Through the Stranger of Liberty, Freedom has come

Liberty is the most important human invention. But it doesn’t run on autopilot. Liberty has to be protected. We propose the use of AI and game theory to design better institutions.

Scholars attribute the rise of liberty to the French Revolution. With liberty, freedom came. It’s important to distinguish the two. Liberty is the absence of oppressive, arbitrary restrictions on human behavior within the confines of the law. Once liberty is established, freedom follows. Freedom allows people to make choices and decisions without being coerced or controlled by others. If you want freedom, fight for liberty. Today, three centuries after the winds of change paved the way for liberty across the Western world, we are at risk of losing it. Liberty doesn’t just happen. It’s not a logical consequence of evolution. Actually, it’s the exact opposite. The rise of liberty is a truly ingenious human invention. It’s the single most important innovation humans have ever come up with. It dwarfs the wheel, religion, literature, penicillin, and even language. But as with any invention, it must be nurtured and vehemently protected. In order to defend liberty, we need to understand its threats. In this essay, we argue that the assault on liberty ironically started soon after World War II, when the Western world defeated the forces of oppression in Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. And it was none other than the man who fought and won those wars, Dwight Eisenhower, who told us in plain English where the danger of losing liberty lies. It’s in us. The seeds of liberty are fragile and require attention. They grow and create amazing things. But it’s not going to happen just like that. Liberty is not on autopilot. The fight against oppression is never won. Liberty must be safeguarded and passed on to the next generation like a piece of heirloom jewelry, carefully crafted and passionately shielded from danger.

The enemy of liberty lives within us

In his famous farewell speech delivered in 1961, Eisenhower spoke about the necessity to defend freedom with arms. But he also warned of the rise of the "Military Industrial Complex" and the inevitable risk of "unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex." He further spoke about the "potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power." Eisenhower was absolutely right about the dangers of an unleashed Military Industrial Complex. Today, half of the US federal budget goes to feed this monster. However, Eisenhower failed to warn us about the risk of other inherent threats that are even more dangerous, such as the rise of the Academic Industrial Complex or the Public Health Industrial Complex. Both have shown their teeth in recent times. Our academic institutions are contaminated with the Woke virus, which threatens to destroy liberty where it’s most needed—at the very source of intellectual and scientific thinking. And the Public Health Industrial Complex showed its destructive tendencies during the recent pandemic, when unelected bureaucrats took it upon themselves to waste trillions of dollars, undo civil liberties, and jeopardize the livelihoods of millions under the pretext of fighting a virus whose origins have never been revealed. In his seminal novel 1984, George Orwell identifies the sources of oppression. One of them is when abstract enemies are created and officials take it upon themselves to "save us" from them, that’s precisely when "unwarranted influence and misplaced power" happen. That’s when the foundation of liberty is at risk. Here is where Orwell meets Eisenhower. He saw this problem through the lens of his playground, the military. Orwell saw the danger more broadly. It applies to other institutions of society, not just the military. Both men sent a stern warning to the generations following the victory over oppression in WWII.

Lack of competition threatens to destroy our universities 

Let’s start with the Academic Industrial Complex. Guess when the last relevant US research university was founded? You might argue about relevance, etc. But don’t worry, since most of the names you might consider, such as Stanford, UT Austin, UC Berkeley, Duke, UW, etc., were all founded more than a hundred years ago. The most recent university with some relevance attached to it is UC San Diego, which was founded in 1960. Because of this lack of competition, universities are degenerating into a dangerous mix of institutional corruption and outright political indoctrination. It’s like when the Catholic Church meets Lenin. This has been going on for decades. What changed recently under the disguise of Wokism and the so-called Cancel Culture is that they added Stalin to the picture. In other words, universities have added mob-style intimidation of unlike-minded students to their repertoire of oppression. Now it’s real. People who don’t agree with whatever the agenda du jour is are intimidated, oppressed, and often threatened physically and financially. Life on campus has turned into a walk on eggshells. And as it always goes with mob-driven indoctrinations, the goal posts are constantly moved so that nobody knows anymore what the mission is or what one is supposed to fight for. Even staunch defenders of Wokism would have a hard time formulating a clear mission for why they are oppressing others. Abstract enemies such as "climate change," "saving lives threatened by COVID," or "fighting for the rights of the disenfranchised" are created. Nobody knows exactly what they are fighting for since those problems are vague and subject to interpretation. "Climate change" can mean lots of things to lots of people. So do COVID and the "fight for the disenfranchised". It’s the fight that matters, not the goals. History is full of lessons about where such belligerent movements typically end up. Look at Lenin, Cuba, or Mao. If you let the mob decide what is and isn’t, you’ll inevitably end up with concentrated power. It’s like a game of chairs where the last man standing takes all the power. We cannot let the Academic Industrial Complex destroy one of our most cherished human inventions, which is knowledge creation. Unfortunately, knowledge creation is tightly intertwined with the Academic Industrial Complex. Either we change academia or we remove knowledge creation from academia.

