How Civilizations Lose the Signal

Listen To This Story

There’s a moment in a  conversation when something clicks. When the thread connecting baby names to the fall of the Roman Empire to Bitcoin to Jeffrey Epstein to the basket of deplorables to the last reserve currency suddenly becomes visible. And once you see it, you can’t look away.

That thread is the signal. Not communication. Not language. Something older and more fundamental than either: the mechanism by which civilization itself coordinates billions of people who will never meet, across timescales no single human life can fully comprehend.

Simon Pearce – president of Emotif, a strategic consultancy that helps organizations thrive in an eara of rapid change and disruption – has spent years mapping how that mechanism works, how it fails, and what it looks like when a civilization is deep into the failure.

But here’s the relatable part. You already know something is wrong. You feel it in the institution that stopped working, the conversation that went nowhere, the explanation that didn’t explain anything, the sense that the people in charge are somehow incapable of seeing what everyone else can plainly see.

What Pearce offers isn’t another opinion about what’s broken. It’s the architecture underneath all of it — the reason the failures keep rhyming with each other across domains that shouldn’t be connected.

What makes this conversation different from anything you’re likely to hear elsewhere is that Pearce refuses the usual frames.

This isn’t about left versus right, capitalism versus socialism, Trump versus anyone. Those, he argues, are themselves symptoms of the breakdown — signals that have detached from the reality they were meant to describe. The real story is structural, civilizational, and has been playing out across every complex society in recorded history. Including this one. Especially this one.

He talks about why globalization couldn’t scale. Why credential inflation and currency inflation are the same phenomenon. Why the professional managerial class is George Orwell’s outer party, compensated far better but trapped in the same doublethink.

Why Epstein wasn’t an aberration but a logical endpoint. And why — somewhere between the Roman Empire continuing on 300 years after Nero, and the very real innovations still happening inside the wreckage — there might be more reason for hard-edged hope than the moment seems to allow.

This is one of those conversations that changes the way you read the news the next morning.

Apple PodcastsGoogle Podcasts RSS

Full Text Transcript:

Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the special WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. There’s a game we’re all playing, and most of us don’t know the rules. It starts early, earlier than we think. Before we know what we want, we’re already watching to see what other people want. We imitate, we signal, we compete, and over time, those signals harden into something that feels like personal preference, like conviction, like identity. But it isn’t. Not really. It’s the accumulated residue of a social process, so old and so pervasive that we’ve stopped being able to see it.

My guest, Simon Pearce, has been staring at it hard. He’s been building, essay by essay, across a series that now spans four deeply interconnected pieces, a unified theory of how civilizations organize themselves, how they compete, and how they come apart. And the thread running through all of it is the signal, not the message, not the meaning: the signal, the compressed, legible, imitable marker that tells the world who you are and what you’re worth, and whether you’re inside or outside the circle that matters.

What he’s found is both elegant and unsettling. Signals work until they don’t. They coordinate behavior across millions of people who will never meet. They make hierarchy legible and therefore actionable. As signals become cheaper to imitate, they inflate. As they inflate, they detach from the reality they were meant to represent. And when that detachment grows large enough, when signals stop pointing outward at the world and start pointing only at each other, the system doesn’t just mislead, it begins to fail.

And here’s what’s at stake. We’re living through a moment when almost everything that was supposed to hold things together — institutions, credentials, political discourse, shared truth — seems to be failing at once, and most of the explanations on offer are either too narrow or too tribal to be useful. They explain a piece of it, a symptom, a personality, a party. But they don’t explain why it’s all happening simultaneously, why the failures rhyme with each other across domains that shouldn’t be connected.

Simon Pearce has built something different. A framework that shows these aren’t separate failures. They’re the same failure, expressing itself at different scales in baby names and reserve currencies, in yacht purchases and political beliefs, in online feuds and pre-revolutionary court rituals. The same dynamic running at different speeds and different arenas, but driven by the same underlying logic. And once you see it that way, you cannot unsee it. This is not a description of ancient Rome or pre-revolutionary France or Weimar Germany. It’s a description of right here, right now, on this morning, on this conversation, on the conversation you had last week that went nowhere, the institution you stopped trusting, the political moment that feels simultaneously chaotic and completely stuck.

