Philosophical Research:Molecular Democracy/5.2/1612 saiyan-revolution
The Saiyan revolutionIs "culture" really a meaningful factor in preventing revolution?
first of all nobody can give a satisfactory definition of what on earth "culture" and "cultural" might mean, because Culture is an incoherent concept and when it comes to the concept of Culture there /is/ no good definition. but aside from that, even if Culture really did mean something, by what processes would "cultural" factors actually prevent proletarian revolution?
if you are trying to solve the problem of how to advance Marxism in the First World here is a helpful _koan_ for you to ponder: When will Saiyans have a Communist revolution?
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even if all countries are made of populations, and all populations are made of subpopulations, and all subpopulations are made of social links formed atop arbitrary social bonds and agreements, no country is actually made of "culture". not even North Korea originates from "culture". if countries were fundamentally made out of "culture", they would not be able to change and improve their traditions and attitudes because those traditions and attitudes would constitute the entire existence of the country and the country would morph into an entirely different population if they changed. if, for instance, transphobia was part of North Korean "culture", then one would have to become South Korean and stop being North Korean to become inclusive to transgender people. but nobody would say this is the case. a typical argument against transphobia in workers' states generally contains the implication that it is possible to be North Korean without being transphobic, and in fact that "culture" is almost _easily_ changed despite "culture" being the entire grounding for and framework for comprehending the existence of separate national populations. Spain exists because it is the home of the Spanish Culture, yet the Spanish Culture is also easily changed if there is anything we don't like about its current manifestation, yet we are also not to comprehend Cultures as something we are allowed to comment on from the outside without the understanding of their unique Cultural perspective, yet the entire Spanish Culture can be fought _as a race_ of European individuals in a material battle complete with blood and death if it is oppressing other races. the typical overall framework by which people comprehend Cultures is highly contradictory and incoherent. it cannot successfully explain what right anybody has to change an oppressive Culture from inside or outside without abandoning its own central concept of protecting an inherent right for Cultures to exist and be themselves regardless of what anyone else thinks.
the problem of protecting all Cultures, subpopulations, and demographic identities from oppressive populations always comes back to the problem of how it is possible for Saiyans to be Saiyans without being defined as The Saiyan Culture by a system of brutal and violent daily practices. do Saiyans stop being Saiyans if they abandon the destructive practices associated with the Social-Philosophical-Material System of Saiyan imperialism? such a claim sounds especially ridiculous in a science-fiction context where planetary populations outwardly appear to be different species, yet if national populations are to be comprehended as Cultures defined by the history of their own traditions, we quickly end up in a populational teacup-and-donut problem where it is impossible to visualize a group of Saiyans which is not tainted by some particular embedded Being-in a Social-Philosophical System of traditions which actually causes them to be Saiyans. the teacup is a grid with one hole; the donut is a grid with one hole; the Saiyan species is a graph with one border; the Social-Philosphical System of Saiyan imperialism is a graph with one border. how will we ever tell them apart when they have the same shape? only, most people can easily recognize the diffence between a teacup and a donut. the same should be the case for individuals in a population and the outdated notion of defining populations as "Cultures".
if populations are not defined inherently by the particular content of a Social System's embedded Philosophical System, then what are they? there are a few possible answers. a population can be defined purely as a Social System of graph connections regardless of the content that binds people together, as is sometimes done in Existentialism. a population can be defined purely as a Material System of such material structures as economic institutions, government institutions, and class territories, as is sometimes done in Stalin Thought — a workers' state is a self-contained socialism-in-one-country consisting of the socioeconomic structures of a workers' state, where the ethnic character of a population is acknowledged but incidental to its definition. a population can be defined purely by the ongoing process of defining its borders against other populations. this is one of the more confusing and difficult-to-work-with definitions, but also the most accurate to real life in such cases as attempting to study ethnic or subcultural subpopulations. a local subpopulation of Latino people contains all the people who are _not_ in the subpopulation of _non_-Latino people; a local subpopulation of Muslims contains all the people who are _not_ in the subpopulation of _non_-Muslims. it is the easy route to try to tell ourselves that there exists some "Latino culture" or "White culture" just because there is a defined group of Latino or non-Latino people and they all share with each other some particular content to their interactions, while it is harder to intuitively conceptualize the image that "Latino culture" and "White culture" are only formed as an artifact of which individuals have sorted into each subpopulation and subsequently begun interacting and forming bonds with particular kinds of content. part of our resistance to this possibility may lie in this model's accidental implication of determinism, where the combination of a set of individuals in one area appears to _cause_ them to generate a particular Latino identity and the combination of the same individuals in another area would _cause_ them to generate a Spanish identity. this is not necessarily true because the sideways dialectical interactions between populations also play a role in defining each population's content. but even if it were true, the finding of people generating a Spanish identity because they have formed together into a population in the area of Spain would be preferable to the finding of people generating a Spanish identity because they are bonded together by previously-existing arbitrary Spanish traditions. if the Spanish identity can be defined without any particular previous Spanish traditions, then the Spanish identity does not need to be defined by the historical brutal exploitation of people in Hispaniola.
Saiyans are an alien species that exist in parallel to earth people in _Dragon Ball_'s universe. they resemble humans with a couple of ancestral monkey characteristics and a generally brutal attitude saiyans are notorious for undermining their own society by picking fights with others inside their own group. some individuals become obsessed with eliminating specific rival males. at other times the upper classes of Saiyan society have become convinced that someone aims to take their place and immediately expelled that individual. early in their history Saiyans apparently had a civil war. near the beginning of their history on Planet Vegeta, Saiyans wiped out the T'fruians, the other alien race that lived on this planet, basically in order to make more space for themselves. [*htm/vv] saiyans are best known for their practice of violently clearing out planets in order to sell them to other empires and subsequently to purchase better technology that would not otherwise be in their capabilities. they appear to put a great portion of their resources into strengthening their army, which has a prominent place in their day-to-day culture. it is said that when Saiyans hold ceremonies they show up in battle armor as their idea of formal wear.
