Wishes, Love and Cosmopoiesis

This may be the most serious piece I have written on substack. What if all our wishes come true? What if technology delivers true abundance within the decade? Imagine a world with unlimited cheap energy from nuclear fusion and space-based solar power. Imagine a world with unlimited resources that come from asteroids and new materials science. Imagine a world where there is no digital divide because we can access the internet anywhere at any time. John Maynard Keynes envisaged this kind of abundance in 1932 when he wrote “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren”. As Mike Green pointed out in our recent Twitter Space conversation, it was a similar moment in time. The start of The Great Depression was bearing down. Everyone was preoccupied by loss, not by possibility. Keynes suggested that we’d have so much abundance that there would be no need to work more than three hours a day.  Has this happened? Yes. The economy and innovation bolted forward so fast since 1932 that we can hardly appreciate how big and fast the leap has been. The problem has not been the technology. The problem is us. When given the gift of better and faster ways to do things, we don’t stop to spend the leisure time living. No, we fill the time-space with more work. The problem is not the tech. It’s the psyche. Can we humans handle abundance? Can we really stop? Is there an “enough”? And what would we fill the rest with? We know the answer. I don’t say this lightly or frivolously. Love.

Look at the aptly named asteroid called Psyche. If the wealth from that one asteroid alone were distributed evenly, NASA says every human would be a billionaire. But what would we do with that freedom and that money? How many would spend it on outdoing the next guy? How much time and money do we spend trying to outdo someone else with something bigger, better, rarer, more valuable, shinier, prettier, or whatever? But does this buy happiness? Does this feed the soul? No. Does it spur us to dig deep and find out what we are really made of and really capable of? No. At best, it buys dopamine hits in a world where our neurorights are being violated by ever more sophisticated dopamine-inducing algorithms spawned by the gambling industry. As Russel Brand recently said, the culture of competitiveness acts like “jump leads” on your consciousness, prompting you to be driven by FOMO, terrified of the end of the world and envious of everything everybody else has. We fill the free time in the race for “more”.

I listened to both Joe Rogan and Eric Weinstein on separate podcasts where they started talking about the need to earn more money and have more stuff to attract the women they wanted. They assumed that it was perfectly normal and obvious that meeting material needs equated to attracting beautiful women. I’m pretty sure they’d be offended if I said, “so you think you can buy love?” And yet, that’s what each clearly supposed. It was shocking to hear otherwise thoughtful men completely miss that they are going after the wrong people if money can buy them.  Neither seemed to understand that it’s the qualities that money cannot buy that are the most attractive and compelling. This made me realize the irony of humanity's situation. As we reach into the abundance of outer space, we will be forced to face the emptiness of our inner space. St Augustine called it a “God-shaped” vacuum or hole, and Blaise Pascale called this inner space an “abyss”. It is the place humans try to fill with outperformance. It is the land of superlatives: bigger, better, more. Humans try to fill it with alcohol, internet scrolling, ice cream, sex, procrastination, new shoes, a bigger car, gambling, sugar or whatever. Human nature is to distract ourselves from finding purpose by pursuing any distractions.

Here is the problem. It is a fundamentally philosophical problem and one beautifully described by the philosopher Daniel Schmachtenberger, who is a founding member of The Consilience Project. He says we are racing to harness certain molecules so that we can have more stuff, but it takes billions of years to create these molecules. Oil, gas, lithium, cobalt, wood, H2O - name any molecules you like. The exponential race to more based on a finite supply puts us on the road to catastrophe. We are not talking about global warming here. The point is, as Schmachetnerberger says, competition for finite resources is itself a problem. “Rivalrous dynamics multiplied by exponential tech will lead to self-termination”. We are heading to an extinction event unless we find another way to fill the God-shaped hole. If one superpower harvests Psyche first, the rest will fight for it.

Love. Love is the answer. Consider what would happen to the world economy if everybody devoted at least some of their day to love. By the way, if you define love in the crudest, least sophisticated, most primal way, you get pornography. That seems to be 80% of all the activity on the net, which just proves my point. People are looking for love. But, there are other, better definitions of love. Let’s take CS Lewis’s 1960 classic called The Four Loves. He identifies four types of love: Storge, Philia, Eros and Agape. Storge is need-love, like bonding between a parent and a child. Philia is going to drink beers with your most trusted mates and talking about real stuff. Agape is charity and a love of the well-being of others. Militaries operate on love. You love your fellow soldier more than yourself and thus would never leave anyone behind. In companies, Simon Sinek says, “We become leaders the day we decide to help people grow, not numbers.” This is love in the context of geopolitics and the economy.

