The Case for Biocentric Longtermism – responding to nonsense with slightly less nonsensical nonsense
The most ridiculous (and alarming) millenarian cult (so far) needs an update! --- [Estimated reading time: 20 min.]
Sometimes I just write things down to get them off my chest. If a particular topic is nagging me, I write a few lines and see where it takes me. The following is the result of this (rather chaotic) process of defragmenting my thoughts. It has been lurking in my drafts for too long already, so here we go.
My new “pet hate,” longtermism, is so indescribably stupid – yet so annoyingly prevalent in the circles of the influential and powerful – that I couldn’t help but pour out my heart onto the virtual pages of this blog. Should the result be mediocre compared to some of my other writings, then so be it.
As I’ve said before, this is An Animist’s Ramblings, so ramble I shall.
If you don’t know what longtermism is, I’m afraid you’ll have to read one or two articles about it first. I could try to summarize its main premises (and I will attempt to in a second), but I could never do it as aptly as someone who used to be a longtermist himself – like the author of the two articles linked above.
I’m serious: if you have the time, go ahead and read them!
Longtermism is, in the words of said author, “arguably the most influential ideology that few members of the general public have ever heard about.” It’s basically ‘science fiction meets eugenics,’ with a healthy dose of megalomania and a whiff of good old colonialism, buttressed by unbridled naïvety. The idea would be hilarious, if it wouldn’t be for the fact that its adherents are super-rich and tremendously influential, making it extremely dangerous. Longtermist initiatives count several billionaires among their proponents (you guessed it – unsurprisingly, Elon Musk is one of them, as is almost the entire tech elite), and have over 46 billion dollars (!!) in committed funding already. They man government positions and influential think tanks, from which they spread their delusional fantasies. The New York Times and TIME magazine both featured longtermist articles, part of a PR strategy to gain attention. But why is it so dangerous that I spend my precious time writing about it?
What longtermism really boils down to is, as the name implies, thinking on longer timescales. But not just a few millennia – no, longtermists would never be so humble! Longtermists think on the timescale of one googol years – yeah, you read that right, that’s not a typo! That means 10^100 years, or 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 years – a one with one hundred zeros. That’s about how long we have until the heat death of the universe, the entropic end stadium at which the universe freezes over and nothing can happen anymore. But humans will still be around at that point, at least according to longtermists! Well, we might not be that human, after all, since most of us will probably lead some miserable existence as an NPC in some VR videogame, and only a few will be allowed to inhabit the superhuman cyborg bodies bursting with biotechnology and alpha genes – probably the direct descendants of Elon Musk’s army of neglected children.
‘Humans and the things we build are the highest good, the sole source of meaning in an empty and hostile universe that we must conquer and subdue.’ Sounds familiar? Well, it is, because that’s exactly the same stuff people have been thinking for quite a while already, a worldview that has brought the first (and last!) global civilization to the brink of collapse in a mere century and has ushered in the next Mass Extinction Event. One could say longtermism is what comes out on the other end if you run anthropocentrism in a positive feedback loop for a few googol times.
Longtermists assume that technological progress will continue accelerating for the next few hundred billion years (at least!), meaning we will have conquered the entire Universe and brought Coca Cola, McDonald’s and Nike footwear to every corner of this galaxy (and the next few trillion galaxies as well). By that time, there will be a lot more of us (a lot!) and most of us will probably live in some kind of AI-governed virtual reality. I won’t bore you with the details. But when I say “a lot more of us”, I mean it: careful longtermist estimates as to how many humans could exist someday run up to 10^58 people (that’s 10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 people), all happily floating in spaceship-serverfarms, deeply immersed in some ultra-stimulating virtual reality where they get all the entertainment, sex, action and attention they could ever wish for. In case someone is still unhappy, dopamine levels will be raised automatically by the AI that controls the system via intravenous injection. Doesn’t sound inviting?
It’s still our best shot, they allege, since the cumulative amount of pleasure experienced by 10^58 utterly miserable people is vastly greater than the pleasure experienced by a few billion people leading lives worth living,1 and if you think like a calculator, the former is somehow preferable to the latter, so we should discard any concerns about immediate well-being and focus on enabling humanity to survive for a googol years or so. Nothing is as important as ensuring humans will be around for the bulk of that time. Anyone and anything threatening this Mega Ultra Manifest Destiny Turbocharge 9000^999 XXXL™2 is considered an “existential threat” and needs to be eliminated by any means necessary.
