The Pope on the Power of Ideas

“ideas and ideologies […] enable us to imagine new worlds and different types of society. Many paths are possible.”

— Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology (Harvard University Press, 2020), p. 7

Pope Leo XIV’s encyclical Magnifica humanitas is an unlikely gift to anyone who thinks the digital economy is a political choice rather than a fate. Its central premise reminded me of Thomas Piketty’s Capital and Ideology, so I revisited it for this occasion. The book argues that inequality is legitimised by ideology and does not follow naturally from differences in people or by technological development. Instead, ideas decide how the spoils are divided and why this is good. The Pope, relatedly, writes that even when futuristic visions “remain largely speculative, they gain relevance by altering the collective imagination and thereby influence social, economic and political choices.” Ideas do work in the world before they are true — and whether or not they ever come true. I was amazed to find that the Pope really gets this, insisting that “technological evolution does not follow a predetermined path, but can be guided by personal and collective responsibility.”

More specifically, Leo targets transhumanism and posthumanism — the fantasy of the “enhanced human being” or “human-machine hybrid,” bound together, as Leo writes, by “the central role of technology and the aspiration to transcend the limits of the human condition.” It hardly matters that none of this will come true or makes sense because an idea need not be real to be powerful. Just as humanity has taken grave decisions in the name of unprovable gods, the post-human vision steers real economic and political choices simply by being taken seriously (or by being abused) where power sits. The harm is, then, that the dream of the future is already doing its damage now.

These ideas form “the ideological background present in some centers of technological power” and occupy the collective imagination by emphasizing that being merely human is not enough and that the body and its finitude are bugs to be patched. It is the ideology that ranks human beings by output and treats the un-enhanced as obsolete. Sound familiar? It relates to the meritocratic story Piketty identifies as the great legitimiser of modern inequality. That worldview was also beautifully dissected in Michael Sandel’s The Tyranny of Merit (2020), as the conviction that we deserve whatever our talents can command, so that our worth collapses into our achievements. Pushed to its caricature, that creed arrives at transhumanism — for once a person simply is their performance, human nature itself becomes a limitation to be engineered away, subordinated to its capacity to produce. That is precisely why the Pope insists that “the value of persons… does not depend on what they achieve or produce.” He puts forward a universalism where dignity is owed to everyone “simply by virtue of being human,” of which no one can ever be deprived.

In a similar vein, you can watch a sibling ideology raise money in the SpaceX IPO. This one is not transhumanism but its posthumanist sibling — the aspiration to transcend the Earth, and the human itself. These beliefs will never hold, yet, just like transhumanism, they reshape the present all the same. SpaceX is chasing a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation, potentially the largest flotation in history. What it is selling sits on the first pages of the prospectus: its mission, the filing declares, is “to make life multiplanetary… and to extend the light of consciousness to the stars.” A risk factor recasts Mars colonisation as a backup for humanity, arguing that since the odds that something eventually wipes out life on Earth are “non-zero,” moving off-world will “ensure species-level redundancy” so that “the light of consciousness will not be tied to a single planet.” So instead of dealing with climate change or inequality, the idea is to build rockets and colonise Mars? Maybe the idea is just to earn money.

There is one more problem, beyond ideas and their power. And a very worldly one, at that. This IPO is engineered as an upward redistribution scam. A new Nasdaq “Fast Entry” rule will force Nasdaq-100 index funds and ordinary 401(k)s to buy SpaceX within 15 trading days at whatever price the market sets, while a public float as low as 5% and staggered insider lockups let early holders sell into that mandated passive demand — what Michael Burry bluntly calls retirement savers being the insiders’ “exit liquidity.” None of this requires the Mars dream to be true, profitable, or even believed. This recalls 2008, when the losses of the banks were socialised — offloaded onto the public through bailouts — while their gains stayed private. The same logic runs through this listing as SpaceX’s loss-making stock is forced into the portfolios of index funds and pension savers, and when the share price falls back to what the company is actually worth, the loss settles onto those ordinary citizens while the insiders keep what they took out.

I’m with the Pope on this one. Habemus papam.