The Seven Priorities Killing Our Future

We circle around one topic here: what kind of culture is fit to spread life from Earth?

It's hard enough to talk about past and different cultures due to the difficulty in seeing beyond whatever your current value system might be.

How much more difficult to talk about a culture that doesn't yet exist!

A trick we can pull is to look at aspects of fringe subcultures we think might inherit the future, and combine them with the constraints that would be necessary to survive in the future we expect.

To look at that, let's first look at what is valued in our dominant culture: that of Western, Educated, Intellectual, Rich Democracies.

We can't ask them, of course.

A feature of our time is that stated goals are used as rallying flags to keep large populations together. The content of what is said has little clue on what is actually pursued.

Instead, we will have to glean this from the goals people pursue in every micro-interaction.

By my reckoning, they are, in rough order of priority:

• 1) Economic security

• 2) Status & credentials

• 3) A feeling of safety

• 4) Appearance & being Seen (Identity)

• 5) Comfort, convenience, and work-life balance

• 6) Entertainment

• 7) Romantic autonomy

These all serve the self over lineage or group. Yes, we may go after economic security for our families. However, you may note that once you have economic security for your families, is your family asking other families for help?

Will there ever be a barn raising if you can simply hire someone to put up a mass manufactured barn, instead?

This is a result of the two-thousand year steady march of Divide et impera. And who or what benefits from the elevation of this self?

Who benefited from atomization? Oh we can talk about divorce lawyers, I suppose. Therapists. The broadcast industry, and later the streaming industry. Dating apps. The list would go on and on.

Yet the clue of who sits at the root of all that lies in the first goal, like Atlas under the Globe.

1) Economic security

Which brings us to... who rules the economy?

Divide into selves, yes, and what can a self do without a central authority.

I digress.

Let us turn to the matter at hand.

The culture fit to spread.

It will need Asabiyyah, unity, we know. The very thing ripped apart by the blender of our society. At a distance, and in the harshness of new frontiers, all divisions produce near-instant fission.

Like tempered glass with embedded tensions, one sharp impact shatters into a thousand cubes.

It is taken back to the Void.

Total party wipe.

From my years looking at trust, I discovered that one does not simply...increase trust. Take a soccer team and send them through bootcamp, eye contact sessions, or whatever. What does it matter if they never get on the pitch. If they never have that goal...of putting a ball into an opposing goal? Then they will never learn why trust is worth leaping into.

You actually have to want to change some specific thing in the world, in such a way that you are forced to rely on others.

So let us look at the minimum necessary goals for a culture fit for traversing the void between stars.

1. Off-Earth Orientation

2. Backups & Continuity

3. Exergy Maximization

If you don't orient off Earth, you don't get off Earth. If you don't have a culture that backs things up and privileges the continuation of the life, then every launch is bound to suicide- destroying both those who scout, and those who stay on base. Without mastering the flow of energy in all things, we're not going to muster the energy necessary to coordinate across vast distances of time & space.

Yet we can look at the other goals a future thriving culture may have. The less "necessary" ones.

• 4. Capability extension

• 5. Machine Alignment

• 6. Micro-sovereignty + radical transparency

The longer our individuals live and the more capable they are, the easier it will be to serve the continuity of consciousness.

We hear about "AI alignment" every day, but this is part of a bigger goal that we see the beginnings of now: the alignment with all our tools. Do our tools serve us, or do we serve our tools? In the past, this was rarely a question. In the last fifty years, it has become central.

Lastly, a spacefaring society will need to keep up with the speed of decisions. This means smaller groups that have the freedom to improve the world around them without checking in with a central authority. And the ability to adapt to local conditions. For all the groups to learn from each other to benefit the whole, we need radical transparency. Both to improve those groups, and to allow us to sort ourselves with ease.

Next week, we'll look at more grounded, everyday examples of what this might mean, in the day of a life.