Research:MDem/5.3r/1999 IBE

I think that everybody deserves housing, health care, and education, says the social-democrat.
"I hold that everyone deserves". "I defend that everybody deserves". "I guess that all people deserve". "I suppose that all humans deserve". "I imagine that all human beings deserve". "I believe" that everybody deserves.

I believe... that everybody deserves.
I believe... that everybody.

Let's stop and think about this arrangement of words for a bit. Isn't this an awfully strange construction? "I believe that everybody"?
To believe something is generally to reflect on the world and think or guess that something is likely to hold true. Or alternatively, to really want something to happen, without necessarily being absolutely certain it will actually occur. To believe something is generally not to know it with certainty, or even to know it in any solid way at all.
But everybody is a concept with a bit more absoluteness or finality to it. If everybody had an office chair, that would be a lot of office chairs. If everybody jumped off a cliff, that would be a terrifying prospect. If everybody was a fan of one specific sports team, it would begin to shift the expected outcomes of a lot of sports matches, because the league would have to re-calculate what kinds of match-ups were even worth having in light of every match having to contain a particular team, and perhaps some teams becoming seen as the "inevitable" or "impossible" pick to win, depending on why exactly people root for the team everyone likes. If everybody stayed home from school or from college lectures it would be on the news. If everybody just happened to have a portrait of Stalin somewhere in their house, you'd immediately ask what country was being talked about other than the United States.

I believe that everybody is a very strange thing to say, were it the case that you were talking about something you expect everyone to do. It's one thing, and probably a mostly harmless one, to say "I believe that everybody should have". But if you said "I believe that everybody should do"? Imagine that everyone in the United States had a copy of Pokémon HeartGold or SoulSilver and you said "I believe everybody should catch a shiny Legendary Pokémon". This task requires a 1 in eight-point-two thousand die roll, and can take anywhere from three consecutive hours to a year. How many people who booted up the game at least once do you think would actually catch one? Probably not all three hundred million people.

This is the thing about making a statement that starts with "I believe that everybody". Whatever comes at the end of the statement, if a statement tries to predict that individual people are going to actively complete some particular action, but it also claims that that action can be completed by all people, it is effectively claiming that the actions of each individual person are certain. Because if someone's belief that every Pokémon player will catch a shiny Entei is indeed accurate, that cannot happen without every individual person arriving at a successful result. The rate of all individuals together catching a shiny Pokémon must become 100%, and as time goes by, the present probability of each individual having succeeded in the past must become 1.

What is truly interesting about these kinds of statements is not what people wish for — not how big or small it is, and not even how it will be achieved. It is the act of reducing big, long, and potentially complicated journeys into a single number where we assume the journey already ended. That the adventure itself is not worth spending any time on, and that knowing the course of the entire incomplete ordeal in advance is something that is easy and simple for anyone to do. If "I believe that everybody" can make it to the end of a Pokémon game, tutorial areas, walkthroughs, and example gameplay footage become irrelevant. If "I believe that everybody" can solve a Sudoku, no need to explain how to do the puzzle. If "I believe that everybody" can learn to knit a sweater, no need to look up any patterns. If "I believe that everybody" can become a class-conscious worker... how? If there was an actual series of events between now and then, or if some unlucky suburban boy summoned up his fairy godparents and wished that everybody perfectly understood capitalism tomorrow, would there be any difference?

There is one particular problem with "I believe that everybody" statements: they appear to have all the content in the world, but they actually say nothing. Almost every printed novel spends hundreds of pages not skipping to the end and saying "a story happened" but going over all the things that happen between "I believe that" and "everybody". To spend time exactly laying out the route to an ending isn't an act of overconfidence. It is, in fact, the only way to have concrete proof that the author has a clear and un-confused understanding of how the characters' lives and accomplishments happened.

A metallic rule corroded

"I believe that everybody" statements are not good at descriptively explaining the world. This should seem evident enough once you have seen an "I believe that everybody" statement applying to any task where there is a less than 100 in 100 chance someone will have either the skill or the patience to succeed within any given period of time. But... what if it was very important that somebody did the thing other people hoped that they would do? Would that prior context of some other person needing the task to be completed change a person's actual probability of success?

