Evaluating the UN based on news from the security council is like evaluating the US government based on news from hollywood.
The SC is a circus, but the UN fosters lots of multilateral progress through meetings you don’t hear about because everybody’s scared of showing that they just want world peace in a world where realism reigns.
Hollywood shows American superheroes fighting evil, while the government tries to operationalize the coordination of 300mio people. Sure, hollywood memes might foster popular American dream narratives and the government fails regularly but it’s doing surprisingly well even when a hollywood-esque clown was its face for four years.
UN soft power has given us beautiful multilateralism that lets a virus spread faster than any, even more virulent ones, before—take a moment to appreciate it when you brush your teeth. Our tooth brushes also are the product of a crazy amount of coordination that no national security focused perspective would have enabled.
The national security perspective is a potentially harmful self-fulfilling prophecy and the people meeting in Geneva to undermine it or those running governments as a career are much closer to superheroes than most others.
Of course, the UN is highly dysfunctional in many ways but there’s also a lot of room for improvement. Of course, there’s Musk et al, but they are crazy outliers, unreachable for most.
I think, if more EAs focused on international governance and diplomacy, the UN system would already be substantially better off. From what I’ve seen so far, what it’s lacking most is memetic leadership and EA+LW have done a great job at reifying values through memes that would actually catch on and could be well-maintained in the cosmopolitan UN context.
Evaluating the UN based on news from the security council is like evaluating the US government based on news from hollywood.
The SC is a circus, but the UN fosters lots of multilateral progress through meetings you don’t hear about because everybody’s scared of showing that they just want world peace in a world where realism reigns.
Hollywood shows American superheroes fighting evil, while the government tries to operationalize the coordination of 300mio people. Sure, hollywood memes might foster popular American dream narratives and the government fails regularly but it’s doing surprisingly well even when a hollywood-esque clown was its face for four years.
UN soft power has given us beautiful multilateralism that lets a virus spread faster than any, even more virulent ones, before—take a moment to appreciate it when you brush your teeth. Our tooth brushes also are the product of a crazy amount of coordination that no national security focused perspective would have enabled.
The national security perspective is a potentially harmful self-fulfilling prophecy and the people meeting in Geneva to undermine it or those running governments as a career are much closer to superheroes than most others.
Of course, the UN is highly dysfunctional in many ways but there’s also a lot of room for improvement. Of course, there’s Musk et al, but they are crazy outliers, unreachable for most.
I think, if more EAs focused on international governance and diplomacy, the UN system would already be substantially better off. From what I’ve seen so far, what it’s lacking most is memetic leadership and EA+LW have done a great job at reifying values through memes that would actually catch on and could be well-maintained in the cosmopolitan UN context.