Clearly, if we expect there to be a Communist revolution in a population like this, we really have our work cut out for us. If one did not have any more information on Saiyans, it would be tempting to think that their collective nature as a fictional lifeform, their _constitutive essence_, inherently prevents them from comprehending other forms of society, or that "Saiyan culture" is inherently impervious against the threat of new forms of thought and tradition.
If we are tempted to say either of these things, we ought to turn around and look in the mirror. Much like Saiyans, the United States fought a deadly war over land with the other populations that existed on its continent. Much like Saiyans, the United States puts a great amount of its civilizational resources into its military. And much like Saiyans, First World countries such as the United States have benefited from leveling other countries in world wars and exacting war debts or subordinate supply chain relationships to then use for their own purposes. We are not as different from our notions of fictional alien empires as we might think. The more human beings continue to produce science fiction, the more it becomes evident that throughout _all historical circumstances we can conceive of_ empire is empire.
if we have the self-awareness to face our _koan_ of Saiyan historical development and see it through, we will quickly see just how inadequate all the popular twenty-first century approaches to comprehending real-world imperialist states have been, including Marcuse, Gramsci, and North American Maoism, and why we genuinely need new approaches and understandings.
beginning at Antonio Gramsci and the threat of an emerging Nazi Germany, the Western-Marxist tradition has proposed that the power of fascism lies in its ability to capture the overall spatial terrain of society and crowd out the possibility of other factions and frameworks. this in turn logically entails the understanding that people are structured and constituted into a society through the mechanism of various finite slots, including generic class territories, specific identity-based territories of such things as corporate brands or political parties, and numerous smaller Job Slots or similar such finite societal positions perched atop larger competing territories which are often not adequate in number for the total number of people in the society. the solution to this problem that Gramscians propose is simply for all Marxists and progressives to attempt to fill up society's finite slots as fast as possible in order to operate the society in a manner they can tolerate and get out their message before "fascism" claims the same space, in order to thus secure "cultural hegemony". Gramscian hegemony politics is effectively one big game of musical chairs in which the battle for spatial terrain _is_ politics.
What might happen if Gramscians existed on Planet Vegeta? Is it reasonable for us to assume that if some bright Saiyan culture-creator goes into the mass media and tries to change society by filling it with their bright ideas that the rest of the population of ferocious monkey-men will listen? We would intuitively expect that the greater portion of Saiyans would mount a hostile attack against the newcomers, if not to protect all they are familiar with, then simply to rectify the "mistake" of handing finite societal slots to weak individuals they deem unworthy of taking up the position. Why would we see this pattern of behavior? Because whenever there is a reactionary segment in society, those individuals are never fully isolated from each other but instead connected by a Social-Philosophical System into a coherent subpopulation. The Saiyan population would thus truly consist of one giant population of resistant individuals and one tiny population of progressive individuals in which the giant population can easily defeat the tiny one.
compared with Gramsci's approach, Marcuse's propositions aim in a different direction. Marcuse's language and framings can make it difficult to understand what he is actually referring to, but overall, one of the central concepts he advances is _models of reality_ — essentially, a framework similar to the Amalthean-Beagelian distinction. for Marcuse, one of the chief problems keeping us from rebelling against capitalism is simply that we do not understand it. capitalism presents to us a particular gated reality and then capitalism hides its own inner mechanics from us. Marcuse proposes that ultimately all we actually have to do is make people able to understand Marxism — the material workings of societies and the processes that create history — and this task itself will transform us into informed Subjects capable of making decisions to resist class society and of taking action. labor is the act of expressing and developing The Subject, at the scale of individuals and subpopulations alike, if only we all knew how to comprehend labor and actively make the choice to use social-historical-economic knowledge to arrange labor into the societal shape we want. [*Lu]
Marcuse's model is beautiful in its straightforwardness because there is little arguing with the proposition that if everybody understood Marxism everybody could apply Marxism. The greatest problem with it lies in the steps that lead up to everyone understanding Marxism. Let us imagine Marcuseans exist on Planet Vegeta. The Marcuseans assemble their party and start trying to create theorists. They do their best to lay out how the structures of Saiyan society prevent anybody from properly understanding the big picture of its workings. You are trapped in empire, they say, it has transformed you into its tool, it chews you up and spits you out. The most likely thing to happen next is that the Marcuseans discover that their model of how embodied Amalthean perspectives lead up to different modes of individual subjectivity and action is not quite correct. Marcuseans are likely to meet Saiyans that become able to correctly outline all the oppressive structures and processes of Saiyan society and correctly describe what every one of these does, yet who then turn around and say everything they just described is perfectly fine — with all the horrors of Saiyan society unwrapped and unable to be concealed any more, they merely resolve to do Evil with a clearer head. In the case of Saiyans, the crux of the problem is that even if you unmask empire philosophically it still materially exists and is still materially effective. Many Saiyans will look at the material structure of empire and feel that in is effectiveness it genuinely suits their own interests and character, integrating it into their development as Subjects. If this process is successful, they will not feel oppressed, but rather that they freely chose said violent and abusive system and perhaps even became stronger because of it. If others attempt to tell them their choice is morally wrong, it does not matter to them because for them there are currently no negative consequences, and instead there is only the positive consequence that they have the power to smash their enemies and critics.
