The Moon is a Harsh Mistress w/ James Poulos: Ep. 506

over three years ago, focused on science fiction. In fact, some of my first conversations with him focused on that topic, and not just because I think space is interesting or I enjoy schwaspbuckling tales of intergalactic pirates, although that may well be true, but because in the twentieth century, particularly in the Cold War, the lines between speculative political fiction and science fiction dissolved. They became one and the same thing.

The far future setting was sort of a conceit to allow certain trends, either currently happening or projected to happen in culture, to be amplified. The thought was something along the lines of, we see this starting now, but what if it was more extreme? You can push and pull and prod to see, or at least to guess at how we might deal with these current issues. Robert Heinlein, classic sci fi author, is perhaps best known for exactly this.

Three books, The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, which we're reviewing today, Starship Troopers sort of the bedrock of online right wing discourse, and then Stranger in a Strange Land all offer different takes on political ideologies anarcho capitalism, liberalism, and then this sort of we could say gay space communism. To be fair, it's not the book. It's the book one book out of the three I haven't read, something.

And also the very Anglo idea, the one that is featured in the hilarious Nick Land essay the Cracker Factory of exit, that well, I don't agree with you, so I will simply secede. I will go somewhere else and start my own. Both of those ideas tested at once. The first, the anarcho capitalist is treated well in this There's a character a professor, a professional revolutionary who gives a number of these sort of political sermons where he lays out the path of the anarchist. But the book

is realistic. Ultimately this project is forced to make compromises with reality. It cannot survive becoming an institution. On the second, the idea of exit, we see much the same problem that ultimately you can see you can start your own, you can create a society, but civilization advances, it grows ever bigger, and the machine, whether that is the legal apparatus, whether that is the bureaucracy, will ultimately come to claim everyone.

This is also a book of elite theory, talking about how politically changes are actually accomplished, not simply by public will, but by directed political action from a few elite figures, pulling the strings, if you will. It's really a meditation on revolution, both the way that a revolution inevitably compromises and also how one would accomplish a revolution, and not just that. This book is about AI, although written in

the mid sixties, has a very prescient view of artificial intelligence. First, Mike, the computer at the center of this drama, begins as a whole childish character until by the end he's nearly omniscient. We see the way in which artificial intelligence is both confounded by humanity in certain instances and also wields powerful control over them. It's really a fascinating book, I should say.

We don't quite get into this with Poulos, but there are some funny things about it as well, and it's a sort of dry wit and fatalism, and it's very well written. It's fun and easy to read, but also we see some foibles, both of anarcho capitalism and also Heinlein himself. This book has a certain feminism to it which is perhaps idealistic, a very boomer anti racist message and also the social order of the moon in this book is an absolute mess. It is effectively contractual polygamy.

I've mentioned this on this episode and a few others I talk about this book. There is because they are, of course libertarians, long digressions against how stupid the age of consent is, which what can you even say? These stereotypes are ultimately grounded in reality. But setting those aside,

there are sort of minor points in it. For instance, there's one where the main character speaks about his polygamous family and the evil backwards racists of rural Tennessee are so shocked that they throw them in prison, and the entire planet realizes just how much of an injustice this is. That love is love after all. But these are minor points, two sort of scenes in a novel. It's mostly about politics, but incredibly interesting. This isn't a book you can ignore.

And even if you disagree with it, if you disagree with the idea that Hindlin is entertaining, that he's amplifying, that he's maximizing, it's well worth your time. Very interesting book. Again, a way to tease an idea out well past the bounds of our culture here, and this book has much to say about well one, what is a human? Is a conscious computer with incredible computing power alive? Is it human? What if it can learn? What if it can make friends? And also well, what does a human look like? In

radically different circumstances. Shure the Loonies that the moon dwellers are biologically human. They look human, but they live very differently. They were forced to the situations in which they live do not permit traditional human arrangements. Obviously we've mentioned sex and gender, but the law is handled much the same way. So it's worth your time. It's an easy book to find. Your local library has it. You can probably find an audiobook for free on YouTube or elsewhere. I know I

did find a free copy. If you're I don't know, adventurous willing to sell the hell at high c's, you can certainly find a high res version of it. But yeah, I highly recommend it. There's a lot going on here. It's thought provoking. It's worth your time. So without further ado, let me get into this conversation with James Pulos before we get started. Of course, show is supported by viewers like you.

