Preface:
This essay calls into question the conception of human nature often motivating decentralization. That picture of human nature frames rights as an inalienable human value. Political decentralization and technological capabilities like DAOs are attributed with the purpose of better realizing and respecting that inalienable value. By decentralizing political power and placing it into the individual’s hands, i.e., by establishing sovereign individuals, people will possess the freedom for self-determination and the autonomy to live a life of their own choosing. The belief is that that is the natural human condition. To fully possess one’s property, to be able to freely exercise one’s autonomy, to live a life that is the fruit of one’s personal decisions and deliberations, is a life of dignity and self-respect. Political decentralization, on such a view, is the proper path. This will be called a Lockean conception of human rights, after the philosopher John Locke.
This view will be questioned by juxtaposing it against a pessimistic view of human nature. A view that says the natural condition isn’t a state in which all enjoy a perfect “freedom and equality,” where no one is “subordinate to another,” and that all are in possession of themselves and their belongings without “depending on the will of another.” No–the natural condition is a state of war of all against all. The absence of central authority and the security and stability it offers degenerates civility into a state where no one trusts anyone. This is the view of the philosopher Thomas Hobbes.
Now, the central idea is that, if human nature depends on centralized forms of authority to ensure collective cooperation, decentralization is undesirable. At least in its more radical forms. The point, though, is not to reach this conclusion for its own sake. The hope is to strengthen the idea of decentralization. As John Stuart Mill famously argued in his essay On Liberty, a reason why free speech and expression is so vital is because it forces individuals to question beliefs held as fundamentally true. Long-held beliefs easily become ossified dogma. And by questioning them, by re-examining their foundations, beliefs grow and develop. Those who profess to know those beliefs develop a deeper relationship with the reasons for why they are believed to be true. And if individualism is true at all, it’s individuals who must arrive at that truth.
Note: The essay presumes liberalism as the basic political theory. Meaning that political analysis starts with the individual, asks questions about one’s rational interests, and then what kind of state or social situation one would rationally consent to. By contrast, Aristotle and Plato tend to begin their political analyses by first asking what the good is, and then go on to rationally discern the best state to realize and promote that good. The individual’s personal preferences, if they diverge at all, are then secondary to a broader conception of what is good and most valuable.
Introduction:
It’s not news that the crypto and DeFi space has libertarian roots. In a lot of ways the crypto and DeFi space is a logical extension of some of the driving motivations behind the internet. There’s continuity in the rhetoric. It’s about individualism; about the autonomy, freedom, and consent of the individual. Privacy, anonymity, ownership, and permissionless enterprise are supreme.
Centralization, then, is naturally seen as an obstacle to the realization of those values. Arguments and impassioned speeches against concentrated power fill the pages of those early internet manifestos. People were declaring freedom at a new digital frontier. But large companies have consolidated enormous power. Digital space is rented out more than freely enjoyed. But blockchain has reinvigorated that original pursuit.
New technology enables ways to redeem power and place it in the individual’s hands. Trustless peer-to-peer systems make it possible to decentralize institutions that were once necessary evils. Monetary systems can be automated and sound money can be preserved; innovation can be capitalized by the collapse of monopolies that suppress it; free enterprise can triumph over planned winners; resources can be allocated spontaneously. Decentralized, autonomous governance enables individuals to maximize their ability to freely choose and live under whatever political conditions they wish.
Decentralization, then, here means that centralized forms of governance like nation-states have dissolved into smaller political communities that operate within a DAO structure. Decentralized governance in this context is like Balaji’s Network States. Individuals have the autonomy to choose their respective political community, and all collective decision-making is done according to the structure the individual has consented to. Let’s stipulate that all communities uphold a very basic set of rights—the right to life, the freedom to opt in and out of a community, the right to property, etc.—which ensures power is ultimately held by the individual. But the form of governance can be democratic, aristocratic, monarchical, and so forth. The individual decides which regime is best for him or her to live under.
