The End of Liberalism and the rise of Network States?

This week I got into an argument on Twitter. That’s quite rare for me, these days, but still happens occasionally. I tweeted something about the damage Trump has done to democracy, globally, and an account called ‘Behold Retreats’ tweeted back that democracy is a sham.

Behold Retreats was set up by an American called Jonathan de Potter, who previously worked as a management consultant at Accenture before he tried ayahuasca in 2017. Five years on, he’s organizing psychedelic retreats in Mexico, Portugal, the Netherlands and Costa Rica.

I was dismayed that a psychedelic retreat would be publicly attacking democracy, and wasn’t quite sure where Potter was coming from. He retweeted some crypto libertarians, and I went on a bit of a rant about how he was a libertarian parasite using the state infrastructure of Costa Rica while not paying taxes there. He told me I didn’t know what I was talking about, and that I should read two books: Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed, which came out in 2018, and Balaji Srinivasan’s The Network State, which just came out.

So I did. They’re both interesting reads, so I’m grateful to Potter for drawing them to my attention. You see — something good can come even from Twitter arguments!

Both books evince a deep pessimism in American democracy and a sense that the end is nigh. Deneen, a political philosopher at University of Notre Dame, quotes founding father John Adams: ‘There never was a democracy yet, that did not commit suicide’ (Britain?) What’s interesting is that both books look to the example of religious communes as prototypes for what could come next. This is a classic 1920s / 30s move: when faith in liberal democracy was extremely low, all sorts of alternative utopian communes bubbled up, as Anna Neima explored in her recent book, The Utopians.

Deneen argues that American liberalism has failed in that fewer and fewer people believe in it any more or trust its institutions, while depression and suicide are rising. He thinks it has failed because it succeeded. It liberated the individual and gave them opportunities to satisfy every material and sexual desire, every urge for freedom. But Americans have discovered this doesn’t really satisfy their soul. Liberalism undermined what every religion teaches: human desire is ravenous, and needs curtailing. Only through the curtailment of desire and the cultivation of virtues is true satisfaction found. What America offers instead is ‘institutionalized discontent’ — ie capitalism.

He offers the Amish as an alternative — they’re a Puritan Germanic sect found in the US. They have a custom called Rumspringa (it literally means ‘run around’), where adolescent Amish get to go wild in secular society for two years before choosing whether to return to Amish society and commit to its values. Deneen says that 80% of Amish choose to return, because the Amish religious commune is more satisfying than American liberalism’s soulless mall of unfettered desire.

Deneen’s book has been hailed as an interesting and radical critique of liberalism by Barack Obama, no less. He recently appeared on the Vox podcast and you can listen to that conversation here. While his critique is interesting, to me, it’s not a very new perspective. It’s in the well-established tradition of communitarian critiques of secular liberal individualism, previously expressed by writers like Christopher Lasch, Alasdair Macintyre, Michael Sandel, Robert Putnam, Robert Bellah and the entire tradition of Catholic Thomist thought which Notre Dame promotes. This tradition is built on Aristotle’s idea that the aim of the state shouldn’t just be individual freedom but flourishing, and you need a paternalist state and a strong sense of the common good for that.

The question is, how do you get from western liberalism to a more communitarian or Aristotelian society? How do you put the genie of individual liberty back in the bottle? Deneen doesn’t believe in theocratic revolution a la Iran, and instead says we need a mass voluntary conversion to a vision of the common good. So, regarding Behold Retreats’ anti-democracy — Deneen is not apparently preaching the overthrow of democracy, just the overthrow of rampant individualism. But when American society can’t even agree whether to wear masks during a pandemic, or whether to make guns harder to buy when you have mass shootings every week, the chances of a mass democratic conversion to a shared vision of the common good seems slim. What you’re left with is Alasdair Macintyre’s idea of small communes on the fringes of civilization, like Benedictine monasteries, committed to a shared Rule while the dark ages rage around them.

This is pretty much where Balaji Srinivasan also ends up. He’s a different fish to Deneen of Notre Dame. Balaji is a Silicon Valley guru, who started off as a statistician at Stanford, then set up a genomic testing company, then became a venture capitalist, a leading evangelist for cryptocurrency, and finally CEO of Coinbase. Now he’s one of Silicon Valley’s many philosophers and futurists — he predicted COVID would turn into a pandemic at the end of January 2020.

Balaji caused a stir with a talk at Y Combinator in 2013, called Silicon Valley’s ultimate exit. He declared that the US used to be run by four cities: Boston for higher ed; New York for media and banking; Los Angeles for culture and DC for regulation. And now Silicon Valley is ‘becoming stronger than all of them combined’. And that’s provoked a back-lash, particularly in the form ‘Woke Capitalism’. Balaji feels that the American Left has turned San Francisco into an unlivable shit-hole.

The solution is not for entrepreneurs to move to Austin or Miami, but for Silicon Valley to exit America and start its own opt-in country, which he points out is what Peter Thiel has explored with ‘seasteading’ (starting libertarian floating republics) and Elon Musk is trying to do on Mars.

He develops this idea in his new book, The Network State. The US is becoming anarchic, he says. It’s like Weimar Germany, with political mobs fighting on the streets. He sees two tribes at war: Wokeism and Bitcoin Maximalism (huh?). He really despises the New York Times and spends whole chapters accusing it of being a lying mouthpiece for Woke Capitalism.

It’s interesting, by the by, that Silicon Valley founders like Elon Musk typically see ‘Wokeism’ as the great threat to America, while having a total blind spot when it comes to white supremacist / anti-liberal movements like MAGA, the Proud Boys, Qanon etc — the armed groups actually storming the Capitol with pitchforks and nooses. The reason is that Wokeism is far more obvious in San Francisco, and far more of a threat to founders’ daily lives (they might get cancelled or even booted off their own boards).