Think of what would happen to the economy if more people turned their avocation into their vocation. I recently did a podcast called Video Games Real Talk with the Founder of Streamline Media, one of the most influential developers of video games over the last twenty years. He got into it because it was fun. He never imagined he could make a living out of video games when he started. But his love of video games led to expertise which led to demand which led to the creation of a very successful company.

Do you even know what your wishes and passions are? How would you if you don’t devote any time to finding out what they are because you are so busy working? And working for what? A bigger house that comes with a bigger mortgage which means you’ll have to work even more? For more stuff? Stuff takes time and energy. The Catholic philosopher Thomas Moore wrote a brilliant book called The Soul of Sex: Cultivating Life as an Act of Love. In it, he says “sex is not something you do. It is something you are”. He suggests that every object on your desk and every image on a wall has a sensual quality. You gaze. You touch. You feel. How much time do we devote to the objects we already have? How deeply engaged are we in the deeply sensual aspects of living in and with beauty? When is the last time you made art? When you buy art, do you buy it because you think it will be worth more in the future or just because you like it?

As for romantic love, I think Rainer Maria Rilke got it right when he said

“For one human being to love another; that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks, the ultimate, the last test and proof, the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

Yet even that is its own devotion. It is hard work. You know it is. Yet how much time do you devote to love? To your loved ones? To the love of your own personal growth? To the cosmopoiesis of love in your life? I recently read John Wineland on this and was struck that he, too, says going out and earning more money, getting a promotion, and working harder is not the best way to provide love to yourself or anybody else. Tyson Yunkaporta has an arresting line in his remarkable book Sandtalk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World about building a world that allows for modern achievement while protecting the space for ancient human needs for joy, companionship, and just laughing with your loved ones. At one point, near the end, as he asks the reader to engage in cosmopoiesis (he doesn’t call it that). He asks the reader to imagine the person who loves you unconditionally. If you don’t have someone who loves you unconditionally, put this book down right now and go sort that out.

The point is not to make life smaller by consuming less stuff but to make life bigger by creating more experiences. This is not about reducing the standard of living but about raising it by redefining it. The shift from consumption to creation will not reduce GDP as many suppose. It will allow a bursting forth of innovation that will increase value in the economy. Someone recently sent me a deck for a sparkling wine business in the UK. Thirty years ago, the idea that you could grow sparkling wine in the UK was more than laughable. It was insane. But, somebody loves wine. Today the UK is producing more than 200 such wines, many of which are quite quaffable. Pommery has 89 acres in Hampshire called The Pingelstone Estate and will be bringing a British sparkling wine to market in 2023. Taittinger has a similar such a vineyard in Kent, Domain Evremond. Who is laughing now? Order another round of creation and laughter.

We are now in a creator economy. The tools to create are becoming ever faster and more useful. GPT3 and Google’s LAMDA are giving humanity the tools to create without needing to speak the language of code. So, who will create? What will be created? It seems obvious that the more creative input humanity brings to the AI learning process the better. As Mo Gawdat says in his new book about AI, “Scary Smart”, we have to take responsibility for AI. We have to parent AI. We can’t kill it. But, it can kill us if we don’t teach it what matters. If AI learns that efficiency is everything, then we cannot be surprised to see AI turning on humans because it is inefficient to compete the species to extinction. We need to teach AI that seemingly inefficient things have value like love, beauty, joy, laughter, kindness, curiosity and creativity. But how do humans teach things they do not understand themselves? They say the best way to learn is to teach. I think it may also have to do with our preoccupation with “doing” and confusion about “being”. How do you just “be” without doing long enough to find out what your wishes and desires really are? How do you figure out what you want to create?

I spent 50 years building a library of meaningful (to me) and remarkably obscure books. Now I realize I have reams of obscure words in my head that I cannot use with live humans in real-time conversation. The words are fascinating but rarified. Words like cosmopoiesis, which means the act of world-building. I have never met anyone who uses or even recognizes this word. Yet, it is the very definition of what we are here for. Comopoesis is what drives the economy forward. It is the source of all innovation. It is the act of creating a world. That’s what Steve Jobs did with Apple. He didn’t make computers. He created a world where brilliant people would not have to think about computers. That’s what Yvon Chouinard did with Patagonia. He created a world where you could be a mountaineering naturist even if you lived in a city. It is what every scientist in a research lab is doing, creating a world that will have less disease, faster computational power, more nutritious food, less need for energy.

Throughout the course of human history, people have used two principal methods for imposing order on chaos – numbers and narrative, and these two technologies define the kind of future we are creating. All of us have experienced cosmopoiesis from stories, numbers, or some combination of the two. We have been to the cozy land of Hobbits that JRR Tolkien described. We have felt the wonder of the world Jules Verne created for us where you could fly around the world in a balloon and under the surface of the sea in a submarine. Ballons and subs existed when he wrote, but no one had imagined a world where you could really go places with them. Whether the ancient stories like Gilgamesh and The Odyssey or Philip K Dick’s modern Blade Runner-like sci-fi dystopias, we recognize these worlds which help us make better sense of life.

