Robin:

Hello, Agnes.

Agnes:

Hey, Robin.

Robin:

What are we going to talk about tonight?

Agnes:

We're going to talk about utop– the Paradox of Utopia.

Robin:

The paradox of Utopia. This is the perfect paradox that you go to Utopia and you discover the best of all possible paradoxes.

Agnes:

And we're going to discover that – were would you discover that we wouldn't like it?

Robin:

Aha.

Agnes:

So I thought we could start by talking about an example that William James gives in this paper of his, What Makes a Life Significant?, where he talks about this trip that he took to, like, some kind of planned community near Chautauqua and he says, “I went there for a day but I stayed for a week.” And it was this, like, ideal world of you know, various kinds of athletics, society and, you know, perfectly run kindergarten, religious services, perpetually running soda-water fountains, intellectual lectures, no poverty, no drunkenness, no crime, no police, culture, kindness, cheapness, equality. He writes, I went in curiosity for a day. I stayed for a week held spell-bound by the charm and ease of everything, by the middle-class paradise, without a sin, without a victim, without a blot, without a tear. And yet, what was my own astonishment, on emerging into the dark and wicked world again to catch myself quite unexpectedly and involuntarily saying: “Ouf! What a relief! Now for something primordial and savage even though it were as bad as an Armenian massacre to set the balance straight again.” OK. So…

Robin:

All right. So…

Agnes:

He discovers a Utopia and then he finds it sickening, and he starts longing for a massacre.

Robin:

OK. So now, he's not the first person to maybe not be sure what he wanted, that is to try something and thought it wasn't exactly what he wanted. So, but we think there's something bigger at stake here than this one example. I mean, you might think you like fish, and then you try some fish, and you don't like that fish, right? But that's not a problem from our usual world view. So why is it this particular example a bigger problem?

Agnes:

Right. So I mean, one thing is it's not just him, right? It's like a whole bunch of people got together to make what seems like it would have to be the perfect sort of community. And it's not that he didn't like it, right? He got there and he liked it. He was going to stay for a day, he stayed for a week. He enjoyed it. He found it, you know, pleasant in all the ways you would predict someone would find something of that sort to be pleasant. And yet, when he left, he felt this incredible relief.

Robin:

So it wasn't complete in the sense that, you know, that's a nice part of the world to have but like, often we go on vacation to places that we wouldn't want to live. And that's not so puzzling. I might say, the problem here is that if the idea of Utopia is hard to realize or even incoherent, that suggests that we know a lot less than we might think we do about what we want. It's not just some one person who found that one thing wasn't exactly what they wanted and they also wanted something else. If in general, when we humans try to imagine at least what we want, and then we find that imagining in more detail tells us it isn't what we want, and we keep getting stuck that way, we can't find a thing that we can imagine and say, “Yes, that's what I want.” That suggests we have some deeper troubles with knowing what we want. We are just in some sense wrong about what we want and deeply confused.

Agnes:

I mean, I wonder whether it isn't even worse than that. And I’m feeling one step worse than that, which is that even if somebody who’s not a human being, let's say, were to look at us and to study us, right, really objectively and figure out what we actually do want, and then create a situation that perfectly creates that for us and puts us in it, we probably wouldn't be happy with that either.

Robin:

OK. So, I mean, one theory is to say, well, we're not the sort of creatures who can be happy with anything. Our lack of happiness isn't a lack of the perfect situation. It's a lack of this being the sort of creature who could be happy. That's just not who we are. We are just these creatures who will find something to be complaining about everywhere, and we can't be satisfied.

Agnes:

Well, the sort of paradox of Utopia runs a little deeper than that though, because you might think that then we can just get closer or farther from it, right? And that James would be like, “You know, this is pretty awesome. It's not as perfect as I thought it would be but I'd like to live in Chautauqua.” But in fact, I mean, here's what sort of puzzling about it. Like, I think you could imagine, you know, one thing he complains about is that there isn't enough struggle, right? And like, you could imagine that they would just – the people, the planners will be like, “Oh, I'm sorry, you know, we forgot to include struggle in our perfect world. I mean, we had the soda-water fountains and the intellectual lectures and the boating but we forgot the struggle. So we'll include at least one hour of struggle per day for everyone, everyone gets thrown into a pit for one hour a day, you got to struggle to get out or whatever it is different kinds of struggle, right?” And they invite him back and be like, “Look, now we added the struggling. Now, are you happy?” And I think he would not be happy, even with the struggle added in. And I don’t think…

Robin:

All right. So…

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

So why can't there be just a disconnect between what we want and what we complain about? Why can't – it might just be that there is no world that we wouldn't complain about, even if it's the best possible world. We just – we like to complain and we do. And we're really, in some sense, happier when we can complain, and we do feel justified.

