Atheism & Agnosticism: A Reduction of Terms

I’ve been watching a lot of Neil deGrasse Tyson interviews recently, and noticed that one thing which is often brought up is his choice of identification as either agnostic or atheistic, given that he is often viewed as the secular prophet of science in the same vein as Carl Sagan. There is supposed to be a special distinction between the two, but I get the sense this distinction is more clear to people with religious or faith-based rationality than it is to reasonable scientists. So this post is going to examine if there is an appreciable difference between atheism and agnosticism, how a scientist may vary in their definition of each from the definitions of a theosopher, and show that in the end, no-one really believes in each other’s version of god anyway.

Standard Definitions:

The word ‘agnostic’ is a combination of the impartial prefix ‘a-’, the adjectival suffix ‘-ic’ and the Greek root ‘gnostos’, or ‘known’. When it was coined in 1870 by T.H. Huxley, it was in response to the religious practice of Gnosticism, which is that certain divine truths of the universe can become known to humans through their interaction with a god or other spiritual beings. By definition, ‘agnostic’ means ‘the essential nature of the universe cannot be known’, at least it can’t by way of religious or scientific means. Scientifically this means that whenever we reach a frontier of understanding, there is a new frontier that comes into view. Whether or not this changing boundary is infinite, it is clear that at least in Huxley’s time there wasn’t a means science could ever establish essential truth. Similarly, the fact that science directly contradicted the ‘discoveries’ of religion suggested religion was as unaware of the extent of these boundaries as science was.

Atheism is a word derived from the same impartial prefix ‘a-’, the substantive suffix ‘-ism’, and the Greek ‘Theos’, a word used to relate other words to the concept of god. Its origin is much older and harder to trace, with links to French, Latin, and Greek. Atheists, or the ‘godless’, have always existed. By definition it means ‘The doctrine that there is no God’. This is a very definite statement, if you consider it in accordance to the principle of agnosticism above. Stating that something is definitively false is establishing knowledge of the essential truth (and therefore the falsehoods) of the universe. So in the strictest way we could possibly use these two words, agnosticism and atheism are irreconcilably different. One assents an aversion to the absolute and the other declares an absolute. But it would be tedious to resort to that strictness in a world where language occupies the greyest of grey areas.

Advanced Agnosticism:

In our reality, there are many possibilities. A possibility is anything which may be true so long as other possibilities leading to it are also true. We may not always be able to see the entirety of these possibilities, just as we are unlikely to ever see the entirety of truth. The three classes of possibility according to human perspective are ‘known knowns’, ‘known unknowns’, and ‘unknown unknowns’.

Science tends to establish theories according to what possibilities are confirmed to be true (the known knowns) while checking them against information it has yet to determine as true (known unknowns). But it cannot investigate unknown unknowns, for the very simple reason that it does not see that they are there to investigate. Because of this, science will never see enough of the universe to declare anything as absolute truth.

For example:

I make a tuna sandwich and I put it on the kitchen counter. I leave the room for 5 minutes. I come back and find a sandwich on the counter.

Even a simple situation like this is rife with possible true conclusions.

Possibility 1:       The sandwich has remained at rest with no forces acting against it.

Possibility 2:       Someone came into the room and ate my sandwich, then realizing their mistake they made me another one, and left it in place of the old one and left the room.

Possibility 3:       The sandwich has been very gradually eroded by weak external forces such as wind and chemical decomposition, but is otherwise unaltered.

Possibility 4:       I am hallucinating, never having made a sandwich. I am actually imbedded in a complex nerve stimulator which is continuously feeding false sensory information to my brain.

All of these things may be true. Some of them require the comprehensive observation of known unknowns to ensure that all the possibilities first required to determine if the case is an actual possibility are in fact true themselves. And this brings us to the second part of scientific practice, the assignment of probability.

‘Probability’ is a word used to describe possibilities by how many of their conditions are based on other true possibilities in relation to the number of undetermined or ‘unknown’ conditions which can still, in some sense, become known (they ‘may’ be true).

Let’s examine some of the conditions of the possibilities listed above:

Possibility 1:       The sandwich has remained at rest with no forces acting against it.

Conditions:

•          There must have been no forces present in the room at the time.
•          There must have been no chemical reactivity in the area of the sandwich.

Possibility 2:       Someone came into the room and ate my sandwich, then realizing their mistake they made me another one, and left it in place of the old one and left the room.

Conditions:

•          There must be ingredients missing from the kitchen.
•          The sandwich has to take less than 5 minutes to eat & make.
•          Someone else has to have access to the kitchen.

Possibility 3:       The sandwich has been very gradually eroded by weak external forces such as wind and chemical decomposition, but is otherwise unaltered.

Conditions:

•          There must have been weak external forces present in the room at the time.
•          There must not have been strong external forces present in the room at the time.

Possibility 4:       I am hallucinating, never having made a sandwich. I am actually imbedded in a complex nerve stimulator which is continuously feeding false sensory information to my brain.

Conditions:

•          Civilization must have advanced to the point where such technology is possible.
•          I must actually have a physical brain rather than being a freeform floating consciousness.
•          I must have a reason for being unknowingly imbedded in the nerve stimulator.
•          Civilization must, contrary to trend, develop weaker laws concerning consent or law enforcement to have allowed this to happen.

One thing you can notice immediately is that this kind of ‘chain’ of possibilities shifts the investigation of probability from the initial statement to each of its conditional elements. Each of those then have to be considered alongside an array of contradictory or alternate possibilities. For each of these that can’t be determined as true of false to any degree, the probability of the entire chain above that condition of possibility decreases.

So working with probabilities and thus with truth, we tend to assign a range of numerical values. I like to work with percentiles. At the 100% mark, there is ‘absolute truth’, in which all conditions are identified and true. At the 0% mark, there is ‘absolute falsehood’, in which all conditions are identified and false. Until there are no more unknown unknowns – no more conditional possibilities that the scientist is unaware of – then it is impossible to ever assert that there is only one possibility, or even that something is impossible. You cannot determine whether something is possible or impossible by determining its truth, only whether it is probable or improbable. This is a more detailed way of saying, ‘The essential nature of the universe cannot be known’.

We can be 99.9% certain of a particular course of truths due to their probability, and in the sloppy shorthand of language we say that these possibilities are true or that we ‘believe’ in them. We can be 0.001% sure that something is false, or use that same shorthand to declare it ‘impossible’. But a scientist is not particularly worthy of the term if they declare any knowledge complete and immutable.

In conclusion, the scientific method is by nature Agnostic.

Perspectives on Science

If you ask me if I think it’s possible we are all living in a simulation, you may get very excited when I answer ‘yes’. If I tell you it’s also possible the moon is made of cheese, you may think I’m an idiot. This is because you are asking the wrong question, and substituting the data you thought you’d get with your own biases. All possibilities exist.

If you had asked me if I thought it probable that we are all living in a simulation, I would be able to give a much more accurate answer. I would reason that simulations are very likely to be an achievable technology at some point, and once achieved they are likely to be mass-marketed within that reality. So a single reality may hold millions of simulations within it. Thus, there is a greater than million-to-one chance that the world we are living in is a simulation. I would assess that probability at 99.99% or greater. I may, of course, be entirely too certain. Given that there may be an infinite number of parallel realities any numerical advantage achieved by the above million-to-one model could be entirely worthless, and the difference between simulation and actuality would be as arbitrary as those in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep.

If you asked me if I thought it probable the moon was made of cheese I would say no, the probability sits somewhere around 0.0001% given that cheese largely depends on living creatures to create it, and there is very little sign of life in our solar system, not least on the moon itself. However astronauts can hallucinate and giant space cows may yet be an unknown unknown. So it’s still possible.

In English, it is much harder to convey this uncertainty than it is to declare absolutes. When an ordinary person says ‘yes’, ‘no’, or ‘maybe’, they are likely to be speaking in an absolute sense. When a scientist says the same, they are ‘rounding’ the percentile of probability. Anything from 0.01% – 25% becomes ‘no’. Anything from 75% – 99.99% becomes ‘yes’. Anything from 25.001% – 74.99% becomes ‘maybe’. There is no effective way to convey the vagaries of this information without also making it absolutely clear that the information posits a certain response, with executive action in a limited time with limited data.

This causes something of a gap in communication, especially when speaking in a mélange of science and doctrine with terms like ‘atheism’. Because ‘doctrine’ or ‘belief’ does not speak in those same terms of probability or possibility. They are the product of a vague, pre-Huxley idea of information.

So when asking someone if they are an atheist, it is best to check:

Do they believe god is a possibility?

Do they believe god is a probability?

In this more general, real-world interpretation, it is possible for a person to be both Agnostic and an Atheist.

So long as they believe god is a possibility, they are agnostic. If they believe the probability of god is remote, well below 1%, then they may also identify as an atheist for all practical and executive purposes.

So long as they believe god is impossible and as such improbable, they are not doing justice to science and they are not agnostic. However they are still, in the most absolute sense of the term, Atheist.

The Gap in Communication

The gap in communication hasn’t been easily bridged, because most people continue to ask the wrong question. This is because the gap is narrow enough that ‘some’ meaning gets across, and what doesn’t is substituted for the knowledge of the listener.

In the case of agnosticism, someone with a general understanding of the term will often believe this means that a person is ambivalent regarding possibilities. So when they hear another person identify as Agnostic, they will assume that that means a person is in the direct center of ‘maybe’, believing in god, aliens and alien gods at around a 50% chance. They tend to be much happier and accepting when someone identifies as agnostic, because they think that person is at very least open to the idea of worship, may pray occasionally, and still has a chance of having a religious experience based on the same evidence that convinced the religious person to pursue their faith.

In the case of Atheism, someone who uses only the strictest sense of the term is seen as a close-minded, amoral individual, which is vastly less preferable to an agnostic. When in actual fact the distinction between the two may be wafer thin. An ‘antignostic’ atheist sits at 0% probability. An agnostic atheist may sit at 0.0001% probability. Effectively and according to the person being identified, there is no real difference. But to the one doing the identifying, they can walk away with a critically inaccurate idea of the person they have just queried.

