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Metaphysics_of

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  1. Repentance in a Moral Society There is no god in modern society. There was a time when humans sought to ascend to that role through the sciences. Now even the most prominent figures of society resides within itself; society, the human sphere; an earthly one that we are born into and die in. Yet human abstraction is unchanged. Society itself is seen as a being with a character of its own; the collective presence that never physically exists is only made whole by the shared views of the many. It is incapable of acting by itself, yet it compels millions to action. This inanimate figment is no substitute for an animate god that itself formulates its own judgements and casts its own justice. Forgive the derivative postmodern deluge, it is just that the flood of transformation has left an open landscape in which I simply wish to plant the seed of question while the soil is still wet. Truly, I write this because I do not know the solution to something that will be of great concern in the coming years. How is sin forgiven without god? I do not mean "sin" in a theological sense, despite the invocations of god this is not a religious piece of writing. I write of sin as the action that proves a being immoral in society. In a society of morality, it is the action in which a person loses their humanity to the collective by consequence of an inhuman action. We are leaving the realm of thought where crime is only an infraction upon another; where punishment is a penalty in the playing field of the market. We transition to a moral society, where crime is not an infraction against another, it is the contrary to the humanity of society itself. Justice follows as the victory of the absolutes good and evil, and rightly so. Moral crime in a moral society is the essence of "big crimes"; the takedown of the Ponzi scheme of Bernie Madoff, the condemnent of the sexual abuses of Harvey Weinstein and Jeffrey Epstein, the prosecution of Derek Chauvin for the murder of George Floyd; the legal crime aligns with the moral crime to punish the perpetrators traditionally and strip them of their humanity; their social citizenship so to speak. A moral society has moral crimes. A moral society has no place for the immoral. Before the introduction of christianity and modern philosophy dictating a regularized system of punishment that maintained individual right there have historically been 2 punishments for moral crime; exile and death. While our society today thankfully does not have the same amiability to death that ancient societies had, exile has always been the choice of punishment for a once moral person that commits a sin against their society. To be born of sin, to be defined as selfish market actors fighting for survival, we have culpability, for crime in said case is the abuse of our nature. Today, we are born just. A moral crime is not a failure of our reasonable sensibilities, but an alternation of the goodness of human nature by a conscious and aware inhuman act. The immoral have no grounds to participate in society for they are not part of it. We have no moral law in our society today. Our society is not however without moral punishment. A victim of moral crime is a question of identity for the whole of a moral community. By force of the abstract ideal, the principles of the collective invoke the many to uphold the goodness of society and the perpetrator is effectively exiled from participating in society. I have no stance on the proliferation of moral punishment. Indeed I cannot deny the wrongness of those brought down by what has been referred to as "cancel culture". I also do not believe that we as a species are weak and desperate enough to fall to the right's "slippery slope" argument that we will continuously target lesser and lesser moral crimes with the absolute punishment of exile until the point where the collective ideal is completely stripped from any individual capability of achieving it. I do believe that in a moral society, in the modern era, we are lacking the force that goes hand in hand with sin; repentance. The only recovery from moral crime is forgiveness. As we deal more with moral practice and moral punishment it is of the upmost importance that those who have committed moral crime be given a route back to humanity, back to participation in society. Who is to give forgiveness for the collective? How is forgiveness possible if there is no natural culpability to moral crime; that a human with goodness in heart would never be capable of immorality. I do not know how we move forward without a path of redemption. If indeed wrong is committed, there is nothing gained by exiling the embodied wrongs. Repentance cannot exist without forgiveness and forgiveness cannot exist without the belief that with repentance can emerge a stronger community, that by learning to be moral, we can become even better people than our moral teachers, and have an awareness of what is right that can extend beyond the sight of those who have never had to overcome the evil within themselves.
