Meditations on Moloch
Link to Meditations on Molochhttps://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Link to Destiny Lore Cardshttps://www.ishtar-collective.net/
Link to Destiny Lore Videoshttps://www.youtube.com/@MynameisByf/videos
It's so simple. Elegant like a knife point. It explains - this is not hyperbole, this is the farthest thing from exaggeration – EVERYTHING. Why does anything exist? No don't reach for that word. There's no 'reason'. That's teleology and teleology will stitch your eyelids shut.
Why do we have atoms? Because atomic matter is more stable than the primordial broth. Atoms defeated the broth. That was the first war. There were two ways to be and one of them won. And everything that came next was made of atoms. Atoms made stars. Stars made galaxies. Worlds simmered down to rock and acid and in those smoking primal seas the first living molecule learned to copy itself. All of this happened by the one law, the blind law, which exists without mind or meaning. It's the simplest law but it has no worshippers here.
Imagine three great nations under three great queens. The first queen writes a great book of law and her rule is just. The second queen builds a high tower and her people climb it to see the stars. The third queen raises an army and conquers everything. The future belongs to one of these queens. Her rule is harshest and her people are unhappy. But she rules. This explains everything, understand? This is why the universe is the way it is, and not some other way. Existence is a game that everything plays, and some strategies are winners: the ability to exist, to shape existence, to remake it so that your descendants - molecules or stars or people or ideas - will flourish, and others will find no ground to grow. And as the universe ticks on towards the close, the great players will face each other. In the next round there will be three queens and all of them will have armies, and now it will be a battle of swords - until one discovers the cannon, or the plague, or the killing word.
Everything is becoming more ruthless and in the end only the most ruthless will remain and they will hunt the territories of the night and extinguish the first glint of competition before it can even understand what it faces or why it has transgressed. This is the shape of victory: to rule the universe so absolutely that nothing will ever exist except by your consent. This is the queen at the end of time, whose sovereignty is eternal because no other sovereign can defeat it. And there is no reason for it, no more than there was reason for the victory of the atom. It is simply the winning play. Of course, it might be that there was another country, with other queens, and in this country, they sat down together and made one law and one tower and one army to guard their borders. This is the dream of small minds: a gentle place ringed in spears. But I do not think those spears will hold against the queen of the country of armies. And that is all that will matter in the end.
One of Scott Alexander’s most influential if not most influential essays is Meditations on Moloch, in which he uses the Alan Ginsburg poem Howl as a framing device for a discussion on morality, competition, and civilization. I was already aware of Malthus, The Prisoner’s Dilemma, Tragedy of the Commons, and most of the other individual concepts that Scott discussed, but the synthesis of all of them together and the ultimate consequences of what they mean stunned me. I was equally surprised when I saw very similar concepts weaved together in the lore of the video game series Destiny. The similarities are so significant that I am surprised that I have not encountered anyone linking them together before now. Ironically, they also were released very close together as well, July 2014 for Mediations and September 2014 for Destiny 1. In this essay I will be reviewing/synthesizing/analyzing Meditations on Moloch and the lore of Destiny to try to create a more complete picture of what “Moloch” is and if there is anything that can be done to stop it or bring it in line with our values.
I will be brief with my summary of Meditations because I assume everyone reading this essay has already read it. If you have not, I recommend you do so and a link is provided above. Scott presents the full poem and provides many examples of races-to-the-bottom that illustrate how people can be trapped into a mutually harmful system. From the essay:
Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. From a god’s-eye-view, the competitors know they will all be worse off if they defect, but from within the system, given insufficient coordination it’s impossible to avoid.
The defecting agent could be a business owner over-utilizing a non-renewable resource, a cancer cell deciding to multiply instead of accept apoptosis, a country investing in more military, or any number of other things. This is not to say that the defecting agent is necessarily evil, as Scott agrees:
I know that “capitalists sometimes do bad things” isn’t exactly an original talking point. But I do want to stress how it’s not equivalent to “capitalists are greedy”. I mean, sometimes they are greedy. But other times they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do. Business practices are set by Moloch, no one else has any choice in the matter.
