The Villains We Choose and the Work They Give Us | Frankly 155

**Nate Hagens** (0:00)
I continue to be fascinated by many topics, but one that I've pondered a very long time is why and how all humans, at least with access to the internet, can access the same facts, yet come up with wildly different inferences and worldviews and outlooks. And I have a frankly series planned later this year, which I think I'll title How Could I Be Wrong, which might be quite a long series, where I plan to steel man all the core pieces of logic that comprise the Great Simplification thesis. But before that, there is a prequel, I think, needed to set the stage. Today, I want to talk about what humans variously consider to be the prime mover of all the pieces of the system around us. And to this end, I've come up with eight different perspectives to answer the questions, what is wrong with the world today? And what might fix it? And these perspectives each provide their own answers and reasoning. And all of them are held by intelligent and sincere people looking at the same planet and socioeconomic system. I will acknowledge up front that I hold one of these perspectives primarily. And it's the last one in the list. How convenient of me. But lining up seven straw men and knocking them down is not my goal here. This morning, I want to better understand why we all have access to the same information, but come up with completely different interpretations. And at a minimum, this might help us understand why we so often are talking past each other. And perhaps, hopefully, allow us to empathize, find common ground with others as we respond to what's ahead.
Okay, let's get into it. Number one, the political lens. This is probably the most widely held lens, at least in the countries where this podcast gets watched. And through this lens, the world is coming apart because the wrong people are running it. Domestically, in your own country, that means the other party, whichever one that is for you, has captured the institutions and is governing directly for its powerful donors rather than average citizens, and that we're on the verge of authoritarian rule. And on the world stage, the geopolitical arrangement that has mostly held since the end of World War II is now coming apart. And what's replacing it is the countries with the biggest militaries and currencies doing whatever they want. Of course, there is a lot of truth here. Who holds power determines who gets bombed and who gets tariffed and whose land floods first and the like. But holding this lens, whatever is ultimately driving all our current upheaval, politics is how it reaches our personal lives. And a summary quote from someone in this demographic might be, the other side has really screwed this up. We have to vote our way back. And the remedy is to win in the next election, of course. Organize, turn out, take back the majority, appoint the right judges, pass the right laws. And on the international side, deter and make new allies and rebuild the geopolitical arrangement. From inside this lens, what we currently face is solvable, which is probably a large part of the appeal of this lens, because there is always another election coming. Okay, number two, the religious lens. This is the oldest perspective on this list and the one probably held by the largest number of human beings currently alive. And I specify that because a lot of the discourse on the TGS platform is really a discourse happening among a smaller population inside a handful of wealthy, secular countries, but is not representative of the whole of humanity by a long shot. I think the religious lens comes in two flavors, and each of them point in very different directions. The first is stewardship. Creation is a gift. Dominion was always inferred as a responsibility, rather than a license to extract and exploit, and humanity broke that trust. That's Laudato Si, and the creation care evangelicals, and the caliphs in Islam. There are for sure people in each of those traditions who have been saying such things a great deal longer than the modern environmental movement has existed. It was given to us, and we were told to keep it, we didn't.
The fix for that flavor is repentance and stewardship, which sounds kind of soft to secular listeners, until we consider what's at its core. Every one of these spiritual traditions already contains voluntary restraint as some sort of ritual or working practice. The Sabbath, fasting during Lent, or Ramadan, tithing, and even the whole concept of enough.
Recall that Jubilee was periodic debt forgiveness written directly into scripture. And all of these were functioning social technologies for getting very large numbers of people to purposefully consume less. And they basically run at scale for thousands of years, which is exactly the thing the degrowth people are currently trying to reinvent. So if you wanted to convince a few billion people to be happy with less, it's perhaps easier to not start from scratch. You would probably start with these religious traditions, but I digress. The second religious flavor is a bit harder for me, but I will try to do it justice. History has an author, and our way of life was always going to end. The world is not our home, and the entire project of engineering our way out of limits and mortality sits somewhere between arrogant and futile. Someone who believes this might look at the world and say, You all seem very frightened. I am not. This was always going to end, and it was never ours to save. That is probably the most action-suppressing belief on this list, but at the same time, it's the only lens with a real answer to despair. If you actually believe history has an author, then your calmness is coherent as opposed to it being denial. And to be blunt, many of the people I meet in that camp seem steadier and happier than many of the people I know in mine. Okay, number three, the class lens.