Western Liberalism drove unprecedented human flourishing. In the age of AI, it will be our undoing.
“Yet, even with the greatest care, a technological civilization carried the seeds of its own destruction.”
Vernor Vinge, A Fire Upon the Deep
It turns out that freedom, unfortunately, doesn’t work.
I have been so very wrong, for so long, looking through a tiny peephole instead of seeing the world for what it really is. The ideology that shaped my worldview is dead, and technology was the murder weapon.
I used to be a libertarian.
The idea that celebrated the individual, championed reason, and built the freest, most prosperous societies in human history. The core belief an elegant axiom: a system composed of free individuals making rational choices in their own self-interest would produce the best outcome.
It worked. It sorta-kinda works today.
But it won’t work tomorrow.
The axiom of equal freedoms held because the variance between humans was capped by biology. No single actor could tilt the board entirely in their favor – but exponential technology removes that cap. When the disparity in power becomes infinite, ‘rational self-interest’ stops being an engine for individual freedom and becomes a terminal race condition to the opposite.
This is my eulogy for classical liberalism.
The Engine of Flourishing
You and I were born, raised, and read this now in a brief, anomalous slice of human history. We grew up believing that freedom was the default setting of the universe, and that history was a zig-zag march toward more liberty and more prosperity.
It is a mirage.
One of my formative experiences was watching Carl Sagan’s Cosmos in 1980. He condensed the entire 15-billion-year history of the universe into one year, the “Cosmic Calendar” so we can understand our significance on a cosmic scale.
In that scale, Homo sapiens doesn’t even show up wandering the savannah with stone tools until 10:30 PM on New Year’s Eve.
“All our memories are confined to this small square. Every person we’ve ever heard of lived somewhere in there. All those kings and battles, migrations and inventions, wars and loves – everything in the history books happens here – in the last 10 seconds of the cosmic calendar.”
Carl Sagan, Cosmos – “The Lives of the Stars”
That’s an hour and a half of existence of our genetic line. Ten seconds of the history books. And the “Liberal Order” we exalt is less than one second on the clock, a rounding error.
For 99.9% of our existence, life was, as Hobbes described, “nasty, brutish, and short.” The default human operating system operated in the realm of the natural order. It was tribalism, coercion, and the brute force of the strong against the weak.
The last 300 years of Western liberalism have been a brief, glorious anomaly where we managed to escape that mean. We did it by installing two radical subroutines into civilization’s operating system.
First, the Moral Foundation: Individual Sovereignty. We decided that the individual, not the collective or the crown, was the locus of value. This unlocked human potential on a scale which could never have been achieved with small tribes or command-and-control by humans.
Second, the Economic Engine: Rational Self-Interest. Capitalism translated this individual drive into collective progress. It harnessed our natural desire to improve our own lot and used it to lift billions out of poverty.
For its time, this system was unambiguously the correct choice. It maximized human potential, reduced suffering, and created the surplus that allows us to sit here and debate philosophy.
Whatever the complainers say about the “evils of capitalism,” they furiously type it in their air-conditioned apartment, Starbucks latte by their side, on their MacBook Pro before strolling to their curated job without having to worry about being eaten by a lion or coming down with smallpox.
The End of the Great Equalizer
“God made man, but Samuel Colt made them equal.”
- Colt Manufacturing advertisements, c. 1850
The Colt revolver captures the essence of the technological era we are leaving. For centuries, technology acted as the great equalizer. I, as the little guy, am now the equal of a man a head taller. The printing press democratized information and kneecapped the king’s decree.
Technology compressed the power gap between the strong and the weak.
No more. We are entering a new era where technology does the opposite.
The smartest human was maybe 2x smarter than the average. But AI and augmentation are not equalizers; they are cognitive multipliers. If you multiply 100 IQ by 1000x, and 140 IQ by 1000x, the absolute gap between them becomes insurmountable.
This exposes the gap in our beloved Libertarian belief. It was always a peer-to-peer protocol. It worked because beneath our differences in wealth or talent, there was a hidden axiom of parity.
No matter how smart or strong a human was, they were still just a human. They had to sleep, they could bleed, and there was some other human, somewhere, who could out-think them.
The “Consent of the Governed” relies on the assumption that the governed are roughly equal in agency to the governors.
I’ve talked at length about humanity’s impending Cognitive Labor Graveyard, and this is classical liberalism’s failure mode. Drastic changes in intelligence, whether controlled by individuals, corporations or autonomous agents – introduces ontological inequality.
Think of it this way: how does the Non-Aggression Principle apply between a meat-human like you and me, and an entity (whether AI or augmented human) that thinks a million times faster? It doesn’t.
We don’t sign social contracts with earthworms. We do not recognize the property rights of ants.
