Who drives progress? Is it government planners mapping out national economies? Or is it individuals who challenge convention and pioneer better ways of doing things? Is it the Trumps and Bidens who defy boundaries? Or is it the Musks, Jobses, and Fords?
Christopher Cook, writing on Substack, makes the simple but urgent point that progress depends on people:
My working thesis right now is that depopulating the planet… would bring about a technological and cultural dark ages.
The reason is simple: we would not have enough geniuses.
He’s right. But progress requires more than just individuals—many individuals—with potential. Progress requires the environment to allow these individuals to challenge the status quo. As Cook notes, most of these individuals fail—lacking motivation, connections, or the necessary modicum of luck.
A very small percentage of these geniuses will make it. They will change the world. But without the possibility to tread their own path, without the ability to challenge the status quo, none will succeed. If the right conditions for progress hadn’t existed, there would be no reusable rockets, pocket-sized supercomputers, or horseless carriages.
Drivers of Progress
So what are the right conditions for progress?
Freedom of speech is foremost. Without freedom of speech, there’s no freedom of thought. If you need to self-censor all the time, how will you develop your ideas? If you can’t discuss your thoughts, how will the views of others enable you to refine your thinking?
Freedom in academia builds on this. If certain hypotheses are off-limits, intellectual exploration narrows. Research becomes dogma, and our understanding of the world stagnates.
Freedom of the press is essential for holding power accountable, for exposing mistakes, and for spotlighting areas ripe for innovation.
Free markets incentivize individuals to notice a need, imagine a better method, take risks, and reap the rewards. Without the prospect of personal gain, why would anyone take a chance? Turning insight into action can be a difficult endeavor. When risk is high and reward absent, ideas die on the vine.
Freedom to choose education, career, and belief system enables a multitude of modes of conduct. Everyone can test and discover which way of life suits them best. Different worldviews fuel discussion that reveals the good, the bad, and the ugly.
Freedom of movement allows geniuses to go where their ideas can be developed without being crushed by bureaucracy.
Taken together, without freedom there is no innovation, scientific discovery, accountability, entrepreneurship, personal development, and cultural evolution. Without them, no progress will come to pass. With them, some geniuses will amass incredible riches and incidentally lift up the living conditions of everyone.
Statists like to argue about public welfare but often forget that freedom is the engine that improves everyone’s life. Progress flows from liberty, not control.
Unicorns
History proclaims this lesson. East Germany tried central planning, state control, and censorship. West Germany tried spontaneous order, open markets, and free speech. After being completely destroyed in war, one region emerged as the economic engine of Europe. The other had to build a wall to keep their people in. Three decades after reunification, East Germany still lags behind the West.
Look at South and North Korea. Look at pre-reform and post-reform China. None of these nations is a beacon of freedom. But if you compare the situation of tight state control with the situation of relative freedom, the winner is clear. When the scale tilts towards liberty, prosperity and cultural richness explode. The tighter the state’s grip, the dimmer the situation.
Authoritarian regimes can maintain a positive outward appearance for a period of time, but they only mimic progress. They don’t innovate; they imitate. Tyrants can only try to catch up to free civilizations; they cannot lead.
Though measuring a country’s contribution to global progress is not straightforward, we can use unicorn production per capita as a proxy. Startup “unicorns” are defined as a “pre-exit startups valued at over $1 billion.” The top five countries for these unicorns? Israel, Estonia, Singapore, the United States, and Luxembourg.
These countries are not perfect—not every aspect of freedom is cherished all the time. But these countries rank, in different ways, among the freest in the world.
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A Precondition for Progress
The Cambridge Dictionary defines progress as “movement to an improved or more developed state, or to a forward position.” Looking at humanity as a whole, this means less hunger, disease, and early death.
Again, there are different ways to quantify this progress, but over time, they all point in a similar direction. As people gained the freedom to think, trade, and reap the rewards of harnessing their ingenuity, global living conditions improved dramatically. During the last 200 years, the share of people living in extreme poverty declined from 79 percent to 9 percent, child mortality fell from 43 percent to 4 percent, and the literacy rate increased from 12 percent to 78 percent. And all of this happened while the world population grew eightfold.
Progress means solving problems. First come existential problems: hunger, disease, early death. In the West, we rarely even think about those anymore. Because our freedom enabled us to become very advanced at solving such fundamental problems, we shifted towards solving optimization problems: delivering packages overnight, making smartphones even faster, and getting AI models to stop lying.
None of these problems are solved by decree or control. Instead, it takes millions of free minds experimenting, failing, learning, and sharing. The Trumps and Bidens of the world can help shape these environments, but they don’t discover the cure, write the code, or sketch the blueprint.
Left alone, entrepreneurs hatch wild business plans and create inconceivable products; scientists chase unpopular hypotheses and discover miracle treatments; and artists challenge dogma and rewire culture.
Freedom is more than a “nice to have.” Freedom is the precondition of advancement. The fire of progress can only continue to burn with the free flow of oxygen.
Set Yourself Free
Freedom fuels progress. This is not just a political principle—you can also use it as a personal compass. Surround yourself with systems and relationships that foster freedom. Do it in your work, your relationships, your thinking. Do it in small ways; do it in big ways. But always keep moving towards freedom.
Gravitate toward workplaces that trust you with autonomy. Engage in projects where you can experiment without asking for permission at every turn. Take risks and test—that is the best way to learn. Favor relationships and partnerships based on mutual trust, not on control. Voluntary choice beats manipulation.
Think freely. Entertain wild ideas. Investigate them—and discard those that don’t hold up. Read widely. Question assumptions. Challenge narratives. Break free from echo chambers. Step outside the algorithm. Progress begins with independent thought—and ends with taking responsibility for your decisions.
When self-censorship becomes the norm, when conformity replaces curiosity, when freedom is no longer practiced in daily life, progress stalls. Civilization begins to rot. Jordan Peterson captures it:
[A]n authoritarian state emerges when everyone is lying about everything all the time.
Freedom is the default state. However, with forces working against it, freedom must be cultivated over and over again. Cultivate freedom in your own life; cultivate it in the institutions and all of civilization. Or else progress falters.
A Chaotic World
A large number of humans is a precondition for progress. But numbers are not enough. Without freedom, those humans can’t explore, experiment, and build—they can’t develop their ideas. The bedrock of technological, cultural, and economic advancement is the freedom to tread one’s own path.
Let individuals make free decisions. Let ordered unpredictability reign. Freedom is chaotic. But without trying bold ideas—most of which will fail—there is no breakthrough, no progress. Cage the individual, cage civilization itself.