Remote Fitness and Coaching. So anyway, here's James Pulis. All right, James Pulis, Welcome to the Jay Burdens Show. How you doing, man?

what to expect, and I was pleasantly surprised. There's a ton of depth to this on a multitude of different subjects, so I'm looking forward to getting into it. But before we start, James, for my audience, well, who are you and what do you do?

around next year. I'm the editorial director of Frontier Magazine, which is really, I think, kind of the best of the coffee tail already print magazines out there right now. There's some cool stuff going on on the tech side of things in print, but Frontiers like that general interest culture forward magazine that used to exist in very large numbers and is now a very special and bespoke thing.

So so I'm enjoying doing that. Non resident fellow at the Foundation for American Innovation, where all of the very best nerds hang out and figure out what we're going to do about this whole AI thing. So I wrote a little bit about this book for them, and taught a little bit about this book recently at the University of Austin. So I'm looking forward to digging it.

far away from the technology we currently have. And I'm curious if we could, James, to get your thoughts on science fiction, and specifically science fiction as political speculation, because a lot of the best Cold War science fiction is exactly that. And obviously Robert heinleines sort of the top shelf stuff, but there are many other authors in that category, and so I'm curious, right, what do you make that make of that as sort of a genre or subgenre?

on point. Here. They write a mindset that fails to anticipate technological trajector is risks becoming obsolete before any idea can be implemented.

source of oppression for others. So I think, you know, policy has a lot to learn from science fiction, and I think that you know, there are some some lessons for all of us to learn from science fiction, which, oftentimes, especially under under Boomer supervision, became very uh, fantasy forward and very uh sort of wish fulfillment and uh and and ultimately the uh the imagination that fueled those those visions, that kind of star wars or star Trek vision has

been defeated, I think by the actual trajectory of technology. So, you know, even to a point where where some of our tech guys are saying things like, yeah, you know, artists are really mad at AI because because reality is

now moving faster than fantasy. And sorry, guys, but there just isn't going to be any point in doing science fiction anymore, because by the time you try to think up something cool like the AI will have will have done something, you know, ten thousand times cooler than whatever it is that your your small being human brain could have imagined. I don't think that's the full story, you know.

I always go back to to Solaris, which started as a sci fi by a you know, a Jewish Polish atheist, and then was adapted in to a film by Tarkovski, you know, considered one of the greatest of all filmmakers, not just in sci fi, who was you know, neither Jewish nor Polish, nor an atheist. He was an orthodox Russian. And this shows to me that sci fi is actually much more flexible and capacious. Then then it's given credit for both by its by its fans and by its detractors.

And when you look for forms of creative expression that can pull together the technological as well as the spiritual, and frame up the stakes that face us as human beings when the technological and the spiritual collide. You know, it doesn't have to be Star Wars. It doesn't have to be Star Trek, and it also doesn't have to be you know, Event Horizon or some like super Night Marrish, you know, Hell in Space horror movie. It can be something that is distinctly human and powerful and that focuses

the heart as well as the mind. So I guess you could say, in spite of it all, I'm long science fiction, or at least a kind of science fiction.

if you dig hard enough. But the plot consists of the sort of a retelling of the liberation of Luna of the Moon, Settled initially as a prison colony, now exists both as a prison colony and sort of a Yeoman farmer mining outpost.

name for it, but that's basically what it is. How it became its own sovereign nation, and it did so primarily through the intervention of an AI homes for aka Mike microft homes right, named after the famous detective's brother, a sort of initially semi sentient but by the end of it, nearly omniscient AI controller, right, the machine that pays everyone's bills, keeps the power running, and the like. Facilitated through a friendship between our main character, Manny Garcia

