My Prayer

It is the duty of good people, always and everywhere, to condemn, reject, and disavow the use of political violence.

Even or especially when evildoers would celebrate the use of political violence against us.

It is our duty always to tell the truth, always to play by the rules — even when evil triumphs by lying, by sneeringly flouting every rule.

It appears to be an iron law of Fate that whenever good tries to steal a victory by evil means, it fails. This law is so infallible that any good that tries to circumvent it thereby becomes evil.

When Sam Bankman-Fried tries to save the world using financial fraud — he fails. Only the selfish succeed through fraud.

When kind, nerdy men, in celibate desperation, try to get women to bed using “Game” and other underhanded tactics — they fail. Only the smirking bullies get women that way.

Quantum mechanics is false, because its Born Rule speaks of randomness.

But randomness can’t explain why a bullet aimed at a destroyer of American democracy must inevitably miss by inches, while a bullet aimed at JFK or RFK or MLK or Gandhi or Rabin must inevitably meet its target.

Yet for all that, over the millennia, good has made actual progress. Slavery has been banished to the shadows. Children survive to adulthood. Sometimes altruists become billionaires, or billionaires altruists. Sometimes the good guy gets the girl.

Good has progressed not by lucky breaks — for good never gets lucky breaks — but only because the principles of good are superior.

There’s a kind of cosmic solace that could be offered even to the Jewish mother in the gas chamber watching her children take their last breaths, though the mother could be forgiven for rejecting it.

The solace is that good will triumph — if not in the next four years, then in the four years after that.

Or if not in four, then in a hundred.

Or if not in a hundred, then in a thousand.

Or if not in the entire history of life in on this planet, then on a different planet.

Or if not in this universe, then in a different universe.

Let us commit to fighting for good using good methods only. Fate has decreed in any case that, for us, those are the only methods that work.

Let us commit to use good methods only even if it means failure, heartbreak, despair, the destruction of democratic institutions and ecosystems multiplied by a thousand or a billion or any other constant — with the triumph of good only in the asymptotic limit.

Good will triumph, when it does, only because its principles are superior.

Endnote: I’ve gotten some pushback for this prayer from one of my scientific colleagues … specifically, for the part of the prayer where I deny the universal validity of the Born rule. And yet a less inflammatory way of putting the same point would simply be: I am not a universal Bayesian. There are places where my personal utility calculations do a worst-case analysis rather than averaging over possible futures for the world.

Endnote 2: It is one thing to say, never engage in political violence because the expected utility will come out negative. I’m saying something even stronger than that. Namely, even if the expected utility comes out positive, throw away the whole framework of being an expected-utility maximizer before you throw away that you’re never going to endorse political violence. There’s a class of moral decisions for which you’ve allowed to, even to be commended for, using expected-utility calculations, and this is outside that class.

Update 3: If you thought that Trump’s base was devoted before, now that the MAGA Christ-figure has sacrificed his flesh — or come within a few inches of doing so — on behalf of the Nation, they will go to the ends of the earth for him, as much as any followers did for any ruler in human history. Now the only questions, assuming Trump wins (as he presumably will), are where he chooses to take his flock, and what emerges in the aftermath for what we currently call the United States. I urge my left-leaning American friends to look into second passports. Buckle up, and may we all be here to talk about it on the other end.