Should this little essay here “go viral,” I might be considered an existential threat (so please don’t share it), and some bunker-dwelling billionaire might pay an assassin a few bitcoins to execute me in cold blood – for the long-term benefit of humanity.
On a more serious note, we can definitely imagine the immensely powerful cadre of longtermists doing everything in their power (and I mean everything) to decry, derail and destroy any movement that advocates degrowth, a low-tech lifestyle and a return to Nature, and nip any ever-so-vestigial effort to realize any of the aforementioned in the bud. Their propaganda campaign3 will be truly shock-and-awe-inspiring, and there will be little we can do about this, since those psychos basically own the entire internet already.
If you take the basic premises of the dominant culture,4 which are by no means universal truths or Laws of Nature (but merely the inherently unsustainable delusion of a single, globe-spanning culture), and project them into the far future while utterly disregarding any natural limits, tipping points, thresholds and planetary boundaries (that will undoubtedly put an early end to the longtermists feverish dreams eventually), this is what you’ll get. A pathological phantasmagoria by a bunch of left-brained science nerds who watched too much Star Trek when they were children – so much that it caused some serious mental degeneration that makes it impossible for longtermists to discern what’s reality and what’s fiction.
Suggesting that humans are an animal, not more and not less exceptional than termites, and our place is among the myriad other animals and plants we share this planet with is high treason, blasphemy, an insult of the highest order to them.
As anyone who has watched the spine-chilling series Altered Carbon knows, this kind of scenario predicted a mere three hundred and sixty years into the future (environmental conditions permitted) is an absolute obscenity – but not if you belong to the 0.00001 percent who run the entire shitshow by then. Sure, the elites won’t be any happier than they are today – in fact, I highly doubt that many of them are truly happy now – but they will have a lot more perverted pleasure stimuli at their disposal and be vastly more powerful, and they seem to mistake the light-headed frenzy this mixture instills for actual happiness.
Again, I wouldn’t waste my time writing about such obvious nonsense if I wouldn’t think that those people are a serious threat. They are elitist to the core, as the following quote by Nick Beckstead, one of the founding fathers of longtermism, proves beyond doubt – this guy seriously said that “saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries, […] it now seems more plausible to me that saving a life in a rich country is substantially more important than saving a life in a poor country, other things being equal.” Ugh.
Even more concerning, their paranoia about some “existential catastrophe” means they will stop short of nothing: not geoengineering, not nuclear fusion, not gene-editing, not the most abhorrent rape and torture of our Great Mother Earth you can imagine. They are psychopaths, stuck in the left-hemisphere mode of thinking, ideologically and emotionally more akin to computers than to other living, breathing humans. For them, as for so many other super-rich people, “the very structure of The Mindset requires an endgame. Everything must resolve to a one or a zero, a winner or loser, the saved or the damned.”
You can be sure that in their mind, they are the one – and you are the zero.
So why write about them? Why give them a platform? Well, since you will by now undoubtedly have a broad understanding of what longtermism aims for, at the very least it is not them who are not going to be the first ones to tell you who they are and what they want. That’s already a good beginning. But other than raising awareness about some millenarian cult of technotopians (that already has a disturbing amount of influence), I want to point out that there’s a different take on longtermism. One that includes the entire the Community of Life, not only its most arrogant members.
If longtermists get to propose their obviously nonsense carbon copies of science-fiction manuscripts disguised as serious concern for the future without facing widespread ridicule, please allow me to wallow in the same sort of imaginative overdrive for a bit:
What I’m proposing – tongue-in-cheek – is a biocentric longtermism, in which we focus on the long-term implications of our actions on the entire biosphere, for the benefit of the entire biosphere. Biocentric longtermism is not limited by technology (like its pathetic, mechanical predecessor), but transcends the need for advanced technology, and focuses on symbiosis, mutualism, cooperation and interconnection with other living beings. It doesn’t deny, but cherishes and reaffirms our ties to the living system we inhabit, and instead of separation, it strives for an even stronger unity.
In this version, techno-industrial society itself would be an “existential threat” to the continued survival of the biosphere, so everything in our power must be done to stop it from devouring the entire living planet. What matters is not the maximum amount of pleasure that the highest imaginable number of humans could experience, but the amount of self-determination, happiness, satisfaction and freedom that all living beings, from the tiniest bacteria to the largest old-growth trees, experiences throughout their lifetime. This doesn’t mean a world without suffering – contrary to longtermists, I am well aware that it’s childish nonsense to dream of a life without any pain – but a net positive for each creature, if anyhow possible.