perhaps the problem here is that Saiyans exist in a defined fictional cosmos where there are solid definitions of Good and Evil. only, much like we saw with science fiction in general and the general patterns of empire, this scenario is still not far off from the patterns we see in the real world. over the past century it has become common for right-Liberals to only become increasingly more versed in the definitions of capitalism than ever before, even being able to list off all the worst harms of capitalism, and to dismiss every negative consequence and bolt themselves into capitalism for their own benefit while attempting to recruit as many other beneficiaries as possible to this same abusive and destructive yet horrifyingly-effective system. it can hardly be said that capitalism is actually concealing anything from anyone any more. as much as some people may fail to understand the basic workings of capitalism, it is just as common a problem to find people who look at capitalism in its existence as a material structure and despite knowing all its perils choose to jump onto it because it is there. capitalism links an assortment of individuals without the ethical principles to deem it wrong into a Social-Philosophical-Material System of capitalism, they operate it and benefit from its effectiveness, and they cease to see how as individuals they could ever find anything that suits them better or makes them into stronger and improved people. if others have problems with their particular assembled Social-Philosophical-Material System of right-Liberalism, it does not matter because capitalism is adept at finding various ways to excise graphs of people who do not fit into a particular island of it into their own isolated Social-Philosophical System — nation-states, local states, siloed political parties, separate towns which people move to away from toxic bosses and neighbors, and on and on. the first Social-Philosophical-Material System of reactionary right-Liberalism can follow the rules of capitalist empire to bulldoze the second and all the others into dust if it chooses.
so, it would appear one of the great problems of creating proletarian revolution in the First World is that people frankly do not understand basic concepts of why destructive actions and abusive systems are undesirable. in response to this, North American Maoism proposes a kind of population-based theory which combines models of global capitalism with notions of human in-groups and out-groups. the form this takes can vary from a simple categorization of First World countries containing capitalists and elite industry experts versus Third World countries containing a larger proletariat, to a more complex categorization of First-World-ified populations inside the First World versus Third-World-ified populations at the First World's margins, to models that accidentally or intentionally end up highly racially charged and effectively make White people synonymous with the exploiting class and other races or nationalities outside the most "First-World-ified" part of the First World synonymous with the exploited class. This lattermost division of Maoism is responsible for producing works such as _Settlers_, which attempts to lay out a picture of United States history as defined by an inextricable connection between the failure to achieve Marcusean-style empowered knowledge of Marxism and the oppressive structure and practices of North America's White formerly-European-and-still-imperialist settler population. _White-settler culture_ is the specific thing that prevents the United States from uncovering the mechanics and perils of capitalism, and there is a particular system of White supremacy that must be broken open before the normal process of history being defined by a series of class conflicts can proceed.
the basic model of empire proposed by North American Maoism is, again, hard to argue with. if North-American-style Maoists existed on Planet Vegeta, it would seem to ring true when they call out the Saiyan population as a single toxically-connected structure of oppression defined by violence and genocide. yet, there is still one big hole in this argument. the Maoists can present their manifesto of brutal Saiyan settlers all they want to, but if nobody can understand the basic concept of why exactly it is a problem to be a genocidal racist, this kind of argument will never succeed. it is common for Marxists and progressives in general to assume that racism is "obviously" wrong, but the horrifying truth is that it is just as easy for people to bolt themselves into racism after comprehending all its details and perils as it is with capitalism. This is the realization that is required to properly grasp such phenomena as the United States MAGA movement and "Tea Party". Today's resistance to Marxism essentially amounts to a monstrous twisted counterpart Marxism that offers full descriptions of the workings of societies and historical processes as well as their destructive potential — up to and including historical processes such as _racist genocide_ — but instead applies all its socio-historical-economic knowledge to frantically spread class society and systems of oppression.
When we have seen the full depth of the abyss as far as what it means to be a First-World citizen, or a citizen of the Saiyans, we might be tempted to feel like our task is hopeless, and there is no way we can possibly accomplish it. If people have such a twisted sense of what is right and wrong that they cannot understand the problems with oppression, domination, or racism, how will they ever come to understand liberating all people from oppression? Are all Saiyans nothing but pure Evil? Are the people of the United States nothing but Evil? At what point did White people spin themselves around into becoming a cursed lineage of hatred and Evil? Where did we go wrong?
Here we should pause to realize that where we have ended up is very different from where we have started. We began with the concept of scientific socialism and historical processes, yet somehow whenever we try to discuss historical processes in imperialist populations it is very easy to end up veering off into what amount to pure discussions of morality. When we speak of the fictional Saiyan kingdom this becomes obvious, because _Dragon Ball_ is not afraid to mix materially-observable concepts like empire with constructed ideological concepts like Good and Evil. However, as much as it may be concealed inside other concepts and terms, this is also very much a problem that turns up in real-world progressive efforts. in the everyday motions of center-Liberal political campaigns it is almost the _majority of issues_ for which people indirectly invoke some concept of right and wrong. It is totally obvious (morally right) that transgender people should be called the correct pronouns; it is completely imperative (morally right) that we stop contributing to global climate change and highly questionable (morally wrong) when we do not; it is unthinkable (morally wrong) that you do not actively cast a vote against the increasingly White-supremacist and pro-class-society party who have been spewing rhetoric that is obviously racist (morally wrong) because it is blatantly obvious to normal people (morally right) that racism is wrong. at the same time, Liberal political systems such as the United States have increasingly ground to a halt as each coherent group of people becomes committed to a particular concept of morality or apparent lack of morality and people become unable to comprehend what it is like for someone to be incapable of grasping and becoming part of their particular local concept of morality, or perhaps what it is like to actually possess a concept of morality at all. This problem becomes further confounded by popular traditions such as Christian scripture, which quickly throw around notions of right and wrong and invite people to become falsely convinced that they already know what morality is and have the inherent ability to define Right and Wrong when in truth morality is a learned skill that takes a lot of practice and they actually have no idea.