Simon Pearce writes the Liminal Lens Substack. He is president of Emotiv, a strategic consulting company that helps organizations thrive in an era of rapid change and disruption. He’s been doing some of the most original civilizational thinking being published anywhere, building a unified theory that connects evolutionary biology to medieval feudalism to modern platform economics to reserve currency cycles without ever losing the thread. And today we’re going to get into all of it. It is my pleasure to welcome Simon Pearce here to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. Simon, thanks so much for joining us.

Simon Pearce: Thanks, Jeff. Great to be here.

Jeff: Well, thank you so much for joining us today, appreciate it. I want to begin by talking a little bit about this idea of signals and what you mean by them specifically, because I think that’s a good foundation to begin with to talk about this.

Simon: Sure. So, I think when we think about signals, I think it’s very easy for us as people to file that in our minds under communication, right? And language. And I think what I mean by signals is actually something much broader than that. I think of it as a civilization-scale mechanism for coordinating really the whole of our society, right? And you could argue that it’s even bigger than that because signals appear in nature. You could say that hormones within the human body are signals. You could say that the red striping on a poisonous frog in the Amazon is a signal. And in fact, that last example is quite a good one, because once that signal of the red stripe on the poisonous frog has an effect on other animals, leaving that frog alone, it becomes an opportunity for other frogs that aren’t poisonous to try and copy that signal. So one of the things that I try and avoid in my writing is putting too much of a moral framework on signal erosion. I think signal erosion is a natural ecological phenomenon that we see in the plant kingdom. We see it in the animal kingdom, and we see it in human civilization.

Jeff: What does that tell us in terms of our own individual agency and the degree to which we’re able to effectuate that agency, when in fact, so much of this is because of those signals, because of that influence.

Simon: Yeah, it’s a tough question. I mean, it’s very hard when you ask that question not to go all the way into the deep end of the swimming pool. And by that, I mean free will versus determinism or my favorite kind of sub-flavor of that, which is turtles all the way down, right? This can become a very sort of recursive problem. I mean, the way I think about it is we’re kind of in this giant system. We feel like we have agency within that system, but we have agency under a great many constraints. Now, you might say we have no agency, that we’re just a bundle of constraints, internal, external. And the fact that we feel like we have agency is just epiphenomenal. It’s a trick of fate. I don’t quite believe that, but I don’t think there’s really any way to prove that one way or the other. I think what we can say without going all the way into the deep end of philosophical speculation is that we’re often much more constrained by circumstances as individuals than we realize. And I don’t know if it’s popular culture, but certainly in culture recently, there’s this whole concept of the hyperobject, right? As we approach these major thresholds in human history and human society, that could be AI, Ray Kurzweil’s idea of the AI singularity, Ray Dalio’s idea of the coming fiscal cliff, Peter Turchin’s idea of the end of, or I won’t say the end, but I guess he calls it End Times, but it’s a period of disintegration. All of these things feel massive. And I think from an individual standpoint, it’s hard to have much agency against these hyperobjects or in relation to these hyperobjects.

But the way I think about it is not in terms of cause and effect, but if you can understand the system you’re in, maybe you can tilt it with your individual human agency or with collective action with other human beings who co-recognize together as a group that their own group dynamic is driving the system in a certain direction. So once you realize it’s all these group dynamics that are driving us in a certain direction, you’re like, okay, well, maybe I can get the rest of the group to understand this dynamic so we can re-steer it.

Jeff: So to a certain extent, it is a kind of natural social coordination. But to another extent, it is potentially performative. And the degree to which it becomes performative for some people steps aside or steps out of that natural social coordination.