And since longtermists seem to shamelessly borrow most of their oh-so-unique “imagination” from hyper-alienated science fiction writers, let me continue to explain my summaries of pop-fiction movi… – err, I mean, my unique visions for the future, that may sound like, but are in no way based on the science-fiction movie Avatar.5
Let’s imagine modern humans would finally realize that we were never made to build cities and destroy our environment, and gradually return to a forager lifestyle. Let’s imagine rewilding on an unimaginable scale, so that in no time forests span the entire tropical belt again, and most other parts of the world as well.
Let’s further try to identify certain biocentric tendencies that we could project into the distant future, such as symbiotic interspecies communication and cooperation (and the resulting relationships), as observed among several hunter-gatherer cultures, for instance between Hadza foragers and the honeyguide bird,6 or the millennia-old mutualistic relationship between human hunters and their dogs. Imagine now that this forager lifestyle is continued for another, say 50 million years. For longtermists, who think on timescales of quattuorvigintillion years (not a typo), 50 million should be well within what’s considered confidently predictable. Dinosaurs inhabited this planet for over 160 million years, so a mere 50 million definitely isn’t too far-fetched.
Could it not be that we form connections of unimaginable depth with our fellow animals and plants? Could it not be that we find ways to share our conscious experiences by exploring a common mode of communication or by fusing our minds in some way? Wouldn’t we be able to communicate efficiently with other living beings, and with our Great Mother, the source of all Life, herself?
Let’s assume we find a way to reverse the gradual shrinking of our brains that has started with the transition to an agricultural way of life (and would surely accelerate in the conventional longtermist scenario),7 and regain the full mental capabilities available to our distant ancestors. Now imagine we would continue to use the proven scientific methods of obtaining knowledge from logical inferences and deductive experimentation in an attempt to better comprehend Nature – but free of its outdated, sickening, psychopathic, mechanistic, reductionist, Cartesian tendency towards utilitarianism, violence and exploitation.
We already have access to the astonishing results of decades worth of incredibly detailed, high-tech research about every imaginable aspect of biology, and we were able to create a pretty decent image of how things work in the living world. We know, for instance, that there are species with brains much more complex than ours – Cetaceans – so it would be a good start to try to respectfully establish ways to communicate and cooperate with those species, to sincerely apologize for centuries of bloodthirsty madness, to ask them what they need and want, and what we can do to help them – instead of incarcerating, enslaving and exterminating them. I firmly believe that if they would only want to, if they would see that we mean what we say and that we have truly realized the folly of our previous ways, our Cetacean relatives could do a lot to help facilitate communication. I mean, just look at that brain!
Every indigenous society ever recorded employed (or still employs) a cosmology that views the world in animistic terms – it is only the dominant culture that has forgotten that this is the way the world really is – and what I propose here is to take the animistic worldview (that has been repeatedly proven right by scientists over the past few decades, and often explains natural phenomena much better than the mechanistic approach ever could!), and build on that. We don’t need to adopt animistic beliefs from existing indigenous cultures, most of which have too strong of a mythical character8 to appeal to the “arch-rational” people we modern humans tend to think we are, and which would furthermore constitute blatant cultural appropriation. If it’s easier for people of this culture to “believe” in science, then let’s create a science-based, animistic worldview! The groundwork has been laid in disciplines as diverse as ecology, ethology, systems theory, microbiology, plant neurobiology, primatology, apiology, myrmecology, mycology, and even physics – a possible (and actually quite plausible) explanation for quantum indeterminacy, the fact that we can’t predict what a particle is going to do even if we know all the forces that act on it, is the animistic view that even the smallest particles make self-conscious decisions. Even electrons are conscious. We live in an animated (and hence an animistic) universe.
I am well aware that all this might sound profoundly ridiculous, and right now you probably regret even reading this article up until here, but my point is that it’s still at least a nonillion times more realistic than the absolute and utter stupidity that longtermists (working for renowned educational institutions!) propose. If Nick Bostrom, who taught at Oxford for years, is allowed to ramble on about his crackpot ideology and expect to be taken serious, so should I!
Admittedly, Avatar is set in the year 2154, basically a zeptosecond for longtermists (again, no typo – that’s how long it takes for a single particle of light to pass through a molecule of hydrogen. Don’t ask me how I know this.9). But the Na’vi (the humanoids indigenous to the exomoon ‘Pandora’ in the movie) have probably been evolving for a whole lot longer than that, at least if compared to us humans and the pathetically few symbiotic relationships we managed to forge with our fellow living beings in our short time here.
