Theme: Agency

[I] have to accept the evidence, but I do not like it. I would like very much to believe that we grasp the world as it is. And it appears that, at least with the help of instrumentalism (logic and science), we can grasp the physical world with a high degree of accuracy – at least, sufficiently to make use of it for our purposes. The cooperative world of human beings consists of inconstant relations, we desperately try to reduce to an ideal type, a stereotype, a single simple rule, a universal value. But it is more complex than the physical world that consists of constant relations. For that reason we may be limited to a logic of cooperation and every prohibited from a mathematics of cooperation – except at the highest levels. The data is conclusive: we are far more morally blind than I had expected. Our moral and ethical intuitions are genetically weighted but our moral biases evolve and are emergent – still invariant. Our metaphysical assumptions (assumptions about the way the world functions) are far more unconscious and unalterable than I’d expected. And very, very, very few of us are capable of working hard to modify those assumptions. (The process of which I am at this moment writing about.) [L]ibertarians can speak of morality in it’s logical language: economics. But that is partly because libertarians are both severely affected by moral blindness, less dependent upon others for information and decision making, and less vulnerable to deception. Libertarians not only are blind to morality, but discount it because it’s not useful to them. Our language, common protocol that it is, fools us into a sense of similarity. Progressives are interesting in that the world appears simple to them, and is simple to them computationally, because like any form single-variable calculation, it is in fact much simpler to reason with. But they are also the most morally blind demographic: progressives dysgenically and anti-socially apply their moral simplicity to all matters – like the mother of a serial killer who believes her son is merely misunderstood, and incapable of the crime. That analogy is all one needs to understand the moral blindness of progressives. Conservatives have the worst computational problem. They weigh all of the moral instincts about the same. Which means that they must contend with seven or more different weights and values that must be compared at any given time – something that the single-axis human capacity for reason cannot possibly manage, and abandons to the wind. So conservatives speak in moral language. Partly because it is simply too complicated to speak in any other. And largely because we have only recently understood these underlying intuitions. While Machiavelli, Hume, Pareto, Durkheim and others have attempted to derive the answers, only in the past twenty years with the help of science, anthropology and experimental psychology, have we been able to understand them. We humans speak to justify our genes. That is about all. The very last thing that we should try to engage in, is the politics of anything larger than an extended and homogenous family. The market – in this case, a market of communities (states) – is the only possible means of computing and calculating the future by scientific means.

[I] have to accept the evidence, but I do not like it. I would like very much to believe that we grasp the world as it is. And it appears that, at least with the help of instrumentalism (logic and science), we can grasp the physical world with a high degree of accuracy – at least, sufficiently to make use of it for our purposes. The cooperative world of human beings consists of inconstant relations, we desperately try to reduce to an ideal type, a stereotype, a single simple rule, a universal value. But it is more complex than the physical world that consists of constant relations. For that reason we may be limited to a logic of cooperation and every prohibited from a mathematics of cooperation – except at the highest levels. The data is conclusive: we are far more morally blind than I had expected. Our moral and ethical intuitions are genetically weighted but our moral biases evolve and are emergent – still invariant. Our metaphysical assumptions (assumptions about the way the world functions) are far more unconscious and unalterable than I’d expected. And very, very, very few of us are capable of working hard to modify those assumptions. (The process of which I am at this moment writing about.) [L]ibertarians can speak of morality in it’s logical language: economics. But that is partly because libertarians are both severely affected by moral blindness, less dependent upon others for information and decision making, and less vulnerable to deception. Libertarians not only are blind to morality, but discount it because it’s not useful to them. Our language, common protocol that it is, fools us into a sense of similarity. Progressives are interesting in that the world appears simple to them, and is simple to them computationally, because like any form single-variable calculation, it is in fact much simpler to reason with. But they are also the most morally blind demographic: progressives dysgenically and anti-socially apply their moral simplicity to all matters – like the mother of a serial killer who believes her son is merely misunderstood, and incapable of the crime. That analogy is all one needs to understand the moral blindness of progressives. Conservatives have the worst computational problem. They weigh all of the moral instincts about the same. Which means that they must contend with seven or more different weights and values that must be compared at any given time – something that the single-axis human capacity for reason cannot possibly manage, and abandons to the wind. So conservatives speak in moral language. Partly because it is simply too complicated to speak in any other. And largely because we have only recently understood these underlying intuitions. While Machiavelli, Hume, Pareto, Durkheim and others have attempted to derive the answers, only in the past twenty years with the help of science, anthropology and experimental psychology, have we been able to understand them. We humans speak to justify our genes. That is about all. The very last thing that we should try to engage in, is the politics of anything larger than an extended and homogenous family. The market – in this case, a market of communities (states) – is the only possible means of computing and calculating the future by scientific means.