Simon: Yeah. So the way I think about what we might call performative behaviors, I rather think of them as local optimizations. So I think a node in a system or a set of nodes, if you think of the human being as a bunch of biological nodes in a broader civilizational system that has some sense of itself and is trying to maintain coherence of the body and mind, right? Like we’re all trying to keep ourselves coherent. That’s why we go to the gym, we try and eat healthy, or that’s why we eat at all. So when you see these kind of performative things, what you’re normally seeing from a system standpoint is a form of local optimization, right? Like I’m going to perform behavior X in this context to get outcome Y. So I try not to view performative through a moral lens, although it’s easy to go there because it can be really annoying, but it’s kind of a human system that’s figured out how to optimize for an extremely specific set of local conditions and isn’t connecting to the broader system. And so when there’s a performative relationship between two human beings where one is performing something for the other, it probably means that the complexity of the links and the ties between those two human beings are somewhat simplified and thin and not that complex, right? It’s the difference between a loving relationship and a relationship that’s sort of built on, let’s go out and let’s buy each other things.

Jeff: I guess it’s also an issue of what the reward system is, what the recognition is, and what the reward system is.

Simon: Yeah. And there’s no one reward system. And they exist on different temporal framings, and the reward systems are not stable throughout human history. And so this is Ray Dalio’s point about the rise and fall of reserve currencies. And reserve currencies through the last three cycles have lasted about 150 years each, which is enough human generations that the person at the end of the reserve currency doesn’t remember what it was like at the beginning. And I think that’s actually not a coincidence. That’s kind of part of it. And so by the time you get to the fourth, fifth, sixth generation of human being in that reserve currency scheme, they think of that reserve currency as a sort of permanent object. It’s part of the permanent landscape of their lives.

And I think it can be incredibly jarring to realize that it is contingent, that it is itself a signaling system within a broader human civilizational signaling system, and that these signaling systems are subject to imitation. In fact, I think currency inflation is really just, if you really break it down, highly analogous to any form of valuable signal that becomes so valuable that it gets imitated, right? And so during the Roman Empire, the first denarius that was minted was 95 percent silver. The last denarius that was minted was 3 percent silver. You could never quite say at what point the denarius became worthless. But it was an ongoing process of signal dilution. The signal stopped referring back to the thing that it was supposed to refer back to in the first place. And this happens with the poison frog, or the not-poison frog that has the red stripe. That’s exactly the same thing as the denarius.

Jeff: Right, it becomes incredibly self-referential. And then, with each generation, it’s the opposite of digital really, because each generation decays from the previous generation. Each copy that comes along, each degree of self-referential nature becomes weaker or different than what came before. It’s not like digital copy.

Simon: No, it’s copies of copies of copies of copies. That’s right. Yeah. I think that’s right. You know, I also think that in highly complex civilizations, every human being is going to optimize first and foremost for their local conditions, right? Their immediate family, their immediate career. What I think happens in what Ray Dalio would call late in the long-term debt cycle is that these clusters of local optimization are hyper-optimized for local conditions, but are completely disconnected from other pockets of local optimization, right? And so again, the fragmentation that we’re seeing, I don’t view it primarily as a moral thing in the sense that the human beings who are going through these bizarre fragmentations right now across the world, and especially in the West, but frankly, everywhere, including China, those human beings are not, I want to phrase this carefully. They’re not inherently, I think, less moral than previous generations. They’re extremely locally optimized for their own social milieu. Certainly the fragmentation of media has helped this. And that they’re actually incapable of understanding the other groups.

And I think perhaps what makes me a little bit unusual is I talk to lots of these groups. I talk to people who might be considered part of the quote-unquote “business elite.” I talk to people who are most definitely not in the business elite, but might be considered part of the media elite, depending on where you sit. I talk to university professors. I talk to ordinary people. So I think one of the things that I did by accident was I didn’t locally optimize my life all that much. I mean, I’ve kind of bounced between a lot of different worlds, I think because I’m just extremely curious about the differences between those worlds. And so when I take a step back and look at current conditions, what I see is a bunch of internally coherent philosophies within these local bubbles that make complete sense when you’re inside them but are not capable of having an information exchange dialogue. 

