When I look at my own intellectual and moral trajectory, I find my values mostly unchanged, but my models of political and historical reality changed dramatically between 20 and 40. When I was young, I could observe the same shocking transition in adults, but never understood it.

1. Freedom does not form in the absence of power, but in the balance between powers, and it depends on available resources and modes of social coordination.

2. There exists no intrinsic force that shapes human behavior to be moral. Opinions and behavior behave ecologically: if a belief or strategy is possible, it will exist. If it is incentivized, it will be abundant. If you want to prevent it, you need to disincentivize it.

3. History is not best understood as the struggle of large groups of good people against large groups of bad people, but as an evolutionary struggle between large populations of state building chimpanzees with the ability to tell stories.

4. Nuclear weapons have on balance been good. It is not possible to guarantee that accidents or proliferation won't cause devastation in the future, but it seems obvious that they have successfully secured peace between the imperial superpowers.

5. Being a vassal state within the US empire has been very good for Germany and its neighbors, because it led to several generations of unprecedented peace, safety, stability, prosperity and individual self-actualization that probably could not have been achieved otherwise.

6. Imperialism is by itself not evil (or good). If an empire is well governed, people living within a successful empire tend to have a better life than those outside of it. The concentration of power is inevitable, but its consolidation and long-term stability is not.

7. The value of democracy (or any other political system) cannot be measured by its aspirations and moral claims, but by the actual life outcomes of people, compared to attainable alternatives.

8. The main difference in power between people and groups springs from their ability to act on long-term plans and deep models of reality. The present failure of our civilization springs largely from a future that changes faster than the models of our elites.

9. Cultures don't have intrinsic value. Their value consists in the sentience and sustainability of the civilizations they can give rise to. Working cultural pluralism requires submission to the long game of a joint common culture.

10. People without children seem to integrate reality horizontally, across the present generation. People with children begin to perceive reality vertically, as a history between interacting families, where present personal, political and cultural circumstances are transitional.

11. Surprisingly, gods and spirits are real, in the same way as human selfs are real. Spirits are the operating systems of autonomous, internally coordinated agents (which includes plants, ecosystems and societies), gods are selfs that span and can move between multiple minds.

12. Religions are mind altering technologies that have been created as tools for stabilizing civilizations as gods and coordinating human activity over long timespans. Successful religions are entirely rational, but by their nature, the rationality is hidden from their laypeople.

13. Most human beings are spiritual, including most atheists. Atheists reject the antirational mythology and authoritarianism of religions. Spirituality is structurally the belief in playing a part in a coherent 'greater whole' that extends past the lifespan of the individual.

20 year old me would have rejected every single one of the above statements, some of them emphatically. 60 year old me is probably going to have a different perspective again. Don't expect me to be right, and don't expect to agree with me on all things.