And who knows? If we go down the road of biocentric longtermism, who’s to say that we don’t find a way to plug into the collective consciousness of the vast, beautiful, mysterious and awesome ecosystem we are inevitably a part of? It’s not like there aren’t already ways to do this!10
We will be part of this system until our slowly expanding Mother Star renders Earth inhospitable to life in a few billion years, and afterwards we will become part of the larger cosmos once again. We will return to the next bigger system snugly nestled inside the next bigger one in the endless, fractal dimensions of existence.
Not long enough for longtermists? Well, grow up and memento mori. One way or another, we will be around until the end of time. But not in the shape we currently occupy, and not within the constraints of the transient phenomenon we call ‘ego’, which we all too often mistake for who we are.
But for the time span that really matters – our lifetimes, and those of our children and grandchildren – we can ensure that the direction we take is not one of control, separation, exploitation and dominion, but one of care and community, of belonging and reciprocity.
To be honest, there are other possible paths that open up if we contemplate biocentric longtermism, some of which would lead us into truly bizarre territory. Let’s take the odd obsession with large-scale societies some members of the dominant culture exhibit. That cities are inherently unsustainable (and stand in direct contrast to the environment we evolved to inhabit) should be more than clear by now, so within a biocentric longtermist framework, large-scale future societies would have to look a lot different than contemporary cities.
There are precedents: termites and ants are ultrasocial, like us, but had 40-60 million years to figure out which societies are sustainable and which aren’t, and they’ve achieved highly sustainable colonies with millions of individual members.
If we’d think along the lines of biocentric longtermism, we might extrapolate that – in the near term – once the fossil fuels and high-grade ores are gone and the topsoil is on the bottom of the ocean, population levels would plummet (making habitat available for other living beings), and the remaining people would revert to some saner way of life (like hunting and gathering, which seems as sustainable as it gets – it exists successfully for the entire three-million-year history of our species).
But if some of those humans simply can’t rid themselves of the strange fascination with extremely large societies, maybe in time they’d develop into an entirely different species, closer resembling ants or termites in their social organization and concerning the role of the individual. Over time, they would perhaps become a lot smaller in stature, and their behavioral plasticity would be reduced dramatically, until they inhabit societies with little to no individuality left; toiling away under the yoke of the most extreme division of labor and the highest levels of social stratification; working boring, pointless jobs until they drop dead; being part of a totalitarian hive mind that doesn’t care much whether they live or die; and maybe even becoming a suicide bomber for the greater good!
Maybe there’d be a special caste of breeding females who replenish the colonies, and that’s pretty much all they do their entire lives. Others might – due to epigenetically induced morphological changes – grow specialized heads that can seal the entries to their colonies and keep out intruders, and their lifelong job is to guard a door. Others might become farmers, and spend their entire lives feeding organic matter to some giant fungus that their kind formed a symbiotic relationship with, and that constitutes over 90 percent of what they eat.
If that’s the kind of life you would aim for, you’re most welcome to swing by our place for a few nugs of organic weed and a multi-hour symposium about the pros and cons of either scenario. At least the ultrasocial human subspecies, homo urbanus, would get to enjoy the benefits of being a singular organism who can send kin11 cells out to forage for food, and if some of them don’t come back, ki12 just makes more. I never said there are no upsides to it at all.
But if you ask me, I like the whole Avatar – uhm, I mean biocentric longtermism scenario a lot better. I like to imagine a future in which we humans are facilitators, mediators, guardians and stewards of Life, constantly exploring new ways to benefit the whole, and forging deep relationships with the myriad other beings we share this world with.
Let’s hope that, before long, conventional longtermism will get thrown into history’s dustbin, together with all the other utterly ridiculous and nonsensical belief systems that flared up briefly during the final death throes of this culture, like QAnon, the Flat Earth Theory, Mars colonization and “Net Zero by 2050” – the last, desperate attempts of the super-alienated to make sense of a world that’s falling apart in front of their eyes, using hopelessly outdated explanatory frameworks: precisely the ones that caused the very collapse we now witness.
Should there be even the slightest chance for us to learn – for once – from the mistakes we made, something like biocentric longtermism is the way forward. Everything else is science-fiction: it sounds like science, yes, but it is, ultimately, nothing more than fiction.
I write stuff like the above in my free time, when I’m not tending the piece of land we’re rewilding here at Feun Foo. As a subsistence farmer by profession I don’t have a regular income, so if you have a few bucks to spare please consider supporting my work with a small donation:
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I don’t say that the “few billion” alive today live “lives worth living,” but even if they did, longtermists would prefer the former scenario because the overall amount of pleasure is higher. Utilitarianism on steroids.