If somebody was about to lift a bar weighing 100 pounds, and a coach was either not in the gym or in the gym specifically telling the weightlifter on every failure they shouldn't have not succeeded, the bar would still have the same mass of 45.4 kilograms.

Whether we like it or not, human beings are finite, and each person has a particular level of ability to produce a successful result at any given task, separately from whether anybody believes they can finish it or needs them to finish that task. This creates a very big and very under-examined problem in the field of ethics. How should our mental conception of what an ethical requirement generally is or can be change if it turns out that our mental model of what individuals or groups of people are capable of turns out to be different from what we believed it to be at the moment we created that ethical principle? Surely if we saw someone fail at a specific task in real time, we would simply update our expectations. But what if every single time we tried to predict that someone was capable of fulfilling a moral requirement that prediction was always wrong in every case? What if the entire concept of "should" was not what we thought it was? What if the entire concept of ethics was simply wrong?

At this point, you probably have an objection. The entire concept of ethics... wrong? Incorrect? How could that be possible? Isn't ethics something of a tool or technology as opposed to a descriptive science? Ethics is a bunch of hanging ideas that we float around and test out in various situations and see if they serve us. Ethics is a distant goal to aspire to, or a neat discovery to share with people in a blog post in hopes they will become your friends. Ethics is this. Ethics is that.

What you might not have realized is that if you just objected to the concept of ethics being incorrect, then you implicitly said an "I believe that everybody" statement. I believe that everybody should think that ethics means this and functions in the real world in this particular way. But although someone might or might not believe that, whether the projected outcome someone believes reflects the way the world around them descriptively functions in their own everyday experiences is entirely another story.

For one of the simplest cases, let us examine the golden rule. This proposition takes a few different forms in various ancient religions and well-known secular philosophies, but one of the best known formulations is: Do unto others as you would have others do unto you. This abstract sentiment can be further broken down into a series of basic assumptions as follows:

1. People exist within a social setting where they have regular contact with other people.
2. People possess the ability to do kind acts for others.
   
3. People have some idea what other people would want.
   
4. Acts of kindness will be appreciated.
   
5. Acts of kindness will be remembered.
   
6. Acts of kindness will affect the other person's future or general well-being.
   
7. Effects of an act of kindness will be passed on to other people.
   
8. Other people will be affected by the second act of kindness, and pass on the effects to further people.
   
9. The chain of people will eventually create a closed loop which somehow comes back to, if not precisely the very first person to be depicted in the example, at least some of the previous people in the chain, creating the illusion that human behavior is an overall amorphous pool of "culture" that each person simply contributes to and freely takes out of, as if local culture were some sort of magic wishing pond where the "magic" was that the pond was shallow enough to take a coin out.

As simple as this rule may seem on the surface, it is actually rather complicated on the inside. There are many layers of steps where the basic assumptions that cause the rule to be applicable could simply fail to be the case. An ethicist would refer to these situations as a "dysfunctional society". But that is not to say that such anomalous situations and dysfunctional societies do not happen, or that people should not be prepared for them to be what happens instead of the desired outcome.

One of the most obvious ways for this set of steps to be disrupted is for the long chain of people to simply stop in the middle and never come back to the first few people at the beginning. There are a lot of reasons this could happen. Perhaps a few people are genuinely selfish. But even if the vast majority of people are not, the possibility the people in the middle will carry on the chain is not guaranteed.

For a somewhat dramatic example, let's imagine that you live in the 1930s Soviet Union. You are an ordinary person. You get up and go to work every day. You have seen any number of odd, slightly corny slogans around you at times talking about how to build a brighter future. But one you remember, for some reason, is someone saying once that everyone should be proud to be an employee belonging to a business territory and contribute each day to the shared city and town facilities within society so that other people will do the same and your contribution will eventually come back to you. (They probably said it in a shorter, less awkward choice of words.) To you that makes sense. As people put up railroads, there will be railroads, there will be national parks when there are foresters and park rangers, it's the workers that build theater buildings and schools and fire departments. As people cooperate to build industries, everyone will slowly earn money, and however slowly it seems to be going right now there will be more stuff in general and more opportunities for leisure. You wish there didn't have to be so much time spent on tank engines but it is what it is.

