Introduction
Network states begin with a one-commandment. They need a moral premise to capture people’s motivation. This article builds on previous articles on the nature of network states, with the last article offering a framework for how to think about their basic infrastructure. It was said that network states should be thought of as a kind of economic protocol sitting on top of preexisting nation-states. This article will assume that framework.
A Word On Method
We’ll discuss a lot of big ideas from different periods in history in this article. We’ll be critiquing ideas in liberalism and its conception of human nature; we’ll see how liberalism falls short in significant ways by contrasting it with Dante and the Renaissance period that followed, showing that the history of ideas matters when predicting what the future may look like; we’ll look at Aristotle and his ideas of virtue and how that can inform us about the good life and how we should be living; we’ll turn to Adam Smith and his ideas about how our social relations and the ways we interact with each other are constitutive of that good life. There’s a lot to unpack here. But big ideas are necessary for forging a moral vision. We need them to motivate the conviction that network states are a legitimate idea worth pursuing. To do that, we need to understand how network states connect with the past and how they are capable of pushing history forward. As Balaji himself says, history matters.
What To Expect
In the first section, we’ll briefly explore and contextualize network states by looking at Balaji’s tripartite distinction between Leviathans: God-State-Network. These are the sources of legitimate power and authority in the West. Following that, we’ll begin our critique of liberalism by articulating its conception of human nature and examining some of its key features, which can be observed in influential people today, such as Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg. We’ll then see how the Renaissance thought much differently about the good life than liberalism did. With that, we’ll develop our one commandment by drawing on ideas from Aristotle and Adam Smith about the intrinsic value of our social relations, and how those social relations provide higher ends that should be collectively pursued. The article will finish with a discussion about the Buidl network state and its moral vision behind the one commandment.
But what, exactly, is the one commandment? The one commandment is that a network state should be a kingdom of higher ends. We won’t invoke this phrase too often, but instead will refer to it in unpacked form. The kingdom of higher ends means there are ends that better fulfill human nature, and that are therefore more meaningful than others. As we’ll see, contrary to liberalism, network states should institute what will be called a domain of higher activities that aim toward a set of ends that are of intrinsic worth. Unlike liberalism, network states should not take a stance of neutrality toward ends.
To Be Clear
Before we start, let’s clarify some terms. When the term higher activity is used, what is meant is a set of means that aims at a higher end that is constitutive of the good life. The good life can be understood as what the ancient Greeks called eudaimonia, which generally translates as human happiness or flourishing. We all desire happiness, whatever that precisely means. And some ends constitute that happiness. For example, Socrates famously said, “The unexamined life is not worth living.” This is a claim about the good life; about what life is best. And the end, or telos, to use the Greek word, is to live a life of self-examination and inquiry. For Socrates, the rational life, a life dedicated to discovering whether one lives according to truth and goodness, is how each person ought to live. And so, in this case, higher activities are activities that further this end, which, according to Socrates, is the philosophical life.
Another term is civil society. This term is meant to encompass three things: society, culture, and the state. Society is the most basic layer underlying the other two, consisting of the basic relations that characterize human life, e.g., family, friends, marriage, peers, administrators, etc. Culture is the layer in which those relations are configured and realized at a particular time and place, e.g., Italy and Italian culture, Germany and German culture, etc. And the state is the centralized authority governing a society and its culture, e.g., the US government. This article does not address how a one commandment interacts with all three, and so civil society is used as a general placeholder.
With these terms in mind, let us now contextualize network states.
(1) Network States as Historically Significant
In many podcasts, Balaji will mention a triad of concepts: God-State-Network. He refers to each as a Leviathan. In essence, each Leviathan represents a source of power that successfully governs a society. We can loosely trace the concept of punishment and how it has been historically justified to illustrate this.