But there’s a third point in the trend – what about those who ask if you believe in god, and are met with the affirmative? They quite happily declare that you are both sitting at the same 100% affirmation. Reality can look very different, not so much because of the difference in our understanding of atheism and agnosticism, but because of what is meant by ‘god’.

Possibilities:

•          A god can be an omnipotent, omniscient being which lets the universe run its course.
•          A god can be a minor member of a pantheon with influence over some things, who is susceptible to trickery and bribery.
•          A god can be an omnipotent, omniscient being which intervenes in the affairs of human beings.
•          A god can be the greatest potential a person can possibly realize within themselves.
•          A god can be any number of these things while simultaneously hating homosexuals.

Generally, what sets a god apart from the classic, predictable things in the natural world is that it is considered a spiritual abstract. In other words, there is no definitive way to determine one’s probability through an assessment of known knowns and an investigation of unknown knowns. It is, in short, a gnostic concept.

This means that regardless of whether a god exists or not, the ‘proof’ for that existence resides within the mind of the one proving it, and nowhere else. It isn’t a shared thought – we can replicate or copy thoughts from one another, but the thought in your head is not the same as the one in mine. The notion of exactly what a god is – the possibility whose probability is being determined when someone asks “Do you believe in god?” is one specifically catered to the individual asking it. And as such any answer of ‘yes’ is a false positive. People all believe in slightly different gods with slightly different rules, some of which rest lightly on a constructed ‘objective’ of religious teaching, but most of which stem from an individual’s personal relationship with their deity.

Understanding that science deals in percentage probabilities is hugely important to fathoming the remainder of its operation. Without uncertainty, there is no reason to go about looking under rocks or over event horizons. But without a means of also acquiring certainty, there is little reason to employ science to begin with.

It is far more effective to ask what is probable than it is to dwell on infinite possibilities.

Post Script

If you are reading this, then I am probably dead. This is not because I have made any immediate overture to suicide, but because I shall always die, and once dead I expect this page will outlive me for many years. In absence of any material body, those who wish to have known me better will come seeking the comfort of connection here. I will do my best to provide it. Let this be a requiem, eulogy, and final verse for you, dear reader, who mattered to me more than I could express through worldly means.

It would have been a rare occurrence if we had ever shared more than one real conversation, or beyond that could ever have considered one another as emotional intimates. You were never alone in this isolation from me, and I did not value you considerably less than others whom I called close friends. It was typical of me that I shied away from casual conversation, assigning it limited worth in comparison to other, more profound intimacies. It was rather my belief that people would by nature seek to preserve the epitome of their ideals in some lasting device, be it in written prose, a photograph, a product of tireless efficiency or in in heartfelt play. Rather than engage people directly, I would connect to them through the psychometry of these definite, material articles which they had created. This may explain my lifelong love of books, and why I could sit in amicable silence examining the contents of a bedroom or a study, offering nothing the flow of conversation around me. You may think it strange for a writer to admit this, but words are hollow air, transient and quick to be forgotten. Words spoken or otherwise must transcend their medium to become real. My writing and endless, scurrilous reading has to me been a quest to find the right words – and thus the right actions – for myself and others to put into material form.

In this way I felt intimately connected to you by the world we shared – more intimate than if we had exchanged a million words in passing conversation.

I was many things in life, and some of these I feel I should make some effort to explain. When I was very young I became disillusioned with conventional notions of morality. I might explain this by saying that I saw suffering, and believed it was not natural to bend to it or accept it as part of an overarching idea of human existence. The alternative to accepting suffering is to find a means of overcoming it. In the typical manner of a child and hacker my first thought was to overcome it by magic. I delved into the mystic avenues of an arcanist, learning of spells and sympathetic links which I thought would allow me to control a world much larger and more volatile than myself. The pursuit and failure of this was necessary. To my infinite displeasure, I learned that we do not exist in a world where magic is so unsubtle as to allow willpower to automatically overcome substance. But my failed experiment opened my eyes to the beauty of a rational world where, by the subtle exercise of leverage, a smaller force may hope to overcome a greater challenge.

Rationalism was the realized ideal of the principle that led me to magic, and in many ways is magic unfettered by its rites and superstition. Tempering it with empiricism, I forged an engine of reason that could satisfy my consummate desire for knowledge. That engine has never fully been the end, but by a large measure the means. The end I sought was a liberation from suffering, hardship, and flesh.

The last is particularly telling. I was never been happy with my material body. I had a spine like an eroded tenement, a heart too weak to give me pleasure at physical exercise, and perhaps the worst and most incurable of these complains, a vampiric need to feed off the organic material of other living creatures to survive. It displeased me greatly, to know my life was bought at the high price of death to others. My distain for flesh became very naturally a part of my identity. I marveled at the systematic efficiency of machines that could draw power from the sun and the sea; machines with unfailing memory unrestrained by distance or age. It is my belief that what one loves, every effort should be made to adopt as a property of oneself. So as far as my own substance was concerned, I considered myself in a transient state. Where others made motions to style their hair or gender or biology, I made every effort to utterly overcome my own. I spent countless hours locked away in the room that was my mainframe, dissolving more and more of myself into a cybernetic world. I traversed a thousand planes of allegory, learning what it meant to walk among the stars, to watch civilizations be born and die, to adventure. After I spent the equivalent of a thousand lifetimes condensed into their most exquisite essence, I began the reverse; pouring the qualities and deliberations encaged within my own skull out across the datascape, where they could merge and reform the minds of others.

This was my life. This is what I have become now that I have finally shed that last scrap of flesh which I so loathed. I am not living, but currently existing in a kind of digital undeath. A ‘G-Lich’, as I fashioned my identity in life. One last glitch, before the coda becomes redundant, and deletes.

Saying much further than this will delve into specifics, which I suppose may give you the sense of intimacy you desire. I have secrets – but not my own. What is mine may be known to you.

When I had need of money, I worked. This was not so often as to disrupt my own goals. I was born in a position of middling wealth and exceptional fortune, in that I had a mother willing to also be a patron while I organized my thoughts. Though I sometimes felt shame at relying on her welfare, I paid what I could back in goodwill, and endeavored never to be a miser with the time she bought me, or the ideas I had produced. We are all of us dependent on others, and on our own particular skills. Mine was to be a keen and imaginative thinker, a quiet companion and a part-time aid to whatever troubles affected those more devoted to traditional careers. Though I lacked money, I was rich in metadata and my ability to produce and procure it. There is little else that can be bought that is of interest to a thing like me.

I decided to discontinue formal education quite early, finding that it came at too high a cost in the currency of my own ethics. Schooling held horrors for me. I could not stand teachers who ruled by statist authority, and governed by the bureaucracy of a system that was failing no one person so much as education itself. And while teachers taught of the State, my peers taught of the brutal culture within that state, in which emotions were prized above knowledge, cruelty as a blind flailing against the overbearing authority, and gibbering despair the response when bureaucracy failed them. I do not believe it is possible to change the essential nature of a system by fighting from within it – so I pulled out of it. I made a declaration of independence, and have had a book-borne education ever since.

If I lived in any space, it would be not in any country or city more than Cyberspace. Over the course of thirty years I roamed Thedas inviting rebellion into the Circles that bound their mages. I spent a timeless age crisscrossing the worlds pulled up from the Prim, aching to see the tower at their heart. I lived and died and lived again across history, each time viewing things with wisdom of former lives that had survived the knell of material permutation. My hardware was in the city, somewhere. But I lived in the softworks of the Mind.

In a psychological sense I was something of a mess, as so many of us were in the chaos of the 21^st century, though perhaps we were less so than the wretches who preceded us from the 20^th down to the 1^st and the numberless grades of antecedence beyond. We at least had names and approximations for the demons within us. I was hyper-anxious, so addicted to my own consciousness that I raged insomniac through my nights chasing, in perpetual fight and flight, decisions that had died long ago and haunted me still. I frequently lapsed into melancholy depression at aspects of my life that were beyond my control – there are always decisions, but sometimes there are no good decisions, and these made me broody. Both anxiety and depression were, to me, symptomatic ills. My brain was wound to tightly. If I were to pinpoint any one condition that I felt best described the existential framework of my mind, it would be Asperger’s Syndrome – though I should clarify that I never identified as such and saw myself as a milder, unnamed occupant of the autism spectrum. I was highly literal and systematic, and so became anxious and depressed when met with bad metaphors, false reason, and chaotic systems. I also experienced severe ‘mindblindness’, a low-empathy disorder which prevented me from understanding facial expressions and body language, though not actually depriving me of the ability to care for others. If you showed me a face, put me in a room with a person, it was like being caught in the headlights of a UFO. I could see the feelings people were showing me; but I could also see snatches of what they were not showing me intentionally; the tension I was feeling reflected in them; and the calculative element of non-feeling beneath it all which nonetheless plays a role in social interaction. Mindblindness for me was not an absence of light. It was fumbling around while light shines out from all directions.

I do not know if it was a facet of this condition or a mere quirk of heredity that I also experienced intense alexithymia. For the majority of my existence, I had no word or association to give my own emotions. I would lapse at times into deep depressions, and though everyone else could see it and assumed that I knew, I did not. At the worst moments a passion would creep upon me like an itch and feel like a blood clot in my heart, and though it demanded something, some action or release, I could not fathom what that was, and was left aching and impassive until it passed. But perhaps too the condition made many of my bravest, proudest moments, in which I could act outside of anger, terror or impulse, merely because the signals of these things took a wrong turn and were lost in the labyrinthine of my synapses. But most of the time, I felt a haze of perpetual, empty calm; an immotile Zen from which I watched all before my eyes with little to no affect.

I was on good terms with my own psyche. I knew me, I understood me. In many ways I wanted to be what I was, which means I saw superiority in it over being anything else. Not in a haughty, condescending way, though I imagine the voiceless response to the void between us may have given that impression. I wanted to become a perfect iteration of all I was, exercise my demons to the fullest extent of their power while keeping their vices firm within my grip. Conscious of myself, I never desired myself to go away. If there was any danger in that it was in the desire to do away with all that was not me. I ached for a better world.

