How deep have we trapped ourselves in the mindset of stagnation? Once you live through a period of technological change, it is not possible to believe in this perverse myth.

After the steam engine came the factory, the locomotive, the modern city. After the transistor came the internet, email, Google, Facebook, and the entire digital economy. New technologies are the beginning of an explosion in social mobility. Believe fully in your moral and technological convictions and build. No great technological change comes without social reorganization.

The moral slogans of the twentieth century are withering fast. We live in anomalous times morally repugnant to civilizations past, from the British Empire to the Romans to the Mongols to the Han. Soon, our self-imposed straightjackets will look as unreasonable as any dead moral system.

Morality is important because it is how we organize law, taxation, safety, culture, and commerce. Morality will change markets, research, startup formation, investing, and daily life. It already has.

No one understands how far the snowball will roll. Those who tell right from wrong no longer act with conviction. They know not that they are winning. Every day, new iniquity and abuse is unveiled around them. They think only pessimistic thoughts. They see only disenchanted traces of false gods. They do not believe that a new morality can be formed. But it will, and it is inevitable.

This is not a persuasive article in the traditional sense. This is an article to describe how far the world will change and how to build the new world. This is an article to persuade those who already believe in concepts to act with full faith in their beliefs, to destroy our enemies and welcome our time.

Early reviewers of this article persuaded me to launch the vision first, and the execution later. But I am working on something to capitalize on this moment, and you should get in touch in the ways you know how if you’re interested.

The Veil of Deception

The internet is unveiling long-hidden truths. The moral and political architecture you live under was the direct consequence of television and radio. Broadcast is one-to-many while the internet is peer-to-peer. Some consequences are obvious, while others are well-hidden. Past technologies inherently distorted information in a narrative and projective direction, favoring authoritarian egalitarianism. The internet, revealing the full extent of other players’ values, behavior, and social organization, favors self-improving order. Unlike television or print, the internet is an environment with natural peers, natural friends and enemies. The internet is a new system of moral relations.

Now, the first generation to fully mature in the internet age is only just reaching adulthood. And can see exactly how television morality has pathologically lied to everyone for over a century. The internet revealed to everyone that the underclass cannot exist without mass subsidization and exception from the rule of law. Western regimes follow the moral rules of the TV dinner, and as a result have accumulated a political Looter class with two constant demands.

1. Reduction of standards to accommodate the criminal underclass

2. Arbitrary persecution of the most productive members of society

All of this matters to you personally. You may think you know the depth of the West’s moral failure. Perhaps you oppose racial quotas, criminality, or socialism. Your beliefs are noble, but they do not constitute the breadth of how morality will change. It is not merely that America has been subject to the hostage demands of its criminal underclass. Not merely that kind, hardworking, and noble men made slaves to the base and feral. What has not fully been conceptualized is how much the flesh of the ordinary man has been cut and misshaped to subsidize this inverted moral order. We don’t know what man will look like once he and his brothers push each up other towards greatness rather than down towards parasitism. Now is not merely the time of self-improving technology, but self-improving morality.

Trench Lawfare

At present, the concept of law itself has been completely inverted. And with the inversion of formal law is the inversion of its penumbra — expectation and necessity. Inverted law will be fixed in due time, but inverted culture can be fixed immediately.

A necessary question of law is who the law governs. As observed by Plato, all laws govern a specific people. For instance, American laws govern American citizens. Criminals who evade capture or who the state exempts from prosecution are immune from law. To know whether laws are just, we must ask whether laws promote just or unjust people.

An uncontroversial example is waste and fraud in public schools and universities. Excess of ninety percent of resources are directed towards dysfunctional students who in past decades would be correctly judged unfit for schooling. Programs for the smart but financially poor kids are shredded to subsidize the violent and disruptive — the cultural and often biological offspring of the criminal underclass. The earliest sacrifice of the best for the worst. This is an intentional construction of a half-century of education policy, dominanted by egalitarian activists and politicians.

For the worst, not only are their lives subsidized by the taxpayer, but law itself is suspended. Consider two-tier policing, most sensational in Britain, but occurring around the world. Law no longer provides equal protection to races or sexes. Victim groups have an exception to stab, murder, or otherwise victimize ‘oppressors’ based on race, sex, and nationality. Equally important but overlooked, Western law creates special liability for people running productive business, excessive and contradictory “regulation” for those who register above-board establishments. These are two faces of the same legal system. The same egalitarians, often precisely the same lawmakers, are responsible for both.

