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Saturday, 26 May 2018



The social intelligence moves towards a condition in which each agent's point of view, or relative centre, is treated equally, and so the inherent demand for justice for and on behalf of each agent, for their entitled respect, will have equal weight. This becomes the human law, but it is only so as a usurping of divine law or the caprice of the gods, which is what exercises the final choice and assignment of value. This divine caprice however, or its nakedly Darwinian form, is necessary to maintain the structure of society. Say there is a certain position of power or prestige, and this can be at any level, and in order to fill it a candidate needs to be motivated to a degree that requires significant sacrifice of other options. To ensure that one such candidate exists many must be trained, must voluntarily submit to the training. Only one can be chosen, but each must train as if they will accept no other outcome. Since there can only be one winner the losers need to find a way to deal with the pure negativity of losing. The structure can offer consolations to some degree. If it is a sporting contest, then there is the hope of doing better next season, if it is a skill competition, there are lesser but meaningful roles that can be accepted by the 'runners up'. At some point these compensatory mechanisms within the system break down, especially as each agent's demand for personal preeminence grows more uncompromising. The system itself can be reconfigured to some degree, but each time this is done its anchoring in the unsearchable will of the gods is weakened and it grows more fragile. The social structure is designed to assign meaning to failure, to create such meanings out of nothing, to even make failure more meaningful than success, but its ability to do so is inherently unstable. The more the structure succeeds in its task of recycling empty sacrifice into meaning, the weaker it becomes. There must be periodic tantrums also known as revolutions.

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