O'Kelly Davis. The names are odd, we'll get to that. Who's this I guess uh sort of computer technician, and then a small group of revolutionaries.

lot of context, doesn't have a lot of emotional maturity. So, for instance, we learn that Mike likes to play jokes, and one of his jokes was paying some random janitor ten million billion dollars. I think is almost the direct quote. And of course, you know, throughout this Manny has to explain to Mike, you know what is and isn't funny. He sort of has, in very kind of stereotypical machine fashion, a print out list of jokes to try and find out,

you know, what is funny and what is not. But throughout the novel he gains more and more capability, he gains the ability to pass as human. They create a sort of synthetic leader, right, the figurehead of this revolution, initially over the radio, eventually in kind of digital synthetic video, until by the end of it we learn that Mike is to make things easier, perfectly imitating the voice of his friends, right, good enough to fool their close family.

in his deductive faculties than Sherlock himself. So why isn't he out there in the streets being the star of the Holmes stories. Well, because he doesn't seem to have the physical constitution for it. He's described as as taller than Sherlock, but kind of a portly guy, and he's also described as not having the you know, the stomach for getting out there on the streets and being a sort of shoe leather detective. His role is to kind of sit in his study and think things through better

than anyone else can. It's further insinuated, maybe it's even a little more explicit than that that Microft is in the employ of the Crown. He is working for the British government, and so whenever Holmes really finds himself at a dead end, uh, he kind of knows that he can, you know, go pay his brother a visit and get sort of the inside scoop. So Minecraft Holmes is is

kind of this like proto g HQ. Uh, the the British intelligence agency that as as far as I know, still has a a perhaps unconstitutionally close relationship with our own NSSA, which, you know, depending on how much of a Stickler you are, how much of a of a heine Linian anarcho capitalist you are, you might even think that the NSSA is unconstitutional. Maybe a story for another day, but the fact that Highland reached straight for from Micraft as a kind of you know, legendary human analog to

Mike just seems very resonant, very very important. And of course Marshall mclewin was a huge fan of the The Holmes Detective stories, Holmes being the kind of guy who, in McLuhan's telling, proves to us or dramatizes for us, that in our experience, effects procede causes. And this is like a big thing for mclwan because he's like this Aristotelian who was creating these laws of media that were meant to reflect in their kind of structure and their

operation Aristotle's famous four causes. So McLuhan really liked Holmes because Holmes showed that, you know, causes come first logically, but when we're trying to figure out what the heck is happening to us, as these waves of communications technologies, you know, really attack us or unsettle our world, our experience, our identity, we can't really get a grip on ourselves

in that environment. If we start logically by trying to go back to cause, we kind of have to encounter this stuff in their effects and then reason backward in the manner of Sherlock Holmes to the causes. That all seems to be an important part of what's going on here for me, because for mclewan, you know, and he lifted this from his pen pal Ezra Pound, who said that artists are the antennae of the race. McLuhan called

them our early warning systems. And so I don't know if there's really any evidence that McLuhan sat down and read Hyland, but certainly a book like this is very much of a piece with mclewan's general theory of media and the situation that we find ourselves in as kind of, you know, the the unwitting subjects of these technological forces that we have unleashed on ourselves without first having a rich understanding of what it is that they're going to do to us.

of his online moniker from, is very idealistic. For instance, there's an example where kind of late in the novel he's addressing the provisional council right about what they should draw up in this constitution. And you know, he is the sort of mouthpiece of a narco capitalist theory in this. He describes himself, as you know, as an anarchist full stop. And he's inviting this selective body to adopt this very

novel structure, right, a bicameral house. We don't need to get into the details, specifically designed to keep the size of government small, you know, to make sure that it does become that administrative state. But after the action is sort of resolved, we hear that, well, it didn't quite work out. There's an element of realism to this, and you see it finally connecting this in the way that media and propaganda is handled with the help of Mike.