Agnes:

But like, I guess I think that there's this weird way in which the way James describes it that he was quite surprised by his reaction. Like, it wasn't as though he wanted to complain to anyone, right? It was just he had this reaction, almost like a physical reaction of just relief, where it's hard for me not to believe that in having that reaction, he was responding veridically in some sense to what he actually wanted. Namely, he actually wanted to be out of there.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Right. So it is possible to know what you want. He learned what he wanted through this reaction of being relieved that he was getting out of there. I think it is sometimes possible to know what we want. What doesn't seem possible is to construct a world that caters to every possible want. But it's not just that it's impossible to do that. It's that those worlds are positively distasteful to us. They're worse than the worlds. I mean, he was comparing to like, a massacre. Massacre is really, really terrible, right? That I think driven to the thought of a massacre, having been in this world, suggests that when we try to construct – even though we do have some sense of what we want, when we try to construct a world that perfectly caters to it, we find that world abhorrent, not just imperfect, but abhorrent.

Robin:

So let me suggest this somewhat supports the concept of hidden motives, that is, our real motives are different from the motives we think we have. And we often don't notice that because our stated motives are not achieved and we can explain our unhappiness with our situation by saying, “Look, this is what I want, and I'm not getting it. And that's why I'm unhappy.” And then sometimes rarely, we do achieve and we do get what we say we want, and then we find that we're not happy that, when that's the key data point that real life reveals to us that we were wrong about what we wanted. And we are in that moment more aware of what we really want. But it's a fleeting moment. And it'll go away as quickly as we allow ourselves to distract ourselves from it. And then we will be back to the situation of just being wrong about what we want. Might not this all show that the plausibility of hidden motives, that we have an idea in our head of what we want, we are – notice we’re unhappy and we attribute that to not getting what we think we want. But perhaps in fact, we want something different. And then a Utopia shows us more the conflict because it tries to give us what we say we want, and we find that we're unhappy with it. And then at that moment, we are more aware of what we really want. And in that moment, we can then more pursue what we really want. But this awareness of what we really want is ephemeral and quickly goes away. And so we can quickly return to the usual world where we can complain about the usual things and blame them for why we're unhappy.

Agnes:

So, that would suggest that we could construct a Utopia. It would just have to be, as I said earlier, the scientist who studied hidden motives, who would be in a position to construct the Utopia.

Robin:

But we might not…

Agnes:

So you should be able to tell us whether Utopia…

Robin:

But we might not be able to agree that that's an utopian until we are actually willing to be exposed to and accept that we have hidden motives.

Agnes:

Why would we have to accept them? I mean, suppose I secretly desire X, right? If I really do desire it, then if you give it to me, that will make me happy, and then maybe I never need to notice that I even desired it or that my desire was satisfied.

Robin:

No, I meant for you to admit that it is a Utopia, you might need to be aware of your hidden motives. You might, in fact, be the most status satisfied in that world, but you might not admit that or accept that fact, if you are in denial about your actual motives. And it might be that in your favorite world, in your favorite state, you complain a lot. And you loudly complain about how this world isn't the best. And because that's in fact, part of what you like about a world is your ability to do that. So more context for this whole discussion, is the fact that we are now crazy rich compared to our ancestors from a few centuries ago. And there's a sense in which from their point of view, we are kind of close to Utopia. And then there's the fact that we are not very satisfied with it, and that we complain a lot about it. And a question is, maybe, how close are we to Utopia at the moment, compared to how most people have ever – what most people have ever wanted? We'd have relatively peace and prosperity and free time and health. And yet, we say it's a terrible world and things are crashing, and all is terrible. And they elected the wrong politician and so now everything will go to hell.

Agnes:

So I think that – I think that you're right that the unappealing nature of Utopias, and of course, this isn't just James, right? It's like Plato tries to construct the Utopia in the Republic, and nobody really likes it, even though he tried to make it ideal. He's doing his best, you know, the Milton's Paradise, but people like have famously not found descriptions of Utopias to actually be that appealing. And I do think that that suggests that we don't know what we want. I'm not sure it follows that we have hidden motives, I mean, it may be that we just haven't figured out what we want yet. But that is the – the idea of hidden motives suggests that there's a determinate fact of the matter already about what we want, and it's just hidden from us. And the other possibility is just we, you know, we're incoherent and we haven't like, worked our way towards really wanting anything.

Robin:

We're at least overconfident, right? So there is at least a surprise factor. People have been surprised about how little we want to what we – the ideals we've constructed. So at least suggests we thought we knew more than we did.

Agnes:

Right. Right. So I said, it's just that we don't know we want.

Robin:

And not just that we don't know, that we thought we knew more than we do.

Agnes:

Yeah, I agree. But there's another thing that I like, I feel like that James captures well, which is where I actually do think his experience gives you some data about what you want and why it might not be able to be fulfilled in a Utopia. So one thing is that a Utopia feels fake. Getting everything you want feels like you're not living in the real world somehow. I think a lot of you will have that response. And they don't want to live in Utopia. They don't want to live in heaven. You know, there's the – what's that TV show where they're all in heaven, but it's actually hell? The Good Place.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

The Good Place. Right. There's something – it's hard for us to believe when we're in a Utopia that we're in reality. We're inclined to infer from the fact that everything is perfectly suited to us that we're in some kind of fake or constructed or simulated world.

Robin:

And these are about purported Utopias not necessarily actually Utopias, right? These might not be true Utopias. They might not be actually giving us what we really want.

Agnes:

Right. But one thing is these are – there are things – we don't have this, it's a simulation feel about any environment we're in. We have it about environments that seem like they're catering to our every desire.

