Category Archives: specialization

Ethics of revenge

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pointless

Wanting to get even is inherently a dangerous proposition, but grasping why can be difficult.  Revenge is a competitive act.  Sometimes it is selfish thoughts about a legitimate loss in a fair contest.  Just as often, it’s about a losing a contest you didn’t even know was a contest.  Avoiding selfish gratification becomes an easy choice for most empaths, but result of losing a hidden contest is moral outrage.

Think carefully about this asyemetric condidtion.  If you were wronged by a person or a society because they were competing  when you were cooperating, they have commited a psychopathic act.  This does not mean they only capible of psychopathic or selfish acts (a psychopath) but it may.   You may challenge them to a fair rematch, but if they are a psychopath they will only accept if they think they can win.  Rematches for unfair contests are a cooperitive not competitive behavior.

If you relize that they have intentionally slighted you, the temptation may be to challenge them to a second contest with some unfair suprise.  Retribution is the act of challenging a person or society to an unfair contest, to teach them a ‘lesson,’ about having done the same.

You may already see what is wrong here.  If they are a psychopath, they will not learn any lesson about right and wrong.  The only possibly good outcome is if they fail to assess the contest, agree to it, loose, and then determine that they were in correct and you are actually the master and they the slave.  You can imagine how likely that is.  Even if you get the prize of being ‘master’ who want’s to hang around with a psychopath?

If it is an empath or a moral society, you simply need to point out the inequity, and they will correct it as soon as they can.  You should forgive them, as that is best for everyone’s emotional health and well being, but don’t forget.  Memory is critical to seperate an unethical act from a patern displayed by an amoral entity.

So personal retribution can have a good outcome, but it’s a BIG risk.  Hence our unexplained aversion to it.  Our metamind’s advantage in long term high impact risk.

Of course retribution does not need to be high risk does it?  Life operates as many levels.  Even if they don’t cooperate with them, that person or society interacts and perhaps even hides in many other societies.  Societies have rules to keep out psychopths.  If the rule is ethical, and it has been broken, invoking it is actually doing a service for humanity.

Of course if you’ve encountered a sociopath, their guile will slide past your attempts to unveil them.  The best advice you can get is ‘the best revenge is living well.’  Free yourself from the people and organizations that shield the amoral agent.  Turn your back.  Shun them all.  Don’t interact.  Don’t communicate.  Don’t invest.  And encourage others to do the same.  Adapt to life without their society.  Remember it’s not the strongest or the smartest, but the most adaptive to change.  Make your life a contest they could never win.  A contest of cooperation.

Type One Civilization

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ST-earth

Wrote a new paper on creating a type one civilization.  Here’s a quick preview of the things humans will need to do to their societies to make it work.

  • Know yourself
  • Seek enlightenment
  • Identify psychopaths
  • Identify graft
  • Minimize hierarchies
  • Reject rigid identities
  • Embrace forks
  • Shun non cooperative behavior
  • Practice identification on outside societies
  • Support moral societies

http://www.matthewnewhall.com/Type-one.html

Going to take a break for a bit.  This one burnt me out.  Of course I can be lured in by comments and post suggestions!  🙂

Update:  Been back over the link a few times.  Corrected many errors.  If you found it difficult to follow yesterday, please give it a second chance.  I knew I was tired.  🙂

Time is not money

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IN TIME

 

We have chosen to measure our economic success in our currency.  Our dollar denominates GDP growth, goods produced, jobs created, whatever.  But the currency is not the important thing here but rather the production.  The official position is we are satisfied with linear production growth, but we know production is non linear.  Also the currency is expanding, making the measurement smaller than it actually seems.  So rather than the natural state of exponential growth, the economy is shrinking, it’s obvious when you consider it is being measured with stretched out rubber dollars.  Even the equity markets are just another rubber money.  Distorting our perception of the goods and services produced and the level of positive effect that can have on quality of life.

That lack of production can mean many things, but the one thing that connects them all is trust.  People choose not to invent and produce because they see a large risk they will be stolen from.  That perception ebbs and flows, but in the big picture the trend is down.  It is inversely proportional to the number of psychopaths in our society.

So corruption and waste are eating away at our quality of life.  You are told things are normal, but you scramble from task to task to make ends meet.  Quality of life can best be measured in free time.  Time to make your own choices.  Being able to decide what to do with your time means investing (risking) your time in your own future.  This is where real invention comes from.  Invention is the only thing that matters in the long run, because it is where all production increases come from.  The less free time people have, the worse the economy is doing.

Do you have more free time or less than ten years ago?  Your family?  Your neighbors?  Make some time think about this, if you can.  Next time someone tells you a product or a law will save you money, ask yourself instead, will it save me time?  Time, like thoughts, are yours to give.

What you talking bout willis?

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rosetta-stone

Rather than force people to read the ridiculous tomes on this blog, I have made a terms page, explaining rarely used, misused, newly defined, or new words.  One day when I have more time I’ll make it even shorter.

Of course I am open to correction or criticism.

Your blog makes me sad

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cryin-in-the-rain

Don’t be sad.  I was sad too.  At first.  I truly believed that everybody had some good in them.  We want to trust everything and everyone.  We want to believe that all behavior is learned and therefore preventable.  It’s not.  A psychopath can vary quite a bit in actual behavior, but their context of ruthless selfish logic is just plain old genetic.