The equally important counterpart to this trend is that legal liability for productive Americans has expanded to a ridiculous degree. Consider the “Caution: HOT” print visible on cups and storefront across the West. This print is a legal requirement due to liability law. A Looter judge ruled that McDonalds must compensate their customers if they spill coffee on themselves without realizing that coffee is hot. The standard established in this case holds businesses accountable for not treating their customers as universally retarded. How did we arrive at such a ridiculous standard? This was not an attempt to create a just law, nevermind a just people. Rather, it is the natural conclusion of Looter ‘logic’, a post-hoc rationalization of subsidizing the underclass at any opportunity. However ridiculous the situation, egalitarians are drawn to narratives to present productive classes as villains and the underclass, however at fault, as victim.

In fact, the more an underperformer is responsible for their own or others’ suffering, the more the Looter sympathesizes. The Looter does not recognize cause and effect, only opportunity to loot from the productive and generous people who they terrorize.

All American liability, workplace safety, administrative, and welfare law derives from this framework. Every underperformer is an opportunity for looting, sympathetic under the right doublethink. This doublethink is so pervasive that self-identified conservatives seek to appeal to these traditions. It is not that conservatives prefer the looters; they maintain the natural human disgust productive Americans have for them. It is that the emotional connotations have ingrained themselves so deeply to form a pattern of automatic action, that Plato’s question of “who the law rules”, once an obvious question, does not even appear in their minds. The most important function of this doublethink is to make you forget that question.

A liability lawsuit is “justice” by definition. “Accountability”, “regulation”, “safety”, all propaganda terms used to loot the productive and hide the question of whether their lives have been improved when these catchphrases are used in an extortion racket. Safety in this sense has nothing to do with whether people are murdered on the street or doctors promoted for their race kill their patients. Instead, safety is the cudgel against new and interesting technologies like AI and nuclear energy, which offer productive people a career path outside of the Looter belief system. An economic transaction invisible to the Looter panopticon is “unsafe”. The Looter understanding of safety is irrelevant to physical safety, which they aggressively deteriorate by subsidizing and integrating the criminal underclass. Governance by connotation is so severe that certain self-professed conservatives, inevitably boomers, continue to expand the liability looting regime to the internet and to AI, unaware that they are handing their children’s future to people who hate them.

Noncrime Doublethink

The mindset of the Looter is simple, though self obfuscating. The method of looting is to label all constructive development as exploitation, identify an aggreived party, absolve that party of all responsibility, and extort the other party for all damages, perceived and real. This is why the Looter loves the criminal underclass.

The Looters and the criminal underclass are not always the same people. The criminal underclass are the people who commit the crimes. The Looters are the political and legal apparatus — lawmakers, administrators, activists, lawyers, and judges — that justifies the crimes.

The relationship between Looter and criminal is symbiotic. Any damage criminals create, the Looters multiply and exponentiate for looting. When both parties are satisfied with their transaction Looters must invent some aggrieved third party — their reason for their war against freedom of association and freedom of speech. If grievance can be indirect, then Looters can extort every productive person, even if every last one of their customers were 100% satisfied.

At face value, this is simply organized crime. Except the modern Looter’s project is not organized; it is a free for all of ever-expanding criminals’ rights, legal nonprofits, and liabilities, a cthnonic growth with no ruler, no gang leader responsible for the preservation of their territory.

Its boundaries far exceed organized crime. Traditional organized crime is interested solely in their victims knowing who controls violence and paying accordingly. Looters are no longer capable of controlling the state monopoly on violence – the criminal underclass constantly victimizes even the most loyal of progressives. Instead, Looters control speech, thought, and loyalty. Looter-created laws mandate that this is done parasitically within firms, through legal and HR. They circumvent the first amendment through the selective suspension of freedom of association in business.

Tragically, this has led many great leaders to abandon their dreams. It has led them to do nothing, or pursue what is wrong rather than what is right. Large portions of the economy have been annihilated by this regulation, which governs thought as much as it does action. Those industries are at best offshored and at worst nonexistent.