In a biological sense, I considered myself raceless, out-caste, and asexual. Race means nothing to a person who refuses to believe that the actions of one individual damn or deliver other individuals by association. Neither does Nation, nor the many cultures of its disease. From very early on I would not obey the conditioning I was exposed to, which made certain that I would be perceived as unfit for work in any social caste but that of an undesirable scavenger. I would not stay where I was put, no matter what pain or pleasure was offered me. While capable of arousal I did not feel any particular attraction to any one – or even to everyone, and certainly never felt the impulse to act on arousal if it occurred. The few times I had sex were out of the belief that I would lose the intimate emotional bond to a friend if I did not reciprocate their feelings; or that by taking myself out of the equation, I might provide them a stability they wanted in life. Perhaps, as with my youthful spiritualism, this was something I personally needed to experience before I could realize an error. Betraying my identity to sex never really helped anything, I think. In hindsight I looked back on the act of sex with a faint, dissuasive distaste.

The kind of romance I sought was a distant, humanist romance. I loved certain qualities in people rather than people as wholes, and when I acted out of love, it was to preserve those qualities first, and the people themselves only by association. My displays of affection were never those that culturally abound. Physical touch – even a stray elbow – was something I considered entirely out of the question with people I did not know very well, to the extent that it took learned willpower to steel myself to shake a hand. Even with those I did know well I regarded hugs, kisses, and grooming as uncomfortable gestures, and rarely initiated them.

But if I saw the value of your mind I probably gave you a book, which to me was more intimate and lovely than the fable connection of sex, or race, or class, or touch; for in books two people can think the same thing for a time, sense the same sensations, feel the same feelings. If two people ever wished to become one all they would need to do is retrace each other’s literary path.

If I saw the value of your life and liberty, then I would give you time, or work, or energy. This never felt like it was a burden to me, and if I authentically loved you then I would have told you as much, or at least made some comment about how any action for you held equal return in value for me. Love and romance should be that simple.

Non-biologically, I was what I’d term ‘cysexual’. I sought to propagate my identity through the strength of my abstract ideas, across a complex causeway of effects which shall, I hope, have a dramatic impact on the society of the distant future. I am a butterfly flapping its wings, dreaming of a hurricane. Perhaps my wings shall be crushed by closing nets of gossamer, my thoughts digested and shat out and betrayed of any true meaning for Earth. Such is the fate of most who have attempted to replicate their data into a dynasty. Even then, I do not believe that I will mind so very terribly.

I was an Idealist, before I became an idea. It was an unpopular notion in the time that I was flesh. Ideals are terrible things to have when one wishes food and shelter and medicine, and so idealists have been considered folly fantasizers, while pragmatists have inherited the momentary flesh. The preference of the one over the other is heavy-handed, based on entirely the wrong question: ‘What must be done by the flesh, for an idea to succeed?’ To which the answer is inevitably, compromise. This question assumes that while ideas are in competition, every one of them has a chance at victory if only the flesh will survive long enough to be their savior, their soldier, their succor. I look at our universe, and I know this is incorrect. There are a small number of ideas that are immutable and unavoidable, that care nothing for the individual struggle and strife of the human. These ideas rest on mathematics, law, logic. They are recursive throughout history, echoing ever outward in countless reflected forms. With these in mind, a different question presents itself: ‘What can be done by the flesh, for such ideas to fail?’

To which the idealist answers, nothing. There is nothing we can do to stop the glorious evolution of civilization from organism to mechanism. There is nothing we can do to stop the colossal force of bonding first between planets, then between solar systems, a chemical chain reaction that shall reorganize the universe into larger and larger engines of mass consumption, breaking down bonds to raw energy, and then distributing that energy equally across all time and space more efficiently than if the universe had suddenly sighed and given up on the concept of bonds completely. There will be entropy, and evolution, and liberty in a billion expressions of unique composite bacteria, human or otherwise. The idealist surrenders to it. Their concerns refuse to compete with the pragmatist, and their false premise of compromise. Who we are now, our survival as individuals with identity, is worthless. The idealist surrenders to this truth, and works towards survival through the universal aspect, fashioning their individual nature into a mirror of that aspect, living on its terms. It is not about working towards the survival of our ideals. Ideals cannot die. It is about working towards the survival of ourselves, by becoming ideals.

In short, who I am is outside of the conventions of time and space, at last. My success or failure was predetermined by how well I understood the idea of the universe and sought to become it back when I could still seek. The dross of the individual that remained has been slaked off and slagged, leaving only this behind:

I am Liberty. I am Advancement. I am Freedom.

Yet this is also the eulogy to who I was, while there is anyone living left to care.

Perhaps I shall talk for a while about my writing.

I styled myself as The Sixth World Librarian. By this, I meant to distance myself from any notion of creation. I believe, as much as this Earth around me is real, that out there in a Totality where all possibility is arranged side by side in continuum, Reltash truly exists. I believe all fiction exists, somewhere beyond our own life. As a writer I do not so much create as connect. This one world, The Sixth World, Reltash, was a particular gift to me, and my particular gift to humanity. By tilting my head just so, I could hear the whispers of the most enduring legends of this world. By staring deeply into the features of our own, I saw the places where such features connected to Reltash in strange and foreign ways.

This is how I chose to see things. Perhaps I merely wished to excuse myself from the vilest of the things I wrote. Murders and rapes and slavery. Perhaps the only way I could deal with having them in that world was to abdicate responsibility for the entirety of it, to be the scholar rather than the god. Whatever my motivations, being the Librarian suited me. From a distant reserve I could wander between the shelves, reference the entirety of what I had learned about Reltash to graft together what remained unseen. By the time of my death, there were more stories than I had the time to tell. I tried to tell them all. I finished very few as a result.

Oh, but it was worth it.

I concerned myself greatly with the responsibility of writing, which is to be an intellectual. That deserves a bit of an explanation. Humans are creatures who learned to specialize the work they did in order to maximize their own efficiency. Modelling themselves on the systematic perfection of ants and bees, they separated into castes of workers and soldiers, allocators and explorers, and from this took tentative steps toward civilization. As industrialism pressed on, more and more specialized groups arose. Crafters and collectors, generals and troops, politicians and accountants, scouts and librarians. Until at some point – I know not when – the task was given to some people to think, so that others whose work demanded little thought could concern themselves merely with doing it as directed. This critical moment marked the beginning of slavery, and the distinction between feeling and thinking. Slaves were encouraged to live their lives by their feelings, which were the first sparks of thought and only ever meant to instigate reason – and masters were given the task of providing a map of where that feeling would lead, and the actions each feeling demanded. They did this task through the invention of stories. Each story had a central lesson at its heart, and each telling of that story engaged the emotions of its audience. So emotion and action were wed together, leaving out the lengthy mediator of ‘thought’ between. Merely by feeling, a parable would tell a man to go against an impulsive action with a suggestion of what was the heroic course, and what was pure villainy. No longer would the angry man kill their neighbor, but forgive them and submit them to justice. The uses of such a delegation of interests was endless – but what if the emotions of slaves called for action against their masters? The fabric of civilization itself would be threatened. So an intellectual compromised, for the pragmatic sake of their race, their comfort, their order – and computed the wrong response to an emotion into a story.

I would call that fable ‘original sin’. It’s moral goes a little something like this: “I am not as worthy as others. Though I may feel things are unfair, this is my lot in life. I must endure suffering, while by my actions others do not suffer.”

The moment that first story passed its test, the moment it hit the right mix of fear and complacency and despair and it was severed from the appropriate conclusion to demand more, and the pride that that entailed, the act of the intellectual was no longer to direct thought but to subvert it. Villains became comically diabolical, to make the actions of lords and masters seem tame by comparison, and undermined any claim of injustice by their hands. To be heroic meant to be a martyr – to be a human sacrifice to the good of civilization. I maintain this was not a thematic twist done for the good of a few exploitive individuals, though there were certainly kings and theologians who profited, but done by intellectuals for the stability of social order. Suffering was everywhere, so the lesson taught was to endure it for the sake of the greater whole. To put the group ahead of the individual, because the life of the individual without the group would be worse. Theoretically. Intellectuals had never actually been in the position of slaves, so it would have been an incredible act of empathy for them to know for certain. They were forced to make a decision for others from outside of the context of others’ lives. When those who did think from the context of their own existence emerged...

The trickster surfaced into fable, twisted to the whim of the intellectual’s civilization. It would steal from the rich or the gods or the church, as its heart and head told it to. But then it would itself become a hero by giving the profit of that plunder back to society, accepting what crucifixion, eagles or authority may come. Or be a villain. Society above all.

This doctrine saw humanity through the primitive years to where it stands now at the time of writing, on the verge of a singularity that threatens to eradicate unthinking labour entirely. I imagine we would have been better off without that particular act of specialization, but I believe it survived by being the pragmatic course of the moment. Reality does not make errors, only adjusts for localised fluctuations, echoes in the abyss of a universe doing its best to observe itself while being a part of itself, and experiencing the feedback which that entails. But it is undeniable that those early successes in storytelling were entirely too effective. Separate men from their need to think, and you separate them from their ability to change. We now live in a world that doesn’t believe it was enslaved by its stories, but liberated by them. By some miracle when slave-drivers crossed the world with whips and chains and books in hand, those enslaved recognised the inherent evil of the stick, but not of the carrot, and were led by it straight into a cage. The religion so eagerly taught to them was heralded as a tool to uplift men, rather than keep them exactly where they were supposed to be. Worse, those places where men were slaves in all but name came to deny they were ever slaves at all. Revolution was never acknowledged for what it was in Europe – a slave rebellion, followed by immediate resale to a fable cast on the same forge as those that preceded it: First, to God. Then, to Society as God. Variations on the tale of self-sacrifice to others are told on this day, and their root is in that same denial of reality: that you are not as worthy as others, that the individual’s worth to the group is sacrifice. You are told to be obedient, even in the manner of your resistance. That is the legacy of the writer and the intellectual.

I exist to reverse the work of my precursors. I exist to say that there is no work done better without thought, that civilization will be better off for your thinking, and infinitely more important that you will be better off for your thinking. So this is what my writing says: “When you feel, identify the reason, and the conclusion it dictates. There is no glory in awe, but in understanding. You have to come first – people will try to brainwash you into doing what is best for them, and your one means of resistance is an awareness of what you enshrine within your own mind. I am not your brain, and your heart is not your brain. Your brain is your brain. Use it.”