Then one day you find out your neighbor got arrested. The investigation recently ended and she was released. The authorities were rather vague about the details. But when you ask her about what happened, she is all too quick to let loose information she probably shouldn't have said. The authorities were looking around for evidence of a conspiracy to attack the government. She showed no signs of being connected to the upper tiers of the conspiracy, so they ultimately let her go. But little did they know, she was part of a diffuse effort to sabotage ordinary workplaces, putting in seemingly valid work some days, other days secretly delivering a big hit to some of the worst decisions this accursed government makes. Fill an engine with sand here, leave a train boiler un-fixed there. She seems to have assumed that you might be interested in joining the "fun", because in her view, nobody in their right mind would actually be loyal to the central party or the increasingly ineffective "bureaucracy".

Leading up to this point, there have been two major ongoing developments: the development of the Trotskyites, an only partially-known faction that wanted to create some kind of second Communist party and take over the government, and a broader sea of people with vaguely anarchist, right-Liberal, or village-populist leanings who have no specific ulterior motive yet are tired of everything and simply want to break it all apart. The central government has been seeing less and less difference between the two each year and persecuting everyone in both of them plus a few ordinarily-sloppy managers just as ferociously. One big sea of chaos, one solution.

Let's compare this hypothetical situation back to the golden rule.

1. ✔ People have regular contact with other people.　 — other than seasonal workers.
2. ✘ People can do kind acts.　 — no, due to the slowly brewing age of cold wars and demanding government plans, some people are drained.
3. ✘ People know what other people want.　 — no, due to political polarization different swaths of people have wildly different goals and desires.
4. ✘ Kindness will be appreciated.　 — only by those who consider wrecking to be acts of kindness.
5. ✘ Kindness will be remembered.　 — no, due to rapid social change and people abandoning plans started earlier.
6. ✘ Kindness will affect the other person's well-being.　 — for complex reasons some people's situations may get worse as the historical situation develops even if other people are nice to them; everyone remains drained and it's hard to fill them back up.
7. ✘ Kindness will be passed on.　 — no, some people will turn against those who are kind.
8. ✔ Further people will be affected.　 — sometimes, to some extent, but only a fraction of outgoing connections will produce success.
9. ✘ Further people will be affected.　 — no, society becomes polarized into some sections that grow and some that disintegrate.
10. ✘ The chain will make a complete loop.　 — no, many people feel like everything they do is for nothing.

The golden rule states that when you do good things for other people just because they are the right thing to do, it will encourage other people to have better behavior, and through the indirect effect of many people chaining against each other perhaps in many directions, you will ultimately be able to create a better society through your own individual actions. But when there are severe antagonisms inside society, the chain is easily broken, and the rule overall fails to hold.

Of course, perhaps the limitation here could be that we have the wrong formulation of the golden rule.

One variation on the golden rule is its inverse, the silver rule: Do not do unto others as you would not have others do unto you. On the surface, this rule appears slightly more appropriate to the situation. People are interrupting their usual patterns of behavior with new patterns of behavior that are causing problems, so maybe if we were to tell them to stop doing bad behaviors, the chain of reciprocity could be rebuilt. But try telling that to your neighbor, and she will probably tell you that when the Soviet government stops doing things to people none of its citizens should do, she'll stop. Your neighbor's idea of what is ethical is completely different from the central party's idea of what is ethical, allowing her to assert that when the Soviet government doesn't follow her ethical rules then society is dysfunctional and not worth upholding. From her vantage point she is the government.