Math also allows the creation of worlds. Modern economics, for example, was built on the clockwork-like principles of supply and demand and the idea that physics has laws that can be harnessed to create value and wealth in the form of things like car engines, AI algos and the internet. We are reconceiving our cosmopoiesis of the economy now with more modern ideas. Companies, countries and effective leaders combine stories and numbers in cosmopoiesis. Nike didn’t sell shoes. It created a world where you could become an entirely new kind of person we now recognize as “a weekend warrior”.  Rwanda reinvented itself from being the epicenter of genocide to being the high-tech Singapore of Africa in the last twenty-five years through cosmopoeisis.  JFK wasn’t just a President but a cosmopoetic who gave us a vision for putting a man on the moon, which took immense mathematical skill and storytelling alike. His cosmopoeisis helped humanity leap off of earth. Cosmopoiesis can encompass the galaxies or arise from the small stories we tell ourselves. You are smart and beautiful and here to do something special….. or not.

Whether we rely on stories or numbers or both, we can think of these “techne,” as the ancient Greeks called them, are the means which allow us to find and establish patterns with knowable cadences, proportions, relationships, rhythms and which create new possibilities. A brilliant young philosopher, Frederico Campagna, wrote about this in his book Techne and Magic: The Reconstruction of Reality. He points out that techne without magic is soul-destroying and dangerous. Technology can do awesome things, but humans also need awe, wonder, beauty, and joy. The magic of being human matters. It is this wondrous magical idea that we can create something and build a better world that drives humanity forward. But the grind of work/make money/pay bills and postponing dreaming and joy till later is soul-destroying. Life does not offer efficiency and joy sequentially. Delight cannot wait till your retirement, especially since the economy may not ever deliver retirement for many.

So, how do we find our passion, and our purpose and discover our true desires? Most people prefer numbing themselves with food, drink, drugs, sex, box sets, etc, to avoid feeling their way to their inner truths. Everyone has to find their own way. You have to build your own world. As a human and an economist, I realized that one path for me is to build an anti-library to complement my library. It is a space that has no books and no words. It is a space (sometimes a virtual space) full of art, music, textures, and beautiful objects. It is a space where I can be less in my head and more where feelings can inform my truths. I’m focused on the art I want….strike that….need to create. That space is where I remembered that my Grandmother taught me how to make art with fabric. She was a seamstress and supported her family as a couturier to Mrs. William Randolf Hearst. My other Grandmother taught me to make quilts and to needlepoint. My parents are both great writers and taught me to make art with words. Those arts are acts of love. With all that, I began to realize that the economy itself s nothing but the warp and weft of ideas and actions that individuals weave together in their attempts to engage in cosmopoiesis. Anyone who has ever worn a fabulous new dress or suit knows that dressing is an act of cosmopoiesis. Don’t tell me this has nothing to do with the economy. Vivienne Westwood’s cosmopoiesis with fashion created a revolution called Punk and generations of people who think of themselves as Sex Pistols!

Any kid under Grandma’s quilt knows they are in a world someone has lovingly created for them. Maybe that helps explain why many people are walking away from their jobs. They seem to be committing to doing a different kind of work. If you happen to be unhappy in your work, maybe the answer is to love yourself. Walk away. There’s a labor shortage out there. Dream up a new world that will inspire your creativity and actually pay you for it. Tomorrow’s economy may be richer for the self-investment that seems to be underway today. But don’t think every cosmopoiesis succeeds. Very few do. You still need grit and grind. It’s not all fun.

Technology is turbocharging the race for an economy that is ever-more efficient at producing an ever-higher standard of living. But our psychology needs to change if tomorrow’s world is to arrive at all. What is enough? Do you have enough work and efficiency in your life? Do you have enough love, awe, art, magic, beauty, joy, and laughter? The economy needs both the efficient and the seemingly inefficient if it is going to generate and even survive the arrival of abundance. Remember Arthur C Clark’s 3rd law? “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” When Sir Tim Berner’s Lee imagined the internet, it was magical thinking. It was cosmopoiesis. Magical thinking about the value of internet companies is another thing altogether. We mustn’t confuse the two.

Our wishes look set to come true. Technology is delivering everything we ever wanted it to. Are we delivering the human element and the love needed to balance things out? As we near abundance, the risk is that we confuse more efficiency with a better future.  Only love can deliver a better future. Have you made any space for that this year? What is the future you want? It matters because your cosmopoiesis will define the future we will get.

You are the storyteller and director of tomorrow. What is your cosmopoiesis for 2023?

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