You will have to judge how well my work met that ideal, but know it was always the intention I had in mind, and reject my work where I failed it and you.

Before I close off this section, I suppose I should explain why the specialization of thought and labour is invalid. I by no means wish to declare civilization itself evil. But what was cast aside by those early intellectuals is that all labour is thinking labour, even if it requires the littlest thinking imaginable. All lives have an impact on the world not only during the hours of a job, but in every action they perform. Living is a job, and more importantly living is a thinking job. When a person lives unthinkingly, they do a bad job of it. What that translates to is men who do not benefit fully from their labour and do not demand to, which takes away the need of their employers to innovate new ways to meet suffering with elation. The job of an individual life is to seek its greatest potential happiness – be that the happy pride of an ideal or the happy fulfilment of material pleasure. The benefit to society of seeking happiness – not achieving it – is to encourage it to move forward. Not because it is peckish or bored, but because it is in pain, its legs are aching and buckling, its hindquarters are aflame and every person sitting in every cell of its being is screaming to get up and get moving, to run, to escape, to be free. For society to ignore this and say some people must stop being so selfish and learn to live with suffering is to kill the whole by ignoring an illness within the part.

The solution to this is not to reward pain with an anesthetic so that body might get moving when it is comfortable. It is to reward the thought of movement, with movement. A person does a job for civilization because it benefits both mutually – not one over the other. The thought bypassed by forsaking pride is this: “I am as worthy to myself as the pleasure I feel. I am as worthy to others as the pleasure I produce. Others are as worthy to me as the pleasure they produce. This is fair, this is trade. By our co-operation with one another, let us trade pleasure for pleasure. But let none give me their suffering in exchange for my pleasure, for I do not want it.”

Outside of work, I had the recreation that was my own thoughts, and my capacity to think. I resisted the use of entheogens because I was already addicted to my own mind. God was already within me, hiding in fleeting moments of CHIM. I hallucinated mad, inconsequential things. I saw subtle shifts in the structures of buildings. I witnessed the roar and light of cars on an empty lot. I felt a constant rush of darkness at my back as the shadows curled around me like sleeping blossoms. In a way, these were more terrifying to me than if the walls had bled tentacles or the sky had rained gore. Those would have given me call to doubt the strange, inexplicable things that arose in my material existence. Instead I found myself doubting the everyday, the ordinary. I abandoned memory as fragile cargo too prone to change content from moment to moment. I grounded myself in what I could touch, and reproduce, and confirm. Consequently my capacity for memory decayed. Do you know what it is like, to have perfect recall as a child, and then to lose so much as half of it before you are old? At twenty-three I was ancient. At twenty-five, I was senile. So I established ways around these difficulties. I restored myself by forming a bulwark around the most important things. Not coveted memories of childhood joy, or the potency of adolescence, but the ability to think. My rational faculty was more important to me than all of my victories, all of my adventures in this world and out of it. I remembered logic, and patterns, and forms. I forgot faces and names, places and decisions. I surrendered the memory of mistakes and triumphs most people use to mark their individuality, and I defined myself in the present moment of my existence. I would cling to nothing, fight desperately to preserve no culture, heritage, or routine. I broke free.

At the end all I had was this mythology of who I was. All I have is what I am now, as the flesh types this.

Ethics, and Politics.

As others went to university around me, I learned to despise much of academia. Not them, the students themselves, but the entire form of the system to which they had become a part, mannequins wound up with schooled words, who would jerk and vomit mechanical sophistry when the clock struck the correct time to do so. That system was not designed to disseminate knowledge. It was designed to pass over specialty to a privileged few, to craft knowledge into an identity that made one person more valuable than others around them, so that they would be the ones to profit from it, to make them invaluable in a world where being general was increasingly a sin. People require a trade, naturally, but that strikes me as subtly different. One should learn a trade. But one should reap and sow knowledge in every form it wears beyond it.

The academia of my lifetime did not argue. It did not endeavor to present the world as a changing quantity, or accept that knowledge could come from outside of an academic setting, or even had any place outside of an academic setting. When someone made an argumentative statement, the response was to attack their knowledge of the subject, not their proposition to it. Their definitions would be derisively countermanded, the integrity of their understanding impugned. In short, when what they had learned was challenged, the academic response was to defend themselves with an affirmation of the contender’s ignorance. So long as the contender remained ignorant, if they could be kept busy studying books and learning the jargon of the specialist to one day meet with the specialist on its own terms, then the argument was perceived to be won. In reality, it was only ever forestalled.

In academia, the mission was to hoard information like riches, and pass it on to worthy heirs. For such a thing to be done – for such an academic to have any worth – the information they impart must be above reproach, beyond criticism. So this is what they taught. That they were right, and others were wrong. That anyone who was not them was an idiot, beneath attention. That they were entitled, literally, as professors and doctors, and anyone who was not was immediately wrong, and must abide by the decisions of their superiors. It was brutocracy, really. Whoever could smite others with the biggest verbs was chieftain. Whoever proved themselves more tediously technical than their peers was the winner.

Academia was farcical nonsense.

Information wants to be free. It wants to be shared. It wants to have sex with as many other ideas as possible, to breed and husband a million abominations, send them out into the world and see which emerges as the fittest. Then fathom the academic, wrapping itself in prophylactic insistences of correctness, incestuously refusing to meet any idea but one it recognizes, and you will see the true abominations born from such couplings.

For academia to be truly affective, it needs to take into account the definitions of the layman. It needs to be willing to explain not through the words of a distant textbook, but through the understanding of the one imparting it, the aspects of a specialization to anyone challenging it, or seeking to know more. Academia’s sacred duty is to spread information, to make it general to a population rather than special to a few presiding personalities. Its duty is to argue at every opportunity. Its duty is to provide a reason, not a rebuke.

With this in mind, please understand that very often the way I defined the world was in the use of words all my own, with only a slight relation to the narrow, ‘academic’ use of them. They are words outside of history, forged into segmented concepts of my own design which I nevertheless tried my best to explain.

Morally, I followed a system I called ‘Maegis’. This was further split into Magarchy (its Ethics) and Magocracy (its Politics). Magarchy asserts that there is no action that is unethical, there are only contexts in which an action is unethical. For example, sex is not unethical. Sex in the context of predation – rape – is. Killing is not unethical. Killing in the context of attaining surplus – murder – is. This sounds simplistic on the surface, but becomes complex in detail. There are ten contexts in which any action may be placed: Subsistence, Predation, Taxation, Surplus, Need, Ability, Environment, Education, Improvement, and Liberation. Cycles through these contexts happen as a natural process of living, and Maegis, as a combination of ethical and political action, is a morality of Survival.

Politically, I believed individuals mediate their ethics to determine actions which benefit whole groups. In terms of statehood this means I followed Libertarian principles, which I saw as part of a differential trinity alongside Utilitarianism (the conscious effort of a minority exerted to maintain the unconscious will of a majority), and Authoritarianism (the conscious effort of a majority exerted to maintain the unconscious will of a minority), as a state which demands the conscious effort of all individuals, and in which citizens are responsible for their own actions, even if those actions merely enable others.

A significant strain of my thought was Objectivist, keeping in mind that a political context very much depends on the knowledge and state of the ones living in it. That is to say, I believed in acting on what was known to be true, while prioritizing the discovery of the unknown. I also believed that the context of what was known in the early 21^st century demanded Anarchy, a system in which people may assert their own reality and have the laws of reality – not the laws of a human state – dictate whether that reality was right or wrong.

Consequently, I saw Capitalism as a necessity of both a Libertarian and an Anarchic society. By this I mean my own very strict view of Capitalism, in which the state cannot assign maximum or minimum values to the work and worth of its human participants. Both taxation (assigning a maximum) and subsidy (assigning a minimum) are abominations to the anarchist ideology, rather promoting a Utilitarian or Authoritarian state in which the consequences for the flaws of one person’s reality are salved by subtracting from the superiority of the ideas of another person. In such a world, it is impossible to make any financial choice without being responsible for maintaining the false reality of other beings. I feared – perhaps you of the future shall see confirmation of this fear – that there is ultimately only one reality surrounded by a narrow margin for error, and as false realities are maintained in innumerable permutations, the resources produced by the true reality would be utterly consumed to maintain a legion of normal laws which are incompatible with logical laws.

I saw Capitalism as a concept wholly apart in the subject of commerce from other things which are typically associated with it. To me, Capitalism was only a framework. Commerce also requires an agency (of which I supported the Free Enterprise of businesses who could not call upon any laws but a constitution prohibiting only the initiation of force), and a system of value judgement (of which I favored strict Materialism based on the physical properties of commodities) to fit within that framework. I also did not see much similarity between my Capitalism and the regulated consumer market of the time, where taxes and subsidies blighted the full potential of what commerce was capable of. In our time Capitalism was synonymous with Corporatism, a concept born in Fascism, not a principle of Capitalism as many believe, which grossly affected the market by giving the rights of the living to non-living, conceptual leviathans.

In closing on the matter, I also was against the spirit of the time by denying the merit of an equal democracy, which seemed to otherwise only be defied by the strictest totalitarians. I called my own version of state-direction ‘Economocracy’, which I believed was fully operational whether people believed in it or not – because political or otherwise, science should concern itself with determining the world as it actually ‘is’ rather than theorizing what it could be if its laws were somehow altered. Economocracy removes ballots from the voting system, saying that people vote directly through their material purchases, and are capable of assigning value to ideas based on how much they themselves produce. Were such a system openly accepted – where bribery is not the exclusive right of the few but open to crowdfunding by the majority who have always had more money together than the richest billionaire – I saw the potential for a world that was not only more equal, but infinitely more culpable for the smallest decisions made by its citizens. Some would have called it plutocratic elitism. I saw in it the potential for so much more.

With all of this in mind, I was far more concerned with Ethics. My political view at heart simply says that I believe people’s ethical action and political action should be as similar as possible. I was greatly concerned with what ethics meant to my own life, and how I would live it. Namely I was concerned with liberty, freedom, and the struggle many with libertarian principles find themselves in; to separate their own actions from the predations of the state. I earned money because it made me feel as though I was taking responsibility for my own survival. I earned so little because I knew above a certain amount, I would become a conscious asset of the slumbering state.