So we’re back to signals again with the other bubbles. It’s just a massive misunderstanding, and it reminds me of Errol Morris’s famous documentary, The Fog of War, which everyone should watch. He interviews Robert McNamara, and he gives him a very intense kind of light-shining-in-your-face style of interview. And McNamara, at some point in the interview, tells the story of going back to Vietnam years after the war and having dinner with his former adversaries. And I guess there were a bunch of Vietnamese generals there, and there were a bunch of, I think including Giap, and a bunch of Americans. And so having this awful realization at this dinner that both groups had completely misunderstood each other all along. And I think that’s overwhelming for a human being to realize you’ve caused that much death and suffering because these two groups are optimizing for local conditions and are failing to interpret what’s going on with the other group. Now, by the way, you could still interpret what’s going on with the other group and still end up in conflict. I don’t think that it’s a magic bullet for preventing conflict. But I do suspect that a lot of human conflict is avoidable if these subcultures in these systems could just do a better job of understanding each other, right?

And so why does that happen? Well, over the period of a long cycle, let’s say four, six generations, these subcultures actively select for insiders who don’t understand the outside and who are focused on the inside. They actually create more self-referential nodes within the cluster. And that’s the problem in a nutshell.

Jeff: And why, in a world that is theoretically smaller, when things like social media exist, when better communications exist, do we still suffer from these same problems? In theory, the shrinking of communication should help solve some of that. But in fact, it makes it worse.

Simon: Yeah. To me, it’s not a paradox. This is where Turchin’s book, The Great Holocene Transformation, is helpful because what he’s mapped over thousands of years of human history — and he has this great chart that has two axes on it. So basically, on one axis, you have what he calls civilizational compute or civilizational complexity. So it’s the capacity at civilizational level to process information. And because we’re going back through thousands of years, he takes a bunch of proxies for this, institutional proxies, various complexity markers. And then on the other axis, you have the scale of civilization. And what’s very clear is there’s sort of a path to a larger scale civilization that requires more complex signaling and coordination systems. And if you don’t achieve the next level of civilizational communication system, you’re not going to achieve the next level of scale.

Now, in the modern world, we’ve never had more people alive on the planet. And our industries have never been more complex. The differences between technical knowledge spheres has never been more complex. I mean, we live in an exponentially more complex world. And we’ve managed, I think, at this point in our history to locally optimize some key areas. The aerospace industry is fantastically, almost mind-bogglingly well optimized locally within the confines of that industry, to the point where we can get on a plane anywhere in the world with no worries, knowing that it’s extremely safe. Nothing is perfect. But the airline industry achieved Six Sigma decades and decades ago, which is an absurdly, you know, to the layperson will say, Six Sigma is an extremely high level of quality control across all systems. I mean, if you’re building an airliner, everything’s trackable back to the original rivet that you — and you put thousands of these rivets in these planes, and airline rivets have all these reporting requirements.

What we lack is a civilizational compute layer. And part of that is human cognition, I’m not just saying computers. I mean a civilizational compute layer that enables us to globally coordinate these activities. And, you know, the globalist project was supposed to do that, but it was built on architecture that couldn’t scale. And this is to me the point, because some of your listeners might hear what I just said and say, “Oh God, Simon is another globalist.” You have to listen more carefully to what I’m saying, if that’s what you’re thinking right now, because that’s not what I’m saying. The globalist architecture was built on something that could scale reasonably well up to a large nation-state and was incapable of scaling to the next level. But we tried it anyway, and it kind of failed.

And the first signal that we got that it was really failing, of course, was Brexit. When the UK nation-state crashed out of the European superstate in dramatic fashion and said, yeah, this isn’t working for our people. And that process, the Brexit process, is far from done. I think one of the things as human beings that can be frustrating is these things that I’m talking about take decades, if not hundreds of years to play out. So not all of this plays out in any one human lifetime. So you kind of have to be enormously patient. It’s frustrating because you want to see, you know, you want to see how the movie ends. But we’re not even halfway through the Brexit process. And that’s just one country that crashed out of the European superstate that was supposed to be the model for global governance, right? And so, you know, these institutions that we tried to scale have not succeeded in scaling.

