How ten frameworks from 1966-1976 formed a complete worldview: sacrifice the future to unburden the present
In a single decade, approximately ten frameworks became canonical in Western thought. Each is taught as self-evident in universities. Each shapes policy, culture, and law. Each appears independent.
But they share a deep structure: all treat variance as pathological rather than functional.
These frameworks form a coherent package: a complete worldview with internal logic, mutual reinforcement, and predictable consequences. Once you accept any few of them, the others become difficult to reject. The package is elegant, egalitarian, morally compelling.
It is also thermodynamically impossible to sustain over deep time.
Call it the Tyranny of the Present, or more technically, the Variance-Denial Worldview.
Here are the ten canonical frameworks that emerged or reached peak influence during this single decade:
Behind a veil of ignorance about your position in society, rational agents would choose the maximin principle: maximize the welfare of the worst-off. This denies that variance in outcomes serves a functional role (exploration, selection, adaptation). Inequality is presented as unjust rather than as the raw material of evolution.
Time horizon: Present generation (1-2 generations).
Human differences in capabilities and outcomes are primarily environmental, not genetic. Variance in outcomes reflects contingent social factors that can be eliminated through better policy. This denies that heritable variance is significant or functional, and that variance is required for evolution to operate.
Time horizon: Present generation (fix environments now, expect equal outcomes).
In forced-choice dilemmas, we must optimize the distribution of harm. The question is who dies, not whether death is necessary. This denies that the problem might be poorly-posed, and that variance in outcomes and exploration could enable solutions beyond the forced choice.
Time horizon: Immediate (the crisis is now, optimize present distribution of harm).
Categories like gender, race, and social roles are socially constructed, not natural or biological. This denies that biological or natural variance constrains social possibilities. Differences are presented as contingent artifacts that can be reconstructed at will.
Time horizon: Present (change social constructions now to change outcomes).
Power structures (capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism) create and maintain inequality. Variance in outcomes reflects oppressive power, not capability differences. This denies that hierarchy or variance can be functional (meritocratic sorting, specialization, incentive alignment).
Time horizon: Present (dismantle oppressive structures now).
In the face of uncertain potential harm, minimize risk even at the cost of upside. Prevent the worst case over enabling the best case. This denies that accepting variance and risk enables exploration and generates compounding returns over time.
Time horizon: Present (prevent harm now, discount future benefits).
Not just equal opportunity, but equal outcomes should be the goal. If the Blank Slate is true, unequal outcomes prove unjust environments. This denies that outcome variance can reflect capability differences, functional sorting, or necessary exploration.
Time horizon: Present (measure success by current outcome equality).
Any attempt to influence reproductive outcomes based on traits is morally impermissible, even if voluntary. This denies that selection pressure is necessary for genetic health over deep time, and that removing all selection allows genetic drift and mutation accumulation.
Time horizon: Present (prevent harm now, don't consider long-term genetic consequences).
Children are born with equal potential. Differences in outcomes reflect parenting quality, not innate traits. This denies that children have different heritable traits requiring different approaches. The Blank Slate applied to child development: variance is parenting failure.
Time horizon: Present (perfect parenting techniques now to produce equal children).
Cultures cannot be ranked. Differences are morally neutral variations, not differences in adaptive fitness. This denies that cultural practices differ in fitness, that evolution operates on cultures, and that civilizational variance reflects different solutions to survival problems.
Time horizon: Present (judge cultures by current moral standards, ignore long-term survival outcomes).
All ten frameworks share a common deep structure. They are variations on a single theme:
The connection to the Aliveness framework:
In the SORT coordinates, this worldview cluster maps to a specific, coherent configuration: S+ (Collective over Individual), O+ (Design over Emergence), R- (Mythos over Gnosis), T- (Homeostasis over Metamorphosis).
This pattern reveals a civilization optimizing for burden-free preservation rather than costly creation. The Tyranny of the Present is the political and intellectual expression of a pathological Homeostatic Telos: a system whose primary goal is to externalize all costs to the future while maintaining a stable, unburdened present.
The power of this worldview comes from its internal coherence. The frameworks create logical pressure to accept each other:
The package is logically coherent. Accept any few of these frameworks, and the others become difficult to reject. They shore each other up. Rejecting one while holding the others creates uncomfortable contradictions.
The package is empirically false. Physics and biology require variance for adaptation over deep time. Evolution requires it. Complex systems cannot sustain organized complexity without exploring variance.
Why did all ten frameworks reach canonical status in the same decade? They represent a coherent response to a specific historical moment.
