[Epistemic Status: fiction (in most timelines, that is); in my lane, having fun]

Place: The Equatorial Republic (pop. ~190M)

Time: 2032

My fellow citizens of this great Equatorial Republic,

Today, as I stand before you having accepted the solemn responsibility of the presidency, I am humbled by your trust and energized by the possibilities that lie before us. This administration marks not just a change in leadership, but a fundamental paradigm shift in how we approach governance, human welfare, and our collective future.

A New Era of Compassion Through Science

On this first day in office, I am announcing the formation of the National Hedonic Research Initiative. Let me be clear: extreme suffering can be worse than death itself. Nowhere is this more evident than in the case of cluster headaches—aptly named “suicide headaches” by medical professionals, a condition where the pain is rated significantly more severe than childbirth, kidney stones, or even gunshot wounds.

Through Executive Order 001, I am establishing the Cluster Headache Elimination Commission with an initial $2 billion in funding. The data is clear: approximately 3 million people worldwide suffer from this condition, spending nearly 5 million person-days annually in extreme suffering rated 9/10 or higher on pain scales. This Commission will:

1. Create a nationwide tryptamine research and distribution network, prioritizing low-dose N,N-DMT, psilocybin, and LSD trials based on compelling evidence that these compounds can not only abort attacks but extend remission periods indefinitely for many patients
2. Establish 200 specialized treatment facilities across the nation within 6 months with mandatory oxygen therapy and other proven abortive treatments
3. Fund 50 research laboratories dedicated to advancing our understanding of pain relief mechanisms and developing targeted interventions for these conditions based on patient-reported outcomes

Additionally, I am directing the Department of Health to create the Pharmaceutical Innovation Directive focusing on anti-tolerance compounds for chronic pain patients, next-generation flumazenil analogs to reverse benzodiazepine dependence, and targeted solutions for other iatrogenic conditions that have been unconscionably neglected. These extreme forms of suffering represent the deepest moral emergency in our society, and their elimination is our highest priority.

Mapping the Hedonic Landscape: Beyond QALY

For too long, our policies have been guided by economic indicators and inadequate health metrics like Quality-Adjusted Life Years (QALY). The QALY framework fundamentally fails us by treating all human experiences as linearly equivalent and by capping wellbeing at an arbitrary “perfect health” that ignores the vast territory of heightened human potential.

The empirical evidence is compelling: our current metrics systematically undervalue both the depths of intense human experiences and the heights of human flourishing. As a result, we’ve created policies that address widespread but moderate challenges while neglecting concentrated instances of profound human experiences – both positive and negative.

Today, I am commissioning the first comprehensive Hedonic Landscape Observatory—a scientific assessment of the full spectrum of human experience that will:

1. Develop more sensitive and accurate measurements of diverse human experiences across the wellbeing spectrum
2. Map the neurological correlates of resilience and positive states to complement our understanding of health
3. Create economic feedback loops that systematically reward businesses and institutions that demonstrably enhance quality of life
4. Develop a new economic indicator—the Consciousness-Weighted Prosperity Index—that will appear alongside GDP in all government reporting

This initiative will ensure that governance decisions are evaluated not just by economic impact, but by their effect on the actual lived quality of conscious experience of our citizens—taking into account the true depth and breadth of human flourishing available to us.

Game Theory and Consciousness: A New Political Framework

We stand at an evolutionary crossroads. The old politics operated on outdated models that failed to recognize the fundamental relationship between consciousness and our collective future. Today, we begin the transition to a political framework that explicitly acknowledges the quality of conscious experience—as central to governance.

By Executive Order 002, I am establishing the Consciousness-Economy Integration Commission tasked with creating explicit feedback loops between consciousness research and economic selection pressures. This commission will:

1. Develop metrics that quantify the wellbeing-enhancing potential of technologies, enabling investors to select for innovations that genuinely improve quality of life
2. Create tax incentives for businesses that demonstrably improve the lived experiences of their employees and customers
3. Establish a public research platform exploring the positive potential of consciousness, ensuring that discoveries about phenomenological wellbeing directly influence market forces

This systematic exploration of consciousness is not merely academic—it will fundamentally reshape our economic landscape by ensuring that technologies and policies that enhance human flourishing systematically outcompete those that merely optimize for shallow metrics. The implications for environmental policy, social welfare, and international relations are profound and far-reaching.