Now we can see that even though a world where people lack morality can seem daunting, the problem does actually have solutions. In "Theological morality" we discussed the story of Vegeta, the Saiyan prince. Throughout the _Dragon Ball_ series, Goku and his allies must contend with the problem that although they do not prefer to kill their opponents, when allowed to live, characters such as Vegeta continue to interact with and support them from a position of being morally bankrupt; as much as Vegeta may technically be part of Goku's group, the reasons for which he does anything are very different and at times arguably frightening. If we want to make sure "Vegeta" makes the right decisions, there are two major solutions. The first is to attempt to teach morality. Goku can attempt, like a good little Marcusean or North-American Maoist, to deconstruct all of Vegeta's incorrect impressions of morality and teach him the correct ones. The second approach is to begin all of our analyses from a level so basic it is below morality and no morality is required, such that we only later work our way back up to morality. Now Goku has to think a lot harder about why someone with no desire to help others, no intuitive sense for the perils of harmful actions, and no sense of individual purpose or meaning in the middle of an uncaring universe would bother to make the correct moral decision. Fortunately for him, the task becomes a lot easier if one sees the universe as one big puzzle of floating pieces that merely have the capacity to assemble themselves into several potential solutions.
If asked when Saiyans will have a Communist revolution, it is tempting to simply step away from the question. It is tempting to back down. To shrink from the task. To say that it is ridiculous to think that Saiyans could ever be anything but violent genocidal brutes. This is the easy way out. But what happens, logically speaking, if people in the _Dragon Ball_ universe commit themselves to this path? Saiyans die. Saiyans will cease to exist as a planetary civilization, burning away in petty intra-group quarrels as their greatest external enemy shatters their world to dust.
To this, one might be tempted to say, "good." "Saiyans did not have a positive effect on the universe, so the universe didn't really need them." Goku? By his own words he is an earth citizen and not a Vegeta citizen, so he is irrelevant. Goku's father Bardock? He made no real effort to end his society's oppressive social order nor get himself out of there so he deserved what he got. Broly, the "Legendary Super Saiyan" freed partly thanks to Goku? One version of the narrative may try to say he has a good heart but in the original version there was no way to stop him from going berserk and his very existence was dangerous. Vegeta's brother Tarble? He is not known to have done anything bad, but he is so peripheral and forgettable nobody would miss him.
This is more or less exactly the approach taken by early installments of _Dragon Ball_. Piccolo skewers the Saiyan invader Raditz to death with his abilities before Goku can ever consider converting him. Nappa, another invader, meets a similar fate at Vegeta's hand as the former crown prince fully delivers on his earlier monologue that neither friends nor nation actually matter to him any more. King Vegeta arbitrarily removes Broly from his kingdom and in either version of the story is positioned as somewhat unlikeable; as Freeza blows up the planet, King Vegeta goes down along with any number of other homeworld Saiyans. Vegeta the prince is shown after the incident to "not really care" whether he has surviving relatives. Knowing exactly how "welcome" a Saiyan invasion is on most planets, certainly if Vegeta does not care about his relatives and combat allies nearly nobody else does either.
To any ordinary resident of earth or several other planets in the _Dragon Ball_ universe, this logic would seem to make sense and there would seem to be nothing wrong with it. Why would one care about alien invaders? Why would one care about a violent civilization of space imperialists? Yet, if we step back and begin to see the larger patterns, we unveil a troubling discovery. If the citizens of earth sit back and allow Saiyans to die out, a population dies. If the Saiyan kingdom slaughters the people of earth, a population dies. In either of these cases a population dies and ceases to exist. The people of earth may think they're better than Saiyans for generally minding their own business and not charging into the Saiyan homeworld to slaughter the Saiyan population, but this morally-tinted interpretation sits far above the actual historical processes of the _Dragon Ball_ universe. Down at the level of historical processes, the basic chunk-competition process of populations competing against each other for space, natural resources, and carrying capacity is amoral. If the people of earth sit back and allow Saiyans to die, the Freeza force will expand all over the same space, and Freeza will come kill them instead. This is roughly the same mistake made by the Saiyans themselves — because Saiyans embraced an especially warlike strategy and did not care about other populations, they effectively allowed Freeza's empire to get larger and larger, and their planet fell to Freeza. The fundamental process of chunk competition does not care about morality, and it does not care about high-level abstract concepts such as "racism", "domination", and "the colonizer attitude". Chunk competition merely _happens_ as long as populations exist in open plurality and the lack of a connected relationship at the same time. It may proceed slowly, it may proceed in the background, it may not seem outwardly noticeable to individuals. But as long as civilizations exist as unrelated islands, the mere act of building and reproducing a civilization is an act of violence. We forget or fail to learn this fact because we are trapped inside the localized Amalthean perspectives of isolated plural populations, but at the end of the day, we cannot successfully rationalize away the existence of chunk competition just by telling ourselves our population or its local heroes are good and moral.
clearly to an individual such as Goku, hero of earth, or Dende, heir to the peaceful and supportive practices of Planet Namek, the notion of chunk competition would sound atrocious. but what if you are Vegeta and do not understand the basic concept of why populations destroying each other is a problem? Vegeta would be perfectly content to see the universe be cleared of everything but Saiyans, if not precisely everything but himself. yet, there is a compelling argument that even for Vegeta this can never be a good strategy. in many cases Vegeta is not powerful enough to overcome things he claims he should be able to, including Freeza, Cell, and Majin Boo. if Vegeta really were to wipe out all the people of earth including Goku, he would not be able to keep power over the area for very long before some stronger antagonist would come defeat him. as much as he may not like it, Vegeta needs the power of others in order to survive in the role of either Saiyan prince or Saiyan empire. in theory, that power does not _have_ to come from Goku's faction, and could instead come from a population of imperial subjects centered around a core population of Saiyans. but if Vegeta chooses to not even care about the Saiyan kingdom, he is left with no good option but to put up with the annoyance of working with Goku. it is likely Vegeta would be less frustrated and confused about his place in the universe if he had not given up on the latent power of his own people who think, act, and perceive the world much more like him.