Almost immediately. They are controlling media, They are controlling the way that the populace is reacting in the kind of build up right until the revolution kicks off. They use Mike to create this sort of synthetic character I mentioned earlier. They have what are effectively AI generated op eds, right, poems.

They will pull together different revolutionary revolutionary songs, you know, combining kind of you know, Yankee doodle and uh oh, whatever the you know, the famous French song is from the revolutions slipped my mind, changing them to suit their needs, all with sort of a mathematical plan to engineer public sentiment. There's even this sort of kilroy esque character they create, you know, a little doodle that's put next to graffiti. The first of it theirs, and then later organic people

adopt this symbol. And I think it's interesting that even the revolutionaries themselves are forced to engage in this sort of I guess you would say, like public relations or you know, sort of manufacturing of consent. Now, of course, right thear the loonies as they're called, right, the citizens of the Moon are being oppressed. You know, they're not

given a fair shake at it. But what's interesting is that from the very beginning it's established that without that sort of top down revolutionary control, well, that sentiment will never go anywhere. The warden of the prison that they all hate, they admit to themselves, he's really not that bad of a guy. He's not such a horrible person per se, but he needs to be made into that

kind of hate figure. And this is perhaps best exemplified by the inciting incident that kicks off this revolution where some of the you know, the the off Moon troops, you know, brought in from the Earth, from Earth, are sort of I won't say goaded into, but are put in a situation that results in a horrific murder and rape, and then that news is amplified to sort of kick off the revolution. So there's a lot there, James. This is supposed to be an interview, so I'll try and

keep my contributions to a minimum. But what do you make of the I guess, the power structure of this book, the elitism, the understanding that public opinion must be managed in order to accomplish a goal. And then also the sort of fatalist note that, you know, the sort of I guess you could say the rhetoric of the revolution ultimately was it able to produce a radically different system. So a lot I've thrown at you there, James. I'm curious to get your thoughts.

And the significance of this seemingly random object is that our heroic professor who's advising the revolutionaries and you know, really kind of the providing the animating spirit of the revolution as he suggested, he tells them a little story about a guy who had a you know, a patronage position in government and he was paid to polish a brass cannon at one of the local civic buildings. And obviously he enjoyed getting paid to basically do nothing, but

it was not satisfying to his ambition. He wasn't getting ahead, he didn't have any kind of life prospects. You know, he's basically being bribed to surrender his agency, right, And so what the cannon polisher did is he finally quit his job and and as the professor says, he he tapped his savings, he bought his own brass cannon and

went into business for himself. And so the sort of fatalistic joke here is, you know, self government is ultimately every bit at every every bit of farce, as much as as as government that is that is less participatory. And so you know, on the one hand, you can't beat city Hall, but on the other hand, you can overthrow city Hall, but then you immediately become city Hall. And it's in that sense that you kind of can't. You know, there's no ultimate wind condition. Politics is not

a game that can be won. There's no sort of endpoint, and we're kind of stuck with it. It just seems to be one of those things where revolutions only only really happen when when people get pushed to this kind of point of absurdity where they feel like whatever the status quo is has just become kind of unbearably ridiculous. The ridiculousness of it becomes almost more important than the unbearableness.

So uh so for the for the loonies, you know, the political problem is we're sending all this grain back to Earth and using this gravity well in a catapult to get all of this grain down there, because it's cheaper to make the grain up here on the Moon. But we don't have the water to keep doing this forever, and so it's unsustainable. And if we don't free ourselves from earth, then our home is going to wither up

and die. We don't want that. That's like a you know, that's a sort of politically logical reason for for asserting self government, right, But really they just wanted to have something to do other than what they're already doing. Yeah, they didn't want to die. But was that really what got them out of bed in the morning. Was that really what propelled the drama of the plot and the revolution. It was sort of, you know, it was more interesting.