Universities like Stanford or Berkeley, which always stood for freedom and progress, have turned into bastions of oppression. Just look at the percentage of personnel hired to "ensure" that Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity are enforced. Stanford is among the highest in the country. So-called DIE is code for what George Orwell would call "reeducation". And in the spirit of Orwell’s 1984, Woksim is built on "doublethink," which is simultaneously accepting two mutually contradictory beliefs. For example, recently, a DIE enforcer at Stanford attacked a conservative judge who gave a speech and allegedly hurt her feelings while doing so. Hurting her feelings was worth insulting and verbally harassing the judge. But hurting his feelings somehow never came up in her monologue. Doublethink is the foundation of all evil in human beings. If you accept two contradictory statements, then there is no truth, and without truth, we sink into darkness. Wokism is full of doublethink. The liberties of certain minorities are to be protected while the liberties of others are shoved aside. How can you stand for liberty here but not there? Racism is fought against, but the foundation of DIE is based on race. How can you object to something here but use it as an argument there? Wokism works through doublethink. That’s why it’s so dangerous.

Doublethink is the foundation of oppression 

The genius of George Orwell’s 1984 is not only that he told us a scary story about how society can derail. It’s that he gave us the tools to detect and fight oppression. Crucially, Orwell isolated doublethink as the single most important indicator of oppression. Whenever people use doublethink, chances are they are either consciously or unconsciously using oppression and threatening the foundations of liberty. It’s important to distinguish between the explicit use of doublethink, such as the example I mentioned at Stanford, where the DIE enforcer purposely used oppression and intimidation while arguing against those exact things. Most students on campus are not bad people, and they don’t want to replace liberty with oppression. But most revolutionaries in Cuba or czarist Russia didn't, either. That’s part of the problem. Masses of well-intentioned idealists are drawn into a vicious circle of oppression and violence. We cannot let this happen.

Public Health is the trojan horse threatening to destroy Western Democracies 

So far, we’ve mentioned two of the three big threats to liberty, the Military - and Academic Industrial Complex. Now let’s talk about the third and most dangerous one, the Public Health Industrial Complex. This is where our society faces the most serious threat of losing its footing on liberty and freedom. Probably most people in Western democracies would consider public health a benign institution. Some complain about the high cost, such as in the US or Switzerland, or the long wait times, such as in Canada or the UK. In this essay, we argue that precisely because of its benign image, the Public Health Industrial Complex is the biggest risk to liberty and freedom. The source of the problem is, as Eisenhower correctly identified, unchecked power and misappropriation of influence. There are two key issues here. First, public health officials control oversized budgets, which they use to influence research. This ties the scientific community's fortunes to the goodwill of unelected public health officials. And that’s where the second, most serious threat comes in. When the pandemic started in 2020, public health officials controlled the narrative and tolerated no critical feedback from the scientific community. In other words, scientists, doctors, and other health professionals wouldn’t dare contradict or critically oppose what came out of official channels of the public health community. Whatever the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases said was accepted. This is how unchecked power arises. It doesn’t mean that officials will necessarily turn evil. Most bureaucrats and unelected officials in Western democracies are decent human beings with good intentions. But it takes only a few to turn the whole picture on its head. This is what happened during the pandemic, when civil liberties were abruptly revoked, trillions of dollars were squandered to support lockdowns, and millions of people's livelihoods were jeopardized. Today, we are struggling with the hangover of this terrible mistake, with high inflation and a bloated government budget. Public health officials are still hanging on to their newfound status, and no plan is being put in place to reduce the cost of public healthcare, which is a big part of the US federal deficit. Doublethink spilled over from public health officials to ordinary people. Recently, a friend of mine called and said she got Covid. She then went on and confidently asserted that she was ok since she had taken all the available vaccines. This is a highly educated, successful businesswoman who claims that the very thing that was supposed to protect her from getting sick made her feel better when she got sick. This doesn’t make sense. This is doublethink. Another example of doublethink is when public health officials spoke emotionally about saving lives with lockdowns but never mentioned the millions of lives they destroyed with the very same lockdowns. The fact that many states fought the absurdity of lockdowns demonstrates the resilience of liberty in the United States. Liberty is resilient, but it’s not invulnerable. How can we best protect liberty? What are effective ways to stop the undermining of liberty and freedom?

