TITLE: Onwards and Upwards!
SUBTITLE: What I want out of the State
AUTHOR: Peter Banks
DATE: 2025-04-06
URL: https://peterbanks.org/essays/onwards-and-upwards
SOURCE: https://peteribanks.substack.com/p/onwards-and-upwards

The purpose of this second blog is for me to work through ideas I don’t feel are fully formed, but whose shape I have in my mind. Today I wanted to reflect a little on what I actually positively believe about the world. And specifically what I would like the State to pursue.

Me explaining my esoteric political beliefs to 100 subscribers

Principally, I think that America is facing many simultaneous crises as a result of the profound way computers have changed Human life - front of mind recently the reality that P(Doom) is inching up by the day. We happen to face this crisis while America, like Spain in the 17th century, is a civilization whose motivating ideological force is spent.

Given that I attach an almost unlimited moral weight to the future survival of Life - what else could possibly have moral value? The fact that these crises have the possibility of ending complex life leads me to take them extremely seriously. It also happens to be true that the obvious insurance against these risk vectors is to scatter our species into the inky void of space. If Humanity dies on Earth right now - from one of a number of disasters - it is over, making that no longer true is a moral imperative of the highest degree.1

I appreciate that how, exactly, we achieve this Human scattering is rocky and ambiguous, but this is all the more reason we should clearly set our intentions towards it. We cannot simply hope it will emerge as the natural product of other values - for example maximizing our lifetime discounted utility.

The path that I see to accomplishing this goal is one built around America. Specifically, a rejuvenated American Nation with a civic religion bent soul and purpose towards the goal of settling Space - with the same fervor the Iberians had in their quest for conquest. America, alone among the countries in the world, has the experience, the infrastructure, and the security to accomplish something on this scale. But above that, we also have a uniquely flexible political system which can be set towards any objective - in an orderly and thoughtful manner - if it is what the citizens want. Our Golden Age is already fading and we have spent the last 50 years twiddling our epicurean thumbs in search of more and more complex toys and distractions. We should get to work in this twilight before the sun sets and our species is again thrown to the winds of chance.

I’m not going to pretend this will happen, or that any political party will ever run on it, but it is what I would do if I had power and should be thought of—at least for now, we all change—as the benchmark against which I assess all policies. It is my Sharia law, so to speak. Perhaps even my GDP per capita…2

Since the purpose of this movement is not to achieve Utopia on Earth but our mere long-run survival, the facts of Human nature must be taken for granted and accepted as a part of life. Among these is the Human tendency for tribal loyalty and the Human desire for the success of our biological descendants. Since the only way we have any hope of achieving my goal is through the willing sacrifice of individuals for the success of the group properly motivating the individual is the central problem. 

Success would almost certainly require the vast majority of this country accepting that our lives will be materially poorer and more difficult than they are today. Not because our productive and creative abilities are left untended but because they are focused on a goal other than material comfort, specifically, the expansion of America. I believe that Space colonization centered around American Nationalism is compatible with our instincts in a way one based around abstract ideals like Secular Humanism is not.3

But I would argue that struggle is the meaning of life and our short flash of existence - sandwiched between twin eternities of silence - can either be Lived or LARP’d. I, for one, intend to live it. 

The Greatest Generation of Americans (born at the turn of the 20th century) lived through Depression and War but built the post-War utopia whose prosperity we live in today. It was their struggle and overcoming against the Nazis and the Soviets that turned our elites during that era into what they were. It has been the lack of struggle that has decayed them—on both left and right—into what they are today. All leisure aristocracies rot in the limit. Our politicians and professional yappers invent nonsense as we drift into disrepair. More and more of intellectual and political life is devoted to obvious distractions and lies. The recent Trump insanity is only the tip of the iceberg (I know 5 years is a long time, but we ought not forget Covid). With the Denial of Death eating at the heart of our society like a worm.

I think a point of basic disagreement with my most liberal friends has been my deep feeling that society is in fact in decline. I hope that we can now all agree - in light of the most recent chicanery - this is true.  I see a not small amount of cope online that perhaps as we get poorer, our lives will become more difficult and in response the rot I’ve described will be reversed. 

To this I would simply invite you to look at the poor in the world today and tell me if their elite classes are more virtuous than ours. No, we can sink all the way to the bottom with the Congo if we aren’t careful.

Struggle alone is insufficient. Instead, for struggle to be virtuous, it must be real, it must be towards honest goals. Of course, lies and trickery do abound; in ideologies, above all in the more advanced decaying stages of ideologies, but lies were never the originating influence. They are not the health and life of such things, but their disease, and a sign their being about to die! Lies give birth to nothing; they give death to all things. It is our sole duty as Men to sweep them out of our thoughts as out of our practice.4

I sincerely believe however that this goal - the conquest and colonization of our Universe - is not a lie. It is the principle calling of our Time, the thing that when millennia pass will be remembered, not ups and downs of the Current Thing(TM). 

I don’t have specific policy recommendations beyond the stuff I yap about extensively online. But I do believe that if the purpose is to conquer Space, there are directional policy objectives. Namely, a substantial shift of our public finances away from transfers to investment in fundamental technology and space-oriented manufacturing, the sidelining of cultural issues as divisive5, and avoiding foreign entanglements as much as possible - without creating a global power vacuum which pulls us into its vortex.

More than anything though, what I would like is us as a society to see the awesome duty that stands before us. A lack of willingness to pursue the obvious meaning of our Time is different from an absence of meaning. If we, the Zoomers, can pull this off, we will go down in history as the most impressive generation of Humans to ever grace our small blue orb. We will leave the mark of our time and our values onto all eternity, and the entire Universe will be to America what the Americas are to Iberia. Onwards and Upwards!

1As we look around the Galaxy, it is becoming increasingly probable we are totally alone in the Universe.

2Which is another way of saying average utility

3As much as a moralist may wish they were. 

4Heavily paragraphing Carlyle here. 

5Implicitly the acceptance of Human nature as basically fixed and an aversion to Utopian projects of social reform.
