Leviathan and Behemoth

The Abundance agenda is just a rehash of neoliberalism. That's good

i like how even in 1915 san fransicko was on that gay shit. respect

We’ve all heard about Abundance, the book about how “the left” should embrace economic growth building more stuff or, according to the discourse around it, how Adolf Hitler was correct about everything except Peter Thiel being cool as hell. Regardless of your ideas about it, it’s certainly influential: after passing some Abundism-approved policies this week, the Governor of California explicitly shouted out the book and its authors during a press conference.

I don’t think I have a lot to say about the specifics of the book, so go read Matt Bruenig or Mike Konczal or Eric Levitz or Ned Resnikoff or Bruenig again or the Niskanen Center or Brian Beutler or Eric Levitz again. My reluctance is mostly because it’s an airport policy book so there’s not a lot to say beyond whether each individual policy is good or not and I already think that the policies are all generally good (build more housing, don’t have stupid regulations telling the government not to do things, and promote technology). I also don’t really care about the “is it a political solution for the left’s problems” question and I think you can guess my answer based on a previous post. But, then, what are my general thoughts on the “Abundance movement” as a political/economic ideology? That’s interesting, to me.

Are usually the slaves of some defunct economist

Stubbornness and unwillingness to relinquish a faith once blindly held are taking the place of fanaticism. The stage is set for the growth of a new current of opinion to replace the old, to provide the philosophy that will guide the legislators of the next generation even though it can hardly affect those of this one.

Milton Friedman, “Neo-Liberalism and its Prospects” (1951)

Where does the Abundance movement come from? It’s not that long a story, fortunately. The book is based on a 2022 article by Derek Thompson (one of the book’s authors) where he argues for, well, more stuff aka abundance. These ideas were framed by I think three sort of political/intellectual movements of the late 2010s and early 2020s: progress studies, “state capacity libertarianism”, and YIMBYism.

Let’s start with the latter. YIMBY means “Yes In My Back Yard” and it emerged as a slogan around the mid 2010s or so to characterize San Francisco progressives and liberals who wanted the city (and state of California) to lift its restrictions on land use and build more housing. The term YIMBY was coined as a counter to NIMBY (not in my back yard), which had existed for around 45 years and was invented to characterize people who oppose new energy projects in suburban Virginia (the same types who denied the good people of the DMV a chance to go to Disney’s America). So, broadly speaking, “YIMBY” was a movement of educated coastal liberals who wanted to focus on loosening regulatory constraints on housing and infrastructure projects to achieve liberal goals like promoting economic growth, reducing urban inequality, and tensions around the role of markets versus social housing, and issues like rent control. YIMBY deeply influenced the politics of California, and therefore both the tech industry and later the national Democratic party platform.

Second, “progress studies”. The term comes from Patrick Collison (a tech billionaire) and, more importantly, Tyler Cowen, who wrote a book that was kind of like Abundance for the “early teens” (decade): The Great Stagnation. His case, which I’ve written about before, was that American technological progress was slowing down across many measurable directions. This prompted a lot of intellectual debate that went on for the better part of the decade about 1) whether the Great Stagnation was happening or not, 2) whether it was a good thing or a bad thing, and 3) whether it was inevitable or a choice. In 2019, Cowen and Collison wrote a The Atlantic article asking for a “science of progress” where they put forward a multidisciplinary, empirically-based approach to why economic, scientific, technological, and other types of measurable, technical advancement had slowed down. Some of their explanations were economic and technical in nature, while others skewed more cultural, and they were greatly influential on the San Francisco tech sector in particular, such as billionaire Mark Andreessen (who is, ironically enough, a NIMBY).

This is not crucial for this part, but will be later: progress studies also was closely related to other online intellectual communities of the 2010s and 2020s, especially the Effective Altruism movement and LessWrong/Rationalism. LessWrong (or LW) started in the mid-to-late oughts as an offshoot of Early 2000s Internet Atheism, and basically its theme was how to have empirically grounded beliefs on various issues; in a pretty comical way, it followed the history of Enlightenment thought, because it sought to combine pure reason and logic with empiricism to answer major questions, and later splintered over questions involving religion, gender, and race¹. Meanwhile, Effective Altruism or EA, as I’ve said in the past, started as an offshoot of the philosophy of Peter Singer and Derek Parfit (as well as Will MacAskill, who was inspired by both), and the economists known as “randomistas” who won a Nobel Prize in 2019. Basically, put together, the EAs believe that “charity” should focus on the most cost-effective solutions to important, tractable, and neglected problems in society. Both of these movements coalesced in part into something called Longtermism, which wants humanity to focus on averting the biggest threats to its long-term survival; this follows the work of both MacAskill, a guy called Toby Ord, and Nick Bostrom, another philosopher, and their emphasis is on concrete “existential risks” like nuclear war, pandemics, and especially “artificial superintelligence”.