In the Middle Ages, the concept of punishment, e.g., being punished for a crime, derived its significance from Divine order. The explanation for why something is punishable was always grounded in a theological doctrine. That’s not to say there weren’t significant disagreements. But whatever the Divine order was thought to be, it gave punishment its legitimacy. Think of Dante’s Inferno. How severe a punishment was in Hell depended on how the sin related to God’s moral order, and that moral order served as a complete explanation as to why lust, for example, was less punishable than murder, or why Plato and Aristotle resided in Limbo closer to Hell, even though they were virtuous in their earthly life.
As the proclamation that ‘God is Dead’ spread across Europe, justifications for punishment no longer relied on a theological doctrine. More naturalized explanations were provided to explain the legitimacy of punishment, with the state eventually taking on that role. The state then provided the reasons and explanations as to why something was punishable, which institutionalized the procedures for how it should be carried out. Thomas Hobbes’ book Leviathan is one of the first articulations of the state as a secular phenomenon that derives its legitimacy from the consent of the governed.
Today, Balaji believes the state, just like God before it, is turning obsolete as an outdated form of governance. And so he thinks the network will (and/or should) replace it. Balaji offers a lot of reasons for this in his book, and so it’s not worth articulating those here.
But if network states are going to take on a prominent historical role, they need articulation and development. And that requires human agency. What should a network state look like? How should it be governed? What principles should be adopted to guide its deliberative and procedural operations? These questions need answers.
To sum up, network states may serve as a new Leviathan. The network, which operates through encryption, smart contracts, DeFi, tokenized governance, and so forth, has the potential to be revolutionary in how human beings govern themselves.
But a social critique is first necessary. Just as Thomas Paine’s Common Sense pamphlet is often believed to have kick-started the American Revolution in 1775, which expounded the tyranny of the British government, a social critique is needed to establish a one commandment. Without one, a one commandment remains too abstract.
The one commandment here is that human nature flourishes in pursuit of some ends over others, and that the Buidl network state will promote those ends through higher activities. Locating those ends is therefore of extreme importance. We can do this by critiquing liberalism.
(2) Social Critique: Liberalism and The Deficiency of Ends
The critique here is that liberalism, or what will be called the liberal view, tells a story about human nature that pays too much attention to means rather than ends. That is to say that liberalism––the political philosophy that promotes individual rights, free markets, and individual freedom and liberty––treats civil society primarily as an instrument for individuals to utilize and take advantage of rather than as a connected network of intrinsic value. The values of liberalism are, as the philosopher Hegel famously said, too abstract. They don’t specify a set of concrete ends that people can collectively turn to and discover fulfillment and meaning.
To foreshadow, Aristotle believed that what the Greeks called a polis, or a political community, was essential to human flourishing. A political community provides a shared conception of the good and is integral in giving form and specificity to the good life. Without it, human beings would have difficulty understanding themselves in terms of what is highest and most worthwhile in life. It would be akin to being lost in an enormous forest with no trails or signs to guide and direct one's way out. It’s crucial, then, to see a political community, i.e., civil society, as not only a means but also as intrinsically valuable for providing ends worth seeking to live a full life. As the philosopher Charles Taylor argued in his book, Sources of the Self, conceptions of the good life depend on a shared source of mutual recognition: People recognize the good, can answer questions about value, by observing, mimicking, and interacting with others.
Now, the argument as to why liberalism is an incomplete account of the good life will focus on the following:
- We’ll first articulate the liberal way of looking at human nature and the explanation it affords for why civil society comes about, and what reasons push it into existence.
- We’ll see that the liberal view sees civil society as the best means for individuals to satisfy their interests, rather than as an end in itself. Therefore, society is instrumentally valuable, not intrinsically valuable.
(3) The Liberal View
Now, the liberal view is often framed as a social contract theory (soon to be explained). Enlightenment thinkers like Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, Rousseau, and Immanuel Kant, and contemporaries like John Rawls and Robert Nozick have famously argued for various ways of thinking about social contract theory, which have played integral roles in the development of the Enlightenment period in the eighteenth century and liberal thought in the twentieth. Part of the theory, at least in the older variants, provides a kind of philosophical anthropology. We can think about the theory in the following way.