In hindsight, we can view the rise of Uber as a digital revolution against the Looters stealing from riders and drivers. The moral language moved in parallel with technology. The Looters’ crime was only widely understood in retrospect.

“So hear me out. We make every taxi driver buy these overpriced physical medals, basically designed for organized criminals to launder money. We issue so few of them that taxis are five times as expensive as other American cities and the medals cost six figures. And these do nothing to actually control the quality of the cabs and when Uber bypassed them, quality went up somewhat.”

This was straightforward theft, a policy with zero benefit and heavy costs, whose minor purpose was to steal money for insiders and whose major purpose was purely to destroy. An overwhelming majority of regulations sold as ‘safety’ all look like this in hindsight. This is because they are nearly universally spearheaded and enforced by Looters, whose concern is never with accounting cost and benefit, rather always to sabotage the productive in the name of the underclass.

None of this is complaining for complaining’s sake. This is an optimistic article. Because all of this is operative information. It is time to act. There’s no disaster coming. It’s already happened. And America has ticked on. We’ve overcome the hardest bend in the road without even knowing it. It is only in hindsight that society comes to the consensus that Uber, X, Youtube, Spotify, Udio, and Waymo are all obviously prosocial and their enemies cartoonishly evil. Post-Looter morality revivals of journalism, medicine, manufacturing (both in and out of the West), energy, and chemical production are already in the making.

While the time for new law is around the corner, now is the time to defy noncrime doublethink. All secondary actions, enforced not by law but by social ostracization, are illegitimate and no longer carry social sanction. Plenty of new transactions, organizations, cultures, and economies are possible by punching through Looter social enforcement like the paper mache it is.

Remember that we now have functionally untraceable manufacturing and global shipping. That itself is enough to create digital or physical storefronts to undermine the looters, not to mention 3D printing. What sublegal Looter shakedown and enforcement routines can be legally undermined? How much money would be saved by disrupting those Looters? There are identifiable and semi-liquid markets for Looter disruption. In some sense, any truthful market is a market for Looter disruption.

The digital revolution has already won for speech and art. Despite censorship attempts, everyone on the internet is constantly exposed to doublethink-shattering storylines. It is no longer possible to believe the criminal underclass are the victims. As those pillars fall, Looter psychology itself will be recognized for what it is. This recognition is already happening in greater numbers than any time in my lifetime, it just isn’t evenly distributed.

The crown jewel of this disruption is to supplant the current criminal justice system, whose function is to protect criminals from civilian justice more than to protect civilians or represent their interests. First private companies take on security duties, such as private security firms or private investigators. As parallel law enforcement scales, they will find it necessary to exclude conventional law enforcement in progressive cities to respond to uncontrollable criminals with lethal force. Everyone will realize this is a great thing in hindsight, like Ubers in New York but on a civilizational scale.

So come, build miracles with me. □

Occasionally, people will ask me what common practice will be considered universally barbaric by our descendants. There’s a common but unintelligent answer, which is eating meat. People who answer this way have not thought about the issue or are ignorant of the fact that Rawlsian egalitarianism is already in freefall. Because the moral framework of the world is shifting, all correct answers lie on a different moral framework, not an extension of the old framework.

The obvious answer is our tolerance of crime, which is already considered barbaric in East Asia.

The image of irreparable corruption in the American criminal system is something to celebrate, not to mourn. That image is caused by the rapid ascent1 in human morality, not a decline in legal practice.

The existence of pro-criminal judges is made out to be a grand conspiracy. It is indeed true that leftist judges release criminals early and allow them to rape, injure, or kill more innocent people. They create innumerable idealisms to defend this practice. Racial justice. Mental health. Criminals’ rights. All are reverse engineered from the judges’ emotion and desired outcomes. So it is no mistake to observe that some American judges are pro-criminal. But it is a mistake to blame this on a conspiracy of elites, say, Soros or Clinton and their subordinates. There may be elites who support criminality, but they are the effect, not the cause.

Uncensored media has triggered a preference cascade so widespread and deeply affecting that those who witness America’s tolerance for crime cannot attribute it to anything other than a devious plot.

American judges are pro-criminal because the American people were pro-criminal. Wide swathes of the American public and politicians of both Democratic and Republican parties supported pro-criminal policies. The terrorist left bombed the public and assassinated political figures during the 1960s and were rewarded with special civil rights. Anti-psychiatry because a cause celebre in the public eye and Reagan released asylum inmates into the public. Activist judges invented new criminal rights from whole cloth and the public celebrated.