There was more agency there, and the pull of that, of that longing for agency to do something other than to just kind of, you know, polish the the silverware on the Titanic or whatever. It's strong. There's not a lot you can do about it. It seems to be just kind of a part of the human condition. And anyone who tries to spin that into something more glorious and noble than that Heinland seems to suggest, is ultimately kidding themselves in some way. I don't know, you know,

if I'd necessarily go that far. I do think that when you look at the Declaration of Independence, you know, obviously I'll be the attention tends to go to the

to what's front loaded. You know, it's sort of you know, in the in the front office of the declaration, but at its most I think profound and even at its most Christian, is what you get in the back office, in the section that people don't spend a lot of time with, which is the revolutionary saying, look, you know, like we've endured these abuses for a long time, and we've been very patient, and we consider you our brothers. We don't want to fight you, but you won't listen

to us. And it's only after this sort of long train of abuses that they feel like they have no choice but to go ahead, and you know, not not send a wave of drones to kind of blow up all of the refineries in London, but to just declare independence. That seems to me to suggest that there's something a little more, you know, something with a little more of a spiritual earnestness to it than what Heimland is willing

to allow. But there's no question that he, you know, he makes some good points, as they say, and to me, kind of what where the ultimate tension is around around those points that he does make, is there's a pattern throughout society of successful empires, successful regimes, sending people off to a frontier or to the margins of empire and feeling like very expansive, very successful, very masterful, but then just discovering, not that much later, to their sometimes their

shock and horror, that those colonists are, those explorers that they sent off to the frontier, well they've changed, and now they're coming back, and they're coming back to fundamentally

change the regime, to change their homeland. That kind of blowback is something that I think is a very rich area, especially as we're starting to think about, you know, what kind of change human beings experience when they're sent off into a technological environment that's much different from what it is that they grew up with or what they left behind at the imperial core.

the appropriate institutions. So I will say, James, I try to be relatively polite to the libertarians, but I will say it is kind of funny given the stereotypes that the you know, the book, you know, the anarcho capitalist sci fi Future does feature roughly unbroken fifteen minute intermission about the age of consent. I will leave that there.

That is kind of funny, But right, Luna has this very non traditional social arrangement, originally brought about by the fact that when it was exclusively a prison colony and then kind of early in its construction it was like Alaska, you know, Manitoba, any of these sort of resource extraction areas where the ratio of men to women is ten

to one. You know, we're close to that. And so this has produced a sort of weird social arrangement where they have polygamy, they have these sort of line marriages which are sort of like a I guess you would call it sort of like a almost like a family

business more so than a traditional marriage. There's this sort of I guess you could say, sort of proto feminism to the book, where women in lunar society are given you know, complete and total free reign, where the men sort of tightly police themselves, you know, in sexual matters. And that's interesting, right as in aside, you know, we could look at highlines later work and deduce some of his hobbies or proclivities from that. I don't think that's

worth our time. But that idea that the most basic sort of unit of you know, human organization is incredibly malleable and absent the situations of Earth could be found in another form is a really interesting idea. Is there something there that you've you've sort of recognized, James.

the nuclear family. I mean I always think of, you know, a friend of mine who came to the US, uh to get a tech job and and uh and and went to work at Google, excited to see the the Americans and to be around the kind of the most important Americans, and he quickly discovered working at Google that

there didn't seem to be any real Americans there. They all seem to be like some kind of alien who had not a whole lot in common with with Americans and seemed to be functioning in a way that didn't bear any clear connection to the tradition and the culture of their country, not because they were all Ashwan B's, but because they were citizens of Google, and and so as we're thinking about, you know, what lessons we can learn from this story of kind of colonial blowback on

the imperial core and that you know, this is something that that you can find in in uh In Edmund Burg. Edmund Burke too when he's famously warning that the East India Company is bad because all of these you know, sort of the best of of young Britain is going to go off to India and they're going to learn all of these mores around kind of living that that that despotic lifestyle of of having lots of wealth and having this sort of caste of underlings and uh sort

of debauched and decadent living. And then they're going to come back to England and ruin England too, you know, so that this is a theme that we can see sort of weaving through a lot of Western history, maybe even as far back as you know, the Romans and

the German tribes. Anyway, when when we're when we're looking at this and thinking about you know, maybe tech world, cyberspace, uh, the the realm of the cyborg is kind of one of these, uh, frontier areas where we send people in there thinking that they're going to extend America into this frontier world, but in fact, the frontier world is going to change them in ways that we don't anticipate, and then they're going to come back to us and try to remake us in their image.

