On the Appeal of the Rockford Files [Media Notes 164] {Beware of work-mode!}

I've been watching The Rockford Files again and though I should write up a post about the appeal of the show. But I decided to check the blog first and, wouldn't you know it, I'd already written that post, in June of 2025. So instead I'm just bumping that post to the top of the queue along with a prefatory note. If you look toward the end of the post, the highlighted areas, you'll see that I brought up work mode, pointing out that Rockford doesn't seem possessed by it. 

Now that I'm explicitly thinking in terms of a contrast between Homo economicus and Homo Ludens that in itself seems sufficient to revisit this post. I'm thinking that might be a good way of analyzing the show. Rockford's wayward buddy, Angel Martin, also manages to keep work mode at bay. He met Angel where? Prison, that's right, prison. But he was pardoned. Jim – that's his name, "Jim Rockford" – and Angel are contrasted with Rocky, his retired truck-driving father, and his good friend, Dennis Becker, an overworked cop. Rocky's always after to Jim to get a legit job, like driving a truck.

That's a beginning. I wonder how far we could get with that? Here's the original post, though I added a phrase at the very end.

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I’m currently working my way through The Rockford Files for the fourth, if not the fifth, time. I watched the program when I was originally broadcast back in 1974-1980, and I’ve watched it online several times in this century. Part of the program’s appeal certainly comes from the star, James Garner.

Garner is a handsome middle-aged man, six feet and perhaps an inch or two tall. He plays an easy going character, James Rockford, who is masculine without being macho. He can handle himself in a fight, which he frequently has to do, but he’s not a martial artist or a superhero. He’s competent, but vulnerable and takes his lumps. He likes sports, going to games, going fishing, often with his dad. He’s single, but is attractive to women, and kind. He’s had affairs in the past, and has one or three in the course of the show, he may even have been close to marriage.

Much of the appeal stems from the fact that he’s an interstitial character, if you will. He falls between the keys, lives in the cracks. While he makes a living, just barely, he’s not chained to a 9-to-5 job. He’s not been broken to harness.

He’s an ex-convict who’s been pardoned. Was he ever guilty? Probably not, but I don’t recall off hand. Does it matter? He’s damaged goods. He lives in a beat-up trailer on the beach at Malibu, a marginal dwelling in a desirable location.

He makes his living as a private investigator, which is depicted as a marginal occupation in this, and other shows, but not always. While he’s a decent and honest man, he does quite a bit of sneaking around and more than a little deception. There are a number of episodes where he orchestrates a complex con, though on behalf of a good cause. Always.

He’s got a good friend on the police force, Lt. Dennis Becker, but is otherwise persona non grata with the police force. And he’s friends with a good lawyer, Beth Davenport, who once had a crush on him. He’s also got an ex-con pal, Angel Martin, who’s a bit more marginal than he is, and cowardly as well, yet somehow manages to retain Rockford’s loyalty.

All of which is to say, he doesn’t work within the confines of work-mode, as I’ve been writing about it. Life is not easy for Jim Rockford. He’s often broke, and in at least one episode that I can remember, in danger of losing his home. But his life is interesting and challenging.

I wonder, off hand, how many TV shows present us with lives that are NOT dominated by work mode? And in work-place shows, just how is work depicted? How much entertainment presents us with alternatives to work-mode? And how often is the alternative presented as a critique of work-mode?

Is The Rockford Files a critique? I don’t think so. It’s not pointed enough. Perhaps that’s why it’s been so popular. It presents a clear alternative, a clear difference-from, but it never goes so far as to present the work-a-day world as a soul-destroying trap, though the depiction of Becker comes awfully close to that. 

* * * * * 

Also about The Rockford Files: Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files, Myth-Logic and a Lady Librarian in The Rockford Files 2.

Ross Douthat interviews Peter Thiel, who is clueless

Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel and the Antichrist, NYtimes, June 26, 2025.

They start out with economic stagnation:

Douthat: So I want to start by taking you back in time about 13 or 14 years. You wrote an essay for National Review, the conservative magazine, called “The End of the Future.” And basically, the argument in that essay was that the dynamic, fast-paced, ever-changing modern world was just not nearly as dynamic as people thought, and that actually, we’d entered a period of technological stagnation. That digital life was a breakthrough, but not as big a breakthrough as people had hoped, and that the world was stuck, basically.

Thiel: Yes.

Douthat: You weren’t the only person to make arguments like this, but it had a special potency coming from you because you were a Silicon Valley insider who had gotten rich in the digital revolution.

So I’m curious: In 2025, do you think that diagnosis still holds?

Thiel: Yes. I still broadly believe in the stagnation thesis. It was never an absolute thesis. The claim was not that we were absolutely, completely stuck; it was in some ways a claim about how the velocity had slowed. It wasn’t zero, but 1750 to 1970 — 200-plus years — were periods of accelerating change. We were relentlessly moving faster: The ships were faster, the railroads were faster, the cars were faster, the planes were faster. It culminates in the Concorde and the Apollo missions. But then, in all sorts of dimensions, things had slowed.

I always made an exception for the world of bits, so we had computers and software and internet and mobile internet. And then the last 10 to 15 years you had crypto and the A.I. revolution, which I think is in some sense pretty big. But the question is: Is it enough to really get out of this generalized sense of stagnation?

The conversation goes on in that vein, and then:

Thiel: Well, I think there are deep reasons the stagnation happened. There are always three questions you ask about history: What actually happened? And then you have another question : What should be done about it? But there’s also this intermediate question: Why did it happen?

People ran out of ideas. I think, to some extent, the institutions degraded and became risk averse, and some of these cultural transformations we can describe. But then I think to some extent people also had some very legitimate worries about the future, where if we continued to have accelerating progress, were you accelerating toward environmental apocalypse or nuclear apocalypse or things like that?

But I think if we don’t find a way back to the future, I do think that society — I don’t know. It unravels, it doesn’t work.

The middle class — I would define the middle class as the people who expect their kids to do better than themselves. And when that expectation collapses, we no longer have a middle-class society. Maybe there’s some way you can have a feudal society in which things are always static and stuck, or maybe there’s some way you can ship to some radically different society. But it’s not the way the Western world, it’s not the way the United States has functioned for the first 200 years of its existence.

Two things: 1) Back in the 1990s my friend Abbe Mowshowitz was talking about virtual feudalism, which is where he saw us headed. He hired me to ghost an article about that but, alas, he was unable to publish it, so I eventually posted it as one of my working papers: Virtual Feudalism in the Twenty-First Century.

2) I sorta' kinda' agree with Thiel about being stuck. But I think about history in a very different way. I think in terms of cultural evolution, specifically, the theory of cultural ranks that David Hays and I sketched out back in the 1990s. [Here's a brief guide: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society.] At the moment we're stuck "treading water," as it were, in Rank 4, but haven't made it to the next level. Just what that next level will turn out to be, that's not at all clear, & that's where I talk about the Fourth Arena, thus: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted. When I say that Thiel is clueless, that's what I'm talking about; he has no sense of cultural evolution, of a succession of cognitive architectures, or the mind itself, taken collectively, as a driving force in history.

