On Being Manichae-ish

While we should always try to take on others' perspectives and acknowledge those perspectives as facets of a greater truth, we should not jettison good and evil.

Truth is one; sages call it by various names.
- from, The Rig Veda

When you hear the term Manichaean, it’s probably about black-and-white thinking rather than a dualistic religion from Mesopotamia. Whether they’re more enlightened or sanctimonious, those who use the term almost always point out another’s apparent inability to see that the world is full of shades. It’s fashionable again to speak in Kantian-Hegelian terms about a given issue – thesis, antithesis, and synthesis.

In many circumstances, this is a good and healthy practice. Synthesist thinking requires you to try on, as it were, different perspectives before settling on one. Or better, perhaps, you find a reasoned middle ground that integrates partial truths of extreme views. Life is complicated. People can operate in good faith and still have different perspectives. And, indeed, the practice of pluralism—one of the Six Spheres—requires us to look for facets of truth in all the perspectives before adopting some belief or collapsing into a single perspective that might be missing important insights. 

Yet, I would like to argue that there is room for Manichaean thinking in our postmodern world.

Practical Universalists, Radiative Missionaries

In other words, there are certain domains in which we must be fairly uncompromising in our commitments. We have to be Manichae-ish. If Manichaeish has never been a word before, it is now. Because, by Manichaeish, we must act like Mani in a couple of important ways. 

First, we have to be universalists. That means some moral practices should apply in nearly every domain of life and at every scale. The Six Spheres are one such set of practices. Even if they are not timeless universals we can discover through abstract moral reasoning, we should always endeavor to practice them. And I am not alone in this assessment.

The Vedantic traditions all adhere to the idea of universal practices, even if individual adherents routinely fall short. We are human, or what Christians call fallen. At the end of the day, we seek to form a moral community whose members share our priorities, but then we have cosmopolitan ambitions. Central virtues animate a community.

Second, like Mani, we have to be missionaries. That doesn’t mean we have to act like crazy people who knock on doors or estrange ourselves from our friends and family in the service of Decentralism. Quite the opposite. If we want more people who radiate peace like monks meditating in the forest, we must first practice daily and then patiently share our wisdom. The form of outreach you employ should play to your communication and practitioner strengths. Implicit in being a missionary is finding courage and resolve. It is not about manipulating people, selling fear, finding fault, or badgering anyone. These are bludgeons. Outreach is first about being a good example and then sharing wisdom in the appropriate life contexts.

Paradoxically, Manichaeism was also a synthesist doctrine. After all, Mani and his followers integrated the wisdom and prophets of prior traditions, including Jesus and the Buddha, into a canonical worldview that Mani set out before he died. At its root, Manichaeism was a type of Gnosticism. And like Gnosticism, Decentralism offers us transformation through special knowledge (gnosis). Manichaeism teaches us sometimes to evaluate the world in starker binaries. Put another way, we apply principles. And there is pragmatism in principle. So, dualities such as nonviolence or violence, integrity or corruption, and stewardship or negligence become the facets of good or evil—light or dark.

So we must become more comfortable talking about good and evil again but doing so with discernment.

Now, it might seem strange to maintain that we have to be both Manichaeish on the one hand and synthesist on the other, but we do. These are not contradictory positions. The universals of Decentralism are no good as abstractions. We must practice them daily. And in praxis, we will see the good radiate outward from our being, then radiate back to us from others. Combining such radiant beings into an ever-expanding moral community will steadily improve the human condition. We can be as monks. The world is our meditation forest. Our liberation from Centralism might be as close as we will ever get to salvation.

The Six Offenses and Natural Experiments

Decentralism includes similarities to Manichaeism in that there is an opposing force, a dark side. We have called it Centralism and, occasionally, the Church of State. To understand why it lies in opposition, we return to the Six Offenses:  

Violence. Centralism is the religion of politics, which, as we have suggested, is an entire magisterium built upon the threat of violence. We build Decentralism upon a foundation of nonviolence. In Manichaeish terms, persuasion is the path of light. Compulsion is the path of darkness. 

Corruption. To win in the Centralist matrix, one has almost always to auction off his integrity. There are simply fewer people at the highest echelons of central power. So competitors have to be eliminated. The means for eliminating competitors straddle either side of legal lines and trample over moral ones. There are differences of both degree and kind when it comes to corruption. Some authorities are more corrupt than others. Our concept of corruption is Manichaeish enough to include any illiberal means or machinations that enrich the political actor or expand his influence. But the Ring is always there, tempting the powerful with the bounties of a great negative-sum game. And this game selects for sociopaths.

