When I picked up Michael Muthikrishna’s book, A Theory of Everyone, I wasn’t expecting energy to play a leading role. But Muthukrishna makes a compelling case that energy should be central in how we understand ourselves and how we design our world.
By energy, Muthukrishna means everything that helps power life—photosynthesis, ATP, fossil fuels, renewables, and, possibly in the future, fusion. Energy is “the single most important quantity in the universe,” he writes.
Muthukrishna’s goal in A Theory of Everyone is to provide a unifying theory of who humans are and where we’re going. This means understanding the development of life across millions of years and human life across hundreds of thousands. The common constraint for all life, he writes, is the ability to find and use energy.
“We cannot move without energy, cannot reproduce, cannot do anything at all,” he writes. “At the heart of this theory of everyone is a quest for the capture and control of energy.”
I previously spoke to Muthukrishna about how a theory of everyone could help social and behavioral science progress from a young science to a more mature one. In part two of our conversation, we discuss energy’s relationship to our behavior, particularly as it relates to cooperation. Muthukrishna argues that today’s falling energy ceiling—meaning energy is becoming harder to access—is shifting humanity from a place of overall abundance, triggered by the Industrial Revolution, back to one of scarcity.
“Till the 1700s the energy ceiling remained low. The amount of work our ancestors could do was a function of their own manual labor and the labor of their work animals,” he writes. “With so little excess energy, no matter what we did, no matter how clever we were, no matter how hard we worked, there was a limit to what we could achieve.”
Harnessing fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution changed that, leading to an explosion in population, innovation, health, and wealth. Since then, he writes, “we have come to take energy for granted.”
Muthukrishna wants us to stop taking energy for granted. “Continued progress, peace, and the civilization they create require us to get to the next energy level,” he writes. Many of the societal crises simmering around the world—like unequal concentrations of wealth, antidemocratic sentiments, immigration pressures—will get worse as the energy ceiling continues to fall, he argues.
People who care about solving these problems need to understand not just their psychological or behavioral dimensions but also how energy factors in. “Once you see the links between energy, innovation, cooperation, and evolution,” he writes, “you can’t unsee them.”
Our conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Evan Nesterak: Why is understanding energy essential to understanding ourselves?
Michael Muthukrishna: My interest in energy comes from my interest in cooperation. One of my contributions to the literature is to say that we’ve got all these mechanisms for cooperation: inclusive fitness and kin selection, direct reciprocity (you scratch my back, I scratch yours), indirect reciprocity, reputation (I don’t know you, but I know of you, so I’ll work with you because I heard you’re a good guy). But there’s a problem. All those mechanisms exist at the same time, and they actually undermine one another.
Take corruption. Everybody thinks corruption is a puzzle to be explained. It’s not. Corruption is easily understandable. It’s the natural state for humans—the kinds of things we call corruption are really lower scales of cooperation undermining higher scales.
The kinds of things we call corruption are really lower scales of cooperation undermining higher scales.
If a president gives a contract to their son, we say, Oh, that’s nepotism. But it’s inclusive fitness, kin selection, undermining our institutions. If a manager gives a job to a friend, or a friend of a friend, that is direct or indirect reciprocity undermining our meritocracy.
If it is the case that lower scales of cooperation are more stable and undermine higher scales, how do we live in a world where you and I could have met in the same room and we wouldn’t be too afraid of one another? If this were a few centuries ago, and we’re from different parts of the world, it would be a weird encounter. There’d be some trust issues, right?
If you look at graphs of pretty much any metric of human progress (like child survival rates, size of polities, energy capture, overall wealth, health care, global population) you notice something weird. Everything is flat from the beginning of history until about the Industrial Revolution, and then there’s basically a vertical takeoff to the point where, as Ian Morris puts it, it makes a mockery of everything that came before.
When we build these mathematical models of cooperation, we deliberately set them up as dilemmas. They are only interesting insofar as it is better for me to do something for me than it is to do something for the group. But we forget the model is just a model and the world is the world.
The question isn’t, “Do I contribute to the group or am I a defector?” In reality the question is, “What level do I cooperate at? Do I just do things for myself? Do I do it for my family, for my friends, my region, my group, my country, or the world?” Different people cooperate at different scales.
We built some models of this using a stag-hunt game [discussed here]. We looked to see how you could transition between these levels. There’s pretty much nothing that would allow you to transition between these levels except literal energy capture.
Just energy?
Energy is different to everything else. When I was explaining this to some of my colleagues in economics, they asked things like, “But humans need water as well. Why isn’t water the most important thing?”
I’ll tell you why. Because if you have enough energy, if you have literally unlimited energy, you can get water. But it doesn’t matter how much water you have if you can’t get energy.
Energy has moved us into a positive-sum situation. If you have enough energy, it incentivizes, in terms of payoffs, working together to access and use that energy to outcompete others. The story of humanity is that we cooperate and we compete, and then we cooperate in groups to compete with other cooperative groups. The scale of cooperation that is adaptive is the scale at which I am not better off in a larger group.
You write that we need to think about energy differently today than we have over the past century. We can no longer assume abundance.
If you look at energy return on investment, which is a measure of excess energy, all of the metrics look the same. The return on energy has been collapsing. In 1919, one barrel of oil found you another thousand barrels. That’s a huge amount of excess energy. In 1950, a barrel of oil got you another 100. By 2010, one barrel of oil got you another five.
