Introduction and Overview
Civilisation is a recent development in world history; at just 6,000 years old, it is a young organism compared to the human being who has now walked this planet for around 300,000 years. And yet, in its short life, so many of its kind have already fallen: Sumerians, Ancient Greeks, Romans, and Mayans, once so great, perished long ago.
There is a school of thought which believes that death is the fate of all civilisations. This idea gives solace to those who have accepted decline, and succour to those elites whose limited talent gives them no choice but to manage it. But given the youth of civilisation, this judgement is surely premature. Civilisation can be improved, perhaps even immortalised. The objective of this book is to explore how.
Such a task first involves understanding why historical societies fell. One must therefore call upon Arnold J. Toynbee and Oswald Spengler. Chapter One shows how various trends in modern society were foreshadowed by them and other thinkers. For Toynbee, the decline of a civilisation was set in motion by a decline in the creativity of an elite which sacralises outdated ideas. For Spengler, one of the signs on the road of decline was what he called a dictature of money. There trends have been partly realised – as we will see when we discuss the pervasive lack of trust in the governing elite, rapid environmental change, and the dysfunctional financial system.
This may seem like a depressing opening, but to have any hope of overcoming this situation one must find the power to face uncomfortable truths. And anyway, no challenge is discussed without eventually proposing a solution. This is in contrast to most books on the crisis of the West which fail to present solutions in depth, preferring to end with stirring calls to either maintain the values of the present or recreate those of the past.
Such calls are misguided. If present values have resulted in a declining society, then they must change or the society will die. And if old values could not withstand the historical process in the first place, they have no hope of doing so again. But why are our present values failing? Answering this question is the role of Chapter Two, which will assess how liberalism, or more specifically the mindset it facilitated, contributed to the current difficulties faced by the West.
As liberalism is defective, we must conceive a new moral system that is both timeless and universal. This is the task of Chapter Three. The first task for any ideology is to distinguish between good and bad. To do this, one needs to know the meaning of life itself, for if life has no meaning a distinction between good and bad is itself meaningless.
But if life does have meaning, then our mission is clear: we must discover what this meaning is, surviving and gathering knowledge until such a time that it is discovered. Whatever furthers this mission we shall term as provisionally good. If life has no meaning, then our mission cannot be faulted on any ethical grounds. Discovering the meaning of life is a mission which may take centuries or even millennia to accomplish; but this is a brief moment in comparison to the vastness of deep time.
Once this key energising principle is derived, it must be applied to innumerable questions. For example, does the use of pesticides help society survive and gather knowledge? Answering such questions would require us to integrate knowledge from biology, agricultural science, and economics. Essentially, we are recreating a moral system from a single first principle; a task that requires a entirely new academic discipline, which I call metasophy.
But the main thrust of this new philosophy must not be intellectual, but practical. And as Toynbee said that the decline of society was set in motion by a fall in creativity among the elite, this is the first line of attack. But how can we maximise creativity among the population?
If creativity is depressed, the problem likely lies partly in the education system. Peter Thiel has noted that the number of researchers has increased a hundred-fold over the last one hundred years. If the pace of progress is the same now as it was then, this means the individual productivity of the average researcher has declined by 99%. And while this is certainly a problem, there is a greater one – the fact that the educations homogenises people by not giving them enough space to discover their own special talent or meaning. This imperative was considered by some to be the great Western spiritual aim, already expressed in the thirteenth-century Queste del Saint Graal.
To remedy this defect, a new Metasophist University is needed to provide high quality online modules and reliable accreditation to all. We shall thus provide cheap education of the highest quality to all, while empowering people to explore all domains of knowledge at all ages. This is but a first step to boost creativity, a first volley in our war to ensure the creation of an effective elite.
The second volley will be a Youth Fellowship outlined in Chapter Five. For the Metasophist mission to be successful, the society must be united. In the past and increasingly in the present, national military service was seen as a way to promote this. But this can be boring for many, unfulfilling for even more, and possibly a waste of time for all. What we need is a Fellowship programme appeals directly to the spirit by bringing Fellows together to work on projects that are of particular interest to them, and even help some to set up businesses. Fellows would sort themselves into groups after having already cooperated in online classes – the wide selection of courses that could thus be made available would allow them to find others who share their own interests. Besides nurturing creativity, this system provides young citizens with a way 1) to nurture their particular talents and interests 2) to develop a network of those with the same interests and 3) to get to know people from all parts of society.
Importantly, this Fellowship Programme could be used as the testing ground for a new governing class. The aim is to find creative, competent, and charismatic people with a good degree of foresight at a young age and then train them so that the society always has a large pool of talent available. However, there must be sufficient variation in those selected such that there are identifiably different types of elites – they will thus sort themselves into different chapters, depending on what challenges they see as being most urgent. By creating such different chapters, we ensure that when one type of elite fails, there is another waiting in the wings, partly addressing the problem stressed by Toynbee.
In order for this new elite to have the gift of foresight, high quality news and analysis is necessary. But this is increasingly scarce, and often paywalled or influenced by a powerful vested interest. Chapter Seven thus proposes a programme in order to solve the various problems ailing high quality media, such as falling revenues, a shortage of talent, and the excessive influence of advertisers. This can be achieved through the use of a dual-subsidy whereby media organisations are rewarded depending on how well they predict events and on how popular they are.
However, any effort to reinvigorate society will be for nothing unless we deal with the issue of widespread inequality and parasitic industries. Large parts of finance especially are mostly extractive, but the power of this sector has prevented any possibility for radical change thus far. Chapter Ten outlines how we can finally bring the financial sector under control by preventing any actor except the central bank from creating money. I show how this scheme could bring down public debt levels substantially, thereby ending doubts over the sustainability of the Euro.
Elaborating on this theme, Chapter Eleven discusses how we can reduce inequality and deal with disruptions from increasing automation and trade by setting up a Social Equity Fund. Such a fund would be used to give all citizens equity shareholdings, and therefore finally end the capital versus labour conflict.
Thus we conclude the discussion of economic and social issues -- broadly speaking, the internal matters which can undermine the effectiveness of a society. But external threats remain, and these demand serious thought and even more serious action. Notably, any effort to cheat civilisational death must confront environmental and climate change. Chapter Twelve therefore discusses the effects of environmental and climate change. It proposes a programme that can take advantage of recent technological breakthroughs to lay the ground for an incipient space industry. This new space industry would lessen the strain on the Earth’s resources, while leaving us in a good position to construct a sunshade in space, should it be necessary to avoid the worst consequences of global warming.
At this point, one may be likely to think that the prospects for such a radical reform agenda are dim indeed. They may even see the philosophy as too high-minded, and not likely to appeal to the common man. The final chapter thus aims to address these concerns. This chapter shows how Metasophism can give an individual meaning, mental strength, and a moral compass to guide us away from our current morass.
Thereafter, the book concludes by illustrating how Metasophism would truly represent not just a reincarnation of the West, but an urgently needed moral transformation.