Amerika in the Mirrorverse

Hey fam,

I'll return to a more reflective, optimistic Q2 (more from the ETHDenver technophiles HERE, HERE, and hackathon winners HERE), but the recent Tucker-Putin interview, Trump’s NATO comments, and the ongoing uncertainty around AI have coalesced into a theme de jour with a 100% chance of mattering A LOT in the years and decades to come... so here we are for a political + historical Q1 '24.

And more specifically, these events have brought into question what the United States owes the world, and where we might look to find our deepest sources of strength at home. This isn’t the first time we’ve asked ourselves this question. In fact, we’ve been asking it cyclically since our founding (check out Rudyard's Explaining American History for some cliff notes). The earliest version being articulated by Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton back in the late 1700s––two dudes whose work I got to know well working at the LoC, the most underutilized source of truth on earth (see TJ's Papers Here + Hamilton's Here). 

It may seem odd to go back to the stories in textbooks and primary sources, but the ramifications of their writings are all around us, especially in an election year... and especially as Americans deeply reconsider their role, both at home and within the broader context of Ukraine, Putin, Gaza, Taiwan and all the rest. I firmly believe that understanding our history, and the people (yes, mostly old white dudes) that shaped it, gives us a skeleton key to making sense of our decisions, our commitments, and our legacy. Our civilization is only as durable as our capacity to appreciate and reflect upon the past.

Let’s take it from the top before we get into all the weird ways this conversation has been mutilated and warped lately.

As the founding fathers kicked around all the ways democracy could die in the darkness, Jefferson was acutely aware of all of the political and economic entanglements of life in Europe and became convinced that the path to preserving the purity of the American experiment lay in the ideal of the self-sufficient Yeoman. Working his own land, providing for his family, and meeting the most basic needs. Neither serf nor king. Informed. Engaged. Independent. Self-sufficient.

In contrast, Hamilton saw that as a naive pipe dream and advocated instead for direct and deliberate engagement in markets, alliances, and trade. As we now know, Hamilton handily won the day, and from the 19th through the 20th century, American expansionism and internationalism drove us forward (for better or worse) to where we are today.

But the dynamic tension between these two competing visions has never really subsided. FDR channeled Jefferson with the Rural Electrification Act and later as he resisted getting tangled up in World War II (until Pearl Harbor forced the issue). Eisenhower warned of Hamiltonian scope creep with his famous "military industrial complex" address. The "back to the land" movement of the 1970’s dusted off Jeffersonian idealism and sought to reclaim American virtue through simple rural living (in those wacky-ass geodesic domes that Bucky Fuller hyped on about for generations).

Reagan, a Hamiltonian for a new century, sought to advance U.S. interests by proxy wars in Central America and the Middle East. Jefferson vs. Hamilton American history has followed this Hegelian dialectic, oscillating between the two poles of self-reliance and global engagement since well before any of us were born.

One side has really never prevailed, but the conversation has always moved forward, inch by inch, wrestling with the issues of the day through forefather ideals. But then, over the course of the past thirty years––both of those ideals seem to have been entirely perverted. Like Stranger Things meets Black Mirror (ask Orwell, scifi is often the best predictor of reality), we have ended up in the Amerikan Mirrorverse, a darker, more twisted shadow realm of our true potential.

Post NAFTA in the 1990’s, Hamiltonianism mutated into hypercapitalism and neoconservatism––globally integrated supply chains, offshore tax havens, multinational corporatism, and decade-long wars. We were promised abundance for all; what we got was a gutted middle class, wild concentrations of extreme wealth, and cheap ass t-shirts. Neoconservatism took the notion of "just war" and used it to project force around the world. The intention of toppling despotic regimes to unleash a natural blossoming of free markets and democracy was flawed from the get, and never realized.

Instead, we ended up with a multi-front, never-ending war on terror that has bankrupted the treasury, exhausted the military, and eroded our good will globally. No wonder both the Occupy and MAGA movements sprung up in open revolt. No wonder Islamic movements and anti-American sentiment are at an all time high. Y'all, this is civilizational trouble to the extreme... Hamiltonianism in the Mirrorverse!

All while the American Melting Pot is fracturing. The ideal of a nation founded by immigrants, celebrating integration and upward mobility is under threat, if not broken to no repair. Formerly prominent white, Protestant “Middle Americans” are feeling intense distress caused by the overlapping demographic trends of the “browning” of America and global refugee and border crises. Come to Denver; it's undeniable. 

A way of life diminished and under threat from all sides. Made worse and mocked by cynical conservative media, aging middle-Americans are cranking up the drawbridge and retreating into ethnonationalism (I'm feeling it with fervor as I enter my 40s y'all). America for many is white, Christian, and native born. The rest of the world is dirty, corrupt and impure (see Jonathan Haidt’s work on conservatism’s relationship to purity). Jeffersonianism in the Mirrorverse!

These days, foreign entanglements like NATO, WHO, IMF and the UN are increasingly suspected as a source of national weakness not strength. That's a wild truth to consider. In 2019, a White House official even went so far as to refute The New Colossus poem on the Statue of Liberty and claim that America was only open to European immigrants who could pay for themselves. If you squint, you can still see the faintest outlines of Jeffersonianism in this retrenchment. I can't wait for the LoC to be deemed a deep-state diversion tactic for enabling big-AI.

The world is corrupting. Our strength lies in our independence from outside forces. We must sever the ties that bind us, and commit to the purity of our nation, under God, with liberty and justice for Us... err, for All. But is it jingoism or patriotism? Is it based on fear of the other or trust in ourselves?