You can think of the space of the possible (what we are cooperating to access, if you like) as being constrained by that energy ceiling and an efficiency floor. Because a lot of modern engineering, and certainly economics and psychology, was formed after the Industrial Revolution, it’s focused on efficiency. It’s not worried about the ceiling because the ceiling was so high for so long. That’s why economists think that we’ll always be able to find the technology to get us out of the situation we’re currently in. It’s not true.
What level do I cooperate at? Do I just do things for myself? Do I do it for my family, for my friends, my region, my group, my country, or the world?
Efficiency has been decreasing and there’s a limit. At some level, there’s a certain number of joules needed to heat a building. And you can be as efficient as you want by keeping it all in, but there’s a minimum amount. There’s a limit to efficiency. The ceiling is collapsing on us. So the space of the possible is shrinking, and it’s shrinking our capacity for cooperation.
So the constraint on our behavior is our ability to tap into the energy of the planet?
On an island, for example, larger animals shrink as they evolve. There’s just not enough energy to become a large animal. Same thing with groups. It’s easy to be prosocial when there’s more to go around, and there’s more to go around the more energy-rich and cooperative you are.
Imagine you’re driving your car in a car park and some asshole drives in and takes your spot. You’re going to behave very differently if there are tons of spaces versus if you’ve been driving around for 30 minutes and that was the one you suddenly found.
The payoff matrix is becoming more of that dilemma, the less energy that we have. That is the situation that we find ourselves in today. All of this talk about degrowth, it’s nonsense. It’s going to make things worse, because it’s going to return us to a zero-sum situation. If the economy slows down, it means that your win is my loss, because we’re taking from a limited pie. The alternative approach to climate change, to the climate crisis, to conservation, and so on is energy abundance.
If our energy ceiling is shrinking, which is going to erode cooperation, what’s the thing we should be focusing our cooperation on?
One thing is to staunch the things that are undermining cooperation, the fractures in society. The second thing is to use our cooperative capacity to bring more people on board to tackle the problems we face. That means equalizing opportunity, which means tackling things like inequality.
This is brain power that could be used to unlock cheaper energy that then makes everyone better off?
That’s right. Unlock cheaper energy, unlock more innovative ways to use energy, or make that next scientific discovery that completely shifts the way we live (AI, the internet, transistors, all the way back to fire).
There’s a time constraint on this. We have the maximum probability, within our lifetime, of cracking that very difficult problem by letting a thousand flowers bloom. Some people think we just need to wait for Einstein. You don’t know who the next Einstein is. You don’t know who the next Newton or Leibniz are. You want to create a world where every generation has the opportunity to try to run that race from a relatively equal starting point, so that the best take us ever forward, and that makes all of us better off.
If there’s truly energy abundance, we’d get that vertical take-off once more. . . Right now, everything is slowing down.
In terms of energy, what should we be aiming for right now? I think the low-hanging fruit, the easy answer here, is we should be investing in the technology we have right now, which is nuclear. We know we can do this. But we’re suffering from the fears an earlier generation faced with an awesome new technology that looked a little scary. But we’ve tamed it. We’ve figured out ways to deal with that more effectively. There are still issues, which I describe in my book, proliferation being one of them.
The next step that we should be doubling down on is fusion. Fusion is a game-changer. The next step from fusion is I guess antimatter reactions. Beyond that, it’s so far in the future we won’t look like humans.
If energy becomes virtually free, the promise of fusion, what becomes the constraint on human progress? Is it time to innovation? Is it something else?
If there’s truly that kind of energy abundance, we can go back to the rapid rise in the graph I described earlier. We’d get that vertical take-off once more. Right now, everything is slowing down.
So if we have cheap energy, are we in kumbaya mode at that point?
No, not immediately. Cheap energy allows for the possibility of higher scales of cooperation, but you can still be trapped for a very long time in suboptimal, lower equilibria. The Democratic Republic of the Congo has plenty of energy, but it’s a shit show. The people accessing that energy are not the people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. It is a small set of elites collaborating with foreign oil companies and other companies that are accessing their resources for the benefit of the people in another country and not the DRC. Even with abundant energy, we have to get past some of the fractures that we’ve created in our society and there’s a lag on that.
Let’s say we do have energy abundance. Aren’t there psychological, sociological, or reasons that might hold us back?
The fractures are always there. The question is when we might cross those boundaries and try something new. Under conditions of abundance, we might want to try something new because what we can do together is more beneficial per person than it would be for us to go at each other’s throats. If there isn’t enough to go around, then I do need to lock down into my group and differences matter a lot more. But when you’re in an abundant society, it allows for the possibility of trying something and it being beneficial.
Abundant energy is not a complete solution, but it is a better position than energy scarcity.
I would say something a little stronger than that. I would say that energy abundance is a prerequisite for high scales of cooperation and a peaceful, prosperous society.
Read part 1 of our interview: Michael Muthukrishna wants to integrate the science of human beings, from genes to culture to our environments, into ‘a theory of everyone.’ Doing so, he says, is key to advancing social and behavioral science. “Right now . . . we’re in that pre-Darwinian world where you notice that there are butterflies and birds have different beaks. Or the alchemy world where Newton is turning lead into gold,” he told me. In part 1 of our interview, we discuss how that might happen. — Evan Nesterak, Editor-in-Chief
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