First, when using the word ‘individual’, the question of whether the word means individual persons, or whether the basic unit is a family or a tribe, is a separate point. The essential idea is that civil society results from an atomized set of rational agents who rationally deliberate and decide to opt into a system of law and order that is enabled and enforced by a centralized authority.
Now, in a state of nature, human beings individually seek their interests. Individuals have natural rights to pursue those interests. Each has a right to self-preservation and to protect one’s life; they have a right to liberty and freedom from unwarranted interference; and the right to property by accumulating and possessing goods.
Different theorists offer conflicting pictures of what society may have been like before a social contract. Some think, as Hobbes did, that it was a state of war, while others, like John Locke, thought people acted on moral principles. Either way, there are those in a state of nature who don’t follow reason and choose to violate the rights of others for their own benefit.
The central problem behind this is that the world exists in a state of scarcity. And so when individuals seek their interests, which often overlap, their wills conflict. The result is that people generally lack the resources to adjudicate disputes, enforce peace, and deliberate in rational, effective ways. And because individuals wish to extend the satisfaction of their desires for as long as possible, and society is a better means for achieving this, people bind themselves to a contract and agree upon a centralized authority and a basic set of institutions to look over their natural rights for life, liberty, and property.
Again, because people’s ends are their individual interests, i.e., their preferences and desires, and because a state of nature constantly interferes with their attaining their interests, society, culture, and the state are seen as instrumentally valuable for facilitating and equipping people with the means to achieve what they want.
So, on the liberal view, civil society is not seen as intrinsically valuable. It doesn’t complete, express, or fulfill human nature. Instead, it’s a means for human beings to live a life of their own choosing––a life that is the result of the individual’s will and decision-making. Civil society is neutral in terms of what ends or preferences individuals should hold, and individuals are free to value what they like insofar as they do not infringe on another person’s right to do the same.
(4) Why This Is Significant
This liberal view remains immensely influential in how people think about the good life. It provides one of, if not the principal set of intuitions informing US political discussion. For example, the Constitution is a set of limits and powers that circumscribe the individual’s liberty and rights. And when they’re violated, an interested political party argues that the government or corporations or whatever powerful entity does not have the right or power to do so, and the Constitution is invoked as the rational basis for the argument.
In US politics, institutions with authority are generally not supposed to be in the business of promoting ends for people to live by. It’s the individual’s choice to live the life they desire. This is a powerful and persuasive way of conceiving the role of civil society in the good life.
But it’s incomplete. We’ll see this by turning to a contemporary example. Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg, two figures who are unquestionably at the helm of where human life is going, answer questions about the good life in liberal terms, especially when discussing how AI will affect it.
(5) Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg On Human Happiness
In two recent and separate Theo Von podcasts, Theo asks Sam Altman and Mark Zuckerberg about what they think the future will look like as AI grows its foothold on human life. Although both expressed modesty about their ability to answer, their answers provide valuable insight. They often replied in terms of liberal freedom, i.e., AI will free people from unnecessary constraints.
An example is time. Recall above that individuals exit a state of nature because of unwarranted interferences when acting on their natural rights. One major interference is time itself. If there is no society, there are no institutions. And if there are no institutions, there is little division of labor to maximize capital for production and efficiency. And because there is no shared monetary system, markets would either be nonexistent or in a very local and primitive condition. And so people would be forced to do most of their own production to satisfy their needs, taking most, if not all, of their time. This is partially why Hobbes famously said that life in a state of nature is “...soiltary, nasty, poor, brutish, and short.”
As society develops and these institutions grow, people accumulate more time to pursue what they actually want to do with their lives. Altman and Zuckerberg speak in the same terms. The accumulation of time is a principal reason for framing the possible effects of AI.
Now, while having more time is, prima facie, a good thing, it’s important to examine one’s reasons for why that is the case. Zuckerberg offers a neoliberal argument for why more free time is beneficial for people. By accumulating more free time, people can allocate it to what they want in life, and this allows them to turn to the market and choose the goods and services they like to better their lives and further their projects. Let the market decide, as one may say. And so, in neoliberal fashion, Zuckerberg argues that people know what they want, that they can decide for themselves, and that the market will follow their wants and preferences. The economic benefits, if distributed widely enough, will bolster people’s ability to steer the market in whatever direction they wish.