The straightforward solution is to have a figure of authority punish the defectors to keep everyone cooperating and better off. In the examples above that could be government regulations, the immune system, or the United Nations. However, these institutions are fallible themselves and vulnerable to similar problems. The immune cells can become cancerous, governments can become overly optimized for staying in power over helping society, and the United Nations can become the United Nations.
As technology advances these problems will only become worse. Malthusian over- population is only observed in particular places at particular times, but biological limitations will not stop an AI from brutally reproducing and out-competing any rival located anywhere. Even without the specter of AI, increased technological power will allow the more ruthless humans to compete and extract value from the world ever more effectively. Scott believes that superintelligent AI will be developed in the near future and the only solution is to carefully ensure that the first superintelligent AI cares about us and our values.
The Destiny Series spans 2 games and many DLCs and expansions and has generated tons of interesting lore, but I will be focusing only on the parts most relevant to Moloch. I will not be reviewing the actual gameplay elements of Destiny, although I have played the game and find the basic gameplay to be solid. Destiny has an interesting quirk in that a majority of the lore is contained in cards attached to armor and weapons found in-game; I have provided a link to a website that contains all such cards above.
The player character fights various enemy alien races throughout Destiny, multiple of which share similarities to Moloch. The Vex are probably the most obvious; they are an advanced mechanical race focused solely on their own survival and expansion throughout the Universe. They operate as a hive mind and as far as we know do not experience any emotions or have any individual identity (there may be an exception or two deep in the lore and I am not counting the choral Vex here). The Vex are not particularly unique in fiction or video games, the Borg, Flood, Zerg, Phazon, and Imulsion are all similar factions trying to assimilate all matter. The misaligned AI that Scott fears would likely resemble the Vex, an intelligent, yet unfeeling and alien intelligence that sees humanity only as possible material that it can repurpose for its own goals; goals which are not in the slightest related to human values.
The Hive are another enemy species that willingly follow Moloch. The Hive are insect-like, but ironically very much not a hivemind. The Hive have individual members with their own feelings, goals, and thoughts. However, the majority of the time those goals are kill everything, those feelings are feeling good when killing stuff, and those thoughts are I am going to keep killing things. They call this the sword-logic, the belief that everything that can be destroyed should be destroyed. I am reminded of the rationalist creed, that which can be destroyed by truth, should be. The Hive creed is that which can be destroyed by anything, should be. The Hive wiped out countless other civilizations before reaching Earth, basically just because they wanted to and believed it was right to do so. The glory of combat and killing is praised throughout their culture, where almost no mention is given of many resources they captured or slaves they now have. The Vex would likely just ignore you unless your body was the handiest bunch of material in the area for a project they were working on or they thought you were interfering with their project, but the Hive would kill you for the sake of killing. The Vex follow Moloch because they calculated that it was the most likely method for them to survive indefinitely, the Hive follow Moloch because they enjoy it and believe in it in a religious sense. Scott summarizes Moloch as the thing offering the bargain, “throw what you love most into the flames, and I can grant you power.” The Vex can’t love anything, so they accept this bargain; the Hive love throwing things into fire, so they also accept this bargain. The Hive individual who most faithfully follows the sword logic is Oryx, the Taken King, who I will talk more about later.
Honestly, the Vex and the Hive are not that unique to popular culture; there are many games, movies, and books with factions resemble one or the other. It would not be worth writing an essay in this format just to talk about them. However, Destiny has another character which is completely unique as far as I know. Moloch, or as he is called in Destiny, The Winnower, is a character himself. Yes, I do mean the personification of defection and conquest is in the game and talks to the player directly on a somewhat regular basis. He in no way resembles the monstrous and mindless Moloch from Ginsberg’s poem. He is surprisingly chatty, personable, and possibly even in possession of a sense of humor and morality. In his own words:
I am making this offer over and over again, in every tiniest cell and the vastest of civilizations. Let me in. Take what you need. Be at ease. You have no say in the degradation of your telomeres, but in all the interim, the whole world is your sweet silicate shellfish.