And when you and I last spoke, it was before the Iran war, and we were joking because we weren’t even able to publish it in time. We spent some time talking about how war was one of the symptoms of this kind of breakdown of overarching global governance systems. You were going to see that in war. And before we even got the episode out, a major war started. So we’re back doing it this way now.

Jeff: We’ll talk about why it was unable to scale, in your view.

Simon: It’s not going to surprise you to hear me say that there are lots of reasons why it failed to scale, but one of the biggest reasons, in my opinion, was it lost touch with ground truth within the societies that were being brought together and amalgamated into a global society and a global government system.

And so why did that happen? Well, it happened because within each of these societies, the United States, Europe, China, a tremendous amount of stratification was going on. At the same time, what Peter Turchin calls the wealth pump, which is a repeating cycle in history. And this is what Thomas Piketty would call R is greater than G, right? So you’re growing your economy. You have all these productive businesses. It’s great. And you need to reward those productive businesses for being productive and innovating, and you do all of that. But what you find is over time that the thing that made you successful carries within it the seeds of its own destruction, because the most successful companies and individuals and groups and families increasingly start to own more and more of the economy. And then that filters down into politics. And so policy starts to get made for the interests of a relatively small group.

And so you’ve got all these institutions that since 1970 were benefiting a relatively small group. And then you say, great, let’s scale that to the global scale now. And all the angry, ordinary people — and when I say ordinary people, I’m talking like 80, 90 percent of the population in wealthy countries, and that does not include the population of less wealthy countries — are saying, you’re telling me this is great, but I’m not feeling it. And the wealth of the sort of the people who wanted to scale us up to the next level, the wealth and power of those people was such that they were able to be dismissive of those concerns and felt morally justified in doing so.

And this is probably where I deviate quite a bit from sort of the traditional liberal world that I was educated into and grew up in because, you know, if there’s one statement in politics in the last 20 years that I most emphatically do not agree with, it was Hillary Clinton’s “basket of deplorables” statement because to me, this was the ultimate victim-blaming exercise. Maybe ‘victim’ is too strong, but what she showed me in that statement, she failed to understand the structural demographic drivers that were creating the discontent. And that, to me, is inexcusable as a leader. And so Hillary Clinton as a leadership vehicle on the global scale, she doesn’t scale for me because she’s cognitively tapped out at a level that won’t get us to the next level of global civilization.

I’m not, by the way, advocating for the erasure of nation-states, but it’s very clear that the way in which nation-states relate to each other right now is profoundly broken. You know, we’ve got 30,000, 40,000 people killed and injured every month in Ukraine right now, which is a great tragedy. We don’t know what’s going to happen in the Strait of Hormuz, but I think it’s clear that there’s a significant oil products deficit now that is going to lead to hunger and starvation in some parts of the world. So the inability of large and small nation-states to coordinate effectively at the global scale is a tragedy. If that makes me a globalist, then so be it. Hopefully people will see that I’m not a globalist in the sense of wanting to scale institutions that won’t scale, right? Now, maybe there’s some version of those institutions that could scale. But that’s all very theoretical for me. It’s like, okay, but you’re proposing scaling this thing now to do this job. And some of them just ran out of gas. I mean, some of it’s just cyclical. We had some institutions that scaled quite well, but the assumptions that drove their scaling just went away, right? So some of it is, oh, we tried to take something and it wouldn’t scale. Some of it is, we took something at scale, but it left a bunch of people behind. And we can’t keep scaling it. We’ve got to reform it.

Jeff: Come back around to where we started and how this relates to the signaling we talked about at the outset.

Simon: Yeah, let me try this. So I’m going to go back to money because I think that people misunderstand what money is, especially the Bitcoin guys actually. First of all, we live in a process universe. I believe this to be a good model for describing the universe that we live in, that what we think of as objects are stable patterns within a broader process of instability or entropy generation. You could read A.N. Whitehead on this, I think is good. I particularly like, from a physics standpoint, Stephen Wolfram’s view on this.