Meanwhile, media was highly censored. Violent terrorists were celebrated as civil rights leaders when they should have been the target of airstrikes. All of this can and will be reversed, until the criminal underclass of America is rightly treated as Israel treats Hamas.2

The boomer public, including many Republicans, were part of this atrocious crime and coverup. It was the sentiment of the day, the current thing. Civil rights, criminal rights, and such deranged idealisms could sweep the country with little reporting on the practical consequences of their pro-crime policies. In 2026, everyone knows that being pro-criminal means that criminals commit more crime. Because of uncensored media, more people find out when criminals commit more crime. Americans can see the practical truth in countries like Singapore and El Salvador. Removing criminals from society reduces crime and drastically improves public quality of life. All of this has resulted in a tremendous shift in public opinion, that despite recent improvements, the past and present crime rate in America is intolerably high, and our remaining pro-criminal policies are unacceptable.

It is not the case that American law enforcement has gotten significantly less competent. In some places, the opposite is true. But the positive shift in American anti-criminal morality has outpaced any physical reduction of crime.

The shift has been so rapid that the American public has a tough time imagining how pro-crime their parents and grandparents were. The only way they can envision our current policies coming about is through some grand conspiracy. While the application remains schizophrenic, this is still a moral victory to be celebrated.

We are seeing the spiral of civilization re-emerge, first on the internet, and then in the world.

Escaping the Permanent Underclass

“Escaping the permanent underclass” is an amazing double entendre.

The premise of the original phrase is that AI will automate everyone’s jobs, which is a silly premise for the economically illiterate that deserves to be immediately disregarded.

What makes this phrase genius is that there is a real permanent underclass. And you have to escape their reach to enjoy your life.

By 2040, it likely makes zero sense to hire a human with a substantive criminal record. It may be equally inadvisable to hire any human with a record of suing their employer or leaking to journalists. There’s already a permanent underclass, people who are unhirable due to their tendency to violence, fraud, or other damage to the company. And they’re the permanent underclass you need to escape from. Civil rights law, age discrimination, unions, and other forms of socialism have attempted to make it difficult for man alone to escape from the permanent underclass. But AI, providential as it is, might make it possible for us.

This interpretation transforms “escaping the permanent underclass” from a premise with zero historical precedent to a practical action with plenty of historical precedent. Wartime refugees, fleeing ethnic pogroms, white flight3, and communist dissidents all had to “escape the permanent underclass”.

Escaping the permanent underclass, in the correct sense, is already happening. It’ll keep happening in new and interesting ways. Instead of moving to a new suburb, you might move to a new country.

Schizophrenic Populism

Populists blame a morally outrageous elite to hide their acceptance of a morally outrageous public.

My favorite argument for bombing Iran is “Iran is funding the terrorist left in America”. Which terrorist left co-belligerent will we be bombing? Obviously, we will not be bombing any of the terrorist left, who murder more American civilians in a month than Iran ever has or ever will.

There is a twisted logic to leftist and populist morality. The core thesis of populism is that elites are to blame, not the lower classes. Elites keep secrets, unlike the underclass who do their rapes and murders in public. In a sense, that is because even criminal elites have a better understanding of morality than the criminal underclass, who lack the basic foresight to expect their crimes to be punished.

Populism in practice looks like British cops arresting Prince Andrew on “state secrets” charges while they won’t arrest your block’s grooming gang. It’s not that Epstein shouldn’t have been arrested — it’s that his arrest should be ordinary. Epstein should be one of one hundred thousand shaved heads in an El Savador-style prison.

The ecstatic frenzy of internet populism delays its own victories by poisoning its own moral premises with schizophrenic delusions.

For instance, the Epstein scandal has predictably turned into a weapon of the leftist war on distinction. It is now a cudgel to imply that your average pedophile is an investor or CEO, instead of looking exactly like the rest of the criminal underclass. This has led many populists to swallow the leftist delusion that America’s problems are caused by the top 1%. In reality, 90% of America’s problems are caused by the bottom 1%. Virtually all of America’s problems are caused by the bottom 25%.