The last bunch is “state capacity libertarianism”, and its offshoot of state capacity liberalism, which also comes from Tyler Cowen. His argument is pretty reasonable: free markets and capitalism are very powerful, but a strong and competent state is necessary to form functional markets and achieve prosperity. Back in the early-to-late 2000s, it was common for libertarians to wonder what would happen to libertarianism in a post-Great Recession world that seemed to definitively reject libertarianism - and Cowen’s idea, shared by others like Brink Lindsey (later of the Niskanen Center) and Will Wilkinson (who later supported Elizabeth Warren?) was to achieve some sort of fusion between liberalism and libertarianism that emphasized both tradition’s defense of open markets and individual liberties, but accepted some minimal level of government intervention given how unrealistic the alternative was. State capacity “libism” is generally associated with the Niskanen Center in DC and its “cost disease socialism” agenda to promote liberal purposes not just through government intervention but also through free markets. The whole thing seems to have as intellectual forefathers the Nobel (Prize in Economics) winners Daron Acemoglu, James Robinson, and Simon Johnson, whose main thing is that institutional arrangements matter most for economic outcomes and that the quality of government is the most important institution there is. Acemoglu, to quote another economist, did for institutions what Kim Kardashian did for butts.

I think it’s somewhat clear what “Abundance Liberalism” got from each movement, which are all somewhat similar in themes to each other and to itself: an emphasis on economic growth and not just redistribution, an openness to accept that state actions have frequently failed, and an embrace of technology as a way to secure faster growth. It’s kind of like “Rawlsekianism” except not inherently unworkable, because it actually admits that inequality is bad for democracy and embraces growth as a way to achieve more redistribution.

The end of capitalism versus the end of the world

The most common comparison for the Abundance movement is “neoliberalism”. As a winner of the 2022 Neoliberal Shill Contest (lol), I think I have a thing or two to say. The first, and more contentious thing, about neoliberalism is what it is. The neoliberals themselves and their critics describe it as basically a reaction to 20th century liberalism and that’s basically where the parts where they agree end.

The consensus of what liberalism was before neoliberalism was what’s currently known as classical liberalism by the early 20th century: individual liberty, limited government, and free and open markets. This view came under siege from three events: World War 1 (which took away from the prestige of nationalism), the Great Depression (which diminished support for laissez faire), and the rise of the Soviet Union, which raised support for socialism and dirigiste economics. Additionally, in Europe, a hot new ideology called “fascism” was on the rise, which defined itself as kind of a mix between socialism and nationalism but hating communism. In this context, Friedrich Hayek proposed a new vision of liberalism that was capable of making a robust counterargument against both left wing and right wing totalitarianism. His case was, basically, that both required centralized economic planning, which could only work with an incredibly powerful and coercive state that would almost inevitably devolve into tyranny. His proposal for a “new liberalism” was that society would have general, predictable, uniform laws that would embrace “spontaneous order” (basically organic changes across the world) but would also have a capable, organized, democratic state with a limited welfare state and constitutional safeguards against majoritarian tyranny.

Hayek’s sexy new liberalism met a context hungry for an alternative to both the old and the extreme, and it was met with… basically complete indifference. The liberalism that won out was what they call “Cold War Liberalism”, which combined economic Keynesianism, domestic social justice such as women’s rights and the Civil Rights movement in the United States, a sort of benevolent liberal internationalism, and a virulent opposition to communism. This seems… contradictory - especially regarding the tension between domestic support for freedom, democracy, welfare, and emancipation, and foreign support for brutal right wing dictators and extractionary elites. This liberalism later lost most of its prestige during the Great Inflation, which put an emphasis on both its contradictions and its shambolic economics.

