Foundational Values
Intro: Why Foundational Values Matter
Most of the judgements of Profit of Paradox stem from foundational values. These are the articles of faith that orient a life. They go deeper than political affiliation, livelihood, or other heuristics we often use to assess people.
The political spectrum (“left or right”) is too fluid and mixed to be useful. The coalitions of any era involve partnership between groups with directly competing foundational beliefs on the core issues of life. Political parties and ideological systems are like fully built Lego objects. The values underpinning them are the Lego pieces.
Profit of Paradox essays are like finished Lego objects. This section gets down to the Lego piece level. You are owed some transparency upfront about where I stand on the foundations. I offer three “value axes” that are useful for orienting yourself within the domains that Profit of Paradox explores – and where I stand on each.
Agency (Compounding) vs. Determinism (Stagnation)
“He not busy being born is busy dying” ~ Bob Dylan
Sustained growth with duration – what I call compounding – requires belief in our ability to exert control over reality. To make and own our decisions. To have agency.
Hardcore determinists reject this belief. They throw their hands up and say everything that matters is out of our control. Living with agency is akin to continually “being born.” Trying out new stuff, failing, adapting, making small but intentional bets with our time and talents to arrive at a better place in life.
We all have capacity to shape our lives. But like (non-fake) food, agency is perishable. Its usefulness expires if we don’t use it. A life of navel gazing turns us into practical determinists. Perpetual navel gazers become takers in life, petering out while waiting for life to happen to them. In the long run – determinists stagnate; agents compound.
It may seem obvious that agency is a superior and more useful orientation than determinism. But determinism is not dead. It echoes across our culture, from our identity politics (on both sides of the spectrum) to our over-prescribing healthcare complex.
Too often we seek excuses, explanations and solutions outside ourselves. And we can all admit to being fair weather agents. We tend to rationalize: we “do great things” on the good days and “shit happens to us” on the bad ones.
Rejecting determinism does not imply that luck, randomness, circumstance and providence have no influence on outcomes. Only a fool would say that. Orienting toward agency is less about ignoring the slings and arrows of fortune. It is about committing to focus on what we can control over what we cannot and using setbacks as teaching moments. And recognizing (but not apologizing) when luck breaks our way.
The technology industry and the diffusion across society is a recurring theme in Profit of Paradox. Agency is a core value of the tech industry work ethos. Silicon Valley is a vocally high agency place. Within the tech bro lexicon, agency usually refers to taking control of one’s career arc to get rich, do something disruptive, or both.
But techno-optimists do not have a monopoly on agency. Applying the concept solely to professional and monetary pursuits is distorting and limiting. All the heroes of Western Civilization were high agency people. Odysseus. Saint Paul. Joan of Arc. Leo Tolstoy. Marie Curie. Many of these heroes were unmotivated by money or status.
The technical concept of compounding originates in finance (compound interest). I use the concept more colloquially: compounding includes any process through which sustained effort over time leads to sustained opportunity for growth. It eventually (usually) results in a lumpy but exponential-like growth pattern.
Compounding is the story of civilization’s material progress. The compounding of money (capital) is mostly contingent on underlying compounding occurring in other domains: technical know-how (Moore’s law), or cultures and advantages inside businesses. Market forces generally do a good job of guiding the collective compounding process in these domains whether you are paying attention or not. It pays a lot more to be aware. But we all benefit from the fruits of this collective compounding, even in ignorance.
Market forces have a far worse track record at collective compounding in non-material, non-financial domains: our relationships, spiritual lives, and habits. Unlike know-how and money, wisdom rarely compounds at the collective level. The compounding of wisdom is a bottoms-up process: each of us must put in individual effort and sustain it.
Without engagement, wisdom does not compound. It collects dust. So compounding in non-material domains is less automatic but arguably more important. It’s the bedrock of a society that aspires to have a sustained, broad culture of personal agency.
Modern technology offers the individual the promise of leveraged agency but also the perils of stagnating determinism. The choice is each of ours.
Individualism (Subsidiarity) vs. Collectivism (Centralization)
Orienting towards individualism over collectivism follows from a preference for agency. We cannot endorse individual decision ownership and then prioritize the collective at the expense of the individual.
Collectivist societies do not have as good a track record at sustaining material advancement. From the USSR to Communist China to the socialism of post World War II Europe – each of those social models trades off agency for the material comfort of the many in its own way.
That’s a bad trade. These societies chop off outlier cases of exceptional individual contribution. They are more likely to export their most exceptional individuals to freer societies, and then free-ride off the contributions those individualist societies produce.
