Unstoppable Upward Spiral
There is no such thing as an uncontrolled upward spiral. Why not?
You can be in a downward spiral: life getting worse, and each step making it more likely for things to get worse. Or you can be in an upward spiral: each step making it easier to continue to get even better.
A downward spiral that you cannot control is like tumbling down the steps and being unable to hit the brakes. But there is no equivalent “tumbling skywards”1 on the good side.
This is another example of the Asymmetry of Good & Evil.
The reason why an uncontrolled upward spiral does not exist is simply because it cannot exist, by definition. This is “proof by tautology”.
It’s just not an upward spiral if you are being dragged along, even if you are accumulating wealth/health/power/status, but you really don’t want it. You are losing agency, losing your ability to decide, losing “free will”.
This particular asymmetry is important for me because it helps us distinguish between “good” vs “evil” forces acting upon us:
An “evil” force can push change on you, without your permission or approval
A “good” force cannot push change on you, unless you request it2
In the previous post I explained one dynamic that gives “good” an advantage over “evil” which was that, all things being equal, ruling via love produces higher competence than ruling via fear.
This one is the oppposite. This property of “good” puts it a disadvantage.
But now that we know this, we can tilt the playing field to make the job of “good” easier. We can do so through increased awareness & choice. Consider who benefits in a world with greater transparency, and greater informed choices. Some people win when you aren’t aware their competitors exist. Others win when you are aware of ALL the available options. The latter is “good”3.
This is why a very common catch phrase for me is: “discernment is the bottleneck”. The greater our ability to discern, the more we give “good” a fighting chance.
Consider: what direction would you be “tumbling skywards” towards? Who is deciding this?
If you are distracted by scenarios of “necessary evil for the greater good”, remember that we’re talking about tautological, axiomatic truths here. A human can perform an evil action for a desired long term good outcome. There are “good” actions, there are “evil” actions. What we’re doing here is first identifying them & their nature, and then understanding their effect in the world & how they interact together.
The right frame for all of this to think about it like we’re programming base rules for a “Conway’s game of life” simulation and then observing what happens.
In “the best ad I’ve ever seen” I tell a (half fiction) story about companies outcompeting each other by raising the awareness level of the average customer; a strategy that is impossible to copy/abuse, but it’s also very vulnerable, because only companies with the best products can pull it off. And if someone makes a better product than you, the customers’ increased awareness may cause you to lose business.
This is suuuuuper interesting to me. Feels true in practice, although it gets weird when it's like "I *want* this force to push or change me, without my approval".
- Does that make me evil?
- Is a force that complies with my desire then evil?
Underneath those questions is maybe: Can anything *good* come from evilness? Can it be possible to learn agency through experiencing a lack of agency intentionally?
"An 'evil' force can push change on you, without your permission or approval. A 'good' force cannot push change on you, unless you request it." <- This points, I think, toward the classical liberal position that the best way to enable an "upward spiral" is to give people as much freedom as possible, resist coercion as much as possible, and enforce transparency and information-sharing mechanisms as much as possible.