Transcending Tribal Politics Through Psychological Understanding

From this day forward, international diplomacy will operate with a new level of psychological sophistication. Through the newly formed Department of Psychological Architecture Analysis, we will explicitly model the subagent structure of world leaders and political movements, identifying when narcissism, psychopathy, or tribal thinking is driving decision-making.

International coalitions will be formed not just around shared interests, but around shared psychological awareness. This administration will not hesitate to name pathological dynamics when they appear on the world stage, while offering a path forward through a consciousness-centric yet pragmatic approach to governance.

I am also directing our diplomatic corps to explore new modalities for high-stakes negotiations. We will establish a Diplomatic Innovation Laboratory to research the application of empathy-enhancing protocols in negotiation settings where entrenched psychological barriers prevent resolution. When trillions of dollars and millions of lives hang in the balance of international agreements, we cannot afford to have negotiations hijacked by psychological defense mechanisms and tribal identification.

Just as we now understand that the pain of cluster headaches is objectively more severe than a migraine, despite superficially similar descriptions, we must develop precise language and metrics for the psychological architectures that drive international conflict. They are real, distortionary, and far from game-theoretically optimal. Only by seeing these structures clearly—and developing reliable methods to transform them—can we hope to address existential challenges that require genuine cooperation.

Longevity: The Right of Every Citizen

While extreme suffering can be worse than death, unnecessary death itself remains a profound tragedy and represents an incalculable loss of human potential. Today, I announce the formation of the National Longevity Institute with initial funding of $10 billion, coordinating research across public and private sectors to dramatically extend healthy human lifespan.

This institute will prioritize three areas:

1. Senolytics and cellular reprogramming technologies to reverse biological aging
2. Neural preservation techniques to maintain cognitive function
3. Prevention of age-related suffering states through targeted interventions

The benefits of this research will not be reserved for the privileged few, but made available to every citizen as a basic right. Age-related suffering is not inevitable, and this administration will not accept it as such.

The Science of Awakening: Soteriology as a Research Target

Even as we pursue longevity, we must confront a fundamental truth: all things remain impermanent. Today, I am establishing the Institute for Contemplative Sciences with a mission to develop a rigorous scientific understanding of what traditions across time and cultures have called “awakening,” “enlightenment,” or “liberation.”

This research program will:

1. Systematically study how humans throughout history have made peace with impermanence and transcended existential suffering
2. Investigate the neurobiological and phenomenological correlates of awakening experiences across contemplative traditions
3. Develop scalable, secular methods to help citizens process mortality, grief, and existential concerns within our scientific worldview
4. Create interdisciplinary teams combining neuroscientists, contemplatives, philosophers, and clinicians to bridge ancient wisdom with modern scientific rigor

The ultimate human challenge is not merely to extend life, but to discover how to be fundamentally okay with the impermanent nature of existence. While various religious and philosophical traditions have offered paths to this goal for millennia, we now have the scientific tools to explore these states with unprecedented precision.

By creating a dialogue between contemplative wisdom and scientific method, we can forge new pathways for humanity to face its deepest existential challenges. This is not merely a spiritual pursuit—it is a practical necessity for a civilization grappling with the fundamental questions of meaning and mortality in an age of unprecedented technological power.

Understanding Exceptional States of Consciousness

The most profound states of human consciousness remain largely unexplored territory in scientific research. Today, I am directing the National Institutes of Health to establish the Center for Exceptional States of Consciousness (aka. The Super-Shulgin Academy) with a $5 billion initial investment, tasked with making sense of profoundly positive experiences across the full spectrum of chemically-facilitated and meditation-induced states.

This Center will:

1. Create standardized protocols for psychedelic research, including 5-MeO-DMT with essential safeguards and contraindication screening, recognizing that while beneficial for many, it can induce challenging experiences in others—understanding these variables is crucial for responsible application
2. Fund 25 dedicated research facilities specializing in Jhana acceleration techniques and other contemplative practices that achieve similar states without pharmacological intervention
3. Develop a comprehensive empirical framework mapping the neural correlates of these heightened states while investigating both beneficial outcomes and adverse reactions to create predictive models for personalized approaches
4. Prioritize sustainable MDMA production and research as a north star intervention, focusing on its potential for treating PTSD and enhancing empathetic connection while minimizing cardiovascular impact and developing protocols to mitigate tolerance and neurotoxicity concerns
5. Translate findings into scalable interventions for depression, anxiety, and existential distress, ensuring that safety, accessibility, and individual neuropsychological differences guide all protocols

These states represent extraordinary territories of human wellbeing—regions of experience that offer not only therapeutic potential but a scientific window into the furthest reaches of human potential that we have barely begun to understand. Our commitment is to explore these states with both scientific rigor and ethical care, recognizing both their profound potential and the need for responsible stewardship.