Preference for individualism comes with two obvious but crucial caveats.
First, not everything should be done at the individual level: only what can best be done. It is intuitive and true that raising a family is easier and more effective when done by a couple than a solo parent – and easier still with grandparents and relatives around pitching in. Maintenance of a park spanning multiple towns should be done by a team from the state or county, not one of the towns. Founders must hire employees when they run out of bandwidth to keep growing their enterprises alone.
Reasonable individualists tend toward subsidiarity: the idea that problems should be resolved at the lowest possible level (or fewest number of people) that achieves a good resolution.
Second, to sustain themselves, societies need love of neighbor and capacity to sacrifice for others to eclipse self-interest at some level. Ambition, freedom and agency act as a powerful latticework around non-selfish values. But selfless values must be the foundation.
Definitionally, the foundation must be in the ground – built into the hearts, minds and bones of the people. “Value statements” that live primarily in documents are not foundations. They are just cheap talk from an invisible center: politicians, businessmen at Davos, the Ivory Tower, whatever.
Without selfless foundations individualist societies risk becoming consumed by self-interest and devolving into ruin. Pick any 5-10 historical figures at random and study their lives. Chances are you will learn in some of their stories that envy and excessive self-regard can sustain the pursuit of individual achievement for decades. But they are fuels that corrode the latticework and will burn right through the foundation if they become too concentrated.
A society of purely rational self-interested people won’t produce or sustain the non-economic values like honor, dignity, honesty and generosity that bind us together. Economic motives produce a lot of wealth. This helps justify a preference for individualism. But paradoxically, citizens in individualist societies need to see enough non-economically motivated, random acts of selflessness to believe in the foundation.
The leverage that information technology wields to exceptional individuals is unprecedented. It is tightening the tension between the individualist and collectivist visions for good. The tension was evident in the contrasting approaches to internet regulation across the U.S., the E.U. and China; it is flaring again as new artificial intelligence technologies are being built and deployed. The path to navigating the tension is to protect the foundation, not to undermine the latticework of individualism.
Materialism vs. Spirituality
Why are we here? Will more money and stuff make me happier? If not, what will? Is there life beyond death? If not, does my life matter?
These are big questions that extend well beyond The Game of Capitalism. But we all must lean into them at some point – or else risk becoming thoughtless takers of answers from the current zeitgeist. They are fundamentally spiritual (not material) questions.
Materialism is easy to define. It’s end-all belief in stuff: literally that there is nothing beyond matter (stuff). It is often followed by the corollary belief that more possessions and their derivative positional influences – power, wealth, beauty, whatever – always make us monotonically better.
I have no precise definition for “spirituality” beyond: it’s the opposite of materialism. Or the search for meaning beyond matter. All organized classical religions reject a materialist orientation. But they are increasingly not comprehensive of practiced spirituality in modern life. Nearly a third of Americans now classify their religious affiliation as “none” – and only a third of the nones are strict materialists.[1]
As a practicing Christian I orient towards spirituality – but from the perch of someone who was dealt a very fortunate hand in the birth lottery and spent the first 15 years of my professional life optimizing for economic and material security. I’ve always had it good materially, which may cheapen my judgement. I have no direct experience with real lack for material needs.
But experience cuts both ways. My background also has given me more firsthand looks at the endgame state of chasing materialism and positional status than most get in their lifetimes. It has convinced me that our collective attention is far over-indexed to the material at the expense of the spiritual. Materialism is visible and measurable, and spirituality is hidden and ambient. We rarely seek what we cannot see.
Longitudinal data for both individuals at the end of life and for societies through time suggest that returns (measured in happiness, satisfaction, etc.) to more money and stuff decline as we get richer. The material world seems just one piece in the puzzle for most of us. When decoupled from productive work or spiritual sensibility, materialism begets idleness, hedonism and degeneracy.
These vices can become compounding machines, but only for their peddlers. For consumers they are treadmills: exhaustion machines to nowhere.
In the case of technology diffusion, orientation on this axis matters because the fruits of technological progress indisputably compound faster in material realms than in spiritual ones. Simply - the more meaning and value you tap from the material world, the more technology can do for you.
Even if you disagree with or dismiss my judgment, unless you fall into the 10% of the population that is a strict materialist,[2] you must put in the work to figure out where you fall on this axis and how technology affects it.
[1] Pew Research, 2023 – 2024 Religious Landscape Study.
[2] Pew Research, 2023 – 2024 Religious Landscape Study. 29% of respondents identified as “nones” and 35% of “nones” believe the natural world is all there is.