Back to the conversation, and Homo economicus:

Douthat: So you think that ordinary people won’t accept stagnation in the end? That they will rebel and pull things down around them in the course of that rebellion?

Thiel: They may rebel. Or maybe our institutions don’t work, since all of our institutions are predicated on growth.

Douthat: Our budgets are certainly predicated on growth.

Is that a law of nature, or a contingent matter of historical circumstance?

On the nexus of Silicon Valley, stagnation, and Trump:

Douthat: What did Trump do in his first term that you felt was anti-decadent or anti-stagnation? If anything — maybe the answer’s nothing.

Thiel: I think it took longer and it was slower than I would’ve liked, but we have gotten to the place where a lot of people think something’s gone wrong. And that was not the conversation I was having in 2012 to 2014. I had a debate with Eric Schmidt in 2012 and Marc Andreessen in 2013 and Bezos in 2014.

I was on “There’s a stagnation problem,” and all three of them were versions of “Everything’s going great.” And I think at least those three people have, to varying degrees, updated and adjusted. Silicon Valley’s adjusted.

Douthat: And Silicon Valley, though, has more than adjusted ——

Thiel: On the stagnation question.

Douthat: Right. But a big part of Silicon Valley ended up going in for Trump in 2024 — including, obviously, most famously, Elon Musk.

Thiel: Yeah. And this is deeply linked to the stagnation issue, in my telling. These things are always super complicated, but my telling is — and again, I’m so hesitant to speak for all these people — but someone like Mark Zuckerberg, or Facebook, Meta, in some ways I don’t think he was very ideological. He didn’t think this stuff through that much. The default was to be liberal, and it was always: If the liberalism isn’t working, what do you do? And for year after year after year, it was: You do more. If something doesn’t work, you just need to do more of it. You up the dose and you up the dose and you spend hundreds of millions of dollars and you go completely woke and everybody hates you.

And at some point, it’s like: OK, maybe this isn’t working.

On Mars, AI, and progress, with a conversation between Elon Musk and Demis Hassabis (CEO of DeepMind):

Thiel: Yeah. And the rough conversation was Demis telling Elon: I’m working on the most important project in the world. I’m building a superhuman A.I.

And Elon responds to Demis: Well, I’m working on the most important project in the world. I am turning us into interplanetary species. And then Demis said: Well, you know my A.I. will be able to follow you to Mars. And then Elon went quiet. But in my telling of the history, it took years for that to really hit Elon. It took him until 2024 to process it.

Douthat: But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t believe in Mars. It just means that he decided he had to win some battle over budget deficits or wokeness to get to Mars.

Thiel: Yeah, but what does Mars mean?

Douthat: What does Mars mean?

Thiel: Well, is it just a scientific project? Or is it like a Heinlein, the moon as a libertarian paradise or something like this?

Douthat: A vision of a new society. Populated by many, many people descended from Elon Musk.

Thiel: Well, I don’t know if it was concretized that specifically, but if you concretize things, then maybe you realize that Mars is supposed to be more than a science project. It’s supposed to be a political project. And then when you concretize it, you have to start thinking through: Well, the woke A.I. will follow you, the socialist government will follow you. And then maybe you have to do something other than just going to Mars.

Douthat: So the woke A.I., artificial intelligence, seems like, one, if we’re still stagnant, it’s the biggest exception to the place where there’s been remarkable progress — surprising, to many people, progress.

It’s also the place — we were just talking about politics — where the Trump administration is, I think, to a large degree, giving A.I. investors a lot of what they wanted in terms of both stepping back and doing public-private partnerships. So it’s a zone of progress and governmental engagement.

And you are an investor in A.I. What do you think you’re investing in?

Thiel: Well, I don’t know. There’s a lot of layers to this. One question we can frame is: Just how big a thing do I think A.I. is? And my stupid answer is: It’s more than a nothing burger, and it’s less than the total transformation of our society. My place holder is that it’s roughly on the scale of the internet in the late ’90s. I’m not sure it’s enough to really end the stagnation. It might be enough to create some great companies. And the internet added maybe a few percentage points to the G.D.P., maybe 1 percent to G.D.P. growth every year for 10, 15 years. It added some to productivity. So that’s roughly my place holder for A.I.

It’s the only thing we have. It’s a little bit unhealthy that it’s so unbalanced. This is the only thing we have. I’d like to have more multidimensional progress. I’d like us to be going to Mars. I’d like us to be having cures for dementia. If all we have is A.I., I will take it. There are risks with it. Obviously, there are dangers with this technology. But there are also ——

Now that was interesting, very interesting, Mars as a political project. Hmmmm. And then they launch into a conversation about smart people:

Thiel: But I share your intuition because I think we’ve had a lot of smart people and things have been stuck for other reasons. And so maybe the problems are unsolvable, which is the pessimistic view. Maybe there is no cure for dementia at all, and it’s a deeply unsolvable problem. There’s no cure for mortality. Maybe it’s an unsolvable problem.

Or maybe it’s these cultural things. So it’s not the individually smart person, but it’s how this fits into our society. Do we tolerate heterodox smart people? Maybe you need heterodox smart people to do crazy experiments. And if the A.I. is just conventionally smart, if we define wokeness — again, wokeness is too ideological — but if you just define it as conformist, maybe that’s not the smartness that’s going to make a difference.

I note that smart people aren't going to get anywhere if they're working with the wrong ideas. There were a lot of smart people in the 17th century, but they didn't have radios and airplanes. It's not that they weren't smart enough, rather, the intellectual foundations weren't there for them to work from.

And then they veer off into transhumanism and Christianity and cryonics and and ... the Antichrist? That's where I get off the bus, but you might find it interesting.

Charlie Chaplin comments on the dignity of work

Modern Times, 1936 (Wikipedia):

Modern Times is a 1936 American part-talkie comedy film produced, written and directed by Charlie Chaplin. In Chaplin's last performance as the iconic Little Tramp, his character struggles to survive in the modern, industrialized world. The film also stars Paulette Goddard, Henry Bergman, Tiny Sandford and Chester Conklin.

Modern Times has won many awards and honors, and is widely considered one of the greatest films ever. It was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

How the movie begins:

The Tramp works on an assembly line, where he suffers greatly due to the stress and pace of the repetitive work. He eventually suffers a nervous breakdown and runs amok, getting stuck within a machine and throwing the factory into chaos; he is then sent to the hospital. Following his recovery, the now-unemployed Tramp is mistakenly arrested in a Communist demonstration. In jail, he accidentally ingests smuggled cocaine, and in his subsequent delirium, he avoids being put back in his cell. When he returns, he stumbles upon a jailbreak and knocks the convicts unconscious for which he is hailed as a hero and given special treatment. When he is informed that he will soon be released due to his heroic actions, he argues unsuccessfully that he prefers life in jail.