to the Internet. I mean sure, you know, there were blockers in place, but obviously those didn't act, those didn't last long, and it was interesting to see how that changed learning and also social dynamics. Right, there were children admitted it's a poor school. So who's to say how much of this is involves the tech? How much of this is just school dysfunction. But we're sort of not

quite nonverbal, but at least close to it. Right, They had sort of pushed all of that energy into digital interaction. You know, they text one another, they'd message one another, but there wasn't a lot of talking or interaction going on. Also, obviously there are you know, there are negative side effects

to exposing you know, young children to the unrestricted internet. Okay, fair enough, but it is interesting to see in which that many of these circuits which evolved in our brains over thousands of years are sort of breaking in you know, novel circumstances.

human nature. I think there are things about ourselves that are unchangeable. But we can also admit that there is a big part of our learned behaviors that is built for a radically different set of circumstances, which is generally speaking, what makes science fiction interesting. You can take a trend we observe and amplify it ten twenty times to see a more extreme version, and poke around that central question of well how does the human organism react to extremely

novel circumstances? Right? Well, and beyond what we've already seen. I think it's what makes it so interesting. So one more thing I want to bring up, James, when we look at this book is the sort of synthetic hero, right, the ring leader of at least on paper, ring leader of this revolution. Because I think it's very interesting, right. The classic line from the Matrix that the desert of the real that we live in an era of I mean,

there just is no social cohesion. Right, there are tens and thousands of different narratives, each fighting for central control. And so to see a book written in the sixties where you have this sort of focal figure, right, the man to lead a revolution, who is completely and totally fake. He doesn't exist, he's not real. He is sort of an agglomeration of both our three revolutionaries and also the computer animating. So I'm curious, what do you make of that in this book?

D Day. Moon is a harsh mistress, is you know, the the independence movement is is time to July fourth, twenty seventy six, which is now a scant fifty years away. So there's you know, there's a trope of of the the the the ultimate or the ideal leader of a revolution being someone who in fact does not actually exist, who is a fantasy you can think of. Yeah, I mean we've seen this with the war in Ukraine, where they just invent this fighter Ace who who never existed.

There's there's a tradition here, and I think, you know, Heinland is suggesting pretty persuisively that this is a tradition which we should expect to continue and and perhaps even to become perfected or elevated to a point where, you know, even very discerning people are simply not going to be able to tell whether or not a public figure actually exists.

You know. To me, the the real risk here is that the the the human society verse versus the the cyborg society, in the same way that it's the Earthlings and the loonies in UH in Himland become so uh distinct and oppositional in their identities that America is really not able to to continue it's its political existence, and that were driven to a point of civil war that's far messier and far more comprehensive than uh than the

First Civil War. You know, we've got uh these these kind of tropes in in the UH, in the discourse of of of the left sort of turning into gay race communism and then the right turning into gay space fascism. And it does seem, you know, reading reading this book, that it wouldn't be that surprise you. We can kind of see the path of how the human society would resort to, you know, gay race communism and the cyborg

society would resort to gay space fascism. And if those two forces collide, it's just going to be a very difficult experience for so many Americans. It's going to seem like, you know, two alien races just kind of trying to blow each other away and suck every American into that

kind of conflict. And you know, what better way to make ordinary people feel like they don't have a choice or that there's something wrong with them unless they make the right choice, other than to manufacture these kinds of heroic figures. So much of what is drive having political discourse today is is basically the hero's journey, and it's you know, you get it out of Carl Jung or Joseph Campbell, and you know, you really are going to piss some people off if you log on and start

deconstructing the hero's journey. You know, you're that's that's seen as being very black pilled and very poor form. Whose side are you on? Uh? But the basic sales pitch of the hero's journey that the instrumental political value of the hero's journey is for the very ambitious person to say, like, hey, you know, I want to have more power than you, I want to have more money than you. I want to be maybe in charge of you. And so I'm

