Category Archives: counter-culture

Subconcious speed reading

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books

Darwninan evolution leaves little room for debate. Genetic accidents come to dominate because of advantage.  Including people. Even the very empathy that makes you recoil from the potential horrors of the implications above.

Civgene indicates that the subconscious mind (specifically the conscience) is a risk manager.  Why?  With comparative intelligence, new risks are assessed more quickly by humans with a conscience than humans without (psychopaths).

The risk formula is programmed both by other people like our guardians, and by our own experience.  As our memories are recalled, a secondary map of emotions produces a new, involuntary, composite emotional state.  Sometimes the subsequent compound emotion is fear of a yet seen danger the rational mind could not deduct as quickly, hence the advantage.  Mandatory emotional recall is fast, as demonstrated by the laggard rationalization that follows it.  This is true only if the data is natural (self acquired or at least sincerely emparted) and good mental hygiene is practised.

Just like a caring parent can program a human child with well intentioned warnings, so can a group be controlled.  The ability for one human to program a society with a common identity is known as propaganda.  Grandfathered by Edward Bernays.  Fathered by Joseph Gobbels, mass programming of identities is a potential genocidal machine.  Turning peoples own conscience against them.  Rational minds enslaved to fabricated emotional risk warnings.

The civilized mind
Propaganda is a fabricated, subconscious, communication directed at societies, but it’s carriers originate naturally.  This is visible as secondary communication cues.  Intonation, secondary noises, linguistic lexicon shifts, lighting, temperature, smells, sounds, etc.  Any subtle cue that can be rationally remembered can have a compound emotion attached to it.  People are continuously programming each other.  Human civilization is a vast, distributed, subconscious risk, supercomputer.  Mainly throttled by the bandwidth of human interaction and attacks on it’s networks.

Karl Marx noticed this but did not understand what he is seeing.  In general I have found his observations to be outstanding, while his conclusions wither as a function of time.  Why did he get causality wrong?  No failing of his own.  He like his contemporaries simply did not understand that humanity was two distinct, separate behavioural sets.  They were simply unaware of psychopaths.

History repeated
His observations about late civilization stratification were correct.  The modern bourgeoisie have re-emerged in America and the western world.  In it’s natural form, the bourgeoisie as a class, emerges because of commonality in culture, specifically in subconscious ques.  As the psychopath population grows, the society increasingly devalues cooperation and rewards strict competition.  The bourgeoisie read the same books, attend the same operas, and go to the same parties.  The feedback loop tightens as quantifiable knowledge consumption accelerates.  The programming becomes less and less noticed, less frequently rationalized and ultimately goes completely unexamined.  Simply put the rational mind can’t keep up with the subconscious programming, and so it goes unchallenged.  The people who operate society, the bourgeoisie, eventually become completely psychopathic.

Now, in 2017 propaganda is more science than art.  Massive databases of up to the minute word associations betray our subconscious communication and the current state of shared risk.  Further the Internet has greatly increased the bandwidth for subconscious communication.  Sharing (comparatively) professionally produced videos as fast they can be consumed.  Entire libraries distributed in minutes.  Immersive video games increase the bandwidth even beyond what a carefully scripted stream of videos can aspire to.  Together they form a wall of customized emotionally calculated programming a physically present team couldn’t match.

Today the technical and financial elite are consuming same material. Racing to the treetop to be top ape in true psychopathic fashion.  Their subconscious always silently consuming faster than rational memory components.  Their rational minds can’t keep up.  Their subconscious is polluted with ease as big data guides big media.  The economic collapse, the human disaster, it’s happening again.  But this time it’s measured in days instead of decades.

But there is hope. The art, the music, the stories, the pop cultures of the past can save some of us.  If you are sceptical enough to seek and use them, and ultimately profit.

