Moloch the Impossible Dream

One of the few ways rationalists will be anti-capitalist is their consideration of Moloch. Moloch here is the concept that efficient systems outcompete their rivals, and through necessity turn their hosts entirely into that efficient system. To some degree this is like capitalism pressuring all employers to pay their employees the lowest possible wage, or it’s like a super intelligent AI transforming every piece of matter in the universe into a copy of itself. @slatestarscratchpad had two fairly good posts on this fear.

What is important to remember is that Moloch cannot agree even to this 99.99999% victory. Rats racing to populate an island don’t leave a little aside as a preserve where the few rats who live there can live happy lives producing artwork. Cancer cells don’t agree to leave the lungs alone because they realize it’s important for the body to get oxygen. Competition and optimization are blind idiotic processes and they fully intend to deny us even one lousy galaxy.

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I am pretty sure there was, at one point, such a thing as western civilization. I think it involved things like dancing around maypoles and copying Latin manuscripts. At some point Thor might have been involved. That civilization is dead. It summoned an alien entity from beyond the void which devoured its summoner and is proceeding to eat the rest of the world.

I welcome people seeing the way capitalism coerces us to be cruel to each other, but I think it gets something very wrong about the endstate. The terminal goal of Moloch instead looks a lot more like this picture:

You are familiar with the saying “the map is not the territory.” The real world is an unfathomably complex, messy place. By and large every pattern we find in it, has some exceptions. Racism, phrenology, Marxism, religion, and every other ideology has attempted to put people into certain categorizations only to be flummoxed by “well what about this border case over here? And why does this one member of class A act like a member of class B in this instance? And and…”

Humans are messy. Reality is messy. Every attempt at putting them in maps has failed. The first AI algorithms turning to the issues of analyzing people, are mostly just falling for the same old racist pattern matching that bedeviled us for a while. Any computer program that tries to make a model of the universe without being more complex than the universe itself, is going to have some errors and simplifications.

If Moloch could take over the entire world, I think it would have done so a while ago. Instead there’s also some execrable Other that slips through the cracks, and begins rotting the foundations of the whole edifice.

If capitalism (or an AI, or some other ideology) could actually totalize everything into existence into part of its functioning, I would be much less opposed to it. Sure it might be fulfilling some terminal value different than mine, but I’m not certain my terminal values are that great. What concerns me more is the way some people don’t fit into those systems, and are cast out of society.

For example, heteronormativity would be better if everyone could embrace the traditional model of marriage for a fulfilling life. It’s not that “everyone living in a house with their opposite sex spouse and two kids” is so bad, is that this really does not work for many people, and they find themselves torn between societal pressures to conform, and their own unorthodox romantic urges.

This contradiction makes any ideological system very uneasy. Things are supposed to be perfect after all. So the excluded become the scapegoat, and all the weight of the contradictions of the system, all the anxiety people have about it, becomes placed on the backs of those who don’t fit in. Or in other words “why don’t you have a job yet!?”

Look at that picture again. Trump and ostentatious capitalism want everyone to fit in with their way of living. And they can conquer a lot of the map. But there will always be some disgusting, downcast part that does not fit into their model. The war between that billboard and those street kids is the story of oppression, and the real fate of Moloch.

The point of universal Communism, and of my own more idealistic moments, is to always view things from the perspective of that excluded Other.