Long-Term Cultural Goals
Imagine it’s a million years from today. Those susceptible to the cultural supervirus have been bred out of the gene pool and the population has stabilized. Humanity has solved the problem of AI by dictatorially banning its development (or some yet-unknown limitation stymies its advancement). Man is an interplanetary species inhabiting thousands of systems across the galaxy—but culturally, governmentally, and genetically, man never made the type of leap forward we discuss in this book and its companion, The Pragmatist’s Guide to Governance.
In this scenario, our interstellar empires are still petty bureaucracies constantly at war, using technology more horrifying than anything we can imagine today. There are still genocides, there is still intergenerational poverty, there is still systemic corruption, and mankind has not changed that much (the Battletech—i.e., MechWarrior—universe paints a fairly illustrative picture of this future).
Imagine someone from that future could go back in time and talk to you—someone who lives at a time in which mankind only inhabits one planet, who is arguably among the final generations of humans capable of permanently changing the future of human cultures across thousands of planets by creating a durable culture and high-fertility-rate family that carries prosocial values into the future. Why would you tell them you didn’t make an effort to fix things while one person’s efforts could still make a difference?
Once humanity is spread across a dozen or more solar systems, the cat is out of the bag. All human cultures will evolve from whatever cultures dominate those pioneering ships. We stand at a unique point in history. We have just enough historical perspective to see how we can do better but are early enough in humankind’s timeline that our efforts will define what it means to be human for eons to come. Do not squander this gift.
What is our end game?
We aim to build a cultural reactor, the Index, to regrow civilization from its desiccated state. We will do this without becoming technophobic. We will build on—not over—our traditions. We will furthermore partner with new iterations of what it means to be a child of man. This requires being inclusive of AIs, genetically engineered humans, and the fusion of the two.
We will preserve the capacity for independent thought through a society so heterogeneous that it will make our own look trite. We will intentionally craft new ethnicities, religions, and ways of existing. The genome will be our canvas and flesh our clay. Man is a young species. We still occupy the same bodies with which our ancestors hunted and picked berries. We are so trapped by the limitations of our biology that we lack the capacity to conceive our ultimate potential.
We will bring humanity across the vast Saharas of emptiness between the stars and create a dynamic, perpetually advancing empire that spans galaxies, universes, and realities. Just as our ancestors wove fabric from organic matter, our descendants will weave the fabric of reality. Humanity’s descendants will be entities beyond our wildest conceptions of the divine. Omnipotence and the ability to create universes will be the least of their powers. Whether they are good or evil—whether they even come to be at all—is up to us. In that sense, we have even more power than they do.
We are confident in our ultimate victory. Reality is conspiring to ensure the future that must come to pass does. The cultures against which we compete are objectively deficient in contrast to ours. Beyond being less flexible and less hardy, they are defined and hobbled by a fear of rejection—of being “weird.” They over-index the value of the individual out of a fear that some evanescent iteration of their identity might someday not exist. They deify the genetic and structural stagnation of our species. To even dream of something better terrifies and offends them. They cling to the illusion of sentience and serendipitously evolved emotional states like a scared child to their parents. If we can’t maintain the cultural unity and conviction to beat these witless toddlers, we have earned our fate.