No villains, only unconsciousness

Seeing the innocence of what we're up against, and its transformative potential, is one necessary aspect of “How can we address the wicked potentials of our era?” (according to me)

Part I in “What's missing in our approach to the wicked potentials of our era?” series.

“If you think of yourself as an insurgent battling dark forces, it’s easy to become unduly fixated on the obstacles in your path. But if you truly want to make something new, the act of creation is far more important than the old industries that might not like what you create.”
- Peter Thiel

No villains, only unconsciousness

It’s easy to make social media giants like Facebook the villain of the attention optimization story, but this is missing the deep interconnectivity of everything. Zuck’s hands are tied by the economic system which demands quarterly profits, not because Wall Street but teacher’s unions have retirement plans invested in FB stock; not because America is evil but because hundreds of millions of people bootstrapped through a million tiny decisions to make their lives and the lives of their kids and grandkids better through investing and correctly recognizing the correlation with wealth and well-being increasing together.

loving what is

I see this as the personal-growth equivalent of welcoming what’s here / being with it / loving defenses. After working with thousands of people for fifteen plus years, I can say that in 99% of cases change is far quicker and longer lasting when we come from a place of embracing what is, rather than trying to bully our way past it.

Only when we’re honest and in touch with the truth of what is can we work on changes at a deeper level of identity commitments—because we have to feel what works about what we currently have. What do we lose if the “wanted” change happened? For example, a friend recently got a really bad sinus infection, which meant he couldn’t take part in a painful business negotiation until weeks of recovery. The infection was real, but he was committed to it because it was a solution to another problem: avoiding a painful negotiation.

If this works so well for individual transformation, perhaps it’s relevant to societal transformation as well?

nature doesn’t seem to care about your feelings…

When it comes to big systemic issues I think seeing innocence is hard, because the stories of the those suffering unfair systems are heartbreaking. Nature is violent, along with cuddly. It doesn’t seem to care about our preferences (except that we are nature), but we want it to! And making it a villain means maybe we matter! We’d prefer a loving God, but a judging asshole God seems better than none at all, because then we’re not alone in the universe…

Plus, if fate is indifferent to us, then it seems like we don’t have any control. It’s the same reason I curse the table leg when I stub my toe on it. If we can claim that it’s Trump’s fault (or Biden’s), then our job is clear: vote for the other candidate. (Spoiler: I think both are symptoms, not causes). I have to constantly remind myself not to fall into the temptation of making someone else wrong because making the fuzzy, unknown, dynamic immensity complexity of reality more manageable seems like such a relief.

making villains obscures our flaws, setting us up to become what we hate

But it’s critical that we see unconsciousness rather than villainy, and here’s why: if I think Facebook is evil I usually correspondingly think I’m good, and I can lie to myself about my motivations and make the exact same mistakes they made.

If instead I recognize they were regular people doing what they thought was best for their circumstances, I can see where I might make the same choices and avoid doing that with UpTrust. There are so many almost good features of Facebook that simply got twisted into attention optimization, and for good reason. I’ve heard story after story about this from engineers inside the company. They were trying to ship products fast, no time to think about long-term consequences. They were trying to keep a site for billions of people from failing. They were unconscious.

I know what it’s like to be unconscious. I’m deeply unconscious about so many things right now—the pitch of the notes in the music I’m listening to, the conversations happening in the houses next to mine, the way my computer or the internet works at basically any level—take your infinite pick, and those are just the things I know I don’t know.

I know what it’s like to not think through the second and third order effects. I like to pretend I’m so wise and thoughtful but I simply can’t reason that deeply about everything. Facebook (as an example, but we can use any social media) simply didn’t realize how much power and influence they had, and by the time they did, they were in too deep.

If you’re not willing to admit you’re deeply unconscious, and you’re deeply flawed, you stand no chance of harnessing the wicked potential of wicked problems. Even the best of us can be corrupted, like Frodo with the ring…

A controversial example: US Insurance companies

If UnitedHealth Group goes out of business because people successfully organize together to tank its stock, they’re going to have expended a bunch of energy for basically zero systemic change—other insurers stuck in the exact same system will behave essentially exactly the same way, and no competitor will come along and change the system unless they deeply understand the incentives.

It’s relieving to point the finger at CEO Brian Thompson, but the relief is temporary as it demands disempowerment and makes all the fixes short term rather than systemic. Insurers, hospitals, and patients will all still struggle with inflated list prices, opaque networks, and endless paperwork. Ironically, massive health conglomerates will have to pay CEOs more to counter the risk of murder. Self-organizing systems perpetuate without central planning, and require different strategies to shift.

What villains are you making?

Don’t take my word for it. Pick your favorite hyperobject, see what kind of villains you’re making, and see what happens when you try a different view.

Here are ways to get at the villains you make—pick a wicked problem and try answering these questions in your brain, in the comments section, in conversation, in your journal, with your favorite LLM, or by whatever means works for you:

• Who do you blame?

• Who can’t you forgive?

• Who do you hate/wish didn’t exist?

• What do you think happened that was unconscionable?

• What do you think is the silver bullet?

I’m not even going to talk about owning the projections here; just from a pragmatic point of view what does making a villain give you? What would you lose if you shifted your mindset?

What does making-villains obscure? What solutions become possible when you let that go?

I genuinely would love to see some comments about what comes from this…

The “What's missing in our approach to the wicked potentials of our era?” series attempts to uncover some of (un)common ways of seeing that might help us transform the most tricky global problems into something we’re proud of as a species.

Part 1: No villains (this post)
Part II: Self-organizing systems & incentive landscapes
Part III: Integration of vision and practical in every decision
Part IV: Addressing the whole developmental stack (what’s good for me, we, all of us)
Part V: Culture addressing the problem must embody rare integral values
Part VI: Multiple stakeholder integration