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RegisterPosted by: 90sRetroFan
« on: May 20, 2026, 06:05:31 pm »"Moloch = Homo Hubris"
Moloch is about the fear of not doing what someone else is already doing and thereby losing out. Homo Hubris is about doing things that no one else has done before. We can say that Moloch and Homo Hubris collaborate to make the world worse, in that every time Homo Hubris has found something new to do, Moloch then encourages people who would otherwise not have been doing that thing to start doing it also. But they are definitely not the same.
As the video itself states, Moloch has existed since prehistory and in all civilizations. Homo Hubris, on the other hand, is exclusively Western, and really only significant from the Renaissance onwards. If Western civilization had never existed, we would still have the problem of Moloch, but we would have the luxury of being able to figure out how to defeat Moloch in a world that is at least progressing much more slowly, and thus a world in which chains of cause and effect are easier to see. Rapid progress obscures this and thus makes it harder for us to learn from historical mistakes because the changed conditions from era to era make drawing historical parallels less convincing in general, and furthermore persuade people in each present era that they are less ignorant than people in the past and hence immune to the traps that people in the past fell into.
Moloch is about the fear of not doing what someone else is already doing and thereby losing out. Homo Hubris is about doing things that no one else has done before. We can say that Moloch and Homo Hubris collaborate to make the world worse, in that every time Homo Hubris has found something new to do, Moloch then encourages people who would otherwise not have been doing that thing to start doing it also. But they are definitely not the same.
As the video itself states, Moloch has existed since prehistory and in all civilizations. Homo Hubris, on the other hand, is exclusively Western, and really only significant from the Renaissance onwards. If Western civilization had never existed, we would still have the problem of Moloch, but we would have the luxury of being able to figure out how to defeat Moloch in a world that is at least progressing much more slowly, and thus a world in which chains of cause and effect are easier to see. Rapid progress obscures this and thus makes it harder for us to learn from historical mistakes because the changed conditions from era to era make drawing historical parallels less convincing in general, and furthermore persuade people in each present era that they are less ignorant than people in the past and hence immune to the traps that people in the past fell into.
