Dad, does left or right mean anything in Longevity?

Fourth chapter of the series. Before: I have implemented the Maricarmen Longevity Decree at home, How I vote in elections thinking about longevity and What I will tell my daughter about housing, effort, victimhood and longevity.

I am sorry, daughter. This question deserves context and a good long explanation.

I will start.

At Burning Man I spent a week in a city without money.

There were no stores. Nobody charged for anything. People gave away food, water, music, and art. And, at the same time, nobody owed you anything: everyone brought their own water, food, and plan.

For a few days I had the feeling of living in a utopia. Free and generous at the same time.

And upon returning, I asked myself a question that still haunts me: why does something like that work for a week in the desert and has never worked in an entire country?

That question is, at its heart, the great debate of the last two hundred years. And with an election on November 29th, I think it is worth stopping to think about it.

Two big ideas

Greatly simplifying, there are two ways of looking at society.

The first puts individual freedom at the center. Each person decides their life, their work, what they do with their money. The State should interfere as little as possible. It is the liberal tradition, from Locke to Hayek. Their strongest argument: nobody knows better than you what you need, and when millions of people decide freely, more prosperity arises than any planner could ever design.

The second puts equality at the center. Wealth should be distributed so that everyone has more or less the same. It is the socialist tradition and, in its most radical version, communist: "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need." Their strongest argument: nobody chooses where they are born, and a freedom that only those born with resources can enjoy is not freedom for everyone.

Both ideas are very powerful. And defending one or the other depends, deep down, on a question that is not economic, but philosophical: what is the most important thing in a society?

What is the good?

It is one of the oldest questions in philosophy. What is the good? What should guide us? What is worth defending?

And each answer leads to a different way of organizing the world.

If you believe that what is most valuable is for each person to be the owner of their own life, you will defend individual freedom, even if that brings inequality. The philosopher Robert Nozick took it to the extreme: if what you have, you have obtained fairly, taking it from you to give to someone else, even with good intentions, is treating you as a means and not as an end.

If you believe that what is most valuable is for no one to be left behind, you will defend equality, even if to achieve it, one must impose it and limit the freedom of some. For this vision, a very large inequality is an injustice in itself, regardless of who caused it.

And in between there are many positions. Utilitarians, for example, would say that the good is what produces the most well-being for the most people, and that freedom and equality are just tools to achieve it.

Who is right? The honest answer is that for some people, one idea seems more defensible, or more appealing, and for others, the opposite. It depends on what each person values most. And that cannot be proven with an equation.

Personally, I lean toward defending individual freedom over imposed equality. And not because of team loyalties, but because of what I believe makes us human.

As I told you in this article, the human brain has something unique: the ability to not always live in the present. We can imagine the future, make plans, and renounce something today to build something better tomorrow. No other animal does it this way.

All our intelligence, our science, and our progress come from there. From millions of brains planning, testing, making mistakes, and trying again.

And to plan, you need freedom. Freedom to decide what to do with your time, your effort, and what you save. If someone decides for you what you have to have and what you don't, they don't just limit you. They take away the tool that has brought us this far.

Imposed equality can distribute what already exists better. But it slowly extinguishes each person's ability to imagine and build what does not yet exist.

But I understand those who think the opposite, and I believe it is convenient to listen to their best arguments, not the worst ones.

And the best argument from the other side is powerful. There are those who believe that progress is also born from centralized planning and good distribution. That when the State concentrates resources on a great goal, it can reach where no one could reach alone.

And there are examples. The Internet was born from ARPANET, a project funded by the United States Department of Defense. GPS, too. The Soviet Union, a totally planned economy, launched the first satellite and the first human into space. And a good portion of the basic science behind the drugs that prolong our lives today has been paid for with public money.

There is even an argument that connects with my own idea: if a society guarantees the basics—food, healthcare, education—it frees many more people from mere subsistence. And more free brains to plan could mean more progress for everyone.

I believe history shows that, in the long run, millions of free people planning innovate more than a few planning for everyone. But it is not a silly question. And whoever raises it in good faith deserves to be heard.

Who decides for whom?

Behind this entire debate is a limitation that is almost never mentioned: who decides, for whom, and how we coordinate a government that decides jointly but affects each individual.

And that limitation has a very concrete root. Human beings are individuals by nature. Each one lives locked inside their own head.

Think about what it takes to convey to another person what you have in your mind. We can only do it by speaking or writing. And it is very slow. A study compared 17 languages and found that, no matter which one we speak, we transmit about 39 bits of information per second. Researchers at Caltech calculate that our conscious behavior operates at about 10 bits per second, while our senses receive billions.

