This is a short explanation of the idea I call “Optimalism”. It’s a deceptively simple idea for the almost overwhelmingly complex challenge that is human coexistence.
Optimalism is essentially a hybrid of direct democracy and science.
It’s an open source system for collective decision-making, based on universal human rights and responsibilities. Its goal is to find the optimal solution to every problem, that produces the maximum benefit while doing the minimum harm. Every decision and even the design of Optimalism itself is subject to change as new information emerges and as our understanding of how and why things happen continually improves.
In a previous essay I stated what I called the Optimalist Declaration. It was supposed to be a universally agreeable set of ideals for people to unite around. But it was too wordy and formal and, at the same time, vague. After a lot of good feedback and in conjunction with the upcoming launch of United Humans, I’ve decided to reframe the same ideals embodied by the Declaration into a more approachable form:
Optimalism is built on the pillars of love, fairness and science. Science, because it’s the best thing humans have invented for advancing knowledge and for optimizing outcomes. But without a humanitarian goal, science often strays into optimizing for things that aren’t in humanity’s best interest.
So Optimalism directs the methodologies of science to optimize for fairness. But while most people are in favor of fairness, its definition is open to interpretation, depending on one’s ideology and socioeconomic situation. In the interest of objectivity, we need an ideologically-independent basis for defining and measuring fairness.
And that basis is love. Not just love of those in your inner circle or your wider community, but love of all humans. Which, by extension, means recognizing the equality of all humans, past, present and into the future.
Optimalism uses love to define fairness, uses fairness to direct science and uses science to make decisions.
At the beginning of 2022, United Humans Foundation was formed to research, advance and promote the principles of Optimalism. Please consider joining, volunteering and supporting United Humans in its mission to make society more inclusive, equitable and sustainable.
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.
The current novel coronavirus pandemic isn’t an existential crisis—unlike global warming—but it is a unique opportunity to reevaluate our most basic assumptions about modern civilization.
I’ve spent a good part of the last dozen years trying to come up with a viable alternative to the way that contemporary human society operates. I’m neither an economist nor a political scientist, but it’s been clear to me for most of my life that Capitalism and Democracy are, at best, imperfect solutions to the challenge of co-existing on a global scale. At worst—like this or this or this or that—they’re prone to exacerbate rather than alleviate crises.
It’s a valuable exercise to imagine how this pandemic might play out under different circumstances. Let’s say there’s a parallel universe, with an alternate Earth, where the economic and political systems are intentionally optimized to offer the maximum benefit to the greatest number of people, while doing the least possible harm. I call this paradigm Optimalism.
If this sounds utopian, that’s the whole point! Optimalism is a theoretical model of human society, specifically designed to address everything that’s wrong with the model we have.
It’s a bit of an over-simplification, but for the sake of convenience, let’s call our current paradigm (encompassing both Democracy and Capitalism) Individualism. Individualism is optimized for individual outcomes rather than universal ones and involves decisions made through variations on the winner-take-all contest. Because humans are naturally both greedy and scared, the promise of maybe being a winner and the threat of maybe being a loser have been an effective carrot and stick pair of motivational forces for several centuries.
And it’s true that over that time, by nearly every measure, everyone’s lives (even the losers’) have improved. But we could be doing so much better. It’s entirely possible to feed, house, clothe, educate and provide healthcare for everyone in the world, while using fewer of the Earth’s limited resources and producing less emissions and pollution than we currently do.
The biggest problem with Individualism is that it’s based on an outdated set of rules and doesn’t have the flexibility to adapt to a world that’s changing faster than anyone ever imagined. And critically, this paradigm is uniquely unsuited to situations like pandemics and climate change, where the consequences for losing are catastrophic for all of humanity—even for the winners.
In Optimalism, decision-making is guided entirely by science, instead of by ideology or the vagaries of “the market” .
Rather than political power alternating between groups of “conservatives” and “liberals” (who are themselves beholden to varying degrees to the wealthiest people and corporations), political power is decentralized and distributed among the whole population. I’ll explain what that means in practice in a later post.
So what happens when the humans of Optimalist Earth are confronted with a pandemic, like our COVID-19?
