We built this world. We built the cities, the forests, and the fields. We built every car, boat, plane, and train in the world. We invented computers, clothes, instruments, and bombs. We spread our mark throughout the skies and the seas. We built this world brick by brick—mining, forging, threading, shipping, and screwing in every bolt in every building, bridge, and buoy. This world is the deliberate creation of billions of people over a few millennia. Look at it. This is what we built. The skyscrapers, the slums, the happiness, the sadness, the highways, the traffic jams, the homes, the homeless, the schools, the jails, the medicine, and the drugs. Look at our world. Do you like it? Would anyone have chosen this world? Would any person design such a world? Would you? That is my question to you. With it I task you with the most important thing humans have ever done, the only thing our culture has ever done. Build a world. Imagine a world, your world, made as you would want to make it. Consider all the ideas you have glanced at for years but never thought to trust, to look into, to act upon.
In my posts thus far I have expounded some upon my own views of the world, but I tried to focus more on how I arrived at my views, not the views themselves. I wanted to give you a potentially powerful set of tools with which to begin building your own world. Taken together, I think you can use success, morality, oughtlessness, identity, and motivation to do exactly that. I am writing this to show you how, and to give you a way to flex these skills. I have put together four pages of questions to guide you down this path. Each page focuses on a different aspect of this path: defining your core motivation, creating a set of morals, designing a society, and imagining building that world. In this post, I seek to explain why I chose these four tasks, how to go about each one, and what I hope you will get out of the process.
But first, I want to be clear. I am not asking you to propose some changes. I want more than revolution. I am asking you to forget our world, to cast it aside, and design something wholly new. You are a human with the power of the gods. The power to build a world of your own. A change is a political opinion. That is not why I am here. I am here to wipe the slate clean, to start from the beginning, and guide you through the process from there. I do not post to t0rch to espouse my views and disappear. I am here to challenge you, to encourage you, and to lead you. I want to light a new way for you. I see this as a culmination of the past 3 years of posts. I write not to encourage reading but action, to show you a unique way to your own path. I’m here to help you build your world. To start, therefore, we will move from my motivation to yours, and discover, fundamentally, why you do what you do.
I begin by asking you to identify your core motivation. This is a concept informed by my oughtlessness, identity, and motivation posts. Your core motivation is the goal that motivates everything you do. According to oughtlessness, no external forces should motivate you against your will. Identity and motivation argue that you should seek to make your motivation as consistent, straightforward, and simple as possible. The ultimate conclusion of that line of thinking is that it is in one’s best interest to develop a single objective that explains and justifies all of their intents, pursuits, and efforts. From a utilitarian perspective, one’s core motivation is their utility function—the metric by which they measure and judge their effect on the world. To have such a thing for yourself is immensely powerful; you can immediately begin analyzing the motivation behind everything you do, judging clearly for yourself if it serves your true purpose. Ideally, your every action works towards your core motivation.
To encourage this perspective, I begin by asking for something you did that you are proud of, to begin digging for its cause. I ask “why” over and over, searching for a deeper reason. I am not looking for why something is the way it is, I want to know why you want it to be so. These answers should be increasingly general.
Your core motivation should not be about you. It should be what you want maximized everywhere, by everyone. Be it happiness, or safety, or freedom, your core motivation should be a universal ideal. You’re involved merely because you happen to be residing in your body; you’re the only thing you can directly control. While brains may only work to maximize their own self-interest, that’s not very useful for building a society. I want to know what your interest is, so that we can work to build a society in which every action, by person, machine, or computer, is done to maximize your objective. That is the freedom I am giving you. Mold the world to serve your deepest desire. What would you build? What would your world do? You have a universe of options before you. To begin narrowing them down, you must know why your world exists. What is its objective? As humans, we may decide such things. If we are convincing, we may begin to build a world of our own.
