Category Archives: Oaths

The four leaves of any oath

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The foundation of oaths.  A core oath to care for another party.

“No man can serve two masters: for either he will hate the one, and love the other; or else he will hold to the one, and despise the other.” — Matthew 6:24

  1. Care for your mental well being, or you can’t keep the oath.
  2. Care for your physical well being, or you can’t keep the oath.
  3. Care for the parties mental well being, or you can’t keep the oath.
  4. Care for the parties physical well being, or you can’t keep the oath.

Abandon any of these and you abandon any oath to another. It’s too easy to become focused on an oath and ignore the party they are a promise to. Why? Oaths are actually a demonstration of the fluid output of the conscience.  Insight.  Insight is a right, and you can’t give rights away.  They can only be loaned.

It’s a way to express that you have a conscience, that it is healthy, interested, and able to protect another party. If your ability and interest in protecting the other party are compromised, any other details of the oath become irrelevant. If the leaves wilt, the stem rots, the flower dies.

Sometimes contracts accompany oaths, but they different in purpose, scope and how they work. Contracts should (in a fair healthy system) always be about at least justice, a human right. Justice is there not to protect any particular individual, but protect societies health by discouraging defectors. Contracts may also protect any other human right, but honorable contracts should always include justice.

Oaths have no enforcement mechanism other than social pressure, only contracts named after them do. Oaths are simply a promise that not only does your conscience appreciate another party, but you are willing to lend some of your freedom (another core right) to protect and enhance some or all of their other rights. You can’t give away your rights, you can only promise to lend them morally while you are producing a surplus.

The leaves of oath are both simple to understand and simple to miss because they are so pervasive in scope. Often oaths are violated at the leaves first. How? The most visible part of the oath, the flower, becomes the focus of the honorbound, and the leaves and the stem that connect them to the flower are left to rot. Essentially you can both fall in love with an oath to party, and abandon one or more of that parties basic needs. Flaunting an already broken oath.

  • Spouses ignore their partners basic needs, or their own needs, while preening in public.
  • Soldiers employed by tyrants kill the citizens they swore to protect.
  • Parents and their informal unspoken oaths to their children’s needs, sacrifice their happiness and health, for the flower of ‘their future.’

Image, the most visible part of the oath, is served, while the sworn party is to is left only to act as a slave.   An exercise in peacocking for social status.  AKA: The show

Insight is the output of the conscience, and civilization functions best when people are the most free(freedom) to benefit from it’s risk calculations. It is how we live and grow together.
Oaths are sworn to protect human rights, but often become silently invalid when they impinge or neglect the rights of others. Either you or your sworn parties basic needs are met, or those needs, such as human rights, have become abandoned.

Most likely the oath giver has overreached, but carries on like the oath is still honored. Oaths are not a crime for a reason. Errors can happen. Data can change. Strength can wane. The only dishonor is pretending a rot in basic human needs is healthy.

This brings up the question of death oaths. An oath to die is morally equivalent to an oath until you die. Part of an oaths utility is it utilizes positive subconscious calculation, and if that calculation changes for the worse and you can’t act, you have morally scrubbed the utility of the conscience. A conscience ignored can’t provide a human rights based outcome. Blocking all ability to act on insight is inherently the most broadly psychopathic action you can take, since all rights originate in the behaviors unique to the conscience. A person must be able to manage their own rights, so an oath to die can be made to the self, but no one can morally accept a death oath from another. It is a switch from civilization to a master/slave system. It is enslavement.

Don’t fall in love with the archways and baubles of oaths, without caring for foundations they rest on.

  • Be cautious with social pressure on others, unless you are sure you understand their current conditions, and that all parties basic needs can be reasonably met. If you judge, you risk letting an effigy of an unfulfillable promise become your master.
  • Be weary of contracts named after oaths. It’s a branding exercise to enforce a promise that may become immoral.
  • Oaths that swear death to others permanently abdicate all human rights, an immoral act. You can only lend rights, once you have abdicated any rights for good, you are a slave.

