Welcome Longtermism To End The Time Of Jones and Trump
As I was reading about the $49 million comeuppance lodged against the bulbous, unshaven, toxic fabulist and grifter, Alex Jones, I came upon a Facebook ad for a “New Way To Get Your Concealed Carry Permit.”
Through further research, I found that the concealed carry permit offer is just another scam, this by a Las Vegas, Nev., firm that targets new gun owners and peddles worthless concealed carry permits. The scam warns that “Americans are worried — and they have every right to be as violent crime and armed robberies continue to run rampant across the nation.” And it goes on to sound the alarm, “Meanwhile, NOTHING Is Being Done To Help Keep Us Safe.” The answer, the scam offers, is to get out your checkbook or your Visa card and fork over $178 for your very own bogus concealed carry permit.
While the concealed gun scam is nowhere near the audacious level of Jones’ years-long deceit, it is yet another indicator that like cockroaches and people like Jones, deceptions for profit are very much alive in our hyper suspicious, conspiracy-laden society.
The grifters prey on fears to make a profit. For Jones, it was the lies about mass shootings, government cabals, sinister conspiracies, COVID-19 treatment and the rest that have reaped him hundreds of millions of dollars.
The grifters consider only how they will profit, with no concern over the effects of their actions today, tomorrow and far into the future. I think of trump, the great deceiver, when he tweeted about the “Chinese Virus” and how his utterly irresponsible, self-serving comments helped lead to a rise in anti-Asian racism and attacks. Or the many people who suffered because they believed trump’s unfounded claims that the anti-malaria medication, hydroxychloroquine, would treat COVID-19.
The failure of people to understand future impacts of today’s actions leads to the unaccounability of people like Jones who has pushed such conspiracies as the government was behind the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist bombings and also was behind the bombings in Oklahoma City, which killed 168 people. Jones claimed that the mass shooting at Marjorie Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Fla., was a “deep state false flag operation” engineered to start a civil war. He told his followers that the mass murder at a movie theater in Aurora, Colo., “was a false flag, mind-control event.” The Columbine school shootings were “100 percent false flag,” as were the attacks in Orlando, Fla., Las Vegas, Nev. and San Bernardino, Calif.
And he lied about the children gunned down at Sandy Hook Elementary School. He now admits that that attack was “100% real.”
“Sandy Hook [was] ‘synthetic,’ completely fake, with actors, in my view,” Jones said in one clip played to the jury last week at his defamation trial. “Manufactured. I couldn’t believe it at first. I knew they had actors, they are clearly, but I thought they killed some real kids. And it just shows how bold they are, that they clearly used actors, I mean, they even ended up using photos of kids killed in mass shootings … in a fake mass shooting in Turkey. Or, uh, Pakistan.”
Jones had repeatedly told millions of readers of his alt-right website Infowars that the mass shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., on Dec. 14, 2012, was “a hoax” perpetrated by “actors.” His lies boosted his ratings and through the years since Sandy Hook, helped him earn up to $800,000 a day.
But last week, Jones conceded that the murder of 20 young children and six educators did happen and were “100 percent real.” Jones was ordered to pay more than $4 million in compensatory damages and $45.2 million in punitive damages to Lewis and Neil Heslin, the parents of Jesse Lewis, shot to death at age 6.
The amorality of people like Jones and trump and so many others and the inability to care about the effects of their actions on future lives are themes in a fascinating column, “The Case for Longtermism,” by William MacAskill, professor of philosophy at Oxford University and the author of “What We Owe the Future,” from which the essay has been adapted.
MacAskill says that understanding the long term effects of our actions is the major challenge to promoting sound policies about everything from climate change to responsible governance. The “tyranny of the present over the future” leads society, including those like Jones and trump, to neglect the future in favor of the present because future populations can’t be bilked, they don’t vote or lobby or run for office.
“Future people are utterly disenfranchised,” writes MacAskill. “They are the true silent majority. And though we can’t give political power to future people, we can at least give them fair consideration.”
He writes that longtermism “is about taking seriously just how big the future could be and how high the stakes are in shaping it. Future people count. There could be a lot of them. And we can make their lives better. Future people, after all, are people. They will exist. They will have hopes and joys and pains and regrets, just like the rest of us. They just don’t exist yet.”
Our perspective changes dramatically if we realize that if humanity survives to even a fraction of its potential life span, “we are the ancients: we live at the very beginning of history, in its most distant past. What we do now will affect untold numbers of future people. We need to act wisely.”
MacAskill writes that morality can be boiled down to its essence with the Golden Rule in Luke 6:31 where Jesus says, “Do to others as you would have them do to you.”
“Morality, at its core, is about putting ourselves in others’ shoes and treating their interests as we do our own,” MacAskill writes. “When we do this at the full scale of human history, the future — where almost everyone lives and where almost all potential for joy and misery lies — comes to the fore.”
In order to appreciate life in the long term, MacAskill asks that we “imagine living the life of every human being who has ever existed — in order of birth,” starting about 300,000 years ago in Africa. You live and die the first life and imagine you are reincarnated as the second person ever born, then the third and so on. After living around 100 billion lives, you would find yourself the youngest person alive today.
MacAskill explains that by the time you are alive today, you will have lived in the ballpark of four trillion years. Tracing the evolution of mankind, you would find that you have spent around 10 percent of life as a hunter-gatherer and 60 percent as a farmer, a full 20 percent raising children, and over 1 percent suffering from malaria or smallpox.
“You spent 1.5 billion years having sex and 250 million giving birth,” MacAskill writes. “That’s your life so far — from the birth of Homo sapiens until the present.”
After you have imagined living through 1.5 billion years, to understand the long term picture, MacAskill asks you imagine that you live all future lives. Even if humanity lasts only as long as the typical mammal species or about one million years, and even if the world population falls to a tenth of its current size, “99.5 percent of your life would still be ahead of you. On the scale of a typical human life, you in the present would be just a few months old. The future is big.”
MacAskill implies that with a long term perspective, and understanding of our past and future lives, people would see the impact of their actions in a wholly new way.
“If you knew you were going to live all these future lives, what would you hope we do in the present? How much carbon dioxide would you want us to emit into the atmosphere? How careful would you want us to be with new technologies that could destroy, or permanently derail, your future?” MacAskill writes.
MacAskill is optimistic that with a long term understanding, we can build a better future.
“Humanity could, theoretically, last for millions of centuries on Earth alone. If we anchor our sense of humanity’s potential to a fixed-up version of our present world, we risk dramatically underestimating just how good life in the future could be,” MacAskill writes. “But positive change is not inevitable. It’s the result of long, hard work by thinkers and activists. No outside force will prevent civilization from stumbling into dystopia or oblivion. It’s on us.”
A longterm perspective and acceptance of the effects of our actions is the way to pave the way for a healthy future, free of the grifters who would dam the future in favor of present benefits. Our actions, MacAskill writes, will decide “whether we get a future that’s beautiful and just, or flawed and dystopian, or whether civilization ends and we get no future at all — that depends, in significant part, on what we do today.”