Escaping Molochian traps is difficult. Yet as you identified, the dynamic is fundamentally driven by competition, and there is little value in being right if you are left behind or simply cease to exist. As Alexander Scott argued in his Meditations on Moloch, the primary response lies in balancing competition with cooperation.
This is of course a general consideration, and I genuinely don’t know how the Qing Empire could have navigated its way out. But what I do observe is that cooperation almost always begins with communication, with persuasive ideas that circulate and diffuse across boundaries, whatever form those boundaries take. Someone denounces practices that are abusive, dangerous, revolting, or immoral, armed with rhetoric and emotional or rational arguments, and slowly convinces more and more people until these ideas gather enough support among elites to produce real change: a social revolution, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, a treaty halting nuclear proliferation, an agreement to limit CO₂ emissions and perhaps, one day, meaningful AI regulation.
It doesn’t always work, and the results can be delayed by decades or even centuries. But history offers countless examples where cooperation ultimately prevailed following this process (and sadly, countless examples where it failed). Competition dictates the terms of survival, cooperation renegotiates them.
Escaping Molochian traps is difficult. Yet as you identified, the dynamic is fundamentally driven by competition, and there is little value in being right if you are left behind or simply cease to exist. As Alexander Scott argued in his Meditations on Moloch, the primary response lies in balancing competition with cooperation.
This is of course a general consideration, and I genuinely don’t know how the Qing Empire could have navigated its way out. But what I do observe is that cooperation almost always begins with communication, with persuasive ideas that circulate and diffuse across boundaries, whatever form those boundaries take. Someone denounces practices that are abusive, dangerous, revolting, or immoral, armed with rhetoric and emotional or rational arguments, and slowly convinces more and more people until these ideas gather enough support among elites to produce real change: a social revolution, the abolition of slavery, universal suffrage, a treaty halting nuclear proliferation, an agreement to limit CO₂ emissions and perhaps, one day, meaningful AI regulation.
It doesn’t always work, and the results can be delayed by decades or even centuries. But history offers countless examples where cooperation ultimately prevailed following this process (and sadly, countless examples where it failed). Competition dictates the terms of survival, cooperation renegotiates them.