Protecting liberty requires offense and defense 

Every fight consists of offense and defense. So does this one. Offense is when we actively push for more liberty, such as with referendums or initiatives in California and Switzerland. Those institutions serve the purpose of increasing checks and balances, which is a tool to avoid misappropriation of power. Defense is when you prevent the opponent from hurting you. In the case of protecting liberty from the forces of oppression, this comes down to money. The best way to curb oppression is to cut its money supply. Woke infected universities must be cut off from corporate America and the associated money flow. Budgets for unelected public health officials must be reduced. The same applies to the bloating military spending in the US. The only way we can save ourselves from Eisenhower’s prophecy of the misappropriation of power within our own institutions is to cut their money supply. It’s like fighting cancer by cutting the blood supply to cancer cells. You can’t force them to stop growing, but you can starve them of resources. This is our best defense. Cut off the money supply.

Use game theory and foster liberty

In a recent interview, Yoshua Bengio mentioned a project he’s working on to use AI and game theory to improve the likelihood of good outcomes for society. Bengio is an influential researcher in artificial intelligence. He pioneered some of the most successful ideas used in modern AI algorithms, such as attention, which is the foundation of language models and transformers behind GPT. Sometimes you can summarize what people say in one paragraph, and sometimes you can write a book about every paragraph people say. Bengio belongs to the latter category. His unassuming demeanor and somewhat cumbersome use of language obscure just how influential he was and still is. When Bengio says something, it usually has legs. So does this idea of using AI and game theory to improve outcomes for society. It’s a simple idea. Society is a complex system with lots of agents determining outcomes. The problem is that in a liberty-based society, no one agent has enough power and wherewithal to influence outcomes. That’s why we’re struggling to come up with a plan to fix many of our obvious problems, such as the three threats I mentioned above. It’s easy to explain to an eighth grader why the Academic Industrial Complex is harmful or why the unchecked power of public health officials poses a threat to democracy. But it’s hard to fix it. In that sense, liberty can be seen as an NP problem. You can easily check whether liberty is on the rise or not by checking whether there is unchecked power, doublethink, and out-of-control spending. But you can’t easily find solutions to prevent those things. That’s where Bengio’s game theory and AI come into play. It has been shown that AI can help us find better answers to complex problems than traditional methods of logic.

So let’s look at liberty from this perspective. What strategies should agents choose to increase the likelihood of having more liberty and freedom in the future? In essence, this is what the Founding Fathers were trying to achieve when they drafted the Constitution of the United States. They did a great job since the project has not just survived the past 250 years but also helped the US become the most powerful state in the world. But now liberty and the spirit of the US Constitution are in danger. What should agents do now?

