Few philosophers are as widely quoted as Friedrich Nietzsche—yet few truly understand his ideas. To do so requires disentangling his own contradictions and 150 years of his ideas being misconstrued by those entrusted to convey them. But, with the assistance of a capable, objective guide, it’s possible to get real value from his many powerful insights and novel ideas without falling pray to his misintegrations. One such guide is Sue Prideaux’s I Am Dynamite, and Margherita Bovo’s new review of this book demonstrates how it dispels many of the misconceptions that abound regarding Nietzsche’s philosophy, leaving the way clear to appreciate his many significant steps in the right direction.
Also this week, Craig Biddle discusses the nature and existence of free will with Gregg Caruso, and we celebrate the birthdays of swing music legend Duke Ellington and prolific author of Western novels Elmer Kelton.
I hope you enjoy this week’s articles,
Thomas F. Walker Managing Editor
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The most persistent misunderstanding about capitalism is not that people disagree with it. It’s that they misidentify it.
They point to cronyism, plutocracy, and oligarchy and call it capitalism, as if a system built on voluntary exchange is indistinguishable from one built on political favoritism.
It isn’t.
Capitalism is a principle, not a power structure. It rests on a single requirement: that private property is protected, and that exchange is voluntary. No one is entitled to what another has produced. If you want something, you must offer value in return.
That is not a trivial detail. It is the entire system.
Cronyism, oligarchy, and plutocracy all begin where that principle is abandoned. They require the ability to override property rights. To redistribute. To grant advantage. To decide, by force or favor, who keeps what and who gets access.
Once that power exists, outcomes no longer depend primarily on production. They depend on proximity to power.
That is the mechanism people routinely ignore.
Instead, they are told a convenient story: that this is simply capitalism “evolving,” that inequality leads inevitably to corruption, and that the solution is to fight fire with fire by expanding the same political control that caused the distortion.
But that explanation collapses under its own contradiction.
A system defined by private ownership cannot logically evolve into a system defined by violating ownership. That is not a later stage. It is a different system.
Calling it capitalism doesn’t make it so.
What is actually being described is a mixed system, one where elements of voluntary exchange still exist, but are increasingly overridden by political intervention. When that intervention produces favoritism, dependency, and concentrated power, the blame is assigned to the remnants of freedom rather than the expansion of control.
This is not an accident. It is a reversal.
And it has consequences.
When property rights are conditional, economic success becomes political success. You do not rise by creating more value, but by securing better access. Influence replaces innovation. Connections replace competition.
At that point, the labels stop mattering.
Whether it is called cronyism, oligarchy, or redistribution, the underlying dynamic is the same: ownership is no longer a right, but a privilege granted and revoked by authority.
And once that line is crossed, there is no stable stopping point. If rights can be adjusted for one purpose, they can be adjusted for any purpose. Every group becomes a claimant. Every outcome becomes negotiable. Every success becomes suspect.
The system begins to feed not on production, but on itself.
This is why the common claim that capitalism “leads to” cronyism misses the essential point. Cronyism requires the abandonment of capitalism’s defining feature. It does not emerge from too much respect for property rights, but from too little.
And the proposed cure often ensures the disease.
If the solution to favoritism is to increase the power to favor, then favoritism is no longer a distortion. It is the operating principle.
In that sense, what is often defended as a correction becomes a confirmation.
So the real divide is not between markets and planning, or between rich and poor.
It is between two fundamentally different structures:
One where rights are protected, and outcomes are determined through voluntary exchange.
And one where rights are conditional, and outcomes are determined through power.
I believe that AI can have the same scale of positive impact on human flourishing as low-cost energy—but only if we properly value it, integrate it, and liberate it.
This is what I argue inmy first ever speech on AI—which I delivered earlier this month at my annual private energy conference. The full video is above, and a detailed summary is below.
I believe that AI can have the same scale of positive impact on human flourishing as low-cost energy—but only if we properly value it, integrate it, and liberate it.
Properly valuing AI: AI, like low-cost energy, is a new fundamental of human flourishing
What does low-cost energy do, and why is energy a fundamental that is at the root of everything we think of as a good life today? The key is what I call “machine labor.” Low-cost energy—machine calories—enables us to use machine labor to dramatically amplify and expand our physical abilities.
Low-cost energy amplifies and expands our physical abilities
Low-cost, in the end, means that it does not take a great deal of human time to make something happen. Our ultimate cost is our time. If people can have a great deal of energy without spending much time to produce it, then they gain an army of machine servants that can do all sorts of things they could never do before.
Machine labor amplifies our physical abilities. My favorite example is a modern combine harvester. One person using a combine harvester can reap and thresh as much wheat as it once took roughly 1,000 people to handle. That is why only a small share of the population now needs to work in agriculture. Low-cost energy turns ordinary men and women into supermen and superwomen.