The best way to understand how neoliberalism reared its narsty head was (and I don’t mean this in any charged way) Augusto Pinochet’s Chile. In the 1970s, Chile elected socialist Salvador Allende president, and Allende was both kind of authoritarian and leading Chile to hyperinflation, but also a welfare redistributionist who was hated by the United States and by Chilean elites for supporting the poor. The US fanned the flames of elite discontent, and the relatively obscure general Augusto Pinochet took power in a military coup in 1973. His first economic program to tame inflation was economically unsuccessful, and he was looking around for ideas to stabilize Chile’s economy. This is when a team of American-trained economists, later called the Chicago Boys, presented him with a large tome (called el ladrillo, or “the Brick”) of proposed economic reforms that they’d been preparing all throughout the Allende years: shock therapy deregulation, mass privatization of state assets, fiscal austerity, an independent central bank that would tighten money, labor market deregulation, reversing Allende’s land reforms, and freeing trade and capital flows.

Those policies, essentially, are what we now call “neoliberalism” and they stem both from Hayek’s original diagnosis and ideas through a group called the Mont Pelerin Society, which basically he quasi founded to protect the ideas of liberty and liberalism. A lot of Hayek’s, and Mont Pelerin’s, ideas were based around the rise of Adolf Hitler and the “Sonderweg” (special path) of Nazi Germany, and follow a lot of the ideas of a guy called Alexander Rustow. Rustow believed that the state should be strong, and set clear, stable, and consistent rules for all economic engagement, but without excessive protectionism, subsidies, or planning, which inevitably led to tyrannny like Nazism. Besides coining the term “neoliberalism”, Rustow also coined the term “Third Way”, and he believed his new liberalism should be an alternative to both socialism and fascism: a social democratic, constitutional democracy that is skeptical of both state and market power, with a welfare state but free and open market. This proposal, as described at the Walter Lippmann Colloquium in 1938, was basically a “liberalism from the left” or a “positive liberalism” that attacked the economic, psychological, and social causes for the decline of liberalism. But others, like Hayek and Ludwig Von Mises, did not like this “social liberalism” and instead preferred a more “paleo” liberalism, that didn’t have such an expansive state. A second generation of “neoliberal” thinkers, like Milton Friedman and James Buchanan, defined a more clearly restricted state, a less expansive welfare state, and a somewhat more skeptical approach to democracy. They were following their own research, as well as that of others such as Anne Krueger, and the “New Classical” economists, whose general idea was that government failure, not just market failure, had to be considered. In the United States context, “neoliberal” in particular has an especially left wing history, since after twenty years of bruising defeats and the lack of appeal of Keynesian liberalism in the 70s and 80s, a group known as the “Atari Democrats” and a similar, related faction known as the Democratic Leadership Council pushed the party in a more “neoliberal” direction in order to win over white-collar workers and shed the left’s reputation for out-there culture war positions and economic mismanagement.

In general, neoliberals believe in incremental and pragmatic policies, an optimistic, forward-looking approach, an emphasis on open markets over top-down planning, a desire for economic growth, support for international trade, immigration, and capital movements, and some redistribution. The central policy recommendations of “neoliberalism” were what’s now called the Washington Consensus, a list of economic policy suggestions that are mostly in line with what we’ve outlined above. But something that gets kind of lost is how neoliberalism was originally a left-wing ideology, that sought to keep the ideas of democracy, progress, and redistribution alive in a time where they seemed to have lost all their luster. Bill Clinton and Tony Blair did manage to revive the moribund center lefts of their respective countries and turn them into competitive juggernauts - and, in fact, Clinton beat back fascist figures like Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot himself.

I would simply compensate the losers

Back in the 1990s, the hegemony of neoliberalism was inarguable - that was literally the meaning of The End of History, that liberalism (of the neo flavor, in particular) had won. Well, not anymore. The obvious issue is that we’re no longer in liberal hegemony territory, because it’s being contested by a different ideology - fascism, in all but name, and with the same “social basis” as the other times. People have lost their faith in neoliberalism, in large part due to its many mistakes. What was the problem with neoliberalism, then? Obviously there are many defensible aspects of it - independent monetary policy or laying off price controls are good ideas. But “neoliberal” didn’t become a swear word because the movement was too popular and successful.