Robin:

Right. Although most of the simulated environments we can find in fiction are usually designed to have even more conflict and drama than our usual life does. So…

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

…if we… that's the opposite kind of simulation that we usually encounter.

Agnes:

Well, it may be that the simulations are constantly striving for realism in exactly that way. That like, if you think of like, video games or something, there's often monsters in the video game world but the background is often like flowers and you know, mountains, and waterfalls and stuff. And, like, I remember somebody on Twitter had posted about The Lord of the Rings TV series, you know, the new one? What was it called?

Robin:

Rings of Power

Agnes:

Rings of Power. That there were waterfalls everywhere.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Which is like, they had invested in the tech to produce waterfalls, and they were just going to throw them in everywhere.

Robin:

They did.

Agnes:

So I think that there is, there is something where we can call it utopian or something. We can recognize when a world has a utopian character, which is it's the sort of world that would be catering to our every desire if we were right about our desires, let's say, or something like that. And that those worlds seem unreal to us.

Robin:

So what about the hypothesis that the struggle is what we want, and that a world where we've achieved things is not very appealing, because what we most want to do is achieve things through struggle, and – but we need both of those elements in the world to be what we want. And we're not willing so much to admit that we really like the struggle, we like to pretend that we just are trying to get the outcome.

Agnes:

So, I mean, James was very willing to admit that what was missing was the struggle, right? So he wasn't like…

Robin:

Yeah.

Agnes:

…self-deceived about that. He's like, the problem with this world is that it's missing the struggle. But as I say, I think if I added struggle in, right, well, you have to struggle for an hour a day, that would just, “Because we added it in, in order to give you what you wanted, it would feel like fake struggle.”

Robin:

It would be fake struggle. That is, if what we want is to achieve – to get what we want by struggle, that is not enough just to have get what we want and struggle together, we need the connection between them, right? It has to be that we got what we want due to the struggle.

Agnes:

Good. Right. So like…

Robin:

That being in the pit for an hour doesn’t do it, right?

Agnes:

So let's say, you know, you don't get to go boating unless you wait on a long line, so we can have a thing. It used to be you just got to go boating, but now, you have to struggle first before you get to go boating. I think the knowledge that that system was instituted in order to provide some needed struggle achievement combo for people, would it completely undermine the, you know…

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

The fulfillment of that desire.

Robin:

Well, because I think people would want both individual and collective struggle to be effective. So here, you have the individual struggle, but you have the opposite collective struggle that is somehow collectively we’re doing the opposite of struggling to achieve things whereas struggling to prevent things. And that would seem especially perverse that in one scale, we are struggling to achieve things only because at another scale we had struggled to prevent us from achieving things.

Agnes:

Well, at the other scale, we were struggling as planners of utopia to bring about happiness, right? And we're like, “Look, these humans apparently they don't like it if you just give them the happiness, they have to achieve the happiness. So let's make them do that.” We're beneficent gods.

Robin:

Right. But we would all know that we could have just achieved the happiness more directly without adding the struggle so the struggle would seem fake.

Agnes:

We couldn’t – apparently we wouldn't be happy then. It wouldn’t be happiness. We tried that, right? And we were unhappy. So like, that didn't work. But it also doesn't work the other way, right? And it – But see, the thing is, I think I mean your diagnosis, which is like, “Oh, we have these hidden motives.” The reason why that doesn't strike me as giving a complete explanation here is just actually we can make all this stuff pretty transparent, and we still can't do it. Like even when we know about the hidden motives, and even people will accept, “Yeah, I like struggling. I like achieving things by means of struggling.” You make that happen in the Utopia and people are like, “No, I don't like it anymore. I want it to happen outside the Utopia.”

Robin:

Well, but you're thinking of a kind of hidden motive where upon understanding the true motives, you're OK with accepting that exposure, and then getting what you now realize you want. But if what you want is to hide the motives, you're just not happy in a world where you admit your actual motives, and then actually achieve them in a direct and public way. If you wait – what you really want is to have hidden motives and to keep them hidden, then you're not happy in the world where your motives have been exposed and catered to.

Agnes:

OK. But like, I guess I think it's not the exposing, it’s the catering that's the problem. That is if somehow there were just billboards everywhere in our world, saying people like to achieve things by means of struggle or whatever so we couldn't forget about that. Ah, I think people will be fine with that. But it's the knowledge that these beneficent overlords have set up these little pits for you to fall into so you can climb out of them, or these lines for you to wait on, that the problem there isn't that you're being exposed or that you're having to see something about yourself. The problem is that you feel like that's not reality.

Robin:

So it's worth noticing that a standard Christian theology is that, in fact, God did make our world full of obstacles and struggles exactly to achieve his perfect ends. And people are supposedly okay with that in Christian theology that if God does it, it's OK. But if we do it, it's much more of a problem.