Our lives would not be long enough to transmit everything we know. Furthermore, we don't even have it perfectly memorized. We would have to summarize it, we would make mistakes, and almost everything would be lost along the way.

That is why we need representatives, parliaments, laws, forms, and bureaucracy. They are the imperfect way we have found to coordinate millions of heads that cannot connect directly. And that is why any entity that decides for many, however well-intentioned it may be, always decides with very incomplete information.

And there is an even deeper limitation. Many of our conflicts, in a couple, in a company, or in a country, do not come from us not understanding others. They come from us not even understanding ourselves.

Years ago I wrote about what I called the theory of empathy with our "self" in a different hormonal state. The idea is simple: when we make a decision, we do it rested, enthusiastic, or calm. But the one who has to carry it out is our future "self," who perhaps will be tired, stressed, or sleepy. And often that "self" gets angry at the one who decided.

If it is so hard for us to empathize with ourselves in another hormonal state, imagine how hard it is with another person, who is already different by nature. And in that article, I asked myself a question that I still cannot answer: are two calm and serene people with different values more alike, or two people with the same values but in opposite hormonal states?

It is another face of the same limitation. We don't just transmit information slowly. We don't even have full access to our own. And so it is very difficult for a higher entity, however well it does it, to understand us all.

Hold onto this idea, because in the next chapter we will flip it around.

What would happen if that limitation disappeared? If one day we could pass what is in our mind to another person not at 39 bits per second, but at a speed thousands of times greater? What would be left of parliaments, laws, bureaucracy... and of ourselves as individuals?

It may not be as far away as it seems. And the answer might not leave you indifferent.

I will tell you about it, along with what I think will happen with these limitations, in the next chapter: Vectors of intelligence.

Now, an important nuance must be made. Planning is no one's heritage. There are also those who plan, with all their good faith, for everyone to live well. That no one goes hungry, that everyone has a home, that wealth reaches everyone.

The problem is not in the goal. It is in the method. When you plan your life, you decide about yourself. When you plan the lives of others, you decide about them. And the moment your plan becomes an obligation for others, you enter fully into the terrain of their individual freedom.

There appears the underlying philosophical question, the one that has remained unresolved for centuries: should everyone look out for themselves and decide their own path? Or should there be a higher entity, above individuals, that guides us and decides for everyone?

In the 17th century, Hobbes argued in Leviathan that, without a strong power above us, human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." Shortly after, Locke replied that such power is only legitimate if it protects the life, liberty, and property of each person. Deep down, we remain trapped in that discussion.

Adrián Díaz puts it very well when he talks about authoritarianism and democracy: in both systems, there is an entity that decides about us. One regulates more and the other less. We choose one and not the other. But in both, there is someone above the individual.

Yuval Noah Harari gives it another very interesting twist in Nexus. For him, human societies are sustained by information networks: shared stories, documents, and bureaucracies. And the big difference between a democracy and a totalitarian regime is how that information circulates. In democracy, it is spread among many centers and has mechanisms to correct its errors. In totalitarianism, it is concentrated in a single point, which decides for everyone.

It is the same thing Hayek said: knowledge is spread among millions of brains. The more the decision is concentrated, the more information is lost along the way.

The anthropologist James C. Scott documented it in Seeing Like a State with very concrete examples: entire cities drawn with a square from an office, agricultural collectivizations, villages reorganized by decree. Great plans designed with the best intentions that failed because they ignored what the people who lived there knew.

My conclusion is that we need some of that higher entity. Without common rules, without justice, and without security, there is no worthwhile freedom. But the more it decides for us, the less space remains for what makes us human: planning our own life.

Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, Nobel Prize winners in Economics in 2024, call it the narrow corridor. Free and prosperous societies are those that achieve a State strong enough to protect people, and a society strong enough so that the State does not crush them. Neither an absent Leviathan nor a Leviathan that decides everything.

What can be measured

Now, there is a part of the debate that is not a matter of taste.

There is a science that studies empirically how we use scarce resources, how we respond to incentives, and what happens when the rules of the game change: economics.

Economics doesn't tell you what you should value. But it does tell you how much each choice costs. What happens to the supply of housing if prices are capped. What happens to investment if the rules change halfway through the game. What happens to effort if making an effort doesn't matter.

Philosophy helps you choose the destination. Economics tells you which paths truly lead there and which ones lead you away.

And this is where many people get it wrong: they choose a precious value and then defend measures that, according to the data, achieve exactly the opposite of what they were seeking.

Who plans?

Here comes what interests me most, because it connects with the previous chapter.

I told you that what makes us human is the ability to plan. Well, the big difference between those two visions is not whether one plans or not. It is who plans.

