Backcasting morality

[pataphor]

If history has taught us anything, then the victor defining who was
wrong or right must be part of it.

One of the great pluses of postmodernism was that it allowed everyone to
gain meaning by constructing appropriate narratives for their situation,
or by attacking and deconstructing the just so stories oppressors use to
self justify.

I was never a fan of the kind of postmodernism that was very prevalent
in academia, the type of postmodernism that aims to impress and play
with words mainly to signal the status of the narrator.

Of course signaling is a big part of the effect a message will have and
as such it also functions to define an audience. But for me,
postmodernism's true value has always been the enabling of a rational
discourse by the deconstruction and recombination of old values and
narratives. Unnecessary status signaling often serves to strengthen the
position of the narrator at the cost of facilitating dialogue.

It is this same kind of fake morality that must be overcome in our
social and economic systems. The narrative goes somewhat like this:

"In order to better the outcomes for all, we must provide incentives.
Since people strive for wealth and status we must allow some of us to
become rich, lest nobody who is not properly incentivized like this will
expend the necessary effort to create new and desirable things."

However, this morality compromises with some evil. Humans dislike too
great differences in status or wealth and any future humans would feel
comfortable in would set limits to those inequalities. Furthermore we
have the effect of wealthy people influencing the very control
mechanisms that enabled them to gain the trust of the masses in the
first place, creating an out of control spiral of regulatory capture.

The problem is that by accepting this logic of sacrificing one good for
another we end up in a system that is inconsistent. In such a system
people with a lot of money are per definition philanthropists because
supposedly they could not have gained this wealth without catering to
some invisible hand of the market. But now the market defines what is good.

Some people try to get around this conundrum by stating that it does not
even matter if the market is good or bad because there is no way to
resist its effects. But this is just a logical fallacy, an infinite loop
caused by forgetting that it is the victor who defines the markets.

In a way what we are witnessing here is the age old problem of the
demiurge not able or willing to see what lies beyond him. It is
understandable for this to happen because humanity has progressed so
much it is now up to us to create this future.

What future do we want? Do we want a future with sex without love? Do we
want a future that sacrifices human values one by one? Pay money for
sex, represent some other person's interests in exchange for safety? Let
rich people invent rationales about how good it is that that they have
so much money?

The one thing that lies beyond modernism and postmodernism is the act of
creating moral systems by imagining a future and then finding a viable
path from now to then. Maybe the now leaves no path to there, maybe it
does. But if there is a path it would be preferable if it would not lead
us into temptation.

So how would such a future where people are working in their own
interest while still contributing to the common cause look like and how
would it retroactively judge our current value system?

For one thing it would be easy to redefine our current wealthy
philantropes as just people blocking the way forward with their massive
fortunes. The market 'obviously' (the scare quotes are there because
we're judging things from a possible future moral system) works better
when there are lots of small elements who form temporary alliances than
when massive bureaucratic power structures would hold progress hostage
to the interests of a few. Also, it's just math. Yes, math is also
subject to a choice between systems.

The task before us is to envision a way to get what we want without
making compromises, because those will blind us and lead us into
inconsistent systems that can't make progress. If it turns out there is
no way to make a system that is consistent with all our values we must
jump, not crawl. But here's to hoping that our current cognitive
complexity is too tiny to prevent solving the combinatoric puzzles.

There must be a reason space is almost empty. Could it be they left all
this space to whoever comes after? Just like it is good practice to
occupy only one chair in an otherwise empty waiting room full of chairs
in anticipation of all there is to come?

Whatever the reasons it seems prudent to keep our moral continuum small
and consistent.

P.