You Have Two Choices

Red Cloud, Brave New World, my hatred for Sam Altman, Sophocles, existential dread & the cure (???)

Several years ago my Uncle Murdoch told me the story of Red Cloud, a great Lakota chief who, through allying several Great Plains tribes, defeated the U.S. Army in Red Cloud’s War. Red Cloud was a fierce warrior, a skilled tactician and a tireless advocate for his people who did much to slow the westward expansion of European Americans. Like most people who are able to get things done, he learned to be a bit of a politician. In 1870, after his victory in the war that bears his name, and after the soon-to-be-violated Treaty of Fort Laramie was signed, Red Cloud visited Washington D.C. Seeing the young capitol city thoroughly convinced him that the tide he had been fighting could not be stopped. He went back west and led his people onto the reservation. He died there of natural causes.

When Red Cloud gave up the fight, two younger Lakota chiefs took up the mantle—Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull would not be led to the reservation. They fought, and led their people to an even more notorious victory over U.S. forces in The Battle of Little Bighorn. They won reprieve, but still they were pursued. In later years, both Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull were killed by U.S. forces. The new order that the United States sought to impose could not be squared with their systems of understanding—their beliefs, their values, their moral and ethical codes—and so they refused to bow to it.

I am, of course, boiling down the lives of these robust men into two paragraphs and on top of that, theorizing without source on the psychology behind the decisions that they were forced to make.¹ A message emerges nonetheless: adapt or die.

I think of this story often, and the way that my uncle presented these facts to me, most of all because the apparent dichotomy of choice disturbs me greatly. Are those really the only two options? This was all brought back to my mind most recently after reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, which is a novel that has a lot going on. Test tube babies, endless cloning, hypnotic conditioning, flying cars, movies where the viewer can themselves feel what’s happening to the characters, randomly, perfume on tap everywhere, sex all the time, and Soma, the perfect drug.

This is The World State, motto, “Community, Identity, Stability”, messiah, Henry Ford, but also kind of Freud. Ford and Freud might be the same person? No one knows because all the old books have been destroyed. Everything is standardized and assembly-lined. Huxley slowly introduces his reader to the wonders of this place—to the Hatchery and Conditioning center where the Bokanovsky Process takes place, and one egg is split into 96, and embryos are assigned to their caste and treated (alcohol injections to make sure the lower castes are dumb enough to be suited to the menial labor for which they are destined) and conditioned (“Oh no, I don’t want to play with Delta children. And Epsilons are still worse…I’m so glad I’m a Beta”) accordingly. Natural childbirth was phased out long ago for its inefficiency and destabilizing potential. Can you imagine…having a mother??

We meet some members of the upper castes—Bernard Marx who’s a little small for an Alpha and doesn’t want to numb away bad feelings and feels like an outcast, Lenina Crowne who’s pneumatic (read: curvy) and who almost went down a bad path when she went out with Henry Foster for a month straight without mixing in any other lovers, and Helmholtz Watson who’s a propaganda writer who believes he could write something…better. They chafe against the order of The World State to varying degrees, but at the end of the day they are slaves to their own comfort—just as they were conditioned to be. As the Resident Controller for Western Europe, his Fordship, Mustapha Mond puts it towards the end of the novel, “There isn’t any need for a civilized man to bear anything that’s seriously unpleasant.”

As a modern reader, it’s hard not to just sit there thinking about which of Huxley’s predictions have come true or are on their way to becoming true. To see reflections of our own cultish devotion to comfort for example. To me, one of the most disturbing parallels between the Brave New World and our own can be found in the presence of constant noise. Huxley imagines loud speakers across the city that play synthesized music (designed to invoke happiness!) or start chanting hypnotic messages at opportune moments (when riots break out!).

We don’t need loud speakers because we carry the delivery devices around in our pockets all day. Of course we can still choose what we listen to, but it’s not hard to imagine a future world where choice is constrained or eradicated—whether surreptitiously or not. Aside from (though linked to) the possible avenues of control that our beloved technology presents, the real downside to the noise (literal and metaphorical in the case of the now constant barrage of ‘content’ we face at every turn) is that it stops us from thinking. There is no need for a civilized man to bear…his own thoughts in his head.

Shortly after I finished Brave New World, I stumbled upon a clip of Sam Altman being interviewed at a recent TED conference. In it, the interviewer asks him if a cartoon generated in the style of Charlie Brown qualifies as intellectual property theft. The audience claps, and Altman snaps at them, “you can clap about that all you want, enjoy,” in a tone of voice that can only be described as equal parts childish and cruel. It was enough to make me never want to look at his face again, but someone commented that the clip was taken out of context, so I spent 47 minutes of my precious life listening to the whole damn thing.²

I can acknowledge my own biases and insufficiencies when it comes to this topic. I have a very surface level understanding of how AI works. If AI can eradicate cancer, no, of course I wouldn’t wish that it had never been invented. Maybe my little peabrain is just incapable of envisioning the “after” world that we will soon emerge into like fresh born (hatched?) babes. The world that plastic-ass looking Sam Altman has in mind for us where intellectual property will be as unseemly as giving birth to a baby is in the year A.F. 632. The world Altman clearly believes wholeheartedly will be better than the world we have now. All those things are true. Well, I don’t actually think I have a peabrain, but I will leave space for the possibility that I do. Like the people who were afraid of the lightbulb when it was invented or whatever.