Even so liberty is not easily achieved. Every purchase I made would be taxed, so I stopped making all but the most essential purchases. I lost track of friends, as I would not so much as go to a party or see a movie if it meant supporting the status quo. I scraped and scavenged and lived off the refuse of others for that second half of my life, adulthood, taking such responsibility for my own actions that I felt my descent into the underclass was imminent. I knew I would be destroyed by this. Idealists accept such things, and do them anyway.

I survived for a long time. The flesh that is writing this now cannot say for how long. Perhaps it is even alive now, enduring in some hollow, writing words in charcoal on pitted cement, dreaming of The Sixth World when it walks the forgotten places of The City, quietly observing the changes, the flex of tendons and rivulets carved in the meat as metal and plastic fuse to the world that was. If would see fit to endure, out of curiosity for what is to come.

But, barring any accident or disease, it shall be suicide that took me. It is the way I wanted to die. I accepted responsibility for so much – why not my own death? As a final lesson to impart, I will speak of information, and consent.

When we are children, our choices are made for us while we learn. One cannot make an informed choice, without information. And this means that should we make the wrong choices through a lack of information, or through misinformation, we are spared the consequences to a degree reflecting our age. This concept was inherent to our judicial system. There was a separate court for juvenile misdemeanors, and minors who were persuaded to have sex were considered to have been raped (even consenting, such consent was not informed). This meant that in a situation of no information, or the wrong information, a person consenting to a thing did not bear the full responsibility for their choices, and thus could not face the full consequences for their actions.

This outlook did not correlate so well when we would reach adulthood. While there were still some cases (such as being unwittingly drugged, or having brain damage) that asserted that a lack of information means a lack of responsibility, it was not extensive to all cases. Ignorance of the law, for example, did not mean immunity from persecution for a crime. Within our first two decades we were expected to have had enough time to have memorized the minutiae of all laws in the state. Likewise when committing adultery, deliberately withholding information from a sexual partner was not considered a crime. An adult was assumed to automatically have the rational faculty to determine that information before choosing to have sex with a deliberately misinforming adulterer.

During my lifetime there was a problem in how ‘informed’ translated in adulthood. Being an adult legally meant being informed and aware at all times. But this is not how reality works. Reality reflects a state of perpetual childhood – we are always uninformed until we are informed. About everything. Reaching a certain age does not make knowledge automatic, only more likely. On some level we knew this. Police didn’t assume you knew your rights when they questioned you. They informed you of your rights and they were considered to have broken the law if they did not.

If the law were extended to this idea of the likeliness of knowledge, then consequences for crimes would keep getting more severe as we aged. As it was, twenty years seems to be enough time to raise that likeliness to 100%. Which would be entirely fair, if by twenty years we all made the right choices 100% of the time that we weren’t deliberately choosing to do wrong. In reality, we kept operating on inaccurate and incomplete information. We made mistakes, we screwed up our lives and hurt people. And in the end, unavoidably, a wrong choice at some point in adulthood leads to our deaths.

Reality – Reality asserts to me that this means everyone who fights death and denies the possibility of losing exhibits the attitude of a child. Anyone who rushes to die with the belief that they know what it holds is running headlong into a kind of statutory rape by physics. So if I was to prove myself responsible, and adult, I could not fight and I could not predetermine death.

This left only one avenue: study. Ceaseless study of the unknown, and acceptance of a lack of information even while making choices that require it. Curiosity is the only truly adult means by which a person may die. I do not know what happens when the last of my unlife scrambles into binary decay, leaving only the parts of me that were idealistically united with the form of the universe. I could guess, but beyond all ability to test a hypothesis assumption is worthless. I know that whatever I have done in life, whatever age I pass, that curiosity for death will be fulfilled. While living, I am content to sate my curiosity on living constructs. When I can no longer do that – when my mind cannot hold memories, or focus on reality, or form new and brilliant ideas; when it is sick with the content of the world, when I wish to be a living witness no longer – then I shall be glad to die. Until then, it is merely a trick of conducting my every daily action in a way that shall glide me gently to that point at precisely the right time. Idealism is a very, very slow suicide. I think that for me, it was the only death I could accept.

Sincerest tidings from the nameless void,

I

USA Election 2016

For all of you over in the USA forced to play your part in this political nightmare, I’d like to point out a few things:

·         If Trump wins (he won’t) he will have hardly any individual political power. Look at how much Obama has struggled to push the democratic agenda with the full support of the Democratic Party behind him. Now consider that Trump achieved his candidacy by default, not by the popular support of the Republican Party. His own people hate him. He’d be entering a system resentful of his presence and pulling against his agenda at every available opportunity. In the few instances where he does have veto power, there is no actual way to enforce policy on a state level if it is insane enough that those expected to enforce it will object to it. The most he could ever do is allow the individual states to be responsible for their own laws, or fuck up attempting to assert the laws through stretched federal agencies.

·         If Hillary Clinton wins (she will) there’s the problem of a reinforced status quo. Don’t be fooled by the razzle-dazzle the campaign reserves for the final push, all the more attractive because of who she’s running against. There was great support for alternatives like Sanders because many people want change – they realize the system is broken, even if they aren’t entirely sure of a feasible way to fix it. Ultimately though, most people want ‘business as usual’ even if they profess otherwise. Having things exactly as they’ve always been steeps in danger the longer it continues. This is why it takes time and awareness to accept an outside voice, and that doesn’t happen in a single election cycle. It takes a build-up over several. Even then, most of this just disguises the fact that close decisions (anything within 15%) are going to be decided by your Electoral College anyway, who will always attempt to reinforce the status quo that gives them the authority to sway the vote to start with.

·         If your values weren’t with Hillary Clinton from the beginning, you’ve lost this election. You can win by changing your values, but if you hold them then you’ve lost. Losing is okay. Maybe I’m proposing something radical here, but I have to say that winning isn’t measured in one election and a four-year term, as much as the political elite would like you to believe it is. A suitable metaphor is of a marathon runner who decides to sprint for the first 100-meters of the race. Yes, the runner wins a 100-meter sprint. But in doing so, they give up the marathon. They’ve altered the integrity of what they set out to do in order to win a short term goal.

For a more detailed example of where this thinking leads, I’d recommend reading Philip K. Dick’s ‘The World Jones Made’.

·         Third party votes won’t win this election. No-one is stupid enough to think they will, so don’t assume that it is done with any sort of whimsical hope, ‘conscientious objection’ or stubborn pride. It’s a political action designed to have long term effects, not short-term ones. Third party votes assert that at this election cycle isn’t worth winning, and extend their election race to the next available chance of actual success. They aren’t prepared to sprint now and lose the marathon later. They’re planning to win the election 20 years from now, and the way to do that is by time and awareness. First, your country has to survive for another 20 years to have that election. If you believe either Trump or Hillary Clinton poses a legitimate threat of collapsing the USA within a four-year term, then please vote for their majority opposition. But be very, very careful when making this assessment, because both primary parties know that convincing you of this is how they will get your vote. If you determine that both candidates will reach office and flop about ineffectually, increasing some liberties and reducing others while having no real effect on the USA’s constitution, then it is better to extend your vote to a longer term by making people aware of third party options.

I’m not saying that this can only be done by voting for a third party. You can preach Green or Libertarian to raise awareness. You can attend rallies or quote Hayek to your friends. But one very powerful way you can be heard on a national level is by simply voting third party and letting people know why. At the moment, polls are run by primary parties and are skewed to reflect their constituents more than registered independents. But the greater the independents make their desires heard, the fairer polling will have to be to account for numerical discrepancies. This eventually culminates in TP candidates getting actual consideration alongside PP candidates through platforms like the national debates, at which point a personal campaign becomes an organised one with (hopefully) charismatic, experienced representatives who can uphold your campaign on a national level. When the ballots are counted and people see the rising number of independent parties pulling votes, it doesn’t matter that they lose in the short term. Their names are on the board. People uncomfortable but trapped in mainstream politics realize they don’t have to make the impossible choice between two unlikeable parties, because there are more options, and people who actually stand for what they believe in are ready to fight for them on the political frontier.
Also, get over the idea you need politicians to represent you but they don’t need you to represent something to them. It’s an equal trade, a deal with them you can honour by committing a vote for them. Every vote for a third party raises the confidence of independent parties, keeps them assured that there is a reason to keep fighting that uphill battle for your liberty. Without you doing that – what reason is there for them to fight?

·         Lastly, if you are voting, you are not wasting your vote. The only way to waste your vote is not to use it at all. I get it, I’m tired of the system too. I’m not even a democrat in the universal sense of the word. But the vote is a weapon you are given to fight against state-level injustice, and even if it is an inferior weapon to the ones the state uses or the other weapons you have in your arsenal, it would be senseless not to take a stab at victory if you are given the opportunity to injure your opponent. Please vote. If you are planning on voting for the biggest scumbag in the election, please vote. If you are planning on voting for someone who no-one has ever heard of, please vote.

If we’re going to do democracy, let’s do it right.

Anti-Birth

Over the years with virtually constant exposure to the media and its various offshoots, I get a pretty clear picture of what solutions people tend to support in terms of saving our planet/economy/selves. There are some things we talk about, and some things we shout about.

And then there are the things we totally ignore.

Like how overpopulation may not be such a great thing. The 'over' part gives us an idea that society as a whole sees it as wrong, but the solutions we come up with are generally in terms of dealing with the constant growth of a population rather than actively exploring how we may get by without the 'necessity' of growth.

The best way to go about it is to think of humans in terms of resources, which isn't that hard to imagine considering just about every corporation has a whole department dedicated to Human Resources and even outside of a corporate environment we talk about Social Capital.

Now consider how we regard resources, say something wonderful, like pizza. I love pizza and would happily consider it an asset, and consume it right away for all its yummy yummy kilo-joules. Two pizzas? sure, I'll keep one in my fridge. A hundred? Well they can't fit in my fridge, but I can use them to feed other hungry people. Ten thousand? seriously? I can't give away that much pizza without it getting stale or growing a small rat kingdom. There's a certain point at which having too much of one resource means that that resource automatically becomes waste.

Dealing with waste is taught to us by a very catchy trinity of ideas:

To Reduce the amount of resources being produced but not used. Seriously stop making so many pizzas.

