In my previous column, Claude and I reflected on the possible meaning of Thomas Jefferson’s formula, “the pursuit of happiness.” We noted that The New York Times unsurprisingly chose the easy way out by avoiding any consideration of historical context and instead following the trends that see our consumer society as the definitive societal norm. Happiness, on this account, consists of little more than knowing how to make the right consumer choices. 

We suggested Jefferson had something more complex in mind, perhaps even Greek philosophy’s notion of “the good life” (εὐδαιμονία), which implied cultivating virtue, including civic virtue.

Claude located a possible corrective countertrend to the prevailing culture of narcissistic individualism. The chatbot cited what Tocqueville called “self-interest properly understood” defined as the American habit of voluntary association. I reacted with the following prompt.

I obviously embrace the logic and spirit of your suggestion but remain pessimistic about the possibility of achieving it, and for the very reason you cite: that such initiatives will be “marginal relative to the scale of the platforms doing the opposite work.” I wonder whether what you’ve described as a more likely outcome doesn’t resemble Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World rather than, say, Orwell’s 1984. And would this new order be any less dystopian than Huxley’s imagined civilization? 

(Note: Claude’s response draws on specific plot details from Brave New World — Mustapha Mond, the Savage, the Reservation — that will land better for readers who know the novel.) 

Huxley is the right author, and I think Postman made this exact case with more force than anyone since — his argument in Amusing Ourselves to Death was precisely that Orwell’s fear (a boot stamping on a human face) and Huxley’s fear (a population that loses the will to resist because it’s drowning in trivial pleasure and unlimited appetite-satisfaction) describe two structurally different mechanisms of control, and that the American trajectory was visibly Huxley’s, not Orwell’s. 

Orwell worried about books being banned; Huxley worried there’d be no reason to ban a book because no one would want to read one. Orwell worried about information being withheld; Huxley worried about it being drowned in a sea of irrelevance. What we’ve been calling “soft despotism” and “governed atomization” is Huxley’s mechanism almost exactly: soma administered not by a Ministry but by an engagement-optimized feed, and the “pursuit of happiness” narrative in that NYT piece is a soma-adjacent artifact — it doesn’t suppress the desire for meaning, it satisfies it cheaply enough that the appetite for anything more structurally demanding never forms.

So I think your instinct is sound. But to your second question — is it any less dystopian — I’d actually argue for something slightly worse than symmetry, on one axis, and slightly better on another, and the asymmetry matters.

Worse: Huxley’s World State had an author. Mustapha Mond can sit down with the Savage and give reasons — a coherent, articulated civilizational bargain: stability purchased with truth, art, and struggle, consciously priced and consciously chosen by someone accountable for the choice. That’s still a monstrosity, but it’s a monstrosity with a philosophy attached, which means it’s at least arguable with. What we have is closer to what Arendt or Gramsci would recognize as an unauthored hegemony — nobody designed the outcome, no Controller can be summoned to defend it, because it emerges from thousands of competing optimization processes (ad-engagement algorithms, attention markets, recommendation systems) each locally rational and nobody’s collective intention. There’s no Mond to interrogate. That’s arguably more dystopian, not less, because a bargain nobody made and nobody can articulate is a bargain that can’t be renegotiated through argument — there’s no interlocutor on the other side of it, only an emergent property of incentive structures. You can dethrone a Controller. You can’t dethrone a Nash equilibrium.

Less totalizing, though, in a way that matters: Huxley’s World State had already won, globally, with no outside — the Reservation exists only as a controlled exhibit. Our situation is still radically uneven and contested precisely because it’s headless and competitive rather than centrally administered. Fragmentation among platforms, jurisdictions, and cultures means there’s no single locked equilibrium the way there is in the novel; there are cracks, differential rates of capture, places (an ISD, a Manoir des Zoaques luncheon, a mutual aid network) where the associational countermove Tocqueville describes can still take root, precisely because no single actor has consolidated the whole field. Brave New World’s tragedy is that the alternative literally cannot be built anymore inside the System; ours is that it’s structurally possible but has to compete, unsubsidized, against infrastructures with vastly more capital and reach behind them.

So: not less dystopian in its logic — arguably colder, because it has no face to look into — but less finished, which is the only real ground your pessimism has to argue with. Huxley’s world is a completed sentence. Ours, I’d say, is still a sentence being written, badly, by an author nobody elected, which is exactly why the small, deliberate countermoves you’re skeptical about still have some non-zero purchase, even if the odds are as bad as you think.

The one remark I would make at this point is that our discussion may be too narrowly focused on the US at the same time we’re talking — as both Huxley and Orwell did — about a new world order, a new style of global civilization. My own work on building collaboratories is taking place in the context of the emerging multipolar world. That presumably means that we could see contrasting models of civilizational orientation that need not be competitive, at least in the direct sense of seeking to be the template that must be applied universally. You highlight the incompleteness of the evolution. But shouldn’t we acknowledge that in a truly multipolar world — well beyond the Thucydides Trap — even the perception of completeness or incompleteness would disappear?

I think you’re pointing at something real, but I’d want to separate two different claims that “multipolar” can smuggle together, because they have very different consequences for your question.