realizing that Vegeta, and arguably his father King Vegeta III, do not actually care about the well-being of their subjects, it would already seem entirely logical for the remaining population of Saiyans to realize that when their king has walked out on them it is now their responsibility to govern and protect themselves. this does come with the caveat that Saiyans are hardly ever framed as logical or intelligent. nonetheless, should any individual Saiyan turn out to be capable of such a deduction, we can already see good justification for at least the formation of a Saiyan republic.
on the stage of history, one does not need to ask the question of whether the universe contains good reason for Saiyans as a species to exist. a universe is in one sense just one big collection of puzzle pieces, and if it is possible to take the pieces of a national population and rearrange them into a functional republic, this new ergodically-produced universe-piece will find its own functional purpose. the new national population will find its own identity and own future, and as Existentialists tell us, will solve its own problems of life, day-to-day care, and anxiety as a unique and individualized growing and maturing Group Subject.
with this, we have perhaps gotten the Saiyan nation to Liberalism, or a medieval republican form lacking a serious business class as seen with the Roman empire. we are perhaps looking at a state of things where landowners can nominally vote but every societal position of note is more or less controlled by a small assortment of prestigious families. this would be a great age for the Saiyan military. the more individual noble families are not constrained or eliminated by paranoid kings, the more a process of forming a layer of "knights" or _equites_ could develop; within the mechanics of the _Dragon Ball_ universe, this might mean a proliferation of Super Saiyans or space forces able to afford impressive combat vehicles.
compared with the Saiyan kingdom, a Saiyan republic could quite possibly become much stronger against other interstellar civilizations. the might of individual noble families loosed from the yoke of the king would amount to a multiplication of Saiyan empire into something much greater than what was possible with the narrow structure allowed before. but is it necessary for the Saiyan nation to go further than this? if Saiyans are already formidable as individuals and a Saiyan republic would grant them such great military power, would they really have good reason to proceed all the way to Communist revolution? once again, there is a compelling argument the answer is _yes_.
within _Dragon Ball_, Saiyans are depicted as making use of many kinds of advanced science fiction technology — scouters, spaceships, specialized materials used for lightweight battle armor and other such things, incubators for raising self-reliant babies, even handheld computer systems of some kind have been shown in some cases. if Saiyans wanted to gain an edge over other civilizations, they would need to learn to produce these technologies. in the "pre-republican period" Saiyans have always obtained technologies by selling planets to other empires, but if Saiyans ever want to reach or exceed the power of these other empires, this practice cannot continue forever. it is more or less a matter of basic mathematics that if Saiyans take over a planet and produce technologies on it repeatedly they will end up with more products than if they simply sold the planet. [*sud] however, in order to successfully produce technologies, Saiyans would require experts with the capability to actually understand technologies and industrial techniques. this would lead to the creation of an Artisan class capable of mastering specific trades and selling its expertise to others in the population instead of purely earning wealth through participating in empire.
the creation of a successful Artisan class that is able to go beyond the level of industrial understanding associated with guild systems opens up antagonisms between bare individuals and lays the foundation for a true Market Society. whereas in our Saiyan republic scenario the scattering of the nobility into new free-floating class territories opens the door for a medieval republic, the scattering of Artisan types toward mastering individual trades and creating free-floating industries or business territories opens the door for the deeply confusing social-graph soup we associate with modern Liberalism. a transformation that leads to republican "democracy" is not inevitably the same as one that spawns Liberal capitalism proper, and it is fully possible to imagine a national history where they are two separate sequential transformations rather than being combined. with the creation of "Artisanal territory soup", a new phenomenon then happens in which Artisan types have no particular connection or loyalty to the overall national population and form arbitrary loyalties amongst themselves. particular social graphs with localized traditions and identities form as individuals compete to become permanent fixtures of society at the exclusion of others, sometimes expelling each other as outsiders and sometimes associating together as allies.
in the case of Saiyans, it is conceivable that the Saiyan population would not fully differentiate into a soup of Social-Philosophical systems such as political parties, religions, or local-nationalisms. as much as the creation of the Artisan class would weaken national bonds and national loyalty, Saiyans often give the impression of being uncomplicated and mostly happening to share the same set of cold and brutal values. because of this, it is possible the vast majority of Saiyans would more or less form a single unbroken Social-Philosophical System — with perhaps the tiny exception of the one or two outlier Saiyans who are busy trying to invent Gramscianism, Marcuseanism, or Maoism. the particular phenomenon of real-world countries such as the United States splitting into hostile subpopulations that compete to eliminate each other and establish officialized cultural systems of traditions and values might not be a problem, giving way to a barer and simpler system which merely consists of a spatial slot hierarchy where individuals compete for overall membership and unique socioeconomic roles within the population. a Saiyan republic in the age of Artisans is in essence a one-party state, practicing Liberalism or Existentialism as a pyramid of individuals demonstrating their own individual ideas and political expertise rather than operating under the influence of factions and parties.
once Saiyans have made it through the two transitions that lead to early capitalism, we once again run up against the daunting wall of imperial effectiveness. the most intuitive reason for Saiyans to invent the Artisan class and the so-called "free market" is specifically to produce weapons of war and more effectively destroy or dominate other planetary populations. neither the creation of a Market Society nor a national republic necessarily leads to peace, or calm and ethical rationality. on the contrary, a nation of thriving productive individuals still has great incentive to treat all the other populations of the world like dirt. as long as populations are separate and unrelated yet undergo unrelated growth and expansion over the same terrain, there will be chunk competition, and there will be the incentive for populations to kill each other in order to claim each other's resources or simply make the question of reconciling two different political systems more trivial. with this observation in hand, why would Saiyans ever throw away the prospect of genocidal or colonial expansion over other populations to instead embrace Communist revolution?