Providential Technologies

Make a list of the few legal ways that people are rewarded for good decisions and punished for bad decisions. Stock trading, social media, and prediction markets — basically the top three moral panics of our day. They are pathways for people to face merely financial4 consequences for their actions. The dying egalitarian order will try to ban all technologies and institutions which reward good decisions and punish bad decisions. In history, they have largely succeeded.

Social media is one of few things in modern life that rewards good and punishes evil. The most interesting, hardworking, and fun people I’ve ever met have all been through social media. Social media gives you what you want. If you want good, it gives you good. If you want evil, it gives you evil. Instead of reflecting, maturing, or even changing one’s preferences, the leftist and sometimes populist reaction has been to ban social media from schools, ban people under 18 from social media entirely, or to attack civilizational infrastructure such as datacenters. Populists follow all the rules of Shakespearean tragedy, destroying necessary paths to displace boomer morality. The same can be said for prediction markets or AI.

A popular theory of civilizational decline posits we need war and starvation to get truthful feedback. But truth finds a way. Truth has found a way in heavy industry, finance, and posting, until the force of the law bans distinction.

Funeral Parties

John Rawls has been dead for more than 20 years. Paul Ehrlich died this year. Peter Singer is 79; hopefully his clock is running out too. As I have written in long form, civilization requires the distinction between better and worse. All the evil men who have tried to erase or morally devalue this basic civilizational direction are dying. Philosophy is healing, funeral by funeral.

The twenty-first century will be a time of great moral reckoning, in which the plain truth that egalitarian idealisms hide are available to all. So if you believe in hard truths over convenient lies, take hope in the fact that the caskets we bury won’t return for several political eras.

I’ve been settling on a new aesthetic for the changing times ahead.

My old aesthetic was wartime abundance: there are people who want to make America poorer, lazier, and more criminal. They are evil, cannot be reasoned with, and we must destroy them with overwhelming force.

That’s still true, but it’s not an appropriate aesthetic for building new companies, software, and philosophies. So what’s the new aesthetic? It’s providence — bringing a disco ball to Paul Ehrlich’s funeral.

I received the following questions from Richard Jordan in response to my article on Rawls and television. They are excellent questions and examples, which clarify several of the weaknesses in the original article. Here are the questions in full:

As you know, Rawls is just the latest in a long line of state-of-nature theorists, many of whom tend toward some blank-slate view of human nature. If the appeal of the Veil of Ignorance is driven by tv, by "a routine of technology" that hides human differences, then why did these earlier philosophies also catch on? The only answer that occurs to me is that Rawls requires more interchangeable humans than Hobbes or Locke. Is that right? And is that belief what television enabled? (No one who lived through the English Civil War could suffer the delusion that we all basically want the same things!)

Similarly, living vicariously through fiction is nothing new: one could say the same thing about novels or really any kind of extended narrative. I'm willing to buy that 20th c. television was so very canned that it succeeded in creating the illusion of a homogenous humanity, but I don't see any evidence that man "does not have empathy for the abstract other — until the invention of the television set." CS Lewis is famous for describing the ways novels allow us to inhabit other lives, Adam Smith grounds his moral theory on the ability to inhabit and anticipate generic human responses to our behaviors, Vergil enabled Romans to sympathize with Dido, and the Iliad (pace BAP) portrays Hector in such a way that no Greek could but have admired this Trojan "Other."

I will answer the second question first, because it helps with answering the first question. This question deals with vicarious empathy, which I describe in the original article:

Through the television screen, Americans could vicariously live the lives of others. Not just through the daily news, but sitcoms, documentaries, and period pieces. Sit on the couch, turn on the TV, and feel the Veil of Ignorance wash over you.

These vicarious narratives are not organic. They were constructed piecewise by producers trained to dramatically pull you in.

Richard observes:

Similarly, living vicariously through fiction is nothing new … I don't see any evidence that man "does not have empathy for the abstract other — until the invention of the television set."

I agree that the distinction between empathy for the abstract other and empathy for a concrete other is difficult to define. I might have failed to define it sufficiently in the original article. Comparing the other forms of media Richard introduces gives more color and nuance to this distinction.