Mainly though, what I came away with after watching this interview was the impression that Sam Altman wants to stop us from thinking. At the end, when asked what kind of world he envisions his son growing up in, Altman says, and I quote, “my kids hopefully, will never be smarter than AI. They will never grow up in a world where products and services are not incredibly smart, incredibly capable.” There is no need for the civilized man to bear…anything. It was then that I realized that Altman—who will be, if he’s not already, one of the most powerful people on the planet—has a system of understanding that cannot be squared with my own.

Beyond all the distracting gizmos and Huxley’s uncanny prescience, Brave New World is actually the story of John the Savage’s inability to square his system of understanding with that of the civilized world. Coming from the reservation—an area of fenced in land, kind of like a nature preserve but instead of wildlife, it’s humans that The World State determined weren’t worth civilizing—John’s system of understanding is what you get when you cross Native American spiritualism, Christianity and the complete works of Shakespeare.

When Bernard brings John home with him, it takes some time for this uncrossable fissure to become clear. John is amazed at first—distracted by the shining modernity of his surroundings. The sleekness, the cleanliness, the ease—particularly as compared to his previous life, which, in its baseness, also oppressed him. Before too long though, particularly in relation to romantic love and his understanding of the beauty of suffering (like I said, Shakespeare), the clash begins. Confronted by a people who revile the things he values and value things he cannot comprehend, he suffers and is ultimately faced with the dichotomy of choice: adapt or die.

Spoiler alert—it does not end well for John. He is unwilling to bend to the “civilized”expectations that offend his soul. I’ve come to understand, though, that it was never really a choice for John. He is the hero in this tragedy, which means his circumstances and his character set him apart specially to suffer.

I audited a seminar this month on Sophoclean tragedy³ during the course of which I read Ajax for the first time. In it, Ajax is furious at Odysseus for using his smooth talking trickery to get Achilles’s armor. Ajax, being the best warrior on the Greek side after Achilles himself should get the armor. He is also furious at Agamemnon and Menelaus for falling victim to Odysseus’s wily ways. He plans to attack the camp of his leaders in the night to avenge this injustice (i.e. kill them all), but Athena puts him under spell of blindness, and he ends up killing and torturing a bunch of sheep instead. It is humiliating, and when Ajax regains his grip on reality, he cannot bear his new status. Ajax represents an old order of Greek heroism that focuses on personal glory achieved through deed not word. When reality no longer aligns with his system of understanding—when he has been humiliated and laid low, he cannot accept it, and so he kills himself.

This comes up again and again in Sophocles’s tragedies. Antigone kills herself when she refuses to obey Creon’s orders to leave her brother unburied. His decree offends her system of understanding, and she will not bend. In less direct parallels, even Oedipus and Philoctetes are brought down (or nearly brought down) by their inability to adapt to new circumstances.

The heroes, Ajax and the others, and John the Savage—they die for and because of their unwavering commitment to their systems of understanding. Can we say their systems are the correct systems? Not necessarily. However, in their constancy to the system, to the code, there is something right and admirable. The person who holds strong in spite of conditions that would make most others yield is imbued with a kind of grandiosity. The man who cannot keep living in a world whose values he does not understand is a hero. In the simplest terms, Crazy Horse and Sitting Bull both met a more honorable end than Red Cloud. It is their extremity that makes them, but it’s also their extremity that unmakes them.

The alternative is to adapt, and it is presented, both in the tragedies and in Brave New World. In Ajax, the counterpoint to Ajax’s inflexibility is Odysseus’s endless adaptability. He uses trickery to secure Achilles’s arms for himself. When word of Ajax’s failed plan for vengeance reaches him, he tells Agamemnon and Menelaus that they must enact punishment. But when the Greek leaders arrive on the scene to find Ajax already dead, it no longer makes sense for Odysseus to hold a grudge, so…he doesn’t. He convinces Menelaus to bury the body. What makes the most sense for Odysseus in that moment is to not incur the wrath of the gods, and so meeting the moment, he goes back on his word and his curses.

In Brave New World Mustapha Mond, the Fordship himself, is an adapter. In his younger days, he too had a touch too much individualism. He wanted to pursue science to ends beyond what was needed to ensure stability—to pursue it in the name of truth. When his activities caught the attention of leadership, he was given a choice, to be shipped off to an island (the very compromise that Bernard and Helmholtz take in the end) or to give up his pursuit and fall in line. We aren’t privy to how he makes his choice, but he does. He squares his system of understanding, and now, he can read Shakespeare when no one else can. He makes the rules so he can break them.

