Amdir, Estel, Peter Thiel

In dark times such as these, those of us who wish to see a better, more just world speak a lot of hope. The word in English, however, is badly overloaded: we mean a lot of different things when we say "hope". We can hope that it's sunny outside, hope that our business venture succeeds, hope that we recover from a serious illness or home that the world that we live in is fundamentally good or for our benefit, despite all of the pain that we see. We can hope that a long project we've been working on will pay off, even if we don't live to see it, and we can hope that people who've been behaving cruelly will somehow see the light and repent of their wicked ways. All of these are very different kinds of hope, and when we speak of hope in our current context, it's easy to get muddled and cause pain. Where one person might speak of a metaphysical kind of hope that this will all turn to the good eventually, another might read that it's the kind of hope that comes from believing that the thing is actually likely to happen and get offended because they can't see a plausible path for it to occur. And so, when we most need to be able to foster many of these different kinds of hope, we instead fall into mutual recriminations and despair.

J.R.R Tolkien, as is so often the case with moral matters of this kind, provides some startling clarity. In one of his books of unpublished works and notes (this particular excerpt is from Morgoth's Ring), Tolkien's son published an essay of his titled Athrabeth Finrod Ah Andreth, or "The debate of Finrod and Andreth". If you aren't a shameless Tolkien nerd like me, the gist of it is that when men (that is to say, humans) first moved into the west of middle-earth, they encountered elves, and some of the houses of men made friends with the elves who came over the sea to fight the Great Enemy. Elves, as we know, are very long-lived, but are otherwise in Tolkien's work much more similar to men than they tend to be in other texts: they're broadly speaking the same kind of thing. With the stage thus set, King Finrod of one group of the elves found himself at one point staying as a guest of a house of men, where he was friends with Andreth, a wise and learned woman of that house. During the stay, Finrod and Andreth discussed the different lifespans and different approaches to the world of men and elves. While the whole essay is interesting, I wanted to pull out a particular chunk where Finrod and Andreth discuss different conceptions of what hope is:

'Have ye then no hope?' said Finrod.

'What is hope?' she said. 'An expectation of good, which though uncertain has some foundation in what is known? Then we have none.'

'That is one thing that Men call "hope",' said Finrod. 'Amdir we call it, "looking up". But there is another which is founded deeper. Estel we call it, that is "trust". It is not defeated by the ways of the world, for it does not come from experience, but from our nature and first being. If we are indeed the Eruhin, the Children of the One, then He will not suffer Himself to be deprived of His own, not by any Enemy, not even by ourselves. This is the last foundation of Estel, which we keep even when we contemplate the End: of all His designs the issue must be for His Children's joy. Amdir you have not, you say. Does no Estel at all abide?'

Quenya, being a much more elegant and better-designed language than English, neatly sidesteps the overloading issue by giving the two kinds of hope different names. Given that I think this is a conceptual distinction that is useful and that we are the poorer for not having words for it in English, I'll borrow the Quenya and use it in this article. We have then, Amdir and Estel, two very different concepts that we tend to express with the same word. In Finrod's framework, Amdir maps to hope on the basis of the evidence: "an expectation of good, which though uncertain, has some foundation in what is known." Estel, by contrast, is something more like a metaphysical hope or trust: a belief or a habit of mind that points towards keeping the possibility that things that are good and will leave us happy and fulfilled can and do still happen, even in a world where they're uncommon and it might seem impossible. Finrod, of course, poses this in religious terms: if we are all the children of God, God will not suffer any of us to be lost or to, in the end, not have our lives and experiences redeemed and in some way turned to the good (for those of you watching who are of that bent: yes, this does imply that we have to at least hope for a universalist situation). Even without the religious elements, though, I believe the concept is broadly useful: even if this is the one life that we get to live, it is still better and healthier, on the whole, to approach it with a lens that however bleak the situation may look, that an overall good outcome is not categorically impossible. A belief in a fundamentally hostile world where only small and limited victories can be had is not one that predisposes itself to happiness or to upright behaviour.

The contrast is illustrative. While Amdir is properly a belief, in the sense that it's something we know about the world that we believe to be the case, Estel isn't. Estel, rather, is something shaped more like a behaviour, a habit of mind or a tendency to interpret the world in a certain way. While if there's no rationally or empirically plausible hope or way to get from current state to desired state , Amdir cannot abide, Estel remains unaffected.