In one, each person plans their own life. In the other, the State plans for everyone.

Hayek explained it in a famous essay, The Use of Knowledge in Society: the knowledge necessary to decide well is spread among millions of people. What you know about your neighborhood, your job, your family. No ministry can gather it all. That is why central plans fail so much.

Housing, which we talked about in the previous chapter, is a perfect example. When it is planned from above who can rent, at what price, and for how long, what usually happens is that the supply shrinks. In Stockholm, with indefinite contracts and controlled rents, the average wait in the official queue to get a rental is more than nine years. The plan was for everyone to have a home. The result is that it's held by whoever arrived first.

But one must be fair to the other side. Rawls proposed a very powerful thought experiment: the veil of ignorance. Imagine that you have to design the rules of society without knowing if you will be born rich or poor, healthy or sick. What rules would you choose? Probably ones where there is freedom, but also a safety net for those who have bad luck.

And the philosopher Isaiah Berlin distinguished two types of freedom: negative, that no one prevents you from doing things, and positive, having the real capacity to do them. A liberal emphasizes the first. A socialist, the second.

Left and right don't explain everything

We tend to think that the market is right-wing and planning is left-wing. But it is not that simple.

Actually, there are at least two distinct axes that we mix up all the time:

• The economic model: how much people and companies decide, and how much the State decides. More market or more planning.
• The political system: how power is distributed and exercised. Liberal democracy, with elections, alternation, and freedoms, or authoritarianism, where power is not subject to a vote.

There is even a classic chart, the Nolan Chart, that separates economic freedom from personal freedom precisely because a single line from left to right falls short.

The one who has shown me this best is Adrián Díaz, who has lived in China for years and is the author of 21 Keys to Understanding China in the 21st Century. In one of his videos, he defends a thesis that breaks many molds.

According to Adrián, China is not socialist in economic terms. There, almost everything is paid for by whoever uses it, very few costs are socialized, and the culture of merit is extreme. Meanwhile, the United States, which passes for being the temple of the free market, intervenes more and more: tariffs, protectionism, major investment plans directed from the White House, and direct pressure on companies.

So, why has China grown so much? His answer is that it has not been because of socialism, but because of what its political system gives it: predictability. Legal security and expectations. You know where China is going to be in four years. With the United States, or with any democracy, it depends on the next election.

This connects directly with what we saw regarding housing: long plans need stable rules. It doesn't matter if a person, a company, or a State plans. Without predictability, no one builds.

I don't share all of Adrián's conclusions, and I wouldn't trade freedom for stability. The great advantage of democracy is that it allows for correcting mistakes and changing who governs without violence, and that is priceless. But his reflection seems very valuable to me for two reasons.

The first: it forces us to stop thinking in terms of teams. For those who admire China for being "socialist" or those who defend the United States for being "liberal," the data can give them more than one surprise.

The second: it reminds us that freedom needs more than just laws. It needs rules that don't change halfway through the game. That is the great challenge of democracies: to offer stability without renouncing freedom.

There is another idea of Adrián's that has made me think a lot. According to him, we didn't like democracy so much for the procedure, for the act of voting, as for its results. And for decades, especially since World War II, those results were spectacular: Western democracies led in economic development, technology, medicine, standard of living, and security.

But something is changing. The West is experiencing a certain sense of decadence, partly due to that lack of predictability. And in Asia, societies with more authoritarianism, like China or Singapore, are beginning to offer results that seem enviable to many people.

Does that mean authoritarianism is more desirable? Not necessarily. We may just be in another turn of a longer cycle. History is full of systems that seemed invincible and ceased to be so. And in the middle of a technological revolution, it is likely that we will see forms of organization appear that we don't even imagine today.

Ray Dalio explains it very well in Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order: many of the great changes that seem unprecedented to us have happened other times, just not in our lifetimes. To understand them, you have to look back centuries, not decades.

And that gives one pause. Perhaps many things we take for granted are so only because we haven't experienced anything else. It is hard for us to imagine what it was like to live in other societies and other eras, and whether they were desirable or not.

Although, with all the data in hand, it still seems that we live in the best era in history. And it is worth not forgetting that a good part of it was built in freedom.

The world we actually live in

Here is the interesting thing: we don't live in either of the two extremes.

In Spain, and in almost all of the West, we have a mix. There is some equality of opportunity: public education, universal healthcare, scholarships. We don't all start from zero, but we start closer than in almost any other moment in history.

And there is quite a bit of freedom of choice: you can choose what to study, where to live, start a company, save, or spend.

It is neither a liberal paradise nor an egalitarian system. It is a playing field with concrete rules, which also change every four years depending on who wins.