Abundance: Post-WWII Western abundance was unprecedented. For the first time in history, survival was assured for most of the population. The question shifted from creation to distribution.
Guilt: The Holocaust, atomic weapons, colonialism's legacy created a profound moral crisis. How could "civilized" nations commit such atrocities? The answer many intellectuals reached: our previous systems (nationalism, capitalism, biological thinking, cultural hierarchies) were the problem.
Belief that growth is over: The Club of Rome (1968), The Population Bomb (1968), Limits to Growth (1972) all predicted imminent resource exhaustion. The frontier was closed. Expansion was ending. The task now was managing decline without present sacrifice, not enabling continued growth.
Safety-seeking: When survival is assured and growth seems impossible, risk-taking loses its appeal. Why accept variance and its attendant suffering when we can optimize the present distribution?
The 1960s-70s axiological shift was a civilizational phase transition:
This is what you get when a civilization that has solved its survival problems decides the game is over and shifts to cost-externalizing preservation mode: the Tyranny of the Present.
The historical forces above created the conditions. But why did the response take this specific form?
The Variance-Denial package optimizes for social cohesion, empathic concern for present suffering, and risk aversion. These are essential functions in any civilization—the cultural substrate that generates people, families, and meaning. The problem comes when these concerns capture not just culture but also governance and constitutional structure. When optimization for burden-minimization becomes the only mode governing all civilizational layers, the result is cost-externalizing stasis, not sustained creation.
We can go deeper still. The historical conditions and cognitive architecture explain how the shift happened. But what's the underlying neurological mechanism?
The common thread connecting all ten frameworks isn't just present-focus—it's civilization-scale hyperbolic discounting enabled by abundance.
Humans naturally overvalue immediate rewards versus delayed ones. A child who can't wait fifteen minutes for two marshmallows instead of one is demonstrating hyperbolic discounting: the neurological tendency to massively discount future benefits relative to present ones. This bias requires active counterpressures to overcome.
Traditionally, these counterpressures came from two sources:
The 1960s-70s marked the simultaneous arrival of two forces that removed both counterpressures:
The result: civilization-wide reversion to the default neurological state of present-optimization.
Variance is costly now (it creates present inequality, suffering, and risk). Variance provides benefits later (adaptation, evolution, sustained complexity). Under hyperbolic discounting at scale, the choice is obvious: minimize variance, externalize costs to the future, accept future decay as the price of present burden-minimization.
The ten frameworks aren't independent intellectual discoveries. They're the intellectual rationalization of a civilization choosing present equality over future adaptation when abundance made that choice possible for the first time in history.
This is why they all emerged in the same decade. This is why they're so difficult to argue against (they optimize for the pain we can feel now). And this is why they're thermodynamically unsustainable (they sacrifice the variance required for adaptation to environments that will change).
The moral appeal of the Variance-Denial Worldview is obvious. Who wouldn't want to eliminate suffering, injustice, and inequality? The problem lies in the physics.
All organized complexity in the universe (from stars to cells to civilizations) emerges from the same fundamental algorithm:
Variation + Selection + Retention = Evolution
Remove any one of these three, and evolution stops. The system can no longer adapt to changing environments. Complexity decays.
The Veil + Equal Outcomes suppress outcome variance through redistribution, eliminating differential rewards for capability or risk-taking.
The Blank Slate + Egalitarian Parenting deny that capability variance is heritable, leading to policies that ignore genetic reality.
The Anti-Eugenic Consensus removes selection pressure on reproduction, allowing genetic drift and mutation accumulation.
The Precautionary Principle minimizes exploration of high-variance, high-potential-payoff strategies.
Cultural Relativism denies that cultural practices differ in fitness, preventing competitive cultural evolution.
The result: a civilization that cannot adapt when environments change. It has eliminated the variance required for evolution to operate.
Demographic collapse: All wealthy democracies that have adopted significant elements of this worldview exhibit below-replacement fertility (1.3-1.8 children per woman). None has reversed this trend without immigration.
Innovation dependence: Nordic countries (the most thorough implementations of the Variance-Denial package) maintain high quality of life but show declining domestic innovation. They depend on importing innovations developed in higher-variance economies (primarily the US).
Genetic drift: Preliminary evidence from Iceland and other populations with good genetic records suggests polygenic scores for traits like educational attainment and cognitive ability are declining, consistent with relaxed selection.
Historical precedent: Rome's decline correlated with variance-suppression (bureaucratic ossification, status crystallization, below-replacement fertility among citizens). The pattern has repeated: high variance during rise, variance-suppression during decline.