Remediation
The more bandwidth your media has, the more quickly your subconscious can be damaged.  Reading is the lowest bandwidth way to express complex information, so is the least dangerous.  It is difficult for subconcious programming to outrun the critical, rational mind with a newpaper article alone.  Listening is worse.  A podcast or radio program are more likely to reprogram you.  Video has many dimensions by which to perform the card tricks of propaganda.   Your rational mind following one path and your subconscious another.   And of course games both with their interactive 3d and reactive feedback could be weaponized at a level not yet imagined.

Slow the information down and test yourself.  Our metaminds are a database.  Care for it.

  1. Need to read something questionable?  Play loud familiar music while reading a suspect source to interrupt emotional data creation.  DOS your own emotional recall system.
  2. Do you think your emotions may have been contaminated?  Take time to meditate and focus on clearing them.  LIFO pop the stack.
  3. Noticed your feelings changed after consuming strange media?  Inventory the issues that are important to you and see if your feelings have inexplicably changed on them.  If you can’t understand the change erase it with self repetition.  Make sure to sleep on it before accepting the change.  Checksum data.  Erase corruption.  Perform a database integrity check.
  4. Exposed to something you don’t trust?  Follow questionable sources with next class up of familiar and trusted media.  Listened to a untrustworthy news story?   Then watch a favourite movie. Nightly news known to be disreputable? Don’t watch it.  But if you must, play a trusted favourite 3d video game to test and reset your own mind.  Ride a mental bicycle over your mind’s roads to see if they have been damaged or changed.  Perform a system wide antivirus scan on your metamind, as soon as you can.
  5. Want to consume something from a serial offender?  Wait.  Simply wait a few months to a few years and then consume it.  Wait until it is out of fashion.  Subconscious reprogramming is highly context sensitive.   Sure you’ll miss the water cooler talk but the older messages will be much more like noise to your subconscious.  Like running a new operating system, released after a virus (subconscious programming) is public knowledge and it’s exploits repaired or blocked.

Beat the propaganda.  The key is to slow down the face melting pace of rational learning and examine your feelings.  Remember more bandwidth means more damage.  No matter how smart you are, your conscience(if you have one) still absorbs propaganda faster than your rational mind can counter it.  Take some time to let what you consume sink in.  No matter the topic.

Reading has some risk. Listening is worse.  Watching still worse.  Games have the highest subconscious programmatic rate.  Take the time after consuming public media to practice good mental hygiene.

Reject the bourgeoisie and protect civilization.  Put your own mental hygiene ahead of accelerating competition.  The lasting standards are open source anyway, inherently an exercise in cooperation.  The currency of reputation is almost always worth more than short term victories.  Forget top branch, it’s a big forest.  It’s your mind.  Don’t loose control.

Note: For the record this page’s (probably rather confusing) computer analogies were white on white and were not meant to be subliminal, but instead hidden unless sought.  Alert me if the words subtly appear in your browser/copy.  TIA.

Edit: Added a fifth trick for keeping your subconscious clean and belonging to you.

Primer on propaganda

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bk-bj

“Propaganda is like rain…knowing it’s wet does not keep you dry if you’re exposed to the weather.”  — taopraxis

If you master spotting propaganda can you stand in the face of it?  It seems to me the answer is ‘a brief while.’    Like the beginning of a rain storm, understanding wet cold drops on your skin is not useful if you don’t take cover.  Soon you’ll be soaked and shivering.

Chris Martinson has won this year’s subconscious Olympics.  Not only for feeling the early drops, but warning other people to take cover.  Please read his excellent primer on propaganda and how it works.

https://www.peakprosperity.com/blog/103565/were-being-played

And once you’ve identified a media outlet as untrustworthy, please come in out of the rain.