  2. The Limits of Hate and the Post-Modern Gamble For lack of a better introduction, I will start with a rather unrelated proposition that I will loosely connect via some transitioning to the subject of this writing. The US became a "nation" under FDR. Despite the inequalities of the era, it was the formalization of the notion that each citizen is a participant in a government that acts not solely for the facilitation of living, but for the advancements of collective national interests. Since then and continuing on to this day, the "public good" has been at the center of political discussion in American politics. The forces of political patronage and laissez-faire ideology were no longer the predominant talking points of politicians. National values, identity, and public wellbeing were debated in presidential contests, the national vision of the winner becoming the national vision of the nation for the foreseeable future. Although a winner take all system, national visions were indeed national and at least attempted, whether truthfully or not, to be universal to every citizen. That formality is gone. In the mid 1990s, with all of the strategic architecture in place from the Reagan revolution, conservative strategists came to a realization. Perhaps it was due to the neoliberal ideologies at the time as this realization also arose in the field of behavioral economics, but regardless of the reason how, conservative strategists came to the ultimate conclusion that their political power was best acquired by adopting a strict win/loss strategy. Of course, there is no big surprise in this realization. It is common sense in any game. What is unique in this approach, is the use of a certain behavioral economic approach in this political strategy. The key flaw in market/realist theory that is often pointed out by thinkers such as William Foster Lloyd, Garrett Hardin, and Elinor Ostrom, is the tragedy of the commons in which the overwhelming incentive for each actor to exploit the resources of a system will lead to the collapse of the system itself and the loss of all actors. Key take away for the current stream of thought: in a purely competitive system no actor has incentive to act for the common good. An example more specific to the following thinking: in behavioral economic theory, similar to the motivation of acquiring voters for a political party, there is NO increase in number of customers for a business that compromises its business objectives and there is NO loss in number of customers for a business that doubles down on its business objectives. Research done for "megabanks" such as Bank of America (pardon me for forgetting the source here) have shown that no added transparency, no added personalization, no added benefits will persuade potential customers not interested in participating in a "megabank" from becoming customers. Similarly, no cut of benefits, no decrease in customer satisfaction will cause an existing "megabank" customer from leaving said "megabank". Core principle of behavioral economics: consumers are driven just as much by affect as they are by utility. This is quite the paradigm shift when applied to conservative strategy. By doubling down on conservative ideology, conservatives can better rally support and hardline their agendas through congress while knowing that they will not lose their moderate voters. They can forgo the public good and play a game of absolutes to liven conservative voters and pull right leaning moderates with them. Well, this is partisanship 101. At least it was until Donald Trump proved even the public good of morality need not be maintained under this strategy. In response to the threat right wing absolutism poses, we have seen the rise of left wing absolutism; the left's rallying of their own base. Thus the normal distribution that should represent the spectrum of political beliefs has become bimodal; pulled to either end by each extreme. In this game of absolute ideology, there is not just null benefit from moderation, there are negative consequences as moderation becomes a betrayal of the extreme. With these assumptions in place, there is no competitive disadvantage to fueling hate, not just for the other party but one's own by continuing to pull deeper dissatisfied moderates. Each side will not lose voters and will only serve to increase the likelihood of voter turnout. This is the postmodern gamble. When the actors are solidified, it is the faith in institutions by the nature of their inertia. Be it the case of a party or a business that need not care for the public good, this strategy of maximizing competitive advantage while alienating non consumers and promoting internal dissatisfaction relies on the faith that the institution can bear the brunt of the following instability; that the order that forms society, built upon hundreds of years of constructivist norms, somehow is order in and of itself. It is the gamble that the system itself that has become disembodied from human wills; that the structure that has led to these competitive motivations has long since ceased to be human organization and has in some way become structural fact of our environments; a "natural" mechanism of human operation in and of itself. I mean this not in the popular notion that people have "accepted the way things are". I put forward the postmodern premise that it is not the acceptance of norms, it is the understanding of institutions as the nature of society; that the mechanisms of civilization are perceived as the physical laws of nature. To invoke a popular postmodern case, I allude not to the understanding of racism as systematic; I conclude that the "racial lens" itself is a facet of society; integral to it, that components of society such as race are perceived as the operating mechanism itself. It is the perception that these norms themselves are the origins of thought, not the system of logic that controls thought, that is the heart of this premise. The question of who is responsible for the common good is not a question of political science but of the political process. When we expect the public good to be stable in and of itself; that it is the truth of our environment, and we assume it can fend for itself while we pollute it with the products of exploitation for personal gains, at some point the public good, the "Mother Earth" of this comparison, or in this case, the fundamental faith and agreement in the social contract that originally formed a nation, dissolves under the weight of those who assumed it could bear the weight of strategic instability.
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