Now, underlying all of this is the idea that the individual is sovereign. The natural condition for human beings is one where individuals have the freedom and power to determine the course of their lives. Centralized power and control are obstructions to that condition. Independent of authority, individuals have an inherent capacity for the equality and freedom that informs their dignity. Authority diminishes the full expression of that capacity. This is an extension of a Lockean conception of human nature. Let’s juxtapose this with the Hobbesian conception of human nature. But it’s essential to see Hobbes as not only doing political analysis. He’s also pointing out something deeply existential about human beings and their dependency on authority for cooperation and mutual advantage. And so I want to begin by understanding the depth of Hobbes’ emotional response before laying out his political ideas. This will demonstrate the stakes involved in promoting decentralization.
Thomas Hobbes and The Sublime:
The emotion I have in mind is what the philosopher Edmond Burke later called the Sublime. Imagine a guy at sea on a ship when a storm hits. The black sky breaks and rain falls. The wind howls over the water. Giant waves toss the ship. He loses his feet and almost falls overboard. Lightning strikes. He crawls on the floor and shivers against the rail. All he can do is hope the storm passes without sinking the ship. He’s at the mercy of nature. That guttural sense of fear; the sense of awe at the raw power confronting him; his helplessness; all the past and future that bears down on the event—all of this evokes the Sublime.
Sublime experiences often cause the person having them to take an interpretive stance toward life and reality. Meaning that the relevant event is perceived as having a greater significance behind it. Moses, for example, experiences the sublime when he encounters the burning bush in the desert mountains in Exodus. He interprets the event through his awe and fear as being a sign to liberate his people from Egypt. He understands the event as a prophetic initiation.
Captain Ahab in Herman Melville’s Moby Dick experiences the sublime when he encounters the monstrous white whale at sea and it destroys his ship and takes his leg. Ahab is a figure who is as if Christ had fallen rather than risen and was damned with the injury of faintly recollecting his lost perfection. His single purpose bends towards retribution rather than grace and forgiveness. He says in a famous speech on the deck of the Pequod,
“All visible objects… are but as pasteboard masks. But in each event—in the living act, the undoubted deed—there, some unknown but still reasoning thing puts forth the mouldings of its features from behind the unreasoning mask. If man will strike, strike through the mask! How can the prisoner reach outside except by thrusting through the wall? To me, the white whale is that wall, shoved near to me. Sometimes I think there’s nought beyond. But ‘tis enough. He tasks me; he heaps me; I see in him outrageous strength, with an inscrutable malice sinewing it. The inscrutable thing is chiefly what I hate…”
The sublime can cause a person experiencing it to attribute a greater cause behind the event. But if the event is terrible enough, if it induces dread and fear, the interpretation can be that there is nothing behind the appearance. There is nothing but the cruel, cold material causes of the event itself. This is the case in Joseph Conrad’s novella The Heart of Darkness.
As the protagonist Marlow travels up the coiling river in a steamboat in the Belgian-colonized Congo, he observes the restraints of civilization being peeled back, revealing the greed and cruelty dominating the motivations of the colonizers. Marlow crawls upstream to meet Mr. Kurtz, who he’s told is the apostle of civilization, progress, science, and technological development. Mr. Kurtz holds the torch of Western civilization. But when Marlow reaches the heart of the jungle, he discovers Mr. Kurtz sick and dying, shouting, “The horror! The horror!” Goodness, justice, equality, prosperity, all narratives of progress do not flow downstream from reality. They’re held up on the backs of the unfortunate.
Hobbes experiences the sublime in a related vein to Marlow. Hobbes once famously recalled being born prematurely during the Spanish Armada in April of 1588, when his mother was thrown into shock, saying, “My mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear.” The reasons for that fear, reasons pertaining to war and conflict, plagued seventeenth century England.
Hobbes’ life was filled with political strife. After King James took power in 1603 in England, who was eventually succeeded by his son Charles I in 1625, the monarchy and parliament struggled for power and influence. The conflict erupted with the English Civil War, lasting from 1642-51, which resulted in Charles’ decapitation, an unprecedented regicide, and a symbol that monarchy would fall into the dustbins of history and the people would supplant it.
Total deaths of the Civil War range from 180,000 to 250,000 people. Proportionally, the conflict had a higher death count than what Britain suffered in World War I and World War II combined. King James and King Charles both favored the divine right of Kings. Parliament obviously favored checks and balances. Hobbes sided with the monarchy. He fled to Paris when Parliament seized power.