It follows, then, that Amdir and Estel have very different relationships to human psychology and morality. Amdir is mostly a question of fact: even when what's being discussed is subjective, you either do or don't have good reason to think that on the basis of existing knowledge, something good might happen. I have, for example, very little Amdir that we're going to get through our current political mess without a lot of bloodshed, and that's on the basis of the evidence I have. There's nothing particularly moral about that position: it's just a fairly cold calculation based on what I see in the world. Estel, however, is mostly a question of morality and psychology: it seems to be a load-bearing habit of mind in humans. In the context of Estel it doesn't really matter much whether we're likely to see peace and justice in the foreseeable future or not: the only moral option is to believe and act as thought it could happen even if we can't quite see how and do things that will make it more likely to come about.

Amdir is also considerably smaller and more limited in scope than Estel. Estel is, after all, constructed such that we are all children of God and that things can be turned to the good for all of us, and even if we choose not to take it in a religious sense, some colour of that remains in the word: if Estel isn't for all of us, it's for none of us. Amdir, by contrast, can be maintained for an individual or for a group: one might have Amdir that a person can get a PhD, but one cannot maintain Estel in the same proposition.

Finally, Estel, as a result of all this, asks certain things of us that Amdir doesn't, and thus acts, in some cases, as a moral restraint. Estel, as mentioned, has to be maintained for everyone, which means that, if acting in Estel one cannot act in ways that degrade the ability for other people to live good lives and experience good things. Amdir makes no such demand. Thus, while having Estel means that, practically speaking there are some things that you shouldn't want if you want to maintain Estel, Amdir allows you to want and/or hope for more or less whatever you want.

Combinations of Amdir and Estel

With this basic structure in place, we can (as is the fashion) create four categories to examine: the situation where a person admits neither Amdir nor Estel, the situation where a person harbours both, the situation where a person harbours Estel but not Amdir and the situation where a person has Amdir but not Estel. The situation where a person has access to both is undoubtedly the best one: you have both real belief that the positive outcomes that you want might well happen and have Estel to reassure you that even if things don't work out in the way that you hoped, things may well still turn to the good or be redeemed. It might turn out that a horrible outcome today leads to something far better than could have been thought of down the line, or that even a failed desideratum in the Amdir-sense might lead to an outcome that, if unexpected, is still very good. In general, this is where we want humans to be functioning for full flourishing, but alas it's a state of being that's possible less often than we might like.

Estel in the absence of Amdir is an outcome that's far from ideal, but is a useful discipline for times like ours where a clear path from our current situation to, for instance, "trans people are treated with respect and dignity" does not seem to exist in any way that's immediately plausible. While the situation in itself is shitty, having Estel at least allows us to frame the situation in a way that makes life easier to live in a good way. Estel encourages us to limit the damage that's done and help make life for each other, if not good, at least better than it could be. It reminds us that, because things may still turn to the good even if we can't quite see how, we need to defend what's good in ourselves and others and not act in ways that are destructive to that goal: even if you can't see things getting better, you still can't become fully nihilistic and make things actively worse. And it reminds us to keep an eye out for the good things that still happens: even in the midst of sin and sorrow, Estel reminds us that not everything is awful and that we should enjoy the good things when they happen. On the whole, while we'd much rather maintain Estel and Amdir both, Estel helps us survive the absence of Amdir much better than the lack of either.

A person lacking both Estel and Amdir is one who's given in to despair. This is, on the whole, an ill outcome: with no reason to believe that anything good can happen whether there's a path to it or not, and with no reason to think that one should keep open the possibility that good things could happen or that bad situations could be redeemed even in the absence of evidence suggesting that it's plausible, all that's left is to try and survive as best as you can, retreat into whatever you can find that takes the pain away and generally shut down large parts of your humanity. In this situation, you can't even retreat into hedonism, because genuinely taking pleasure in something relies on Estel: hope, for example, that you might have a really good meal, and the belief that the presence of really good food and wine (or whatever else you take pleasure in: embedded microcontrollers, web development or distance running for example) isn't just an isolated pleasure but that it say something about the world: that it has good things in it and thus isn't entirely bad. A lot of people in this world, I think, function without Estel or Amdir either: they just keep their heads down, do their work and survive, putting one foot in front of another and engaging as little as possible with the world. It's a bleak kind of existence, but one that seems, at least initially, to minimise the amount of pain a person has to endure. I don't, however, think that this is the worst possible state you can be in: while it's bleak, people with neither Amdir or Estel abiding tend to be a danger only to themselves and don't tend to cause much harm. The same, unfortunately, cannot be said for out last combination.

