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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   28223 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 23, 2023

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If you believe in prioritizing the destruction of everything your opponents value, it's because you don't want to coexist with your opponents in any way.

If your opponents and everything they value are evil, why should you *want( to coexist with them, unless you absolutely have to?

If you are unwilling to coexist with your opponents in any way, there is no way to make peace, as conflict becomes by necessity existential.

Which is certainly a problem if you lose such a conflict, but if a clear assessment of relative power indicates you're much, much more likely to win, how is your opponents ceasing to exist forever not a goal to be much desired, enough to be worth suffering serious losses to attain?

Which is certainly a problem if you lose such a conflict, but if a clear assessment of relative power indicates you're much, much more likely to win, how is your opponents ceasing to exist forever not a goal to be much desired, enough to be worth suffering serious losses to attain?

Nobody starts a war unless they are confident they can win. Yet, many lose. Humans are irrationally self-confident and overoptimistic. As the infamous Konkvistador said: "War is computation with tanks. War is truth revealing. As war proceeds uncertainty collapses."

Perhaps a perfectly rational being could take into account the meta-uncertainty, and only go to war when they were a thousand times sure they could win. But for mere humans, a willingness to coexist acts as a deontology to prevent you from making that kind of costly mistake.

If your opponents and everything they value are evil, why should you want to coexist with them, unless you absolutely have to?

You wouldn't. You're describing at how someone arrives at the mindset I'm describing. But of course, no large-scale, long-term stable collection of humans is actually evil in this sense, and those who come closest are notable by their commitment to the idea that large numbers of their neighbors are irredeemably evil.

Which is certainly a problem if you lose such a conflict, but if a clear assessment of relative power indicates you're much, much more likely to win, how is your opponents ceasing to exist forever not a goal to be much desired, enough to be worth suffering serious losses to attain?

"I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair."

History is littered with societies thinking themselves invincible, only to be destroyed in conflict. Sometimes the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must, but sometimes the strong break their teeth on the "weak" they attempt to victimize.

History is littered with societies thinking themselves invincible, only to be destroyed in conflict

Except, you can't be destroyed in conflict if there's nobody outside your group to be in conflict with. If you conquer and force to submit and fully assimilate to your group and its ways, or else destroy, the whole rest of humanity, then the entire future of humanity belongs to your group.

Sometimes the strong do what they will and the weak suffer what they must

I think that not only are we here, but that in this case, "the strong" are indeed so powerful that they have better than even odds of pulling off the above-described world-domination. Again, if you subjugate and exterminate everybody until your group is the only one left, literally the whole of humanity, how is that not a "stable win"? And if you (IME correctly) assess that the odds are good that you can pull it off, then why not?

your group is the only one left, literally the whole of humanity, how is that not a "stable win"?

Queue the schisms.

Sure, but both sides of the schism are still your heirs/descendants…

At no point in this discussion have I used "group" to describe biological descendants, and ideological heredity is neither innate nor reliable. While ideologies can and do have descendants, no individual or group can be forced to either adopt or maintain adherence to an ideology.

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