While I am clearing the decks, I have had a worldbuilding article sitting around that just won’t congeal, so in the absence of any signs of congelation, I figured I’d dump it here for general interest and possibly assisting people who might need a helping thought to grasp the Imperial take on things.
It’s essentially some thoughts I had after reading these articles, from the Everything Studies blog by John Nerst, which I link should you wish to read them beforehand for relevant context:
- The Tilted Political Compass, Part One
- The Tilted Political Compass, Part Two
- Variations on the Tilted Political Compass
…and you probably should, or this may not make a whole lot of sense.
So the first of the novel axes suggested here is decoupling, essentially taking the concept of cognitive decoupling and translating it into this realm by asking: what if it’s not about connections between ideas, but connections between people?
Now, I believe we have already established that the eldrae in particular and Imperial society in general can be pretty damned hard-core about their cognitive decoupling.
Well, I think we can establish, based on the definitions given there, they’re also pretty damned hard-core about their social decoupling:
In decoupled society the default relationship between two people is that of no obligations whatsoever (special circumstances like friendship or family bonds don’t count since we’re talking about the macro scale). The only obligations are to respect explicitly stated rights and agreements. No expectations beyond that are valid (for example, between employers and employees). Social problems can and should be adressed with formal means: contracts, property rights, tort law. Political decouplers like money and the market as institutions because they quantify and decontextualize social obligations.
In coupled society what it means to be a good person or what may be required of you at any point is open-ended. There are not clear boundaries between people and you are expected to take others’ or society’s interests into account as much as your own. Anything you do that plausibly affects anyone or anything outside yourself is everybody’s business; duties are not fully specified and can never be completely discharged or fulfilled. Social problems can and should be adressed by everyone taking on themselves to be more self-sacrificing and focus less on what rights they have to do what they want. Political couplers dislike money and the market for the same reasons decouplers like it.
Sound familiar? Well, it should.
An Imperial Stereotype Speaks Against Coupled Societies, And Why They Are So Terrible:
“We live in a society!” says some clichéd statist stereotype. “Yes,” our protagonist responds, “we do, because we choose to. We respect the rights and bind ourselves to the obligations of our society, of and to each other - as with all our other associations - because cooperation towards mutual benefit is the optimal state for all involved. We have laws and institutions clarifying the boundaries around which this happens simply to reduce transaction costs and prevent conflict, which detract from the benefit each achieves. We are just, honest, clement, generous, loyal, responsible, courteous, and kind not because we are required to be, but because that is the nature of the enlightened sophont, the best way to live. All civilized peoples must necessarily reach this conclusion.”
“We do not advance the claim that everyone has an indeterminate, non-dischargeable, potentially infinite duty to -claim on - everyone else. There is a term for people who owe indeterminate, non-dischargeable, potentially infinite duties. That term is ‘slave’. Yes, I said the s-word. Get over it. If your life, liberty, property, and/or obligations can be disposed of without your consent, then you’re a slave, however little your master chooses to exercise that control or however deluded you are about the nature or the righteousness of it. Even if it is only to compel you to ape the actions of the enlightened, that is a moral failure twice over - his for doing so, and yours for it being necessary.”
“Worse, despite that miserable and degraded state, it is nothing - nothing - compared to what you do to yourself by exerting that power over others. Just having it - be it as a singular despot, one vote among millions, or merely a compliant minion - is enough to make you an example of another term. A somewhat less popular s-word. And when your ledger is at last added up, that will be counted against you.”
(“Bloody grovelers,” he mutters in an aside to himself. “What sort of people are so devoid of an ethical faculty as to need to exist in a state of mutual slavery just to be excellent to each other? Why would the universe make such beings?”)
The article then goes on to discuss them not merely as moral stances, but also as factual stances:
Coupling and decoupling as moral stances are obviously politically relevant. How about as factual stances? At least as much. According to a decoupled view, human beings are built from the inside out. They have traits, tastes and behaviors that results from a combination of inborn nature, rational thought and acts of will, and social structures are the emergent result of them interacting. In the coupled view, human beings are created from the outside in. They’re lumps of clay shaped to perform the roles assigned to them by a system tending to perpetuate itself, and individual selves are the emergent result of socialization into these roles.
And that also ought to sound pretty familiar, too. Not terribly fond of automatonists, Marxists, or Last Men around those parts, either.
That’s the major stuff I’m going to quote (all from part 1), but reading onwards also discusses the thrive-survive axis (naturally, as you might expect, the Imperials are hard-core thrivers; although this hits the limit of the axis system inasmuch as they have whittled down a very few core principles on which there is absolutely no negotiation, in the understanding that these, these are the things which guarantee the survival that lets them be thrivers in every other respect.)
Chasing these axes down through the next couple of linked posts will probably explain why a lot of things work the way they do. In the variations post, in particular, take a particular look at Variation 6: Hierarchies and Variation 9.