What’s up folks. Back again this week with another segment of my socioeconomic-theory-of-everything. During my time off I was consuming a lot of knowledge, which I think is necessary for inspiring creativity.
Two books I read recently:
The Ancient City by Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges describes how the earliest civilizations formed from simple worship of our ancestors, to tribes, and eventually cities based on common beliefs which morphed into religion.
The Elephant in the Brain by Kevin Simler and Robert Hanson talks about how we are all subconsciously driven by status, and yet our brains try to hide this from us. We often don’t know our own true motivations for our actions, but can always confidently make up a story to tell ourselves.
Both are great and I highly recommend.
Anti-Ancestralism
There is a theme that runs through western society that I have noticed recently. We generally don’t appreciate the older generation anymore, why is that?
Growing up we were taught to respect our elders, but the funny thing about being a kid is that you always think the generation above you knows what’s going on. The kids a few grades up, definitely your parents, and absolutely your grandparents, just knew more about things, they had it all figured out.
But what we come to realize as we get older ourselves is that no one ever had it figured out. No one is really ever fully prepared to have kids, or start a business, or run for office. You can never know everything, and every generation goes through these growing pains, but has the problem been exacerbated recently?
The trajectory and rate of change in knowledge has been altered in super recent history with the internet, and some kids now know more by age ten then their parents ever will. Brain plasticity weakens over time, which makes it harder to learn new things as you get older, and the amount of information available during the formative years is growing so exponentially, it’s safe to say that each generation of children will be miles more advanced than the preceding one (assuming we provide them with an equal opportunity from which to start at). Is this relatively new informational phenomenon the reason why Millennials and below have such low respect for their elders?
In The Ancient City, the author describes how the very first form of worship was that of your immediate ancestor. You would bury them in your house, and light a fire in the hearth each night in their remembrance. The first gods were our parents, and they stayed with us for eternity. Eventually, after many generations, the oral and written history of our elders became lore, and the famous Greek and Roman gods and goddesses we are familiar with today took their place.
Despite being in such a modern society, we are still primitive in our development as homo sapiens. We are much closer to the first societies than we would like to think. The majority of the world practices religion in some form, all of which are derived from similar origins. From a practical standpoint, the worship of ancestors still makes sense. If you were going to celebrate the existence of your own consciousness, wouldn’t it make sense to celebrate the literal humans of which your own flesh and blood is made up of? It’s a simple, base human ideology that got muddled up with the politics of religious factions and powers of the republic, but it still stands as a basic building block of what makes us human.
I think the western trend to distance itself from from religion also moves it away from the conceptual idea of worshipping ancestors, and in turn has a direct effect on the current generation’s perception and protection of the future (i.e. long-term thinking, and favoring delayed versus instant gratification). More on that in a minute.
Another reason why we may have lost respect for older generations, aside from the trend away from religion, has to do with the fact that we are all living so much longer. With many people living well into their 90s and 100s, younger generations get to see the interactions between generations, and the compounded dysfunction that exists there. Three generations of alcoholism or domestic abuse or xenophobia alive at the same time could be enough to elicit the “OK boomer” disdain.
We also have a diminishing middle class. With each subsequent financial crisis, and decreasing ability for future generations to buy homes and education, people are staying “financially younger” longer. By that, I mean the seemingly perpetual “Friends” phenomenon where a bunch of people in their 30s are still living with roommates and figuring their lives out, at a time in their lives when Boomers and Gen Xers had already had kids and were well into their careers. Some of this can be attributed to inflation, some of it can be attributed to the fact that capitalism increases wealth inequality over time, but I think the biggest factor is that social media acts as an accelerant of this information from a pointedly Millennial and Gen Z perspective.
I need to write a separate post about this, even though it’s popped up in a few of my recent posts, but status is the integral factor in everything that we do. Social media is the status perspective accelerant, and the constant feeling of wanting more makes you feel inadequate with what you have, which almost puts people in a permanent state of adolescence. We don’t have a house, therefore we aren’t adults, therefore we must continue thirst trapping and showing off our vacations to simultaneously indicate status and youth. Youth is good, youth is healthy, youth is status, but youth is ego.
