From Moloch to Humanware
Government Versus Governance — and the Application of Wisdom in Independent Societies
“Coordination is the foundational mechanism human societies evolve, adapt, and innovate.”
-Neter
Escape the Coordi(N)ation Hunger Games: The Matrix of Coordination & Optimistic Exit (Part 1)
“In the very near future, we are going to lift something to Heaven. It might be Moloch. But it might be something on our side. If it’s on our side, it can kill Moloch dead.”
-Scott Alexander,
Meditations on Moloch
The chief aim of Polis Labs is to prevent Moloch dynamics in governance, especially for parallel and independent societies. Our vision is to lift governance to heaven, à la Scott Alexander, and inspire a future free from broken systems that give lip service to humans but feast at the altar of a vile deity. Ultimately, we intend to destroy Moloch, but we must understand what we are up against to achieve success.
Moloch dynamics include skewed incentives and coordination failures that plague outdated governance structures. A Moloch dynamic is a game-theoretic scenario in which individuals optimize for personal benefit at the expense of collective well-being. This broken dynamic causes externalities and spillover effects that harm swaths of people and devastate ecologies of organisms.
Currently, coercive-backed politics and infighting dominate most of our governance frameworks. This is because humanity has largely adopted government over governance, which leads to a downward spiral of corrupt gameplay. Politicians harbor a winner-take-all mentality, which results in the propping up of a managerial class, leading to a cascade of downstream consequences.
The solution to these Moloch tendencies is consistently applying wisdom and restraint in governance. In this context, wisdom means we have learned from past mistakes and understand the outcomes of governance models based on historical analysis and accumulated data. Overall, we see the pinnacle of wisdom and restraint in governance in the deployment of “humanware,” which we will discuss at length. Exploiting humanware in governance will uphold dignity, peace, and prosperity as we move into the future.
This article explores modern governance practices and promotes the application of humanware to disrupt Moloch games.
Governance Fitness
As we mentioned, instead of deploying governance models, we use government in most places worldwide for human organization and political sensemaking. How is this problematic?
“Government” is a predatory human organizational model. Regardless of its form or style, government is an association of people who monopolize the use of force and rule over a population. It does not matter if the operating system is a democracy, monarchy, oligarchy, or communism. Government is not meant to be a framework for human flourishing. It is a framework for control. It is the instantiation of Moloch in society. H.L. Mencken famously said, “Democracy is a pathetic belief in the collective wisdom of individual ignorance.”
Conversely, governance is a voluntary cooperation model that deeply implies being data-driven and defined by human organizational expertise and wisdom. When we say wisdom in governance, we refer to governance that is not geared around control, coercion, or manipulation. Instead, it is based on the thriving, adapting, evolving, peace, and prosperity of a social structure. We call the application of wisdom in human organization governance fitness.
To achieve governance fitness, quantitative and qualitative measures must be established in a framework that a specific network state or parallel society adopts and consistently deploys. Governance fitness should be weighed on a sliding scale and backed by economic and psychological measures and outputs.
In this sense, governance fitness calculates how well a governance framework functions — and Polis Labs intends to define “functionality” along a spectrum of measures, including what the Kingdom of Bhutan calls Gross Domestic Happiness (GDH). Other measures and scales can include (but are not limited to) individual prosperity, economic freedom, civic freedom, spiritual well-being, etc.
The overarching goal of governance fitness is to subdue or eradicate Moloch dynamics and coordination failures. When runaway Moloch dynamics contaminate a system, governance collapses into power politicking, and humans can experience a failure to thrive.
Let’s explore Moloch dynamics in detail.
Moloch Dynamics
The glaring tragedy of Moloch dynamics is that the people involved know they are making the world worse.
For example, modern governments and corporate entities are racing to develop the most sophisticated and devastating drone warfare capabilities. They do this because they are stuck in an arms race — an arms race is just one version of a Moloch dynamic.
This is how it works: individuals at the top of a government or corporate hierarchy notice other governments or corporations relentlessly pursuing advanced drone weaponry. They feel these actors may preemptively attack, so they ramp up development efforts. They push more resources into their agendas. They know they are driving a zero-sum game but cannot escape its grasp.
The results are an overwhelming net negative for humanity and our collective well-being. One could argue that this scenario results in mutually assured destruction, but certainly, having mutually assured destruction is not a preferable outcome. Not to mention, all the time, energy and capital being expended on developing catastrophe weapons could be better spent making the world more peaceful and cooperative.
Humanware
We believe the best way to prevent or eradicate these dynamics and bolster governance fitness is to include “humanware” within our frameworks.
Our friend Neter coined the term “humanware.” Neter would say we have a world of hardware and software but little humanware. We have advanced technology but little consideration of human relational and cultural insight in governance.
The reason for promoting humanware is that technologists and technocrats often consider the human element as merely another variable or metric rather than a central concern. It is with this attitude that democratic states devolve into Moloch-riven technocracies.
So, what exactly is humanware, and how do we achieve it?
Put succinctly, humanware is people relations, rules, interactions, and coordination. All the relational interactions and dynamics emerge in a complex system, which can be seen as an emergent property of large groups congregating to form a tribe. Included in the humanware are these pieces:
Coordination mechanisms (market networks, social platforms, organizational apparatus, tech)
Rulesets, constitutions, mores, and taboos
Dispute resolution and arbitration agents
Emotional/relational/spiritual dynamics
For the purposes of this article, I will not delve into each granular component of humanware. Just note that humanware is an indispensable part of developing a new society. “Government” has typically been an artificial, proxied stand-in for humanware. Governments have taken the mantle of providing and regulating the means of coordination, defining the rules, resolving disputes, and setting the groundwork for cultural and relational dynamics.
The reality is that when humanware is packaged by governments as a one-size-fits-all solution, it degrades and results in what Jeremy Bentham called the “panopticon,” a surveillance prison, the same as Aldous Huxley’s vision of dystopia in Brave New World. In this context, it is not humanware; it is Molochware.
We view achieving humanware implementation as being rolled out as unbundled governance services backed by a collective understanding of wisdom and restraint to prevent Moloch dynamics and coordination failures. This type of collective understanding is provided by coalitions and alliances of network states, parallel societies, and research institutes that work in concert to ensure Moloch remains suppressed.
These coalitions deliberately leverage knowledge and data from various fields, including game theory, behavioral economics, social psychology, blockchain, AI, and anthropology, to prevent coordination failures and Moloch traps that repeatedly undermine the development of our societies and our ability to resolve conflict meaningfully, without violence.
Conclusion
As a species, we are evolving our understanding of human relations and what governance of our complex societies implies. Insights from history, anthropology, and game theory are essential to comprehend how we can deploy independent societies and their social structures.
We don’t have to assume some governance or government structure is the best because a ruler or dark triad personality says so. Instead, we can leverage data from many fields to achieve the best results. And the best results must mean “gross domestic happiness,” the capacity for individual self-actualization, minimal violence, and a flourishing economy.
It is an underlying meme that governance always seems like an ad hoc decision of some “leaderly” type. Those days are coming to their rightful conclusion. Governance is not about power dynamics and politics. It is about maximizing governance fitness, human cooperation, and the continuation of our existence on this planet and in the universe at large.
Are there real-world examples where ‘humanware’ solutions have successfully addressed coordination failures, similar to what the article describes? I’d love to hear thoughts on this!
I'm glad to find this. I make the same kind of distinction between government and governance in my book Pioneering Prosperity: The Morazan Model for Free Cities.