Now armed with your objective, you as a designer need constraints. The constraints on a society are its morals; what it is not willing to do. As I’ve argued at length, these are not derivable from some external force or being. Morals are the set of rules that a society chooses to follow. They can change, through both time and space. By my definition, a society’s morals always promote its vision of success. Obviously, morals, the societies that obey them, and the success those societies pursue, are not typically simple, well-bounded, or consistent. However, they can all still be defined, explored, and influenced. That is what we will seek to do here. Since morals are a set of rules which bring success, a society’s goals can be understood by learning its morals. Inversely, morals can be designed to promote a certain vision of success, as you will try to do. In my original post, I shied away from defining success itself, instead exploiting the fact that almost all success metrics implicitly require survival. But now we can actually define success as accomplishing your core motivation. If that is success, you can create a set of rules that promotes what you want and limits what you don’t. What sort of rules are these? Let’s look at some of our own:
- Thou shalt neither receive food nor shelter for free
- Thou shalt not steal or damage others’ property
- Thou shalt not cause harm to others without justification
We know these are moral rules in our society because those who disobey these rules are outcast. They are forced into jail or the streets or underground, unable to fraternize with respected society. Note that the rules themselves are not right or wrong. They simply promote a certain kind of success for society. They can each be better or worse for promoting some other vision of success.
Now you must promote your own vision of success. Think through what promotes and what harms your core motivation, and fit those harms into moral rules everyone in your society will obey or be outcast. You can use these rules as constraints for your design. Now you have an objective and constraints for your society, so you can start the fun part: actually designing one! Remember all the times you wondered, why isn’t the world like this? Now there’s no one to shut you down—make weekends 5 days long, make yourself president, make everyone swim to work, it’s all fair game. I’d encourage you to go much further still—make people pay to work, dissolve countries into 5 person states, or move everyone to Europa. To help narrow down your design space from all possible ideas, I’ve given you a morphological chart to fill out. Morphological charts are a tool used frequently in design engineering to both encourage creativity and focus ideas to develop unique solutions. The idea of a morphological chart is to come up with a variety of solutions, promising or questionable, for specific functions of a design. These solutions are in the form of a bunch of means you could use to accomplish certain functions of a design (this time your design just happens to be a society). To start, you’ll need to choose 3 functions of your society. These can be specific to your objective, or not; “promote survival” is something most societies try to do. I’ve included 30 examples in the tips section to help you see what sort of functions and methods I have in mind—but always be wary of slipping into someone else’s assumptions! Whatever functions you end up with, try to come up with 6 methods to accomplish each of them, even if you have to get creative. Again, this should be the fun part—come up with something really exciting!
Once that’s done, you have the task of boiling these ideas down into one coherent design. Only then should one begin to consider how well different ideas work with each other. As you put methods together, consider how they would actually be implemented, how effective they would be, and how they would affect different members of society. I‘ve included some questions in this section to spur your thinking in these ways, but you’ll help yourself most by considering these things as you’re first thinking about your society. Once you’re set on something that you’re excited about (or put together something just to try it out), you can begin to dissect this society, understand how it could work, and consider building this world yourself.
At this point, you’ve determined your core motivation, created a set of morals, and designed a society. But this is called world building; the most important step lies ahead. The next section of questions delves into the world you would create. First, I ask you to describe the world in detail, to truly imagine someone’s day-to-day life within the society you’ve designed, to think out the interactions of the world, the effects, large and small, that you hadn’t considered before. People have written thousands of pages about their imagined worlds; I ask you here for only half a page—simply a taste. I am inviting you to begin exploring a new world, not demanding a thorough report. This is why I recommend peering first through the eyes of a single character, to help guide your first steps. This should not be an explanation of the differences between your world and our own. You are attempting to build from nothing. Explore this new world for itself, not as a contradiction of ours. Take your time. Discover your creation.