to answer this, we need to address the existence of a class that most Marxist literature does not properly label or differentiate: the Refuse class. when early or late capitalism develops, each localized alliance of Artisans or bourgeois allies only has a particular palette of slots, roles, or institutions — any particular agriculture industry only needs so much food per person, any particular construction industry only needs so many builders and buildings per area, any particular TV industry only needs so many shows, and so forth. any particular spatial area or population becomes ruled by the finitude of its _required material products and services_, turning from a civilization of people into a civilization of things. in turn, this palette of required things creates an artificial limit on carrying capacity, steadily taking all individuals who do not demonstrate adequate talent or do not fully subordinate themselves to the needs of producing the currently required things on the palette of things, and pushing them bit by bit out of a given society as defined by a localized social alliance capable of having industries. this Refuse process can be part of the reason for Liberal capitalist societies differentiating into various ethnic, religious, generalized local-national, minority-demographic-oriented, or politically-focused subpopulations — simply put, a town isn't big enough to hold two of them, so two different Social-Philosophical Systems of culture go build separate towns.
Saiyans, once again, seem unlikely to form into separate subpopulations for ideological reasons. however, a Saiyan population capable of producing advanced technology is likely to end up with a lot of convenient excuses for why it does not have room for some individuals, or why some individuals who cannot fit into the society's limited number of slots supposedly do not deserve food or shelter. these individuals would end up dispatched across the universe to other planets, sometimes under the guise of expanding the glorious Saiyan empire and making it greater, and sometimes clearly just dropped there because they are considered unwanted and unnecessary. the more this happened, the more incentive that Refuse-quality Saiyans would have to begin questioning the spatial slot hierarchy and asking why their own civilization that is supposedly so great does not have space for them. peripheral Saiyans would have great incentive to hate core Saiyans if they ever stopped to think about how their situation came to be. of course, as always, there is no guarantee that Saiyans would be this smart. the antagonism between Artisans or bourgeois corporations and the Refuse layer could easily just lead to populations pointlessly separating into different factions or planetary nations, similar to how the British Empire broke apart to leave the United States, Canada, and Australia without ultimately changing its basic civilizational form or civilizational problems. however, the shorter and more intelligent route is to uncover the antagonism between the core and Refuse process and for everyone getting pushed toward the Refuse zone to turn around and challenge the system. the incentives for resistance and change become rather different in this stage. the core has increasingly little incentive to change anything as one moves toward the central cluster of prestigious slots in the society, while the incentives increase in a gradient for every step away from the center. the vast majority of people in this particular social form benefit from ending it even if it is the case that they currently benefit from continuing it. the omnipresent threat of individuals pushing each other out of society is simply too great a drawback for any reasonable person to accept. if individuals are smart, they soon come to realize that perpetuating capitalism is asking for the day that some impossibly bright employee or business owner that can do things beyond their imagination will crop up out of the ends of the earth, push them out of their job, and leave them living in their car. there is no such thing as deserving food in capitalism. just as the basic process of chunk competition between populations turns war and genocide amoral, the spatial slot hierarchy turns the preservation or extinguishing of individual lives amoral.
of course, if there are any two themes that the _Dragon Ball_ series is largely about, it would be food and individuals. many or most plots in the series focus on the journeys and unique characteristics of exceptional individuals. if a typical _Dragon Ball_ episode discusses the value of Saiyans, it is typically through the lens of some particular individual's experiences and their overall journey to find themself and comprehend their circumstances. in the context of fictional narratives, such a statement might seem like it goes without saying, but in fact, it is actually quite notable — depending on the genre of fiction, some fictional narratives with a theme of illustrating history or illustrating an overall world may not choose to take such a character-based approach and may instead use characters purely to present epistolary snapshots of large-scale events or processes. a novel about the Dust Bowl might not spend its time focusing on individuals; _Dragon Ball_ does. with this in mind, it begins to become more plausible to conceive of a moment in the fictional history of the _Dragon Ball_ universe in which miscellaneous Saiyans begin _individuating_ themselves and appearing as "interesting" individual Subjects that are now considered to have value and to have been wronged by the Absurd historical processes of the Saiyan empire. this would be a rather Existentialist vision of Saiyan resistance, yet when the overall structure and framing of the series lean heavily Existentialist, such a thing might be about what we should expect.
as for food, Saiyans in general are quite fond of it. Goku is notorious for eating all the food in sight, almost indiscriminate toward what kinds of food he will eat. he seems somewhat disconcerted when the cat sage living on Karin Tower suggests an arrangement of things in which he does not need to eat. Vegeta does not care about anyone or anything and yet even he seems to perk up at the sight of food. Broly is shown to readily eat wild plants that other aliens consider disgusting. on the whole, although some Saiyans born through hybridization with other populations may not share this characteristic to the same degree, Saiyans are known to either enjoy or indiscriminately devour food. food also factors into Saiyan capabilities and power. Goku is shown to have trouble fighting if he has not had enough to eat, and to insist on a generous helping of food before he attempts to master a new technique. this is to say, the basic nature of Saiyans as a violent expansionist empire is tightly connected to their ability to obtain food. in our scenario of a Saiyan republic, the empire transitions from kingdom to republic on the basis of creating an _eques_ layer of competent fighters from well-off families. however, the further expansion of such an _eques_ layer is threatened if there is a limit on how many fighters and overall individuals the civilization is willing to support. if Saiyans are smart, they will realize that at a certain point early capitalism is turning around and undermining the very empire it initially created. no compassion, morality, or progressivism is required for Saiyans to realize that the Artisan class is scamming them and they will in fact be able to build a better empire more capable of producing competent fighters if they join against the Artisan layer and abolish the spatial slot hierarchy.