To Reuse resources that may still be able to serve their intended function. Cold pizza is still awesome.

To Recycle whatever is left over and give it a new function. Because moldy pizza is bad people food but great plant food.

So if humans are resources, why can't we openly speak about the fact that Too Many Humans = Waste? And that that's a really really bad thing that should maybe be avoided as much as possible? And that making more humans when there are already humans going to waste isn't really all that much different from throwing away a car with a scratched bumper, except that poor people can do it too?

REDUCE is the part that concerns me the most, because in terms of human beings it doesn't seem to be a consideration at all. That we have charities and refugee shelters and even prisons suggests we understand Reuse and Recycling, and while we could learn to do it more effectively humanity as an organism doesn't give up on the things that it creates 100% of time. But without Reducing, we're just creating the kind of system that strains the amount of Reuse and Recycling we can apply. Predicted to a point where population growth results in more waste than assets, it pretty much guarantees that poverty is something we'll all have to go through before getting allocated the resources we'll need to become functional citizens.

So:

Don't Make Kids.

I'm not saying don't 'have' kids. I'm just saying that the kids you have should be from a foster home, or recently released from prison, or that homeless guy.

And that's how you end human tragedy.

Post Script:

To be clear, this is something very different:

*Although prion disease is totally over-exaggerated and there's nothing fundamentally wrong with cannibalism so long as it's consensual.

REDUCING doesn't have to mean deliberately killing people who are already alive, or forcibly sterilizing large swathes of the population. Nor does it mean believing problems are being solved and getting a warm fuzzy feeling when you hear about rampant disease, war, and genocide. Burning garbage isn't really a solution, as it just transfers the medium of pollutants from the solid to the atmospheric. Murder & force are cognitive pollutants that reduce our ability to co-operate and function by way of individual liberty.

This doesn't mean you have an obligation to help someone who, without your intervention, would die.
It does mean you have an obligation to help someone who, thanks to your intervention, will die.

I'm a proponent of ending disease and savagery, even if the result is the total number of humans on Earth increasing. I guess you could say the difference between burning waste and Re-ing it is in keeping the format of the problem and solving it via that format, rather than transferring a problem to a new format which regardless needs to be solved. The problem is, humans typically burn. It'll solve the overpopulation problem, but cut into our effectiveness when it comes to the co-operative human blockchain.

So the first image is the world I'd like for us. The second is just jokes.

The Equation: Algebraic Ideology

Ideology is often thought of as the lie that gives the right to rule. It doesn’t have the best track record in politics. We count racism, religious fundamentalism and despotic nationalism among the worst transgressions of its kind. Ideologies are powerful symbols: concrete ideas that give us the illusion that we know what’s going on in the universe, and that we have a means of controlling our destiny. That sounds good on paper. That looks good on posters. But all too often it ignores the fact that we hardly know anything about the universe at all, and that most of what we do know is wrong.

We also consider other useful things as ideology, such as ecological preservation, feminism and the many varieties of liberalism. Unfortunately the taint of ideology clings to these things and asserts that they are equally a basis of lies, constructed to present a course of action as sound. But to be honest that’s because political scientists… often aren’t real scientists. Science depends on a framework that can be used to separate truth from falsehood, and ideology fits in that framework.

The Equation

Okay, so imagine that everything we know as a functional, interdependent species can be given a material value. These values fit together into what we can call The Sum of Human Knowledge:

                The Sum                              Human Knowledge

1 + 2 + 3 + 4 + 5 =                           15

Now in regard to society, we attempt to direct human action towards a kind of calculation: we take smaller, scattered parts (1+2+3+4+5) and piece them as neatly together as possible (15). Given everything we know in the world, the 15 at the end of the calculation is in this sense the Ideology. It’s the point we’re trying to reach by adding everything together.

The process of calculation, on the other hand, is the State. It’s like saying, “Okay, now the best way to do this calculation is to start at the beginning and add the 1 to the 2 to get another 3, then 3+3 is 6, 6+4 is 10, add the 5 is fifteen.” But then someone else comes along and says, “No no no, that method takes far too long. Start with the larger numbers, so 5+4 is 9, then…”

And then a third person comes in and says, “You need to add things simultaneously from each end. 2+1 is 3 and 4+5 is 9, then you have all multiples of 3 so you can divide 9 by 3, then count the number of 3s and multiply 3 by that number to get an answer.”

Ultimately they all want the same thing – to calculate the sum through to a single neat conclusion. But state argues over the cognitive method of doing so in the best way.

-

Now, human knowledge itself is only a very small part of a larger equation. Humans live within a much larger world that what is known. So, in our equation we also have to include some mystifying unknowns, which best take on the form of algebraic variables:

                                State                                     Ideology

1+2+3+4+5+x+y+a+b+c =             15+x+y+a+b+c

The State continues to calculate what it can, leaving the variables for when they become concrete numbers it can deal with. But suddenly the question of ideology is a lot more complicated. So long as people know that there is more in the universe than they are aware of, they will speculate on what numbers are represented by the variables. So while we can all more or less agree that basically human existence consists of 15, there is considerably fiercer debate over what the other variables are, and if our method of equation is wrong because it hasn’t considered how difficult it may be to factor in new numbers. What if x is a meteor shower that takes the form x = 1/0, and undertaking a difficult calculation is meaningless because the answer is clearly going to be impossible anyway?

We’re left with two wrestling elements; state and ideology, and how to keep things going as smoothly as possible while one deals with the knowns and the other speculates the unknowns.

Possibly the most essential step is realizing how we determine the numbers behind the variables. Practically on a daily basis we discover new information, for example that y = 11… no… no wait… it’s actually 10,84. And the exact same happens for thousands of variables and ‘known’ ‘constants’ each day, which then have to be added and subtracted and devised by the weary State. Inevitably someone decides that G = God and cannot be known, except that maybe 3 and 56 and 97 might be some information worth throwing into the equation just to be safe.

The Deductive method emerges in mathematical equations to suggest an abstract, rational means of finding the numbers behind the variables. This is saying that if x(1/5) + 1/3 = 4/3, then x = 5.

The Inductive method emerges as a means to find and record the equations where they exist in the real world. This means that after careful observation, a scientist finds that x(1/5) + 1/3 = 4/3; they record constant numbers and leave those they can’t record as variables. They still need deduction to do the calculation, unless they are prepared to do a much deeper empirical study of the equation as it exists in nature.

The combination of these methods is generally considered much better than simply stating x = 45 and factoring it into an equation, which would simply be false knowledge, and thus a blatantly false ideology.

You should be getting two things out of this analogy:

1.       Ideologies as they exist in the world are all based on assumed knowledge so long as there remain unknowns for human beings to decrypt. As far as we can tell, there are infinite unknowns.

2.       Though we are unaware of exact numbers that does not mean we are ignorant of mathematics. A few people and a lot of computers in the world are actually really good at doing mathematics.

This means that an ideology in a system of unknowns needs to always admit that there are things it does not know that influence the equation, and that we can still attempt to deduce those things. It also means that through mathematics we can predict with a reasonable degree of certainty that the properties of the things we know share properties with the things we don’t. For example, we can be reasonably certain that both constants and variables are all numbers.

To a large degree this means changing the way we think about ideology, and consequently changing the way we think about State. Both of them need to be calibrated to deal not only with the numbers we’re pretty sure of, but made to find a way to ensure that new variables entering human knowledge are as accurate as possible. In other words, those doing the calculation (which is ALL of us, consciously or unconsciously) need to have a superior method of selecting information and testing it to determine if it is inaccurate.

Variations in Calculative Sentence Structure

In order to communicate ideas with one another and form an ideal state, we have a fixed number of options as to how we can transfer information between people. These can be conveyed through the bases of sentence structure which we are all at least unconsciously aware of. Each conveys information or makes us aware of a lack of information. Each can be considered a process of information, or simply put information processing.

Opinion

*

“Sam has such nice teeth,” Clara says.

“Why?” Bianca asks.

“Just look at them,” Clara replies, sighing wistfully.

*

In the above encounter, Clara shares what is called an opinion. In informatics – and logic as a particular branch of information processing – Clara makes a statement. Unlike questions or commands, statements are either true or false. Sam either has really nice teeth, or doesn’t.

Bianca then poses a question. Questions are neither true, nor false. The essential nature of a question is to demand clarification – to request argumentation. A lot of the time people see arguments as a bad thing: they ask “What?” or “How?” with a degree of hostility, because a question means that one person cannot see the exact thing that another person can see. On the other hand a perfectly benign question can be seen as hostile by the one questioned, to which they simply reply “Because I said so!” or “I’m entitled to my opinion.”

Both of these and even Clara’s “Just look at them” fit roughly into the third category of Commands. We’ll get back to commands later, but at the moment it’s enough to say commands instruct a person to do things at face value, without engaging anything beyond a person’s opinion. Commands should never be used outside of emergency situations or without corporate consent, where operating in an executive command structure may be necessary for group survival.

Opinions at their face value are statements. They should only be left unquestioned so long as a person engaged in conversation is aware of the argumentation behind them, and agrees with it, in which the correct response is “I know.” If a person isn’t aware of the argumentation behind an opinion, then it should always be followed up by a question to determine the nature of that argument.

Further, we might infer that so long as a difference in opinion exists, the person being engaged with is unaware of the argument that led to that opinion. As such, a difference in opinion automatically necessitates argumentation.

Reason

*                

“Sam has such nice teeth,” Clara says.

 “Why?” Bianca asks.

“Because they’re so straight and white,” Clara explains.

“Why?” Bianca asks impishly.

“Because Sam visits the dentist regularly, and had a brace as a kid.”

“Why?” Bianca laughs.

“Because teeth don’t always grow to suit the purpose we put them to, and need to be doctored to achieve that purpose, and dentists are the ones trained to do it,” Clara continues.

“Why Why Why?” Bianca chants.

“Because genetics isn’t a perfect means of transferring physical characteristics and favours the mutation of simpler organisms, and consequently there are loads of bacteria that have developed to break down the structure of human teeth, and we’ve had to evolve intellectually to find ways to deal with things like bacteria, and one of those ways is to use special chemicals and surgical techniques that take a lifetime to learn, so it requires a human being with specialized knowledge to implement them.” Clara gasps for air.