In a weird way, the social justice warriors of the far Left echoe something similar. The American Dream is a sham––cloaking patriarchy, privilege and oppression, so they say, so our best recourse is to dismantle the system and claim what is ours, the historically dispossessed. Whether it’s Fox news adherents chanting “build that wall” or campus protestors chanting “check your privilege”––the end result is the same––a dismantling of the Infinite Game in favor of a return to tribalism.

Politics may make strange bedfellows, but the modern meme-wars in the mirrorverse make something much stranger.

Once seen through the lens of Finite (win-lose) vs. Infinite (win-win) games, we realize that mortal enemies like social justice warriors and alt-right Twitter trolls, are actually playing on the same team, united by their rejection of the Enlightenment project and their desire to tear down the American experiment.

And here’s the thing that’s super easy to overlook: This just isn’t a fair fight––it’s asymmetrical memetic warfare.

Adherents of the Infinite Game––extending care and concern to all people regardless of race, color, creed (or politics)––are supporting a fragile project that goes against millions of years of evolution and thousands of years of history. Evolutionary biologists remind us that any aspirational society we try to build (godspeed Balaji) rests on the deeply encoded foundation of natural selection––i.e. the preservation of self and tribe.

Adherents of tribalism––both far-left and alt-right have entropy, the rather important second law of thermodynamics, on their side. They are following Robespierre’s maxim, “to make an omelet you have to break a few eggs.” Under stress, we revert back down to fear-based tribalism. We bond by scapegoating the other. We survive by marshaling limited resources at all costs to our own clan and kin. All the finite players have to do to “win” is to emphasize and widen the fault lines that extend down to our very foundations as tribal primates.

Smash all the eggs; never mind the omelets!

Adherents of the Infinite Game on the other hand, can’t win by breaking eggs better or faster than the tribalists. They’re doing the exact opposite––trying to put poor Humpty Dumpty back together again. It’s painstaking, delicate, impossibly complicated work; easily prone to failure and collapse. With goals that lie in direct opposition to the laws of evolution and physics. It tries to create order (and compassion and inclusion) out of entropy; an exponentially harder, but worthwhile task.

And like any propagandist knows, the job of misinformation is never to replace the truth with a lie. That’s far too much effort. The job is simply to confuse (or amuse as both Postman and Waters warned) the notion of truth so much that the masses give up looking for it.

So how do we rescue Amerika from the Mirrorverse, and how can we do it without further activating intense polarization?

The simplest place to start is by dusting off and reclaiming a love for history and the Jeffersonian/Hamiltonian dialectic from the darker forces from which both have been co-opted. How, for instance, might we update Jefferson’s ideal of the yeoman farmer and affirm the centrality of inclusive community self sufficiency? When's the last time you knocked on the door of a neighbor? Start there. Start now!

Energy independence. Community supported agriculture. Barn raisings. Volunteer fire departments. Community led Public Safety Officers. Parades, races, and public libraries (will I see you at Burro Days?). Local disaster relief efforts (“we live here, we give here”). Skilled labor and craftsmanship. Community arts. The answers are simple, yet sadly unfamiliar. Take one small step. Build from there.

We have a long and distinguished history of these types of things (see the “Don’t Mess with Texas” anti-litter campaign as a great example of deliberately colliding cultural identity with civic engagement). This kind of local resilience will become increasingly essential as federal budgets and responsiveness become overwhelmed with successive crises.

It’s time to replace the suburban fragmentation epitomized by the book Bowling Alone with local community bonds of “we’re in this together.” How can we affirm Hamilton’s key insight from the past three centuries––that we cannot simply isolate ourselves from a global, interconnected world? How might we fully live into and up to America’s role as a responsible and benevolent “leader of the free world”? 

Perhaps more simply, how can we uphold our humanitarian role of providing aid and support to the most vulnerable and at risk around the world? How can we take the lead on threats (climate and epidemiological) that span all political borders and require globally coordinated solutions?

And while many transnational institutions are mired in bureaucracy, they still play an essential role in counterbalancing raw power, corruption, violence, and the overt and amoral decision-making of multinational corporations in the developing world. We need to clarify and strengthen our commitments, not abandon them. The best solution to address the refugee crisis isn’t to build better walls on our border, it’s to solve the problems that forced people from their native homes in the first place. 

The best solution to the collapse of international ecosystems isn’t to grab what’s left first––it’s to restore resilience to the commons. The bumper sticker, Think Globally (Hamilton), act locally... or hillbilly (Jefferson) might just sum up this dichotomy and polarity best. We need to promote this concept beyond the Subarus and Teslas in the Whole Foods parking lot, to the born-again patriots who see in it our shared American Legacy.

The hypothesis of the American Experiment––that all humanity is entitled to a fair shot at "the good life"––remains one of the most aspirational goals ever to make the leap from philosophical treatises into the material world of governance and civic life... and it has never been at a greater risk of failure. In fact, many rightly fear we've already crossed the event horizon. We don’t need a mom and apple pie whitewash of our American legacy, but we shouldn’t trample it in frustration for all the ways it (and we as a people) have fallen short. It is way harder to build something better from scratch in times of cascading threats than it is to repair what we’ve already got... and we've got A LOT. 

What we need now isn’t an aspirational appeal to global centric consciousness and inclusivity at a time of degrading existential condition. What we need is actually healthy regression towards the noblest expressions of tribalism––and that most likely lies in doubling down on American Patriotism and Enlightenment ideals of a mirrorverse all but forgotten. 

Ok, on to the good stuff...
Taykentots I'm currently snacking on:

• Read: Gitcoin 2.0 Whitepaper 

• Watch: FOR THE TIME BEING (Lightworks)

• Watch: ETHDenver 2024 BuidlWeek + Festival Recaps

• Review: Whatifalthist (Rudyard Lynch)

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