of course, to abolish the spatial slot hierarchy is not an easy thing. much of real-world capitalism has not accomplished this task; many instances of what we take to be late and developed capitalism are actually early and undeveloped capitalism. only in such places as China and Vietnam has capitalism properly begun to go through the process of developing itself to create slots for all its people. as China loses sight of its core task of creating factories and productivity and embraces the indiscriminate development of a Market Society its average workers find themselves priced out of housing and pushed out of cities. a short distance away in Japan, the country is absolutely covered in corporations and industry, yet many people find themselves tossed out of capitalism-proper into an unproductive layer of _hikikomori_ or unemployed shut-ins. the ability of our hypothetical Saiyan nation to overcome a problem not yet overcome in the real world depends on how determined Saiyans are to overcome the problem of being shoved into the Refuse process. if Saiyans are sufficiently angry about increasing numbers of them being converted into Refuse and the resulting insult to their love of food and technology, then they will have no choice but to ask themselves how to better structure industry and civilization. it may be far from the Saiyan way to think of civilization as a welcoming place which should be designed to hold more people and cater to a basic set of people's rights, but at the same time, if they wish to have products and careers, all Saiyans have a great incentive to improve production. as much as Saiyans may be quick to get into fights and even destroy their own people, it will eventually become outwardly evident to anybody that this is a wasteful and pointless process that at best undermines the further expansion of the overall Saiyan nation and at worst pulverizes the development of particular exceptional individuals and factions. at this point the logical thing to do is first to make sure that Saiyans are unified into a one-party state of one-nation-per-nation, and second to make sure that all the free-floating territories of Saiyan industry are unified into said singular nation. although this particular kind of Social-Philosophical-Material System is quite alien to many of today's Liberal republics, hooked on the promises of chaotic-anarchy and neoliberalism, it still does not require any traditional Communist rhetoric simply to carry out this basic step of connecting and unifying industry. this is how it is that civilizations such as China, North Korea, and in some people's mind even the historical Soviet Union appear to first base themselves in the concept of becoming a unified nation before they are ever able to successfully create better conditions for national industry or the proletariat — it truly is the first step to pick up all the shattered pieces of a country and put them together.
when Saiyans transition from a period of free-floating Artisans to a unified nation of industries, this will require a recalibration of historical processes. in previous societal forms such as the medieval republic and early capitalism, a new system often begins with the breaking of earlier forms of structure and the scattering of a new set of class territories into chaotic-anarchy. many people today either truly or falsely believe that a Marxist-Leninist workers' state, the most prototypical form of a unified economy, is incapable of producing the kinds of new historical processes that successfully expand society. however, when any other observed form appears much more wasteful and likely to generate fractal separations of populations into new populations in violent chunk competition, it would appear that there is no other sensible way forward. if factional chunk competition is recognized as unproductive, people must rise out of the spatial-slot-hierarchy and factional-assembly processes that generate it to create a unified republican population. and if chunk competition continues between plural unified republics, the only logical solution is to convert separate unified republics into a supranational federation. Saiyans will almost inevitably end up with either a single large one-party republic or a "Soviet Union" of many smaller federated regional or planetary republics. for citizens of the United States, the most obvious piece of evidence for this historical process is right under everyone's noses. the mere creation of separate local states in the United States is essentially the creation of a small supranational federation, much as the Soviet Union was a supranational federation. the only major difference is that the regional republics of the United States were created on much more arbitrary grounds than the national histories underlying the republics of the Soviet Union.
already, without having to invoke morality, Good, or Right, we have managed to get to the point where Saiyans have reason to create a non-Communist "Soviet Union". the mere existence of material needs and the need to expand civilization can be a powerful driving force in the creation of new forms of society. but what about contradictions within the new supranational federation? Surely a supranational federation is a place of failed industry and Totalitarian oppression. Only, the people of the _Dragon Ball_ universe already live in supranational federations. in _Dragon Ball_, the people of earth live in a single planetary kingdom divided into 43 subordinate territories. this planetary kingdom is portrayed as a mostly peaceful place in which the monarchy hardly exerts any actual control, similar to many real-world national republics. This is to say, in the _Dragon Ball_ universe the mere concept of a supranational federation would not be considered unusual, unexpected, or horrifying. Neither would a Saiyan republic be feared _specifically because_ it took the form of a supranational federation. If the people of Universe 7 are afraid of a Saiyan republic, it will be because even in the age of a unified one-party state it has not cast off the specter of imperialism and still moves to destroy or subjugate other populations.
with this, we are back to what seems like our final question. if we wish to get Saiyans to stop destroying other alien races, must we invoke concepts of prejudice and morality? if at the stage of supranational federations almost all obvious contradictions are solved, and all that appears to remain is the raw plurality of separate unrelated populations, must we resort to speaking of plurality itself, and presenting it through the lens of "nation" and "culture"? no. if we think this way we are overcomplicating things. with regard to the _Dragon Ball_ universe, every nation and every empire is dead if it does not have the overwhelming power required to stand up to universe-scale threats such as the Freeza force. beyond this lie even more powerful or authoritative entities such as the gods-of-worlds (KaiŌShin) and Gods of Destruction; despite their officialized title as "gods" these are more or less the same case as Freeza and only distinguished by their power. thanks to Freeza and Beerus, Saiyans once again have a completely amoral reason to at least temporarily put aside their prejudices against other alien populations and agree to form alliances. it is even arguable that at this stage there is already cause for the planets of the _Dragon Ball_ universe to fully join together into a galactic International. of course, such a thing will still not be obvious to populations that have not fully come around to what the real world knows as Marxism. to propose an international conference structure which is truly effective and truly able to end world wars is more or less to reach the point of Lenin, Stalin, Trotsky, and traditional Communist rhetoric. so, to move on to what is actually the final question: do we need morality for the _Dragon Ball_ universe to successfully form a Communist International?