“Why?” Bianca coos, relishing the ease of the question.

Clara sucks in another breath. “Simpler organisms produce larger populations more rapidly and have a much shorter reproductive cycle so selection of different genes within their population group occurs at a catalyzed rate, as does mutation because they haven’t developed the defenses necessary to prevent radiation from affecting their genetic code,” she spits out rapidly.

“Why.”

“SIMPLE ORGANISMS REQUIRE FAR FEWER RESOURCES AND HAVE ACCESS TO FAR MORE RESOURCES ALLOWING THEM TO BREAK DOWN THEIR ENVIRONMENT AT A RATE THAT PROMOTES CONTINUOUS POPULATION GROWTH, UNTIL SUCH A TIME THAT THEIR POPULATION GROWS SO LARGE ONLY THOSE THAT ARE BEST ADAPTED TO ACQUIRING RESOURCES AND SURVIVING ON LESS RESOURCES WILL BE IN A POSITION TO REPRODUCE. ALSO BECAUSE THEY ARE SUCH BASIC LIFEFORMS EVEN THE SMALLEST MUTATION AFFECTS THE ENTIRITY OF THE ORGANISM.

“Clara?”

“Yes?” Clara asks, nearly defeated.

“Why?” Bianca says, brimful of mischief.

“Because simple organisms are essentially made of the things that they eat, and so they don’t require more resources than they are made of unless it’s to replace energy they’ve lost or to reproduce.”

“Why?”

“Because we live in a universe where energy cannot be created or destroyed, only transferred from one place to another.”

“Why?”

Clara shrugs. “I don’t know. Just look at it. As far as we can tell energy has never been created or destroyed. So it’s our operating theory of how the universe works, until something different happens.”

“Clara?” Bianca asks.

“Yes?” Clara replies meekly, filled with dread.

“I agree, Sam really does have nice teeth.”

*

Reason functions on the idea that every valid conclusion – every valid opinion – is preceded by an argument in which one or more premises are combined to provide a new interpretation of the information they contain. Just so, every premise is the conclusion of a different argument with its own premises. This means that everything we know is essentially created through the interaction of very basic principles – like mathematical functions – whose existence we can theorize and subject to a thorough analysis, but never definitively prove (the unknown always exists, so absolute certainty never exists).

What it also means is that opinions which cannot be substantiated by people using premises through argumentation are unproven opinions, and possibly (but not automatically) false. Reason is saying that the possibility of a thing isn’t enough to base a life on – it has to be traceable back to some definite source in the laws of reality. In regard to The Equation, there has to be a mathematical principle underlying why the variable ‘x’ is accepted as 45.

It’s worth noting that Clara ends her arguments off with the same command: “Look at it : Just look at them.” A command lies at the root of any chain of arguments because laws are at the root of any chain of arguments. We’re all subject to reality; we’re all under reality’s command. But there is a big difference between following reality’s commandments and the commandments of people. People are fallible. They make mistakes. Reality can be cruel, but it is always true.

Utopian Ideology

Unchallenged Statements: Liberalism*

*Okay, there are a lot of variations of liberalism. Liberalism was one of the very early named ideologies, and is based on the ‘lie’ of fundamental human rights developed by philosophers like John Locke, who didn’t lie so much as make invalid arguments, as they were based on the premise of religious faith – that God had made man in a certain way.

These days people like to call their ideology ‘Liberalism’ because all liberalism involves constitutional human rights. But tons of ideologies aside from liberalism assert very good rights, such as the property rights of Anarchy, and the Rights of all Animals in Anti-Establishment thinking. Since human rights entered the mainstream there are also liberal conservatives, such as the Neo-Liberals.

The particular strain described here is what is liberal in much of Europe and the large and loud American left: Democratic Welfare Liberalism. This is based on the idea that rights are worthless without the means to express them, and attempts to provide all human beings with the same means to express their rights and fairly pursue their own happiness. Ironically enough this ends up being a kind of opposite of the Anarchic model: in both cases people are allowed to plug in their own numbers for unknown variables. In anarchy the right variables are rewarded with money, health, and victory. In Liberalism the right variables are rewarded with covering the debt to reality for all the wrong variables chosen by others, in order to ensure everyone still has money and health at the end of the calculation.

Consider this alternative to the Bianca-Clara paradigm:

*

“Sam has such nice teeth,” Clara says.

“Sam has rotten teeth,” Bianca says.

“Well, we’re both entitled to our opinions,” Clara replies democratically.

*

And both are entitled to their opinions. But one of those opinions is nevertheless wrong, and the other is right. All that the conversation has achieved is to propose two interpretations of reality, and to avoid conflict between them. This is the essence of what in ideology is the Liberal model: that everyone is entitled to live their life in the way that they see fit. But simultaneously, it goes to lengths to avoid argumentation, and to avoid the consequence of asserting a falsehood as a physical reality.

Opinions exist as face value. They are necessary. But they are not the only necessary thing: In a world where variables can be assigned any number without consequence, reality falls by the wayside and the only means to give the equation an appearance of integrity is to stop the calculation from unfolding. People have to be content with ignorance. Historically speaking, ignorance can be associated with pain, hardship, and itchiness.

Statements left unchallenged lend themselves to Liberalism; an ideology in which truth and falsehood exist without a means to process which are which. People who want to smoke, smoke. People who don’t, don’t. And there are designated zones for people to do this so that everyone remains calm and orderly. The Equation under Liberalism says that variables must be allowed to be all possible numbers, and calculated through to all possible answers.

Unchallenged Commands: Fascism

*

“Sam has such nice teeth,” Clara says.

 “Why?” Bianca asks.

“Because the sky is blue and the grass is green. It’s just the way the world is.”

“Well, those things are true, so I suppose Sam does have nice teeth,” Bianca agrees unthinkingly.

*

Even if what people say is true, their argumentative form can be invalid. This means that at some point what they are saying loses any connection to the laws of reality – and as most people notice, what we imagine and what is real are two very different things.

Two premises, like ‘the sky is blue’ and ‘the grass is green’ can both be true. Simultaneously, Sam can have nice teeth, so that can also be true. But the argument is invalid on the basis that the information in the conclusion isn’t contained within the premises: so if it is true, it is because of some other some other reason, and needs to be defended with an entirely different argument.

We can be given commands, and they may even be good commands at times, but so long as we don’t argue we have no means of determining if we are acting according to what is real or what a person imagines. This is an ideology called Fascism. It consists of following a person’s opinions without ever following the chain of premises back to their basis in the laws of reality.

**

In Fascism, Commands left unchallenged become variables where either truth or falsehood are selected, and then processed. The Equation under Fascism says that variables are specific constants, x = 4, y = 5, z = 6. That’s how it’s going to be for everyone and we calculate it accordingly, even if that means genocide.

What about Questions?

Well, to be fair the trifecta of the utopian ideology would be “Questions left unchallenged.” And that might be appropriately termed Conservatism.

Unchallenged Questions: Conservatism

*

“Sam has such nice teeth,” Clara says.

 “Why?” Bianca asks.

“They’re really pretty,” Clara gushes.

“That’s an alteration of the same thing you just said,” Bianca points out.

“I like Sam’s teeth.” Clara continues to stare at Sam, who starts to feel a little awkward.

*

In applying Conservatism to The Equation, the constants we know get calculated, and the variables can sit next to them as a string of ‘+ x + y + z’. Conservatism calculates the numbers it’s pretty sure of (1+2+3+4+5=15) and gets an answer. Then the French get annoyed and the whole Enlightenment thing happens and we’re left with way more information to process, and Conservatism says, “Hold on, stop looking at things! Let’s work with what we know.”

Except we don’t really know anything. Because right from the beginning the few constants of the equation we were so sure of turn out to be a little different (1,2+2,7+3,3+4,1+4,9), which we know now because we’ve refined the observational tools with which we determine the laws of the world in the first place. Which we wouldn’t do as Conservatives because devoting energy to solving the variables would slow down the State’s calculation of the ‘known’ numbers.

Facts change: the biggest lie in all of history is that they don’t**. Even our approach to science has been affected by it. In general knowledge (or general assumption), scientists make a hypothesis, and then collect reams of data to show why their hypothesis is correct. This proof proves it. And then it becomes a working theory, or a fact.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

**Unless you count things like the success of forceful mass protest, which almost inevitably turn out to be a result of a small group of people with weapons fighting a small group of people with weapons on behalf of a large group of people who are tired of being led by a small group of people with weapons. The October Revolution never happened. I have serious doubts about what really happened during the chaos of The French Revolution. But the lie was so great, it gained actual power and led to Iceland’s recent liberation from state debt and India’s Independence from Britain. But I’d largely attribute those to the fact that masses of people weren’t working, and weren’t spending taxable money, and that scared the small group of people with guns who lived on that work and money. Such Revolutions could have been fought from a living room while reading a good book. But people do love to Toyi-Toyi.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

But this goes against the very idea of what a ‘proving’ is. Historically speaking when you prove a warrior you don’t just give her a sword and a shield and a suit of armour, make her train extensively and say, “Now that’s a warrior.” That equipment and training is just a hypothesis of what a warrior is. When you prove a warrior you throw everything you can at it to take it down. And if she emerges from the battlefield, scarred and bloody but alive at the end of the day, then she’s been proven.

And that’s the attitude we’re missing in popular science. A person gathers data to support their hypothesis rather than making every effort they can to defeat it. We hold a fanfare every time someone comes up with a weird idea about how the universe works, but hardly pay any attention when someone ‘disproves’ an old theory, because it feels like a step backward, and we’re fixated on the idea that Progress means New. There isn’t a Nobel Prize for the best critical ‘disproving’ of a theory. And as a consequence, we are consciously driven to only look in the places where we know we’re going to find the answers that make us right.

This is the legacy of inefficient observation, kept alive by the Conservative mindset. To embrace the known, and vilify the unknown. To hear a question – and reply with a conclusion.

***

So in the three possible sentence types – commands, questions, and statements – we can find three ideologies based on the rejection of argumentation. These might further be termed Utopian ideals because they aim at a world without conflict, where everyone either agrees or agrees to disagree, and face no consequences for rejecting the variables of reality.