Trapped in work-mode @3QD [ultimately coping with AI]

I’ve got a new article at 3 Quarks Daily:

Trapped in Work Mode: The Real Challenge of AI is not Technical, It’s Conceptual, Mythic, and Institutional: https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2025/06/trapped-in-work-mode-the-real-challenge-of-ai-is-not-technical-its-conceptual-mythic-and-institutional.html

It’s about how we’ve become trapped in work-mode, a form of behavior that became solidified during the Industrial Revolution, though I don’t talk about how that came about. I open by talking about how my father, a very talented man with man interests spent an enormous amount of time playing solitaire once he’d retired. I then go on to talk about the rise of retirement coaches, professionals who help people adjust to the “rigors” of retirement. It’s as though many have become so “broken to the harness” of work that they are unable to figure out what to do with themselves when their time, once again, is their own. In this situation, I suggest, instituting universal basic income to support people who’ve lost their jobs to AI, that will amount an indirect subsidy of the drug industry.

I go on to suggest that, if we are to flourish under AI, we need to structure our social institutions around something other than work (Homo economicus), which is the current arrangement in the advanced nations. But I do not, in that article, suggest what I have in mind. What I have in mind, of course, is Homo ludens, which I’ve been writing about here and there.

The Industrial Revolution trapped us in work-mode

Consider this passage from Johan Huizinga, Chapter 11, “Western Civilization Sub Specie Ludi,” Homo Ludens, 1938:

The 19th century seems to leave little room for play. Tendencies running directly counter to all that we mean by play have become increasingly dominant. Even in the 18th century utilitarianism, prosaic efficiency and the bourgeois ideal of social welfare-all fatal to the Baroque-had bitten deep into society. These tendencies were exacerbated by the Industrial Revolution and its conquests in the field of technology. Work and production became the ideal, and then the idol, of the age. All Europe donned the boiler-suit. Henceforth the dominants of civilization were to be social consciousness, educational aspirations, and scientific judgement. With the enormous development of industrial power, advancing from the steam-engine to electricity, the illusion gains ground that progress consists in the exploitation of solar energy. As a result of this luxation of our intellects the shameful misconception of Marxism could be put about and even believed, that economic forces and material interests determine the course of the world. This grotesque over-estimation of the economic factor was conditioned by our worship of technological progress, which was itself the fruit of rationalism and utilitarianism after they had killed the mysteries and acquitted man of guilt and sin. But they had forgotten to free him of folly and myopia, and he seemed only fit to mould the world after the pattern of his own banality.

Thus the 1 9th century seen from its worst side. But the great currents of its thought, however looked at, were all inimical to the play-factor in social lif e. N either liberalism nor socialism off ered it any nourishment. Experimental and analytical science, philosophy, reformism, Church and State, economics were all pursued in deadly earnest in the 1 9th century. Even art and letters, once the "first fine careless rapture" of Romanticism had exhausted itself, seemed to give up their age-old association with play as something not quite respectable.

Beyond the human

Someone calling himself John Doe left a helpful and insightful comment:

I would like to propose that it misses the non-human-but-still-life perspective. I believe it to be essential for human flourishing in the long run. Physically and mentally. Humans usually define themselves in relation to other humans, sometimes animals, much rarer other lifeforms. Most of us believe they care about those and yet on a planetary scale (which is by definition not the human scale but still relevant for most humans to flourish) we are arguably in a predicament. Which leads me to the conclusion that it would be helpful to find a way to support flourishing for more lifeforms with less use of resources in absolute terms. This will be a very tall order which some, possibly many, will knowingly or unknowingly but nevertheless actively, refuse. Sometimes violently. It will also become much more of a question of cooperation and healthy competition on many levels.

I would argue that deliberate contemplation, meditation, care work in a broad sense (not only human-centric) should be encouraged. To be very pragmatic about it, maybe it'd make sense to set up community spaces that enable contemplation/meditation in some sort of social group.

Sex/Life: I don’t buy it. [Media Notes 162B] {Blame it on Homo economicus}

I want to pick up where I left off in my previous note about Sex/Life. I ended with this observation:

I note, as an afterthought, that plays to my current hobbyhorse project, Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena, I note that in a world where social organization is dominated by Homo economicus, “whores” and “bad-boys” will always be a threat to society and so will always be marginalized. It is quite possible that in such a society, this problematic cannot be satisfactorily resolved.

I think that’s right, though that thought requires more of an argument than I’m prepared to give it at the moment. But I did have some conversations with Claude. 

Primate Sexuality 

In this conversation I set things up with a question about primate sexuality:

I’m curious about sexual behavior in our nearest primate relatives. Do chimpanzees form long-term bonds between mating pairs?

Chimpanzees don't form long-term monogamous pair bonds like humans often do. Instead, they have what's called a promiscuous or multi-male/multi-female mating system.

In chimpanzee communities, females typically mate with multiple males during their fertile periods (when they're in estrus), and males compete for mating opportunities but don't establish exclusive, long-term partnerships with particular females. The social structure is based on a fission-fusion system where group composition changes throughout the day as individuals come together and separate.

However, chimpanzees do sometimes form temporary "consortships" where a male and female will go off together for several days or weeks during the female's fertile period. These aren't permanent pair bonds though - they're more like short-term exclusive mating arrangements.

This mating system likely evolved because it provides certain advantages: females can potentially confuse paternity (which may reduce infanticide), males have opportunities to mate with multiple partners, and it maintains genetic diversity in the population.

Interestingly, this contrasts with some of our other primate relatives. Gibbons, for example, are largely monogamous and do form long-term pair bonds. Even bonobos, our other closest living relatives, have a different approach - they're also promiscuous but use sexual behavior much more broadly for social bonding and conflict resolution.

The lack of pair bonding in chimpanzees makes the evolution of human pair bonding (even if not universal) quite fascinating from an evolutionary perspective.

Madonna/whore 

Then we reviewed the Madonna/whore business that Freud outlined in his 1910 essay, “A Special Type of Choice of Object Made by Men.” From there I uploaded a Shakespeare paper where I recast that conflict in more modern terms: At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? After giving me some favorable comments, Claude asks a crucial question:

Do you think this framework applies beyond the specific historical moment of early modern England? The attachment/sexuality conflict seems universal, but the particular resolution Shakespeare achieved might be culturally specific.

Your last questions are critical, aren’t they? The attachment/sexuality conflict certainly seems to with us still. I just watched a Netflix series, Sex/Life, which centers on that conflict, though in that series it’s the woman who has the trouble with integration. A man is either a good-man-husband-father who is sexually unexciting, or a sexually exciting bad-boy unsuited for marriage.

Exactly! That's such a perfect contemporary example of the same psychological dynamic, but flipped. Sex/Life demonstrates that the attachment/sexuality conflict has not only persisted but has become more democratized - it's no longer just men who struggle with this split.