Empathic humans are as far as I can tell the only creature in the known universe that gives so much with the promise of so little in return.  I’m just making you sadder huh?

Look at it this way.  The world would just be giant stadium of thoughtless brutal fighting without us.  We are the parents reigning in the out of control children in the playground.  We are civilization.  We are hope.  When we work together the sum is greater than the parts.  This is literally what economy of scale is.  Our cooperation and trust makes the world a MUCH better place.  Even the dismal science (economics) has this at it’s center.

Be the change you want to see in the world.  Now we have the tools to fix it.  Use your gifts.  Treat everyone with compassion and love.  Cooperate.  Resist and avoid emotional programming.  Investigate waste and corruption and stand firm against it.  Create and share.  Know yourself.  Learn how to contribute to civilization.  Grow.  And we grow with you.  It’s a fact.

I’m working on a code (not a murderous one) for psychopaths.  Not just to protect us from them, but to make their lives better.   Give them a life without panic and subterfuge.  A new option.  Just as psychology lifted emapths up, psychopaths have their own psychology.  With awareness they have options.

Hang in there, we’re just getting started.

Violence is not a solution

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two-brains

It could be said that there is no problem that can not be solved with violence.   I would concur that some problems can be solved with violence, but problem is the solution is always temporary.  Philosophies, even bad ones, are ratified in the blood of their purveyor.  Populations become more fearless as they cornered and become more threatened.   Natural resources and lives are wasted in conflict.  Psychopaths are no exception.

It seems that the lack of the civilization gene is not dominant.  Everyone has the warrior gene, if there even is such a single gene.  The behaviors it promotes are observed in all higher mammals.  Past civilizations have routed psychopaths.  To them all they had was a hammer so every problem looked like a nail.   They thought the effectiveness of their campaign would end their rein forever, not realizing their yet unborn child could be the next psychopath, through no fault of their own.  The best tool we have had until the 1970s, was a system that focused their aggression, drive, and selfish logic on the public good, a capitalist republic.

But we live in a different world now.  With work we can positively identify psychopaths with use of an MRI AND written tests.  With known pools of genetic material we can search for the civilization gene.  Once we have it we can screen.  Without the risk of intelligent test takers providing the answers the test expects.  Simply knowing what an ethical course of action is does not indicate an intent to follow it.

The ethics of screening are clear.  Law enforcement agencies already do it.  So do parole boards.  So corporations.  There is no outcry.  No once says this is unfair to the psychopaths.  We have already signed off on screening, so why not be effective at it.

It is insane to leave these tools on the table unused.  The clock is ticking and we will reach some critical mass of waste.  Once that happens the economy will fold and the empaths loose the opportunity to screen rather than exile and murder.  Probably forever.

A vote for no action is a vote for violence.  If we are lucky, which I doubt, it will simply land us right back where we are right now one day.  In the nuclear age it seems to me to be a pointless risk.  A temporary solution is no solution at all.

The cost of inaction

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fukushima_plume

There is no way to dress it up.  The indication of self limiting psychopaths is bad, real bad.   Since they breed faster than non psychopaths, they will grow in numbers until their host society can no longer support them.   The corruption is to great and the civilized specializing empathic humans simply fold their arms and stop participating.

In the past this worked like a charm.  The psychopaths were more easily spotted in small local societies, and cast out and shunned.  After a while, numbers would dwindle and a new economy would rise up.

Before 1945 the resulting economic collapse would usually be local to a country or region.  But after 1945 two things changed.

  • Society has become completely global
  • The globe has hundreds of nuclear power plants.

Before this realization, that economic collapse is inevitable, I supported nuclear power.  But as if in some brutal, global teachable moment Fukushima happened.

Now I know that nuclear power plants will quickly melt down without constant attention to the spent rods which are almost always kept within walking distance of the active reactor.  Attention must include physical maintenance of equipment, a constant supply of liquid fuel or electricity, security, and supervision.  All of these things are very difficult to do without stable money and a very large economy of scale to build parts, train specialists, generate and deliver electricity, etc.

Surely economic collapse means intermittent power grids.  And as we know from the Soviet Union’s collapse, some nuclear stock piles went unguarded.  People who can’t protect or feed their families don’t go to work.

If we do nothing a handful of the hundreds of nuclear power plants could meltdown, the rest will likely follow.  The globe will be contaminated for tens of thousands of years (not months or years like nuclear weapons.)  It will certainly mean the end of civilization.  If  humanity is lucky and survives somehow, it will be as people having children at ten years old and dying of cancer at twenty.   I don’t any 10 or 20 year olds capable of cleaning up a nuclear accident, do you?  Think of the Eloi, from H.G. Wells ‘Time Machine.’

The good news is, if we approach this problem from this perspective it is solvable.   Hands off fuel rod maintenance is possible to set up everywhere.  And we will be rewarded with non linear economic prosperity if we do rout out corruption at it’s psychopathic source.  It’s time to stop thumbing our noses at history and treat nuclear power as it really is.  Needing to be resilient against meltdown in the face of long term neglect and isolation!