In general, I’d say it failed on two fronts: the economic, and the philosophical. Despite the frequent conflation (particularly in non-American contexts) between neoliberal and orthodox or mainstream economic policies, the truth is that, in fact, neoliberalism does not implement the best recommendations of mainstream economics - it frequently abandons them in favor of free market ideology. Beyond (bad and dumb) criticism of the “homo economicus” model of rationality, critics usually focus on three aspects: open trade, open capital markets, deregulation, and “austerity”. Regarding open trade, I’ve gone on the record as a critic of protectionism and a supporter of global integration, but with one caveat. The argument for “free trade” is that countries will specialize on the activities they have the greatest advantage in (as determined by the relative supply of each factor of production), and that this will enrich them by increasing aggregate production and consumption. However, because each factor of production sees its incomes change relative to their participation in output and therefore trade, then trade would also worsen inequalities between, for example, educated versus uneducated workers, labor versus capital, or either of those and land owners. Particularly, the concern was that trade exposure would reduce employment and increase output by shifting national income to labor and land - which is what ultimately happened aka the “China Shock”. The general consensus in economics was that there could be a “Kaldor-Hicks Efficient” solution where they taxed the winners of globalization to provide welfare benefits to the losers. This was the standard economic policy recommendation back in the 80s and 90s and it… did not happen, largely for political reasons.

The second item of criticism is about deregulation and capital account liberalization, which is just way less interesting because it’s just “we’ll take the bad side of policy dilemmas”. In general deregulation is an “it depends” type of thing (more on this a few paragraphs down), and financial deregulation, the kind usually criticized, was not very productive: it arguably led to the Great Recession by increasing the supply of credit to people who could not continue affording their homes during a recession, and, in general, episodes of deregulation tend to precede financial crises and these crises are usually bad for the economy for a very long time. Regarding international capital flows, there’s what’s known as Mundell’s Trilemma, where you can choose between controlling your own interest rates, controlling your own currency, or controlling capital flows. This means that if you don’t control capital, you either have to give up control of interest rates, which can trap you in a “liquidity trap” that implodes your economy; or you can give up control of your exchange rate, which can lead to your currency collapsing and also, you guessed it, blow up your economy. But in reality, if you open up your capital account you end up having to both give up some sovereignty over currency and interest rates to keep the capital happy, which means there’s not a trilemma but a dilemma.

The real bad one for “neoliberalism” was actually austerity. There’s some discussion about this term (for one, that budget deficits didn’t actually shrink very much) and it’s one where there’s pretty significant country-by-country differences, differences across time, and just different implementations of the same ideas. For example, in some cases privatization increased efficiency of enterprises, and in others it did not. The UK had pretty stark cuts to social programs, which resulted in substantial damages to the economic prospects of young men in particular. But I think that one domain where “austerity” mindset was actually in full swing, and where it did have the worst consequences, was in the “expansionary austerity” idea that was popular in the mid-to-late 2000s. Basically, following a paper that only reached its conclusions because two prestigious economics fucked up an Excel average, it became a trendy idea in economic policy circles to believe that contractionary fiscal policy was actually more expansionary than traditional stimulus. This was especially popular in Europe for whatever reason, and they implemented these ideas during the Great Recession… which fucked up their economies for over a decade. It was just not true that slashing spending and raising taxes made economies grow more during and after recessions, which goes against not just common sense but also basic macroeconomics. It’s also tied to some, much older ideas in heterodox right-wing crankonomics (I wrote about it vis a vis Elon Musk).

I feel like in every part of this you see a pattern where a “let’s use common sense and follow best practices” gets ignored in favor of a hardline pro market agenda regardless of what the actual tradeoffs and implications of very sensitive decisions were. This is not a coincidence. A very famous book titled Democracy in Chains by Nancy MacLean argues that this was by design: James Buchanan, founding father of public choice economics and of neoliberalism, was associated with some pretty unsavory types (the Ku Klux Klan) and his whole thing was basically a smokescreen for an oligarchic takeover of the United States. MacLean’s book was, well, incorrect in many of its key factual claims about Buchanan. But it did capture an important truth: Buchanan and Hayek were suspicious of majoritarian democracy, in large part because (as outlined in The Road to Serfdom) it’s pretty plausible, if not frequent, for nations to just vote themselves into statism and economic penury, as well as into genocidal totalitarianism. Both of them, thus, wanted a democracy that placed more procedural, constitutional boundaries on majoritarianism². Basically, democracy (like fame) is a gun, and their aim was not to take it apart, since it could be useful (in fact, most “liberation” movements have been to liberate the property rights of the working poor from the predation of the powerful rich), but rather to prevent The People from using it to shoot themselves in the head.