I don’t want to spend too much time taking up this argument. The obvious remark to make is how much Zuckerberg underestimates his influence on people’s imagination about what they do, in fact, want in life. It’s an understatement to say that social media impacts how people think of themselves and what they conceive to be worthwhile in life. Instead of throwing a blanket over that and pretending the market simply decides, we should be more intentional about trying to shape what AI will bring in the future.
On the other hand, Altman, while in the same vein as Zuckerberg, has something more interesting to say. He gives a very informative historical analogy for why AI will be a net good by citing the Renaissance as a comparative case. This is worth zooming in on. Let’s examine this in the following way:
- First, the Renaissance (a period beginning around the end of the fourteenth century and ending in the seventeenth century, primarily in Italian City-states) was a period of tremendous economic growth. This corresponded with a cultural bloom in artistic and intellectual expression. Altman believes the results of that economic growth are an analogy for today’s world.
- But, second, this analogy has deep caveats. The Renaissance thought about the good life in much different terms than the liberal view. Not only did it precede it historically, but the Renaissance’s sources of how to think about the good life were much different than the liberal view. The Renaissance often believed society and culture to be intrinsically valuable, which provides ends for the good life, not just means. We’ll explore Dante’s Divine Comedy to see this.
(6) The Renaissance and The Good Life
The Renaissance was a period characterized by a bloom in cultural expression and achievement, accompanied by significant economic progress. Some of the greatest artists in world history lived in that period. Such a bloom in cultural achievement was accompanied by economic progress. While the Renaissance was not a golden age, we can glean something from the way that period generally thought about eudaimonia.
Now, as with all cases of economic progress, at least some people were freed to allocate their resources toward productive cultural achievements. Wealthy families like the Medicis served as patrons for artists like Raphael and Michelangelo. Altman believes this is an apt analogy for framing and thinking about AI and its potential economic benefits.
Again, this analogy has deep caveats. One is that the Renaissance existed before the liberal tradition, and so preceded its widespread influence. A principal difference between the two periods is how people framed the good life and human flourishing. This is exemplified in Dante.
(7) Dante and The Good Life
First, although the Divine Comedy was published just before the Renaissance at the end of the Middle Ages, it played a substantial role in shaping the period that followed. The historian Jacob Burkhardt argues this in his book, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, which contributed to thinking about the Renaissance as a distinct historical period. His arguments for thinking that Dante was profoundly influential in shaping the Renaissance are assumed here.
Although Dante preceded the Renaissance, his conception of the good life, where there is a definite set of ends and means that are constitutive of the good life, was paradigmatic of the times. What I don’t mean is that all notions of the good life were religious. Instead, it was that most operated under a perfectionist framework, which means that the goal in life was to ascend to a higher set of ends that characterizes a complete life. One of the hallmarks of liberalism is to flatten out this vertical axis of ends, hence the idea of liberal neutrality: there is no objective way to determine which ends are of more significance than others; only individuals decide that. The Renaissance generally did not think in those terms.
Now, there are at least two ways to notice this. The good life for Dante and the period that followed had the following structural components.
- First, contrary to the liberal view, the good life was framed primarily in terms of ends, not means. Civil society isn’t first a means or a tool toward achieving individual preferences. Civil society is intrinsically valuable and essential to the ends and means that characterize the good life.
- Second, because ends came before means, the means had a much more determinate nature. Once a set of ends is specified, the field of possible means is naturally narrowed.
Let’s begin with the first point about ends.