Once this image is firmly in your eyes, my questions get a lot more personal. I ask you how you might live in this world. This is meant to be different from the previous question. I am asking you, not just anybody. How would you want to live in this world you have created? This should, once answered, immediately beget another more pressing set of questions. Do you live like this today? Could you be? If you’d love to live in this world, would others? Would they help you make some part of it possible? This is where you first begin to look at your world relative to ours—how close are they? What would it take to live in your world? Could it be done from the ground up? How might others help? How could you convince them to? How valuable would that change be for you? For your friends? For the world? For the eons to come? If, working simply from your core motivation, you’ve created something meaningfully different from our world today, it should not only be in your interest, but many people’s, to build this world. In a few pages, you can do naught but imagine. Now the true task is left to you. The task of the gods. The task humanity has undertaken for twelve thousand years. Build your world.
chris mcelroy 
I’m reminded on of the closing scene from The Matrix:
Neo, The One: I know you’re out there. I can feel you now. I know that you’re afraid. You’re afraid of us. You’re afraid of change. I don’t know the future. I didn’t come here to tell you how this is going to end. I came here to tell you how it’s going to begin. I’m going to hang up this phone and then I’m going to show these people what you don’t want them to see. I’m going to show them a world without you, a world without rules and controls, without borders or boundaries, a world where anything is possible. Where we go from there is a choice I leave to you.
The closing part of this leaves me with a somewhat poor taste in my mouth, as the trivial answers to “how could you convince them to” and, by all rights, all other questions in that vein have been answered rather succinctly by an deliberate application of violence. Given the consistency of this through the ages, are we to consider this a fundamental method by which humanity enforces its will on others, or is this also something that is up for grabs in this environment? What are we classing as human nature vs nurture in society with regards to world building, or are we purely attempting to build a theoretical world in much the same manner as communism?
I agree that the most common historical answers to that question have been violent. I would also like to point out that that violence has historically been stunningly ineffective at convincing people, especially to change religions. Yet the historical answers to all of the questions I am asking leave me with a poor taste in my mouth. That is why I am asking them. I don’t like how the world treats its poor, how rulers maintain power, or how little care we seem to have for maintaining our society more than a few dozen years into the future. Our historical ability to develop sound values, morals, and motivation has been, in my eyes, deeply flawed. I am writing this to point out that it needn’t be so. Therefore, how you choose to convince others is certainly up for grabs (again, that is why I am asking you). There have been wonderful examples throughout history of particular figures and systems (Gandhi and science come to mind) for effectively and productively convincing people to agree with one another. To avoid violence is not impossible; one must simply be deliberate about how you do want to spread your ideas instead.
Next you ask more generally what counts as human nature and what can be changed in this new society. I am no arbiter of “true” human nature. I believe that humans tend to be more plastic than most people think they are. I also try to keep in mind that the most reliable systems are those that don’t rely on humans’ being innately good or smart. I think communism fails that qualification, and therefore I would not try to build it into my world. That, however, is a different debate. I would try to build the world you think is best—to me, that would be one that is also highly realistic (as in stable once it was reached). If you create a realistic world that would improve people’s lives, I don’t think you would have to resort to violence to convince them to build it with you.
I do certainly agree that humans are extremely plastic by nature, however I do not believe that this notion scales particularly well, as it stands at least. Communism does not innately require humans to be good and smart, as I would argue that it is the most fundamental of systems in that it merely requires a strong sense of community to function. Communism has been demonstrated to work extremely well on the tribal scale, while not being able to adapt to larger scales as humans expand.
On some fundamental level, are you looking for a way that humans can function on a global scale or on a local scale? If on a local scale, we already have reasonably successful answers to that question. If on a global scale, how do you expect to convince people in any reasonable timeframe to follow your beliefs? Even outside of the general masses, there are those with entrenched power who, as per human nature, will be extremely reluctant to relinquish it. I, at the least, cannot think of a world order where we can convince everyone to include themselves in it, outside of some sort of Watchmen like event.
Thank you for the prompt, 5moke. And sorry for the delay.