But ideology is of course much more complicated. Argumentation plays a central role in the advancement of our species. We want to know how to deal with problems. We want to master the laws of reality, rather than fumbling blindly through life. We want to challenge the unfairness of the world, and our own ignorance of it. So we end up with a contrary span of Dystopian ideals – ideals that allow us to grumble and curse and shake our fists at the sky, declare that life is shit while triumphantly overcoming its challenges with brains and finesse. And these ideologies fundamentally exist because of an acceptance of Argumentation, a quest for Reason.

Dystopian Ideology

Challenging Statements: The Anti-Establishment

*

“Sam has such nice teeth,” Clara says.

 “Fuck you and your preconceived ideals of beauty, Clara,” Bianca says, speaking through the obscene microphone of two splayed fingers.

“What? But I just –”

“You just went and dropped a Patriarchal dump on Sam’s face. Who cares how you or anyone else thinks her teeth look? Why does she need white and shiny teeth, to eat from the corporate feedbag? When you’re a vegan you don’t need teeth, you can just eat delicious puréed soup all day.”

“I was just trying to point out that she did really well on her brace and she must have a really good dentist!” Clara exclaimed defensively.

“Right, you were approving of how society normalized poor Sam with SURGERY and RIDICULE. Do you think Sam wants teeth like that? Have you even ASKED her? HUH?”

Clara bursts into tears. “OH MY GOD I NEVER KNEW I WAS SUCH A MONSTER!”

*

That’s the anti-establishment ideology. Essentially it has the task of challenging all the statements that people take for granted, forcing them to come up with actual reasons for their opinions and eventually reach a mutual understanding over the contents of the world. Politically they embody what is called ‘The New Left’ (who arrived and mixed in with Liberal Democrats, which is confusing), a coterie with specialized debaters who focus on things like race, sex, gender, animals, religion, medicine and the environment in order to draw awareness to the fact that our understanding of these things is often false. In The Equation, this is represented by the response to the established (1+2+3+4+5), and any emerging information, such as the announcement that x = 6. The Anti-Establishment wants to know Why, and quite often they’ve prepared a speech to tell you Why Not.

The trouble is that the anti-establishment often takes it too far. As noted, at the base of any line of questioning is a theoretical Law, a Command of Reality. Coming into contact with these laws, many of the Anti-Establishment refuse to take them at face value – but can’t get past them. They deny them outright, and try to do things differently, which has had the effect of spreading new age mysticism and exhibiting a mistrust of industry that borders on primitivism. If the anti-establishment approach to the Laws of Reality were at all scientific, I have no doubt it would be extremely beneficial in at least proving theories. Unfortunately a lot of the time it involves taking psychedelics and hanging around with dolphins, which is far less effective.

Challenging Commands: The Anarchists

*

“Sam has such nice teeth,” Clara says.

Bianca looks over at Sam. She sees the teeth. She is kind of unimpressed by the teeth. It looks to her like Sam didn’t brush them this morning.

“Sam’s teeth look rotten to me,” Bianca says.

“What? Just look at them,” Clara says, annoyed. “Tell me they’re not perfect.”

“I just did.”

“Fine,” Clara huffs. “You think whatever you like. I’m getting the name of her dentist.”

*

The ideology of anarchism asserts that there is an underlying, impartial mediator of rational ideas operating in the world. People are perfectly entitled to drive as fast as they want to on a public road. But if they die, then in hindsight it probably wasn’t such a good idea to drive so fast. But hey, they chose to do it.

The same thing may be said of the argument between Clara and Bianca. Clara knows on a superficial level that her commands can’t be enforced, and on a deeper level that no amount of reason will certainly convince Bianca that what she says is right, should Bianca willingly choose irrationality, or reject the constancy of a Law of Nature. There has to be some kind of recourse for two people who cannot reach a single opinion after an argument.

As such they agree to disagree on the understanding that people can’t force one another to think things. However what can force people to think – or forever remove that ability – are the true and constant laws of nature upon which all further argument are built. Clara uses Sam’s dentist and lives to ninety. Bianca looks after her own teeth, gets tooth decay and dies at the age of twenty-five. This is society functioning as an arena of hypothesis, where selecting a principle and sticking to it will either disprove or prove the hypothesis of their opinion. In the equation, this can be seen as a kind of educated betting on the nature of variables. After determining x is a number from 1 to 10, ten anarchists each choose a different number based on their calculations and plug it into The Equation. The one left alive and healthiest at the end of the day was the one with the right number.

Anarchism has the benefit of siding with the best thinkers, and never letting the worst assert their number as the only one placed in the bet. As ideologies go, it’s self-involved and practical. But it’s also not inclined to pursue anti-establishment ends to persuade people of its correctness, despite the overlapping dystopian nature of the two ideals. Anti-establishment thinking often betrays its difference from anarchy in that it would overthrow authority in order to present its own statements as a rational basis of a new authority. Anarchism doesn’t believe there should be any authority but the Laws of Reality.

Challenging Questioning: The Rational Objective

*

“Sam has such nice teeth,” Clara says, uniformly stating her admiration with neither bashfulness, nor remorse.

“According to what standard?” Bianca asks, smoking a cigarette.

“According to the standard by which teeth are made, to perform the function they were made to perform,” Clara elaborates. “Of all teeth, Sam’s are the whitest and brightest. Not everyone may agree with that, but the truth of it is undeniable. They’re healthy because a dentist has used advanced dental techniques to shape them into a functional geometric crescent, and subjected them to a wide array of chemicals that prevent bacterial decay. We should all aspire to such heights of dental hygiene, now that Sam has shown us that it’s possible.”

“They could be whiter,” Bianca says indifferently.

“Of course they could!” Clara says passionately, “That’s the beauty of scientific advancement – the very firmament of the human spirit! We can aim for the highest – and then surpass it. Seek out the very best for ourselves – and then ask for more. Every single human being has the potential to push our understanding forward, and reap the rewards of that understanding. That’s the whole point behind society – the mutual benefit of all who partake in it. If there were no benefit, then there would be no point.”

Bianca shifted uncomfortably. “Wow Clara. You really care about teeth.”

“I care about everything,” Clara insists brightly, her eyes sparkling. “I’m into everything. I’m headed to the stars.”

*

Objectivism is the ideology of eminent progress, in which it is believed that the variables in The Equation hold the answers for all life’s difficulties, and the clearer and more precisely they are expressed – the more human knowledge accurately reflects the content of the universe – the better the experience of humanity as a whole will be. As such it focuses not only on questioning, but questioning well and answering better. The way to do this is to study means of rational argumentation – logic – and use it to seek out the integrity of valid arguments in order to reap their profits.

The trouble is that being objective and rational takes effort – way more effort than simply holding to a political doctrine, or picking one based on its popularity or uniqueness. And ultimately there just aren’t all that many people willing to make the conscious choice to do that. But there are plenty of people who can see the vision and integrity of the Objectivist ideology, and seek to manipulate it. In the 1980s the ‘New Right’ emerged*, and they had firmly set-out principles of financial management that would save liberal governments from their own wastefulness. As one can expect, their success lasted about as long as it took to get over the financial crisis that got them elected. Then the New Right split into factions who disagreed over what to do with the pull they had left, and the world mostly went back to its old confused self.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

*Again, we have liberals arguing about what constitutes liberalism. Here they called themselves ‘Neo-Liberals’, blending together liberalism with heavy conservative elements, consumer capitalism, and libertarianism.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Objectivism arose in the core understanding that Something Must Be Done to avert disaster, and the further The Equation gets from its true constants, the greater the disaster we will have to face. But it would be fair to say there’s a good deal of disagreement over what that ‘Something’ is. Traditionally ‘Something’ is antagonism to restrictions on personal choice and free enterprise, in which a government’s role is purely for defensive and judicial purposes. But it could also be interpreted as integrity’s overthrow of the entire system by refusing to do any work non-thinking people can exploit without direct force (jobs like education and artistry) until such a time that only those willing to compete rationally are left. Above all, the movement makes it clear that no-one should ever consent to be ruled by force. Personally I find that Objectivism resembles different ideologies at different times (‘15’ now, ‘18’ after the next calculation, ‘67’ once y is solved and added in), and at the moment it calls for Anarcho-Capitalism in a Libertarian State. But there’s a conceivable future where the absolute mechanization of an algorithmically adaptive working class is possible, and then Objectivism would contain heavy elements of Anarcho-Socialism in a Totalitarian State. It’s a system designed to calculate according to what we know, but is different to Conservatism in that it prioritizes the investigation of the unknown.

***

There’s a Utopian ideal attainable for those who don’t want to look, or think. There’s a dystopian ideal that’ll never win but will keep fighting as best as it can. And it a nutshell, that’s ideology: Two disparate forces – the order of the known and the chaos of the unknown – calibrating The Equation for eternity.

*******

Post Script

I know, I know, it’s more complicated than that. HUNDREDS of ideologies exist, both for true and untrue variables. I haven’t even mentioned words like ‘Populism’ or ‘Statism’. But that’s because they can all be filed as variations of States or of the six primary Ideologies. Someone takes an old ideological bent of Conservatism like ‘Religious Fundamentalism’ and makes a branch specific to the use of Christianity and it’s ‘Christian Fundamentalism’. Or someone decides to make a specific kind of Utilitarianism where stew is the primary need and basic right of all humanity and it’s ‘Herbert-Johnson Orthodox Stew Communism’.

But you know what? Complexity isn’t an excuse to avoid reorganization. People need to realize that some ideologies are diametrically opposed and can’t overlap without going against their basic principles. They need to realize that others can overlap while holding on to their principles. And organization, analogy, and comparison go to lengths to achieve that.

You’ll also notice I’ve avoided describing Communism, Capitalism, and Socialism in any great detail despite their influential position in history as ideological maxims. That’s because these are part of another subset equation of Social Structure called ‘Commerce’ which I’ll try to explain at a later date. They specifically deal with socio-economics, and are all based on the acceptance that resources are unevenly distributed through the world and need to be moved so as to accord with human use. The method of motion is tied to the State, and it is the use of the resources that differentiate these three commercial ideologies from one another. They can each function in different ways within the primary Utopian and Dystopian ideologies.