So the whole thing’s a process. So you can’t really store value and think of money as an object, right? Like money is a civilizational, especially reserve currencies like the U.S. dollar, it’s a civilizational nervous system that coordinates many of the other nervous systems to keep the organism alive. Like if you think of civilization as an organism or the human bio, sorry, the world biosphere as an organism and constantly signaling to each other in order to keep the energy moving, in order to move down the entropy gradient, which is the one certainty. You know, the first and second laws of thermodynamics, basically. So the one thing we cannot escape, at least we haven’t figured out how to yet, and we’re probably not going to anytime soon, are the laws of thermodynamics. So, you know, we’re just constantly taking energy and generating entropy, I guess, is the best non-physicist way to try to describe it.

And the signaling systems are how we do that. That’s how we coordinate it. That’s you talking to me now as a signaling system. But ultimately, you want signals to be meaningful. And the only way to make them meaningful in the long run is for them to be quote-unquote “expensive.” This is where I do overlap with the Bitcoin guys a bit, this kind of proof-of-work concept, right? So peacock feathers are expensive because they make the male — first of all, they’re biologically expensive to produce, but they make the male peacock enormously vulnerable to predators. So it’s quite an expensive flex. That’s not like a fake signal.

But human society seems to find ways to take these expensive signals and make them cheap. I think this is why reserve currencies that accumulate puddles of wealth in a very few sets of hands get displaced by new reserve currencies, because once the wealth has puddled, it becomes a stagnant pool. Its signal value goes away because the signal value of money is dynamism and energy and getting things done, creating new things, exploring, expanding, and so on. But because of what Piketty has shown in his work, it’s going to puddle. I mean, it’s puddling now. Right? And so it becomes kind of like a stagnant pond. And I don’t think the people sitting on top of the stagnant ponds fully understand just how stagnant the pond is. And it’s like they think of money as an object that they own. And it’s not. It’s kind of an energy-transfer system. And when it becomes less energetic, it’s going to get displaced by a different energy-transfer signaling system.

Jeff: It relates to this idea, which you just touched on a minute ago, that after a while, the saturation, again, coming back to the peacock, makes the signaling cheap.

Simon: Cheap, and therefore… You know, I kind of think of financial inflation like type 2 diabetes for a civilization, right? I’m not a medical expert, but my very rough understanding of how type 2 diabetes works is you’re getting all these kind of hormonal signals, insulin, and the body stops responding. It’s gotten so many signals, it learns to ignore them. It says they don’t mean anything anymore, right? And so this can happen with reserve currencies as well.

Now, it’s too much of a digression for today. I think of crypto as the last hurrah of the ancien régime. I don’t think it’s solved this problem at all. What I think it is, is a bunch of people who realize this is happening, and they’re looking for a personal lifeboat off-ramp without changing anything else. In fact, the puddling that I described, that stagnant pond, so much worse with cryptocurrency than it is with the U.S. dollar. I mean, it’s orders of magnitude worse. And there’s data to kind of back that up. And so I kind of compare the crypto guys to the Marxists. They’ve correctly diagnosed the problem and totally failed to understand the solution, which is kind of like how I feel when I talk to Marxists. I’m like, great diagnosis. I’m not going to give you the keys to the car. Thank you.

Jeff: All of which leads to this, the next status level that you talk about, of really rule breaking.

