Oguzhan Aygoren

I wrote my reflections on visiting San Francisco and its vibes: an all-encompassing pursuit of greatness. I touch upon the recent cultural and political ascendancy of Silicon Valley and how an abundance movement that would last should look like. writingruxandrabio.com/p/the… "Yet there is nothing bourgeois about the ambition that animates San Francisco: the ultimate, unspoken goal here is not merely success, but greatness, in all the depth and power that the word implies. This is accompanied by a certain disdain for the tepid ambition of those who merely follow the “established path”. The ultimate goal is having a say in how the future itself will play out, or “bending reality to one’s will”. Being a real world ubermensch. Great people have existed everywhere, but I am not sure there has ever been a place in history that has concentrated so many people who want to be Napoleons. Of course, this is somewhat delusional. Statistically speaking, one cannot sanely expect greatness in one’s life. But, as Tobias Huber and Byrne Hobart point out in Boom: The End of Stagnation, (constructive) delusion is a prerequisite for greatness. The narratives pervading San Francisco create a self-fulfilling prophecy and do ultimately generate extraordinary things. Not for the individual aspirant, of course: in this story, each ambitious young person arriving in SF is merely a coin toss. But inspire enough coins to toss themselves high enough, and collectively, greatness shall be reached. Failures do not matter, it’s the 100x successes that drive everything forward." And what a successful long term pro abundance movement coming from the Valley should look like: "It might also need to answer the pervasive question: “What for?”. The purely cerebral might need to think how to touch hearts, by conveying some of the thymos of those who develop technology to those who don’t. This means that, unlike Effective Altruism, it has to paint a picture of progress enabled human flourishing that goes beyond dry statistics. In order to motivate the mundane to admire the Great, the Great might need to first pay some homage to the mundane. When I talk about such a movement’s success, I do not even necessarily mean with the average voter, but also, and perhaps more importantly, other elites. The truth is that even most of those who are, relatively speaking, “winners” in today’s society, find eternity a bit too cold, knowing very well that the chance to uniquely shape the future is reserved to extremely few and that their own flame shall not burn for too long after their deaths."