Callousness. Centralism also beckons us to turn away from compassion. Those who want to seem compassionate will shroud themselves in an illusion. Not only are they callous to those who object to the authorities’ threats of violence and expropriation, they see political means as a stand-in for charitable acts. In other words, voting for some platform or program is not really compassion at all. The willingness to outsource one’s compassion is a way to signal rectitude. Under our conception, one should give away everything before obliging people with guns to confiscate another’s earnings or property. Compulsion is not compassion.

Monomania. Centralism is the religion of The One True Way. Bureaucrats, activists, and partisans labor under the notion that there must be no divergent paths from the law, much less from executive orders issued by our modern Emperors. Pluralism is not just acknowledging that different people have different conceptions of the good. Monomania is baked into Centralism because Centralism is inhospitable to diversity by its very nature. Pluralism requires active practice, which includes integrating different truths and tolerating other ways of living, as long as those divergent ways originate and terminate in consent.

Negligence. Centralists imagine that the state is somehow a good and rightful steward of resources. Yet the list of resources the state wastes or neglects constitutes a book unto itself. Governments routinely incur debts greater than their gross domestic product (GDP). Governments pay exorbitant sums to contractors that no market would bear. State-managed forests fare poorly compared to privately managed forests. The United States government is the world’s largest polluter by far, and its military pollutes more than the next 100 countries. State-managed roads fall into disrepair as new roads are being constructed in a Congressman’s wilderness. Social Security’s coffers are bare. Centralist systems create incentives for negligence, and the political class is shaped by those incentives no matter how much they posture and peacock on the campaign trail. Those who follow them do so in negligence, not stewardship, so we won’t call them sheep. Even sheep do the work of grazing.

Casuistry. Politics hones the art of casuistry, and politics is the Centralist’s home. So when you hear promises that sound too good to be true or hear an appointee baffle the fawning press with bullshit, you know you’re in the Church of State. Casuistry is not just the highest value of the political class, power’s handmaidens—whether the media or the activists—learn to recite talking points as part of Centralist liturgy. When rationality gets reduced to rhetoric, truth is the first casualty. 

Now, if you doubt that Centralism engenders the Six Offenses, consider some of the world’s natural experiments: Germany and Korea, specifically when both countries were split—East and West, North and South—respectively. Neither of these is a perfect exemplar of Decentralist or Centralist institutions, but they are good enough for comparisons, especially in a time before the Internet.

In The Social Singularity, I relate the following study, which deserves a lengthy quote:

A group of behavioral economists wanted to study the difference between cultural values after years in different institutional settings. Specifically, the team of Lars Hornuf of the University of Munich, and Dan Ariely, Ximena García-Rada, and Heather Mann of Duke University ran a test to determine Germans’ willingness to lie for personal gain. Some 250 Berliners (the citizens, not the doughnuts) were randomly selected to take part in a game where they could win up to $8.00. And the game involved opportunities to gain through lying and cheating.

According to The Economist, after wrapping up the game, the players had to fill out a form that “asked their age and the part of Germany where they had lived in different decades.” The researchers concluded that, on average, those participants with East German roots cheated twice as much as those who had grown up in West Germany. The team also looked at how much time the participants had spent in either place prior to the fall of the Berlin Wall. “The longer the participants had been exposed to socialism, the greater the likelihood that they would claim improbable numbers of high rolls.”

Why did these two groups perform so differently? 

The study did not prove the causal determinants of the different behaviors. But we can speculate. First, we can safely rule out the hypothesis that East Germans are born with a predilection to cheat and lie. Both sets come from more or less the same genetic stock. It’s also doubtful that the differences in moral outlook came from differences in, say, diet. So the likeliest explanation for the difference is that the two vastly different sets of rules eventually shaped the values of the peoples. 

We become what we follow. We shape our rules and then our rules shape us.

In my work, I have tried to show that we are not just passive victims of our institutions. We have agency. We have morality. We have culture. And we have meaning to make. Just as East Germans risked death to scale the wall or tunnel beneath it, we can find courage in our will to liberate ourselves and others. Just as Yeonmi Park found her way out of North Korea after years of abuse and neglect, she lives in relative freedom today.

Still, she watches in horror as darkness descends over civilization as Centralism becomes the dominant religion. 

The darkness flows, not from any external threat but from within the human heart. We are beings capable of happiness and flourishing, but sometimes we push our fears and anxieties into the shadows. There they fester. And from those deep psychological bowers, fear, and anxiety reemerge transformed. 

To live right now, then, is to live in paradox.

Despite relative peace and abundance in the West, a psychosocial pathology has taken hold. It manifests itself as something like a replacement religion. Where people once turned to their temples and communities for reassurance, now more turn to political authority. Merchants of fear magnify the significance of certain human problems, which obscures complicated truths and feeds the dogmas of this new faith, whose adherents characterize Decentralists as evil.

Adherents to Centralism believe they are on the side of the angels, but their faith threatens to bring about a Dark Age. Why? Because more and more people in the grip of this religion are willing to use the fist.