The female protagonist's dilemma mirrors what you describe in Shakespeare's male characters: she can't integrate the nurturing, stable attachment figure (her husband) with sexual excitement. She's essentially created her own version of the Madonna/whore split, but applied to men - the "good husband/father" versus the "sexually thrilling bad boy."

This suggests something profound about your analysis: the underlying psychological mechanism is indeed universal and persistent, but its cultural expressions and gender dynamics evolve. In Shakespeare's time, it was primarily framed as a male problem with female sexuality being the site of projection. Now we see it manifesting across genders, with both men and women struggling to find partners who can fulfill both attachment and sexual needs.

What's particularly striking is that Sex/Life suggests we haven't actually solved this integration problem that Shakespeare was working toward in his late romances. We've just redistributed it. Modern dating culture, with its emphasis on "types" and categories (the reliable partner vs. the exciting one), might actually be reinforcing rather than resolving these splits.

This makes me wonder: Is our current cultural moment more like Shakespeare's tragic period - aware of the conflict but still destructively acting it out - rather than having achieved the integration he imagined in The Tempest? The prevalence of divorce and relationship dissatisfaction might support that reading.

That brings me to pose a question:

What I’ve been wondering is just why it is so difficult to integrate these two aspects of human behavior in a single person. It’s one thing to argue that we’re dealing with two different behavioral systems. But why should they come in conflict when directed at a single object?

That's the million-dollar question, isn't it? Even granting that attachment and sexuality are distinct behavioral systems, it's puzzling why they should be mutually inhibitory when focused on the same person.

The problem of work mode (Homo economicus) 

Claude then offers several suggestions and we have some discussion. And then, finally:

I have half an idea that’s come from way out in “left field,” so to speak. Over the last decade or so I’ve become aware of retirement coaches, people who help retirees adjust to life in retirement. Why do people need a coach to help them deal with free time? It’s as though “work mode,” if you will, conditions a person so that a whole range of choices become difficult to entertain. That is, you spend a large part of your adult life working within a framework where your range of choices for a major part of the day is dictated by the demands of your job, whatever it is. That conditions you in a way that makes it difficult to enjoy spending a lot of time on “hobbies” or developing new ones, and so forth.

Well, the person who is conditioned to work mode is also married and has children. Traditionally in modern Western society it has been the man who works outside the home while the woman stays home, raises kids, and maintains the household. I’m wondering if this kind of conditioning has something to do with it. It’s not simply a matter of having time for sex, but of becoming so accustomed to work, whether a job or raising children, that it’s difficult to break free to enjoy sexual pleasure.

That's a genuinely novel insight! You're suggesting that the attachment/sexuality conflict might be partially an artifact of how modern industrial society has organized work and family life. The psychological "role-lock" that makes retirees need coaches could be the same mechanism that makes spouses struggle to see each other as objects of desire.

This would mean that when you spend decades relating to your partner primarily through instrumental roles - provider/homemaker, co-parent, household manager - you become psychologically conditioned to see them through that functional lens. Shifting into "pleasure mode" or seeing them as sexually exciting becomes difficult, like asking someone who's been in work mode for 40 years to suddenly start painting watercolors.

Chapter Outline: Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena

This is a preliminary outline for my current book project (title above).

Introduction: The Problem of Homo Economicus

The social institutions of the Western world have become “shrink-wrapped” around the requirements and capabilities of Homo economicus, economic man. That brought us the Industrial Revolution and thereby our prosperity. And it has brought us the AI technology that has swept the internet in the last two-and-a-half years. It has the potential for large scale economic disruption, leaving many people without jobs, and in despair despite the possibility that some form of Universal Basic Income will make it possible for them to live. Why despair? Because in a world shaped to the needs of Homo economicus, life’s meaning is anchored to one’s job. Jobless have no meaning in this world. Further, while Homo economicus has brought us the current regime of AI-as-deep-learning, it cannot take us beyond that. Going beyond will require new architectures and they only way to discover them is to conduct “blue sky” no holds basic research in Ludic mode. Now that Homo economicus is commandeering all resources for its own projects, there will be few resources available to move beyond.

Part 1: Basic Concepts 

Chapter 1: The Four Arenas

The universe has seen three Arenas (as I call them) so far: 1) The First Arena, inanimate matter. 2) The Second Arena, the world of living things (biosphere). 3) The Third Arena, human culture. We are now standing on the brink of the Fourth Arena in which, through the aid and support of artificial intelligences, Meaning will become a constitutive principle in the universe.

I have sketched this out in this article at 3 Quarks Daily: Welcome to the Fourth Arena – The World is Gifted.

Chapter 2: Complexity

In this chapter and the next I begin to lay out some basic conceptual equipment, making the point that complexity is different from complicated. Complication is about lots of stuff all mixed together. Complexity is about the nature of stuff, about how simple processes and rules can yield elaborate structures through repetition and amplification. A complex world is full of “lumpiness,” things with odd shapes and so is different from a “smooth” world of simple things that grade into one another (think of circles and ovals). I’ve sketched this 3 Quarks article: World, Mind, Learnability, Large Language Models, and the Metaphysical Structure of the Cosmos.

Moreover, important and interesting resources and concepts and distributed in an irregular manner. Think of how various mineral resources are distributed over the earth, e.g. gold, oil, or natural medicines. You have to go prospecting for them, with no clear map of where they are or certainty that you will find anything. Good ideas, whether for works of art or practical inventions are like that as well. I lay these ideas out, with illustrations, in this working paper: What economic growth and statistical semantics tell us about the structure of the world.

Chapter 3: Self-Organization and Evolution

Building on the previous chapter I develop the idea of self-organization, starting with a very simple example: You put a drop or two of black ink into a tumbler of water. The ink diffuses through the water in an irregular way, but over time the ink particles form into vertical currents circulating in adjacent cells. Why? Because the tumbler was exposed to the sun and the ink particle picked up energy from it. (For images, see photographs in A Primer on Self-Organization).

Building on that basic example I can discuss the origins of life and its evolutionary elaboration of every more complex ecosystems and species (see A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity for some background concepts). From there we move to cultural evolution and Richard Dawkins’ concept of memes. Robert De Vany’s work on Hollywood movies shows how the film world is a self-organizing evolutionary system (blog post: Chaos in the Movie Biz: A Review of Hollywood Economics).

Part 2: The Mind Orders the World

Chapter 4: Animal, Vegetable, of Mineral: Patterns and Ontology

I introduce the idea of conceptual ontology by with the game of Twenty Questions. One person, the Answerer, chooses something that the others, the Questioners must guess. A typical variant is known as “animal, vegetable, or mineral”. Why? Because the Answerer starts by telling the Questioners that the object belongs to one of those three categories. Those categories are critical points in our conceptual ontology, the inventory of the kinds of things that exist in the world.

From there we examine the difference between “salt” and “sodium chloride.” Physically they are the same substance. But “salt” can be characterized by its taste and appearance while “sodium chloride” is an abstract concept about the physical world that is defined in terms of atoms, subatomic particles, and covalent bonds, concepts that didn’t exist until the 19th century. These ideas belong to different regions of our conceptual ontology.