You exist because you have been more suited to it than all the others. Steal what you require from another rather than spend the hours to build it yourself. Break foolish rules—why would you love regulation? It serves you to cross lines, and if others needed rules to protect them, then they were not after all worthy of that existence.
He is shockingly persuasive, so I will quote from him at length. I honestly can’t say wherever it is a criticism of Mediations that Moloch does not get to speak in his own defense because that might be the last thing we actually want to defend, but I will allow The Winnower to argue his own view here:
Would you tolerate a bomb in your own body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of society?”
Those who do not exist cannot suffer and are of no account to any viable ethics. If the true path to goodness is the elimination of suffering, then only those who must exist can be allowed to exist.
But imagine the abomination of a world where nothing can end and no choice can be preferred to any other. Imagine the things that would suffer and never die. Imagine the lies that would flourish without context or corrections. Imagine a world without me.
Oryx, my King, my friend. Kick back. Relax. Shrug off that armor, set down that blade. Roll your burdened shoulders and let down your guard. This is a place of life, a place of peace.
Out in the world we ask a simple, true question. A question like, can I kill you, can I rip your world apart? Tell me the truth. For if I don’t ask, someone will ask it of me. And they call us evil. Evil! Evil means ‘socially maladaptive.’ We are adaptiveness itself. Ah, Oryx, how do we explain it to them? The world is not built on the laws they love. Not on friendship, but on mutual interest. Not on peace, but on victory by any means. The universe is run by extinction, by extermination, by gamma-ray bursts burning up a thousand garden worlds, by howling singularities eating up infant suns. And if life is to live, if anything is to survive through the end of all things, it will live not by the smile but by the sword, not in a soft place but in a hard hell, not in the rotting bog of artificial paradise but in the cold hard self-verifying truth of that one ultimate arbiter, the only judge, the power that is its own metric and its own source—existence, at any cost. Strip away the lies and truces and delaying tactics they call ‘civilization’ and this is what remains, this beautiful shape.
Your new rule will only make great false cysts of horror full of things that should not exist that cannot withstand existence that will suffer and scream as their rich blisters fill with effluent and rot around them, and when they pop they will blight the whole garden.
Your shoemaker philosopher was right, and it matters more than anything. Sorrow cannot survive death, and it cannot precede birth. Those who exist have moral worth, and those who do not have none. Think about it. Do you mourn the uncreated? Do you grieve for those who were never born in a nation that never developed around an ideology no one ever imagined on a continent that never formed? No! And from that self-evident truth, you must raise your eyes to the ultimate revelation: those who cannot sustain their own claim to existence belong to the same moral category as those who have never existed at all. Existence is the first and truest proof of the right to exist. Those who cannot claim and hold existence do not deserve it. This is the true and only divination, a game whose losers are not just forgotten but are never born at all. That which cannot claim and hold existence is not real. You do not mourn the unreal. Why should you care for it? Tend it? Guard it?