This means that there’s a tension between free markets and the ironclad property rights necessary to preserve them, and therefore between markets and democracy, which manifested itself in many ways: first, as an “encasement” of global capital against popular sovereignty via separate systems of government, separate legal institutions and frameworks, international “superstates” imposing protections on property rights, and limits to democracy itself. In fact, the interests of large corporations, banks, the very wealthy, and the financial sector wormed their way into neoliberalism through this channel - by equating the economically sound principles of the neoliberals with their own, rent-seeking agenda. Secondly, the OG neoliberals themselves influenced a second tier of thinkers (such as Murray Rothbard, Ayn Rand, or Hans-Hermann Hoppe) who are not just skeptical of democracy, but in frank opposition to it. In 1992, Rothbard wrote “A Strategy For The Right”, an essay about how radical free marketeers could team up with authoritarian reactionaries in order to basically abolish democracy and replace it with a minarchist autocracy. In fact, the idea that democracy and sovereignty can be entirely suspended in order to advance the free market has an actual framework for implementation, the Special Economic Zone, where sovereignty is “cracked up” and replaced with a complicated mishmash of jurisdictions, loopholes, and corporate-friendly enclaves, such as in places like El Salvador or the Gulf States, non-democracies with special privileges for capital.

Thus, there’s a somewhat frequent connection between vulgar neoliberalism, which is in large part just ideologically and financially captured by global capital, and a spectrum of skepticism of to opposition to democracy. This “pipeline” between libertarianism and fascism is fairly well established - in large part due to the tension between libertarianism and democracy, but also in this type of libertarianism’s ontology, the idea that there is a natural hierarchy of skill and talent and that perverse government action is mucking with it; part of this hierarchy, of course, is not just intellectual but also national, racial, and gender-based. This gets to probably the least pleasant part of the philosophical failures of neoliberalism, the part about race, culture, and gender. Hayek himself agreed with calls to “end immigration” in the late 70s, and his later writing reflected this: he believed that, for a free market econoy to prosper, there had to be a favorable culture and “social cohesion”, which also helped prevent the sort of totalitarian takeover he wanted to insulate markets from. After the Berlin Wall fell, whether the former Soviet nations would be able to become normal and well-functioning capitalist societies - or whether they didn’t have the culture and traditions to do it. Some Mont Pelerin types, like Douglas Murray (author of the pseudoscientific rag The Bell Curve) take it even deeper, and blame it on race and biology outright; this hostility to “anti-liberal cultures”, coupled with a broadening rift over whether multilateral organizations and treaties were “communist” or not, led to an “anti-neoliberal” neoliberal right, that pairs free markets with closed borders and biological determinism. These types, of course, all loved Pat Buchanan. It’s worth noting that these weren’t like, authorized interpretations of Hayek; in large parts, they were like gangrene, flying onto an open surface and taking roots as deep as possible.

Suckered onto me like a car window Garfield

This whole Abundance thing is, in short, deeply Californian, and responds to a lot of very specific elements of early 2020s politics: the state shackled by constraints on its own capacity (many of them imposed, ironically enough, by the neoliberals themselves) and also limiting the margin of action for the private sector.

Someone who also shared this diagnosis, as I’ve previously mentioned at some point, is billionaire Mark Andreessen, first with his “it’s time to build” piece in 2020 and later with his “techno optimist manifesto”. The former is pretty anodyne and inspired Ezra Klein. The latter… is not. The politics are… not good. Andreesseen’s whole thing is basically saying that Abundance would be good if it abolished the government and also “DEI” and “ESG”. It was not well received. The most frequent comparison was to Fillippo Tommasso Marinetti, an Italian poet who in the 1920s proposed more or less the intellectual/aesthetic backbone of Italian fascism: futurism, the worship of strength, machinery, technology, and violence. The relationship between technology and fascism, a movement that believes that The Jews have used modernism to destroy the Nation’s connection to its homeland via a degenerate libertine culture, is fairly complicated, but there is a type of fascism that embraces technology as a way to “cut through” said degenerate culture and Get Shit Done. This “reactionary modernism” of the traditional fascists is, not so coincidentally, what Ezra Klein called Mark Andreessen - basically, the definition of fascism as “the technocratic rejections of politics as such”, the replacement of democracy with a technological autocracy.