So, we have a decreasing opinion of prior generations as they clearly didn’t know what the were doing when they fucked up the economy, the environment, the government, and the nuclear family. We have a decreasing amount of religiosity for better or worse, and we have an increasing amount of egoism, narcissism, and woe-is-me-ism commensurate with the increasing surface area of observable status vectors. By observable status vectors, I mean the array of economic outcomes that are visible online. Or, more bluntly, all the cool shit we see on Instagram that we would totally buy if we had an extra $1k, $1M, or $1B at our disposal. I haven’t discussed it too much on this platform, but I am a huge believer in Rene Girard’s mimetic theory that all desire comes from seeing other people have stuff. That is to say, the more status we see, the more we think we deserve. The problem is that the upper bounds of obtainable status as seen on the internet, far outpaces what the vast majority of individuals can rightfully obtain. As the observable status vector increases, and we can’t obtain exactly what we want, we start to settle and make concessions. When you can’t afford a yacht, a Louis bag seems like a bargain.
The more status we see, the more we think we deserve.
This environment is a marketer’s wet dream, as each passing year allows them to push the consumer’s aspirations higher and higher, extracting more and more margin. The unfortunate flip-side of this margin equation is that consumers are being psychologically duped to incrementally overextend themselves financially.
All of this Anti-ancestral disconnection from the past and hyperfocus on our own present status leads to Anti-generational forward progress, or myopia if you prefer. Getting out over your skis by overestimating future cash flows is but one way to effectually rob the future to increase your status in the present.
As I’ve written about previously, we don’t undergo massive 200 year projects to build things like cathedrals anymore. Why would I personally fund something if I am not personally going to see it? (Rhetorical) There is actually no economic incentive for creating a better world for future generations. This creates market dynamics that enable various Ponzi schemes where no value is created except of the perceived or hypothetical variety. The goal of economics is to mark up your own book and sell it while you’re still living. I’ve discussed this macro perspective before, and the solution is more spiritual than psychological, more existential than economic.
No ties to the past means no incentive to have ties to the future. No science backing religion means less religion. Anti-ancestralism is just egoism of the newest generations, a push towards secularism without strategizing a new structure.
To be clear, I’m not religious. I tell people who ask that I’m “Buddhist if anything” because Buddhism is a science of the mind and doesn’t require the “leap of faith” that the more popular religions do. I also am not calling for a return to religious institutions dominating western society, because I believe firmly in the separation of church and state. All institutions are subject to ideological infestation and the development of perverse power incentives. What I am calling out is that the empirical, inborn, societal building block of ancestral worship is diminishing in western society. And honestly who can blame us if we get another Biden/Trump election while the majority of congress has far outlasted their mental expiration dates? The Anyone Under 80 memes are funny because they are true, but also reflect a subconscious, societal disdain for our elders.
The important takeaway here is that new institutions are rapidly developing around us, as old institutions rapidly change from within. Anti-ancestralism leads us to distrust the enduring institutions, forging new ones. However, the new ones are being created with haste, and even though they might have the best of intentions, might feel good, feel right, feel moral, and feel justified, or even required, they may in fact, at their root, be the subconscious brain seeking status. So we have old, rotten, dysfunctional policies that need to be changed as they become increasingly authoritarian (free speech, cancel culture, gerontocracy, regulatory capture). At the same time, being Anti-religious is Anti-ancestral, is Anti-institutional, is Anti-authoritarian. This bucking against the old guard may actually cause an increase in said authoritarianism, which of course increases the bucking. A vicious cycle.
All solutions are ironic paradoxes. There is a classic Aesop fable, the Ship of Theseus, where the following thought experiment is posited: a wooden ship crosses the sea and changes each of it planks, one by one, until all the planks are replaced. At which point did the ship become a new ship? The ship in this analogy is our institutions, they have changed underfoot, and aren’t actually the institutions of the past. Do we continue riding the ship just because it is what we have always known, or do we build a new ship in the same specs as the old one?
I think it makes sense as the changes in society have been so exponential, that the institutions need to be redesigned with modern infrastructure. Humans will always need to display status, as that is inherent in all sentient beings. Such status will assuredly have to be digital, as that primitive shift is here to stay. But how does a new primitive with perversely manipulatable incentive structures keep its head afloat long enough to push society into a higher level of consciousness? An immutable ledger? A platform that economically values provenance? Or perhaps a psychological shift away from placing an economic value on everything..
To summarize:
The move away from religion and institutions, albeit justified in many cases for their well documented hypocrisy and grift, acts as an expedient to rising egoism, which in turn yields a more pernicious focus on short term material value for the self, rather than long term social value for the collective. The undercurrent can be seen in the increasingly visceral battle between Authoritarians and Libertarians, with both the old guard and the new jockeying simultaneously for power and freedom. The unsatisfying existential answer is of course Nirvana, or perhaps all roads lead to decentralization..