The Winnower shows great and earnest affection for Oryx, his most devoted follower among the Hive, and interestingly, also for the player character. In Universe, this makes sense, as we have spent most of the last 10 years killing a bunch of aliens that were trying to kill us, proving that we deserve to keep on existing. I believe that the Winnower would prefer that every being in existence to be like Oryx, and Oryx isn’t entirely without virtue. He earnestly loves his siblings and children, although this love is usually shown by trying to kill them (I don’t know if it’s a strength or weakness of the sword logic that you treat your friends the same as your enemies). He also appreciates them when they try to kill him. He even shows admiration for the player character when we kill him for good. From Oryx:
Sometimes I wonder if I’m a nihilist. I don’t do much except break things. That’s what they say about me: we could’ve had a great civilization, if it weren’t for that damn Oryx, that damn Hive. They don’t believe in anything but death. The only way to make something good is to make something that can’t be broken. And the only way to do that is to try to break everything. I’m glad I learned that the universe runs on death. It’s more beautiful to know. But I’m lost somewhere strange. I think that Savathûn and Xivu Arath (his siblings) are trying to steal the tablets from me. They must have cut off my tribute while I was away communing with the Deep. I love them so dearly. No one else is clever or strong enough to try to break me. No one else can give me this gift. Once, long ago, I killed Xivu Arath on her war moon, and she blew up the whole moon to kill me with her (powerful Hive can survive ordinary death). She was laughing in joy. I laughed too. A whole moon! A whole moon. It was a waste of a moon, but it taught me how to save myself from exploding worlds, which was necessary to fight the Ecumene. I love mighty Xivu more than a moon loves the tide. I’ll kill her for this. Over and over, forever and ever. When I get home from my wanderings in the Deep, and I take back my throne, I’m going to have children. That’s what I need. Sons and daughters to love and kill.
So, we have one solution to the problem of Moloch; if your values are not compatible with Moloch, change your values so they are. Problem solved. You can still experience love, friendship, pride, as long as the basis for all these things is in line with Moloch. You can conquer and kill out of a deep sense of purpose that you are ending the suffering of those that were not suited to existence. That you are pushing the universe towards its final shape. You can earnestly appreciate others when they practice the sword logic, even against you.
Beyond the player character and their allies, there is another character in Destiny that takes objection to this. The Witness, who nevertheless is an enemy to the player and allied to the Hive, has a different idea of the perfect universe than The Winnower. The goal of The Witness is to freeze the universe in place with every being frozen in their greatest moment of success. I am not sure if every being would get such a good moment, but all the moments we see personally offered are supposed to be the best for that specific person.
This somewhat resembles Scott’s solution of putting an all-powerful, sympathetic being in charge to shutdown Moloch/The Winnower forever. I would think that Scott hopes that us lesser beings would maintain our free will, but I don’t know if free will is compatible with a perfectly stable world. If humans are still free, we could work against each other or against our superintelligent overlord. A few rogue humans would not be a threat to such an entity, but even once humans are more or less under control the superintelligence would still need to worry about supernova, gamma-ray bursts, aliens, entropy, etc. Scott says we are only free from Moloch when the whole universe is a garden (both Scott and Destiny love their garden metaphors). The universe is a big place though (citation needed). Even if we make a benevolent and superintelligent AI, there is still a long way to go before the whole universe is under control, if that is even physically possible. And if it is not, the AI is going to need to devote some of its resources to expansion, protection, and research forever, potentially letting Moloch back in if the AI decides its survival is uncertain and it needs to trade against our human values for its own power or survival. There is the additional complication that “human values” is undefined and no matter what is proposed a large group of humans is going to strongly disagree with those values. The Witness can only be confident in its ultimate victory because of the Destiny Universe magic system, but an AI in the real universe could never be 100% sure that it is safe to tend the garden now.
The player character fights just as hard against The Witness’ plan for a static universe as they do against The Winnower aligned enemies. The characters in the game, and likely people in the real world, do not accept eternal frozen happiness as a reasonable end point to the universe. It is unclear what an acceptable end point would be, besides Moloch is bad and stasis, even good stasis, is bad. I wonder if no Moloch is as bad as total Moloch, and think back to the The Winnower’s words of what we would get without him, “great false cysts of horror full of things that should not exist that cannot withstand existence that will suffer and scream as their rich blisters fill with effluent and rot around them.” Seems like an accurate description of a future where everyone is wire-headed into pods and have no real challenges.
