When No One Maintains the House, Part One

Liberalism meets AI

As is not atypical after hearing a lengthy Ezra Klein podcast, we have thoughts. Enough of them, that we are making a three-blog series on it (the universal themes should hopefully carry us until the end of the summer, with Eddie’s help?)

On the 26-5-26 podcast with Sapiens author Yuval Noah Harari (titled Donald Trump’s Core Delusion), he and Klein dive into structure, work, and the mind, and we have intersected all three themes with where AI situates itself among them. 

So before this post itself gets too long, let’s dive in, why don’t we? 

“You can talk all you want about international niceties and everything else, but we live… in the real world… that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power. These are the iron laws of the world are saying since the beginning of time.”

— Stephen Miller, White House Deputy Chief of Staff

How gross is it that I just quoted Stephen Miller on *our* blog? I could have just cited this and called it a day:

You’re the cutest thing that I ever did see
I really love your peaches, wanna shake your tree
Lovey-dovey, lovey-dovey, lovey-dovey all the time
Ooh-ee, baby, I’ll sure show you a good time

— Likable Steve Miller, Joker/Smoker/Midnight Toker

Anyway, there is some truth to what the Voldemort-y Steve Miller has to say, I have to admit. What can I say, part of the reality that I see is the one described by Max Weber in “Politik als Beruf,” Walter Benjamin in “Critique of Violence,” or Michel Foucault in “Society Must Be Defended.” Of course, these all ultimately roundly reject Miller’s approach if not definition, and so does Harari: “The whole of human history is about how do you get more people to cooperate and to trust each other and you cannot do that only with brute force.” Soft power is what gets us farther as a society (or, at least, in the modern political scientists’ minds, it’s what legitimizes their violence). 

This question is not only relevant for the Trump World Order, but for AI governance and indeed how social impact orgs justify their existence. The liberal world order, according to Harari, is 

…[This] kind of amazing house in which all of humanity is living and the systems are still sort of running like the water, the sewage. Nobody takes care of them anymore, but they were built in such a robust way that even though we don’t maintain them, they still function. But within a year, five years, 10 years, you know, if you live in a house and nobody maintains it, eventually it collapses and then it’s too late.

Ultimately, he claims you can’t scale beyond a hunter-gatherer band on brute force; the whole of history is getting strangers to trust and cooperate, and even reliably share information. I am reminded of John Dewey’s work from oh, about 100 years ago, The Public and its Problems: only communication can create a great community.

Harari even reclaims the idea of nationalism as a love of insiders, not hatred of outsiders, as a liberal concept. The “shared story” is the real engine. The key O.S.s of the 20th century are fascism (conflict of races), communism (conflict of classes), and liberalism (cooperation). Of course the last helps good things proliferate, but without a collective ideal, goal, or promise. Liberalism, unlike most ideology, admits that we’ll mess up sometimes. 

Liberalism has harnessed some course-correcting mechanisms, maybe without the same telos of other ideologies: voting (correcting political choices), courts (correcting laws), free press (correcting a catchall of ideological apparatuses), and amendments, which frankly were rarely used by the U.S. in the 20th century. As lofty as the Founding Fathers were, their works are a socially contractual fiction we can adapt as we go. There’s no redemption, but there’s space for revision; contrast that with “I am the LORD your GOD.”

So as liberalism chugs along healthily, sans redemption and–very clearly–effectual leadership, it disengages fraternite from liberte and egalite.

How does AI play in? 

1. It can fortify self-correction by helping us navigate all of modernity’s complexities and the speed of information.
2. It forces people to contemplate society’s revision as it potentially takes on the role of sewage manager, executor of laws that we were happy to agree to that are now being disintegrated, and “updater.” Simultaneously, though, it takes away humans’ long-curated clean-up capabilities.

What story are we holding, and what would it cost to keep it unmaintained? The systems still ain’t broke, which is exactly why no one’s fixing them. 

Next up in the blog series: Whose actual job is maintaining the house and why is it the social impact sector? Stay tuned.

Really like our peaches? The shared story really is the real engine.

Wanna shake our tree? Self-correction is at its roots.

We’ll sure show you a good time! (We’ll try not to burn out.)

_{[In this post, we used AI for polish, not purpose.]}