The epic assaults being carried out against the vulnerable around the world at this very moment will determine the fate of our species and the living earth itself.
Source: Ushering in the Closing Chapter of the Human Species – by Kenn Orphan @ www.kennorphan.com
I read this article some time ago, and had made some comments which drew me back to the article, as others had liked those comments; in my revisit, I noticed some new comments by others which drew further replies from me, and that I thought I would share.
Patriarchy & Exploitation:
The first of these comments by others came from a woman who lay the blame for a large proportion of the world’s evils on patriarchy.
Now I’m under no delusion that patriarchy is a benign force and that it has not been to blame for many things; I certainly acknowledge that. However, as I pointed out to the commenter, there are plenty of women in positions of power who betray all other females of all other species if they’re not in her circle of who she finds to be important & worthy, or without some kind of agenda for personal advantage to be gained (often economic and political: Hillary Clinton is a good example); but also note the fact that 10% of serial killers (that we know of) are women, and being clever, perhaps the reason those numbers are lower is because they’re smarter, more covert in their actions, and don’t tend to get caught as often.
I’m neither making this point to defend those men nor attack those women who do harm, merely pointing out that sex may not be the ultimate cause.
My own personal perspective is that it seems to me, that on the one hand while there may be an imbalance between men & women, on the other hand it is NEITHER men nor women that is the problem, and that once again the problem is systemic … and the systemic issue is that we run an economic system which empowers psychopaths, and disempowers sentient beings, reducing them to merely resources to be exploited by the psychopaths.
The other aspect of this being the systemic sociopolitical problem of having hierarchical power structures, where one being can hold the power over another.
IN OTHER WORDS: It ultimately doesn’t matter who is in charge, if society is motivated, empowered and rewarded by the exploitation of “resources”, and a sentient being is able to be turned into such a resource … in such a system, the psychopaths will always rise to the top unless you have absolute power over them from birth (which itself is problematic).
Anarchy & Social Collaboration / Organisation:
Another commenter by the name of Andy (if you want to look up his comment on the related post), made the point that he used to be an anarchist, but realised they were not as good at collaborating & organising, because they had no chain of command etc.
So I rexiled to Andy telling him of my work, with the pertinent points of that reply summarised for you as follows:
I’ve solved this dilemma by creating a system of individual & collective motivation, that operates anarchically for both short medium & long term objectives, and without any hierarchical authority, but instead by simply motivating people to minimise negative & maximise positive ecological & social consequences of their actions and the actions of others.
For example:
- If a “bad” person was to band together a group of thugs, in order to rob, enslave, manipulate or harm others, this has a quantifiably deleterious set of consequences, which vastly outweighs any quantifiable benefits they could achieve (short of destroying the system should that be their objective);
- Had they instead done something good to earn access to whatever resources they wanted (much of which they’d have received anyway without even needing to show cause for access, if such resources are abundant), they’d have been much better off in the first place;
- Thus doing harm is demotivated / disincentivised by the system;
- Simultaneously, if they go ahead and do it anyway, then stopping them and restoring things to order becomes a very quantifiably valuable objective (as does predicting and preventing);
- Some may choose to specialise in: negotiating / reasoning with such people to cease and desist their activities; psychoanalysing whether they can be trusted not to repeat; providing means of incarceration & treatment / rehabilitation of the psychologically disturbed, and; as a last resort, “bounty hunters” who deal with the worst cases that perhaps (sadly) cannot be dealt with any other way … ie – executioners, not as punishment but as pragmatism to save the innocent from extreme cases … no judgement or authority comes into it, it’s simply a matter that the person’s death has become quantifiably less harmful – including in psychosocial terms for everyone else – than the damage they do if allowed to continue.
So we can even have people who specialise in NON-authoritative NON-hierarchical “police” work, and paramilitary type of work … because they’re not enforcing a law or someone’s will, they’re simply preventing harm (which is the very thing such activities should have been from the start, ie – actually worthy of the title “honourable”).
Such people are motivated to police themselves and each other (as are others motivated to police them), with no one having authority over the other, and everyone kept in check by the exact same scientifically based analysis of harm and good of actions that everyone is personally responsible for.
IN OTHER WORDS: killing and incarceration are neither authorised nor non-authorised, neither lawful nor unlawful, as that juse doesn’t enter the equation; there’s no hierarchy to dictate “law”.
It’s just a matter of refraining from such actions until the quantifiable probability of (or actual) harm against innocent people (or other species etc. – with others specialising in the (semi)automated & manual collection, calculation and evolution of such data), becomes deleterious & serious enough to warrant the case for intervention, incarceration or in the most extreme cases death.
NOTE: this is NOT about “punishment” for “crime”, it is about prevention of harm and promotion of benefit in ecological & sociological terms.
Because even though it may be quantifiably warranted action, the actor must still take responsibility for the action, so the value of doing so must VASTLY outweigh the consequences of all other possible actions, as no one wants to destroy their own statistics … thus people are motivated to attempt diplomatic and other means if at all possible.
In the case that no other solution is possible to stop a tyrant or murdered, it is possible that under such a system, not everyone would be capable of “pulling the trigger” (though everyone may want an end to the violence), and so the community agrees to share the statistical burden of responsibility with the actual executioner … perhaps even that the algorithms do this automatically, as you were effectively involved in requesting a solution be found, you were potentially / proportionally at risk, and thus agree or not you do bear responsibility … as indeed to some degree may the parents of the murderer (or other childhood influences) bear some responsibility.
Conclusion:
So what you see in Open Empire, is that without anyone being in hierarchical authority, without any such power structures, and without any money property or trade, we get:
- detectives
- forensics
- data analysts
- psychologists
- “police” or “bounty hunters”
- psychiatric asylums / care facilities
- jailors and jails (for extremely rare cases only)
… and we do away with the question of morality, by simply defining and calculating what is quantifiably harmful or beneficial from a non-species-biased perspective and in logically, mathematically & scientifically verifiable terms.