Agnes:

A lot of times, kids will get really angry at you when something they thought was fortuitous, you actually planned it that way. To the point where my kids will like, sometimes accuse me of planning stuff that I didn't plan. It really was fortuitous but they’re so paranoid about the possibility that you planned it that way. That they are, yeah, they're like on the lookout for it. And I think kids are very sensitive to the possibility that they're living in a constructed reality and the reality constructed by their parents. And this is part of why they don't trust their parent’s praise, their parent’s approval, they just think that's all bunch of lies. Like, “Oh, you did a great drawing, Timmy, or something.” And he’s like, “Yeah, right. Of course, you always say that.” So, and that's why it's so important to them, like what their peers say or what their teachers say, so to speak, the people who aren't paid to approve of them.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Like the parents, right?

Robin:

But if God does this, it's OK.

Agnes:

Right.

Robin:

It’s OK for God to construct your world to produce various struggles that you then overcome and show you virtues of when things go wrong.

Agnes:

I think it's pretty important to that, I mean, you know, I'm not Christian so I could be getting this really wrong. But I think it's pretty important to the acceptability of that, that God is seen as being fundamentally inscrutable.

Robin:

Right. So we talked about the sacred on a recent podcast, at least in the last 10 podcasts. And one of the principles of the sacred, or one of the correlates of the sacredness and attitude is this idea that you don't choose or control or construct the sacred. It is outside of your control, and you are accommodating to it. And it more constructs you. And you might think that's the norm we're invoking here. It's OK if our highest ideals are achieved by struggle, as long as we don't construct the struggles, and they are constructed by this outside sacred force that is inscrutable to us. But if we are choosing it and constructing it, then we have made that profane and it's no longer these sacred struggles. To be safe struggle, sacred struggles, the struggles have to be created from outside of us, struggles that we encounter, and created by perhaps an inscrutable God, but not by us.

Agnes:

It's a little hard, because I think the part of this story that is sacred is more like the ideals that are in fact realized in the utopia. And it's somehow the fact that they're realized too easily is what bothers us. I'm not sure we do see struggle as sacred.

Robin:

Well, let me add an argument to that, which is that a standard correlate of many sacred things is the expectation a lot of sacrifice for them. And often, the validation of people's, you know, connection to the sacred by their sacrifice, that is, sacrifice is actually a pretty big part of the sacred.

Agnes:

Good, right. So I think the problem here is like we have these ideals, you know, intellectual ideals, egalitarian ideals, ideals of like pleasure and joy, et cetera, that are religious ideals, that are achieved in this world Chautauqua in this, you know, planned community. We have all of that. But people don't have to sacrifice in order to achieve the ideals. They don't have to make sacrifices. And somehow, the fact that they don't have to make sacrifices to achieve the ideals makes us think that they're not really achieving them. So, yeah, I think that when we talk about struggle, I actually think that that's really what it boils down to is sacrifice. It's a world without sacrifice.

Robin:

Right. It's not just a sacrifice, but that you were willing to make the sacrifice. So an involuntary sacrifice doesn't count nearly as much. I think it's important that you chose to make the sacrifice. And that's part of what struggle means.

Agnes:

Right. And so one question would be, well, why can't we build sacrifice into our Utopia? Right? Why is that – is that unthinkable that you would say to people, “Look, in this Utopia, there's like, it's like Disney World, but there are regions, right? And if you want to enter the religious region, you're going to get whipped for a little while. And if you want to enter the philosophy region, you're going to have to, you know, run a race or something. And if you want to enter the boating region, you have to wait on a line. And so we include sacrifice as part of the payment for entry into the various regions.

Robin:

It occurs to me that the usual debate over immortality is pretty close to this discussion we're having now. That is, death seems terrible. And it would seem wonderful to overcome death, except for the fact that we then imagine a world where you live forever, and you're guaranteed to live forever and don't have to struggle for it. And then we ask, what's the meaning of life that goes on forever? And many people claim that a life that goes on forever couldn't really be meaningful, because it's death that gives meaning.

Agnes:

Right, exactly. I think that is really similar. I think the idea that death gives meaning is just a partner to the idea that Utopia is impossible. So maybe that like one of the…

Robin:

Or that sacrifice is essential to give the other kinds of achievements value.

Agnes:

Exactly. Right. And see that seems – that does seem to me to be different from the hidden motives explanation, and much more plausible. That the issue here – because I don't think we are so shy about our attraction to sacrifice.

Robin:

But the people who made these idealistic communities, they didn't as a habit design sacrifice and struggle into them.

Agnes:

Yes.

Robin:

So there's something hidden to some degree in utopian designers about that element. It's not fully visible to them.

Agnes:

Good. And so maybe it's like, maybe there's something where there's a characteristic mistake that you're going to make, right, as a designer. Because like, on some level, what it is, is just designing this is just a matter of getting all the relevant ideals into view, right? What is the ideal society? Well, it's going to have boating and intellectual activity and soda fountains. And… so that's going to be the ideal society, right? And then, of course, because those ideals are so important to you, you'd be willing to sacrifice all sorts of things in order to have them. In fact, the planners of the city may have made really big sacrifices in order to bring that about, right? Because they would recognize that, that it's worth it. But they're not thinking about the fact that the inhabitants of the city also need to sacrifice. They need to – it's like the inhabitants of the city won't feel like they're pursuing the ideals unless they're sacrificing.