The Divine Comedy is a poem in the epic tradition, a tradition consisting of poets like Homer and John Milton, which follows Dante along his pilgrimage through the Medieval cosmos. He starts by finding himself lost in a dark wood, having strayed from the straight road that leads to eudaimonia. To be saved, he has to travel down through Hell, climb Purgatory, and finally reach Heaven, where he attains his telos, namely, salvation. Notice, then, the immediate end he posits that characterizes the good life. In the first Canto, after he’s realized he’s lost and in need of grace, he looks at the top of a hill at the sun. He writes,
…I found myself before the little hill
And lifted up my eyes. Its shoulder glowed
Already with the sweet rays of that planet
Whose virtue leads men straight on every road,And the shining strengthened me against the fright
Whose agony had wracked the lake of my heart
Through all the terrors of that piteous night.
For Dante, the sun is a layered symbol. An essential aspect of that symbol is that it represents the course he must take to reach the good life, as well as anticipates the fullness he will discover in it. Everything pining away at him dissolves as he sees the sun. The sun, then, shows him a higher set of ends he must pursue to be saved. And it isn’t optional for him. To turn back is to be lost in the agony found in the dark wood. This draws out our first point: Dante’s journey through the Medieval cosmos directs him toward ends necessary for his flourishing.
Now, as for the second point about means. When Dante discovers he’s lost in the dark forest, he writes,
Midway in our life’s journey, I went astray
From the straight road and woke up to find myself
Alone in a dark wood.
So, he has lost the road, which indicates there is a proper road to his salvation. He attempts to escape the forest through the use of his will, but continually fails due to his lack of virtue. Before he loses himself in despair at not being able to escape, he’s saved by the Roman poet Virgil. This signifies the significant role given to the classical world in Dante’s journey. One crucial function Virgil represents is reason. Without Virgil’s wisdom and knowledge, i.e., his virtue, Dante would never make it out of the forest. Classical knowledge will lead him down Hell and up Purgatory. It will facilitate his journey by providing the means to prepare and attain what he most desires: his salvation. This, then, is the second difference. There are specifiable means to achieve his end. And a fundamental aspect of those means is studying and understanding the great works of the classical world. This is a higher activity for Dante.
Dante’s journey, then, immediately bears two principal differences from how the liberal view frames the good life. Dante believes some ends are naturally better and more fulfilling than others, and he believes in higher activities to get to those ends.
Therefore, Dante thought about the good life in different terms than today. And how he thought about the good life was more common than something akin to the liberal view. The great artists in the Renaissance, like Michelangelo and Raphael, worked within this artistic mindset. The artist is a momentous cultural figure, capable of participating in something cosmic and of changing the course of history. Being an artist isn’t something purely optional, as it is often seen under the liberal view. The artist is a central figure bearing an intrinsic value to civil society.
In short, then, Dante thought about the good life in different terms, and this played an influential role in the outcomes of the economic progress at the time. Therefore, Altman’s analogy isn’t straightforward and deserves further scrutiny to discern how we can reach similar results in cultural achievement as the Renaissance.
With all of this in mind, let’s now develop the one commandment. We’ve seen that the liberal view deemphasizes a shared sense of the good life that encompasses concrete ends for individuals to pursue collectively. By learning how Dante saw things, we can use that to look for a higher end that is constitutive of the good life and that forms the basis of the one commandment.
(8) The Telos of The One Commandment
We’ve located a place to articulate a meaningful one commandment. What we want to do is preserve what’s good in liberalism, namely, individual liberty and rights, while fusing it with a different way of thinking about the good life. We want to form a synthesis between the ways the Enlightenment thought about eudaimonia and older conceptions of what that concept meant. We want freedom and liberty, but also a collective aim that people participate in and work toward to achieve a collective sense of purpose and meaning.
To do this, we’ll develop two ideas. One, as mentioned above, comes from Aristotle. The polis, or political community, or, for our purposes, civil society, plays an integral role in promoting a shared source of value necessary for people to attain eudaimonia. Social relations, their cultural interpretation, and the institutions that embody them are essential for establishing ends that people value and prefer to live by.
The second idea comes from Adam Smith in his book The Theory of Moral Sentiments. There, he discusses what he calls sympathy. What he means is not the emotion but the very faculty itself for imagining oneself in another person’s circumstances. Just like how human beings’ rational faculty makes arithmetic possible, Smith’s sympathetic faculty allows people to ‘step into someone else’s shoes,’ imagine their experience, and respond accordingly. It undergirds all other-directed emotions, allowing human beings to project and relate to one another. The claim will be that this faculty, if properly developed, provides intrinsic value to the people who exercise it. And so it is a virtue, as Aristotle would say, that is constitutive of the good life.
