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- Article → Meditations on Moloch
- Podcast → Meditations on Moloch (Audio)
Welcome, Wayfinder.
We made it.
I’ve built some suspense but honestly there’s no spooky element to this.
Unless, maybe, it’s your first time encountering it.
Encountering Moloch…
Encountering multi-polar traps, whirlpools of incentive and game theory that give rise to the death, abuse, manipulation, and violence that characterize the human story and modern civilization best.
There’s exhaustion in my heart but Devotion in my spirit to take in all the best maps of the Wayfinders who have come before us.
And this is one of them.
Shout out Daniel Schmactenberger for work on genuine, thoughtful reflection of existential risk and the factors at play.
What is Moloch?
Moloch was traditionally referenced as a Canaanite deity from the Hebrew bible who’s worship implied child sacrifice.
The Book of Kings contains a passage roughly translating to “passing [one’s] son or daughter through fire to Moloch.”
Around 1935, an idea entered academia from some scholars who theorized that Moloch was not a deity, but instead a word for “sacrifice” itself.
In the cultural zeitgeist of the last 400 years, Moloch appears as a power that demands a dire sacrifice.
Looking beyond the etymology of Moloch, the mythic theme is our anchor point—sacrifice.
And sacrifice with a flavor of… bad.
Let’s synchronize with Allen Ginsberg’s famous poem, Moloch:
What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination?
Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Moloch whose eyes are a thousand blind windows! Moloch whose skyscrapers stand in the long streets like endless Jehovahs! Moloch whose factories dream and croak in the fog! Moloch whose smoke-stacks and antennae crown the cities!
Moloch whose love is endless oil and stone! Moloch whose soul is electricity and banks! Moloch whose poverty is the specter of genius! Moloch whose fate is a cloud of sexless hydrogen! Moloch whose name is the Mind!
Moloch in whom I sit lonely! Moloch in whom I dream Angels! Crazy in Moloch! Cocksucker in Moloch! Lacklove and manless in Moloch!
Moloch who entered my soul early! Moloch in whom I am a consciousness without a body! Moloch who frightened me out of my natural ecstasy! Moloch whom I abandon! Wake up in Moloch! Light streaming out of the sky!
Moloch! Moloch! Robot apartments! invisible suburbs! skeleton treasuries! blind capitals! demonic industries! spectral nations! invincible madhouses! granite cocks! monstrous bombs!
They broke their backs lifting Moloch to Heaven! Pavements, trees, radios, tons! lifting the city to Heaven which exists and is everywhere about us!
Visions! omens! hallucinations! miracles! ecstasies! gone down the American river!
Dreams! adorations! illuminations! religions! the whole boatload of sensitive bullshit!
Breakthroughs! over the river! flips and crucifixions! gone down the flood! Highs! Epiphanies! Despairs! Ten years’ animal screams and suicides! Minds! New loves! Mad generation! down on the rocks of Time!
Real holy laughter in the river! They saw it all! the wild eyes! the holy yells! They bade farewell! They jumped off the roof! to solitude! waving! carrying flowers! Down to the river! into the street!
Mmm. Visceral.
There’s a lot to unpack here, but for now the connection made in the poem is a view of Moloch as the body of modern civilization.
Modern civilization as a trans-human, ideological machine that has its own life force and momentum, that we have become swept up in.
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money!
Nobody seems to like what’s going on (except perhaps the super-wealthy).
Nobody openly claims that they enjoy the soul-crushing demands, polluted concrete industrial vistas, endless wars, heartless genocides…
So then why, oh why, is it happening?
Since everyone hates it, why don’t we stop?
Moloch.
The unthinking momentum of the system created, of the incentives involved, the game theoretics at play.
An ideological construct run wild.
Was this inevitable?
From the first stone tool made?
It’s time to introduce the general of sub-optimal outcomes.
Multipolar traps.
What are they, and why are they bad?
What are Multipolar Traps?
Multipolar traps are situations where there are multiple agents that each have their own self-interest, and due to the context are incentivized to act in their own self-interest in a way that creates a collectively destructive or suboptimal outcome for everybody involved, including themselves (trap) relative to if they (1) cooperated or (2) didn’t act in their immediate self-interest.
“Well, if everyone’s better off by cooperating, and they are rational agents acting towards their own self-interest, why don’t they just cooperate?”
Great question.
Why do Multipolar Traps occur?
At the root, they are coordination problems.
Yeah everyone is better off if everyone cooperates, but coordinating 100% adherence to not acting in one’s self-interest is a hard problem.
Have you ever heard a drug dealer rationalize selling heroin, meth, etc. because “they’re going to get the drugs somewhere (whether I sell them or not), so might as well be from me (so I can get mine)”?
That’s essentially the calculation being made by every, single, agent.
Every, single, day.
You know the euphemism, “one bad apple ruins the bunch.”
Basically that, but the highest stakes apple bucket on the planet.
The Golden Nugget
In terms of system design, one cool insight from multipolar traps is “how can we design incentive systems such that one agent breaking from cooperation to act in their own short-term self interest results in a collectively constructive or more optimal outcome?”
Not easy to design for, but at least we know what not to design for.
And that’s one step closer to doing the thing.
Stopping early again.
Dialing in my writing flow for these articles.
Tomorrow, we’ll explore multi-polar traps and how they manifest.
Godspeed, Wayfinder.
~ Michael