Why WGMI? | A Response to Packy McCormick's "Existential Optimism"
Hello again, brothers and sisters. It's time to get real. ☠
Let's be honest, as we always should be. It can be bleak out there sometimes. And so when I read one of Packy McCormick’s excellent essays about the existential spirit of our era, I spent the rest of the day braced and uplifted, a strong breeze of aggressive hopefulness blowing through the cobwebs of my mind. I realized that he had carefully identified and traced a thread running through our current cultural tapestry, a mood that we swim in daily without recognizing it. This dual thread, existential acceptance of the need to shoulder our own burdens intertwined with radical optimism about the future, is I believe a vital approach to the new world we find ourselves in. In a moment I'll highlight a number of things that I feel Packy has provided to the culture, philosophical tools that we should add to our kit as we face the problems and promise of our day.
But of course you aren't reading this for a lesser summary of a greater essay. Just go subscribe to Not Boring already. I want to add another lens through which to view all of these things. It's the reason why I can be completely bought into the language and outlook of existential thinkers while still having a rational ground for my deep hope. We're going to talk about creating metahumans.
Let's start with the situation as we currently experience it. Our chaotic age is revealing more clearly by the day the naked failure of many of our trusted institutions. I'd argue for the resilience of decentralized hierarchies and networks through the mess, but I don't think anyone would disagree that most of the old guard is quickly losing authority and mindshare. Our leadership class are rapidly heading in the same direction. In the Anxious Age, we look around us for some new source of confidence and certainty. And in Existential thought we find many seeds of truth that will be deeply fruitful in the soil of our current moment. While the most simplified and pop culture versions of Existentialism are portrayed as sad and lonely musings of pessimists on overcast days, in fact the idea that human individuals are, in the end, personally responsible for and obligated to shape their own future is deeply hopeful in a world without guarantees. Crypto culture, probably the fastest mimetic reaction engine on the planet right now, has latched onto Existentialism, combined it with the driving concept of Sovereignty developed by the cypherpunks, and added a heavy dose of Twitter humor to create a relentlessly optimistic vibe. Coming at the beginning of the 2020s in the midst of deeply troubling world events, hope in the future feels like a long-deferred tonic for desperate hearts.
So far, so summary. But I want to suggest that there are some crucial causal steps that need to be added to this framework. I think that Packy’s identification of Existential Optimism as the philosophy of the future is prescient will continue to be confirmed as true over the next decades. But I also think there is a single issue with this argument that needs to be solved. In short: why are we able to be optimistic? Existentialism answers our feeling of powerlessness, locating potential in ourselves and insisting that our fate is our responsibility. But why is this an optimistic message? We can say it is so, pressing forward into the void with eagerness because we have decided this is better than despair. But this optimism will not last beyond the first shocks of pain and suffering that we will inevitably encounter. Existentialism gives us the grounds for change or transformation but not the rational ground for hope. I'm not sure that I can provide rational grounds for hope, in fact. Based on even a brief study of the last several millennia of recorded history, it seems clear that human beings are a deeply broken species. Existentialism itself, as Packy notes, was forged in the crucible of insane human suffering that was the twentieth century. Accepting the conclusion that a world of anxiety and indecision faces us and there is no institution coming to save us, must we necessarily accept the conclusion that we are able to save ourselves?
Without rational grounds for hope in ourselves, we begin to utilize faith to place our hope somewhere. Existentialism as described by Sartre and others exercises faith in the potential of human beings, their will and ambition to create order from chaos. This is a powerful force, one which named or unnamed acts as the ground for the faith of billions in the secular world. But is it sufficient faith? Man can only be truly sovereign if he is truly free, and truly powerful. The paradigm shift of web3 technology gives us the power to exponentially increase our income (maybe) and to build new structures and networks to replace the ones crumbling in front of us, but that does not truly alter our humanity. And it is human-caused chaos, the intrinsic destructive power latent in our nature, that has built the very Anxious Age we live in, and all of the flawed and corrosive structures we fear and hate. The way out is metahumanity.
The project of philosophers in many ways is the attempt to make man free and powerful. In analyzing Existentialism's benefits here, it is important to remember the deep influence of Christianity on the philosophy. Kierkegaard, the first true Existentialist philosopher, was a Christian to a fanatical degree. Sartre, famously an ardent atheist, ended his life in what his followers and confidants termed a betrayal, stating “I do not feel that I am the product of chance, a speck of dust in the universe, but someone who was expected, prepared, prefigured. In short, a being whom only a Creator could put here; and this idea of a creating hand refers to god.” He called for a priest in his final hours, and when asked why hauntingly stated "In case...."
At the back of Existential thought is the ultimate existential act: the act of faith. Kierkegaard explains this perfectly in Fear and Trembling: "...it takes a paradoxical and humble courage to grasp the whole temporal realm now by virtue of the absurd, and this is the courage of faith." This is, after all, what we all do on a daily basis. We take in the evidence of the world around us, see the rational causes for our despair, and choose instead to build and love and sacrifice and play. We saw this every day in 2020 as Twitter filled up with "gm" and "gn" and "wagmi" and "probably nothing" even as all rational Doomer people insisted that crypto and web3 and hope for life on earth itself was, in fact, nothing. But the apes were right. The entirely rational and logical detractors of one of the largest technological revolutions in history have been proven wrong by self-described "degenerates" with almost blind faith. Now you can argue, and Thomas Bevan does so convincingly in his recent and excellent essay on the WGMI generation, that this faith is misplaced. For now I want to focus on the simple fact of its existence. The reminder of trust beyond our rational minds as one of the fundamental acts of humanity.
If we all have faith, and we recognize the failure of human beings to transcend our own natures and stop the recapitulation of an endless cycle of suffering, then the ground of our faith needs to credibly provide the conditions for our true sovereignty. For us to truly all make it, we would need to believe that all human beings had equal access to an opportunity to become godlike. Only then could we embrace the future with a laugh which wouldn't ring hollow in the frantic void of our own mind. Only then could we reasonably hope that the present circumstances of life might be overcome. A godlike human being could truly face total chaos and bend the arc of disorder to his goodwill. Then we could cheat death, laugh at our own flaws knowing that they could no longer change our destiny. That's probably too monumental a task for any complicated system of linked databases to accomplish, however. If only there was already waiting for us, millennia old, a precise and simple protocol to transform anyone into a metahuman. If only.
I perceived that there is nothing better for them than to be joyful and to do good as long as they live; also that everyone should eat and drink and take pleasure in all his toil--this is God's gift to man. ~ Ecclesiastes 3:12-13
Beloved, we are God's children now, and what we will be has not yet appeared; but we know that when he appears we shall be like Him, because we shall see Him as he is. ~ 1 John 3:2
WGMI 😎