Obedience

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Obey

‘I was just following my superior’s orders’ – Nuremberg principle IV

Is obedience a virtue?  It certainly is treated as such by some.   Obedience may bring to mind strict parents or the rank and file of the military.   Certainly some good has come from both.  It seems to contradict the idea that the human right to fork or to walk away from and split with authority is valid at all.  With some exploration of the word and it’s uses for good, it becomes clear that humanty’s understanding of obedience must be a misnomer.

To answer this we need to look at what virtue itself is about.  A virtue is personal attribute (transitory or not) that reflects both morality and accomplishment.  In other words a person with an accomplishment behind them that deems them worthy of respect (Please see an earlier post for exploration of that word.)  Morality is of course some variation of conscionable behavior.

The very concept of obedience falls apart as a virtue.  The conscience as defined by civgene (psychopaths as our predecessors) indicates that moral thought is comprised of reason (defined), and the metamind part of reason will always be subconscious. A virtue must include both parts of reason (the hunch and rational thought.)  With enough time, your gut will contradict your orders, and unrationalized obedience becomes a vice.

I’m not saying the obedience has no place in civilization.  The lions share of humans may be empaths, but we share the world with psychopaths.  Psychopaths lash out at a world which rejects their master/slave model.  They can be treated well with the right considerations and restrictions, but they will never participate in self contained cooperation.  They simply lack the tools.

To share a particular mission with psychopaths we need to revert to their way of thinking, temporally.  The oath is the solution to this conundrum.  To the psychopath the oath has no subconscious impact, just more master/slave orders to follow, but to the emapth it is ceding one’s personal conscience to a self realized principle.  The consequences of disobedience tie directly back to that oath.    When orders conflict with oath, the commander has broken the very respect upholding the oath has earned him.  He is no longer acting in a virtuous way.

So when an empath follows orders from a parent or a commander, that right to fork is only temporally, voluntarily, ignored.  You can be obedient to an open principle, but no human owns your destiny, except you.  Your conscience owns immoral orders as if they were your own mistakes.   Abusing your conscience in any fashion slowly destroys your understanding of right and wrong.  Morally dubious orders program your subconscious with false risks, crippling your abilty to think in a complete way.  You become oblivious to danger at all levels.  Your temporary submission to achieve the goals of your mission, has made you less capable, which in turn endangers it.

An immoral parent with a gambling addiction may corral you into friends that take money management lightly, a mentor may exploit you sexually as payment for hard to come by experience, and a commander may demand you kill people who pose no violent threat to anyone.  Please consider the respect you have, and may one day be afforded by your society.  That respect reflects your virtues, including operating under oath, and refusing to operate when that oath is violated.

Specifically on children, they and parents have an unwritten oath.  Society demands it, for it’s own good.  The parent genuinely emparts their understanding of the world, and the child genuinely incorporates it into their metamind as their starting point.  A way to get by until their metamind begins adapting to their own experiences.   Forming an understanding of how to invest in themselves and their world without being taken, robbed or crushed in any number of ways.  Children are not slaves to be exploited.  The legitimate oath is by design, temporary, conditional, and only fully functional when perpetually transitional towards functional adulthood.

Psychopaths only compete and never cooperate.  They do not obey moral principles, only hierarchy.  We have some distance to travel before they can be identified and are never given authority over data or other human beings.  They may recite an oath aloud, but it’s up to you to make sure they follow it.  You do yourself, them and humanity as a whole a service when you shun disloyalty to a moral oath.  That is what an oath is for.  A bridge between two groups of humans who behave as two different sets.  Shunning externally simulates the metamind for those without one.   Immediate direct consequence is the only way to impart moral principles to those without conscience.

An oath can externally recreate the functionality of a meta-psychopath for a group of otherwise principled humans.  A conditional temporary suspension of personal reason to well thought out societal rationalizations.  Just obedience is possible if a moral oath is served with integrity.  Obedience need not be slavery, but in the absence of moral thought, it surely is.

Edit: Typo