Amdir absent Estel and its perils

Having Amdir in the absence of Estel is actively dangerous, and the reason is of some interest to understanding a lot about our current sociopolitical situation. Amdir, as we've discussed earlier, is broadly amoral: the only question it asks is "given the evidence that you have, is it plausible that some event that you see as being good could happen?". It asks no questions, even by implication, about what's wanted or whether it's worth pursuing. Also in contrast to Estel, Amdir is individualist in focus and perspective: while you can have Amdir for yourself or some group that you see as an extension of yourself alone, on some level if you have Estel you have to have Estel for everyone. Finally and most importantly, Amdir gives no answer to the "what if it doesn't work out?" question: if the positive thing materialises, it's fine, but if it doesn't materialise, you might as well not have had Amdir at all, and having it might have made the situation actively worse thanks to the shock of disappointment.

The outcome is that with Amdir absent Estel, you find yourself sitting on a knife's edge between getting everything you want and being forever damned to abject unhappiness because there's no faith that if you don't get what you thought was plausible and good things might still be alright: if you lose now you lose forever. As touched on earlier, Estel also represents a moral constraint inasmuch as, if you harbour Estel and thus hold out the possibility of things turning to the good even if it's not immediately plausible, you have a responsibility to not burn everything down: you have a responsibility to act towards the good that you believe to be possible. Without Estel, Amdir quite simply has no moral constraints on it: after all, if you fail at your goal, everything is fucked anyway and there's no chance that you'll be happy or see the good things you want, so you may as well just trash everything. Given the basic amorality of Amdir, it alone is also incapable of telling you whether or not the positive thing you envisage is something that you actually should want or not: Estel acts as a moral backstop here, as if you want something that seems good to you but that undermines a later ability for bad things to turn to good, it is perhaps not actually a positive thing. A lack of Estel means that this form of error-checking is impossible.

Taking all of this together, we find that a person with Amdir but lacking Estel tends to form beliefs and behaviour on the basis of what they think would be personally good for them or their group that they will then struggle to evaluate for long-term impacts or their effects on other people. Moreover, they believe that getting what they want is of essentially infinite importance: if they fail at it they will be forever miserable and there is no hope that they might find joy and good in the world even if what they want doesn't pan out. Consequently, they allow themselves to do anything, no matter how loathsome, in pursuit of what they believe to be the good.

A person acting in this way is one that we'd have little difficulty labelling as being deeply disordered in personality. Unfortunately, people expressing a great deal of Amdir but little Estel are also heavily in evidence in our current society, and many of our current ills can, I think, be laid at their feet. Amdir absent Estel is, after all, the personality of modern capitalism. Take Peter Thiel and the whole slew of tech magnates, for example. Thiel, Musk and Zuckerberg (plus the others) have no shortage of Amdir: they consistently create for themselves one plausible desire after another: AGI, the Metaverse, the ability to rank college students by fuckability, space travel, whatever the hell the Cybertruck represents... these are all things that are plausible, that they want and that could conceivably be positive. Estel, however, is little in evidence for them: one gets the sense that if Elon Musk or Peter Thiel were to lose all of their money and power, it'd be close to being the worst thing that could possibly happen to them. They certainly behave congruently with that: Musk has real trouble finding joy in the little things, like food, drink or interpersonal relationships, and the whole lot of them seem quite willing to burn the world down rather than lose their grip on their particular dreams. If they think that building the Torment Nexus will make them happy and admired, they will damn well build it no matter how terrible an idea it might be.

As much as these particular figures are hated, the behaviours that they exhibit are still very much rewarded in the world. Amdir absent Estel encourages zealotry, pathological overconfidence and an inability to let go of things that should be let go of: all things that are often rewarded in the workplace. A person wanting to advance in a company and who believes that the world will fall if they don't and will consequently do anything to make it happen is going to be much more effective in advancing in said company than a person who believes that even if they don't advance, things will be fundamentally OK. A person who believes that their political cause is the most important one and that the world will completely collapse if they don't win does much more effectively on social media (designed by and for people with little Estel) than someone with a more measured approach. Moreover, the lack of restraint that it engenders taps into the human desire for transgression in some extremely ugly ways: after all, if a cause is the single most important cause in the world and you can plausibly see that say, calling people slurs might somehow advance your cause (it doesn't, but one might plausibly see how it could, especially if you're already working in a space where Estel is little in evidence), the social license to let all of your worst instincts out in the service of something supposedly good can be very compelling. Similarly, if you feel that using a new technology makes you much more productive and raises your social status, and because of the importance of the goals you're working towards the negative effects don't matter, that complex can be so attractive as to be almost addictive. Everything is permitted in the service of the great good because, after all, if failure means the failure of everything, it's important that you do everything you possibly can, however bad, to achieve your goal. Meanwhile, those of us who still think that things could turn out well even if the things we want to happen fall through, and thus think that saying slurs or vibe coding are bad because they damage our ability to enjoy or bring about those good things in the future, are seen as being tedious moralists at best or devils who want everything to fall into perdition at worst. Estel, in the end, is held to be fundamentally undesirable in the society we've built.