Jealousy: The psychopath’s conscience

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Risk

Civgene indicates the narcissism, ASPD and sociopath labels as a logical progression similar to id, ego and superego.  This led later to the metamind model, as a way to understand the subconscious and empathy as attributes of empathic or non-psychopath humans.  We’ve discussed emotional primitives of bliss, despair, and will to action as the building blocks of complex emotions responsible for imagination as the underpinning of empathy.  Also we’ve considered the psychopaths ability to love, and it’s limitation to a subtle compulsion to help immediate family such as other mammals display.

With the previous ideas front and center a new consideration emerges.  Animals display jealousy.  Anyone with more than one pet has seen the green eyed monster emerge, over toys, food, attention.  Animals want each others territory and favour.  They seem so knowing, so human, when they are jealous.

It could be perceived that jealousy is proof that animals display complex emotions.  Namely emotional reactions that involve more than one primitive emotion at once.  The behavior that results can be intricate, but this is not evidence of emotional complexity.  Jealousy occurs when a strong bliss, dispair, and then will to action reaction happen at the same time.  The difference is empathic humans can be jealous as an act of imagination in any time and place, imagination being that passive relational database that is the conscience.  Animals and psychopaths react to the now.

What triggers all three primitives?  It seems to begin with witnessing external bliss.  Bliss seems to create a sympathetic reaction in all animals interested in the same territory or favour as another.  One animal senses (sees,hears,smells,etc) another enjoying something and bliss is triggered within them as well.  Without the access the other animal has, the bliss activates despair.  Despair is simple helplessness.  Once despair has reached sufficient depths, will to action is called.  Will to action then drives a vast array of actions based on the available rational thought.  Rational thought that may be impaired by the strong emotion.

This progression bliss -> despair -> will is ubiquitous.  The desire to ‘steal’ what empaths may deem property or currency or interfere in a friendship is occurring at their LEAST rational state.  Emotions and the chemical signals they employ have taken over the brain.  There is no choice in the process, most importantly there is less or no rational thought.  Jealousy is the animal kingdoms more primitive risk management system.  The jealousy risk engine is the predecessor to the conscience.  Serving a vital role.  Making sure that learned behaviors during periods of calm don’t dictate actions at the moments of highest risk.  Namely one animal taking another’s territory or favour.  It’s a simple trick to snap an animal out of a more common pattern and stand up for it’s self.

A psychopath who has progressed to a sociopath rationally recognizes this risk.  He or she will work to avoid situations that provoke jealousy.  Partly by limiting social access themselves to those who will accept their assignments without challenge, and partly by becoming materially successful beyond practical needs.  They become wildly rich to avoid the green eyed monster.
It’s a good strategy when social interactions are infrequent or small, but inferior to our risk engine, the conscience.  Jealousy breaks down as complexity increases.  Civilization and it’s enabler the conscience creates the invention and surplus needed to concentrate great wealth and power in psychopath hands, but the psychopaths must face other psychopaths with similar wealth.  Instances of jealousy can not be eliminated inside a human civilization.

The flaws in managing risk through jealousy are two fold.

  • Centralized power pushes out investment.  While invention creates surplus, power saps it.  Invention will always occur from empath humans but as a power structure becomes more pervasive, more invention simply occurs outside it.  Currency systems form as a way to capitalize on the external investment, and new power is formed outside the old scope.  This can be at any scope from a family farm to competing superpowers.  Currency (including money) goes to where it is treated best.
  • Any environment from a town to a planet has natural boundaries.  Since there will always be opportunities to create jealousy a sociopath will assert their dominance until they are stopped by force or exhaust all resources.  While they can limit the frequency of jealous experiences, it is a fantasy from a primitive time that they can prevent them.

 

Notice that both of these risks are long term.  Hence the idea the civilization gene, the mutation of the metamind, is a superior engine of long term risk management.

