see also:
- Language is the DNA of concept-domain Entities
- corporeal continuity and cancer
- Selfiishness
- Organization As Entity
- Organismal Identity
- Organismal
Our notion of “ethics” and “justice” are directly tied to the order parameter of our identity.
I’m a married man, and my wife and I don’t strongly desire children. We also mostly stay home. Thus, when we meditate on ourselves as part of something larger than ourselves, it’s easy to see ourselves as members of the world, and “feel” directly impacted by events that don’t directly impact us but do impact others (e.g. LGBTQ+ rights). When someone has a healthy household and family, they’re “world” becomes smaller and collapses around their family. They still see their families position as a member of something larger, but they “identify” much more closely as members of a family than members of society.
espoused conservative values are a consequence of smaller values for this order parameter. ethics driven primarily “what’s good for my family” potentially to the detriment of society. it’s only “selfish” insofar as the voting behavior is governed primarily by considering the family unit as the “self”. my progressive liberal attitudes are selfish too, but that’s because I identify my “self” as a much larger system. when something is frustrating the general stable functioning of society, it is literally an affront to me. The “short-sightedness” associated with supporting fascist values is identifiable to interpreting the order parameter here as the sight “radius”. ethics are governed by the length of this “sightedness”, which is actually a quality of how “big” your identity is.
As a consequence, it’s clear why there’s nothing “inherently wrong” with governing one’s ethics by perceived “family values” (regardless whether those values are actually optimal for the family unit or not). But it is also a signal of a kind of… incompatibility. Like how cancer could be interpreted as “doing what’s best for itself” while also being “incompatible” with the rest of the body. The “shorted-sighted” behaviors end up consuming and destroying the environment within which it inhabits because it has no regard for anythign but itself, because it is not a component of the broader thing.
“…the greater good… the greater good…”>
the issue here though is fascism. this construction is a few steps away from “the individual should cede their autonomy to any more organized collective that comes along”, which clearly isn’t right.
would be good to look at examples where one organization subsummed another resulting in harm to its constituents, like the mcdonnel douglas boeing merger, or the republicans propping up the moral majority as a convenience, but then creating a world in which half the country have joined an apocalyptic death cult which has of course also consumed the republican party top and bottom.
the order parameter thing here is related to the holobiont, collective organism thing.
I posit that there exists some order parameter that puts me and a portuguese man-o-war on a similar scale, such that it makes sense to describe us as a particular kind of “similar” organisms. in so far as I — as an entity unto myself — am more similar to a man-o-war than it is to a corporation. it’s functional complexity is appropriately analogized to my organs, despite the genetic hybridity or whatever.