The idea of conceptual ontology is completely general. Thus fairy tales and science fiction stories belong to different conceptual ontologies, and those are different from the conceptual ontology in which, for example, the news is reported. Fairy tales contain fairies, wizards, and magical objects of all kinds, none of which exist either in the real world or in science fiction. Science fiction stories contain faster-than-light travel to other galaxies, alien species, intelligent robots, none of which exist either in fairy tales or the real world (though we’re working on intelligent robots).

I use ChatGPT to illustrate these concepts in the way it tells stories. Above all, it demands ontological consistency among stories. For example, in one case it refused to add a robot named Gort to a story set in a fairy-tale world while in another case it refused to let a colorless green idea by the protagonist in a story because such things are not appropriate for that role. Using these and other example I show that stories set in very different worlds, with different conceptual ontologies, can nonetheless exhibit the same pattern of events.

These examples are based on experiments I report in this paper: ChatGPT tells stories.

Chapter 5: Lust in Action, Patterns West and East

Now we take the conceptual equipment we have built up and use it to create a fuller picture of the human condition using Shakespeare’s famous Sonnet 129, “The Expense of Spirit.” The poem depicts this pattern:

• Lust begins in longing.
• The act itself is framed by shame, fury, and a sense of betrayal.
• The result is both the heaven of fulfillment and the hell of consequence.

I use Old School symbolic AI from the 1970s, the body of technique that precedes the current regime, to show that, against all appearances, I show that the poem exhibits a traditional Christian patter, the Fortunate Fall (felix culpa), which holds that man had to fall from innocence so that, through God’s grace, man could attain a higher level of spiritual discernment.

I then present the sonnet to ChatGPT and ask it to produce an esoteric reading in terms derived from Hindu and Buddhist philosophy. It does so, using the concept of Maya, the trap of worldly attachment, and samsara, the cycle of desire and suffering. The sonnet itself talks on the role of a koan, a paradoxical statement that tricks the reader into awareness and detachment.

In this process I will have demonstrated two things:

1. Old School symbolic AI, which is presumed to be made obsolete by the machine learning technology we examined in the previous chapter (ChatGPT), can serve as a useful way of thinking about the otherwise opaque structure that is latent in large language models (LLMs).

2. The presumably culturally specific Christian pattern of the Fortunate Fall does in fact have the same form as patterns that have arising in Hinduism and Buddhism.

Finally, this discussion sets the stage for Chapter 7’s of Homo economicus, economic man, which sees little value in the arts. If so, why have they been so important in all societies?

Part 3: The Mind Evolving in History 

Chapter 6: Cognitive Ranks

Cultural evolution is more than the accumulation of ideas, artefacts, and behaviors. It also involves basic cognitive architectures. Rank 1 cultures are built on an architecture enabled by the evolution of speech. Such architectures are characteristic of preliterate peoples living in hunting and gathering bands or small villages. Rank 2 architectures are based on writing and enabled the develop ancient civilizations with walled cities and extensive cultivation of the land. Rank 3 cultures emerged in Europe when mathematics from the East, India in particular, were transmitted to Europe by the Arabs and there encountered European mechanical ingenuity.

Note, in particular, that this story differs from the prevailing story that innovation in the early modern era was driven by the invention and adoption of the printing press in Europe. While the printing press enabled the spread of ideas, mechanically printed books have no cognitive affordances that manually printed books have. You read them in the same way. Using the so-called Arabic number system for arithmetic calculation, however, is quite different. It allows you to do calculations that heretofore were difficult or impossible and allows you to think in a new way. In particular it allows, for the first time, to conceive of a finite system, arithmetic, that is capable of generating infinite results, the real numbers. Conceptually this gave us the Scientific Revolution and the idea of the clockwork universe. Practically, it gave us efficient navigation enabling world-wide trade (and conquest) and the Industrial Evolution.

Rank 4 began emerging late in the 19th century with statistical thermodynamics in physics and evolution biology. Then came ideas about logic and meta-mathematics that resulted in the abstract idea of computation that was embodied in the idea of the Turing Machine. Shortly after World War II, John von Neumann showed how to embody these ideas in physical devices and the digital computer was born. That technology has been remaking the world for the last three-quarters of a century and has brought us to the brink of the Fourth Arena in which humankind assumes a new role in the cosmos, a role that we can only glimpse it is so new and strange.

These ideas are based on an extensive body of writing David Hays and I published in the 1990s. Here’s a short guide to that work: Mind-Culture Coevolution: Major Transitions in the Development of Human Culture and Society.

Daydreaming is essential to creativity

The New York Times has a series of five articles on creativity (yay!), which I've not been following. Yeah, I doodle (day 1), lots, and, yes, I've written a poem or three (day 2), but daydreaming, that got my attention. I do it a lot, have been all my life. And I'm aware of the connection, not simply through my own experience, but through commentary on the default mode network in the brain, which is the daydreaming resting state. So....

Elizabeth Passarella, Day 3: Master the Art of Daydreaming, NYTimes, June 4, 2025.

Sometimes, I miss my subway stop. But on the whole, daydreaming is a positive thing, a portal to more happiness and innovative thinking. We could probably be getting more out of it, though, said Madeleine Gross, a research scientist at the University of California, Santa Barbara, who studies curiosity and creativity. “Our minds wander for a substantial portion of the day, and we’re often passive passengers,” she said. “That feels like a missed opportunity.”

People who are inherently creative tend to daydream more. Higher rates of daydreaming go hand in hand with performing well on divergent thinking tasks, Dr. Gross said. [...]

But it works both ways. “Daydreaming can also make you more creative,” she said. The key is following a few rules. That might sound nuts — it’s daydreaming! — but think about how often your mind wanders right to your stressful to-do list. [...] Research shows that taking time away from a problem to let your thoughts “incubate” in the background can prompt surprising solutions.

The article ends with and exercise in intentional daydreaming. If this all seems strange to you then give it a try.

Sex/Life, gender inversions of old themes [Media Notes 162A]

Over the last two weeks or so I worked my way through a Netflix series, Sex/Life:

is an American erotic drama television series created by Stacy Rukeyser for Netflix. The series is inspired by the novel 44 Chapters About 4 Men by BB Easton and it premiered on June 25, 2021. In September 2021, the series was renewed for a second season, which was released on March 2, 2023. In April 2023, the series was canceled after two seasons

Here’s what Wikipedia had to say about its reception:

The review aggregator website Rotten Tomatoes reports a 21% approval rating with an average rating of 5.5/10, based on 24 critic reviews. The website’s critical consensus reads, “Suffocating its more provocative ideas with steamy interludes and melodramatic writing, this erotic drama is too obsessed with sex to ever fully come to life.” Metacritic, which uses a weighted average, assigned a score of 45 out of 100 based on 11 critics, indicating “mixed or average reviews”.

When I read that after having seen the first or second episode, I was not exactly inspired to binge watch the rest.

