I wrote up a steelman summary of Gupta’s position on another thread after someone pointed out that capitalism is just a coordination mechanism (and one that is overall better than the other coordination mechanisms we’ve tried).
Here’s the summary:
Western society used to be pretty bad at coordinating, but had a basic meaning-making orientation (Christianity) and functional methods of laundering personal responsibility (e.g. Catholic confession, e.g. Protestant predestination).
With industrialization, and then again with the computing revolution, western society got a lot better at coordinating.
Alongside industrialization & modernization, western society began to lose its meaning-making orientation and its methods of laundering responsibility began to lose efficacy.
So now we’re in a place where we’re much better at coordinating than we were before, but we don’t have wholesome targets to coordinate towards, and we’re for the most part operating as though our legacy structures of managing personal responsibility are still intact.
This is bad.
Lately some of our coordinating power has turned towards “colonizing” spiritual practices of other cultures, i.e. it’s trying to adopt a version of them that could replace our legacy personal-responsibility-management structures.
This isn’t going very well, because the spiritual structures we’re interested in are a fundamentally different shape than the ones we’re trying to replace, and we’re more interested in shoehorning the new (from our perspective) structures into the legacy forms rather than adapting our expectations to the new structures (adapting our expectations would be much harder).
This all rhymes with Vervaeke’s stuff (though I haven’t gone deep down the Vervaeke-hole yet). Also rhymes with The Wizard and the Prophet (Gupta is a hardcore prophet, in that framing).
I wrote up a steelman summary of Gupta’s position on another thread after someone pointed out that capitalism is just a coordination mechanism (and one that is overall better than the other coordination mechanisms we’ve tried).
Here’s the summary:
Western society used to be pretty bad at coordinating, but had a basic meaning-making orientation (Christianity) and functional methods of laundering personal responsibility (e.g. Catholic confession, e.g. Protestant predestination).
With industrialization, and then again with the computing revolution, western society got a lot better at coordinating.
Alongside industrialization & modernization, western society began to lose its meaning-making orientation and its methods of laundering responsibility began to lose efficacy.
So now we’re in a place where we’re much better at coordinating than we were before, but we don’t have wholesome targets to coordinate towards, and we’re for the most part operating as though our legacy structures of managing personal responsibility are still intact.
This is bad.
Lately some of our coordinating power has turned towards “colonizing” spiritual practices of other cultures, i.e. it’s trying to adopt a version of them that could replace our legacy personal-responsibility-management structures.
This isn’t going very well, because the spiritual structures we’re interested in are a fundamentally different shape than the ones we’re trying to replace, and we’re more interested in shoehorning the new (from our perspective) structures into the legacy forms rather than adapting our expectations to the new structures (adapting our expectations would be much harder).
This all rhymes with Vervaeke’s stuff (though I haven’t gone deep down the Vervaeke-hole yet).
Also rhymes with The Wizard and the Prophet (Gupta is a hardcore prophet, in that framing).