As mentioned, in the final section of this article, we’ll begin to develop how to think about The Buidl Network State, which aims to capture the one commandment. Again, network states are conceived here as being frameworks for economic activity. So, the Buidl network state will be concerned with the infrastructure that organizes people’s productive resources for creative enterprise directed toward meaningful ends. We’ll look at the moral vision behind The Buidl Network State and its potential infrastructure.
(9) The One Commandment—Human Beings as Intrinsically Social
Aristotle opens his Ethics by saying, “Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that which all things aim.”
As mentioned, Aristotle thought human nature aims at a telos or end. He also believed that a polis has its own good. He even went so far as to say that the political good is of more importance than the individual good, since the whole, he believed, is always greater than its parts. The individual good depends on the political community, as that which depends is lesser than what it depends on. He writes, “For even if the end is the same for a single man and for a state, that of the state seems at all events something greater and more complete…though it is worthwhile to attain the end merely for one man, it is finer…to attain it for a nation or a state.”
This jars against the liberal view. As we’ve seen, civil society is always subordinate to individual rights and liberties. We want to preserve this liberal intuition. But what can be gleaned from Aristotle is the idea that, to attain that which the individual aims at, virtue is necessary as the means. And virtue depends on civil society to be realized.
Virtues are dispositions toward actions that are constitutive of the good life. Classical Greek virtues were courage, temperance, wisdom, and justice. The courageous person knows how to strike a mean between foolishness and cowardice. Confronted by a situation, the courageous person knows how to respond in a fitting, appropriate way that successfully meets the situation. For example, the courageous person does not foolishly put everyone in danger by trying to wrestle the gun from the bank robber. Nor does the courageous person coward away from calling the police when the opportunity comes. They act as a courageous person would by acting in ways that best fit the circumstances.
Now, for Aristotle, virtues are both means and ends. Being courageous is both intrinsically valuable and is a means to the good life, i.e., courage is constitutive of the good life. And to learn what courage is, one must coexist with others. We primarily learn courage from modeled behavior, through our social practices of praise and blame, and by the way others use and apply the term. Great individuals can redefine what courage is (e.g., Martin Luther King Jr. and his heroic efforts in civil disobedience, or Socrates’ willingness to die for the philosophical life). But, first, we learn what courage is through our upbringing with others, and second, it is only once we grasp that initial understanding that we can question and find it inadequate. And so, if courage is constitutive of the good life, and we primarily learn courage through others, then the good life bears an irreducible social quality.
But the virtue of focus here isn’t courage. It’s Smith’s notion of sympathy. And this is, of course, profoundly social. The claim here is that sympathy is constitutive of the good life and is therefore something worth instituting within a higher activity. Let’s now develop Smith’s idea of sympathy, which will afterward be instituted within the Buidl network state, which can be understood as a higher activity, one that is in nature economic.
(10) The Intrinsic Gratification of Sympathy
Smith offers a key insight into human nature in the first chapters of his book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments. Smith says that all human beings find gratification in what he calls sympathy. Again, he doesn’t mean the emotion of feeling sympathy, but something like the very faculty for imagining oneself in someone else’s experience and projecting what the other must be feeling. Human beings tend to do this effortlessly.
For example, someone falls on the street. Observers will often flinch and gasp as if the ones falling, anticipating the painful sensations associated with the experience. Without the slightest effort, observers imagine themselves in the other’s situation.
Here’s another example that highlights the gratification one often feels. Two friends are talking, and one is trying to articulate the feelings he’s been experiencing toward his spouse. He’s struggling to do so, and the other friend, let’s say a she, facilitates by imagining the friend’s situation as if she were the one experiencing it. She pictures what the other said and infers what he must be thinking and feeling. “Yeah,” she says. “I know what you mean. It’s like she’s agreeing with you just not to have the conversation you want to have.” “Exactly,” the man says. There’s a deep and natural pleasure in that exchange. It stimulates something profoundly resonant.