What’s the alternative to American anarchy? The ‘start-up state’. You start online and form a community of shared values — Balaji points out that Facebook and Twitter now have more members than most countries. You find the One Commandment that your members or netizens can gather around. You could have a community organized around ‘Kosher Keto’ (ie high protein low sugar diets) for example, or an FDA-free community dedicated to human improvement and longevity experiments.

This is where the example of religious communes comes in — they build alternative societies based on a shared moral code, like the Adventists, who were Kosher Keto before it was Kool. The Network State can’t just be an off-shore beach-club. You need citizens willing to toil, sacrifice and even die for the common good, so they need to be quasi-religious.

There are many other ideas and web links in his book, which reads like one of Dominic Cummings’ Red Bull-fuelled blog splurges. But this is the essential idea: We in Silicon Valley are smarter and better and we can run society better than democracy / idiocracy, so let’s do it. It’s the 21-st century version of an American movement of the 1930s called Technocracy Incorporated, which Elon Musk’s grandfather was involved with. The Technocrats were a group of engineers who thought that technocracy would run society better than messy democracy.

To which one wants to respond: go for it. Take a group of contrarian, highly libertarian nerds with Aspbergers and start a society, let us know how it works out. It’s all talk, all ego-stroking. Peter Thiel has been talking about seasteading for a decade, where’s the floating republic of Thielia?

What you have instead of functioning crypto-societies is private beach-clubs and gated communities for the rich, which stroke the egos of their rich clients and tell them how spiritually evolved they are, while parasitically feeding off host democracies like Costa Rica or New Zealand. These gated beach-clubs for the mega-rich do all they can to avoid taxes, in the name of crypto-libertarianism. They hoard all their money while letting working-class Costa Ricans (or whatever jurisdiction they’re in) pay taxes for the essential infrastructure on which they depend.

There’s a remarkable absence in Balaji’s vision of any sense that American democracy’s woes might be connected to the social networks that Silicon Valley created, with their in-built financial incentives to foster outrage and polarisation. No remorse, just ‘move fast, break things, then exit with all your cash’. It doesn’t surprise me that Dominic Cummings is a big fan of his — he’s another apostle of ‘exit-ocracy’ — great at smashing things up, less good at building something that lasts.

Anyway, listen, I’m all for new ideas, so both these books are definitely worth a read. See what you think for yourself. Or listen to Balaji talking for three hours on the Tim Ferriss show, and marvel at how many times he says ‘you know about X, right?’ Leaving poor Tim to say, about 100 times, ‘no, Balaji, I don’t, you’re obviously cleverer than me, tell me about X’.

Here’s what I find intriguing about Balaji’s book. As regular readers will know, I have been geeking out about eugenic utopias, like the 19th-century Oneida Commune, or Dr Kellogg’s Sanitarium, or the SS’ attempt to breed supermen, and I’m interested in how this sort of eugenic utopian thinking plays out in Silicon Valley today.

Some of the same people into alternative crypto-utopias are also into genetic modification and longevity — people like Peter Thiel, Dominic Cummings, Balaji, possibly Scott Alexander (I don’t know if he’s into crypto but he’s expressed enthusiasm for Dune-style eugenic breeding programmes). They believe in rule by the smartest, and are often interested in the idea you can genetically screen embyros for intelligence and maybe eventually edit DNA to create smarter people.

This was the vision Aldous Huxley espoused in his last novel, Island, where a small group of highly evolved souls gathered on an island to practice tantric sex, psychedelics and eugenics — 50% of Island’s citizens are born from a genius sperm bank, to raise the community’s average IQ. He was partly inspired by the Oneida religious commune, which practiced polyamory and positive eugenics in the late 19th-century. I know Aldous’ book was one of the inspirations for the original Seasteading manifesto.

Balaji talks about Network States dedicated to human improvement and longevity, and I wonder whether he, or Peter Thiel, or other Silicon Valley rationalists and transhumanists ever envisage some sort of eugenic utopia. I notice Balaji refers to Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis — the idea that Americans are a fitter race because they are a frontier people. The suggestion is that Silicon Valley founders are the fittest of the fit, the 21st century’s frontier people. So why not find an island and breed super-babies, as Jeffrey Epstein apparently planned to do?

I am not trying to cancel anyone. I want to best understand their ideology, from an objective position. I am personally agnostic on human genetic modification. But I am not agnostic about liberal democracy — it’s one of my favourite things.

Both Deneen and Balaji’s books remind me very much of the 1930s, when few people believed liberal democracy had a future, and Aldous Huxley and his friend Gerald Heard abandoned Europe as a lost cause and moved to California. Heard started a commune outside Los Angeles, which he thought would be a ‘raft’ to keep spiritual wisdom alive while civilization collapsed. What happened? Civilization survived while his commune lasted seven years.

American democracy is certainly tottering. To me it seems threatened above all by American Puritanism. On the right, you have this Puritan obsession with demonic paedos and Satanic panics. On the left, you have a Puritan obsession with self-flagellation for the original sin of racism. And then you have Puritans like Balaji saying ‘fuck this, let’s leave and start a new country’. This endless restless demented Puritanism of the American mind!

I still believe in the American liberal experiment. And I believe in it for spiritual reasons. I think a more-or-less stable secular democracy is the best foundation for people to seek spiritual truth, alone or in community. That’s why the US has been such an extraordinary incubator for new religious movements over the last two centuries.

Yes, American consumerism is destroying the climate. But are non-democratic states like China or Russia doing better on climate change, or worse? I’d argue they’re doing even worse.

Keep the faith, America.