Sociopath stage psychopaths can reliably be identified by their desire for wealth and power.  We must avoid the exhaustion of global resources, not by further centralizing their power, but by focusing our power of invention at a local scope.  A psychopath will see external currencies as risk as per their tool jealousy, but they have a major disability when weighing risk to property, currency and the autonomy they enable.  Currency and property of any type is derived from the conscience itself.  Shun false ‘leaders’ that want power over local currencies.  Not just currencies we trade for goods and services, but anything that defines our skills, experience and identity.  Not out of jealousy of their wealth, but as rejection of their inability to even discern, much less serve, humanities interests.

Conspiracy theory

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Never
  It’s healthy to partake in conspiracy theory, provided you don’t believe it until sufficient facts back it up.
  • You could gain a new understanding of the world.
  • You can better understand people who believe the conspiracy theory.
  • Conspiracy theory is a variation of the hunch.  Hunches are at the core of all good police and intelligence work.
  • A well thought out conspiracy theory is a variation of faith.  Faith is the moral underpinning of rational society.
  • A conspiracy theory can be an excellent exercise in civics.  Understanding the morality and impact of different actions on society.  Include overt ones.
  • Most importantly you emotionally condition yourself not to over react if the conspiracy theory or a similar one actually turn out to be true. 9/11 is a perfect example of this.  Remember if people can make you have an emotional reaction more intense than you expected, they can manipulate you.
Therefore it’s nearly a certainty that people who mock casual discussion of conspiracy theories are are up to no good.  Very likely they are in the emotional manipulation business.

The Metamind/Conscience/subconscience, society and long term risk

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snakeoil

“I do not want a good General, I want a lucky one”
— Napoleon

It’s all the same thing.  The Metamind is the conscience and the subconscious.  That final puzzle piece the civilization gene just snapped it all into place.  What exactly the civilization gene did is still unclear, but it’s likely some sort of nerotransmiter.  Their are loads in case you didn’t know.  Some mutation at civilizations dawn, forced us to feel when we remember.  Knocking us out of our psychopathic socks and into another man’s shoes.  Feeling our memories instead of simply referencing them.  It makes us crazy, it makes us erratic, but most importantly it almost seems to make us psychic.

Do not be discouraged by the brutal thuggish ways of the ‘rational’ human.  They are not where our secret lies.   Trust, not a stupid forced one, like one might have from lower intelligence, but instead informed and committed, is.  Not just in our own actions but in the actions of others.  Others that we know, that we have connected with, that regardless of their tact or temper, authentically cares.  Just like us they can’t help it.

Our broad conversations without saying a word, our flashes of insight, our shifting language, and our common understanding are all not some lucky accident.  Instead it is our metamind’s peeking out through our conscious minds, speaking through our hopes and dreams.  Twisting our guts in the face of risks.

Each of our consciences provides an intelligent and highly informed second opinion of how situations we have never faced can effect us.  Now and much later.  Not just next month or next year but how it could effect your great grandchildren.  This is why we fixate on psychopaths.  They, with their unlikely compliance with the social contract, they threaten the integrity of our emotional information.  Repeated deliberate lies don’t just soil your emotional data, but the life saving data of the generations to come.

Of course risks like these can only be expressed and understood in means and averages.  Long term consequences to our health and our planet terrify us even if we disagree on what they are.  Not the psychopaths.  They live to play today and fade tomorrow.  The average psychopaths ring the bells in our mind like the story of the grasshopper and the ant.  But the exceptional ones, can they spin a tail.  Without remorse they work through broadcast to silence our warning bells.

I doubt few would accept such practice as ‘fair game’ if they realized that liberty bell they smashed into a thousand pieces survived hundreds of years prior.  Passed on from generation to generation, parent to child, until 50 years of propaganda pounded it to bits.

That famous Darwin misquote applies.  “It is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives. It is the one that is most adaptable to change.”  Our metamind gave us a huge local advantage.  We could get a wiff of violets and smell trouble, or look at the clouds in the sky and suddenly know what to buy at the market, based on an experience our great grandfather had.  All combined with the powers of the rational mind to work backward from the right conclusion.

