Beyond the Profit Principle

Against H-1Bs and the One Trillion Human Cult

Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos, two of our species’ leaders, have both expressed their wish for humanity to grow exponentially. They believe that the more humans we bring into existence, the more cultural and scientific geniuses we’ll have on the planet—or planets, if their spacefaring ventures work out. On Lex Fridman’s podcast, Bezos wagered: “If we had a trillion humans, we would have at any given time a thousand Mozarts and a thousand Einsteins.”

But is that true? When Mozart was in his mature period, filling up opera houses and chamber halls, Vienna had a population of 250,000. That’s less than the current population of Cleveland, Ohio (362,656). According to an averaging of different global studies, the world population in 1800 was estimated to be around 1,125,000,000 on the higher end, and 800,000,000 on the lower end. Mozart, and any other cultural genius we can think of, grew up in a much smaller world than ours.

For one, the effect such a population explosion would have on communication would be unsettling. If it feels hopeless to form a social network or community, let alone a national culture, in the sea of hundreds of millions currently on the internet, imagine trying to do it when the human species is as numerous, rootless, and generic as plankton. Culture is inherently local, bound to one place and one temporal movement, spreading to other places but never becoming universal in the sense of physical laws. This is why cultural geniuses are common in city-states and rare in empires, which cover far more territory and contain much larger populations.

One might suggest that a trillion humans would inevitably fracture into many city-states, niches for different customs to emerge in. But if the experience of life since the radio is any indication, the opposite is much more likely, where trillions will tune in to the same handful of talking heads, a situation conditioned by federalizing effects of high-speed technology and advertising.

It is delusional to think quantity necessitates quality, and that more humans equal more talent. It is as delusional as Vivek Ramaswamy suggesting, not 24 hours after his followers happily watched their kids unwrap presents on the happiest day of the year, that we should increase the number of H-1B immigrants because they come from superior cultures—“superior” because they neglect quality of life and spiritual well-being in favor of grinding their lives away into the computer screen, and “cultures” not in the sense of millennia-old ethnic and religious traditions but rather psychotic parenting fads imposed by the market.

I suspect that behind these calls for mass immigration and infinite species growth is not a wish for more cultural geniuses but a lust for greater profits, which would be unlocked by the formation of a colossal trough, a gigantic human corral, that would guarantee exponential profit exploitation and a runaway effect for shareholder value. And behind their stated goal of technological development is, again, a lust for profit, as their interest in technology is not that of the humble tinkerer in his workshop but a by-product of their desire for more frontiers to promise investors.

But, then, what is behind these desires, these lusts and greeds? And what would a genuine proposal to cultivate more geniuses sound like?

In 1920, Sigmund Freud published Beyond the Pleasure Principle, an essay that challenged the foundation of all his previous work: instead of relying on a single force to explain the wishes of the human unconscious, termed Eros or the libido, the creative drive that longs for self-preservation in the form of sexual reproduction, Freud in this piece introduces a second drive, Thanatos or the Todestrieb (death-drive). He felt forced to do so to explain the complicated and bizarre acts of self-destruction and self-sabotage he documented among the neurotics he treated: veterans with trauma, victims of child abuse, and so on.

He eventually decides its origin is not to be thought by biology but by physics. In the creation of new cells, an imbalance of energy is produced which disturbs matter; to address this, matter tries to find the easiest way back to the state it inhabited prior to this imbalance, which coincidentally was the inorganic state—death. The wish for death is matter’s urge to find a less contradictory assemblage, namely one without the highly demanding and indebting processes of cellular creation—life.

But why would human beings engage in higher deeds that don’t immediately satisfy the body nor lead to the coveted abyss—where does Da Vinci come from? And what keeps both the blind libido and the self-destructive death drive in check?

Thus, a decade later, Freud releases Civilization and Its Discontents, which introduces a third factor: Civilization, or the process by which our impulses are repressed by collective Reason. Repression depresses the subject, thwarting its drives repeatedly and turning them back in on themselves and causing a host of psychological maladies. But in the long run it creates the tranquility and longevity we treasure in the life of the Polis. And in the gap created between the suppression of appetites, in the repression of our lusts and passions, we witness the birth of the spirit, where those hungry drives for recognition are redirected and sublimated into the grand projects of religion, art, and scientific discovery.