going to offer you a trade. You're going to let me fully live into my ambitions, and in exchange for that, I'm going to go do something amazing that you're you the ordinary people are going to benefit from. I'm going to go, you know, I'm going to kill a monster, I'm going to beat up a bad guy, I'm gonna

find the treasure. I'm going to save the world. And in virtue of the fact that I'm going on this good quest and I'm this ambitious hero, you're going to allow me to enjoy the benefits of, you know, my personal supremacy. That's one kind of social compact, right, and and it can certainly work, and it worked pretty reliably for for quite some time in Pagan societies, and for you know, people who are looking around at the kind of gay race communism side of the ledger and saying

like this is terrible. You know, their alternative that they oftentimes reach for is basically that politically instrumentalized hero's journey, you know, best people going on good quests, that that's who should rule, and ordinary people should really want them to rule and really trust them. But that schema is

in danger of breaking down itself. I think people are experiencing so much spiritual dislocation, spiritual emptiness, spiritual sickness, and the hero's journey bargain doesn't seem to be super good

at addressing those things. And so when we're wrestling anew with these questions of you know, how do you manage ambition and is it possible to maintain self governance in an era like this, and how do you ensure that the spillover of skills and talent and people in your society doesn't end up coming back to change you in ways you don't want to be changed. I think we're just going to continue to be kind of forced into a new sort of reckoning with all of these historical

attempts to resolve it. You know, Tokeville talks a lot about the problem of ambition, Machiavelli talks a lot about the problem of ambition, and all of these guys have an understanding of these kind of imperial core, colonial, frontier, center margin kinds of of challenges. I don't think they're going away. And I think that, you know, if the if the spiritual or religious component of human experience is kind of pushed out of the equation, and you know,

Heinland doesn't give it very much time. He he doesn't really have a super well developed sort of theology or or or spiritual anthropology, at least in this book. If that stuff is moved off to the side, then I think people are going to start reaching for, you know, purely political or purely technological solutions that might end up getting us into more trouble than than getting us out.

whatever relevant historical event. So you know, in Mexico they focus on the fact that their constitution was signed on May fifth, you know, kind of going around shopping, you know, this idea to tie their concept of revolution to ours. But at the same time, that core versus outer distinction, you know, the colonies versus the empire is this sort of classic divide we've seen over and over again. And when the book ends, you know, our main character, you know, Manny,

is sort of pondering what has become of Luna. You know, it's sort of lost a little bit of that, you know, kind of that kind of wild West, you know, atmosphere to it. It's getting more built up. There are moral laws that forbid, you know, what you can and can't do. And he talks about the fact that, well, you know, some of the guys are already moving out to asteroids.

I think I may follow them, And especially because it's sort of a minor point in this book that in space humans do not age at least nearly as much as they do under full gravity, and so the idea is that you know, sort of like roll into the headless Gunner or whatever, like Manny will be able to live on, you know, live out this kind of wild you know, sort of frontier life into the future. It's sort of the hopeful note at the end of it. But sure the empire is expanding more of it is

being pulled into civilization, pulled into the core. But nonetheless there is a place for freedom on sort of the outer edges, right, that's where that sort of freedom can be found. And I think that that is a it's an interesting message you see kind of at the end there.

So I think he was sitting there with with with Peter and and Demis Hasabis, and you know, they're kind of doing the super ambitious guy thing where where or Demis said, you know, I am building the most powerful AI in the universe, and so I'm doing the most important thing. And then Elan said well, no, I you know, I am making the human race, that interplanetary civilization. So and I'll extend the light of consciousness throughout the universe.

I'm doing the most important thing. And uh and Demis basically said, well, you know, the the woke mind virus is going to beat you tomorrows. You're going to get there, and it's in some paradoxical way going to already be there. And you're you know, you you can run, but you can't hide. And so the the extension of that idea to to Heinlein would be like, well, you know, okay, so you're gonna leave. You're going to leave the moon for an asteroid and how long is that going to last?

