Rationality

MAN IS RATIONAL  AND AMORAL – NOT MORAL OR IMMORAL

Man is rational. He engages in predation when it suits him, parasitism when it is possible, cooperation when it is preferable, and flight when it is necessary.

Man is not good or bad, he is rational in his choice of cooperation, parasitism, or predation. We must provide him the incentive to choose cooperation. We must not pretend he does not need the incentive.

Thankfully, through organizing our efforts into myth, ritual, habit, norm, and law, we can raise the cost of predation and parasitism high enough so that man chooses cooperation or flight more often than parasitism or predation.

Our deprivation of his opportunity for parasitism and predation do not change the nature of man – because man is rational. We simply eliminate those less able to cooperate and produce, and provide disincentives to those that remain, thereby creating an imbalance of incentives and proclivity for cooperation and production.

Man Is Rational – Period.

1 – Men are rational. Period.
2 – Men can rationally choose morality or immorality or evil. Period.
3 – Morality consist of reciprocity. Period.
4 – Reciprocity consists of productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary exchange, free of negative externality – period.
5 – The test of reciprocity is any change in property in toto (demonstrated property) Period.
6 – The purpose of reciprocity is the demand for restitution as a means of preventing retaliation cycles.
7 – The Purpose of preventing retaliation cycles, is to preserve the value of cooperation.
8 – The incremental suppression of retaliation cycles produces lower risk and higher experimental velocity, (that we call ‘trust’), thereby increasing the rate of returns on cooperation.

Are Men Not Moral?

Men are merely rational. We are capable of moral (cooperative) and immoral (parasitic), and evil (predatory) behaviors. We demonstrate that we are capable of moral, immoral, and evil behaviors.

We choose good most often because it is rational. A few of us choose not good because it is rational – fairly often. A few of us choose evil – because it is rational given their emotional condition. We always manage our physical, emotional, and intellectual(frustration) budgets, and we

We educate our young and each other in order to preserve the utility of cooperation for them, for ourselves, and the group, and to prevent retaliation for them, ourselves, and the group.

The fact of the matter is that if you are strong, in the short term predation is most rewarding, at the cost of future retaliation. if you are not weak, In the medium-term cooperation is most rewarding. In the long term, if you are weak, parasitism is most rewarding.

And this is what we see: a predatory upper class, a productive middle class, and a parasitic underclass.

There are no possible perpetual motion machines, including those of a polity, economy, and kin group.

We must always defeat the dark forces of time, ignorance, and scarcity, despite that some of us are strong and competent, some of us not weak but competent, and some of us weak and incompetent.

We are, like all nature, bound by the basic laws of the universe, and in particular, the laws of thermodynamics. All civilization is merely an attempt to cooperate at larger and larger scales, by trading off near pleasures, for future returns.

The Consequence of Rational Action

All men are rational actors – neither moral nor immoral, but rational. We achieve the good by eliminating the utility of choosing the bad. We eliminate the utility of choosing the bad by the promise of violence for violations of reciprocity. We test for the violation of reciprocity by demand for fully informed, productive, warrantied, voluntary transfer free of negative-externality. We call this test of reciprocity Natural Law. We can only test this Natural Law by the use of independent judges and juries to discover violations of it by sympathetic testing. We can perform that sympathetic testing when observing testimony. We can sympathetically test from testimony because our ability to cooperate was made possible by an ability to sympathize with intent. By sympathizing with intent, we can discover malincentives and malintentions. We can then judge malincentives and malintentions, and record those judgments for future use in what we call the ‘common law.’. But for this system to work at all, those who testify, the jury, and the judges must give higher priority to the commons than to their self, kin, or organizational interests. And so they themselves must be subject to the same demand for reciprocity as those that they adjudicate. This is the secret to western civilization: the truthfulness of warrior cult spread across all men, via service in militia and army.

The Contract of Aristocratic Cooperation

We prefer to cooperate morally – meaning beneficially – with you.

If we cannot cooperate beneficially with you on fully moral terms – meaning without parasitism, then we have only four choices:

1) Pay the cost of your parasitism and suffer the consequences, in exchange for avoiding the cost of defending against your parasitism.

2) Boycott you and bearing the costs of boycotting you in exchange for avoiding the cost of transforming you into a moral individual or group.

3) Colonize you and bear the cost of evolving you, in exchange for creating a valued member of mankind.

4) Conquering you and bearing the cost of exterminating you in exchange for freedom from your parasitism.

So, you have a choice: limit your actions to productive, fully informed, warrantied, voluntary transfer, constrained to externalities under the same conditions.

Or we will eventually colonize and reform you, or conquer and exterminate you.

You may have the ambition of mere survival. Our ambition is to make mankind moral. For it is only in moral mankind that the evil and immoral are exterminated forever.