But what if psychoanalytic treatment at the individual level isn’t enough? What if civilization at large suffers from neuroses? What if the profit principle that allegedly propels capitalistic society, analogous to the pleasure principle, also triggers a death drive that seeks to return to the “inorganic state”?

Marx reverses the chess pieces we are familiar with. While defenders of the status quo see the motivation to produce profits as the life drive, casting laziness or the return to past states of human society (even back to the state of nature) as the death drive, Marx identified the death drive with the profit principle. For him, human tranquility and technological progress—the production of geniuses—were being stymied by the capitalistic lust for profit.

If a certain activity or invention doesn’t produce a surplus, then it doesn’t get done, regardless of how beneficial it would be. John Deere has now joined the ranks of Mercedes and Apple by making it impossible to repair their products. Boilers are effectively made under the scheme of planned obsolescence because the manufacturers stop making replacement parts for units over 20 years old even if they still work just fine. The pursuit of profit, rather than propelling human development, twisted humanity’s fate away from the happy kingdom of ends toward a maddening and self-destructive civil war of resentment going both ways, up from workers and down from the elite.

Companies want to promise shareholders a constant and hypothetically infinite source of revenue as a guarantee of exponential growth. Everything must be subjected to rent-seeking (subscriptions) rather than commodity-selling to promise this, so they can either constantly expand the subscriber base or charge higher subscription fees. Or, not content with ad revenue and premium subscriptions, the tech and social media companies promise to take users’ data and train their LLMs on it, promising a product with infinite growth potential.

The accumulation of capital for the sake of itself leads to a bad infinity, a logically fallacious infinitely regressing series, rather than the good infinity of the self-enclosed sum.[i] As X user “Antinomy” recently pointed out, the flashy claim of Nick Land’s, that capital is the subject of history rather than the proletariat (leading him to take AI’s side over humanity’s, AI as capital-become-sentient), is a categorical error.

The automaticity of capital operates only by adding more capital to itself; it turns everything into gold and gold into more gold, but it is not capable of fostering and stewarding the complexity of the universal, with all its particulars, under its wings, as a true infinity, the true subject of history, would.

In place of the bad infinity of capital, Marx championed communism, which as I have pointed out before he left ill-defined. For lack of a definition from its prophet, we can define communism as “whatever arrangement of social production allows humans to enjoy the good infinity.” Beside their call for the collection of all productive forces under a new state—nicknamed the “dictatorship of the proletariat” (DOTP) in a different work—Marx and Engels promised that the profit drive would be overturned and ever-more technological devices and wealth would be generated.

But the replacement of private capitalists by the state, while the state pursues the same boundless technological development and improvement of the productive forces, does not get us beyond the profit principle—it’s the profit principle by alternative means. As X user Ross Wolfe recently noticed, to his horror, the defense of Deng Xiaoping’s China by Marxist-Leninists like Domenico Losurdo (who also defend Stalin’s Soviet Union along the same lines) sounds awfully similar to capitalistic society, except the Party is in charge of profit production rather than private actors.

As he asks, what then would be the point of all the effort required to pull off this communist revolution?

Marx’s inability to explain the solution does not negate the reality of the problem he identified. The death drive is indeed the profit principle. But the true face of the profit principle is technological development and its automatic logic which, left unchecked, would enslave humanity to the bad infinity of endless production for its own sake, whether accomplished by private capitalists or DOTPs. Heidegger noted that the metaphysical character of world technology was a will that only wills more willing, perpetual appetite without end, a will-to-will; whenever we contemplate doing an action, we can already hear our justificatory conscience saying, “we have to build this hydroelectric dam so that we can have lights so that we can work in offices so that we can engage in city planning to build more parking lots so that we can have more consumption so that we can grow the economy so that we can… so that we can, so that we can, so that we can…”

Or as Nietzsche said, “Mankind unsparingly uses every individual as material to heat its great machines; but what good are the machines when all individuals (that is, mankind) serve only to keep them going? Machines that are their own end — is that the umana commedia?”[ii]

To “mitigate” the impulse of consumption, as well as the impulse of profit production—twin bad infinites—we must introduce a concrete universal that preserves all particularities, that does not produce a will-to-will but eschews all justification in favor of the idle enjoyment of a king or a god. This is play.