The slow retreat of Estel

It is perhaps expected that people with a surfeit of Amdir and a dearth of Estel will often find themselves in positions of power without anything else to stop them: people who are more able to harbour Estel, having a) standards of behaviour that they'd not give up for power and b) some confidence that the world will not in fact end if they don't gain power, are at a natural disadvantage in this kind of competition unless there's some big external threat that pushes the balance of in favour of the people with Estel (people who exhibit Estel, being more willing to work for long periods of time on things that offer little immediate reward, are often staggeringly better than people with a surfeit of Amdir at actually getting real things in the real world done). That said, whether it's deliberate or accidental, their position of prominence in a society that encourages their behaviour for the last half a century means that, as time passes, it's been increasingly hard for people to develop and maintain Estel at all. This is a massive problem, as the lack of Estel on a societal level leads, little by little, to profound moral degradation.

We've already discussed the way that Amdir absent Estel has of making any act seem permissible in the service of any goal. Even more worryingly, most genuinely positive outcomes in both the political sphere and the sphere of industry are not ones where much Amdir is to be had. If one does not have Estel, then, one's sight is limited to the the things one can reasonably expect, or to things within the boundaries of Amdir. And, quelle surprise, most of these things are simply terrible. To take a highly regrettable example that we're nonetheless currently dealing with, a truly good solution to the US/Israeli war on Iran, and to the historical and geographic injustices that led to it happening, is solidly within the scope of Estel. Right now, the finest military and political minds of the world cannot think of a plausible solution that might actually happen and that the people involved would be broadly OK with. Working from a framing of Estel, then, all we can do is attempt to foster understanding between people of Jewish and Palestinian background both in the holy land and more importantly where we are (we can do little about Israel and Palestine, but we can at least work towards making sure that people in our countries are safe), conduct ourselves well and not give into blind hatred (I.E. don't shout slurs at people in the street or online), pressure our governments to adopt policies that might help and be ready to help anyone locally who suffers as a result of, for example, petrol costing $3.28/litre in New Zealand. This is all fairly boring, prosaic and undramatic work, but it's important and perhaps more importantly, good for the soul.

Unfortunately, the work also requires dedication over an extended time, with us acting in the full knowledge that we may never see the benefit of what's done. There are, however, solutions admissible through Amdir: the most innocuous are the denial-based one where we simply refuse to face facts about what one or more of the sides of the conflict actually are. The least innocuous ones are genocide: after all, if we remove one or another sides to the conflict, there will be no conflict. This is profoundly evil, polluting to the soul and can only lead to evil. But it's also plausible (we know we can do a genocide) and feels like a solution. Estel, of course, would tell you that doing a genocide pollutes the entire world and makes it so much harder for further good things in the world to eventuate, but if you lack Estel, not only are all of the options you can perceive the shitty Amdir-ones, you will lack the judgement to work out that your goal, however noble, is simply not worth the cost. And so we see people at the worst extremes supporting genocide or ethnic cleansing (this often happens when people try very hard not to think about what their policy would entail) or at the very least turning a blind eye to it, turning a blind eye to slurs or defending their use, turning a blind eye to bombing synagogues or shooting up mosques in Australia or New Zealand... I imagine that it's immediately gratifying: the feeling that there's a simple, easy solution to a very difficult and upsetting problem that you can put all your energy behind and that doesn't require you to be good. Moreover, you can expect to see results fast: there is some logic (if a very fucked-up variety) to "if I say enough slurs the right people will die and we can all be happy". But if that isn't morally degraded, what is?