But that’s just one guy, right? Well, let’s start by going back to late oughts libertarianism. One person involved in the “how do we move towards libertarianism” debate was Peter Thiel, now an infamously evil billionaire, back then just a billionaire. In his 2009 post “The Education of a Libertarian”, Thiel makes an immediately eyebrow raising case: “freedom” (understood as free market capitalism and personal libertarianism) and democracy are incompatible, because poor people, low IQ individuals, and women all get votes and they all dislike libertarianism. He proposed as alternatives cyberspace, outer space, and seasteading where libertarianism could run rampant. Which is why it was especially alarming that, in his recent interview with Ross Douthat (the one where he struggles to say he thinks humanity should survive, yeah), he mentions offhandedly that he talked Elon Musk out of space colonization and gave up on seasteading in favor of “a political project”. It’s not that hard to connect what he wrote then and what he says he wants now.

The interesting thing about Peter Thiel isn’t necessarily that he’s a fascist, but that he’s, unlike all the other Silicon Valley troglodytes, a “wordcel”, a man of letters, and so is Alex Karp, the CEO of Thiel’s McKinsey of the surveillance state, Palantir, who was a doctoral student of Jürgen Habermas. In particular, there seem to be four main thinkers influencing Peter Thiel. The first is René Girard, a (surprisingly, contemporary) French philosopher whose whole thing is that people create desires by copying each other (take the case of the labubu), and that, when those desires can’t be reconciled, they all come around a scapegoat to do violence to and build a social mythology explaining how they’re to blame. Because Judeo-Christian values take the side of the victim, they can defuse violence, but without religion that means political conflict worsens. The second is Carl Schmitt. Schmitt is much more prominent than Girard and is one of the most important critics of liberalism. His whole idea is that politics is about dividing society into friends (people who are worth dying for) and enemies (people who aren’t important enough to live). If some sort of social crisis exists, the Sovereign (aka the government) can declare the “state of exception” where he suspends the law and the friends are protected and the enemies all die. If this sounds kinda fascist then you’re right and it’s because Schmitt was a member of the Nazi party, served as kind of their consigliere, and was banned from teaching at the Nuremberg trials. The third is Oswald Spengler, another Nazi, who is much simpler because his idea is basically one of those “weak men, strong men, good times, bad times” memes: sometimes times are good and you focus on grinding and partying, and sometimes things are bad and you focus on killing everyone on behalf of a charistmatic dictator. And the last one is Leo Strauss, who is a really complicated figure because his whole thing was being purposefully obtuse and inflammatory to get people interested while “ball knowers” figured out what he actually meant. For example, Abundance the book says a lot of things, but a “Straussian” reading is that the book is anti redistribution. But in general my read on Strauss is that he’s an old fashioned “in a post God world we have no sources of meaning” conservative who also thinks that people need to be told some comforting lie to preserve social order - particularly, that liberalism refusing to uphold certain values and their tolerance towards all ideas allows intolerant and extreme movements to rise.

I don’t think the whole description of the philosophers was that important, but this is a very specific political tradition that has taken deeper and deeper roots in Silicon Valley - one that is very skeptical of pluralism, democracy, and liberalism (with a big L), and favors unleashing the “technological talents” of the Great Men of our time. There’s also some other, more immediate influences, like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land (who are both, let’s be honest, a couple of dipshits), or James Burnham. The running throughline through all these people is a desire to destroy the capacity of the government to carry out its traditional functions in favor of reduced democracy, an explicitly illiberal and anti pluralist conception of the nation, an openness to violence, and a state that is autocratic and discretionary. And, unsurprisingly, all the weird movements that fed into regular Abundance also feed into Dark Abundance: remember the libertarians who say that “culture” was a reason for a lack of progress? Welcome, reactionary modernism. Rationalism? Check - they’re “postrationalist” now. Effective Altruism and Longtermism? Check.