Robin:

So if we’re confronting this directly, if we are now living in a utopia, to a large degree without actually sacrificing that much for it, to what extent are our lives actually impoverished compared to the ancients who sacrificed much more to achieve the more modest world they had? But was their life more meaningful? Were their victories more valid? Are we impoverished by our easy wins?

Agnes:

Hmm. I think we definitely, like feel a little bit that when we raise, like with raising kids, like we want them to struggle and suffer for their successes, and when they do, in the cases where they're do, we really like, lavish praise upon them. Right now, they've really earned it. So there's this idea that you earned through suffering, good results. And we want children to have – we want to teach children that lesson. So…

Robin:

So, maybe, to a large extent, most of the actual ways in which we pay effort in our world are needless attempts to show that we deserve our world by adding extra suffering. That is, we go to school longer than we need to, and we exercise more than we need to, and we, you know, pay for more medicine than we need to. And maybe we suffer under wasteful bureaucracies with make-work more than we need to and all in order to convince ourselves we deserve somewhat this Utopia we live in.

Agnes:

Right, which it would all be worth it, right? I mean, we should add all that extra suffering, if that's what it takes for us to enjoy the benefits because otherwise the benefits are totally wasted on us. Right? So we may have to pay some cost. The problem here is that it seems to me, like with a Utopia, we wouldn't accept, we still wouldn't accept the utopia that I described where there's like an entrance fee, right, for you know, a certain amount of torture before you can get into the religious place and a certain amount of exertion before you get into the philosophy place. Like if we modified it to include sacrifice, it wouldn't – that wouldn't help. And so there's a question, why does it help when we, in our world, if we modify it to add sacrifice?

Robin:

Because we pretend we didn't add it. We pretend it's natural. And that's how by hiding some things we can like our world better. We pretend you need to go to all those years of school. And otherwise, you wouldn't actually be useful later, when in fact, you would be useful later without all those years of school, but you feel more justified having put all the years of school in and by hiding the fact that it was constructed, we can avoid this irritation at a simulated world. We are living in a simulated world, but we are hiding its construction.

Agnes:

Hmm. But like what, I mean, if, in fact, we are not able to enjoy, you know, all these various good things without sacrifice, and is if it really is a hard limit on our ability to appreciate or enjoy life that we need to sacrifice. And if we don't accept constructed sacrifice, that is we need the sacrifice to somehow be externally imposed, which I'm actually I'm just wondering why that's true. But OK, we should follow up on that. If all of that, then what are we supposed to do once we get rich? What's the alternative to what we've done?

Robin:

Well, you might think once we realize that, as we get rich, we won't let ourselves enjoy our wealth, because we'll make sure we suffer to feel that we justified than you might think there's less of a point to having fewer rich people, as opposed to more poor people. We should just go wild making more people, because they won't be that much less happy than the rich people we would have made instead because, you know, we're not actually able to take advantage of what it is to be happier. But we tell the opposite story about our children, that we would feel terrible to have more kids that we could lavish less attention on and put them through fewer years of school.

Agnes:

Right. So the idea would be we would have, you know, just as happy people, or close to as happy people, if they were, you know, just barely surviving, because they would be getting a lot of meaning out of their little triumphs of staying alive another day or something.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

And so a world of those people, you know, of many of those people would be better than a smaller world of very rich people.

Robin:

Right. So let's call it the anti-repugnant conclusion.

Agnes:

Right. So I guess I think, you know, in taking seriously James's reaction to this Utopia, and in sort of imagining, intuitively imagining what it would be like if we've, I'm imagining myself as in this Utopia, I'm imagining that I would have a similar response to him. What I'm doing is taking my own intuition seriously about what kind of a world I want to live in. And I just, when I think about the world of the mass numbers of extremely poor people who are just barely surviving, I just have a similar repugnance as I do to the other world. So I'm not sure why I should take my repugnant seriously in the one case and not in the other.

Robin:

Right. So one standard explanation for a wide range of intuitions is that we just think that all world substantially different from ours are repugnant. We just grew up in one world and we're comfortable with that world and everything else at least seen from a distance seems wrong. And we really only can like a world if we live in it for a while and see it up close and described abstractly, even our world will repel us except we don't think about it abstractly, we see it concretely. And therefore, we hardly know anything about what different worlds we would like, until we go live in them.

Agnes:

Yeah, a great example of that is just a thought experiment in a philosophy paper in which the person imagines, you know, imagines a group of people who don't mourn. Like when their loved one dies, they just move on and they find someone else like they, literally the next minute, they're just completely happy. They have no persisting sadness over any kind of loss, including loss of an arm or leg, loss of their livelihood, they feel nothing, right? And most people, when you think about that world, you think like, that's terrible. Like, I don't want to live in that world, I don't want to live in the world where if I die, my spouse or my parents would just be completely fine the next day, right? But then you say, OK, what about the, you know, in the world we actually live in, people mourn for about three months, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

That's the average for most loved ones, like spouses, et cetera. And it – but it's also true for like, missing limbs or stuff like that, like people are upset for about three months, and then they get over it. And so now imagine a world where instead of three months, it's like, 30 years, right? And there's just if you, you know, if your loved one dies, like…

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

When a brother or a sister dies, for 30 years, you're an abject misery over that. And we're also like, “No, I don't want that, that seems terrible. 30 years, that's way too long, right?” And so somehow, we've set our amount as like the perfectly correct amount, and everything else would be would be horrible. And that does suggest maybe on some level, we think we are living in a Utopia.

