Conquering the Future
Readers of our other books will know that we wait until the last chapter to get really crazy. With this being our craziest book, it’s time to go nuts. We think civilization is heading in a very dangerous direction and those who normally would be focused on humanity’s most pressing problems have been distracted by shiny objects. While issues like AI alignment and climate change matter, it will be a moot point to address them if we fail to simultaneously address demographic collapse and evade the powerful wave of worrying evolutionary pressures our species is currently facing.
For the last 150 years or so, on a macro scale, investments in the U.S. have increased in value—be they real estate or stock. This growth was driven by exponentially growing population and linearly growing productivity per population unit. If the population begins to decline exponentially while productivity continues to only grow linearly, we will enter an era in which all invested capital decreases in value at the macro scale. We have no cultural memory of a time at which it became systematically unprofitable to invest in the future of our species.
As we emphasized at the outset of this book, given the high leverage (debt) at every level of our society, this is the first domino that begins to knock over the entire system. We enjoyed a world of relative peace and prosperity—it seems unlikely that is the world our grandchildren will inherit.
This is where the grim picture ends, because collapse presents opportunity. Collapse presents a chance for us to make our move. If our culture works, if the Governance Bomb we are building works (see The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance), then we (and anyone who joins us) should have everything in place to capitalize off of this now-inevitable turning point in human history. We have an opportunity to “win” the game of civilization in a manner that would be impossible in a stable, growing world.
Brief periods of flourishing like that which we presently enjoy have occurred throughout human history. Whether we look at the heyday of Athens, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the founding of the United States of America, or any number of other instances, we will see that none lasted for more than three generations. The prosperity they induce leads to hedonism and a break from traditional cultures, which in turn cause a collapse in birth rates among the most creative and productive members of the cultural movement. While we stand at the end of our cycle, we have an opportunity to learn from the failures of these movements and plant the seed of a never-ending Renaissance—one that isn’t prematurely cut short by ennui and population decline. With a little bit of foresight, together we can ensure the dark age into which we presently slide is the last one our species ever has to experience.
Note: When we wrote the above paragraph, it was just a wild theory—however it might have some substantiation. An unpublished (at the time of this book’s release) study analyzed various polygenic risk scores (genetic predictors of traits) of Roman corpses who lived after the fall of the empire, at the height of the empire, and before the rise of the empire to determine whether and how scores associated with educational attainment fluctuated over time. It turns out our theory is perfectly matched by the data. Polygenic risk scores correlated with higher educational attainment peaked during the time of the Republic and declined at the height of the Empire (in fact, they were higher during the time of the Republic than they are for the average Roman today).[[87]](#_ftn87)
We are not the only culture to anticipate a collapse and strive to create the next paradigm. Famously, the LDS Church made a major gamble around this scenario, asking members to keep at least a three-month (and ideally a one-year)[[88]](#_ftn88) supply of food in storage, offering centers where members can buy long-term food supplies,[[89]](#_ftn89) establishing traditions around this practice to refresh expiring food stores, and maintaining sizable underground bunkers below many of their temples. Culturally, this is a great bet. While moderately costly to maintain, this practice does not hurt members much and will make an astronomical difference in certain collapse scenarios, allowing Mormons to quickly become the dominant culture. Unfortunately, the scenarios for which bunkers and emergency food stores are best are based on pioneer or cold war rather than modern risk scenarios.
Unlike the LDS Church, we hope to create a culture that rapidly seeks out and adapts to new information. Originally, we had a very different thesis as to how things would play out. Knowing that twin studies (studies of identical twins raised by separate families) show religiosity to be highly heritable and having a lay understanding that religious people had more kids, we thought that religiosity as a trait would be concentrated in future generations and “solve” the birth rate problem while making society more dogmatic. While not everyone would prefer that future humans be more dogmatic on average, we typically get along just fine with those tagged as “religious extremists” so this future didn’t strike us as uniquely dire.
Our view of this future has changed based on two new (to us) points of data. The religious group we had most expected to be our “allies” over the long run was the LDS Church (Mormons), yet their recent decline in birth rate could very well wipe them off the table as a player, leaving Anabaptists (Amish and Mennonites) and Orthodox Jews as the only two remaining cultures with high birth rates that are arguably aligned with ours (in that we expect them to be on friendly terms with our descendants).
Interest in this issue drove us to more intentionally explore the current memetic landscape of high-birth-rate populations to see where future culture may be trending. Using data collected by Spencer Greenberg’s Clearer Thinking organization and helpful analysis from Mohammed Ali Alvia, a PhD at the Mayo Clinic, we looked for heritable sociological traits that correlate highly with fertility rate. This data revealed something surprising to us: While religiosity was indeed correlated with a higher birth rate, two higher correlatory factors were (1) a hatred of outgroups (xenophobia) and (2) a tendency to favor extremely hierarchical, traditional, power structures (authoritarianism). This has a lot in common with the right-authoritarian personality type,[[90]](#_ftn90) which has a heritable component,[[91]](#_ftn91) meaning these traits are being selected for on a genetic level and not just socially.
Note: This personality type can appear in far left-wing individuals as well (really, anyone with authoritarian inclinations)[[92]](#_ftn92) and we are not the only ones whose findings indicate that this personality type is outcompeting those with only religious tendencies.[[93]](#_ftn93)
We should have seen this coming a mile away. Those with a genetic predilection for religious fervor have been some of the most useful apostles of the cultural supervirus—of course it had developed pathways to twist their minds into tools for its own reproductive cycle. While we can’t remember the last time someone tried to convert us to their religion, preachers of the virus accost us upon every tweet.
Anyone who has spent time in the atheist community would know that it is full of people who were absolute firebrands before deconverting. If anything, fervency of religious belief is correlated with higher—rather than lower—odds of leaving one’s birth culture. What actually keeps people in high-birth-rate traditional cultures is a sociological profile that dehumanizes people who espouse novel ideas and resists engagement with outsiders.
Cultural trends favoring xenophobia and unwillingness to engage and interact with outside groups and ideas worry us. Interest in countering this trend is a major driver behind our choice to publish this book despite the obvious risks we face in doing so. We want to find and build alliances with other families to prepare for a future that will likely be hostile toward what we see as prosocial and altruistic mindsets (mindsets valuing diversity, innovation, willingness to engage with outsiders, etc.).
If the model outlined in this book helps cultures maintain repopulation-rate birth rates, and if we are able to build up a diverse community of other families, we might just be able to do better than solve things. If our model works, we can culturally engineer the seed that will sprout into the next great human civilization.