I have been taking the Destiny lore at face value, but what is plausible in a video game may not be plausible in real life. Would a society structured like the Hive, based on relentless competition and violence, actually be able to function for any length of time? Who is teaching the young, growing food, and building the spaceships if their whole philosophy is take, don’t build? How can they fight wars against advanced civilizations while fighting amongst themselves at the same time? Sometimes The Winnower seems to be making this point, emphasizing mutual interest and adaptability in addition to theft and violence, but it is not really explored so far in the lore.
Defecting seems great at first when you can take advantage of others, but a society of nothing but defectors can’t accomplish anything. The cancer cells are having a great time until their host dies and all the cancer dies with them, where the noncancerous cells in someone else get to pass their genes onto the next generation. There is a balance here, where the defector may outcompete other members of their own group, but weaken their group and allow something outside to defeat the whole group. Competition between groups forces cooperation within groups. Is there an out here? I am not sure. I am tempted to propose that unifying all sentient beings into one group and having them compete against an eternal enemy like death or suffering is the play, but I am reminded of the Winnower’s words, “Would you tolerate a bomb in your own body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of society?” I would have to answer no. However, maybe if I had more faith in society I would answer differently. Alternatively, if the question is asked a little differently, “would you be willing to tolerate a bomb in your own body, waiting to detonate if you deviated from the needs of your loved ones?” I might be willing to say yes, and I can easily imagine many people doing so. Therefore, perhaps the best thing to do is to make a society of all loved ones that is worth planting a bomb in yourself for. Of course, then the next problem is going to be the society that I think is worth it is going to be a dystopian nightmare for someone else.
So where does that leave us? We presumably don’t want to mindlessly follow Moloch like the Vex, probably don’t want to whole-heartedly embrace Moloch like the Hive, and we can’t trust or don’t want to let The Witness or a benevolent AI lock us into an artificial utopia. In the real world there is no law of nature that one of these things must happen, though. We can continue bumbling around as we have done previously. If we are sufficiently isolated in the universe to not have to worry about anyone else showing up, it is just us humans and our creations running the show. And each individual person can always choose to not defect. You may make less money or lose that election, but Moloch is just an idea. He cannot make you defect, you can still choose not to, even if it is the suboptimal play. Scott said, “(Sometimes) they’re just in a sufficiently intense competition where anyone who doesn’t do it will be outcompeted and replaced by people who do.” The key part of that sentence is “replaced by people who do.” Well, there are only several billion people to pick from, what if none of them will do? Probably over-optimistic of me, but this is still a game of human choice, and nothing says that money or victory or power must be a terminal value. The Winnower would argue differently, saying that anyone who does not pursue these things will be ruled by someone who does. But how many people do you know personally that are only concerned with power? And do those people even seem to be any better at obtaining it or using it than people who have other values? I imagine the reader is picturing the most prominent member of their least favorite political party right now and thinking I am full of it, but you are also probably thinking that politician is pretty dumb and not doing a great job of accomplishing even their own goals. I can say from my own personal view I get more satisfaction out of kindness and honesty than any kind of material success, and I would hope most people feel the same way. I view defeating Moloch as a greater victory than any that I could achieve by following Moloch.
I suppose I should summarize with an actual review of these works. Meditations on Moloch is an excellent essay. The arguments are well-reasoned and easy to understand, and the poem adds vivid imagery and structure, unifying the whole picture. My only quibbles are that the poem makes Moloch seem purely a function of civilization when it is just as present in the natural world, and that Scott’s solution seems pretty weak. But it is an almost universal problem that describing an issue is easier than solving it.
Destiny probably has the best and most in-depth lore of any video game I have ever played. It has been years since I have played the game itself and I am still following the story and lore as soon as it is released. I have only touched on a small fraction of it here, there’s a whole story inspired by Roto’s Basilisk, just Savathûn could be another essay of this length, and countless other events going on throughout the game and in the background. I am very curious to know where the writers got the inspiration for The Winnower, and if they view him as an ordinary video game villain or take him as seriously as I have done.