And indeed I did not. But I somehow worked my way through to the end, one, two, or even three episodes at a time. And I’m glad I did, not because they finally pulled it off. They didn’t. But for what they attempted, that’s interesting. The principles in the series are confused. That’s OK. That’s standard. But the folks who made Sex/Life are confused as well. That’s not OK. But it’s interesting.

What’s going on here

Here’s the Wikipedia summary of the first episode, “The Wives are in Connecticut”:

Billie Connelly is a housewife living in Connecticut, married to her husband Cooper and with two young children. While loving her husband and family, Billie cannot stop herself from consistently reminiscing about her past as a wild party girl. The longing for her previous life grows ever stronger as her relationship with Cooper continues to disappoint her sexually. Despite the counsel of her best friend Sasha, Billie also keeps thinking back to her former relationship with Brad, a record producer. Billie documents her desires on her laptop, and this is discovered one morning by Cooper, leading the two to have passionate sex for the first time in years. However, after Cooper leaves for work, Billie impulsively goes to New York City to confide her feelings to Sasha. Upon arrival, Billie is left devastated when she sees Sasha slept with Brad the previous night.

That is to say, Billie is caught between good husband, father, and provider, Cooper, and hot bad/boy ex-lover, Brad. Now, that’s interesting. Why? Because it inverts a situation that Freud described early in the 20th century, where a men are often split between a woman they ravish sexually and a woman they marry and have children with – the Madonna/whore syndrome. A woman can be one or the other, but not both.

In this case it’s the woman who is thus split, between good-man hubby and bad-boy boyfriend. Freud and many thereafter assumed that this split was inherent in human nature. If so, then how can we possibly have a series where the shoe is on the other foot, as it were? Either Sex/Life is a complete fabrication, or Freud was wrong, along with many others. I think Freud was wrong about human nature. And, this being the 21st century and this is Netflix, we even have a scene where Cooper tries, and fails, at a sexual practice called “coital alignment technique,” of which bad-boy Brad was a master (S1, e5). [If you’re curious, read the Wikipedia entry and search YouTube for instructional videos. It’s not rocket science.]

And then there’s best-friend Sasha, who is a successful academic and single. Earlier in her life she had a choice between following her lover to graduate school on the West Coast or staying east to finish her own education. She chose to stay east. This inverts another trope, the man who’s split between the career on which his identity is staked and the woman he loves. In this case it’s the woman who is thus split.

Where Sex/Life fails is that, in the last episode, it all works out. Billy gets to marry Brad, who’s no longer bad-boy, and is in fact a dad, with another woman, a model who divorced him. And Sasha gets her old love-of-her-life boyfriend, who gives up his job to be with her. And, yes, good old Cooper is taken care of as well. So, we get to be happy for them, but we haven’t got the foggiest how that all happened. Or, rather, we have ideas, but they're all foggy.

As one commentator put it:

...the tale has many inconsistencies. Truthfully, it is impossible for values to change and advance at this rate. Additionally, this season’s conclusion leaves a bitter aftertaste, as Billie gets back with her toxic ex, Brad.

It seems like it’s high time for shows to tell stories that accurately depict relationships, or at the very least, reveal how unhealthily connected people don’t yield desirable results. Towards the end, this show achieves none of these things. In actuality, it encourages and directs the viewers to tolerate unhealthy relationships.

Can we work it out?

I think so, though don’t ask me to work it out here and now. But I will make some observations.

There’s a name for the problem, or at least one aspect of it: essentialism. That’s the idea that things, including men and woman, have an irreducible and ineradicable nature, an essence. Madonna and whore are two essentialist views of women while bad-boy and good-hubby are essentialist views of men. Why not drop the essentialism and allow both men and women to embody both bundles of behavioral traits?

If it were that easy, we’d have done it long ago. Why’s it troublesome? Because the problem is not fundamentally a logical puzzle to be solved by the rational part of our minds. It’s a problem lodged in the so-called lizard brain, where attachment (Madonna, good-hubby) is one behavioral system while sexual passion (whore, bad boy) is another. I think if we examine the ethological literature on our primate ancestors – here I’m shooting from the hip; it’s been a long time since I’ve looked at that literature – we’ll find that they have no need to combine the two systems into a coordinated way of interacting with a member of the opposite sex. Adults do not form long-term monogamous pair bonds. Thus the problem does not arise.

Humans do, or at least that has been the ideal in Western society (and in others as well) going back to the early modern era. Shakespeare wrestled with the problem in many of his plays, something I examined (and in terms of modern “evolutionary psychology,” though I didn’t use the term) in an essay I published three decades ago: At the Edge of the Modern, or Why is Prospero Shakespeare's Greatest Creation? [I’ve appended the abstract as an appendix.] But I don’t think he came up with a viable solution. Why do I say that? Because it he had done so, half a century ago, the problem would not be with us today. Obviously enough, it is.

Bonus: An exercise for the reader: Compare this series with The Seven Year Itch (1955), which starred Marilyn Monroe. It dealt with the issue by some very clever flim-flammery which simply denied that men and women seeking active sex lives were at all problematic, or perhaps even real. For extra credit, follow the problematic through Mad Men.

Appendix: How Shakespeare struggled with the problem

Abstract: The plots in three of Shakespeare's plays are launched by the same device: the protagonist mistakenly believes that his beloved has betrayed him. One of these plays is a comedy, Much Ado About Nothing, one a tragedy, Othello, and one a romance, The Winter's Tale. Shakespeare thus considered this one problematic situation, which has to do with a male difficulty in accepting one's beloved as both a sexual and a nurturing person, at three times in his life and produced different kinds of plays. By looking at his career through modern studies of adult development, we can see that the shift from one genre to another follows the reorganization of Shakespeare's psyche. The ultimate fruit of that development is Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, whose protagonist, Prospero, has managed to integrate those aspects of himself which had been in conflict in earlier plays. If we then place Shakespeare's career in a broader psycho-historical context we can see how he helped make the modern nuclear family psychologically possible. 

Finally....

I note, as an afterthought, that plays to my current hobbyhorse project, Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena, I note that in a world where social organization is dominated by Homo economicus, “whores” and “bad-boys” will always be a threat to society and so will always be marginalized. It is quite possible that in such a society, this problematic cannot be satisfactorily resolved.

I follow that thought in a new post: Sex/Life: I don’t buy it. [Media Notes 162B] {Blame it on Homo economicus}

Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena

On March 27, 2025, I published Kisangani 2150: Homo Ludens Rising, at 3 Quarks Daily. It as a speculative vision of the world in 2150 when a mysterious secret society, The Mystic Jewels for the Propagation of Grace, Right Living, and Saturday Night through Historic Intervention by Any Means Necessary, would initiate the final phase of a process that would transform the world through computer technology based on technology created in the West, but shaped toward different, more humane, ends. A day later I issued a working paper under the same title, which contained the article from 3QD plus additional material. In the introduction to the working paper I announced that I was working on a book, Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising.