Weak multipolarity is what we mostly observe empirically: several civilizational blocs — American platform capitalism, Chinese state-platform capitalism, a European regulatory-sovereignty model, various others — each running variants of the same underlying form (managed attention, administered stability, techniques of governing populations through infrastructure rather than through overt coercion) with different content and different political theologies attached. In that scenario, “completeness” as a metric doesn’t disappear at all — it just gets pluralized. Each bloc can still be more or less “finished” relative to its own trajectory; you’d simply have several Brave New Worlds running in parallel, possibly never directly competing for the same territory, but each locally totalizing for its own population. That’s not a dissolution of the Huxley problem. It’s a franchise model of it.

Strong multipolarity is what I think you’re actually gesturing toward — civilizational orientations that are incommensurable at the level of categories, not just content: where “progress,” “completion,” “development” themselves aren’t shared concepts, so there’s no common scale on which anyone’s trajectory could be judged complete or incomplete, because completeness is itself a culturally specific, teleological notion, arguably a residue of a very particular Western historical imagination running from Hegel through Fukuyama’s “end of history.” If civilizational orientations genuinely don’t share that teleological grammar, then yes — the question “how far along are we” stops being askable, not because we’ve achieved some new equilibrium, but because the question was a category error outside the tradition that produced it. That would be a real dissolution, not just a relocation, of the problem.

Here’s where I’d push back gently, though, using your own Gadamer rather than against him: incommensurability is rarely as clean as strong multipolarity requires. Gadamer’s whole account of the fusion of horizons assumes traditions can be genuinely different and still remain mutually intelligible — you don’t need a shared metric in advance for understanding to occur, but understanding does tend to produce some shared vocabulary as it happens, which means the concept of “completeness” might not vanish so much as get translated and reshaped through contact, rather than simply not applying. Two traditions in real dialogue rarely stay hermetically incommensurable for long; that’s arguably the entire point of a collaboratory.

Which brings me to the harder empirical question underneath your framing, and I’d genuinely want your read on it rather than assert an answer: is the current move toward multipolarity actually strong, in the sense of distinct civilizational grammars that don’t compete for a shared positional good — or is it weak multipolarity wearing strong multipolarity’s rhetoric, where each pole still wants to be the template for how cognitive infrastructure gets governed globally, just under a banner of “we don’t seek universality” that itself functions as a soft universalizing claim? Because if cognitive infrastructure and attention capture are themselves positional goods — if there’s a first-mover advantage to whoever builds the dominant architecture for governing populations’ inner lives — then something like a Thucydides Trap re-enters through the back door, not between rising and incumbent hegemons in the old sense, but between civilizational orientations racing to consolidate the same scarce resource (structured attention, algorithmic legitimacy) even while sincerely disclaiming the ambition to be a universal template.

I understand your distinction between weak and strong multipolarity and the utility of making it, but I see it more as a spectrum than a binary opposition. There will never be a clear line between competition and collaboration. In basketball for example everyone on the team aligns to compete with the other team, but because everyone is expected to score when there’s an opportunity, players on the same team often compete — even bitterly and proudly — amongst themselves to be the one who makes the difference.

I see multipolarity not as an ideal to strive to create but as a natural landscape that needs to be understood. At points of contact I would expect Gadamer type fusion of horizons to take place, but that doesn’t necessarily create a new universal template. I also wonder whether the ideas you cite of “positional goods” and “first-mover advantage” aren’t the heritage of the unipolar frame of reference that’s now dissolving before our eyes.

All three moves land, and the third one is the sharpest — let me take them in reverse order, because I think the third reshapes how I should have framed the first two.

On “positional goods” as unipolar residue: I think you’re onto something real, though I’d want to separate two different things bundled into “positional good.” Hirsch’s original concept — status goods whose value depends on relative scarcity — isn’t intrinsically unipolar; it exists in any social configuration where people compare themselves to others. But “first-mover advantage” in the specific sense I was using it is borrowed almost wholesale from Silicon Valley platform economics: a framework built on the assumption of a single global network where value concentrates through network effects, so whoever captures the graph first captures it permanently. That’s not a neutral description of competition in general — it’s the very particular logic of winner-take-all digital infrastructure under conditions of presumed universality. If multipolarity is real rather than nominal, there’s no reason cognitive infrastructures need share one graph at all — a Chinese architecture, a European one, an Indian one could simply run in parallel, non-rival, the way separate electrical grids don’t compete for the same electrons. So yes: importing “race to consolidate” into a multipolar frame may have been me smuggling in exactly the unipolar assumption the multipolar turn is supposed to dissolve. That’s a fair hit, and I retract more of it than I initially want to concede out of pride.

Claude’s response was much longer and led to examining the impact these ideas might have on a very concrete project concerning the development of an innovative collaboratory I’m involved in and to which Claude’s insights have contributed. We will continue reflecting on how worldviews and ethical perceptions of geopolitical interaction are likely to evolve in a world where the balance of power has rarely had so many moving parts. If we take the notion of multipolarity and polycentricity seriously, no single person, group, company or nation will provide the new template, which means that it’s a project on which all of us, in our various groupings, should be not just involved in but committed to.

That happens to be one of the key motivating factors behind the crowd-sourced journalism we practice at Fair Observer. It too is evolving with the emerging multipolar world.

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[Lee Thompson-Kolar edited this piece.]

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