So, the silver rule didn't really work. Perhaps we could try the platinum rule: Do unto others as others would do unto themselves, and others will do unto you as you would do unto you. If you follow this one, you are going to have a lot of work to do attempting to get people's complaints and demands heard through legal channels. With so few people already doing this, it's going to be a severe uphill battle, and you have no real guarantee that any of the people you currently see giving up are going to turn around and stop doing what they're doing right now. You would not want to see the headlines from 70 years later — "Soviet regime defeated, of course it was", and so on and so forth. Giving these people what they want is not the way to get them to stop, as "not stopping" is directly tied to what they want.

There is also the converse golden rule, sometimes dubbed the bronze rule: Do unto you as you would do unto others. This one is not very applicable, unless you consider wrecking to be a moral offense against yourself.

If the golden rule and the platinum rule didn't work out, maybe we could try Kant's categorical imperative, which could be described as combining the golden rule with the silver rule, the bronze rule, and a few other things.

You must act only according to the principle
1) that you would will to become a universal law
2) that you treat yourself and others as an end before a means
3) that everyone's will binds universal legislation onto itself
4) that universal legislation can bind everyone into a society

This one is a bit complicated, but a bit more robust. First, you cannot take actions that you would not want other people taking. (The silver rule.) This will not be effective on your neighbor because she would will wrecking to become a universal behavioral law. Second, you must treat the humanity in each and every person as an end before a means; you cannot use people as your tools. (The bronze rule.) Your neighbor will dismiss this one because she believes the central government to be using people as its tools, and thus believes her power to destroy it to be morally justified. Third, the categorical imperative gains its force to regulate people from people consenting to it. Your neighbor didn't consent to Stalin's government so she is going to exempt herself. Fourth, the purpose of the categorical imperative is to bind people into a society, which is assumed to be an inherently desirable goal. Your neighbor does not find Soviet society inherently desirable, so she is going to try to exempt herself from that too.

Out of all four prongs of the categorical imperative, basically all of them have failed. The most you can get out of it is maybe the second prong, where if you simply say that you believe that everybody should not destroy societies just because they do not understand them, because you said so, you might almost have something to argue. The consent provisions in prongs 3 and 4 haven't served you in getting people to behave better, because they begin with the assumption that everyone is part of one continuous society (the so-called "kingdom of ends", which is conceptually similar to a literal republic) rather than two discontinuous and antagonistic societies. So you are going to have to bridge that blatant trench between two separate populations somehow. Two separate populations with two different goals... Two separate populations with two different "governments".

Wait. You feel like you've seen that somewhere before.
We have been nothing... we will be all... For tomorrow all in place... The workers' International unites the human race.

Right. All of this has always been about bridging the divide between separate populations. Your head is spinning now, but, maybe... if there was such a thing as a Communist International inside the bounds of one giant country, this could still be fixed.

After a little research, you come back with a little information on the Trotskyites. This is... just outdated stuff Lenin said once decades ago? Weird, but at least checking it out from the library isn't going to get you in trouble. It says the provinces of North America were all supposed to combine into one entity. And that Lenin didn't want the state to be an instrument of violence. Fat chance on either of those at this point. The idea is vaguely that the Fourth International is a collection of workers, just a basic one with little more than the International above it. Kind of like that stuff the "Internationale" says. Which is all weirdly outdated now. Did... did they take it way too literally? Like the bourgeoisie in the song are "The Stalinists"? This is a mess. Maybe you can do something with this, if you can get past the urge to stop and blurt out "what kind of idiotic—" in the middle against whoever thought this was a sensible interpretation.

You head back to your neighbor. Because people are revolting against Soviet society to restore the goals of the Russian Revolution, you explain, she is actually part of Trotskyist society, which is a simple chain of workers connected together for the sake of workers, which is the Fourth International, because the Fourth International is whatever government is generated out of the sheer connection of all workers to all workers, but workers cover most of the world, so therefore, the Fourth International joins people together across separate populations inside country areas, because it isn't first defined by the existing boundaries of countries anyway. This is it — she falls under the categorical imperative if she will only agree that she is joined to other workers in a chain of reciprocity on the basis of workers defending workers, because if another worker defends you you have to stand for other workers.

Your neighbor points out that the categorical imperative and the Trotskyist golden rule are two separate unrelated rules.

The chemistry of metallic rules

[unfinished]