Life, Liberty, Happiness (Trilemma)
“Life. Liberty. Happiness. Choose two.” Nathan’s political trilemma, formulated 2020-12-06 as a generalization of an earlier suspicion (“of diversity, democracy, and stability, any society can have only two”). The US Declaration of Independence’s three unalienable rights are, on this frame, not a package but a trilemma: long-term, a society must sacrifice one. The trilemma is the political crystallization of the atonement imperative’s survival-first ethics, and the frame Nathan uses to explain a decade of alienation from both US parties.1
The mapping (2020-12-06)
“I’ve come to believe that, long term, these rights compose a trilemma. Life. Liberty. Happiness. Choose two. I think this may be a useful lens of looking at US politics in general. In my view, the core things that we must optimize for are life (survival) and liberty (robustness). Happiness is nice-to-have, but must always give way to these other two criteria (or be instrumental to them).”
- The right chooses life + happiness. “There’s a lot of talk of ‘personal liberty’ in the US right, but it’s largely of the ‘liberty for me but not for thee’ variety. That’s not liberty, that’s personal happiness.” The right’s apocalypticism coexists with intense orientation toward continued survival; the anti-abortion position is readable as “life” over “liberty.”
- The left chooses happiness + liberty. Prioritizing the protest during a respiratory pandemic; unwilling to make survival-level sacrifices (environmentalism as preference, not as survival discipline).
- Nathan chooses life + liberty — survival and robustness, with happiness instrumentalized: “I prioritize social stability and longevity over notions of ‘justice’” (2023-09-20).
The trilemma’s work in the journal
The frame arrives in 2020 and then organizes the subsequent political entries — a genuine hinge, not a one-off:
- 2018-01-30 (pre-trilemma): “Nobody ever changed the world by appealing to the better angels of human nature.”
- 2018-07-05: “Justice is a means, not an end.”
- 2023-09-20: “liberal in practice, conservative in ideology… under the current historical conditions democracy has become a destabilizing social force.”
- 2024-11-02: “I’ve become increasingly critical of the prioritization of the individual over the rest of the society… I suspect that technology has taken us past the point where democracy is viable.”
- 2024-12-11: “humanity’s generally conservative nature… a strong draw to order, hierarchy, and stability within us.”
The trajectory is legible as the trilemma’s internal logic working itself out: once survival and robustness outrank happiness, democracy itself becomes a robustness question rather than a legitimacy question — and by 2024 the journal answers it against democracy “under current historical conditions” (i.e., networked, high-velocity, individualist).2
Reading it against the wiki
The trilemma is the missing link between two clusters that were ingested separately:
- The suffering axioms (2012): “robustness is at least as important as efficiency” and “fight for the betterment and advancement of all of humanity” are already life+liberty. The trilemma is stage-3 of the 2012 argument wearing party-political clothes.
- The economics cluster: Graeber and UBI optimize happiness (meaning, exit); degrowth optimizes life (survival) at acknowledged cost to happiness; post-scarcity-economics is the claim that the trilemma can be dissolved — that technology lets you have all three. Nathan’s frame is a standing objection to post-scarcity optimism: the trilemma reasserts itself because the scarce resource isn’t goods, it’s robustness against each other.
- The cooperation cluster: cooperation-and-defection and norms describe the micro-mechanics of what the trilemma calls “liberty” (robustness through enforceable cooperation). institutionally-constrained-technology-adoption is what happens when rulers optimize their own happiness-metrics over the society’s robustness — the trilemma’s ICTA failure mode.
Honest weaknesses
- The mapping is asymmetric. The right gets a psychologically sophisticated reading (“liberty for me but not for thee”); the left gets a behavioral one (protests during a pandemic). A left interlocutor would offer the left’s own sophisticated version — “happiness” as capability (healthcare, education) which is itself survival-relevant, making the left life+liberty too, by another route. The trilemma is sharper as self-analysis than as party-analysis.
- “Life” and “liberty” are not obviously separable the way the frame needs. Robustness at the social level is usually purchased with exactly the individual-liberty trade-offs the frame wants to avoid adjudicating; the 2023–2024 entries show the frame sliding from “life+liberty” toward “life” alone (stability over democracy), which suggests the trilemma may collapse into a dilemma under pressure.
- It is a self-location tool, not a theory of the state. It explains Nathan’s alienation well; it does not explain why the parties answer the trilemma as they do, or what would change their answers.
Cross-domain connections
- suffering-axioms — the ethical root (survival/robustness first, atonement over purity)
- discontinuous-self — the metaphysical root: if the self is provisional, “happiness” (of whom?) is already a shaky optimization target; collective robustness is the more coherent goal
- post-scarcity-economics / universal-basic-income / degrowth — the frames the trilemma pushes against (above)
- institutionally-constrained-technology-adoption — the trilemma’s failure mode at the ruler level
- paradise-christianity — Brock & Parker’s paradise is a happiness+liberty community that nonetheless survived centuries (mutual aid as the robustness mechanism); the strongest counterexample in the wiki to the trilemma’s necessity
- dao-attention-scarcity — the trilemma’s democracy-destabilization claim in small-scale proof: when the mechanism runs but nobody watches, it amplifies whoever does watch
- butlerian-jihad-thesis — the refusal option costs exactly the liberty the trilemma says Nathan won’t trade (the Amish price) — which is why he can’t sign up for the jihad he speculated about
Sources
- Selected journal entries (Day One export, 2012–2024)