Visionaries Without Vision
The small and dreary political imagination of billionaires.
One of the most pernicious barriers to our ability to bring about a better world is our natural tendency to anchor ourselves in the existing state of the world. rather than establishing first principles and using those to guide us to our destination, we often fall into the trap of just starting with current reality and then riffing. This forecloses a huge portion of the possibility of what could be, in favor of simply tweaking what already is.
Financial advisors, for example, have a technique for freeing their clients from this mental trap. They show them their current stock portfolio, and then ask, “If you were starting from scratch today, would you buy all of these holdings, at their current prices?” Instead of tying themselves in what they already have as an immovable bedrock of reality, this exercise demonstrates to clients that what exists now is a choice. They could have anything, at equivalent prices. Is what you have now really what you want? If not, you can change it.
You know who could benefit from this exercise? Billionaires. Not for their stock portfolios, which are presumably fine. For their politics. Yes, of course, the politics of billionaires will be economically reactionary and self-serving. More striking, though, is the extent to which even the self-proclaimed humanists in this class of people—who tout themselves as the visionaries of the future, and who have more means to bring about their own preferences than anyone else—suffer from a laughable lack of imagination when they dip their toe into the world of political reforms.
Some people can spend their lives studying political theory in order to construct a well-informed and grounded set of political beliefs. But not most people. Most people have to go to work. And in a democracy, most voters are the people who have to go to work. It is not necessary to read the complete works of Marx in order to get yourself some durable political instincts. You can get pretty far just by asking yourself two questions. 1) What should happen to the existing distribution of power in society—should it get more equal, less equal, or stay the same? And 2) Whose needs in society should be most prioritized, if there are limited resources? To me, it is common sense to say that, first, the distribution of power in society should be made more equal (in order to give everyone a fair shot at creating a good life), and second, we should prioritize the needs of the neediest people. From these basic beliefs, you can live an entire lifetime of decent politics. You can think about which legal and economic policies would best produce these outcomes. You can support the movements and politicians that align with these things you believe. And you can imagine what a just world would look like—one that actively achieved the correct answers to these questions every day.
Compare that simple and straightforward political vision to what comes out of the mouths of billionaires. Elon Musk is the biggest billionaire of all. He got offended that Joe Biden wasn’t nice enough to him, so he gave hundreds of millions of dollars to elect Donald Trump and other Republicans. Then the Republicans passed a bill that was absolutely characteristic of what Republicans believe, and Elon Musk didn’t like it, so now he says he is starting his own political party. According to his Tweets, this new party’s foundational purpose will be to cut government spending in order to avoid “bankrupting” America. A slightly longer policy list retweeted by Musk suggests the new party will “reduce debt,” “modernize [the] military,” be “pro tech,” have “less regulation,” be “free speech” and “pro natalist,” and, most tellingly, have “centrist policies everywhere else.”
What you may notice (besides the fact that this is the sort of policy list that an ill-informed child would draw up) is that Musk’s entire grand political vision—one that he is presumably ready to spend billions of dollars to fight for—consists of an explicitly pro-billionaire economic platform, a handful of vapid personal affinities (legalize jokes! have more babies!), and then… nothing. Nothing else! He explicitly outsources all of the other political issues in the world to conventional wisdom with the dismissive phrase “centrist policies everywhere else.” The totality of This Great and Powerful Man’s political ideas can be condensed to the sentence, “Protect my fortune, indulge my hobbies, and whatever.” Not even any creative fascist ideas like some of his peers. What a sad showing, from Mr. Mars.
Musk’s fellow billionaire Sam Altman felt compelled to publish his own quasi-political complaint/ manifesto for the 4th of July.
“I believe in techno-capitalism. We should encourage people to make tons of money and then also find ways to widely distribute wealth and share the compounding magic of capitalism. One doesn’t work without the other; you cannot raise the floor and not also raise the ceiling for very long,” wrote Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. “The world should get richer every year through science and technology, but everyone has to be in the “up elevator”. I think the government usually does a worse job than markets, and so we need to encourage our culture of innovation and entrepreneurship… I’d rather hear from candidates about how they are going to make everyone have the stuff billionaires have instead of how they are going to eliminate billionaires.” Because the Democrats have “moved somewhere else” from these beliefs, Altman said that he now finds himself “politically homeless.”