Here’s the abstract from that working paper:

The advancement of AI offers us the choice between contrasting paradigms for organizing human life: Homo Economicus (where work is the defining activity) and Homo Ludens (where play is the defining activity). Drawing on Johan Huizinga's work and Kim Stanley Robinson’s speculative fiction, I propose that humanity faces a critical juncture as AI increasingly dominates economic production. The document develops a theoretical framework for a “Fourth Arena” of existence—beyond matter, life, and human culture—that emerges through human-AI interaction. Through speculative narrative (first section) and philosophical dialogue with Claude 3.7 (second and third sections), I argue that play, rather than economic utility, will become the defining characteristic of human value and meaning in an automated future. As AI systems assume utilitarian functions, humanity's capacity for non-instrumental play becomes increasingly central to our identity and contribution. The manuscript represents preliminary work toward a larger project titled The Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising, which envisions play as the essential bridge into a post-economic society where human flourishing transcends productivity-based value systems.

The Kisangani material would conclude the book while the body of the book would consist of a popularized presentation of various material David Hays and I developed in a collaboration that spanned just over two decades from the mid-1970s to his death in 1995. That collaboration contains a 1990 article about evolution, A Note on Why Natural Selection Leads to Complexity, and our various works on the stepwise evolution of human culture through a series of four cognitive ranks.

By that time I had already begun working on a proposal for that book, Welcome to the Fourth Arena: Homo Ludens Rising. I imagined that it would be the same kind of work as my book on music: Beethoven’s Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture. That book ranged widely from neuroscience, through psychology, anthropology and sociology, and cultural history. Fourth Arena would have a similar range but would instead end with a speculative vision for the future and would be on the order of 200-250 pages long rather than 300+. As I set about developing the proposal and developing ideas for the book things began to change. Work on the proposal got bogged down while the ideation, done in close conjunction with both ChatGPT and Claude, became richer and more compelling. I had begun to fear that I would finish the book before I had written the proposal.

The main problem I had with the book is simply stated: I asserted that this Fourth Arena toward which we were headed – it’s hard to tell with these things – was supposed to be genuinely new, something unprecedented in human history. If the Fourth Arena really is new, then how can I possibly say anything about it with existing concepts, concepts anchored in the old world, the one being eclipsed? But what if we have in fact already crossed the threshold into the Fourth Arena, like setting foot on a new continent, climbing the tallest tree on the tallest hill, and surveying that land before you? You can’t see very far, but you are in the new world, of that you can be certain.

I am convinced that we have crossed the threshold and can begin to think about the tasks ahead. To do that we have to perform a gestalt switch. Look at this image:

What is it? Depending on how you think about it, it’s a duck or a rabbit. We’re leaving a world rapidly filling with dead ducks and entering one filled with frisky young rabbits.

With the help of ChatGPT and Claude I have the beginnings of a way to talk about all those rabbits doing what rabbits do and multiplying to beat the band. That allows me to reconceptualized the book, hence the new title: Homo Ludens Rising: A Manifesto for the Fourth Arena. Manifestos are relatively short and they are visionary. Perhaps the best known manifesto is a 40 page pamphlet entitled The Manifesto of the Communist Party. I’m certainly going to need more than 40 pages (but perhaps not the 200 to 250 pages I mentioned above). More importantly, I can now give the whole book a visionary caste, not just the final chapter. That frees me up to be looser, more expressive, more story-like. Oh, I still intend to have some conceptual material – e.g. about complexity, the nature of meaning, the mandala vs. the memory palace – and I’m going to cover cultural evolution. But I’ll be more playful and more approachable.

We’ll see.

It’s still early days.

How can elites live better lives?

David Marchese, The Interview: Rutger Bregman Wants to Save Elites From Their Wasted Lives, NYTimes, May 17, 2025.

The world is full of highly intelligent, impressively accomplished and status-aware people whose greatest ambitions seem to start and stop with themselves. For Rutger Bregman, those people represent an irresistible opportunity.

Bregman, 37, is a Dutch historian who has written best-selling books arguing that the world is better (mostly meaning wealthier, healthier and more humane) than we’re typically led to believe, and also that further improving it is easily within our reach. Sounds a little off in these days of global strife and domineering plutocracy, doesn’t it? Even Bregman, who is something of a professional optimist, is willing to admit that the arguments in his first two books — “Utopia for Realists: How We Can Build the Ideal World” (2017) and “Humankind: A Hopeful History” (2020) — land less persuasively now than when they were published.

But his new book, “Moral Ambition: Stop Wasting Your Talent and Start Making a Difference,” is his attempt to meet the current moment by redirecting self-interest into social good. He is trying to entice the people I mentioned earlier — society’s brightest and most privileged — to turn away from what he sees as meaningless and hollow (albeit lucrative) white-collar jobs in favor of far more exciting and even self-aggrandizing work that aims to solve society’s toughest problems. That’s also the driving idea behind a nonprofit of which he is a founder, the School for Moral Ambition — a kind of incubator for positive social impact.

A key question, though, is how exactly he plans on persuading people to rethink their own goals and values — which is to say, their own lives.

From the Interview

But materialism is real. A desire for status is real. People want to make money. So how do you incentivize someone who might be tempted to go into a line of work that you see as morally vacuous to instead pick a career that is morally ambitious? If people desperately want to work for McKinsey and their main goal in life is to go skiing and have that cottage on the beach, fine. People have the right to be boring. But I think there are quite a few people who work at Goldman Sachs or Boston Consulting Group who are looking for a way out. There’s a period where this happened in the U.S.: the move from the Gilded Age to the Progressive Era. You had figures such as Alva Vanderbilt — a fascinating character who was this very decadent woman, incredibly rich, but later in her life, after she divorced her Vanderbilt husband, became a radical suffragette and one of the main financers of the women’s rights movement. She reminded me of MacKenzie Scott, who divorced Jeff Bezos and now is one of the most morally ambitious philanthropists in the U.S. A decade ago, people like me were told to check our privilege. It’s important to be aware of how privileged you are, but it’s also important to use it.

The dismissal of people’s career choices as “boring” — that tone of light sarcasm or snideness shows up in the book also. Why communicate that way? It works quite well, David.

Does it? Yeah, I agree with you that financial incentives obviously play a big role, but it’s not the only thing. If you go back a couple of decades, students had a very different attitude. There’s this study called the American Freshman Survey, it’s been done since the late 1960s. At that time, when students were asked about their most important life goals, about 80 to 90 percent said that developing a meaningful philosophy of life was most important. Today that’s 50 percent. In the ’60s, 50 percent said making as much money as possible was a really important goal. Today, that’s 80 to 90 percent. The numbers have reversed. For me, that shows that this is not human nature. It is culture. It can change.