Nietzsche again: “Maturity is regaining the seriousness of a child at play.” Play can become a new goal for civilization, a value that commands service and sacrifice, because, perspicuously understood, it is a serious matter. Play does not “go with the flow” of the processes of nature and the impulses of “human nature,” but directs them after some contrivance—however arbitrary. Play takes hold of things and submits them to a higher ideal, a final cause, but without any productivist trappings, serving only as a cosmic celebration. It is the antidote to all utilitarian justifications, and it creates only in order to please. It does not engage in frivolity and satire, mockery and stupidity, but in the intense storymaking that nevertheless does not accidentally take itself too seriously.

In place of Capital and the State, the Nietzschean antimetaphysics of play introduces an anarchy that is also an aristocracy, a serious lightness. In Zarathustra, Nietzsche describes the child as “innocence and forgetfulness, a new beginning, a sport, a self-propelling wheel, a first motion, a sacred Yes,” where the Geist now “wills its own will,” where Geist, “sundered from the world, now wins its own world.” Geist, the Hegelian term for what we are calling “civilization,” becomes mired in willing the other’s will, in inter-recognition, depending on the Other, whose name is “mankind.”

Vivek thinks the American spirit that led to all the technological breakthroughs in the 19^th and 20^th centuries was born out of nerds cramming for tests so they could get positions in major corporations. This is wrong. They were reached by inventors with true passion for discovery for its own sake. Bring back the spirit of Edison, the tinkerer, the backwoods inventor and purveyor of the horizon of human knowledge.

This can be accomplished with less than 25 million free spirits on a fresh continent. This is what early America was. We do not need hundreds of trillions of humans clamoring over subscription promises. We need city-states of sport.

Besides technological production, Capital and the proletarian State have in common the exploitation of individuals on behalf of the “general will.” The Übermensch is he who overcomes not only the profit principle but the communism, the general will, of civilization, inside of his own psyche. The psychological maladies of civilization are born out of the nightmare of the Other. We do not want a civilizing tendency, we want an uncivilizing tendency, a factor that constantly releases us up out of dependency and the so-that-we-can of technology into a true infinity.

Footnotes:

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[i] “The fact is that the infinite series contains the bad infinite because what the series is supposed to express remains an ought, and what it does express is encumbered by a beyond which does not go away, and it is diverse from what it is supposed to express. It is infinite not because of the posited terms, but because such terms are incomplete, since the other which belongs to them essentially is beyond them; what the series actually contains (let the terms posited be as many as one wishes) is only something finite, in the strict sense of being posited as finite, that is, as something which is not what it ought to be. On the other hand, what is called the finite expression of such a series, or the sum of it, is without lack; it contains whole the value which the series only seeks; the beyond is recalled from its flight; what it is and what it ought to be are not separated but are the same.

“More precisely, what distinguishes the two expressions is that in the infinite series the negative lies outside its terms, and these have a valid place in the series only as parts of the amount. By contrast, in the finite expression which is a ratio the negative is immanent: it is the reciprocal being-determined of the sides of the ratio, and this being-determined is a being-turned-back into itself, self-referring unity as a negation of the negation (both sides of the ratio are only as moments), and consequently has the determination of infinity within itself. – Therefore, what is ordinarily called the sum, like the 2/7 or the 1/1−a , is in fact a ratio, and this so-called finite expression is the true infinite expression.” Hegel, The Science of Logic, Section II, “Magnitude,” Chapter 2, “Quantum,” §21.246, pp. 210-211. Translated by George Di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

[ii] Human All Too Human, 585.