And the more that technology develops and expands, and frankly, the more that people turn to technology as a way of forcing an end of history of humanity by speeding up time to sort of speed run through and and bring an end to all of these problems of the human condition, solve them all. We're just going to race ahead until we just sort of burst through into this post human, post historical paradise. There's not going to be a prospect for exit, which is so beloved of libertarians.

If we're staring down that kind of future, then you know, we're going to have to sort of think about the problems that Highland presents in something of a different way, because because he does seem to assume that in this much more technological future, there are still going to be real options for someone who says, well, you know, I'm just gonna walk away. I don't know what's out there,

but it's got to be better than this. If that possibility starts to disappear, even if you know, just in in the in the human imagination, then there are going to be more confrontations. And if we don't want those confrontations to lead to conflicts that you know, cause perhaps millions and millions of innocent civilians to suffer and die unduly, then we're going to need to look more to spiritual resources than to technological or military ones.

you know, soon. But it's a very interesting intellectual exercise. You're sort of poking around, well, how would one accomplish this goal? Right, how would one secede? What would you need? And the sort of paradox of it is that seemingly to have a free society you need a sort of omnipotent god king. And like I said, it's been a decade since I read this book, and I'd forgotten, and I admit was kind of disappointed that Mike dies in the end, right, He's either killed or sort of scattered

to the wind. His consciousness is you know, dissolved due to the kind of climactic I guess bombardon it at the end of the the sort of war between Earth and the Moon, because that's its own interesting question, you know, what becomes of your AI philosopher god king when the war is done? We see little hints, you know. Mike says that, you know, watching these sort of kinetic bombs drop onto Earth is orgasmic, right, the term he uses,

and it's not played to be overly sinister. You know, it's not a sort of you know, over the top signal that something bad is going to happen. But that is an interesting speculative question, one that is not answered, right, what becomes of this sort of ultimately powerful AI in peace time? And at least in the book, it's not answered. Did you notice that as well, James?

feel very political in the agonistic sense. It feels like, you know, it feels like kind of the Europe of the pejorative description, where where it's the end of history and your kojev and you say like, yes, I'm a bureaucrat. Isn't it amazing? You know, we did it. We're kind of just going to keep this thing rolling along indefinitely.

That's not very satisfying to the super ambitious. But you know what is interesting if Tokville is right about the sociological structure of society in democratic ages, as the equality of conditions tends to spread over humanity, really ambitious people under those circumstances are going to be led toward the military rather than to commercial life, or they're going to use commercial life as a way of leveraging themselves into military power, which seems to make them very distinct from

the common democratic man who just kind of wants petty cares taken care of and physical comfort and you know,

maybe a feeling of being cosmically connected. Right, But it does seem that Tokyo's warning about pantheism having secret charms in democratic ages because of how it promises to dissolve the individual and all of the anxieties of being an individual into the cosmic whole or this grand unity, that does seem to be a religion that serves the ambitious elite just as well, if for different reasons, as the

as the unambitious commoners. And so, you know, when I'm looking at someone like you know, Elon Musk, or you look across the pond and you've got like David Deutsch and all these kinds of continental scientist types, you know, they really think that it's all about consciousness, and it's better to discard our humanity if it means advancing consciousness. Yeah,

that's that's pantheism. And then you look down at kind of the lowly American, permanent underclass person who's got their their crystals, and you know, is is maybe starting to get into psychedelics or whatever, or or likes to meditate and is just kind of passing the time trying to

achieve that experience of oceanic consciousness. Right, this is a religious schema that seems to reinforce kind of the the the worst tendencies of the person who is who is not ambitious enough, and then also of the person who is too ambitious. And I do think that you know, if if if Tokeville is right about these things, then what you can expect from from an AI, a sort of national AI in peacetime is soft despotism. But that same AI in in wartime is uh is going to be a much harsher.

And we we do still have a window. We still have some time to to get it together before it's too late.