These compromises, these adaptations, they’re not spiritually or morally satisfying. In fact, to someone with a stringent code, or system of understanding, they’re likely repugnant. But the adapters, the shapeshifters, they’re not necessarily to blame. We may not admire Sophocles’s Odysseus or Mr. Mond, but the fact of the matter is, there’s no clean-cut good and bad in tragedy. Survival is not an ignoble goal, after all.

After I read Brave New World, my dad sent me a video⁴ of Aldous Huxley talking about what he considered to be one of the major problems of our time: how to make sure that man does not become the victim of his own technology instead of being in control of it. He puts forth that “technology was made for man and not man for technology, but unfortunately the development of recent social and scientific history has created a world in which man seems to be made for technology rather than the other way around.” It doesn’t take a genius to realize that this is more true than ever. We all work for AI now and our job is to feed it. Even when we think it’s helping us, we are actually the ones helping it.

I know this does not square with my personal system of understanding. Aside from being able to articulate my various AI-related concerns in a logical fashion, I also simply feel it in my gut. And so, I’m facing a Red Cloud in the capitol moment. It’s fairly clear to me which way the world is going. The toothpaste cannot be put back in the tube. I could accept this, and float with the current, and die the small death of adapting to a new system of understanding that repulses me. Or I could start bombing data centers and go down in a blaze of glory—maybe a martyr for the cause or maybe just a out of touch lunatic.⁵

Tragedy is meant to force us into a new consciousness, and I suppose I have been forced across some threshold, I’m just not sure I like it over here. I don’t want to be faced with the choice to adapt or die—and the worst part is that it’s possible I’m so resistant to the choice because my spirit rebels against adapting but not fiercely enough to face death. And I’m not sure what that makes me. Probably just a normal person, which maybe isn’t the worst thing in the world.

I’ve been going around in circles for the past couple weeks experiencing this existential dread, and the only concrete conclusion I’ve come to is that existential dread is the least cool, least sexy, least interesting thing to experience and the least cool, sexy, interesting thing to talk about. Choose any adjective that you intend to mean something positive: radical, stylish, hot, fun-loving, awesome, gnarly. Existential dread is none of those things. It is offensive to God, and it makes you a loser. I can say that, because again, I’ve been mired in it for the past several weeks.

So what is the solution? I actually really don’t know. I’ve been trying to force out something clean and hopeful and insightful and…something I can offer you (and myself if we’re being honest) as a balm for the unease. Then the other day, I’d had enough noodling over these amorphous and depressing ideas and getting nowhere good, so I gave up and started reading my book—The Mystery Guest by Grégorie Boullier.

Towards the end of the book, Grégorie—this is a memoir—is leaving a party that he was invited to by an ex who left him without a word after four years together. The party was a humiliation, though it did bring some relief. As he is leaving, this passage appears:

“In an odd way, it seemed to me that I had already lived through this scene, or no, I hadn’t lived through it, not exactly, it was more like the powerful scent of a forest after a rainstorm flooding a sealed room in an apartment. The thought drifted down over me like a kind of fog, and I found myself smiling; it was so crazy and came so completely out of nowhere, and no doubt physical and nervous exhaustion had something to do with it, because I certainly was exhausted, and, as I walked along, I saw a bedroom in perfect detail, a bedroom assailed by the effluvia of wood and wet leaves, and the air was cool and vaguely fetid, and the room was awash in the perfectly recognizable odor of acorns and moss and mushrooms even as I saw before me a table, chairs, a bed, a richly patterned rug, a painted ceiling, shelves lined with books, and unless we’d been lied to for centuries, these surroundings could hardly be called a forest, much less a forest after a rainstorm, or even a forest without the rain, yes, it was simple and disorienting at the same time, and this vision filled me with happiness, with irrational joy, like a punch line: my eyes were completely at odds with my sense of smell, or vice versa, and so which sense was telling the truth and which was fooling the other?”

This obviously means nothing to you because you haven’t read the book, and it just goes on after this, page after page of absolute pleasure, and I can’t include all of that here, and anyway it would make even less sense to you. But when I read it, I was on the subway, and I felt so free, and it hit me like that—like a punch line, even though I can’t rightly articulate the punch line now. I don’t know what else to say other than that this passage was written by a human being, and that seems, even just momentarily, to make everything okay.

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1. My uncle recommends educational materials: The Heart of Everything That Is & Empire of the Summer Moon.

2. You can watch the whole thing here if you want, TBH I don’t recommend it.

3. It’s part of a larger series that Daniel Mendelsohn is putting on through the NYRB. The next part of the series starts on Wednesday I think and it’s on Euripides

4. That clip here.

5. If you are a government agency monitoring me or whatever, there’s no risk of me actually doing this, okay.