A couple of weeks ago I published an essay in which I imagined how the COVID-19 pandemic might play out differently in a parallel universe in which Earth is governed by a hypothetical system I call Optimalism. The essay was intentionally light on specifics, as I wanted to keep it short. This time I’m going to explain what Optimalism actually is and introduce a set of 3 powerful principles that could form the basis of a brand new type of government.
But first I need to make something clear: I don’t claim to have all the answers. I’m not a political or social scientist, nor an economist. I have a science degree, but I’ve spent most of my career working in the film and creative tech industries. I’m writing this as a human who believes that humanity, collectively, has limitless potential. I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about why we aren’t fulfilling that potential and about the common root causes of humanity’s failings. I’ve also spent a lot of time examining natural and man-made systems that might serve as prototypes for a better way of doing civilization.
What I realized was that Science itself is the prototype I was looking for. The scientific method and the peer review process together constitute a system that is able to process disparate and, at times, seemingly contradictory inputs, to arrive at an ever-evolving consensus. It’s a system that’s responsive to changing circumstances and new data, is robust against dishonesty and bias, and exhibits forward progress. I believe that if we use Science as a model for decision-making, it can allow us to transcend our selfishness and greed, and facilitate us working together to solve our most pressing challenges. Because, as I like to say:
Competition got us down from the trees, but only cooperation can take us to the stars.
I chose the name “Optimalism” because the core goal is to design a social, political and economic system that is optimized to offer the maximum benefit to the greatest number of people, while doing the least possible harm. In other words, to find optimal solutions to… everything. That doesn’t just mean that every decision is made with the intention of achieving optimal outcomes, but also that the mechanisms of decision-making are optimized.
In order to explain Optimalism, it helps to take a 10,000 foot view of the current system — which I’m calling Individualism. Individualism consists of three pillars: the Democracy by which we’re governed, the Capitalism by which we do business and the culture of Tribalist Consumerism that is our substitute for social fabric.
The way I see it, Democracy and Capitalism are two ways of making large-scale decisions by crowd-sourcing selfishness. For instance we’re expected to vote for the people we think will best represent our interests, while we reward making money for its own sake more than we reward making meaningful contributions to society. When our political and economic logic is purely selfish, it’s little wonder that our culture has by-and-large become self-centered.
Individualism is premised on the assumption that everyone wants what’s best for themselves and the people they care about. This is a fair assumption, but it contains more nuance than you might think. How much people care about others — especially those who are different from themselves — and how much they’re willing to yield their own interests to help others, is a major difference between left- and right-wing ideologies.
Optimalism, on the other hand, is designed to eliminate ideology as a factor in decision-making. Instead, decisions are based on the best information available, subject to rigorous analysis and forecasting. But it isn’t just about politicians listening to scientists, it’s about getting rid of politicians altogether and letting Science drive the decision-making.
We’ve all grown up in a world in which politics and politicians are a fact of life, so it’s hard for most people to imagine a world without them. But think about it: why do we need politicians? What purpose do they actually serve? In theory, politicians exist because direct democracy(in which every citizen gets to vote on every issue) is impractical. Politicians are supposed to represent the conflicting needs of different constituencies, to weigh available information and negotiate among themselves the best possible compromise on everyone’s behalf.
But politicians also want “what’s best for themselves and the people they care about” and they don’t necessarily care about their constituents. To varying degrees, like any human, they are prejudiced, short-sighted, lazy, greedy and vain. It’s unreasonable to expect them to do their job without any bias or conflict of interest. But in the absence of emotional intelligence, those biases and conflicts of interest breed incompetence and corruption.
You might wonder if it’s possible to make a decision without bias and the answer is: not really. But it is possible to minimize the influence of bias by allowing decisions to be made by large, diverse groups of people rather than by small groups, homogeneous groups or by individuals. That’s why trials decided by a jury are more fair than trials decided by a single judge. And it’s no surprise that governments mostly made up of rich, old, straight, white men, tend to make laws that mostly benefit rich, old, straight, white men. The bigger and more diverse the group is that’s making a decision, the less influence any given individual’s bias will have on the outcome; the more likely the decision is to benefit the entire diverse population. Also, since the biases of a diverse group are going to be varied, they somewhat cancel each other out, overall.
But what size of diverse group is ideal? Earlier I wrote that politicians exist because direct democracy is impractical, but that’s not really true anymore. The internet makes it at least feasible that everyone could vote on every government decision. Is that optimal? Probably not, but we’ll never know for sure until we test it.
One thing that has been tested (first in Ancient Greece and again more recently) is something called a Citizens’ Assembly, in which a group of ordinary people (often 100) is selected at random to represent the full breadth of diversity of the population in question. That group is presented with all the available information and analysis and is empowered to make a proposal or decision on behalf of the whole population. This approach has recently produced some significant decisions on notoriously difficult subjects, like abortion and same sex marriage. There’s good reason to think this concept is worth exploring further and there are academics doing just that.
But it’s just one of many possible approaches to collective decision-making. Along with direct democracy and modified versions of representative democracy, there are an enormous variety of models that we must apply scientific rigor to research, simulate and evaluate. Not just out of curiosity, but out of existential necessity.
While I wrote earlier that one of the strengths of Science is that it exhibits forward progress, it doesn’t inherently have a goal, beyond acquiring an increased understanding of things. We can’t simply presume that objective scientific optimization will work out in humanity’s favor. In some ways, Authoritarianism is a more efficient way of structuring human society than any form of Democracy we’ve tried so far. But the human cost of Authoritarianism cannot be tolerated. In order to point our Science-driven search in the right direction we must first seed it with a set of fundamental guiding principles. As such, here is a draft proposal, if you will,
The Optimalist Declaration:
- The greatest imperative is to preserve and advance humanity; to maximize the chances of our species surviving, thriving and continuing to acquire a deeper understanding of the universe
- The preservation of humanity is predicated on recognizing the equality of all humans; affording everyone the same opportunities to contribute to and the same access to benefit from every aspect of life and society, irrespective of any demographic characteristic
- The advancement of humanity is contingent on impartial, evidence-based decision-making; to consider all available information and in good faith to objectively weigh up the needs of all people, to implement optimal compromises that produce the maximum benefit, while doing the least harm
It might seem like a cop-out that instead of providing a complete blueprint for Optimalism, I’m offering up a set of principles and insisting that everything else needs to be figured out collectively by scientists. But it is exactly that that makes me think Optimalism can work. The whole point is impartiality; to prevent any individual’s intuition, assumptions or biases from influencing the design of the system or the outcome of the deliberations.
This is what I would like to see us spend our time in isolation working on (and if you or anyone you know is able to contribute, please get in touch). If the COVID-19 pandemic is quickly brought under control, with limited disruption to major economies, it’s likely that things will return to something close to what we still think of as “normal”. But if we can devise a better alternative in the meantime, we’ll have an opportunity to inject those ideas into the conversation around rebuilding. If, on the other hand, the pandemic drags on, with new spikes of infection every time restrictions are eased; if it has the devastating economic impact that economists and the 1% fear, it might not be possible for them to restore the old, broken normal. In that case we need to already have a plan to build a new world that is more diverse, fair and sustainable.
If this pandemic teaches us one thing, it should be that we, collectively, are only as healthy as our most immunocompromised neighbor. We’re only as rich as our poorest compatriot. It turns out that “what’s best for ourselves and the people we care about” is actually whatever’s best for everyone, whether or not we care about them. And if we lived in a world where the political and economic system was designed to care equally about everybody, I believe that our culture would quickly follow suit.
But we’ll never know for sure until we test it.
#Optimalism 