Simon: Oh, yeah. Yeah. Well, now we’re sort of going back into the cultural side of this thing from the macro side. So, yeah, this is more specifically about virtue signaling, which we haven’t touched on, right? So money is a form of signal. But within these kind of subcultures or subgroups, virtue is a form of signal that can get you things. It can get you hired in certain jobs. It can mean that if you signal certain virtues, then you’re not threatening to the structure that you’re in. So then you’re trusted with responsible jobs in corporate or government jobs. This is something I wrote about recently, that actually we’re very close in that regard today in the professional managerial class to what George Orwell described in 1984, with one absolutely critical thing Orwell got wrong. Orwell’s character of Winston Smith was a so-called outer party member, which roughly translates to the professional managerial class today, as opposed to the ownership class, which would be the inner party. Okay. All good there. But, you know, he’s horribly impoverished in 1984. I mean, he barely gets enough to eat. He’s sick all the time. And this is not how it plays out in our world. The modern equivalent of Winston Smith is extraordinarily well compensated, but in most cases, just like Winston Smith, is required to follow the doctrine, is required at times to perform doublethink. The concept of the thought police in the UK in particular recently has gone from being abstract to being not just within corporate life, but has now gone full civilizational. So I forget how many ordinary people have been arrested for tweeting in the UK. Now, I left the UK 26 years ago, and when I left, it wasn’t like that. You could go, you know, the joke was that you could go and say anything you wanted on Speakers’ Corner, and it was all part of the fun and games of our society. You could say anything you want. People have been arrested for tweets that only five people saw, and I guess the sixth person was the thought police, which is kind of remarkable. I mean, it’s remarkable that you can get arrested for tweeting. And these aren’t tweeting incitement to violence, right, which you could make a case for. These are like, I like this, I don’t like that. I like these people. I don’t like these people, kind of tweets, and you can be offended by that. But the notion that that’s an arrestable offense, I think, is nuts.

So, you know, virtue signaling is itself a set of signals that Rob Henderson talks about with his upcoming book, Luxury Beliefs. So the interesting thing about virtue signaling is… There’s a line from my favorite movie that none of your readers will know. There’s an English pulp movie called Withnail and I, and these two out-of-work actors, one of whom is very posh, they go to the rich uncle of the posh one to get the keys to his cottage because they decide they need a holiday. And it’s a whole nightmare. It’s hilarious. And the guy comes out with the keys for his friend, and he just looks at him, and he says, “Free to those who can afford it, very expensive to those who can’t.” And I think this is Rob Henderson’s argument of luxury beliefs in a nutshell, which is it really does signal something. And it’s low cost, but it’s low cost to the virtue signaler in some ways. Certainly financially, it’s low cost. It’s just a statement. But it’s very exclusionary, like what Henderson says is a working-class person couldn’t get away with espousing these beliefs because they immediately would cause suffering in the community if these policy ideas were acted upon.

Now, this is where I part ways with Henderson, though, because I think there is a cost. It’s cognitive. Right? So again, back to George Orwell — Winston Smith, he got that part, the cognitive load he got right. You talk to people who’ve spent 30 years in corporate life who have not had the skill or the luck or the good fortune or the combination of those things to kind of rise up to kind of a real leadership tier. I’m talking to someone who’s like really stuck in middle management. You see how ground down some of these people are. Now, that part of the doublethink here is they’re not allowed to admit it in public, but you can see it. You can see it on their faces, and in private people will admit this to you, but it’s part of their membership. They don’t want to drop down out of the PMC because once you drop out of the top 10 percent, you’re in the immiserated classes.

I mean, right now in America, you know, the productivity growth that we’ve experienced since 1970, nearly all of that’s gone to the top 10 percent. Almost none of it’s gone to anyone else. Now, some things got cheaper through capitalism, like TVs and stuff, but houses didn’t get cheaper. Education didn’t get cheaper. Healthcare didn’t get cheaper. So okay, yeah, you can get a cheap flat-screen TV, and you have all the benefits of the internet. And that’s true. And that’s valuable. I’m not discounting that. But, you know, I think it’s a more complicated game.

