause and abandon the next generation, sticking it with the bill. The non-obvious fallout here is that more and more youth will be compelled to fix basic components of society like housing, healthcare, labour, immigration, etc—and less and less will get to work on technological advancement.

2

If society can secure its basic needs while resisting its basest urges (e.g. taking a stand on tribal hills), it would have a lot more latitude for flourishing. In Maslowian terms, if our basic needs are met, so will be our psychological needs, and that will enable us to explore societal self-actualization. In other words, we can only get flying cars if we’re all healthy, happy and motivated.

Flying cars serve as a MacGuffin for technological progress. I don’t think we literally need flying cars, but we do need to accelerate. We need to let one group of people fix and manage the bottom of Maslow’s Hierarchy, and another group to hit the gas. Elon Musk was undoubtably the icon of the latter group: his work with SpaceX and Tesla ushered in a new age of innovation inspiring everyone to dream bigger. Unfortunately, the Elon who wanted to make mankind a multiplanetary species has long been lost. I think we lost him because he downloaded Twitter one afternoon and dominoed his way to this gaffe:

While Elon’s arm made that motion, his mouth was saying “my heart goes out to you”. This caused quite a stir because while he’s ostensibly showing love, he’s performing an action that looks confusingly similar to a Nazi salute. This is precisely fitting for Men of Conscience: they say [good things] to earn praise, but typically wind up doing [bad things] because their motivation is not aligned with what inspired the praise in the first place. For example, starting in ₁₉₉₆ Purdue Pharma began marketing OxyContin to doctors and falsely claiming it was good for pain because it was safe and that “the risk of addiction…was extremely small”. This led to doctors overprescribing OxyContin, which led to abuse which led to pill mills all of which exacerbated what we now call the opioid epidemic. Elon might not be slinging opioids, but he is a fountain of ideas that sure sound “good”.

Like Harris and Newsom and Trudeau, Elon started with a pure heart that was corrupted by his sense of superior morality. He thought the COVID lockdowns were dumb and encroached on freedom, so he kept his factories open in an act of rebellion. To some, his pushback seemed noble. If the universe gets to expand, so too do the boundaries followed by Men of Conscience. Elon continued to downplay COVID and at one point suggested that it was “maybe worth considering chloroquine”. Even if a pharmacologist tweeted that, I think it would be reckless. He did it because he was motivated to show that the COVID hubbub was misguided. Elon’s guidance on chloroquine stems from the same warped, expanding morality that ultimately led to his backing of Trump. And his ever expanding boundary lines now have him interfering in Germany’s upcoming election and in the process backing a cast of questionable characters. Trump won the election, so shouldn’t he shutup and get back to making mankind a multiplanetary species? Why’s he meddling in Germany’s election?

Elon, newly minted Men of Conscience member, fails to deliver societal self-actualization because he’s busy mucking around trying to influence decisions about our basic and physiological needs—I mean he literally urges people to procreate. If he instead toiled away with pure focus, built cool stuff, and showed us demos once in a while, we’d be much further along as a species because millions would be inspired to build, not preach. Instead, we get his barren tweets.

3

Where do Men of Conscience come from? Earlier I explained that they start out as well-meaning, good-hearted folks who have earned some kind of broader reputation. But what causes them to turn?

I look to C.S. Lewis’s The Inner Ring for answers:

There are no formal admissions or expulsions.

Humans crave social connection—we want to be included in circles and fear being left out of them. Lewis calls these exclusive clubs inner rings and writes about their dangers. “The quest of the Inner Ring will break your hearts.” Harris, Newsom, Trudeau, and Musk were all good-hearted. Lewis warns that the Inner Ring will “[make] a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things”. Harris, Newsom, Trudeau, and Musk have done objectionable things. You compromise values, and ultimately yourself in its pursuit. Maybe Trudeau wanted to change Canada for the better, but found that getting approval from the likes of Klaus Schwab felt better. And once you’re in an inner ring, there’s an even more exclusive Inner Ring. Ring by ring, Elon eddied his way into Trump’s camp: from railing against COVID lockdowns to criticizing SF’s liberal policies to spending a quarter billion dollars in support of Trump. Clearly, there’s more eddying in Elon’s future and not as much innovation. That’s unfortunate for technological progress, but millions of people are happy with Elon’s moralistic antics.

These people are trying to eddy their way into Elon’s inner ring—they’re on the fast track to becoming Men of Conscience. They like, retweet and puppet Elon’s view-points with absolutely zero self-awareness. Men of Conscience draw self-esteem from pats on the back, so engaging in Elon-adjacent echo chambers feels gratifying. They can hate Gavin Newsom, but they are not at odds with him on a material level. Both Gavin and any one of the millions eddying into Elon’s inner ring are prigs who focus on narrow issues that won’t matter in 500 years. They bicker and trade barbs over narrow cones of topic like gender identity, even if it doesn’t personally matter to them or to society at large.

4

How do we exorcize Men of Conscience from society?

“The best way to drive out the devil, if he will not yield to texts of Scripture, is to jeer and flout him, for he cannot bear scorn.” — Luther

“The devill… the prowde spirite…. cannot endure to be mocked.” — Thomas More

An impulsive option is to simply remove the applause and replace it with vigorous condemnation. That’s all it took to make Trudeau give up his decade-old post. However, I believe it’s better to take life in your own hands. Consider what happens in the absence of Men of Conscience: engineers build flying cars, scientists develop cures, and artists make feelings. In other words, we should recognize and reward quiet competence, allowing definite optimism to spread. That’s our antidote to incompetent scenesters who excel at moral posturing and attracting attention.

The future shouldn’t belong to those who can shout the loudest. It belongs to those who can actually build it. Our north star is societal-scale self-actualization, and we only get there if we’re going full throttle on building stuff. Men of Conscience are insidious: they dress up in benevolence but are possessed by tyrannical morality. Throwing tomatoes at them is one option to make them strip, but the more robust and sustainable approach is to build, baby, build.