Expanding Our Moral Circle: Non-Human Animal Consciousness

Our commitment to understanding consciousness and reducing suffering must extend beyond our own species. Today, I am establishing the Interspecies Consciousness Research Initiative with a dual mandate: rigorous scientific exploration and practical harm reduction.

This Initiative will:

1. Develop objective metrics to quantify suffering in non-human animals, with immediate focus on factory-farmed animals where the concentration of suffering is most acute
2. Allocate $3 billion annually to research and implement improved welfare standards for farmed animals while simultaneously investing in cultured meat technologies and plant-based alternatives
3. Create a roadmap for the gradual, culturally sensitive phasing out of the most harmful animal agriculture practices over the coming decades, aligning economic incentives with ethical progress
4. Establish the Wild Animal Welfare Research Program to cautiously explore the complex ethical landscape of wild animal suffering, acknowledging the immense scientific and ecological challenges involved

The ethical imperative is clear, but so is the need for careful, evidence-based approaches. We will neither rush interventions that could have unintended consequences nor hide behind complexity as an excuse for inaction when suffering is demonstrable and solutions are feasible. This balanced approach recognizes our ethical responsibilities without compromising scientific rigor or cultural realities.

Transforming Education: Experience, Don’t Memorize

A key pillar of this administration will be fundamentally reimagining education. Today, I announce the Consciousness Education Initiative that will transform how we develop young minds. This initiative rejects both outdated rote learning and any form of ideological indoctrination. Instead, it embraces a “see for yourself” approach where students:

1. Learn meditation techniques alongside mathematics, building empirical skills for exploring internal states
2. Study their own consciousness with the same rigor they apply to studying literature, using first-person methods complemented by third-person science
3. Develop critical thinking by becoming aware of their own cognitive biases and subagent structures
4. Understand the psychological architectures that drive political beliefs through evidence-based empirical investigations

The goal is not to tell students what to think about consciousness, but to give them the tools to explore their own minds with scientific precision and philosophical depth. This approach builds intellectual independence—teaching students to verify claims through direct experience rather than accepting them on authority, whether in consciousness studies or any other domain.

A Call to Action

My fellow citizens, I do not promise that these ambitious goals will be easy to achieve. They will require not just government action, but a transformation in how we approach science, governance, and our very understanding of what it means to be human.

But the stakes could not be higher. We have the opportunity to eliminate forms of suffering that have plagued humanity throughout history, to extend healthy life, to create social systems that support human flourishing, and to understand the very foundations of consciousness itself.

This is not a partisan agenda, but a human one. In fact, of consciousness itself. It transcends traditional political divisions and speaks to our shared desire for a world with less suffering and more joy, less confusion and more clarity, less conflict and more cooperation.

Let us begin this journey together, guided by compassion, informed by science, and dedicated to the proposition that the quality of conscious experience matters fundamentally—and that we have both the capability and the responsibility to improve it, in ourselves, our loved ones, and in the field at large.

Thank you, and may we move forward with wisdom, courage, and clear-eyed determination.

Infinite bliss!

[The crowd erupts in thunderous applause]

And now, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome the voted ‘most hedonic’ pop sensation of the year, performing their chart-topping anthem inspired by our vision for the future!

[Cue massive flashy fireworks as the stage transforms. Spotlights sweep across a diverse crowd of all ages beginning to dance as the music starts. Children, seniors, and everyone in between move to the rhythm. The singer emerges from beneath the stage on a rising platform surrounded by dancers in colorful neuron-patterned costumes, launching into their hit song about consciousness, wellbeing and the dawning of a new era of understanding…]

“Conscious Dawn” – Presidential Lyrics

Ancient wisdom meets the future’s light
Through pain’s darkest valleys, we’ll find the heights
Mapping consciousness beyond what we’ve known
A nation where suffering won’t reign on the throne

Tribal boundaries dissolve in our sight
As senolytics set our cells aright
The hedonic landscape unfolds like a scroll
Where DMT whispers truths to the soul

From cluster headaches to enlightened minds
Transcending metrics that keep us blind
Our moral circle widens beyond human skin
Wild animal welfare, a new dawn begins

Science awakens what sages once taught
Not just to live long, but find what we’ve sought
A republic where bliss is more than a dream
Infinite consciousness—our birthright supreme