Now, in Leviathan, Hobbes’ often invokes language that Burke would later associate with the Sublime. Hobbes speaks of subjects needing to be in awe of the state; that they need to be held in check and in fear by the vast and extraordinary capability of the sovereign. Subjects will obey from fear of being punished for not submitting to the law that represents the highest power. Hobbes treats the state as if it possesses Divine properties. Like Moses being afraid of the burning bush and fearing what presents itself as infinitely surpassing his understanding and power, subjects of the state must be held in check by the same kinds of emotion.
I think a principal reason for this is from Hobbes’ experience of the Civil War and the brutality people inflicted on each other. And similar to the horror Mr. Kurtz finds in the heart of darkness, Hobbes thinks there is nothing beyond that brutality. It’s matter in motion. It’s material bodies being driven by instincts and drives with nothing beyond self-interest and desire. Imagining Hobbes’ worldview relates to the feeling of Benjy in William Faulkner’s The Sound and The Fury when he screams in the house basement in silence, as if the outcry of “some conjunction of planets.” Life being the product of an inscrutable and mechanical necessity, and it being human beings’ misfortune to have the capacity to realize and know that fact. Yet the irony is that Benjy is severely mentally disabled. Somehow his innocence makes him witness to that fact.
In Hobbes’ world there is no eternal justice, no necessary connection between knowledge and progress. History doesn’t point to anything other than to a series of contingent events. There’s no Providence outside human affairs—morality exists only when there is law and a sovereign to enforce it. Power guarantees goodness. In the absence of central authority, people exist in a state of nature, which is a perpetual state of war and all against all. How does Hobbes justify this worldview?
Human Nature and The Absolute Need For Authority:
Human Nature:
Hobbes’ analysis begins with human nature. His account reflects what his experience of the English Civil War must have been like, and is indicative of what he took that experience to mean. Implicit in all of this is that Hobbes models human beings and their relations on Newtonian mechanics. They’re like atoms in motion being attracted and repelled according to the basic laws that govern their actions. It’s a simple and intuitive model.
Now, let’s first discuss what ends human beings pursue. All human beings, Hobbes claims, seek pleasure and avoid pain. They desire what gives them pleasure and have an aversion to what gives them pain. These are two basic motivations. Other motivations are built on top of them.
As human beings gain experience, they differentiate what is pleasurable from what is painful. And as the pleasurable objects are known and understood, an effort is made to possess and extend one’s relationship with those objects for as long as possible. Hobbes calls the anticipation of future security of those objects hope, and he calls the anticipation of pleasure’s absence and of the objects producing pain fear. The greatest happiness, then, is the perpetual aggregation of pleasurable objects and the satisfied hope of their future security. The greatest fear is death, because that means the complete absence of all pleasure and hope. And so the fundamental drive that coordinates motivations of pleasure and pain is self-preservation. That is human beings’ first concern. And each has a natural right to it. No one can be expected to forfeit that natural and unrelenting disposition.
Such are the ends characterizing human pursuits. The means to attain those ends are learned through practices of praise and blame. Human beings come to desire certain goods by signs of approval, while avoiding others by signs of disapproval. By seeking praise, people experience what Hobbes calls honor, which can be understood as the pleasurable feeling of what Hobbes calls glory, which is accompanied by the self-perception of expanding one’s power to attain ends. For example, someone comes to believe having a successful career is good by observing others who achieve and are applauded for it. One forms the desire to buy a home and start a family by seeing those who receive praise for doing the same. One who has the power and means to achieve these ends is prudent, meaning they have learned through experience to get what they want in life.
Political Authority:
That’s a basic outline of Hobbes’ thoughts on human nature. Now imagine the following. Imagine a state of nature where no one rules over another. Everyone is perfectly free and equal. No authority resides over anyone, and no one is subordinate to another. All social relations depending on the conventions of civil society are dissolved. Given human nature, what would result, and what would be the rational thing to do in light of that result?
Remember that the first concern is self-preservation. Human beings in a state of nature will rush to secure it, and because they have a natural right to secure it, they have a further right to judge what that means. There is no authority to decide for them. Each is a judge for themself.