So, you know, virtue signaling, luxury beliefs. That’s a very interesting and complex area. I don’t know that I fully, even now, fully understand how it works. But at the top end, and now I’m going to finally answer your question, so what’s interesting is opting out of luxury beliefs at the top end also mirrors George Orwell’s 1984, when he finally meets with O’Brien, and O’Brien turns off his telescreen and Smith says, and I think Julia is there as well. Smith and Julia meet with O’Brien and they say, wait, you can turn off your telescreen? And O’Brien says all inner party members can turn off their telescreen. So, and to those who haven’t read the book, it’s the telescreen that monitors you. So it has a camera on it. So you’re never alone. You’re always monitored. And so, you know, I think obviously Epstein is an extreme case of this. And there are other dynamics at play around predatory human nature and things like that. But, you know, all the people who went to the island, they’re kind of the inner party members who can turn off their telescreen. They espouse virtue in public and vice in private. And in fact, I think you look at Harvey Weinstein. I’m now about to get in real trouble, but it’s fine. But you look at Weinstein and you compare him to other people in Hollywood, and you’re like, he was an extremely coercive and, let’s face it, kind of unattractive, he was unattractive but wealthy and powerful. So he used these very extreme forms of coercion to get what he wants. There are equally morally bankrupt people in Hollywood today who are good-looking, do not need to be quite so coercive to dominate other human beings. You can think about who some of these people are. I’m going to avoid getting in trouble by naming them. Some of these people engage in extremely exploitative relationships in private. And then some of these people may have recently participated in the mother of all virtue-signaling movies, which is, you can figure out what this movie is for yourself. I heard it described as Antifa, the movie. And it won bunches of Oscars for its virtue signaling because it was so virtuous. But some of the actors in that engage in turning off their telescreen in private. Right? So they portray these extreme, in this case, leftist visions of virtue, although I don’t think this is exclusive to the left, in public. And then in private, they adopt a charm-driven but fundamentally predatory, they engage in predatory relationships where they’re the predator. And they don’t think of it that way because it’s all voluntary. So, you know, Harvey’s biggest crime in their world was just sort of being ugly and going from mild forms of coercion to extreme forms of coercion. And I want to be very clear, he deserves everything he got. He’s a monster. But is the line so clear between him and people who are, you know, blessed with better facial features? I don’t know.

Jeff: We see it in Silicon Valley as well. It’s not just Hollywood.

Simon: Yes.

Jeff: In fact, arguably, we’re seeing more of it in Silicon Valley these days.

Simon: Yeah. Yeah. It’s a conundrum, for sure. But as Ray Dalio has pointed out, you know, our society is approaching the fiscal cliff, which to me is an endgame of the current signaling regime. I can’t tell you when we’re going to get there. It could start next week. It might take 15 years. I have no idea. But the current meta-signaling regime that we are in is not in its early stages.

I’m not going to get into prognostication here because my favorite historical fact is how the Western Roman Empire kept going for 300 years after Nero. So it’s like big, complex and we have a lot going for us. This is the thing. I’m not a doom and gloom because underneath all of this, we have a lot going for us. I mean, there’s genuine innovation happening in this system, and some of these pockets in these subcultures, they’re not all bad. Some of them are profoundly generative and productive, and they’re going to benefit all of humanity. But when we find these pockets or subcultures that are not, I think we’re reaching the point where society can’t afford those pockets anymore, and it’s going to have to remove some of the impunity. And you see this happening, and it’s so much bigger than capitalism versus socialism. In a separate piece, I’m going to make the argument that our entire capitalist system is actually remarkably socialistic on a level that I don’t think any of us can really comprehend. So when I see government waste and private industry waste, to me it’s the same thing. It’s like these are all forms of waste and misfiring signals and failure to coordinate, right? Because the job of a civilizational signal is to coordinate billions of human beings who will never meet each other into a better outcome for everyone, right? On average, without falling into John Stuart Mill kind of utilitarianism. But, you know, at a practical level, that’s what we do.

So I don’t want to fall down these rabbit holes of socialism versus capitalism, because I think actually they’re one of the great signaling misfires of our age, this obsession with these two systems. And Turchin helped me get there because, you know, when I look at his work throughout history and I’m like, all his failure modes repeat across all these different types of civilization with different governance systems, and the same failure modes keep showing up. I’m like, well, so it can’t be, well, this one’s good and this one’s bad because it keeps happening.

Jeff: Turtles all the way down.

Simon: Turtles all the way down.

Jeff: Simon Pearce, we will continue this conversation someday. I thank you so very much for all of this. Appreciate it.

Simon: Thank you for having me. It’s great.

Jeff: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you liked this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes.mYou can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to WhoWhatWhy.org/donate.