Now, some of us have had our powers stripped from us.  Completely reprocessed by the clever music placement and linguistic back flips of our televised entertainment.  Your hard won generational emotional metadata smashed to bits.

Some of us have faired much better.  We learned to know ourselves in the face of the blaring noise of ‘public opinion’ on the idiot box.  With the help of fellows like Jim Henson we trained ourselves to tune it out.  Silence the manufactured queues.  Even decoding the interference at a rational level.  Seeing it for what it is.  Not quite a plan, but certainly an agenda.  An agenda to make the world more suitable for the psychopaths trapped in short term thinking.  We’ve adapted to the change.  Now we are embedding our emotional data in our lessons to our children and grandchildren.

The only question left is were we on to you, all along?  Was this passed down from our parents experiences with elixir salesmen and Ponzi schemes?  Do we even know?  Even if I did, I’ll never tell.

 

The Distribution Party endorses – Open Source

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code

Open source may well be the most important invention of modern times.  It’s supporting invention is the Internet.  It replaces distribution hierarchies which have been installed throughout history to piggyback graft and systems of corruption onto the practical logistics of organization.  History will not be kind to it’s many opponents.

Open Source is social structure, supported by a legal structure and a near real time technical organizational system.  The social structure creates the fast technical organizational system using computer code, and uses the Internet to share is at near real time speeds.  The social structure requires near perfect adherence to core scientific principles.  Core principles being, ubiquitous opportunity peer review, experimental repeatability, and a working copy of the reference model and it’s complete plans.  It uses contracts and their supporting legal structure to prevent corruption.

Open source has been mistaken for a business model but it’s actually a social governance model, a utilitarian technocracy for the scientific method.  It uses competition and a legal restrictions on potentially arbitrary use restrictions.  In this it keeps the rules equally lax for all participants in the competition, a cooperative behaviour.  This lack of use restrictions allows for fluid and voluntary participation with any society, or the ability to form a new society should it become inefficient or ineffective, better known as forking.  Forking is critical at it’s core because any restriction on competition can become non-cooperative and form a basis for non-cooperation.  This allows for the orderly, rapid abandonment of a hierarchy should a psychopath obtain a prominent position within it.  Please see my paper on type one civilization for more details on the importance of avoiding rigid hierarchies.

At first Open Source was best known for it’s original success Linux.  Creating a computer science reference model for well understood problems, many if not most uses of computers can happen efficiently and effectively when running Linux.  Initially support for Linux, the GPL and open source was largely practical.  Solving the scaling problems of computer code originated and owned by historically large computer software corporations.

While not nearly as popular as Linux, RepRap has an order of magnitude more potential impact.  It is an open source 3d printer technology, laying lines of plastic extruded at a high temperature on a 2 dimensional descending platform.  The plastic components of the machine, the computer aided design, and the resulting plan files for actual objects are all open source and highly resistant to corruption and forking.  In addition to the scope of objects and devices that can be devised of plastic, scrap material recycling equipment, circuit boards, and other types of material like metal printing are all in various stages of planning and production.

Cryptocurrencies, specifically the reference model Bitcoin is opensource’s most important creation to date.  It enforces honesty and the retention of purchasing power of unspent currency.  While transactions are anonymous by default (with some careful planning) it uses a peer to peer system to distribute a ledger of all transactions ever performed to every Bitcoin wallet, commonly known as the block chain.  Despite some misconceptions, wallets can be traced back to people with a reasonable amount of ease, should a legal response be warranted.  New coins or ‘very hard to guess’ numbers are awarded to ‘miners’ who on average exert the most computational work to obtain them.  Unlike all currencies and equities today, new Bitcoins are allowed to be found by any miner by consensus, not issued to ‘special’ parties by decree or fiat.  All transactions are performed independently of any central authorities, forcing security services like banks to compete strictly on the quality of their service and price efficiency.