For me, the best synthesis between the two ideas is this: what we should ask for is not for things to be given to us, but for them not to take more than necessary from us, and for our taxes to serve to provide opportunities to those who want to make an effort.

Freedom to decide. Equality to start. And the result, let it depend on each one.

Don't be hooligans for an ideology

Many people live these ideas like a soccer team. They spend their lives defending theirs and hating the rival. And while they argue on social media, they do nothing with their lives.

I propose something else: use ideologies as tools to understand the world, not as identities.

A strategist doesn't waste energy wishing the rules were different. They read the existing rules well and play them as best as possible.

How to be a strategist in a mixed world

1. Take advantage of what the system gives you. Public education, healthcare, free training, scholarships, and aid. They are there and you pay for them with your taxes. Use them without complexes. It is the part of equality of opportunity that does work.

2. Build what the system fails to give you. Savings, health prevention, a network of trusted people, useful knowledge. As I told you in the: radical self-sufficiency. In the desert, everyone brings their own water.

3. Low expectations on what you do not control. Who wins the elections, what law is passed, how much inflation rises, what the entity above you decides.

4. Maximum effort on what you do control. Your decisions, your habits, your health, your plan. It is the only thing that no one can vote for on your behalf.

5. Diversify your dependence. If your entire life depends on a single thing (an employer, a Government, a country, an interest rate), you are fragile. The more legs the table has, the more stable it is. Several sources of income, several types of assets, several options of where to live and work.

6. Build wealth that does not depend on a single place. Here enter the principles of what I have been calling pseudonymous economy:

• The most valuable wealth is what you carry with you. Knowledge, skills, reputation, and relationships. No one knows you have it when you cross a border, no crisis can expropriate it, and it can be converted into money when you need it.
• Be valued for what you contribute, not for who you are. In the digital economy, you can work with a pseudonym, with verifiable reputation, without anyone judging you for your age, sex, origin, or ideology. Only by your results.
• Value that does not depend on your time. Artificial intelligence, protocols, communities, and digital assets allow creating value that does not require you to be working every hour.
• Resilience against what you do not control. Wars, crises, corruption, or laws that change from one year to the next. As I told you in this article, the person who may become the richest person in the world, Satoshi Nakamoto, is a pseudonym. It is proof that you can create huge wealth without depending on a country, a title, or an employer.

Always within the law, of course. It is not about hiding, but about not depending on a single structure that can change the rules halfway through the game.

7. Effective altruism without expecting anything in return. Without expecting anything in return. And where it has the most impact, not where the most noise is made.

8. Be optimistic and focused on seeing the post-singularity society. It is possible that we will see it. I will tell you about it in the next article: Vectors of intelligence

The wealth over which you have the most control

I would like to tell you that health is a wealth that no one can take from you. But that wouldn't be true.

A Government can ruin your health in a thousand ways. With a healthcare system that doesn't work, with eternal waiting lists, with decisions that prevent you from accessing a treatment, or with an authoritarian regime that decides what you can eat, where you can go, or what you can know.

And we don't all start equal either. There are genes better adapted than others to the environment. There are those who are born with more predisposition to get sick and those who are lucky enough to be the opposite. It is a lottery that no one chose.

But here is the interesting thing: that lottery weighs less than we think. A great study with data from more than 400 million people estimated that the part of our longevity explained by genes is probably less than 10%. The majority depends on the environment and what we do each day.

Genes deal the cards. But we play them.

That is why I believe health is the wealth over which you have the most control. Not the only one that matters, nor one that no one can touch. But it is the one that depends most on your decisions: how you sleep, whether you train strength, what you eat, how you manage stress, and who you surround yourself with.

And there is something more. The genetic inequalities that are a lottery today may stop being so. Medicine, genetic editing, and longevity therapies may come to correct what nature distributed poorly. But I will talk about that in the next chapter.

Returning to the desert

I already know why Burning Man works for a week.

It works because each person arrives prepared. Self-sufficient. And precisely for that reason, they can afford to give without expecting anything in return.

It is not a utopia imposed from above. It is the sum of thousands of people who have done their part before arriving.

Perhaps that is the lesson for any political system: no society will be freer or fairer than the people who form it.

So, whoever wins on November 29th, the plan remains the same:

• Sign your own decree.
• Lower expectations on what does not depend on you.
• Plan like what you are: human.
• Take care of the wealth that depends most on you: your health.
• Be optimistic. A world of (Even more) abundance may be near. And it is probably inevitable, whoever governs. Transhumanism imposes itself on the conservatism of the left, right, democracies, and authoritarianism. It is not going against Humanism. It is Humanism itself. Traditional Humanism is against the human.

A hug,

Gonzalo