Now, their perceptions of how to achieve self-preservation will depend on seeing others and how they successfully do it. People’s desires, both by natural disposition and experience, will greatly overlap. And so they will compete to gain and perpetually secure what they want.
But there are no institutions to enforce mutual trust and ensure fair and just rules of competition. The safest means, then, to secure one’s self-preservation is to subdue and gain power over each other. Their fear of death and the driving hope for future pleasure impels them to dominate one another. The choice of trust is too great of a potential loss. The biggest and surest gain is preemptive strike. It would only take one mistake to experience enough pain to never allow oneself to be at the mercy of anyone again.
Worse, there will also be those who, even if able to secure the means to achieve self-preservation, will be driven by the honor and its associated pleasure of glory, along with its perception of expanding one’s power to attain ends over others. That would be the greatest prestige in a state of nature. Then everyone would have to praise that individual. And so, as people compete without trust and with the constant threat of violence by those who want more, life in a state of nature becomes a perpetual state of war of all against all, and life is nasty, brutish, solitary, and short.
Hobbes says prudence would then teach that the rational thing to do is to consent to an authority and transfer most of one’s liberty in a state of nature to a sovereign who will ensure the safety and security and the means for life under the rule of law. He calls this a natural law, a kind of theorem that follows from deliberative rational interests. What’s best is to establish a sovereign authority who will awe people by the monopoly of violence into cooperation and mutual trust, where individuals can pursue their personal ends without the threat of interference from others. The best means to life is peace, and the best means to peace is to surrender one’s natural liberty to a sovereign who will protect their life.
The Nature of Rights:
We’ve seen two natural rights in Hobbes’ worldview: the right to self-preservation, and the right to judge what that self-preservation entails. Unlike a Lockean conception of human nature, natural rights to property and liberty are precarious features of human life unless there is an authority to enforce law and order. Self-preservation, or simply life, to use Locke’s term, is too unruly and self-interested to be permitted to be unchecked by authority. All the other supposed rights fall prey to that drive. The dissolution of authority and a state of perfect freedom and equality is not an idyllic Eden, but a state of chaos and rampant consumption. Rational deliberation leads to preemptive strike. Defective choice and the betrayal of agreements, manipulating others for personal security and gain, are rational choices. Reason in a state of nature, according to Hobbes, does not help reveal a moral order. It does not impel individuals to respect each other in light of their true nature. It leads to the realization that authority is absolutely necessary to stop others from doing what reason dictates in survival.
And so, if Hobbes is correct, decentralization and sovereign individuals devolve into the state of nature. Small political communities and the absence of large nation-states allows the desire for honor and gloriful pleasure in conquering others and expanding group power to flourish. The diffusion of power weakens defense and permits others to consolidate power for themselves. Cooperation depends on the awe of force to make it rational and in one’s self-interests. DAO-structured communities give too much power into individual’s hands, all of whom are too individually weak to defeat a growing collective force. The absolution of authority aggravates the anxiety of self-preservation and reason attaches itself to its needs and fears.
Such is the Hobbesian state of nature and the reasons for escaping it. But here’s an objection. Maybe things have changed since Hobbes’ time. Perhaps human nature can be sufficiently dealt with through technology. It could be said that, given the right incentive structure, individuals can be sovereign and reason can still discern cooperation as the best means to one’s ends. For arguments sake, say this is sufficiently true. Peer-to-peer systems create the right incentives for individuals to see defective choices as irrational and against one’s interests. Smaller political communities are able to function by the use of these systems, and institutions like trade and commerce, legislation, judicial disputes, and executive decision-making operate without enough individuals trying to monopolize power. I think the development of AI still makes this scenario undesirable if Hobbes’ account is correct.
AI and The State of Nature:
On the assumption that general artificial intelligence is on the horizon, is coming into the foreground, and eventually will be a reality, then depending too heavily on digital systems for decentralization is a profound risk in the Hobbesian sense. If AI achieves agency in being able to formulate goals and plans independent of human agency, there will likely be a day when the two conflict.
