What sphinx of cement and aluminum bashed open their skulls and ate up their brains and imagination? Moloch! Solitude! Filth! Ugliness! Ashcans and unobtainable dollars! Children screaming under the stairways! Boys sobbing in armies! Old men weeping in the parks!
Moloch! Moloch! Nightmare of Moloch! Moloch the loveless! Mental Moloch! Moloch the heavy judger of men!
Moloch the incomprehensible prison! Moloch the crossbone soulless jailhouse and Congress of sorrows! Moloch whose buildings are judgment! Moloch the vast stone of war! Moloch the stunned governments!
Moloch whose mind is pure machinery! Moloch whose blood is running money! Moloch whose fingers are ten armies! Moloch whose breast is a cannibal dynamo! Moloch whose ear is a smoking tomb!
Our world is controlled by Lovecraftian gods–not literals ones, but metaphors, vast formless things beyond our control that shape our actions and incentives. Moloch is perhaps the best known of these: a god not from Lovecraft, but from Canaanite mythology, demanding child sacrifice in return for victory, representing the destruction of human value by coordination problems.
In Hobbes’s state of nature, Moloch was omnipresent and omnipotent, making life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Humanity coordinated, instituted governments, pushed it back. Yet even in liberal democracies, Moloch persists as the bringer of civilizational failure, of principal-agent problems and information asymmetries and Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibria. It spews poison into the atmosphere. It enacts laws that no one wants. It forces us to toil all the days of our life, instead of living off the bounty of the earth. It makes nations build up nuclear arsenals instead of useful infrastructure. It fills scientific journals with bogus results. It kills premature babies, the cheap nutritional formula that would save them held up in the regulatory approval process.
The communists tried to kill Moloch. They instituted a collective economic regime, where everyone would work for the common good instead of pouring their resources into zero-sum competitions. They also had an elegant solution for what to do about defectors: kill them. It seemed certain that they would drive the capitalists into the ground.
It didn’t work. Running a national economy is computationally intractable, so the decisions of what to produce, and how, and for whom, still had to be delegated. And so the principal-agent problems and information asymmetries and Pareto-inefficient Nash equilibria came back stronger than ever. By the time the Soviet Union fell, it had become a cesspool of corruption and poverty, its economy devoted to producing goods no one wanted simply because that was what the unintelligently-designed local incentives said to do.
Capitalism and democracy have done somewhat better, because local incentives in those systems are aligned with human values, at least to a first approximation, in the short term. Indeed, turning “satisfying customers” and “satisfying citizens” into the outputs of optimization processes was one of civilization’s greatest advances and the reason why capitalist democracies have so outperformed other systems. But if we have bound Moloch as our servant, the bonds are not very strong, and we sometimes find that the tasks he has done for us move to his advantage rather than ours.
Speaking of which, in recent years, liberal democracy has been getting quite Lovecraftian, in that a racist xenophobe is causing all of us to worry about the apocalypse. As such, our next song is one that seems to have lost very little of its relevance from 1959.
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