Stalinist Ethics: If you do not want to die for the benefit of the collective, you lack ‘solidarity’, you are ‘unethical’, so we have the moral duty to make you do it.

How did they know in the Middle Ages that there was a pandemic if nobody tested? Would we know that there was a Covid pandemic if nobody tested? Is then testing (for a pandemic) a form of disinformation?

Those who change themselves to match a particular identity prove thereby that they do not possess an intrinsic identity, that there is no integrated Self to action the change in the first place. The organism does not become ‘itself’ through this change, but only changes the mask of the metaphysical fragmentation that is nominally associated with it in lieu of the Self.

From W.R. Bion “Experiences in Groups” 1967. Bion is regarded as one of the 4 greatest psychologists of all time (Freud, Jung, Bion, Klein) I will venture to make an even stronger claim than Bion’s: All people who are attracted to power have mental illness and ought to be treated accordingly.

What are we to do?

Do we need a government to have human rights? If not, then how do we maintain human rights? Can we ask those who support vaccine mandates, for example, whether they want to have the right to free medical consent, the right to refuse any medical intervention they do not feel right about without being discriminated against, and see whether we can come to agreement? Perhaps they will be persuaded by living through the consequences of giving up that human right? If we all agreed on the fundamental rights, those rights would not be opposed by anyone and would not need institutional defenders. Similarly, do women need feminism to have equal rights? Surely not; women and men could possibly come to agreement on human rights (because both women and men are, after all, human). When we deal with the problem of human disagreement by forming factions that seek to limit one another’s power, the disagreement is perpetuated rather than resolved. In a sense, factionalism prioritises our differences over what we have in common. The only basis for solving human disagreements is our common humanity, not our differences. We also think of governments/politicians as a faction that is notoriously in disagreement with the general population whom they purport to represent. And yet we continue to depend on governments for solutions to our problems and disagreements. We think similarly about corporations, and we continue to depend on their products and services. So how can we go about solving human disagreements when we know we cannot depend on any faction to do it for us, and that factionalism stands in the way of a solution? It is perhaps worthwhile to point out that by expecting the solution to come from me (or any other individual), one would also be committing to factionalism based on dependency.

Remember how black people just wanted equal rights; the right to sit on the bus and be allowed into shops? A few decades later they are discriminated against by their political representatives if they do not support racial riots, complain about black crime, or reject BLM communism. Remember how gay people just wanted equal rights; to be able to keep their job even if their boss did not like gays? A few decades later they are discriminated against by their political representatives if they do not support child dancers in gay strip clubs, males in female showers, or sexual mutilation of children with mental disorders. It is clear that someone is forcing them to accept more than they bargained for, as if it were a punishment for wanting equal rights in the first place. Beware of those who claim to fight ‘on your behalf’; the concept of ‘on your behalf’ was always your ultimate enemy. Was this supposed to be some kind of a lesson?

Mass media love when people make claims about medical facts. They can just call in the ‘experts’ to ‘debunk’ your claims, or just call it ‘fake news’. The general public only needs reassurance to continue believing the experts, they don't care about evidence. On the other hand, a simple, intuitively appealing ethical argument is terrifying to the experts because they cannot dismiss it as ‘fake news’. Ethics is not a question of empirical facts but something we all already know, it is part of the collective unconscious, which cannot be deceived.

Tribalism is Self-defeating

An identity that is ideologically bound to the land, that includes the land as an integral part of ‘our people’, implies nativist supremacism, which is in principle anti-human and precludes universal ethics, and is therefore a priori wrong. It is trivially true that every human is a product of their ancestors and their cumulative experiences, but tribal cultures devalue the fact that we all share the same ancient ancestors, that we are all related, and instead carve out an arbitrary value-distinction in a particular time period and area; a negation of the common roots of humanity for the sake of tribal advantage over others. The injustice of tribalism is not so much the emphasis on bloodline in their becoming, but ignoring the fact that we are all of the same bloodline, and that the significance of bloodline is logically subordinate to the human capacity to generate meaning. The best thing that indigenous tribes can do to advance their agency is to abandon tribal ideology and embrace their human identity, as conscious rational beings capable of creating unbounded meaning with all other humans, by means of what we all have in common. You are all welcome.

In the future, any doctor who vaccinated others or promoted the vaccines, but their own blood does not have vaccine-induced antibodies, could be potentially proven guilty of crimes against humanity. The fact that they faked their own vaccination status proves that they believed the vaccines cause harm (guilty mind). Their blood will the evidence of their crime.