This imaginative faculty provides capabilities human beings possess, just like how human beings have the faculty for reason, which makes human beings capable of rational reflection. But both faculties and their respective capabilities require growth and development. They can either develop for good or bad. For example, bitter jealousy and envy are also other-directed emotions and employ the sympathetic faculty to be felt and experienced. It would be bad to experience those emotions regularly, and especially bad if one finds them fitting responses toward the world and other people. Even worse if one is persistently motivated by these negative emotions to act.
So it matters how the faculty of sympathy is developed. For sympathy to become a virtue, it needs to be developed for the good. But what does that look like, exactly?
Sympathy is developed for the good when it provides fitting responses to other people’s circumstances. For example, the fitting response toward those suffering and starving in Gaza is empathy and compassion. And one acts virtuously when motivated by those responses to alleviate their situation. That could mean several things depending on the one helping. It would be unfitting if the person is poor and donates all their money to a Gaza charity. They would be harming themself. It would be fitting, however, if the person is a billionaire and donates a large sum. Virtue requires knowing how to respond appropriately. And so sympathy is a virtue when it produces fitting responses and proper action toward other people’s situations.
What we don’t want, though, as Adam Smith himself would point out, is for people to be forced to act for altruistic reasons. That tends to be disastrous, as the socialist experiments in the twentieth century document. As classical liberalism argued and neoliberals argue today, people motivated by their own self-interest benefit everyone. Forced moral choices are not only redundant but potentially harmful. By pursuing one’s interests and producing goods for exchange, others can purchase those goods and exchange their own. This division of labor serves as a spontaneous, organic organizing mechanism for productive economic activity. That needs to be preserved. People should also have the right to produce what they want, the liberty to consume what they please, and not be coerced into valuing what they have no desire to.
But this will have to be dealt with in a separate article. For the final section, we’ll look at the moral vision behind the one commandment we’ve developed and the Buidl Network State that will encompass it.
(11) The Buidl Network State
In Book II of Plato’s Republic, Plato discusses whether the just person really does live a superior life to the one who lives unjustly and materially benefits from it. Socrates and his interlocutors explore this question in the famous ring of Gyges passage. In the passage, a shepherd encounters a ring that makes him invisible whenever he turns it on his finger. And by being invisible, he can do what he desires without being seen. If he acts wrongly and unjustly toward others, he won’t be punished. He can freely do what he wishes without fear of the consequences. What life would he choose? Which one will really lead to eudaimonia?
Plato held deep admiration for his teacher, Socrates. Socrates’ life and death inspired Plato to develop the Socratic project, to live the examined life, and show that the just life is the superior one. Plato believed Socrates had achieved the highest form of happiness a human being could attain, and he devoted his life to living and articulating the philosophical life.
But that was more than two thousand years ago. What example comes even remotely close to that today?
A clear case is Satoshi Nakamoto. Satoshi is a modern example of someone wearing the ring of Gyges and still choosing the good. He or she is the example par excellence of someone who could’ve accumulated enormous wealth and the advantages that would bring, but decided instead to honor the intrinsic value of creating Bitcoin. Such an act exemplifies the ethos of the Buidl network state.
Satoshi pursued higher ends. They could have chosen to exploit Bitcoin in ways that contradict the principles motivating it. But that’s not the case. And the reason must clearly be in the vicinity of a commitment to a higher mode of life. And so they concentrated their productive efforts toward a project capable of helping people around the world who suffer from having to trust the corruption of centralized authority. By solving the problems necessary to create Bitcoin, those inflicted by stifling inflation rates, dishonest intermediary institutions, devalued currencies, and so forth, have the opportunity to find a way out. Satoshi located a momentous problem affecting people, solved it, and made the solution available to those in need.