Why, then, is Estel in retreat, if the moral degradation that you get from not having it is so obvious? Well, when in the last few decades have people cared about long-term degradation of any kind when ignoring it would let them earn a quick buck? For the last half-decade, and maybe more, we've been living in a society that prioritises, at every stage, immediate results over long-term good and personal reward over anything wider. From the very beginnings in school where we value number grades, achievement and being cool or popular over long-term understanding, mastery and social well-adjustment, to the workplaces where on every scale short-term flashy results are always, always rewarded over long-term consistency, reliability or anything that pays off in years or decades. Our politics are the same: we tend not to reward people who work humbly and thanklessly for long-term prosperity and stability, but those who charismatically and flashily promise immediate fixes (we can see how that worked out for the USA, certainly). Estel is valuable for precisely none of this: the value of it shows itself over decades or centuries, it's slow and the payoff (in feeling good about yourself, broadly confident in your ability to face the world and the wider results of boring and unflashy but reliable things that make society work) is largely invisible to people who don't have it. While the wiser parts of society will still see the value of Estel, for a new person looking to develop virtues, they will see society applaud frauds, grifters and warmongers. Whether they adopt the same habits (the high-Amdir case) or simply give up on trying anything at all (the low-Amdir case), very few people see much value in developing Estel and so, consequently the virtue never develops. This is, quite frankly, a concern if we wish to make a better world than the one we currently have.

Recreating Estel

Living without Estel is miserable and ugly. How, then, do we go about rebuilding it in our lives and in our communities? Doing it alone seems almost impossible, as trying to maintain Estel when everyone around you scorns it will simply leave you beaten down and maintaining it even harder. Doing it online also seems impossible: many of our social media platforms are so constituted that they rely on quick, flashy and ugly reactions. Long-form writing of the kind that could perhaps foster Estel is a long-term discipline that takes years to make work and that, for all that, is much less popular online than a flippant and often nasty post or video. The current internet, in general, seems somewhat inimical to Estel. This project, then, is something that you have to do with people, and that has to be done in person.

In Rabbinical Judaism a minyan, or a quorum of ten Jewish men (or women in less traditionally Orthodox traditions) is required for certain religious observances, including public prayer. A tradition of uncertain provenance states that the reason for this is that ten people are the minimum group of people that can meaningfully oppose a wicked society while being inside of it: any less and you tend to just get swept up in the wider community's norms. While most of us don't practice Rabbinical Judaism, there's something to this, and I think that if we wish to cultivate Estel a good place to start might be to get to the point where you can, one way or another, form a kind of minyan.

I can certainly attest that this seems to work on the basis of my recent move: I've so far found about four spaces where I can consistently find people who also wish to cultivate Estel. I'm sure they wouldn't phrase it that way, and they wouldn't agree with me on a lot of things, but we care about the same things: making things that are good and that last, reading and doing the kinds of learning that happen slowly and patiently, caring for each other and our communities in ways that actually work and making sure that we do all of that in ways that, succeed or fail, will make our communities better rather than worse. This has been profoundly good for my own sense of Estel: I may still be looking for work, we may be heading into what looks like a truly unpleasant economic crisis and everything may be generally miserable, but people value what I value and there's a consistent stream of small bright spots that makes everything so much more bearable (even things like being able to bake bread again or get books out of the library that I actually want to read). Beyond that, I care a lot more about being the best version of myself that I can be and not causing damage, because I actually spend time around these people and they have to put up with me.

The hope (and I say hope in both the sense of Estel and Amdir) is that this kind of attitude leaks out beyond the groups themselves and spreads through the wider community. The more people who value patience, mastery, slow processes and acting rightly despite the fact that it doesn't seem to be rewarding, the more the wider community adopts those traits and the more they begin to become rewarded, eventually. While doing that by yourself might be possible, it's a lot easier and a lot more fun with other people. As far as what kind of community to go for, as always, I think the goal is to find ones that are doing things rather than trying to be something. If you're at all religious, the right kind of religious congregation can be a great place to start (the wrong one, of course, will make things so much worse). Otherwise, over here I'm getting involved with a community workshop space for women and minority genders, I spend a fair amount of time at my local library, I've found two tech meet-ups where I actually like the vibes (very unusual for me) and I'm even considering getting back into bellringing after a few years' hiatus. Things that require Estel to make them work, generally. This won't be easy. Outside of certain communities, our social networks have been pretty thoroughly ravaged by the last fifty years and the value system that it brings with it. If you can move to a town or city with a strong community ethos, I would strongly recommend it, but if not, working together with people to build one is and always will be an excellent use of your time.

We are, as mentioned at the start of all of this, living in dark times, and hope is essential to getting through it. It has to be the right flavour of hope, though. While Amdir might help give us confidence that we will survive, Estel is vital for making sure that what survives is the kind of thing that we'd want to survive. It would be a tragedy, after all, if we managed to make it through the current crisis only to find that we'd all become such awful people that we could no longer make a good world for ourselves even if we wanted to. Elset and its cultivation is key to preventing that outcome.