Effective Altruism: Secular Scientology
It’s OK to be rich. Of course greed is not good, but wealth is not bad, either. You’re simply exceptional. You’re more capable than the median human. In ancient times, you might have been considered chosen or blessed. In modern times, through the lens of modern religions, perhaps you would be considered unburdened by thetans or other negative forces.
But we know the truth. It relates neither to the divine nor the arcane; you are effective. Your power of decision making, and your ability to analyze complex problems and distill them down to a soluble essence, is what separates you. Your success in life proves this. The money and influence you have stem entirely from your own raw talent amplified by the assiduous application of skills you have worked hard to master. You have made excellent choices in business and technology, and the powerful set of tools that enabled you to do so can certainly be applied to other areas of human civilization.
This is why you should be an Effective Altruist. The world needs your superheroic abilities, and it will incentivize you to answer the call. Why should you pay excessive taxes on the wealth you generated through your ingenuity and work ethic, when you could instead direct it according to your own vision via philanthropy? After all, your objectively superior vision is how you ended up being a high-net-worth individual in the first place. If you can generate abundance for yourself and your inner circle, why should you not be able, through efficient and effective strategies, to broaden that circle to include everyone, even the as-yet unborn?
You see the dials of the machine for what they are. You perceive in ways an unagile bureaucracy and the uninformed masses around which it is scaffolded cannot. It is entirely rational that you would know better than they how to direct the flow of funding. They cannot yet perceive the light at the end of the tunnel, nor even know where the tunnel goes, but you see the whole labyrinthine network of tunnels in which people are trapped, because you can view this problem from higher dimensions. How could solutions as elegant as mosquito nets, data-driven performance metrics, or deregulation have occurred to people who are so downtrodden and beset with stress that it has robbed them of IQ points? How could they be trusted to cultivate the future in their demon-haunted minds?
You know the tragic answers to these questions, so of course it is only right that you join with other like-minded, high-value individuals to obviate the machine. Together you will throw out the dials, rewire the circuitry, and build a better machine. One not subject to the caprice of the uninformed many and their ineffective democracy. A machine built on data and logic to optimize the utility of humanity, and through doing so, construct a better humanity. To do this, of course, you will have to tweak a few settings on the existing machine so that it does not stand in your way. Eliminate a few pesky taxes and regulations so that more funding can be directed toward this new way of life, this shining city on a hill, this outpost from the 22nd century that cannot be birthed by minds mired in a morass of antiquated thought patterns.
This altruistic vision is not merely effective, but moral. It is, in fact, a mandate. Fusion. Artificial general intelligence. An end to poverty. An end to disease. An end to death itself. A multi-planetary — nay, multi-stellar — civilization of immortal trans-humans is what is at stake here. An almost immeasurable level of human utility that even the most visionary can only begin to glimpse. Heaven. Utopia. But real, and attainable. Once you understand these stakes, how can you in good conscience submit to the will of the people or buy into an oppressive rhetoric of equality? To do so would be the ultimate betrayal not just of your own effectiveness, but of humanity itself.