Machine labor also expands our physical abilities. It powers machines that can do things no number of humans can do. If a child is born prematurely, no number of people can get together and function as a human incubator. Even a king 500 years ago could not fly across the country, no matter how many people he could assemble. Machines can do things we simply cannot do.
Low-cost energy amplifying and expanding our physical abilities has made the modern human environment unrecognizably better. Procuring food and water now takes a tiny fraction of our time compared with what it required for most of history. We are dramatically safer from climate, predators, and disease. We have running water, easy travel, modern medicine, and instant communication. And we have far more opportunity because so much of our time has been freed up from basic survival.
AI amplifies and expands our mental abilities
If low-cost energy has dramatically amplified and expanded our physical abilities, then AI can dramatically amplify and expand our mental abilities.
Just as the masses once lacked the physical abundance we now take for granted, most people today lack the mental abundance that the wealthiest take for granted. Wealthy people have access to forms of teaching, advising, and assisting that others do not. AI has the potential to make those benefits available to billions.
Teaching: The best teachers do not just know a subject. They know the specific student. They understand that student’s context, starting point, confusions, and gaps in knowledge. That is why great teachers and tutors are so valuable. AI is getting to the point where it can provide a deeply customized explanation about virtually any topic to an individual learner. This is a world-changing improvement in teaching.
Advising: Much of the value of an advisor comes from applying expert knowledge—whether in medicine, law, psychology, etc.—to a specific situation. AI is increasingly able to provide useful, tailored advice, at least as a supplement, at a cost that is vastly lower than what human experts charge. That means billions of people will gain access to forms of guidance that today often cost hundreds or thousands of dollars an hour.
Assisting: In work and in life, people benefit enormously from having more junior helpers who free them up for higher-level tasks. That is true in programming, research, writing, law, and many other fields. AI is already acting as an invaluable assistant for many people—saving their time, increasing their productivity, and allowing them to focus more of their effort on higher-value work.
AI will not only create more mental abundance, it will also compound physical abundance, because physical abundance ultimately depends on mental labor. The internal combustion engine was created by minds. Battery improvements come from minds. Better power systems come from minds. If AI amplifies and expands human mental abilities, it will accelerate improvements throughout the physical world.
The human flourishing potential of AI matters enormously because most of the world is still poor by our standards. Even after adjusting for purchasing power, the average world income is still extremely low relative to what many in the developed world consider normal. The world is not running out of things to do. The world is full of unmet needs. We should be deeply excited about a technology that can create such extraordinary mental and physical abundance.
Just as we cannot think clearly about fossil fuels without recognizing that the modern world depends on them, we cannot think clearly about AI without recognizing the scale of value it can provide. One day people may look back and find it hard to imagine a world without customized geniuses teaching them, advising them, and assisting them. But that will only happen if we first learn to see AI’s value clearly.
Properly integrating AI: AI will reach its potential only if we use it according to its strengths and limitations.
Once we properly value AI, we must learn to properly integrate it into our work. This is one of the key practical challenges with getting the most out of AI right now.
The Industrial Revolution did not work by creating machines that simply replicated human beings. Machines had different strengths and weaknesses, and people had to learn how to use them intelligently. The same is true of AI.
AI has extraordinary capabilities, but it also has real limitations. It can simulate intelligence in powerful ways, but it does not have an independent connection to reality. That means human beings still need to validate many of its outputs.
AI is already changing the nature of work. In many cases, AI can do a great deal of front-end research or drafting, but humans still need to check the results. That changes the division of labor. It does not eliminate the need for judgment. It changes where judgment is most needed.
A common mistake is to overuse AI by treating it exactly like a competent human employee. Another common mistake is to underuse AI because it makes some obvious errors. Both approaches fail to recognize that AI is a powerful force with unique strengths and limitations, and it needs to be integrated accordingly.
Properly liberating AI: AI will fall short of its promise if it is trapped by bad policy.
Once we properly value and integrate AI, we also need to properly liberate it. Freedom is a requirement of progress in every field, and AI is no exception.
Today, AI faces serious political threats, such as opposition to data centers, opposition to industrial development, and restrictions on permitting. If we continue to impose severe industrial restrictions, we will fall far short of AI’s potential. This matters first because life will be far worse than it could have been with AI freedom. And it also matters because technological underperformance can become a security issue in a hostile world.
Like low-cost energy, AI is already under irrational and anti-human cultural and political attack.
Much of today’s popular opposition to AI is reminiscent of the popular opposition to fossil fuels that we’ve heard for decades.
In particular, critics of AI often fail to acknowledge the enormous potential benefits of AI and instead focus only on the negatives. One version of this is the abuse-use fallacy: the idea that because a technology can be abused, it therefore should not be used.
AI can certainly be abused. But that does not change the fact that it can also become one of the greatest tools for informing, teaching, advising, and assisting people in human history.
