(2018-03-02) Rao The Splintering Of The Second World

Venkatesh Rao: The Splintering of the Second World

I just returned from a week-long business trip in Europe, my first since 2015.

This time, I got a keen sense of the US having lost an essential spiritual quality necessary for mass flourishing.

For decades, the US served not just as the sole superpower, but also as a True West, the direction of the endless frontier, the place you went to if you wanted to self-actualize (by analogy to True North as a moral compass heading).

With the loss of True West status, the US has lost much of its soft power. It has been reduced to a mere military/economic Great Power, like the USSR in the past or China today.

The necessary conditions for mass flourishing are cultural openness plus spiritual hunger.

By cultural openness, I mean active and indiscriminate demand for cultural imports to fuel your own culture's growth. (Cultural Appropriation beyond Cultural Pluralism)

By spiritual hunger, I mean a sense of exploratory restlessness and dissatisfaction with the settled arrangements of a stable society, and a desire for transformative growth at all levels.

I think the global locus of cultural openness+ spiritual hunger should be called the second world. It is the Goldilocks zone of worlds, preferable to both first and third worlds. Civilizational evolution happens in the second world.

The not hungry/not open quadrant should probably be called the zeroth world. A zone that is not really striving to evolve, let alone become the frontier of human development.

Arguably, the US has been the only True West in history

The cultural closing of America has suddenly left the world without a True West, and also with a vastly shrunken second world.

This means, for a young, ambitious, and hungry person today, there will be no brain-dead simple answer to the question, "where in the world should I go to make a dent in the universe?" (Change The World)

I suspect this globally "magnetized" condition is gone for at least a generation. Possibly for a century or more.

due to loss of the benefits of concentration of creative capital, evolutionary pace overall will be slower. Human efforts at evolution spread too thin.

The retreat of the US from its role as the world's frontier, and the loss of a True West for growth-oriented individuals, is undeniably depressing in the short term.

But in the long term, this might be the best thing that could have happened, since we've effectively just dismantled a monopoly on frontier culture (Silicon Valley included).

The nice thing though, is that we do still have the Internet (though that too is under threat) with its no-visas-needed capacity for fostering second world institutions and networks.