Interpretation of the poll.

Option 1 (violent overthrow of a colony of the same size) has approximately 50% chance of failure. After 10 years (ten tests) you would have less than 0.1% of survival, assuming no casualties are incurred during fighting, which would deplete your colony’s fighting capacity. On the long run, this is physical extinction.

Option 3 is a path of diminishing agency. Without freedom and property rights your capacity for thought and action would atrophy, causing consciousness to fade away. On the long run, this is mental extinction.

This leaves us with Option 2, irrespective of how unlikely it is to succeed, because it does not guarantee extinction. It is true that this has never been accomplished in the history of humanity for whole communities, but it is also true that we have never been at the current level of conceptual development, understanding the rules according to which disagreements can be resolved in any communication community. In order to resolve all conflicts and disagreements would not require everyone in the colony to agree on all the facts in question, but to agree on the distinction between facts and assumptions. We can commit to different assumptions as working hypotheses without holding them to be the truth, accept that we do not yet know the truth, and thus avoid disagreements about the facts. If a decision needed to be made on the basis of incomplete knowledge, we could identify the practical purpose of the decision and then agree on the methodology for quantifying the performance of different choices for satisfying that purpose, just as we are doing here in terms of the odds of extinction. Resolution of disagreements could also be found by less sophisticated means, for example, lottery or voting. We have been working towards this end for a long time now, and we are getting better at it, even in the present climate of seemingly incoherent diversity. In daily life we agree on most things, even if we do not talk to one another, and we tend to figure out how to seamlessly cooperate in public; it is rather the disagreements that are exceptions and require careful explanation of the points we disagree about. We notice the disagreements more acutely because we are conditioned not to pay attention to what we already agree on, and we thus preserve both energy and mental focus for resolving disagreements. Moreover, we agree in our identification of what we disagree about, and thus we already demonstrate a meta-level of universal agreement. Since we agree on most things, what is preventing us from reaching agreement on some other things? I suggest that all present disagreements can be resolved at the meta-level by means of the distinction proposed above, between truths and hypotheses, facts and assumptions, values and value-commitments etc.

I am surprised that the percentage of voters for Option 1 has increased after the revelation that the test is to be conducted every year. I expected the participants to notice that this strategy, based on the implied probability of failure, amounts to a suicide if regularly repeated. At the same time, Option 2 becomes relatively more valuable under regular repetition, because once accomplished it remains an asset, a new skill-set combined with psychological readiness that does not require substantial revision in subsequent tests in order to pass them.

Humanity is the Ground of All Meaning

All your rights, all your values, including your value as a person, all meaning and sense, derive from your belonging to the Human kind: the kind of beings who possess reflexive conscousness vis-a-vis one another, and the capacity for rational thought, by means of which WE are able to collectively generate meaning. Humanity has the absolute priority over tribal, racial, cultural or ideological identity, because all these value-categories derive from and are conditional on being human, above all else. To ascribe any priority to your tribe, race, culture or ideology over the value of humanity is to negate the ground of these values, and thus to contradict and negate yourself. Tribalism, racialism, culturalism and ideologism all contradict themselves, negate themselves, refute their own priority, their moral status, their meaning and values. In order to be wholly yourself, to be a fully integrated being, to be fully human, absolutely valuable, of inviolable moral status, one must first abandon all contrary value commitments.

What is Ethics?

Ethics in the most rudimentary sense is concerned with the distinction between Right and Wrong actions with respect to other beings of the same kind, or what we call the social dimension. Social experience has taught early hominids what actions result in better social outcomes, which were probably geared to group survival. These practical insights were progressively formalised as customs, laws and religion. Our modern institutions were build on the prevailing ethical principles, not only because these were socially internalised as the shared moral conscience, but because we became aware that the integrity of the social dimension, which is sustained by ethics, is inseparable from the conditions of social constructs such as meaning and culture. Rational ethics is necessarily grounded in what all rational agents value about themselves: the uniquely human capacity to bestow worth on things, actions and ideas. In order for this capacity to be consistently expressed at the social level we must respect it not only in ourselves but in everyone else. A meaningful existence is necessarily an ethical existence, and the degree of meaning is commensurate with the degree of ethical consistency of the individual and the society.

In essence, we must act ethically to preserve not only the integrity of the social dimension but also a meaningful existence as individuals.