I used the examples of TV (engaging with media as a main character) and social media (engaging with media as a “commenter”) as one example in the original article. Richard mentions ancient epic poems and novels, which both demonstrate more dimensions to this distinction. Epic poems in general, and the Iliad and Aenead in specific, are fantastic examples of empathy with a concrete other. They are typically told from the perspective of a messenger, relating a tale witnessed or heard from others. They take the perspective of an outsider, either in a third person perspective or a first person observer. This perspective and method builds a concrete empathy (sympathy may be a better term). Civilizations across time have been able to use art to better understand the conditions, way of life, and thought process of concrete others.

Another way to illustrate the difference between concrete and abstract empathy is by considering the experience of each. By indwelling in a main character and being conditioned to experience his or her emotional state, one assumes that their own moral instincts and habits are sufficient to “fill in the gaps” of missing context. Context doesn’t add, it takes away. Concrete empathy is the opposite. In the case of the ancients, I think the concrete empathy is contingent on the historical and personal context of the other civilization. It is assumed that the instincts and practice of the other will be shaped by different circumstances, both as a norm and by the structure of the narrative — for example, a messenger travelling to a faraway land and witnessing the story. Context identifies points of agreement, building those bridges based on specific shared traits and virtues. Context is used to add points of empathy.

Initially, these norms might reasonably appear as distinctions without a difference. I disagree, but understand why many might hold that position. Rawls himself is a great help in identifying these distinctions. Rawl’s theory of justice is a consequence of valorizing of abstract empathy, but not concrete empathy. Concrete empathy can speak to a part but rarely, if ever, the whole of another’s experience and moral view. It is impossible to measure the moral views of others and therefore impossible to construct the original position.

The novel is an example that better critiques the distinction I make between the era of film/television and the eras prior to it. Novels, particularly first person novels which emphasize the protagonist’s emotional state, do create the same category of indwelling experience as TV. They result in the same category of abstract empathy. I do think there is a difference of degree in the amount of abstract empathy in novels compared to TV. Consequently, there is an increase in blank-slate thought and proto-Rawlsian philosophies in the post-printing press, but pre-film era. However, this increase is nowhere near the magnitude as the television era in either philosophy or general society.

Moving on, let’s consider Richard’s second question:

As you know, Rawls is just the latest in a long line of state-of-nature theorists, many of whom tend toward some blank-slate view of human nature. If the appeal of the Veil of Ignorance is driven by tv, by "a routine of technology" that hides human differences, then why did these earlier philosophies also catch on?

His first subquestion raises the point of interchangeable conceptions of human nature.

The only answer that occurs to me is that Rawls requires more interchangeable humans than Hobbes or Locke. Is that right?

I think that this distinction is definitely correct for Locke. Locke does have blank-slate tendencies, especially when arguing against heredity, divine right, and monarchy. Still, I believe Locke sees a pluralism of cultures or beliefs, whether by nature or nurture, that makes men non-interchangeable. To me, the Rawlsian step is to define the original position as something universally accessible to rational-thinking men. This presents a different solution than the bottom-up, emergent pluralism of Locke.

Hobbes is a more complex case. I definitely don’t believe that Hobbes requires humans to be interchangeable beyond certain political rights. The most famous description of political equality Hobbes uses is the following, from Leviathan:

“Nature hath made men so equall, in the faculties of body, and mind; as that though there bee found one man sometimes manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another; yet when all is reckoned together, the difference between man, and man, is not so considerable, as that one man can thereupon claim to himselfe any benefit, to which another may not pretend, as well as he. For as to the strength of body, the weakest has strength enough to kill the strongest, either by secret machination, or by confederacy with others, that are in the same danger with himselfe.

It’s a fascinating formulation of political equality that I’ve spent much time thinking and writing about. (https://www.fromthenew.world/p/the-morality-of-envy-is-a-remnant, https://www.fromthenew.world/p/dysfunction-and-dictatorship ). While it implies equality in certain political rights, I don’t think it affirms a modern “blank slate” understanding of human interchangeability. Hobbes explicitly states that there are men “manifestly stronger in body, or of quicker mind then another”, which is certainly a rejection of the blank slate vision.