Offense 

Foster more checks and balances. This is easier said than done. But there is a silver lining. When the Founding Fathers conceived the US Constitution, they were obsessed with federalism, which is a fancy word for saying that local constituencies should have more say over their immediate destiny. Today, this means that states like Texas or California have more control over their affairs. We believe that most state capitals in the US have a crucial role to play in reining in reckless spending by the federal government. More importantly, they also have the responsibility and power to reign in unchecked power grabs by unelected bureaucrats and officials. A good example is the state of Florida, with Governor DeSantis at the helm. DeSantis is fighting against the unchecked influence of Woksim in finance through his opposition to investing public pension fund money into funds that follow a so called ESG agenda. To explain all the intricacies of this particular issue is beyond the scope of this essay. But let’s just say that ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) is a Trojan horse for the Woke doctrine to infiltrate finance and thus get access to resources. It’s an important and scary example of how unchecked influence happens in free societies. DeSantis is opposing this threat. We use this as an example of how checks and balances through competition amongst different constituencies are necessary to maintain a healthy culture of liberty and freedom in a society. The constitution cannot do it alone. We need politicians such as DeSantis to actively fight for liberty. And just to be clear, this applies to both sides of the aisle. California was fighting Trump's federal push to undo the emission standards imposed by California on the car industry. This is another example of how state power can stand up to unchecked influence by federal agencies. Liberty benefits everybody and therefore has to be protected by both sides of the aisle.

Institutions must be introduced that increase the likelihood of good outcomes. Regardless of the actual players, institutions can foster liberty. Institutions consist of a set of rules and the enforcement of those rules. A football game is governed by rules and officials. Athletes play accordingly. The same applies to society as a whole. Institutions such as federalism, referendums, veto power, etc. can help increase the likelihood of good outcomes. AI models can help us design better institutions. For example, one strength of AI is being able to play many, many iterations and see way into the future. Take Go or chess. Imagine an AI that plays chess in reverse. Instead of taking the rules as fixed and iterating over the millions of possible moves the players make, how about you allow for both the players' strategies and the rules to be variable? Now iterate over billions of iterations and come up with a set of rules that are better than others. This, in my opinion, is the spirit of Bengio’s proposal.

Imagine that the MLS wants to figure out how to design the best set of rules to maximize the popularity of soccer in the US. Instead of assuming the rules as fixed, they could design an algorithm that allows for more variability in the rules. For example, if you change the length of the field from 100 meters to 200 meters, players with more stamina in sprints will do better. Now imagine reducing the length of the field to 50 meters; speed might not even be a factor anymore, but there could be more excitement and goals. Or change the rules so that there are no ties. Every game has to be decided either during regular playtime or in a penalty shootout. This slight change in the ruleset would have massive consequences on the skillset required by players and the way the game can be marketed. Advertisers would buy slots just for the penalty shootout. Changing the rules changes the required skill set and potential outcomes of the game. With the introduction of more variability in the rule set, complexity increases exponentially. AI is best suited to help us design workable solutions for such a complex system.

Defense

Defense is a simpler problem. One effective way to fight oppression is to deny access to resources. For example, if the Federal Government is overreaching its powers with high spending, we can cut the money supply by raising the cost of financing the government (this is happening right now). Money is not everything, but it’s a good first line of defense. Imagine a simple model where agents that are expressing doublethink would receive less resources and agents that speak the truth are preferred. Over time, this system would converge towards more liberty. 

Conclusion

Liberty is the most important human innovation, even more important than language or literature. It must be protected from oppressive forces. The biggest threat lies within our own institutions. In particular, the military, public health, and academic institutions are threatening the very foundations of our society by misappropriating unchecked influence and power. The rise of Wokism and Nationalism and the bloating federal deficits are clear signs of that. Like in any other fight, there is defense and offense. The latter is best achieved through the design of better institutions. One novel idea we propose here is to use AI models and game theory to design better institutions. It’s like playing chess in reverse. You allow for degrees of freedom not just in which moves the player might choose but also in the rules. While this increases the complexity, it offers novel and potentially groundbreaking strategies to increase the robustness of liberty. The idea is inspired by Joshua Bengio, who is using AI and game theory to improve decision-making in complex systems. We propose further research in modeling the complex action space and developing algorithms to design better institutions to increase the robustness of liberty.