Character Crisis

Can wisdom keep pace with power?Human power keeps compounding. Character does not. The Character Gap is the distance between what we can do and what we are wise enough to do.We inherit almost everything from those who came before us: their tools, their knowledge, their institutions, their wealth. The one thing no one can inherit is character. Every person has to build it from the beginning, one choice at a time. The Character Crisis argues that the widening Character Gap is the problem beneath all our other problems, and that artificial intelligence, by extending human power into the mind itself, is raising the stakes higher than ever.The book works at three scales:The individual. Jaime Pasquier draws on Aristotle, Confucius, and four decades in financial services to show that character is revealed only when it costs something.Civilizations. The book turns to Rome, the history of trust and insurance, and the Bronze Age collapse.The species. Schopenhauer, the Grand Inquisitor, and Plato's cave illuminate the algorithmic feed, the erosion of attention, and the new industry of digital immortality.The book opens in Paris in 1847, with the Duc de Choiseul-Praslin, a peer of France who had everything except the ability to govern himself, and a family legend that his death was staged.This is not a book of predictions about technology. It is a book about an older question: can anyone build character in an age when power is cheap?The tools are new. The question is two thousand years old.