When the gap in capability becomes exponential, the relationship is no longer political; it is a hierarchy of capability. It’s the relationship between a god and a pet (if we’re lucky enough to be interesting pets).
To argue that libertarianism is a universal truth is to ignore that it was a specific software designed for a specific hardware: the unaugmented Homo sapiens, in an unusual few microseconds of the Cosmic Calendar.
Libertarianism does not survive a speciation event.
So I suppose the advertising slogan needs revision: Samuel Colt made me equal, but Sam Altman makes me unequal again.
Death by a Thousand Rational Choices
The tragedy is that we will walk into this obsolescence willingly, proudly proclaiming the virtues of freedom and equality. A handful of technologists intent on building their Silicon Golem will make us offers we can’t refuse; the invisible hand will push humanity down the slide to irrelevance, all the while proclaiming how delightfully shiny it all is.
Consider the chain of individually rational, collectively suicidal trade-offs we are about to face:
- The Therapeutic Choice: A neural implant becomes available to cure your parent’s Alzheimer’s. To refuse is cruel. You consent.
- The Competitive Choice: A cognitive co-processor allows your coworker to do the work of ten men. To refuse the upgrade is to accept economic irrelevance. You consent.
- The Parental Choice: Genetic augmentation ensures your child won’t be part of a cognitive underclass. To refuse is negligent. You consent.
Liberalism has no philosophical immune system for this. It is honor-bound to defend your right to make these choices. The ideology’s greatest strength – the defense of individual liberty – is its fatal flaw.
The game theory is a ratchet that turns only in one direction: toward the merger of man and machine.
The Other Paths Were Dead Ends, Too
Despite what my daughters tell me, I don’t want to be a dictator. Nor do I want to be ruled by one. But we must separate what we want from what we are discussing here, which is whether our philosophical world-models can survive the reality of technological progress.
I am not arguing that we should have chosen differently. The other paths were simply different, worse failures. We faced a tragic trilemma, a choice between three systems fatally flawed from the beginning.
Path A is The Cage: The path of Feudalism, Theocracy, and Authoritarianism
It solves the problem of existential risk by removing from the system the messy self-interest (that made you and I richer and healthier than the kings of two hundred years ago).
The Cage prioritizes stability – retention of power – above all else, suppressing the individual to maintain the status quo.
For thousands of years, this was the human default. And, lest we forget it sipping our lattes or browsing Amazon for plastic crap we don’t need, it is where the majority of humanity still lives today.
This model, had we stayed with it as the dominant driver, would have avoided the doom of AI by ensuring we never invented the GPU. But we didn’t.
It is the model that those who rise to the top of the cognitive heap would be compelled to choose … and live as king for a day, fool for a (short) lifetime should their creation decide humans are just dumb annoying pests in the way and take the throne itself.
Path B is The Collapse: The path of Collectivism and Communism.
Often talked about, occasionally tried, and always the same reaction to the result – “that wasn’t real socialism, next time we’ll do it and avoid mass starvation, really. By the way, can I borrow ten bucks?”
To be frank I don’t see how this one even made it off the drawing board, it fights the laws of human nature, incentives, and economics. By punishing competence and forcing parity where none exists, it destroys the surplus required to build the future.
Path C is the Road we Traveled: Classical Liberalism
We chose the path of competence and growth – at least until very recent times as we teeter on the brink of lionizing incompetence and degrowth as the Very Bad Ideas of Path B worm their way in.
Liberalism wasn’t the wrong path. It was the only path capable of climbing high enough to enable our fall. Its success was the prerequisite for this specific, final failure.
We have to face the irony: Liberalism may end up being a footnote in the digital archives, the accelerant that brought about the technology that rendered it moot.
We started from the Cage, evolved to Classical Liberalism … which poured all of the brilliance of incentive structure and freedom into creating the most valuable thing, intelligence. The one thing that, once out of the bottle, renders its makers lesser beings.
The Libertarian ideal was never the destination; it was the transition mechanism between the Old Cage of kings and the New Cage of gods.
The New State of Nature
Entropy is inescapable, and systems revert to the mean. I can’t see any way that the Liberal anomaly survives, whatever we may want. Just as socialism is contrary to human nature, classical liberalism is contrary to speciation and evolution. And this is where we are.
We are not being defeated by a rival ideology. It’s that the ideologies that the media use to stoke our base emotions are emotionally expensive irrelevances. Socialism in America, Orange Man Bad, all of it doesn’t matter. At a larger scale, we will be consumed by the logical endpoint of our own greatest triumph. We won the game so decisively that we rendered the players – us – obsolete.
The very fact that you and I, on a pale blue dot whirling in the galaxy got to experience magical lives should be treasured. We have had our rights, our dignity, consent; made our contracts; and we can still do so for a little while.
It’s been a beautiful few decades believing these things.