Robin:

So in my book, The Age of Em, when these issues come up, I introduce that chapter with a quote from Herodotus, basically, to the effect that even he noticed, you know, thousands of years ago that basically every society he came across thought that their customs and practices were the best, and that other societies were wrong and just had the wrong customs, right? That that's just a wide, a long observed thing, right? Most cultures think their way is the best. And this is true, not just about whole societies, but even subcultures, like within academia, you know, philosophy has different habits than economists or physicists, and probably each one of them think that their habits are the best, and the other disciplines are doing it wrong.

Agnes:

Right. I mean, I thought – so I'm probably, I can't remember because it's been a long time. But I thought that that was the passage of Herodotus, where he talks about the different practices about the dead. Like, some people bury their dead, and some people burn their dead, and you know, some people eat their dead. But the, you know, the sort of striking thing about the passage is that every group does something with their dead. That is, so all of these beings are different from the ones I was imagining where they just, like, throw them in the trash, like, they don't care at all.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

So yeah, I think there are these cultural differences and then we live in a world where we're so immersed in alternative cultures that we are quite tolerant, we tend to be quite tolerant of them, actually, I think. And think, oh, yeah, it's fine that, you know, some people take their shoes off when they come in house, some well don't take their shoes off, whatever. But…

Robin:

So this is an even more striking puzzle of our whole question here. If people are usually so confident that their culture is different, is better than the other ones that do it different, how is it that they can't imagine that they live in Utopia? Why don't they see themselves as living in Utopia?

Agnes:

Maybe everybody sees themselves as living in a near Utopia. Like, if just a few things would be fixed or something, you know, how, like everybody always wants to be a little bit richer?

Robin:

Right. With say, a factor two, factor two for anybody would be enough.

Agnes:

Yeah, exactly. Right. And so that suggests that they think that would be Utopia, right, if they had twice as much well. And so for everybody, a Utopia– maybe it's important to us to think that a utopia is within reach. Like, we would have the perfect life, if only these five changes were made. I often get through the week that way, like I think, what do I have to get done this week? What has to happen, you know, and it's like, if only, if only I can read through all these files and if only I can do this, and if only I can do this, then my life will be perfect. Right?

Robin:

Right. It's certainly true that on a daily scale, we pick achievable goals, and we tell ourselves, “I'll be happy at the end of the day, if I get these goals achieved, and that'll be enough, I don't have to fix everything in the world or in my life, I just have to make a couple changes.”

Agnes:

Right. So there's something kind of threatening about the idea of an unachievable utopia, right? Where it's like, forget it, your life's going to suck, you know, because this – the really good life would be in this other world that you.

Robin:

Well, one that will take thousands of years to achieve, right? If Utopia will only be achieved thousands of years ago by our descendants, but between now and then we'll have to suffer a lot.

Agnes:

Right. Right. So maybe the concept of Utopia is doing some kind of local motivating work for everybody, so that it's like a carrot or something that we dangle in front of ourselves, like this week's Utopia or something. And that's why it doesn't work to just be like, “Well, let's construct it in the abstract and then imagine living in it.” That's very jarring, it's like taking a concept that you have a certain practical use for and then, you know, doing something else with it.

Robin:

And I want to follow this on because I think it's related. So, another topic we may do as a podcast is the different planning versus sort of adaptation topic. And so we might say that many of our high level goals are actually more being used functionally as sort of local adaptation metrics, or heuristics rather than actually things we'd want to achieve. And that's related to one of my observations about my story of the sacred end values. And so just to elaborate for a minute, I said that basically, in this physical space, if you see two objects close to you in space, it's relatively easy to tell which one is closer and which one's farther and which one's bigger and which one's smaller. But when you see two objects very far away, it's harder to tell the relative sizes, distances. And that, that may also be true in some sort of a value space, that is, for modest, achievable goals, we are better able to, you know, rank them and compare them and sort of integrate them into a plan for the day. But when we talk about these big grand goals about democracy, and you know, understanding everything, they are at such a distance from our immediate plans and experiences that we find it hard to really compare them or rank them or weigh them together into an integrated plan. We just don't really know how to think about our big goals, because we're not in the habit of actually making plans, useful plans with them. They're just more a projection of our shorter scale goals. And what we really know how to do is to motivate ourselves each day to get stuff done. And we don't really know that much how to plan a whole civilization or even a whole lifetime, we hardly ever do that and we're not very good at it. And you shouldn't trust our – things we say about such things very much.

Agnes:

Yeah, but it also may be that when we imagine ourselves in such a world, or even, in fact, find ourselves in such a world as James did, that there's a kind of sickening feeling of being unable to motivate yourself, right? Because we're used to using the concept of Utopia to motivate ourselves. And maybe that's some of the work that's being done by the idea of the struggle is absent. Some of what we mean by struggle is like, planning for how to make the future better than the present. And if you don't need to do that in that world, then it's kind of like we don't know how to think about how to get through our day.

