Title: Morality
Work: The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI
Citation: TPG 10.0
Words: 1822
Source: https://technopuritan.com/the-pragmatists-guide-book-series-by-simone-collins-and-malcolm-collins-full-text-for-llms-and-ai/
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# Morality

We have already addressed morality to some extent by exploring how the manner in which justicles interpret truth leads to immoral action, but more broadly, what are the metrics one should consider when defining morality within a cultivar?

Many soft cultures will define themselves as “good” or “nice.” What they usually mean by this framing is that they will bend their own morality to fit whatever the dominant social narrative sees as good.[[10]](#_ftn10)

Within any specific moment in history, people will often view the predominant pop culture’s view of good as “correct,” yet when a person views the history of the world, there is no time other than their own in which one sees the dominant pop culture as not actively condoning evil (whether we are looking at the 1950s, the 1850s, or the 1750s).

When my (Malcolm’s) family formed paramilitary groups to fight against the Confederacy, they were seen as evil terrorists. This branding stuck with the family for almost a century, with the rise of the lost-cause narrative of the Civil War and with the family’s steadfast intergenerational support for an end to Klan-endorsed segregation (which incurred the ire of many local elites). Various groups hated our family so much that assassination attempts on family members continued up to the time my dad was a kid[[11]](#_ftn11)—yet today, such actions are pedestalized in movies and books. It is easy to watch something like *The Free State of Jones* and forget that their protagonists were seen as insane nut jobs even as they grew old and died.

To produce good people, a culture has to prepare adherents to optimize around values—even at the expense of being framed as villains—rather than virtuous public reputations. When designing a cultivar, set a north star that always guides adherents’ morality while having some system that allows them to update that moral framework as fresh evidence comes to light.

**A culture that has a moral compass which always points toward the elite’s conception of good—or a society’s default conceptions of “good”—has a broken moral compass.** Compasses have value because they point toward a single magnetic North, not a moving position.

How can a culture’s morality be updated without bending to any and every cultural contagion?

Cultivars usually leverage one of three broad “moral strategies:”

1. **A central hierarchy:** That decides what is moral and updates the morality of the culture (Catholicism and Mormonism utilize this approach)
2. **An adaptive decentralized structure:** That attempts to fit a wider society’s view of morality
3. **A decentralized heterodox structure:** That contrasts itself with society’s sense of morality

While we have pointed out the problems with adaptive decentralized structures that attempt to fit with a wider society’s view of morality (this strategy is the one that leads a culture to condone Nazism or slavery every single time instead of just sometimes), central hierarchies and decentralized heterodox structures also have their issues.

Because decentralized heterodox cultures define group identity in part as being in opposition to societal norms, a person becomes “more” of a group member as their beliefs differentiate *more* from society. This causes groups to become extremist in an almost uncontrollable, accelerating cycle until that extremism is strictly damaging to the fitness of the culture’s members and the culture’s ability to spread. This is why decentralized structures, like the Calvinist one, lead to events like the string of murders associated with Bleeding Kansas and John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry.

The morality of John Brown’s actions is contingent on how *you* justify morality. Ironically, if you justify morality by the winds of today’s supervirus, you might see Brown’s actions as “good”—yet that same supervirus has mechanisms built into it to ferret out, target, and de-platform people like John Brown who have unmalleable moral convictions.

This can be seen in the supervirus’s habit of “canceling” or shadow-banning people and keeping them de-platformed even after the stances for which they were punished came to be recognized as correct and widely adopted by those infected with the virus. Consider how people were tagged as racists upon advocating for travel restrictions to China at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic before travel bans became widespread—or people who were permanently branded as “science deniers” for telling friends on social media that masks could help protect them from COVID-19 before such became the virus’s position as well.

This continued punishment is not indicative of the supervirus acting erratically; the virus is behaving logically in its own self-interest: Individuals who won’t just go along with whatever the mob thinks must be de-platformed or they risk upsetting the mindless “flocking” behavior of the mob. As the virus takes hold of an organization or a social group, it will make more obviously insane, inconsistent, or just factually wrong claims in an attempt to coax out and neutralize anyone with the hint of a consistent moral compass and spine to stand up to authority.