How does one determine what counts as sufficiently ambitious moral behavior? One of the main characters in the book is the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson. He’s my personal hero. He participated in an essay contest at Cambridge University and had to answer this question: Is it OK to own other human beings? He had never really thought about the question. But he did his research, won first prize, and after he attended the prize ceremony, he was like: If this is true, then shouldn’t someone do something about it? Maybe I’ve got to be the one to do it. You can see this mix of idealism and vanity within him. He deeply cares about the suffering of enslaved people, but he also likes to see himself as this historical hero who devotes his life to abolishing slavery.

But this guy can’t be the benchmark! I’m getting there. [Laughs.] After seven years of doing that, he had a nervous breakdown, what we would call burnout. He took it too far, but let’s be honest: Today a lot of people get burned out while they do jobs they don’t like or that don’t contribute to the welfare of the world. So if we’re going to get burned out anyway, we might as well do something useful.

Your book has this implicit idea that there is a deficit of moral ambition in the United States. I want to press on that. One could say that the movement to overturn Roe v. Wade was morally motivated. Or one could argue that what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, was morally driven. So what would account for the possibility that moral ambition on the right seems to be more ascendant or more effectively utilized than moral ambition on the left? That’s a good question. Ralph Nader in the late ’60s and the ’70s built this incredible movement of young people who were like: We’re not going to go work for some boring corporate law firm. We’re going to Washington to lobby for a good cause. There’s one historian who estimates that they had their fingerprints on at least 25 pieces of federal legislation — the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act that saved hundreds of thousands of lives. It’s a beautiful example of what moral ambition can mean in practice. At some point a third of Harvard Law School applied to work for Ralph Nader because it was the coolest thing you could do. Right wingers looked at that model very carefully. They built this huge network of think tanks — the Heritage Foundation, the Federalist Society. I disagree with most of their goals, but I’m in awe of that perseverance. They built a network of 5,000 clerks and lawyers and did so many strategic lawsuits, and that all culminated in the Dobbs decision. That’s what it takes.

What does the left need to learn from the right when it comes to effecting moral change? There’s a real lack of ambition among progressives these days. Take the environmental movement. You’ve got so many people who are obsessed with their own footprint. There are all these commandments: Don’t eat meat, don’t fly, don’t have kids, don’t use plastic straws. In the best possible scenario, you will have reduced your footprint to zero, and you might as well not have existed — and then death is the highest ideal. Not very ambitious, in my view. The same is true for those who are called “woke.” They are often accused of going too far. I think they don’t go far enough. They’re mainly obsessed with policing language and using the right words to describe all the injustices in the world, and they’re very good at going viral. “Tax the rich” and “kill the patriarchy” get you a lot of likes on Instagram, but do you achieve anything?

Here's my take on woke. White guilt, for example, is simply the price some people are willing to pay to go about their lives doing what they will, but doing nothing that benefits the poor and oppressed. That's how woke works. The guilt that accompanies woke is simply a price one pays for doing nothing beyond confessing, professing, and pontificating.

* * * * *

There's more at the link.

On the need for a society that honors Homo Ludens

From a recent conversation I had with either ChatGPT or Claude 3.7, I forget which. As always, my remarks in bold face while the chatbot's are in plain face. 

* * * * *

The effect of AI on worklife

I'm interested in how AI could work with this. The Covid pandemic demonstrated at least the partial viability of remote work, potentially relieving some of the strain caused by work-centered mobility. And, while the encroachment of AI on economic activity has the potential of giving humans the more freedom of association, I'm not sure whether or not people are prepared for it. A sense of meaning tends to be invested in one's occupation for one thing. For another, I'm not sure how many adults would know how to use their time fruitfully. I'm thinking, for example, of all the retires who just vegetate without any sense of purpose or involvement.

You've raised fascinating connections between AI, remote work, and social capital that deserve exploration.

The COVID pandemic indeed demonstrated that remote work is viable for many knowledge workers, potentially addressing some of the geographic disruption we discussed. This shift could enable people to maintain deeper community ties while pursuing career advancement.

However, as you've insightfully noted, there are complex challenges:

Work and meaning: Many people derive significant meaning and identity from their occupations. This raises questions about how people might find purpose if AI increasingly automates work. As you mentioned, the pattern of retirees who "vegetate without any sense of purpose" shows how challenging this transition can be without preparation.

This reminds me of what psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi called "flow states" - the deeply engaging experiences that contribute to wellbeing. Work often provides structured opportunities for flow that may need to be replaced.

Social infrastructure: Remote work can help maintain geographic stability, but doesn't necessarily build community. People might physically remain in place while becoming digitally isolated. This suggests we need to reimagine community institutions beyond either traditional geographic communities or purely digital connections.

Class differential impacts: The benefits of AI and remote work will likely be unevenly distributed, potentially exacerbating the class divides in social capital we discussed. Knowledge workers might gain flexibility while those in service, manufacturing, or physical jobs face displacement without comparable alternatives.

Some promising directions might include:

1. Community-centered technology that strengthens local connections rather than replacing them
2. Revitalizing civic infrastructure that provides meaning beyond work
3. Rethinking education to prepare people for lives of purpose that aren't exclusively defined by employment
4. Exploring new economic models like universal basic income that could enable meaningful participation in community life

The challenge isn't just technological but cultural - developing new narratives about meaningful lives that aren't exclusively centered on paid work. This might draw inspiration from the conceptions of the good life we discussed earlier, which generally emphasize relationships, purpose, and contribution over individual achievement or consumption.

New Narratives

Yes, your last paragraph is crucial. We need new narratives about meaningful life. We live in a world adapted to the narrative of Homo economicus. Perhaps we’d be better off moving in the direction of Homo Ludens, which would give more play to those other value systems you mentioned.

You've touched on something profound with the Homo Ludens concept. Johan Huizinga's idea that human culture emerges fundamentally through play rather than merely through economic calculation offers a powerful alternative narrative.

Moving from Homo economicus toward Homo ludens could indeed create space for those alternative value systems we discussed. Play isn't merely recreational - it's deeply generative of meaning, connection, and cultural innovation. It allows for:

1. Creative exploration without immediate utility
2. Voluntary engagement with others based on shared enjoyment rather than transaction
3. Development of capabilities for their own sake rather than instrumental value
4. Building communities around shared activities and interests
5. Experiencing the "flow state" that contributes significantly to wellbeing

The challenge is that our institutions - from education to urban planning to economic policy - have been designed around the needs of Homo economicus. Our metrics of progress similarly focus on economic production rather than the quality of social relations or opportunities for meaningful engagement.

What's encouraging is that throughout history, humans have consistently demonstrated their playful nature even within constraining economic systems. The spontaneous emergence of graffiti culture that you've documented in your Kisangani 2150 materials shows how creative expression finds outlets even in challenging environments.

A society designed for Homo ludens might prioritize public spaces for gathering, flexible scheduling that accommodates community activities, and economic arrangements that provide security without demanding that identity be primarily derived from occupation.

This connects directly to those alternative conceptions of the good life - whether it's the Buddhist emphasis on liberation from attachment, the Aristotelian focus on excellence in being human, the capability approach's emphasis on substantive freedoms, or Ubuntu's recognition of our fundamental interconnectedness.