Zygmunt Bauman, quoting Leo Strauss, said that in a “neoliberal” world focusing on individualism and free choices, there are more options and decisions than ever, but less meaningful power over our own lives as well - in large part, due to globalization, shrinkage of the safety net and social ties, and ever-growing individual demands. This also affected governments, who became less powerful given the constraints placed on them by capital, and who face growing social demands with less power than ever to respond to them. The Abundance movement saw this dynamic, and decided to remove those constraints to actually be able to resolve questions - to use Carl Schmitt’s terminology in his book Land and Sea, they want to empower the Leviathan, the orderly, rational, powerful sovereign, to solve important social questions by utilizing technology³. Leviathan is named after Thomas Hobbes’s first book, about how the state can organize a state of nature that is “nasty, brutish, and short”, however, Hobbes’s final book was the “bad case”, and it was titled Behemoth, after a biblical land beast (Leviathan was the sea beast). Schmitt defines the Behemoth as an irrational, chaotic, anarchic form of power, that embodies the “national spirit” and destroys the artificial, technocratic state through the power of myth and culture. The Behemoth, the force of anti-rational, anti-universalist, mythically defined action, seems pretty much in line with what the “Dark Abundance” of Andreessen, Thiel, Yarvin, and other assorted freaks want: an authoritarian, antidemocratic quasi-technocracy that stamps out all forms of liberalism, progressivism, or egalitarianism.

Conclusion

… they imagined that all men are two men and that the real one is the other, the one in heaven. They also imagined that our acts project an inverted reflection, in such a way that if we are awake, the other sleeps, if we fornicate, the other is chaste, if we steal, the other is generous. When we die, we shall join this other and be him.

Jorge Luis Borges, “The Theologians”

My favorite short story is The Theologians, by Jorge Luis Borges, which follows Aurelian, a theologian (duh), tasked by the Church to disprove another man called John of Pannonia, who belongs to a sect that claims that all men are actually two men, one who is a saint and one who is a sinner. Aurelian decisively disproves his rival using orthodox Church dogma, and John is is burnt at the stake. But Aurelian starts finding weaknesses in his work, and while traveling in search for sources, a wildfire starts around him and kills him. He goes to heaven, where God mistakes him for John of Pannonia - because, it turned out, they were the same person all along.

I think that this provides a somewhat usable parable for the Abundance agenda. Abundance and Dark Abundance are both reflections of each other, grazing from the same factions and sharing superficial goals; however, while Abundance wants to tame Leviathan to enable broad-based prosperity, Dark Abundance wants Behemoth to destroy it. This is broadly similar to how the original neoliberals wanted to revitalize democracy in a world that had lost its taste for it, and instead managed to, a century later, revitalize the forces that they originally sought to destroy.

I am a liberal, so I obviously think liberalism of some sort has to win out over the illiberal right (and the much smaller, but still extant, illiberal left). The world needs to move beyond neoliberalism and develop its own functional policy program. This is the hole that Abundance seeks to fill. However, I am a bit bearish on Abundance, not by any of its own merits, but rather by the chance that history repeats itself - that, to make an analogy to The Last of Us, the parasite simply completely overtakes the host. I think that, Abundance or not, we all need to look at what kind of futures we are facing: egalitarianism versus oligarchy, and abundance versus scarcity, and develop a liberal policy vision and a liberal policy agenda that achieves them.

1. Scott Alexander, a blogger in this sphere, has a famous post about how New Atheism failed because of what is currently known as wokeness, but his reasoning for why is kind of weak. My explanation is that it was prompted, in 2014/15, by two major events that put Islam on the spotlight instead of American evangelicalism: the Charlie Hebdo massacre and the rise of ISIS. A lot of major online figures that started as Atheism Content Creators, like Sam Harris or Paul Thomas Watson, took the position that Islam in particular was uniquely bad as a religion and it dovetailed into broader social debates around gender, race, and LGBT rights, as well as the general culture war around free speech and campus culture.

2. One of the key tensions within the “Rawlsekian” liberal + libertarian fusionist project that brought it tumbling down is that it’s pretty fucking hard to reconcile antimajoritarian limits on democracy to protect property rights, leading to significant economic inequalities, with demands for substantive equality of opportunity, rights, etc.

3. For whatever reason Schmitt (who was a Nazi) also decided that the Leviathan was “Jewish” because IDK it’s secular or whatever. Schmitt was smart but he wasn’t that smart: he thought England, which was run by Da Jooz, was the Leviathan and Nazi Germany was the Behemoth. It’s a good thing the Allies banned him from writing after WW2 because maybe he would have had to revisit the superiority of gemeinschaft over gessellschaft.