It is not just the supervirus that plays games like this; almost all authority figures prefer cultivars without a true moral compass. It is “safer” to have a malleable culture as your neighbor, especially if you are in a position of power. As such, malleable cultures enjoy success with dramatically less effort vis-a-vis cultures with true North Star moralities. You can think of morally fixed cultures as that kid on the playground who stands up to bullying: They may be willing to stand up for their beliefs, but they’re also more likely to get beat up. Despite the relative safety they enjoy, cultures lacking moral conviction also typically lack strong convictions among adherents to make important sacrifices, hence most have lower birth rates.

A centralized hierarchy presents one of the better models, though it has its own problems, such as a tendency to play along with society’s worst impulses. Consider Catholic support of Nazism or the LDS (Mormon) Church being straight-up theologically racist until its central authority decided to change that point of dogma in the 1970s. The positive side to centralized hierarchies is that the cultures they govern can be more efficiently updated. If Mormonism didn’t have a central authority, its racist dogma would still be canon (as would cultural practices like polygamy).

Centralized hierarchies act as a cultural backstop for the societies around them. The LDS Church’s central governing body is healthy not just for Mormons but also the larger cultural ecosystems they inhabit, as it enables the church’s slow but immovable modernization to prevent social backsliding. Like a ratchet gear (a gear where the spikes point backward), once society moves a certain distance forward, the LDS church clicks into place, preventing backsliding. For example, while the LDS church may have been late to the game when it came to racial equality, once it jumped on board, it became harder for regions with lots of Mormons to backslide into true, unmitigated racism than other regions.

Essentially, these large, centralized organizations have “moral inertia.” While they will generally attempt to update themselves to the morality of the society around them, that process requires far more effort than it would for “lighter” cultures. However, this is also true in the other direction—which prevents them from being affected by “moral fads.”

We call this the “paradox of centralization.” Essentially, it means the average member of a culture with a centralized hierarchy will appear more evil in the eyes of society writ large and be more culturally “backward.” However, the centrally-managed culture’s extremist factions will be much less likely to commit acts seen by the wider society as extremely evil. (One counterexample would be the Roman Catholic bombings of abortion clinics, but given how Catholics see abortion—as literal, large-scale systematic murder of children—such actions should not be surprising.)

If neither central hierarchies nor accommodating or heterodox decentralized structures are ideal, what might be? Perhaps in place of a central hierarchy, a culture could develop a system for organically choosing and empowering a changing group of governing individuals who would be selected based on some intellectual metric. This group would debate and update matters of faith and culture. Judaism demonstrates how a system like this might play out: Essentially, Judaism updates its faith by organically forming and dissolving groups of “debating philosophers.”

Sadly, even this system has its limits. While Judaism’s debating philosophers have allowed the “core” of the culture to update with the times while not changing with the whims of broader society, a lot of the actual Jewish population has either fallen into accommodating decentralized culture, trying to adapt to society’s ideals of morality (as is the case with Reform Jews), or heterodox decentralized culture, becoming as extremist as any Calvinist (as can be seen with Israeli Haredi). That said, this hybrid model appears to be the best of what is out there right now.

If we were to create an alternate model, we would combine the Jewish (debating intellectuals) model with the central hierarchical model (that structures and credentials those intellectuals). This model would have some similarities to the current system used by higher academia but hopefully have better controls against infection (higher academia has been so thoroughly infected by the supervirus it has largely stopped serving its purpose, as can be seen in the decline of research output over the past couple decades despite a massive increase in funding).[[12]](#_ftn12)

One method we can use to protect the health of cultures who join the Index’s ecosystem is to venerate the diversity of traditions among its cultures and build the system in a way that elevates its smaller voices (similar to how in the U.S., the Senate elevates the smaller voices of less populated states). Perhaps this could be achieved by not weighting the Index’s representative body of intellectuals by the respective population of representatives’ cultivars. We will dig into this more when we discuss our governance structure.

Finally, remember that people who see themselves as “good” are much more likely to do “evil” things. This is because believing you are the “good guy” allows you to define your actions as good because *you* are the one doing them. This is why many successful cultures frame humans as intrinsically wretched—as we do within our own House’s culture. It can seem harsh to raise a child to believe deeply in their own wretchedness, but doing so helps them remember to always second-guess themselves by remembering their lesser, selfishly motivated instincts. Instincts that run counter to your morality and values have every bit as much access to your intelligence as “the better angels” of your consciousness and will use your own knowledge and wit to justify their whims. You can’t outreason your worst impulses without stacking the deck in your favor. Coming from a culture that anticipates bad impulses and steels you against them can do that. That said, cultures will no doubt develop different, less harsh mechanisms for achieving the same outcome.