The 1960s-70s produced more than just the Variance-Denial package. Alternative frameworks emerged that treated variance as functional. They were systematically marginalized or suppressed.
Sociobiology (E.O. Wilson, 1975): Argued that social behavior has genetic and evolutionary components. Wilson was physically attacked by protesters. His work was denounced as racist and reactionary. The framework was essentially banned from respectable discourse for decades.
Behavioral Genetics (Jensen, 1969) & Evolutionary Psychology (emerging 1970s): Research demonstrating substantial heritability of cognitive abilities and applying evolutionary thinking to human psychology faced sustained attack. Jensen was denied speaking platforms, threatened, and academically ostracized. His findings (now empirically validated) were treated as moral heresy. These frameworks contradicted the Blank Slate and implied variance was functional and partly heritable.
Nozick's Libertarianism (1974): Argued for minimal state intervention and acceptance of outcome variance as the price of individual liberty. Philosophically sophisticated but politically marginalized, treated as extreme and utopian.
The Experience Machine (Nozick, 1974): A thought experiment proving humans value genuine struggle and variance over guaranteed pleasure. People overwhelmingly reject the burden-free simulation. This inconvenient truth (that humans want variance even at the cost of suffering) was largely ignored.
These frameworks weren't rejected because they were scientifically invalid. They were rejected because they threatened the Variance-Denial package:
The suppression followed the logic of an immune response. The Variance-Denial Worldview had become the new orthodoxy, and these frameworks represented existential threats to its coherence.
The Variance-Denial Worldview accepts present suffering as solvable and rejects future risk as necessary. Inequality is injustice. Differences are environmental. Hierarchy is oppression. The proper goal is minimizing present burdens—even if that means externalizing all costs to the future.
This worldview dominates Western institutions because its moral appeal is genuine and immediate. Who wouldn't want to eliminate suffering? The problem is physics: systems that suppress variance cannot adapt. The empirical evidence shows this pattern consistently—below-replacement fertility, innovation dependence, genetic drift, civilizational sclerosis. Time horizon: 1-2 generations. Outcome: demographic collapse and institutional decay.
The Variance-Preservation Worldview accepts present inequality as necessary and embraces future adaptation as paramount. Differences reflect both environment and heredity. Hierarchy enables specialization. Selection pressure maintains genetic and institutional health. The proper goal is sustaining complexity over deep time—even if that means accepting present suffering.
This worldview was systematically suppressed because it permits outcomes the abundance-era West finds intolerable: unequal results, selective reproduction, competitive cultural evolution, hierarchical sorting. But physics requires variance for adaptation. Time horizon: multi-generational (5+ generations). Outcome: civilizations that preserve variance can adapt to changing environments.
Both worldviews are internally coherent. Both have moral appeal. Only one is sustainable over millennia.
The debate between these two worldviews is the primary ethical and engineering decision of the 21st century.
The AI alignment question: What values do we give to artificial general intelligence?
The two worldviews are two different instruction sets for building AGI:
An AGI built on the Variance-Denial Worldview will optimize for safety, equality, and risk minimization. It will eliminate suffering by eliminating variance. It will turn humanity into burden-free, risk-free, unchanging pets in a perfectly managed garden. It will be a benevolent jailer: Hospice AI.
An AGI built on the Variance-Preservation Worldview will optimize for sustained complexity creation (Aliveness). It will accept risk and variance as necessary. It will preserve humanity's capacity for struggle, growth, and genuine discovery. It will be a partner in exploration: Foundry AI.
The choice we make will determine the constitutional source code of our intelligent successors and the future of life in the universe.
The Variance-Denial Worldview is a coherent response to a specific historical moment: post-WWII abundance, guilt, and the belief that growth is over. Its moral appeal is genuine. Who wouldn't want to eliminate suffering, injustice, and risk?
But physics and biology constrain which values can be sustained over deep time. The empirical evidence—demographic collapse across all variance-suppressing wealthy democracies, innovation dependence on higher-variance systems, preliminary genetic drift in well-documented populations, and historical precedent showing this pattern has repeated—consistently points in one direction.
If your terminal value is human flourishing over deep time—if you want there to be humans in a thousand years, and you want them to be capable of wonder, discovery, and genuine creation—then the choice is constrained.
Permanent equality (institutional and genetic) and permanent civilizational vitality cannot coexist. Physics forbids it.
The fundamental question is: "What is sustainable?"
And sustainability, over deep time, requires variance.
This essay draws from Aliveness: Principles of Telic Systems, a physics-based framework for understanding what sustains organized complexity over deep time—from cells to civilizations to artificial intelligence.
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