“Let goodness conquer all that it can defend” by habryka

Epistemic status: All of the western canon must eventually be re-invented in a LessWrong post, so today we are re-inventing modernism. In my post yesterday, I said: Maybe the most important way ambitious, smart, and wise people leave the world worse off than they found it is by seeing correctly how some part of the world is broken and unifying various powers under a banner to fix that problem — only for the thing they have built to slip from their grasp and, in its collapse, destroy much more than anything previously could have. I think many people very reasonably understood me to be giving a general warning against centralization and power-accumulation. While that is where some of my thoughts while writing the post went to, I would like to now expand on its antithesis, both for my own benefit, and for the benefit of the reader who might have been left confused after yesterday's post. The other day I was arguing with Eliezer about a bunch of related thoughts and feelings. In that context, he said to me: From my perspective, my whole life has been, when you raise the banner to oppose the apocalypse, crazy [...] The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration. --- First published: April 16th, 2026 Source: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/w3MJcDueo77D3Ldta/let-goodness-conquer-all-that-it-can-defend --- Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.