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Notes -
The Illegitimacy of Power
In the beginning, the world was just, populated by true equals. Injustice was born when a Will first imposed itself upon another. How? Power. Is it possible to learn this “Power”? Not from the Good. Might makes wrong. Might as well submit, and take your righteous place in the great chain of...
The Interlocking Wills
With Power, the original Will comes down from above, and as it passes through inert Wills, is transmitted losslessly to the bottom . An ukrainian supports war on his government’s orders, itself a vassal of the EU, itself a vassal of the US, itself controlled by the CIA, the telephone company, boomers, elites, jews, rich cishet whites, billionaires, english royalty, the NWO, or you-shall-name-and-blame-it. Whoever He is, we are all NPCs in the Prime Mover’s single-player game. His shadowy Will reigns supreme. Fear not and rejoice, for it means we are...
The Bloodstained Innocents
We have no agency, pure victims even as we victimize. Our crimes are His crimes. Passing them down the chain, and guilt up the chain, we are a perfect conduit of power. Can’t victim-blame the helpless oppressed. As absolute power corrupts Him absolutely, utter lack of it frees us from corruption. Free to dance and sing and reach for...
The Clouds Above
All our ideas are at best irrelevant, at worst another manifestation of His Will. As we are powerless, it appears he manipulates us through media and everything else for the hell of it. Or an epiphenomenom, the illusory superstructure rising from the base like a cloud of smoke.
edit: I do not believe any of this.
“Just following orders” is not generally accepted as an excuse. Without it, I don’t see how this would absolve anyone.
Edit: more importantly, it makes for a poor parody. There are people who would endorse this sentiment, but I think you have to go a lot further auth than just retweeting an oppressor/oppressed (or paranoid conspiracy theorist) catchphrase.
I mean as a practical matter, removing the moral elements, this is how the world tends to work. Most of us meekly follow along with the powers that be. We might grouse about it, but we’ll do it because most of us have remarkably little power in our lives. If you have to at least pretend to love big brother (in whatever form it takes) just be a you have to eat, keep a roof over your head and so on. If you have to feed your and especially your kids, you’ll give your consent to a lot of things that if they were proposed without the stick you’d be opposed to. I don’t think anyone in a cold state would agree that any given medical procedure should be a condition for getting into a store or restaurant. But if you know you’ll be fired if you don’t check the vaccine card, you’ll check the card.
The man who submits to undue authority is himself making a moral choice. His slavery is a choice.
One's life or that of one's family's may be to steep a price to pay for one to oppose evil, but it is nevertheless a bargain one strikes. A bargain no different from all other such compromises in nature.
Most conceptions of morality still require you to act right under difficult circumstances. Arguably, morality is only useful under such.
The virtuous man does not free himself from the burden of conscience at the first sign of a cost, and the heroic man does not do so even in the face of annihilation.
The man who does the wrong thing enthusiastically is a bad man. The man who does the right thing at great cost is a hero. Somebody who does what he can, when he can, is just a man.
I look up to people who do brave things, but I don't think it's fair to look down on people for not being superhuman. That said, people should exert what agency they do have - I just find the philosophy implied by "Your inner morality is worth precisely zilch. A power imbalance isn’t a valid excuse to submit." a bit too yeschaddish for my tastes.
The problem with this idea is what Hannah Arendt calls the banality of evil. The idea that one can do evil without being evil.
In modern societies, acts, a fortiori evil acts, are parts of large, complex, systems and institutions where a whole bunch of collective actors do small reasonably small evils that ultimately culminate in large atrocities for which no single human can be held accountable.
This state of affairs evidently requires a stricter sense of morality to prevent those large atrocities than one that accepts the small pragmatic transgressions of people whose interactions do not have reach beyond their immediate circles.
Some solve this problem by encouraging strong militancy in everyone ("you can't be neutral in a moving train", etc). Others, like myself, prefer to require of everyone the ethical discipline that used to be reserved for kings. But one's responsibility has to be established somehow.
This is a well-written rebuttal, and I understand your position. To be frank, I do not believe that we can meaningfully address this. It’s just a feature of how humans are, and how they behave in groups. We can deal with individual monsters (serial killers, rapists, child-killers etc. but we cannot bring down large-scale tyrannies until they’ve already begun to decay. That’s what I mean when I say that I don’t want to condemn people for merely being a human and doing what humans do.
That said, the minimum I demand is this:
DON’T be enthusiastic. DON’T help. Don’t go along with things unless you can’t get out without significant cost, and to the extent that you must participate, do so as reluctantly and inefficiently as you can get away with.
In the context of Nazi germany, you don’t have to be the guy smuggling Jews out of Germany (although good on you if you are) but don’t you dare be the one who tips off the gestapo for giggles or to get a promotion. In the context of the modern day, don’t go along with cancellation campaigns against your friends, and if you have to join in with some stuff don't look like you enjoy it. In short, if you must commit small evils, keep them as small as possible.
Ideally, this leads to a slow spreading understanding that all of this is bullshit that nobody wants. Enforcing it gets harder and the bounds of acceptable heresy grow until the thing falls over. It’s slow and unsatisfying but I don’t think there’s a realistic alternative. We (conservatives) failed to nip this stuff in the bud and now it’s too late for anything except attrition. And keeping the memory of sanity for when it’s possible for it to grow again.
I believe this is the attitude invoked in the CIA’s field manual for sabotage:
https://www.the-future-of-commerce.com/2022/05/06/cia-sabotage-manual-for-organizations/
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