A Book Idea: Are We Steering, or Drifting?

At the end of Forrest Gump there is a question about whether we have a destiny or are floating accidentally on a breeze. It is posed about one life. I want to ask it about the species.

On the line running from total conscious control of our destiny to none at all, where are we?

The Answer, and Why It Matters

My answer is: much closer to no control than most people assume.

And this is a problem rather than a curiosity, because the large problems facing us — climate, weapons, the governance of powerful technologies — all require the capacity to decide something and then do it. A civilisation that drifts cannot address them regardless of how clearly it sees them.

The Method: Decompose by Domain

The book would work through domains one at a time, asking of each: does this increase or decrease our collective capacity to steer?

Economics. Capitalism is the deliberate release of control. That is not a criticism — it is the explicit design. The whole insight is that distributed decisions produce better outcomes than directed ones, and the mechanism works precisely because nobody is steering. We chose to stop steering the economy, for good reasons, and one consequence is that we cannot now steer it.

Government. Representative government is likewise a release. Separation of powers, checks and balances, staggered terms, judicial review — every one is a mechanism for making decisive action harder. The system was designed by people who feared concentrated power more than they feared paralysis, and it succeeds at what they wanted. It is designed to be feather-like.

The arrow of history. This one cuts both ways, which is what makes it interesting. Entities grow larger, countries consolidate into blocs, the world becomes more unified — and that increases the capacity for coordinated action. But other forces run hard against it. The internet distributed communication beyond anyone's control. Encryption removed a lever states used to hold. Each technology that empowers individuals correspondingly disempowers collective direction.

The Pattern I Would Expect to Find

Working through the domains, I suspect the finding would be this: we have systematically traded steering capacity for safety from bad steering.

Every one of the mechanisms above was adopted deliberately, by people who had watched concentrated power do terrible things. Separation of powers exists because unified power was worse. Market allocation exists because directed allocation failed. The trades were reasonable, and I would make most of them again.

But the trades were made one at a time, by different people, in different centuries, each considering only its own domain. Nobody ever assessed the cumulative effect, because there was no vantage point from which to assess it and no institution whose job it was.

The result is a civilisation that is well defended against tyranny and correspondingly incapable of deliberate action — and that combination was never anyone's intention. It is an emergent property of a long series of individually sensible decisions.

Why It Is a Book Rather Than a Post

Because the interesting work is in the domain-by-domain accounting, and I have only sketched three. Law, science funding, media, education, corporate structure, international institutions — each needs the same treatment, and the aggregate is the argument.

I am not sure I will write it. But the question seems to me among the most important available, and I have not seen anyone ask it in this form.