Believe in something, goddammit

It is important for our secular institutions to actually stand for something

Jun 18, 2022

Life happens on the boundary between order and chaos. In the yin-yang symbol, dark represents feminine chaos: it is formless potential, which gives birth to all things. Light represents masculine order. It is the structure encoded by DNA which arranges atoms into cells. It is the reduction of entropy encoded by language. It is personality: a set of behaviour patterns that determine, out of infinite possibility, how you will respond in any given situation.¹

Innovation, whether in tech, evolution, communication, or personality - is the breaking of old order to make room for a new one. This requires exposure to chaos, which is destabilizing. Our little wealth and status games, social norms, and the badges of “merit” by which we judge others - simplify the terrifying complexity of the world into something manageable. Most of us are trying to minimize a similar combination of things: pain, boredom, bankruptcy. But there are still infinite solutions to this problem. Accepting a set of norms - social, professional, emotional, religious - reduces the solution set to something workable for decision-making.²

Social norms solve for trust, but stifle innovation

Aesthetics and the people around us influence how rigidly we view our constraints. Corporate folks wear suits, not because it directly improves their productivity, but because it signals to everyone around them that they hold a set of predictable values (such as not upsetting the client). Code styling for developers plays a similar role. It's not that camelCase inherently makes more sense in Javascript than in Python: it’s that someone who pays attention to such details can be trusted to subscribe to a wider range of values which make them a competent software engineer.

In other words, social norms solve for the problem of trust. If I invest time and resources in a person, can they be counted on to behave in ways which are predictable and beneficial to me?

But this is problematic for innovation. If the goal is to create outcomes - find solutions, broker interactions, reveal insights - in ways that the current system will not, we cannot rely on adherents of the current system to accomplish this.

Innovation, in addition to challenging trust mechanisms, also requires walking away from two games that are very hard to walk away from, because evolution primes us to play them: wealth, and status.

Wealth games are amoral; rent-seeking is immoral

Wealth is a simple idea: the caveman that kills more buffalo gets to feed more offspring. But there are two ways to get more buffalo: you can invent sharper, lighter spears, or you can form a caveman-mafia and seize buffalo from weaker tribes. The former is genuine innovation; the latter is rent-seeking. Existing power differentials in society allow people to get quite rich playing the latter game.

This is arguably where capitalism falls down. If money is the arbiter of value, whether it was obtained by selling a better smartphone or by trafficking women, then there is no incentive for investors to assess business ideas - or founders - on what they believe in. This is why religion, spirituality, and philosophy arose as necessary technologies alongside free markets. The essence of what makes us human is the ability to look at a set of behaviours, extrapolate out to what kind of world we'd live in if everyone behaved a certain way, and to say "this causes undue suffering; we can do better".

This genuine, good-faith effort to do better is moral character - and it is something that free-market institutions (companies, VCs, incubators) - don’t actively work against, but generally fail to select for. This is not a problem of bad intentions, but incentives: as long as it is possible to obtain profits and returns without having principles, there will be people who do so.

Moral character is the tone of nobility that once used to define the rhetoric of someone like Bobby Kennedy. It is a tone that is surprisingly lacking in our modern, secular, free-market institutions. It has been replaced by dull, amoral appeals to effectiveness and profitability. We are too afraid to believe in anything anymore.

Status games harm progress; being contrarian hurts

Status is a zero-sum game. In order for someone to win, someone else must lose. It relies on a socially-agreed upon hierarchy of what is good and what is bad. There are, by definition, too many people doing things that are meant to increase status, and only so many of them can actually succeed.

There are also, by definition, too few people doing things that invite social disapproval. Ironically, folks like Thiel and Musk have made it "cool" to be contrarian nowadays, meaning that one of the best ways to win the status game is to claim not to play it. Yet most people claim to love contrarians until they actually meet one, and discover that having your own beliefs challenged is deeply painful. As our favourite Canadian clinical psychologist/national hero/political pariah Jordan B. Peterson likes to say, "nobody likes being poked in the axioms".

Genuine contrarians live in social agony; believing in something is one way to make the pain worthwhile. The evolutionary pressure encoded in our brains to resist social disapproval are a hell of a force: for most of history since the Cambrian explosion, breaking off from the herd usually just meant death. If contrarian behaviour can persist in an individual despite society's constant attempts to quash it, it's usually the result of genuine neurodiversity, profound trauma - or an unshakeable, quasi-religious faith in something.

Hard problems require stubborn conviction

This is why manifestos like Anduril's Rebooting the Arsenal of Democracy, or Chris Seaton's explanation of why he serves in the British Army Reserve alongside his job at Shopify, are so goddamn³ compelling. It is rare to hear anybody in tech nowadays say that they actually stand for something, much less resist prevailing sentiment. It’s even rarer to find somebody who actually lives by those values.

Some things are so hard that they require an almost faith-like level of conviction and stubbornness to execute. Otherwise, you will be bogged down by bureaucracy, rent-seekers defending their territory, social disapproval, or sheer noise and friction. I recall two moments where I felt, for the first time in ages, the definite optimism that Peter Thiel talks about in Zero to One. The first was watching a SpaceX rocket light up the pitch black night sky into daylight, at 2:45am in Cape Canaveral. The second was watching our Tesla change a lane by itself on the freeway for the very first time.

These were powerful experiences because they stood in stark defiance of mediocrity. They were violent refusals to bow down to jaded, selfish, complacent organizations, eking out the bare minimum just to survive until tomorrow, the next shareholder meeting, or the next round of funding. The companies that made these products believed in something.

And it need not be so grand: defiance is contextual, and in certain societies, the simple act of questioning norms may be an act of profound humanity. Archetypes of human excellence are a hell of a force: this article tells the story of a North Korean defector who spent a quarter of her monthly budget not on food, but on South Korean figure skating legend Kim Yuna’s signature fuschia lipstick. North of the 38th parallel, makeup is one of the most prized contraband goods.⁴ Simply seeing a strong vector of human self-expression is enough to inspire some people to break through all social constraints - no matter how deadly the consequences - and risk it all for the idea that they may, one day, also participate in a society that will allow them to do the same.

I don't know how or when we stopped believing in things. All I know is that it will not do as a way of framing the future. When we see someone - a founder, an artist, an author, a defector - hanging onto a conviction for dear life, despite all exhaustion, cynicism, or ability to get away with the contrary - we should pay attention.

Acknowledgments

Views and mistakes are my own. Thanks to Harry Braviner, Seung Eun Yi, Jan Figala (doesn’t believe in social media), Andy Gijbels, Dan Guberman, and Benjamin Parry for reviewing and providing feedback on a draft of this essay.

Footnotes / sources

When personality produces good outcomes more often than not, we call it character. When personality produces bad outcomes more often than not, we call it mental illness. It’s just a set of patterns all the same.
Problems arise when the intersection of the constraints in your life - self-imposed or otherwise - and the problems that you are trying to solve - forms an empty set. This is when people find themselves thrashing in existential despair, or, worse still, opt out of the exercise entirely, and permanently, by jumping off a building.
Note that for all the credit we give to our secular, analytical, rational institutions, we find ourselves resorting to quasi-religious language (“goddamn”) just to speak with any degree of emphasis or conviction.
https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2019/05/232645/north-korea-beauty-products-makeup-smugglers

But First, Entrepreneurs