That illustrates a higher sense of being than if he used it to exploit people. The consequences of Satoshi’s innovation would have been astronomically smaller, and would’ve aggravated the circumstances others face, if the end was self-gain. As many philosophers have pointed out, Socrates’ choice to accept his death sentence and become a martyr enshrined him as a historical figure, which profoundly influenced the intellectual and cultural direction of the West. If he fell short of what he believed to be his duty, namely, persisting in the philosophical life, his influence would undoubtedly have been diminished, and maybe even erased. Satoshi’s choice to step away from all the gains and rewards is of the same character.
While the expectation can’t be that everyone be a Satoshi Nakamoto, a network state can try to emulate the example. The Buidl Network State and its one commandment for a higher set of ends and the virtues necessary for achieving them embody this aspiration.
The goal is to approach problems people face around the globe that are technically solvable, and to create a network by which people from anywhere can opt in, compete, collaborate, and produce technologies and products in the same vein as Satoshi Nakamoto. But, of course, people need incentives. The demand cannot be forced altruism. This highlights the importance of network states working in conjunction with nation states. Outstanding productive achievements should be awarded with access to capital markets; to manufacturers and distributive resources; to regulatory frameworks to expedite research and development; to preexisting international markets and trade deals; and so forth.
A framework for thinking about this is the US government’s DARPA model (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency). DARPA was a response to the Soviets’ technological development in the 1950s, notably when they launched Sputnik into Earth’s orbit in 1957. DARPA works by funding research teams that are granted more autonomy by sitting outside the existing bureaucracy. The teams conduct research that generally won’t be pursued by those within the regulatory system. A primary motivation in the twentieth century was to achieve breakthroughs and scale the technology in industry or war. The point was to take risks, make discoveries, develop them, and deploy as quickly as possible.
Similarly, the Buidl Network State can be conceived of as units or teams, or, in more political terms, even states within a federalist system, that compete toward a shared end that will solve critical problems people are facing around the world. Essential political procedures will be in place to facilitate deliberation, decision-making, dispute adjudication, contract enforcement, and internal policy and lawmaking to determine the ends and govern the means for competition, collaboration, and research and development. Presumably, people will opt in through smart contracts and hold stakes in the political community and its institutions.
But whatever the precise structure of The Buidl Network State, the virtue of sympathy plays a vital role in how the ends are met. If the ends are always oriented toward sincere problems people face, and if the aim is to solve those problems, sympathy will be the critical virtue for achieving them. Building something that addresses and accurately corresponds to a community’s issues requires understanding and imagining what it’s like to face those problems. The US regime-change in the twentieth century certainly suffered from this deficiency. Understanding the needs of a community demands upholding the dignity and autonomy of that community––without seeing things from their shoes, and understanding the ends that community holds for itself, leads to results that merely rearrange rather than resolve the problems they face.
Future articles on this topic will elaborate on how network states interact with the nation-states that host them, and how network states will aim at addressing global problems through economic means. The US is the obvious example of a nation-state with the best potential for hosting a network state, and it’s interesting to think about how a network state could facilitate US foreign policy and correct globalist errors in trying to develop the economies of underdeveloped countries. But that will have to wait for another day.
So, to sum up, the Buidl network state is about free enterprise and competition, but it concentrates it toward particular ends that are intrinsically valuable and that promote virtues like sympathy. And the Buidl Network State and its one commandment is a form of higher activity because it aims toward a higher set of ends rather than leaving it as optional for entrepreneurs to decide to pursue or not. This shared sense of the good life respects individual autonomy and the freedom to create, while also concentrating and organizing it toward a meaningful telos.
(12) Conclusion
As stated at the beginning, we’ve covered a lot of ground. We’ve looked at the shortcomings of liberalism, the lessons we can learn from the Renaissance, and the application of what we’ve learned to the kingdom of higher ends by borrowing from Aristotle and Adam Smith. The goal throughout has been to locate ends that aim toward a higher, more purposeful sense of human nature and the virtues necessary for attaining them. By cultivating sympathy, problems around the world can be technically solved by people who concentrate their productive and creative efforts toward worthwhile goals.