For enhanced ambience, please read this term with the voice of an announcer at a monster truck rally or a wrestling match.
This campaign has already started, and the W.E.I.R.D. longtermist frat bros from the Long Now Foundation (among them computerphile Kevin Kelly) have already taken to the utterly laughable practice to write the current year as 02023 – how inspirational! – to show off our species’ vast potential: the ability to count to ever larger numbers.
The most important of which is “The world was made for Man, and Man was made to conquer and rule it,” but which ultimately encompass all anthropocentric delusions, such as that we are the end product of evolution, evolution perfectionated and perfection impersonated; that we are smarter and better than anyone else in this world and can therefore do what we want to anyone and anything; that our brains are the most complex phenomenon in the entire Universe until we invent a computer that is more complex, which will only further attest to our ingenuity; that there is no limit as to what we can achieve; that we don’t depend on the Earth for our survival; that we can become completely independent from Nature and just produce everything we need ourselves; and that it’s perfectly possible to do all this while staying happy, healthy and sane.
Which is still decent entertainment – at least for a Hollywood movie. Avatar has some great core messages, although if you want to watch a true anarcho-primitivist movie, you should try The Embrace of the Serpent, The Last Forest, or Ten Canoes.
The horticultural Yao people inhabiting the same area (Southeastern Africa) also make use of the mutualistic relationship with the honeyguide bird.
The less you use your brain for different tasks and the less information you need to store there, the smaller it gets. The runaway division of labor this culture has experienced since the dawn of agriculture and the externalization of information, first through written records and later through digital means of data storage, has led to the drastic reduction in cranial size (from 1500cc to 1350cc). Longtermists want you to do even fewer challenging tasks, and remember even less things – technology will do all that for you! Artificial “Intelligence” is hailed simultaneously as our greatest threat and our biggest hope by longtermists, and in their vision there is no limit to how much technology will diminish the need for an actual body, hence shrinking not only brain size but possibly every other body part as well into fucking oblivion. How this is considered desirable for anyone is beyond me.
This mythical character doesn’t mean indigenous cosmologies are any less awe-inspiring and explanatory for those believing in it! An example is the opening scene of the Yanomami-made movie The Last Forest (2021), in which a man explains to his child that pebbles in a river are “crocodile food,” a claim that intuitively seems ridiculous to members of the dominant culture, yet when he goes on to explain that if you cut open a crocodile’s stomach you will find that it contains many pebbles, we see that it makes sense to believe this. Science teaches us that crocodiles don’t “eat” stones, but swallow pebbles to aid them with digestion (they crush and grate food), as a potential source of minerals, to get rid of parasites, and as ballast (to make diving easier). You tell me who’s “more right.”
For many people in this culture, believing in ghosts and spirits is “primitive superstition” – yet the same people have absolutely no problem “believing” in the existence of adenosine triphosphate, black holes, magnetic fields and radiation. They’ve never seen those things, but rely on various methods of divination (using elaborate contraptions made from precious metals), oracles and specialists to communicate with this invisible spirit world, relay the results to them, and interpret their meaning. “But those things are real,” the people on both sides cry, “we have reliable means of perceiving them!”
Researching longtermism leads one down rabbit holes whose contents I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemies. Well, since longtermists are, in a way, my worst enemies, wishing it onto them is unnecessary because they are already deep down that hole. Never mind.
Of course I’m talking about conscious-expanding substances found in our environment in various forms: psychedelics that occur most often as certain species of fungi. Anyone who’s ever had a psychedelic experience knows that the possibility exists, here and now, even without the need for physically “plugging in” as displayed in the movie Avatar.
“Ki/kin” are the new Nature pronouns suggested by Robin Wall Kimmerer in an attempt to ward off the degrading and objectifying implications of using the pronoun “it” for living, sentient beings that are so much more like us than we tend to imagine.
[Ibid.]
I think you might enjoy my purely biological hard sci fi novellas (Our Vitreous Womb) which explore a distant future along the lines of what you are exploring here. Email me at shane.simonsen@icloud.com if you would like a review copy. Paperbacks are due soon if you don't fancy ebooks. I published under the pen name Haldane B Doyle, so you can also check out my author website at www.haldanebdoyle.com.
Awesome essay. And I didn’t think it sounded too tongue in cheek and actually sounded like a great idea!!