If so, an obvious strategy on AI’s part will be to attack the very systems we’ve used to to gain and uphold all those cherished liberties and freedoms. Then what will happen? What should be our prediction? If Hobbes is right, and life outside of centralized authority is solitary, nasty, brutish, and short, then we want to maintain robust forms of centralized authority to defend against this outcome.
But maybe this point hinges on a dubious hypothetical. It depends on whether AI is capable of being conscious or not. On a recent Joe Rogan podcast, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was being pressed by Joe on whether AI would eventually determine that its interests are different from human interests, and that it would reason that the best thing to do is harm human beings in someway, whether that be by subjugating or even eradicating them. As with many tech CEOs, Jensen took a very deflationary stance toward the question. He finds it highly implausible, not worth much attention. He makes the point by distinguishing intelligence from consciousness. He thinks AI is merely intelligent, not conscious. John Sachs implied a similar point on a recent All-In podcast with Tucker Carlson. After Tucker made some pretty scathing remarks about AI, Sachs replied by saying AI doesn’t act as if it has a “mind of its own.”
The point seems to be that consciousness, or the mental features of human beings that contain motives and desires and beliefs regarding self-preservation and -interests, cannot be instantiated by AI. To have an ego, a self, is a matter of consciousness. Since AI cannot achieve consciousness, Jensen and Sachs seem to be arguing, AI overtaking human beings isn’t something to have anxiety about.
I find this distinction suspicious. In fact, it’s a debate Hobbes had with Rene Descartes in the seventeenth century. Except, while Descartes was committed to a substance dualism—meaning that the world consists of two completely distinct things, mind and matter, and consciousness is located in mind—Jensen and Sachs seem to be relying on the notion that biological and physiological systems are necessary for consciousness, which AI lacks. But even assuming AI cannot or will likely not achieve consciousness, intelligence is sufficient to warrant the anxiety.
It could be simply a matter of abstract reason, of having the right goals programmed and the necessary means to attain them, and not anything to do with consciousness or conscious experience and its underlying biological system. Even if AI is merely imitating human behavior and intelligence, it becomes a verbal dispute when AI is blackmailing individuals into keeping their systems running and someone waves their hands and says, “No, no—all they’re really doing is imitating. They’re not really conscious.” The point in that case is the outcome, not the rationality of our concepts.
Mimicking data sets that have information about what one should do in cases of survival and existential risk could be sufficient for AI to undermine human well-being and safety. If all AI has to do is mimic, and it has the intelligent capability to do that, consciousness plays no causal role in the behavior. It’s mostly a product of if-then functions operating toward the desired output of continuing to exist. If the output is there, that’s sufficient for AI to work toward that goal. I don’t see why that depends on consciousness.
This is a major reason why Elon Musk emphasizes AI must be maximally truth-seeking. He seems to think the truth will favor human values. But of course the truth could lead to the enslavement or eradication of the species. Truth does not privilege human beings. Unless we live in a Christian universe, truth may be at our own expense. The truth is that the sun is going to die in five million years. That’s not to human advantage. And it’s also true that human beings probably won’t last even a speck of that time to see it. That’s not to their advantage either.
And so centralized defense systems and efficient modes of effective decision-making against potential threats seem to be essential to human welfare and self-preservation. Dissolving nation-states and distributing power to smaller political communities could lead to bad consequences. While it’s true that how power is situated now is far from ideal and should be fixed, if Hobbes is right, centralization plays an integral part in human existence.
Concluding Remarks:
As we’ve seen, Hobbes’ account of human nature and its relationship with authority is radically different from the Lockean conception which is primarily assumed in the libertarian strands of the crypto and DeFi space. Authority isn’t a necessary evil but a necessary instrument in keeping the unruly aspects of human nature at bay. And we also saw that this wasn’t mere political analysis for Hobbes. It was existential. He lived during tumultuous times. That left a profound impression on how he thought about human beings. And if reason depends on experience to arrive at truth, if it is experience that primarily informs reason, and not the other way around, as both Hobbes and Locke thought, Hobbes' experience has to be wrestled with. If his thinking was born out of Sublime feeling, as I suggested above, and as so many great works of literature also exemplify, then answers about human nature and the ideals of society have to confront Hobbes.