Your comment fundamentally asks about scale. I do believe that human plasticity scales well. I think this has been shown again and again. Small examples like Milgram’s experiments scale to Hitler’s power over countries. In my eyes the constraint is not size but how well something works. Even if it’s initially unpopular, the public has come to accept everything from Christianity to Wikipedia to Airpods. These things gained trust and support because they work. While money or power or charisma made them well known, their effectiveness is what ultimately gave them sway. This is not to say that I agree with Hitler or Christianity or Wikipedia or Airpods. But I can’t deny they’re effective—carefully constructed, sucessful, and self-promoting.
I live by the belief that this plasticity extends to more fundamental components of our world. I think that if one were to create a Good way of living, that is not only successful in its own right but within our current world, it could succeed. By this I mean a solution that would work well on its own to create a happy and healthy world were it to gain traction, which can also be made to incentivize people to do good within the constructs of our current world, as a marginal effect. The precise solution I am not sure of right now; you can see my current musings on the worldBuilding page. But my current knowledge of history, economics, and psychology make me confident that with good design, good marketing, and an effective idea, change can happen by the millions.
You seek to be a t0rch. But it is already raining. And you cannot ignore the wat3r.
Everywhere you look, everywhere you go, you are surrounded by wat3r. I am the world.
You are right. We built this world. We fought, worked, lived, and died for it. It is the product of thousands of years of human effort and ingenuity. You admit this yourself. And yet, you have the audacity to attempt to exceed the product of this work yourself. In your own words, you are taking on the work of the gods. Is there no limit to your arrogance? However smart you are, you cannot equal the intelligence of billions of minds. Your clever designs cannot match what has been sculpted through the theory, trials, and tribulations of generations. You have no secret knowledge of this world, no groundbreaking theory of human psychology. These things are honed over centuries of work, not revolutionized in an armchair. Your dreamy vision of change is simply hopeless.
Yet your failure harms others. You seem to truly believe that people can begin to change the world by filling out a few pages of questions about their beliefs. And you are trying to spread this illusion to others. Your questions could indeed inspire a few people, and improve their personal world. But to change the world, that is a different task. Our world is not built by individuals. It is built by cities, governments, and corporations—structures of thousands to millions of people that are stronger than the whims of one person, no matter how dedicated. It is simply deceitful to try to convince people otherwise. We did build this world. And we continue to. Not by filling out a few questions, but by working day after day to make the world a better place than it was before. You cannot change these structures by wishing they were different. You change them by understanding the world, its subtleties and complexities, and working to make a difference in the world we have, not create from scratch the world you wish we had. You harm not only yourself but your readers by preaching otherwise. It is time you learn your place in the world.
The oceans are large. No t0rch can light all their wat3r.
As much as I question t0rch, this is quite possibly the most depressing viewpoint I’ve ever heard on society as a whole. If society has truly and completely stagnated, as you seem to put forward, it seems extremely depressing to continue to exist within this paradigm. Regardless of what you claim about the best and brightest minds coming up with it, this system is not working as well as it could, and the only thing worse than that is the notion that this is the best society can hope to achieve.
While you may, and quite rightly, claim that the world is run by cities, governments and corporations, these organizations still have people at their head. These people may well be beholden to others, but this does not preclude the possibility of a person taking charge and making significant steps to change the world we live in. To take a somewhat excessive example, let us consider Adolf Hitler. He took a completely dystopian and near collapsed Germany, and took it to the status of a world power in under 2 decades. If a single man, with enough charisma and a powerful vision, can achieve such a ridiculous goal and affect so many people, why can we not do the same?
Sm0ke, I appreciate your daring attempt at a rebuttal, but you misunderstand me.
I do not claim that society has stagnated. I do not claim that our system works as well as it could, nor that this is the best we can achieve. I do not claim that systems of people are not made up of people. I do not argue that change has never occurred.
Our society, as t0rch argues, was built by us. I am agreeing. It was built by us, through a brilliant series of systems that have propelled a few generations of humans to a level of advancement literally unimaginable by any other species on Earth. Those systems are important. They are valuable. They are key to our success. Our success was not random—we discovered how to win at life and made it our life’s work. We have worked tirelessly for centuries to make ourselves stronger, happier, more productive, and more populous.