AI needs to be championed from a confident human flourishing perspective.
It is not enough to defend AI as a necessary evil. The same was and is true of fossil fuels. For years, many defenders of fossil fuels accepted the premise that fossil fuels were dirty, regrettable, or dangerous, while arguing only that society still needed them for now. But fossil fuels are not a necessary evil—they are a profound good that have made human life radically better. The same is true of AI.
AI is not an unfortunate necessity, but a profound potential good. It is a new fundamental technology with the power to make people more capable, more productive, and more knowledgeable.
We are at a crucial point in the development of AI. We have a new fundamental technology, but many people are thinking about it through the wrong philosophical framework. If we think about AI through the right framework—on the standard of human flourishing—we can value it properly, use it properly, and fight for the policies needed to unlock its full potential.
That’s what I’ll be doing, and I hope many of you will join me.
“Energy Talking Points by Alex Epstein” is my free Substack newsletter designed to give as many people as possible access to concise, powerful, well-referenced talking points on the latest energy, environmental, and climate issues from a pro-human, pro-energy perspective.
I vividly recall a meeting of our philosophy department a few years ago when a student representative—or perhaps a young PhD—broached the topic of “decolonising” the philosophy curriculum. It was bound to happen sooner or later: I had already caught murmurs and whispers about this decolonisation movement in academia. Like other manifestations of “wokeness,” it had emerged across the Atlantic and only later trickled down to Europe. I must have rolled my eyes at the meeting. I vaguely remember speaking out against the idea, though in truth I did not take it very seriously.
Part of me was even inclined to sit back, mildly amused, and see how it would unfold. You see, unlike many philosophers, I do not spend much time studying the illustrious Dead White Males of the canon. Not because I am especially woke, but because I am what philosophers call a “naturalist”: someone primarily concerned with real-world problems of today, in my case science and technology. For some of my colleagues, however, poring over the great works of Kant, Hegel, and Aristotle—seeking ever new interpretations and insights—is a lifelong vocation. Moreover, most philosophers lean left and desire to “stick with the program.” So how, I wondered, would they square the circle of dedicating their lives to Dead White Males—who were often very racist and sexist—while still staying in the good graces of contemporary activists? You can’t exactly rewrite the history of philosophy. It struck me as somebody else’s knot to untangle.
I was terribly wrong to be so insouciant, as I discovered when 7 October happened. I’m not Jewish and don’t have a personal connection to Israel, so initially I didn’t follow the news very closely. I had relegated the attack to the—regrettably vast—mental category of jihadist terrorist attacks across the globe, failing to grasp that this was, in fact, a full-blown invasion. In my naivety, I assumed that after the massacres in Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin, and countless other Western cities, everyone had finally woken up to the true nature of jihadism. When a bunch of Allahu Akbar-chanting fanatics slaughtered innocent young people at a music festival, just as they had done at the Bataclan in Paris, it seemed inconceivable to me that any of my colleagues and friends would condone, rationalise, or even celebrate such acts. And yet that is precisely what happened.
To my horror, within days—even hours—of the attack, when the Israeli army was still fighting off the invaders, I started seeing reactions of excitement and gleeful jubilation on social media. Not from the usual religious maniacs praising Allah, but from left-wing activists at prestigious universities. Academics started breathlessly applying the same framework of decolonisation that I had foolishly brushed aside as amusing but harmless virtue signalling. As the writer Najma Sharif famously posted on X that day, racking up tens of thousands of likes and reposts: “What did y’all think decolonization meant? vibes? papers? essays? losers.”
Social media post of Najma Sharif, 7 October 2023
It was as though she was talking about me. I was one of those “losers” who had been foolish enough to think that decolonisation amounted to little more than papers and essays, along with some harmless but well-intentioned proposals to diversify the philosophy curriculum. If only. What I came to see in the wake of 7 October was something far less benign. Decolonisation operates as a rigid, almost Manichaean ideology that neatly divides the world into evil perpetrators (Western colonisers) and innocent victims (the colonised, indigenous peoples). In this worldview, there is no room for moral ambiguity. Those on the wrong side of the divide are irredeemably rotten and deserve everything that’s coming to them, while those on the side of the angels are completely absolved of any wrongdoing. If they appear to commit atrocities, these are reframed as understandable—perhaps even inevitable—responses to prior injustice. In fact, the more extreme the violence, the greater the wrongs they must have endured.
At one point, many on the Left considered Israel an admirable success story of decolonisation—of an indigenous people driving out the Western colonisers and achieving self-determination in their historical homeland. For a variety of complex historical reasons, however, the Jewish state is now firmly relegated to the side of the oppressors. In fact, Israel is regarded as the settler-colonialist enterprise par excellence, and Palestinians as paragons of victimhood. And that is all the latter-day activists need to know to reach their moral verdicts—which explains why those verdicts came rushing in mere hours into the unfolding event.
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