The broader open source communities dual will and action to avoid hierarchy has paid off.  Wildly successful without the usual hierarchical graft despite not having direct corollary of financial reward to cooperative effort contributed.  Economy of scale, uncorrupted, is humanities civilizing force.  It seems as if the scale of humans has been reached where the benefits of cooperation exceed the wealth extracting hard power of master/slave hierarchies.  Vast concentration of wealth and power is not necessary to promote economic growth, just the peer to peer information sharing power of the Internet, and the tools to use it when we personally need it.

Prejudice – Real life situation, how to cope

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NY-guns

I had an experience I’d like to share.  I went to a gun range to practice shooting.  In case you didn’t know I’m a New York City resident.  This range was outside of the city.  I arrived early and had a wait a bit for my turn.   There were two employees and a half dozen regulars talking to each other casually about guns.

From what I gathered at least three of the regulars were present or retired law enforcement.  Nobody gave me the creeps, and they all knew each other, so it was pretty clear these were all upstanding citizens.  They were loud and maybe a bit boisterous.  Perhaps it was a lifetime of a deafening hobby effecting their ability to hear their own voices.

I was first shocked when I signed in.  The manager told me I would be tolerated this visit but I was not welcome.  That I should not come back.  Looking to diffuse the situation and not waste my trip, I agreed.  I took it on it’s face and sat down.  That’s when the ribbing started.  Nothing was said directly said to me, but hypothetical conversation started among the regulars.  It’s rapid conclusion was that ‘city slickers’ should stay in the city.  One poor fellow who was also clearly a regular defended his status as ‘not a city slicker’ for a full minute.  This went on for the duration of the wait.  Without knowing anything about me except that I lived in NYC, it was clear everyone there was prejudiced against me.

Eventually it was my turn to shoot and I did.   I paid and left without any altercations.

What were they really saying?  They were criticizing my society, New York City.  As you know from the type one civilization paper, that prejudice is really the observation of psychopaths controlling someone else’s society.  What were they trying to accomplish?   Rationally nothing, or maybe trying to get me not to come back.  But subconciously, they were signaling to me that by living in the city I was supporting psychopathic control.  Their metaminds were trying to persuade mine that it was acting in an unconciousnable way.  They want to hold me responsible for some harm caused to them by a society I support, or to get me to hold myself responsible.  Is it rational?   Perhaps not, but it is useful information.  My society is being manipulated by psychopaths.

Of course this information is too vague to locate the psychopaths, and even if I could, what could I do?  NYC is a very large complex hierarchy which will excel at hiding them from me.  I certainly can’t identify them much less demand their removal.  All I can do identify the psychopathic behaviour and shun it. but how do I do that?

Well lets look at the context.  I’m at a gun range and nearly every conversation I heard was gun related.  So perhaps they are saying that NYC psychopaths are trying to do something to their hobby,  perhaps even their livelihood or freedom.  That fits perfectly.  NYC is the largest city in the country by a factor of two.  There are legitimate reasons to not want a gun in every house.  Mistakes are very costly.  Stray bullets can and do kill in cities.  It’s part of the population density.  But I’m not in the city. I’m at a gun range in a much less dense area.   If you don’t want to disarm, simply don’t travel to the city.

But that’s the rub.  The city and particularly it’s mayor are trying to change gun laws everywhere on earth.  The city is trying to change the world to suit it’s needs.  It is trying to eliminate guns everywhere so they can’t be brought into the city.  A wish of homogeneity of sufficient scope is ultimately psychopathic.  It’s insane to try and dictate rights of others, everywhere else, where population density isn’t so high.  The cities society must think it’s the master and the world is the slave.

So the city IS attacking these folks and they are angry that I am part of it.  They are right, it is my society.  I recognise this and before I leave I apologize for my city and promise never to return.  I would love to shun the city, but everything I can do that directly shuns their gun policies is illegal.  I can sell my home and leave but that doesn’t suit my smallest society, my family.  So because I won’t leave the society of my family, the city has become an ultimate authority for me.