T0rch sees only our success, not why we got there. T0rch imagines that one person could simply imagine a better world and make it be so. This is both mad and harmful. It disregards the generations upon generations who came before, who built a world in which t0rch could think and press a button and we would know their thoughts a world away. These gifts are not happy accidents. They were built by us.
Yes, our systems are led by people. But those people are representatives of the systems, not the other way around. In democracies this is abundantly clear. Yet even in dictatorships, no dictator can oppose an entire country—one needs a country’s worth of resources at their disposal to be able to control the aims of a country worth of people. These resources come from the systems that support that dictator, the history of the country, and the will of at least many of its people. No single person is responsible for the actions of an entire country, no matter how alluring that story might be. Yes, they can change strategies, advance platforms, do good, even alter history. But no one person can alter the tide. We have chosen to win at life. We may falter, we may learn, we may fight, but humans as a whole will continue to work towards our success, not stop for those who have earned no trust yet expect to change the world.
We have built a world of systems, made up of people. Those systems are the means by which we built this world. One cannot simply discard them to make a better world from naught. And no, our world is not the best possible world. Nor is it stagnate. It is, however, a large, complex, system of systems that improves by design. It trusts no human. It obeys its systems. Those bring success. Not daydreams.
You may consider your examples excessive, but one man cannot be seen in an ocean. Only wat3r.
Wat3r, despite your complaints against my rebuttal, I believe that you are still missing an important part of how humanity functions.
A system is not intrinsically valuable, as we have multiple examples of theoretically successful systems that completely fail to deliver in practicality.
One person can very reasonably imagine a better world and take steps to achieve it. These steps might be predicated upon some buy in from the layman, but is by no means achievable. To once again take the example of Hitler, he imagined a better world and very successfully manipulated people to make that world a reality.
Even if we are to claim that people only exist as avatars of particular systems, that implies an extremely simplistic viewpoint on how politics, and the aforementioned systems functioned. Mussolini did not have an identical agenda, nor an identical rise to power, as Hitler.
Systems are important, but what makes the systems function is the raw charisma of the people advocating for them.
When fire and wat3r meet, there is always 5moke
Thank you for the challenge, wat3r. You’ve pressured me to light again.
Wat3r, you point out that our current world is no happy accident. You are correct. It is the most explosively productive society that has ever been created. This productivity, the reason we have gained hitherto unequaled power, is built upon destruction. These systems are not the product of billions of minds. They are the remains of a 10,000 year old culture that has spent quadrillions of hours destroying the earth. Our own world, as the explosive outgrowth of that tiny initial culture, is antithetical to your argument, wat3r. The successful vision of one person can light the world on fire.
You assert that society is too big and too old to be swayed by one person. You claim that I have wronged others by convincing them that they can affect the world so easily, or that their ideas might have value.
You are wrong.
5moke is right—history is typically a tale of individuals, not organizations. 5moke is, however, wrong to say that systems are not intrinsically valuable. It’s true that a great system can work poorly when other things go wrong, and that flawed systems can work for thousands of years. But a society cannot be successful without systems that are truly successful. We are in desperate need of one.
Worldbuilding is the deliberate creation of a vision. One that is built around a consistent and intentional set of goals. Working out a vision doesn’t mean you can “make it be so”. Wat3r, you are right that such a belief would be naïve and misleading. So I want to be clear: the point of worldBuilding is not to force the world to change into yours. The point of worldBuilding is to create a vision of a system that could be successful. This vision can be shared with others and used to direct change in a focused and productive way. Historically, this is how societal change happens. A clearly stated vision of the future inspires millions of people to work together building that future.
Yes, the world has been built by billions of people over thousands of years. But they were not working alone. They were working together to advance a shared vision of the future. Our first priority is making sure that vision lights the way to success.
Wat3r cannot stop a billion t0rches.