Norms

Manners Ethics Morals Traditions Holidays

The Problem of Habituation (state, monopoly) vs Reason (spectrum, markets)

MORALITY DOESN’T SCALE.

The reason we need a Sun Tzu a Machiavelli, and a Doolittle, is because we are civilized and moral people and do not grasp the limit beyond which the immoral is necessary for group success. Conversely, the reason for Jewish and Muslim success in undermining, weakening, conquest, destruction by consumption, and failure of creating a civilization of their own as a growing, going concern, is their immorality. In other words. Law may be a moral discipline, but war by genetic, informational, financial, economic, and military means is not a moral discipline.

You cannot simply, like a pet, learn habits, without reason. Because other people do not learn moral habits. They learn immoral habits and call them ‘good’.

We live in an era of SCALE. The world, the universe, the very large and the very small. Our minds evolved to habituate almost everything and reason only when necessary. But we live in an era where reason is always necessary.

ANd this is why democracy fails. Not enough of us have knowledge. Not enough skill, and far too few of us reason, and fewer still who reason across time.

Most of us are still semi-domesticated, well trained animals.

That does not mean that like the herd we must tolerate being led to slaughter.

 

Absolute Morality?

Morality is as absolute as mathematics. Everything else is not morality but competitive strategy: contractual variations upon objective morality. Just as all law is as absolute as mathematics but all legislation contractual variation (or command).

Cooperation evolved after individual survival. For cooperation to be rational it must be mutually beneficial. For it to be mutually beneficial it must be (in the aggregate) non-parasitic.  We raise our children, demonstrate kin selection with kin, and we cooperate with non-kin, and we compete with those with whom we do not cooperate.

The conflation of morality with strategy and law with command is a long-standing problem in rational philosophy. The Natural Law and Morality are identical but Group Strategy and Group Contract are merely utilitarian.

Morality is absolute.
Norms are not necessarily moral. Norms are merely tactics.
Legislation, Regulation is not necessarily (and rarely) lawful (under Natural Law).

As such, we can measure whether some cultures are more moral than others, by measuring the degree of suppression of parasitism (free-riding) that is suppressed by law and norm. So not only is morality absolute, but the relative moral content of different cultures is absolute. That this difference determines economic velocity, and economic velocity affords us greater morality (if we choose it) is the more interesting area of inquiry.

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