Robin:

Right. So a hypothesis here maybe to consider is that we have these two concepts. One is how we plan, or strategize, or decide, and the other is what our goals are. So we usually think that goals are primary and planning or strategizing, or deciding is secondary. That is, we think about different ways to decide, or plan, or to strategize as a heuristic way to calculate whose justification is because it will let us achieve these goals we have. But you might flip that around and say, “No, what we mainly have is ways to decide or plan or choose. And what we're most confident in is, is our practices and habits of planning and choosing. And within that we have a way to talk about our goals, but that's secondary. In fact, we only really can plan and choose with relatively near concrete versions of our goals. Those are the things that show up in our choices, in our plans, typically. And when we talk about, you know, the grand goals of, you know, immortality or peace and prosperity or whatever, we're projecting these near things we understand to a much longer distance away where we don't really understand them very well and don't have very, you know, well thought out thoughts about them.

Agnes:

Right. And so that, I mean, I guess that could explain something like why something like cryonics would not have many customers. Because it would require like, you know, the thought, do we actually want immortality? Do we want to live past our deaths? It may be that a lot of the like, so to speak, long-term planning that we do about our goals, that what looks like long-term planning about our goals, is actually really more short-term planning that…

Robin:

You’re right.

Agnes:

…has a kind of habitual or cultural form that will lead to long term success.

Robin:

Right. So if we look at things in our society that look like long term planning on people's parts, like choosing to have children, or choosing to go to college, or say, getting a mortgage in the house, those are often justified and explained in terms of long-term plans. But I think for each of them, you can say, “Well, what's really going on as people are executing a short-term strategy.” People don't go to college, because they make a long life plan about college. They go to college, because everybody else is going to college when it's time to go to college. And their parents would tell him to go to college. So they just execute the near term plan, right? Or even having children. People don't necessarily plan for what the kids will be like in 20 years. They right now feel like they'd like to have some kids right now. And they have the kids right now in order to experience the childhood right now.

Agnes:

Right. So what I'm interested in is what are the things where you would need to do long-term planning in order to achieve them, right, within your life? And it seems to me, cryonics is one example, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

That is, it would be I mean, maybe…

Robin:

And investment is another one, like…

Agnes:

… the people who signed up for it, did it because their friends did or something.

Robin:

Right. I think that's actually true. I mean, another classic example might be saving for retirement.

Agnes:

Mm-hmm.

Robin:

You might say, well, we just wouldn't be in the habit of saving for retirement, retirement is decades away. And it would just be habits of saving at all, that would be saving you, that would be achieving things. So you might just say, “Look, this habit of buying a house instead of renting is a habit that induces people to have more money at retirement.” And, you know, we can praise it for that purpose, we might say, “The reason people buy a house instead of renting is not usually to save for retirement, it's because that seems to put them in more control and it seems to be higher status, and you can get in better neighborhoods that way or something.” And, again, we're not actually planning for retirement, we are doing things that make sense in the short term.

Agnes:

So let's say that there's like certain things where they're very good, but they only exist as a result of long-term planning of some kind, or they're essentially long-term by their nature, like universities, right?

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

They're long lasting long-term institutions. How… how do we…

Robin:

How did that happen?

Agnes:

Yeah.

Robin:

I mean, the story would have to be it was an accidental side effect of other things, right? That are anything that lasts a long time in the world would happen to exist, because, you know, people created lots of things, some were short-lived, some were long-lived. They created them for other reasons. But then the long-lived things lasted longer. And that's what we see.

Agnes:

So it would make sense, if that's right. And so if there are, then these just these good accidental byproducts of short-term thinking, right, that we're left with, that we would feel like very invested in preserving those things, that we'd have a certain kind of, it's like, “Look, if we're not going to, if we're not going to be able to think ahead, at least we can preserve the good things that we've landed with, right? So like, for instance, the preservation of historical districts or historical buildings, or the preservation of universities, not increasing them too big, with the worry that they would be destroyed if they were increased too big, like to protect these things from these pressures, from economic pressures too.

Robin:

I mean in some sense this was the traditional conservative world view. That is, traditional conservatives said, “Look, we've inherited marriage and religion and sort of a limited state.” And, you know, they were wary of changing that. And in some sense, the people on the other side says, “Look, we have these arguments why– and we'd rather like, you know, have divorce instead, and maybe deficit spending, and maybe less investment in the military and less religion.” And they said, “Look, these things seemed like good ideas now, and you're just giving us some mystical story about how what we see is some great things due to reasons we don't understand.” And they said, “We don't believe that. Let's do get the things we can see we want.”

Agnes:

Right. So this would be an argument against long-termism and against futurism. The thought would be, “Look, we're just not good at thinking about the long-term future. That's just something our brains are not designed to do. We will screw it up for sure.” One thing we can do is recognize good things when they're right in front of us. And so what we should be and we should have extreme like status quo bias, we should be like, “If there's any good stuff around you, sacrifice a lot to preserve it and keep it, and just hope that accidentally good stuff will arise in the future and then we'll sort of keep that stuff too. But don't try to think too far ahead.”

Robin:

Well, you might more say let's keep the stuff that's lasted, so you wouldn't necessarily want to keep everything, if some of it was ephemeral and short term. This would be more heuristic about like, giving a priority to stuff that's lasted a long time.

