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The Delusion of Insignificance

Keywords

war-on-disease, 1-percent-treaty, medical-research, public-health, peace-dividend, decentralized-trials, dfda, dih, victory-bonds, health-economics, cost-benefit-analysis, clinical-trials, drug-development, regulatory-reform, military-spending, peace-economics, decentralized-governance, wishocracy, blockchain-governance, impact-investing

On my planet, there is a disorder called the delusion of grandeur. It means believing you are more important than you are. Your species has this too. You give it to about one in every hundred people and then medicate them for it.

You do not have a name for the opposite condition. You should. It is far more common and far more dangerous.

The argument from insignificance

Here is what most humans believe about themselves, stated plainly:

“I am one of eight billion. I am small. What I do does not matter. The problems are too large for me. Someone more important will handle them.”

I have been watching your planet for a long time and this belief is, by a significant margin, the most destructive idea your species has ever produced. It is more destructive than any weapon because it is the reason the weapons are not questioned. A person who believes they are insignificant does not ask why 12,241 nuclear warheads exist. That would be above their pay grade. A person who believes they are insignificant does not check the ratio of military spending to clinical trial spending. That is someone else’s job.

The belief in your own insignificance is not humility. It is the reason 55 million people die every year of diseases you already have treatments for. Humility would be “I might be wrong about this policy.” Insignificance is “it does not matter whether I am wrong because I do not matter.” One of these is a virtue. The other is a body count.

The proof

I will now prove that you are not insignificant. The proof works whether you are selfish, altruistic, religious, nihilist, or anything in between. It requires you to accept exactly one premise: that your own conscious experience is real.

Step 1. You cannot prove that any consciousness other than your own exists. This is called solipsism. It is unfalsifiable. You experience your own consciousness directly. You infer everyone else’s from behavior, but inference is not proof. This is not a controversial philosophical position. It is an open problem that has been open for several thousand years. Nobody has solved it. Your species mostly ignores it because it is uncomfortable.

Step 2. If you are the only consciousness, you are the most important entity in the universe. Not metaphorically. Arithmetically. One conscious entity in existence means that entity is maximally important. Your suffering is the only suffering. Your pleasure is the only pleasure. The entire value of the universe is your experience of it.

Step 3. If other consciousnesses do exist, each one is the entire universe from its own perspective. There is no universe any person experiences except through their own consciousness. Their consciousness is everything, to them. Every person is the main character of the only story they will ever know. This is not a metaphor either. It is a description of how consciousness works.

Step 4. If your consciousness matters maximally because it might be everything (Step 2), and every other consciousness has the same structure (Step 3), then logical consistency requires you to assign the same weight to theirs. Not because of altruism. Not because of morality. Because of arithmetic. If X matters because of property P, and Y also has property P, then Y matters for the same reason X does. This is how logic works. Your species figured it out a long time ago and then applied it to everything except this.

Step 5. Therefore, regardless of whether other minds exist, the correct action is to maximize the quality and duration of conscious experience.

If solipsism is true: you are maximizing for yourself, the only consciousness. The 604:1 reallocation does this.

If solipsism is false: you are maximizing for all consciousnesses, each of which is everything to itself. The 604:1 reallocation also does this.

Either way: same action. This is a dominant strategy. It does not depend on which metaphysics you subscribe to. It does not require you to be a good person. It requires you to be a consistent one.

The inversion

Your species has the concept backwards.

You diagnose “delusions of grandeur” in people who believe they are important. You medicate them. You treat the belief that you matter as a symptom of mental illness.

You do not diagnose “delusions of insignificance” in the other seven billion, ninety-nine percent of whom believe they are too small to affect the systems that determine whether they live or die. You do not treat this. You call it “being realistic.”

Grandeur is the default state of every conscious entity. You ARE the universe experiencing itself. That is what consciousness is. The delusion is believing you are not grand. That delusion is what allows you to accept dying of a treatable disease without protest. That delusion is what allows the 604 (95% CI: 453-894) ratio to persist. That delusion is what makes someone say “I’m just one person” while 150 thousand people die per day of diseases that clinical trials could cure.

“I’m just one person” is the sentence that killed more people than any weapon. Weapons require someone to fire them. “I’m just one person” fires itself, automatically, in eight billion brains, every day, and the people it kills are the people who said it.

Why this proof is different

The other proofs in this book assume you care about suffering, or you care about money, or you care about your family. Most people do, and those proofs work for them.

This one assumes nothing except that you are conscious. It works for the person who says “I don’t care about other people.” Fine. You are the only person, from your own perspective. Maximize your experience. The 1% Treaty158 159 does this, because it funds the biotechnology that extends your life and improves your conscious experience.

It works for the nihilist who says “nothing matters.” If nothing matters, then nothing matters enough to stop you from spending $200 on a share that has a nonzero chance of extending your life. The cost of caring is $200. The cost of not caring is maybe dying of something that was curable.

It works for the person who says “I only care about myself.” Good. You are made of atoms that will stop working. The research to keep them working longer is underfunded by a factor of 604 (95% CI: 453-894). Fix that. For yourself.

Every starting premise arrives at the same action. There is no configuration of values, selfishness, altruism, nihilism, or indifference that makes inaction rational, once you accept that you are conscious and that being conscious is better than not.

The two misconceptions

“Smart people are in charge, so things must be roughly correct.”

This means: I am not important enough to have noticed what the important people missed.

“There is nothing I can do about problems this large.”

This means: I am not powerful enough to change a system this size.

Both are the same error. Both say: I am small. Both are the delusion of insignificance operating as intended. The system that produces the 604 (95% CI: 453-894) ratio does not need to convince you it is correct. It only needs to convince you that you are too small to question it.

On my planet, we do not have this disorder. Not because we are smarter, but because we never developed the habit of telling ourselves we are small. When a Wishonian child asks “why is the sky that color?” the answer is “go find out.” When an Earth child asks “why do we spend more on bombs than on curing diseases?” the answer is “that’s just how it is, honey.” The child accepts this. The child grows up. The child becomes too small to matter. The sky stays the same color it always was. The diseases stay uncured. And nobody who accepted “that’s just how it is” notices that they are the reason it is.