My options are limited and there is really only one choice for me.  Work to make NYC less powerful.  Break it down into smaller pieces until it’s citizens can clearly see the corruption before them.  Not talking about cutting off funding.  Leave that intact and break it up fairly.  Instead return jurisdiction and regulation back down to to the burroughs.  Time for burroughs to make their own decisions.  The mayor of Manhattan is not your king.  It’s our responsibility to reign in the insanity.  It’s time we claimed responsibility for what we enable.

In case I seem flip, or damn casual about my intent to legally dismantle NYC into five smaller cities one law at a time, I don’t take this lightly.  Of course I don’t, it’s my society.  I actually choose it.  I grew up outside the city and longed for the equity of race and religion, the lower taxes, and the sensible convenience of a well established mass transit system.  In fact I was not predisposed to this conclusion and reached it while writing this post and reviewing my own document on a type one civilization.  I’m as shocked as you are, perhaps more so.  But until we can screen for psychopaths we don’t have a choice.  To protect our societies from those who only compete and wish to make us slaves, we must shrink our economies until they are obvious.  Only when we can screen out psychopaths at a distance, can we trust at a distance as well.

Kohlberg, psychopaths, and the pointless tragedy of Socrates

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Socrates

The problem with most of our modern social models is they assume that humanity is exactly one global set of behavioural variations.  This makes sense as actionable study of psychopaths has really started in the early 70s.  Without a concerted effort until the 1990s.  Psychopathy as completely different set of social behaviour is only 40 years old, and it’s most definitive test, the MRI word list, only 30.

Lawrence Kohlberg developed a theory of moral development.  Of course his development model assumes all humans could display all behaviours but this is not true.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kohlberg%27s_stages_of_moral_development

It turns out only the first four stages of moral development are available to psychopaths.  The highest a human with only a master/slave model of interaction is a level four (of six) or the law and order model of society.  Level 5 is almost a literal definition of applied empathy, and level six is expanding empathy beyond the current physical and temporal constraints into a system of higher principals.  No empathy IS the definition of a psychopath.

For simplicities sake, I’m working on the principal the proceeding stages are automatically available (they seem to be) when a higher stage is accomplished.  Theoretically psychopaths could accept that society is their master and they the slave, IF they accept that all the empaths working together are superior to their self in every way, AND that is unlikely to change.  Without screening it is impossible to guarantee a psychopath will never perceive a golden opportunity rapidly plunging them back into a two or a one (what’s in it for me.) on Kohlberg’s scale.  So for now it seems they are reduced to the highest possible consistent state of a three, assuming that they have accepted a ‘social norm’ that many people would take a golden opportunity.  Unfortunately this is true enough in a society where their imperceptibility is the norm.

I have long contended that no society could be peaceful unless their entire membership is at least a four or law and order oriented.  Then post conventional agents could adjust the laws as needed, and the society could adapt to their environment without conflict.

When Socrates was threatened with death he contented that law and order were the minimal requirements for a peaceful civilization.  Without the aid of Kohlberg’s stages I think he was describing a level four citizen as a societies minimal requirement for progress and peace.  What Socrates didn’t know is that (absent genetic screening) that a percentage of indistinguishable humans could never become a stage four in moral development.  So long as some high functioning humans can’t get past a three, there can never really be peace.

I understand Socrates decision at both a gut and an intellectual level, but he didn’t have all the information.  He didn’t know that some people could never ever be reliable fours, and could never truly revere law and order, no matter how intelligent or logical they became.  That they just didn’t have a conscience, and we just couldn’t spot them every time.  If he did he would have realized that the social contract had always been invalid, because some of it’s signers traded a property they could not have ever owned.  The capacity for complete reliability.  He would have ran.  He would have raised and army, and he would have crushed the disintegrating country that condemned him.

What a tragic waste.