Agnes:

Right. So you'd be like Paris or something. You know, Paris has lasted a city, I mean, it's been pretty long lasting. And so you might be like, don't put high rises in Paris, or something. Take Harvard, that's lasted a pretty long time.

Robin:

Right.

Agnes:

Don't expand it too much, because you might ruin it. Right? So this would be like a conservative impulse. And so the thought would be that, this insight about our defect when it comes to Utopianism could constitute a kind of argument against the attempt to do long-term thinking.

Robin:

But it's not just long-termism. It's mostly the entire sort of modern liberal order, basically, which is feels relatively free to old things when they think they have an argument for something new. Like, again, you know, allowing divorce to be easier, getting rid of state religion, having a larger state…

Agnes:

Right. I agree.

Robin:

…get – settling, not having war, even like, one of the most, strongest modern projects in which many people agree is that there was too much war in the past. And we should be happy that we have cut way back on war. And then you can make arguments, “No, look at all the bene– war was giving the world a lot of benefits. And you've thrown that all away.”

Agnes:

That was the first thing that James went to was like some nice, juicy massacre, right? So that's like, that's the feeling of living in reality is like a political turmoil and war. So I think that that's right. I think that there's kind of physical conservatism. It's interesting that these things don't tend to go together, right? So physical conservatism and moral conservatism, like so you could be conserving buildings and institutions, which would often be a matter of making sure they don't grow too big, making sure they don't change too much, making sure the city basically changes, stays like the same size. So have like a lot of building regulation and stuff to make sure that it doesn't change too quickly. That will be like on the one hand. And then there's the moral conservativism of here's the way that we've done things for a long time, we've had marriage, we've had, you know, traditional gender roles, we've had war. And then we should like basically continue with those things because they've worked.

Robin:

If we care about the long-term future, but now I mean, you will need some form of long-termism to underlie this overall argument, right? Some people may well say, I don't care about the long-term future, it looks like I'll be happier today if we get rid of, you know, if we let divorce be easier, if we stop having war, at least for the next 50 years it'll be great. Let's just do that.

Agnes:

It's somehow, it's paradoxical, right? That the person who cares about the long-term future is going to be the one who says we have to conserve and keep things the way they have been in the past. It's certainly not the way that long-termists nowadays mostly talked, right. So there would be this weird character– we've been we've created a new weird character, right? The traditional long-termist, who thinks for the sake of the long-term future, we have to be like hardcore conservatives about physical space and about moral norms.

Robin:

They weren't called long-termists, but this was a classic conservative position over the last century. This idea that we've lasted this long because of things we've inherited, and we should be careful about changing. Chesterton's fence, for example. I mean, Chesterton's fence argument is an implicitly long-term argument. It says, there's a fence here, and you don't know why it's here, you should leave it because eventually you'll need it. That eventually is part of the argument. If you said, “Well, I don't care about the future, the fence is in my way right now I want the fence out of the way, let's just do that.” And the counter argument has to say, “But you care about the future.”

Agnes:

Yeah, yeah, that's right. That makes sense. Yeah, I mean, I guess I had never, I haven't understood that conservative argument to be a kind of future-directed argument. But I guess it's not – it hasn't, it hasn't ever been pitched to me that way. But I can see that it could be pitched that way. Because I think that a lot of conservatives, the way they tend to pitch it is something like a kind of romance, a kind of romantic – it's like Hesiod, you know, Hesiod has this idea of these generations where there was the golden heroes, and then the next there was like the silver ones, and every generation it gets worse. And we've now degraded and we need to go back. And so that's not quite the same as we have to preserve the things that have worked because, like I think the problem with divorce and war and traditional gender roles, like a lot of those ships have kind of sailed and that we've already lost those things. We just already too many of us don't care about them. And so those norms are no longer the norms that are governing people. It's like trying to rebuild the castle that we've destroyed rather than save the castle.

Robin:

So it might be that it's too late. So, there’s this…

Agnes:

Yeah, like I've often heard conservatives as more just like complaining constantly that it's too late, actually, more than wanting to preserve anything.

Robin:

So there's this all four-line story of history, which starts out like, you know, strong men make good times, good times make weak men, weak men make bad times, bad times make strong men, strong men make good times sort of, you know, cycle of decadence story, right? And according to that story, we're partly through, right? We're already in the weak times, and the weak men. And we're going to suffer the costs of our previous lack of conservatism.

Agnes:

Right. And according to that story, there's no need to be a conservative because it's built in to the cycle, right? So we're all set. We can't fail, because failure is part of the success, right?

Robin:

Although, I mean, the implication is that you could slow it down a bit maybe. Maybe at the moment when the strong men are being replaced by weak men in the good times you should slow down that replacement so that you will not go as fast into the bad times.

Agnes:

Yeah, maybe. I mean, I wonder what are the effects of the slow downers on the process, right? Maybe it will accelerate because people are trying to slow down and other people are rebelling against this. OK, we've gone for an hour. So…

Robin:

We have. And I think we've – I think we found some insight. So thanks for talking.

Agnes:

Yeah, bye.

Robin:

Bye.