Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future

Indefinite Politics
Politicians have always been officially accountable to the public at election time, but
today they are attuned to what the public thinks 
at every moment
. Modern polling enables
politicians to tailor their image to match preexisting public opinion exactly, so for the
most part, they do. Nate Silver’s election predictions are remarkably accurate, but even
more remarkable is how big a story they become every four years. We are more
fascinated today by statistical predictions of what the country will be thinking in a few
weeks’ time than by visionary predictions of what the country will look like 10 or 20
years from now.
And it’s not just the electoral process—the very character of government has become
indefinite, too. The government used to be able to coordinate complex solutions to
problems like atomic weaponry and lunar exploration. But today, after 40 years of
indefinite creep, the government mainly just provides insurance; our solutions to big
problems are Medicare, Social Security, and a dizzying array of other transfer payment
programs. It’s no surprise that entitlement spending has eclipsed discretionary spending
every year since 1975. To increase discretionary spending we’d need definite plans to

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solve specific problems. But according to the indefinite logic of entitlement spending,
we can make things better just by sending out more checks.
Indefinite Philosophy
You can see the shift to an indefinite attitude not just in politics but in the political
philosophers whose ideas underpin both left and right.
The philosophy of the ancient world was pessimistic: Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and
Lucretius all accepted strict limits on human potential. The only question was how best
to cope with our tragic fate. Modern philosophers have been mostly optimistic. From
Herbert Spencer on the right and Hegel in the center to Marx on the left, the 19th century
shared a belief in progress. (Remember Marx and Engels’s encomium to the
technological triumphs of capitalism from 
this page
.) These thinkers expected material
advances to fundamentally change human life for the better: they were definite
optimists.
In the late 20th century, indefinite philosophies came to the fore. The two dominant
political thinkers, John Rawls and Robert Nozick, are usually seen as stark opposites: on
the egalitarian left, Rawls was concerned with questions of fairness and distribution; on
the libertarian right, Nozick focused on maximizing individual freedom. They both
believed that people could get along with each other peacefully, so unlike the ancients,
they were optimistic. But unlike Spencer or Marx, Rawls and Nozick were 
indefinite
optimists: they didn’t have any specific vision of the future.
Their indefiniteness took different forms. Rawls begins 
A Theory of Justice
with the
famous “veil of ignorance”: fair political reasoning is supposed to be impossible for
anyone with knowledge of the world as it concretely exists. Instead of trying to change
our actual world of unique people and real technologies, Rawls fantasized about an
“inherently stable” society with lots of fairness but little dynamism. Nozick opposed

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Rawls’s “patterned” concept of justice. To Nozick, any voluntary exchange must be
allowed, and no social pattern could be noble enough to justify maintenance by coercion.
He didn’t have any more concrete ideas about the good society than Rawls: both of them
focused on process. Today, we exaggerate the differences between left-liberal
egalitarianism and libertarian individualism because almost everyone shares their
common indefinite attitude. In philosophy, politics, and business, too, arguing over
process has become a way to endlessly defer making concrete plans for a better future.