In general, I don’t believe that moral egalitarianism, and especially political egalitarianism, are a TV phenomenon. I think there is a particular homogenizing and universalizing character to Rawlsian egalitarianism that makes it distinct from previous forms of political egalitarianism, such as Hobbes or Locke. The distinction between Marxism (as laid out by Marx) and modern interpretations of the socialist project is an interesting case study of this change over time. Joseph Heath has an excellent article on exactly this topic with a detailed intellectual history:

In Due Course

John Rawls and the death of Western Marxism

Back when I was an undergraduate, during the final years of the cold war, by far the most exciting thing going on in political philosophy was the powerful resurgence of Marxism in the English-speaking world. Most of this work was being done under the banner of “analytical Marxism” (aka “no-bullshit Marxism”), following the publication of Gerald Cohen’s…

Read more

2 years ago · 1271 likes · Joseph Heath

In summary, the asymmetric power between capital and labor was not seen as unjust due to the existence of inequality, but because of asymmetric political and economic leverage. It had a foundation of cultural polarization between capital and labor, not cultural similarity. Many Marxists, if not Marx himself, did not believe it was even possible for capitalists to understand them or empathize with them.

Once again, a true and understandable criticism of the original article is that the Rawlsian era is marked by a difference in degree rather than a difference in kind. I still believe that difference in degree matters. I believe that a similar shift in degree back towards concrete empathy, rather than abstract empathy, will be consequential for both philosophy and politics.

As we move beyond broadcast television, we will move beyond the philosophy of vicarious egalitarianism. More than anyone, John Rawls spoke for this philosophy.

Rawls’ most famous concept is The Veil of Ignorance — the idea that to project yourself into the position people of different capabilities, culture, core beliefs, or circumstances is the pinnacle of justice.

This concept was not sold to ordinary man until the modern world. Ordinary man has empathy for his family, his community, and real individuals surrounding him. He does not have empathy for the abstract other — until the invention of the television set.

Rawls described his Veil of Ignorance in A Theory of Justice in 1971, a year after NBC Nightly News first aired. It was the height of broadcast television, a high-production value monoculture scripted daily to suit egalitarian tastes. Through the television screen, Americans could vicariously live the lives of others. Not just through the daily news, but sitcoms, documentaries, and period pieces. Sit on the couch, turn on the TV, and feel the Veil of Ignorance wash over you.

These vicarious narratives are not organic. They were constructed piecewise by producers trained to dramatically pull you in. Cast a fishing hook with the ideal bait for the target audience, then reel them in at a rapid pace, pulling them deeper and deeper into the narrativized life of someone on the other side of the world. Every piece of this script is optimized: selectively picking facts, making up entire worlds, culminating in the most addictive of narratives.

With a routine like that, what American wouldn’t be addicted to the Veil of Ignorance? Every night you sat down and experienced someone else’s life. Often, you lived multiple lives per night. The Veil of Ignorance became a routine of technology. With conditioning like that, how could anyone stand up to Rawls?

But these lives were carefully constructed fakes. Screenwriting logic dictated the precise plot beats to lure someone in and keep them there. Rawls’s Veil of Ignorance is better described as a Matrix of Ignorance.

Portray an actual life — full of real customs, storylines, decisions, and consequences — and there’s no way Americans relate. Live, in-person television started this downfall. It was the first deviation from the narrative hook. It pierced the Veil of Ignorance live from the scene.

Social media hammered the nail in the coffin. It fed pieces of context to be interpreted and reinterpreted by anyone, anywhere. It fed raw images, personalities, shower thoughts and ideologies. The stream of consumable information was no longer limited to vicarious experiences to indwell in.

Social media tore the Veil of Ignorance to shreds by presenting real opinions. Anyone who engages with social media naturally engages as a distinct individual. Most social media platforms have a comments section, where you and thousands of others can comment as a distinct person, outside of a piece of content. Now, you can get countless examples of people whose fundamental values and abilities could never be interchanged with yours in the click of a button. And by scrolling down to the comments section you can view the full kaleidoscope of difference in individual value and values.

John Rawls died in 2002. He barely lived to see 9/11. He didn’t get to see social networks, personalized algorithms, or artificial intelligence. I would like to think he died happy, with a final vindication.

I cannot blame Rawls for his egalitarian legacy. He was a philosopher whose logic embodied the medium of his era. Television created a consensus of egalitarian politics. Rawls was the sharpest of its messengers.

Nonetheless, I’m glad that era is over. Let’s lift the Veil of Ignorance and admit that we are not the same.