Arguably, under Optimalism, there would be no transmission of coronaviruses from wild animals to humans in the first place, because nobody would be hungry enough to resort to eating questionable meat from a wet market and because boundaries would exist to separate human and animal habitats. But that scenario wouldn’t teach us much, so let’s imagine that even on Optimalist Earth, every few years a virus makes the jump from infecting wild animals to humans.
You might think it’s inevitable that such a virus would spread among the local community for at least a few days until one of the victims’ symptoms got bad enough to send them to a doctor. But even that assumption is tainted by Individualistic thinking.
In an Optimalist society, healthcare is considered as essential as roads are in our world: a service that some people need all the time, that everyone needs sometimes and no one ever wonders whether they’ll be able to afford it when they do need it, because it’s just there by default.
The Optimalist medical system is built around preventing (rather than treating) disease, because that’s been shown to produce better health outcomes for all of society (as opposed to producing more profit for a few companies).
So, on Optimalist Earth, every home has a health scanner that tests each family member’s vitals on a daily basis. Because it’s a daily routine, this scanner knows each person’s individual variability and immediately detects any unusual deviation, to trigger a more in-depth medical examination. As soon as a cluster of similar anomalies pops up, a containment protocol kicks in. People identified as having the contagious disease are put into isolation, as is anyone they’ve been in contact with, until the infection is contained and eliminated. Simple.
But this simple process of isolating the infected is incredibly difficult under Individualism. On our Earth, the broad assumption is that adults don’t get to eat or have a roof over their heads unless they’ve worked to earn those things. Even most people with reasonable sick leave provisions aren’t in a position to survive weeks without working. All together, this discourages voluntary isolation and makes people especially resistant to mandatory quarantine.
On Optimalist Earth they believe that everyone should be fed, sheltered and kept healthy, no matter what. But they don’t stop at that. In the case of an epidemic, people get paid to go into quarantine, because they’re doing a public service.
Again, that was too easy, so let’s increase the difficulty level. We’ll say that the new virus is so novel that it evades detection by home testing equipment and so has had the chance to spread for a few weeks before the first acute victims receive medical intervention. Hundreds or even thousands are infected and the disease is spreading globally by the time it’s identified. A test hasn’t been developed yet, much less a treatment or vaccine.
First, it’s important to note that there’s a significant difference in the way a potential pandemic is communicated between these two alternate Earths. On our own Individualist Earth, people are being told conflicting things by a variety of sources that they don’t fully trust—including that they should consider submitting to restrictions that will have a negative impact on their livelihood and lifestyle. They’re told that they should do this even though the risk to them personally is very low. The culture of mistrust and entitlement allows people’s biases to overrule facts and they choose not to believe things they don’t like.
On Optimalist Earth, the messaging is consistent and factual, because knowledge is rightly enshrined as the most valuable commodity.
Free speech is important, but lies aren’t protected; demonstrably “fake news” is illegal and, as such, is punished. The people of Optimalist Earth trust news sources because they aren’t corrupted by individual, corporate or nationalist agendas. Instead, everyone receives the most up-to-date information available, with complete transparency. When doctors recommend social distancing as a way to slow the spread of a disease, most people listen. And again, because no one’s livelihood is on the line, people don’t hesitate to stay home when they become ill.
Meanwhile the scientific analysis of coronaviruses on Optimalist Earth is a global, collaborative effort and one that continues at full steam in between pandemics, rather than being reactive. The same applies to researching vaccines and treatments. Labs across the planet share results with each other, because they know that they’ll reach the goal quicker by pooling resources and not duplicating efforts.
With a combination of universal preventative healthcare, guaranteed sick pay and trustworthy media, any viral outbreak is quickly contained before becoming a pandemic. Thus buying time for the scientific community to develop and deploy treatments and vaccines.
I realize that while everything I’ve described above is technically feasible, it probably sounds fanciful to a lot of you. You might have questions like “but how do we pay for it?” or “what makes you think the people in power today will allow change?” I’m going to be writing a lot more about Optimalism over the coming weeks and months, which I encourage you to follow here on Medium and via From the Trees to the Stars. Please share your thoughts and if you or anyone you know has ideas or capabilities to contribute, please reach out.
Because as the stock markets crater and as overwhelmed governments resort to increasingly desperate interventions, with no end in sight, why shouldn’t we take this moment to consider if we really want everything to return to “normal”.
I mean, just imagine what a system of decision-making based on science could do for the climate crisis…
#Optimalism 