Consider the unspoken value structure concealed beneath these anodyne words. Altman’s primary political priority is—explicitly!—to ensure that we don’t eliminate billionaires. He dresses this up in altruistic clothing by suggesting that, you see, he wants everyone to have the stuff that billionaires have, and we can achieve that if we just unleash capitalism and technology and entrepreneurship. Oh? Should all 340 million Americans become company founders, funded by Y Combinator? Should the teachers and the firefighters and the retail clerks and the restaurant waiters and the sanitation workers and the truck drivers and the security guards all become venture capitalists? Who, exactly, is going to work at all these wonderful new entrepreneurial ventures? If some people have to be employees and some people are going to be employers, how do we ensure that the “up elevator” serves those with less power and less money? How does the existence of billionaires comport with the need to ensure that everyone who is not a billionaire doesn’t get left behind? Altman’s belief that his little message is common sense is proof of the thickness of the walls of the intellectual bunker he shelters in. A billionaire, on the 4th of July, arguing forcefully that America’s political priority must be to “raise the ceiling” so that billionaires can make more money. Truly a moment of great patriotism, sir.
As with Musk, what is striking about Altman is not that he is a rich guy who is concerned with increasing the wealth of rich guys. That is to be expected. What leaps out to me is the extent to which these men who fancy themselves visionaries are actually sunk neck-deep in the dreary task of protecting the status quo. Their political imagination begins and ends with accepting the idea that America’s most profound deformations are inevitable: There must a tiny class of ultra-wealthy potentates who wield enormous economic and technological and (by extension) political power, and those people are people too, and how can we arrange society in order to be nicer to them? All of the political fumbling of these tech billionaires reveals them to be babies with guns, utterly lacking in the maturity necessary to wield the power that has been placed in their hands.
Do not be like these pitiful men. Do not let the world as it is seduce you into believing that it is the only world that can be. Think about what a righteous world would look like, and proceed in that direction. In America, fewer than a thousand billionaires hold more than six trillion dollars in wealth. If these guys are so concerned with paying off the national debt and making everyone richer, I can think of an easy place for us to find the money for it.
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Related reading: Confiscate Their Money; Technology Does Not Solve Political Problems; Enough Wealth to Warp the Universe; The Underlying Problem.
Isn’t it curious that rich business leaders who say they are concerned with making everyone in America wealthier never seem to donate money to the labor movement—the most effective tool for increasing the wealth of the working class in America? I think it is quite odd. A single determined billionaire donor could probably provide the resources to turn around the decline of union density in this country. If that person is you, email me. For more on why this is important, check out my book “The Hammer,” about how organized labor is the tool we need to break our chains. You can order it from an independent bookstore today.
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I think one of the biggest lies of history, after the idea that the US has ever been meaningfully democratic, is the idea that the aristocracy disappeared or lost power.
Generation after generation we have these small, petty tyrants who wield astronomical fortunes and play with lives of normal people. Sometimes they are loud and sometimes they operate in the shadows, but they have never stopped being the only truly dangerous minority.
The notion that billionaires have something to do with new technologies has gotten into the American psyche to such a depth that its essential goofiness never seems to get examined (outside of venues like this). The core technical discoveries or inventions of our hype cycle were made by grad students for whom the prospect of interesting work loomed larger than remuneration- and remuneration in the hundreds of thousands or millions no doubt saturates that mechanism as surely as billions. No doubt big technical projects and infrastructure take big heaps of money, but...isn't that why finance exists, whose managers are presumably just as capable when they take a slightly smaller fraction of the fortunes that pass through their hands- and the rest could, you know, actually be invested into interesting work?
If someone profoundly wealthy really wanted to speak some common sense, it'd be 'the interest on having $50M in the bank lets me consume as much of anything it makes sense to buy as I could possibly stand. Much past that puts me into a realm of turning into a real freak show trying to bend the world to my unremarkable and increasingly insular whims out of boredom. I stopped being the technical driving force at my organization about the time I got interested in buying islands instead- if I was ever actually an idea guy at all. The next billion I get is not going to people that might actually have undeveloped ideas in their head instead. Please, save me from myself.'