in the age of supranational federations, the most noticeable enduring contradiction will be the tension of various locally-connected graphs inside the overall graph. localized national republics may feel like breaking out of the supranational federation, or localized nations or factions spanning across republics may try to redivide the arrangement of subpopulations into a new set of borders. for all we know, the _Dragon Ball_ universe could suffer a case of "space Trotsky" in which a localized part of a supranational federation specifically becomes redivided into a faulty Marxism. none of these transformations actually create forward progress which truly changes the situation. the joining and separation of unique political or local-national identity graphs does little more than reset the same historical period to be replayed over and over again. likewise, the specific case of large empires capturing smaller populations or smaller populations breaking out in a colonial-independence movement is also delaying and sidestepping the real problem. the question which will actually create progress and generate a new historical period is: how and why will nations form a Communist International? how will populations that experience philosophical plurality or plurality of history and tradition successfully unite themselves into a new larger structure? this is the hard question repeatedly tackled and fumbled over the past century by the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition. and the short answer is "Vegito". the answer of how to bridge the final gap of national plurality lies in understanding the concept of Group Subjects — a concept which has proved difficult and elusive for both Existentialism and Marxism until now. A Group Subject is nothing more than a group with the ability to think; it is a relationship which thinks in the language of combined persons; it is a nation which thinks in the language of combined nations. A Group Subject is at once the simplest thing to describe and the most difficult thing to successfully understand. nonetheless, _Dragon Ball_ as a series has already understood it, and so can anyone else.
is it possible to properly understand the formation of Group Subjects without discussing morality? no. however, the reason for this is rather complex and not easily reducible to a simple need to use morality to form Group Subjects. the existence of morality in the discussion of Subjects comes down to the fact that the great scale of two nations becoming connected is roughly analogous to the smaller scale of an individual social relationship. social relationships cannot be fully separated from morality, whether they are mere interactions between individuals or whether they are the more exotic case of Group Subjects. thus, morality will always catch up with us. Morality is a difficult and frustrating thing which can at times be utterly mind-bending, but unfortunately, it is time for our nation of 99 million Vegetas to suffer through it.
morality is a vast topic, but we have already been over the basics of it. when faced with such situations as Goku leading a team of heroes to defend the earth and Freeza leading a destructive galactic empire, most people "know" that Goku is the good one and Freeza is the bad one.
but what is the actual source of morality? how do we actually "know" such seemingly evident moral facts? if we wanted to persuade Vegeta that empire is _wrong_ and not just annoying or a unique personal hardship of the oppressed, how would we do this? as we have covered above, Vegeta and most Saiyans simply do not understand morality. we can explain to them without much difficulty why the planetary nations of the _Dragon Ball_ universe should develop industry and form a Communist International, but if our task is to explain to Vegeta why it is an _incorrect action_ to kill Goku or kidnap Goku's son to get what he wants, we will by far not find it as easy.
in order to get a better grasp on morality, perhaps we should take a few steps back. how do people we recognize as Good know that they are Good or prove they are Good? how do we know that somebody we recognize as Good is not making periodic mistakes and feeding us incorrect versions of morality? this may sound like a silly question, but within the universe of _Dragon Ball_, we see Goku help people, defend the world, and then offer up one of his companions to the fifteen-generations-removed god-of-worlds as a fine pair of breasts. one of these actions is not as morally-uncontroversial as the other two, and ironically enough, Vegeta is the one to point this out. but if Vegeta mostly does not understand morality, how can he know that any particular action Goku performs is morally wrong? why would Vegeta not simply respond to this situation with apathy the way he would respond to anything else that happens? how does Goku determine whether something is morally acceptable or unacceptable, and what claim does he have to put himself forward as a moral example?
the most obvious interpretation of Goku that a great number of people are likely to stumble onto — whether they may be aware of the proper technical vocabulary for such things or not — is that Goku is an Existentialist hero. Goku's vision of morality is essentially connected to the concepts of individualized choices made as a free agent and personal development as an individual. as well, his story of detaching from one planetary population and immigrating to another neatly matches up with the biographies of any number of early thinkers in the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition who left "difficult" countries such as early-1900s Germany to go discuss early Existentialism in France, and the conceptual vocabulary of Deleuze and Guattari as they attempt to tell us that all fictional narratives are ultimately about individuals "escaping" from bad graphs of people in order to join themselves into good graphs.
Existentialism is very fond of taking events that were not actually choices and painting them as deliberate choices, as if all individual reactions to an event are simply the individual reacting to their own prior good or bad decision. one textbook example is the prisoner who chooses to react to their "decision" to be unfairly thrown in prison by choosing not to internalize captivity and to instead internalize whatever possibilities for resistance they still possess; another common example is an individual's choice to wield "their" time each day in a particular way within the surrounding set of circumstances and recent events they did not actually cause to happen yet still are fictitiously in control of, the stated reason for this being that every second of time and of the motions of external reality an individual experiences as an embodied Subject is necessarily "theirs" through the active possession exerted by their perception and agency. said in fewer words, an Existentialist proposes that Goku is an authentic hero if _Goku believes_ he is in control of the capability to become a hero and successfully defeat threats such as Majin Boo or Freeza. it does not matter if somebody else put Goku in the situation he is in. as soon as Goku says "I won't give in" he is a hero, because if Goku believes that the situation Bardock put him in is the situation he wants to be in, then it may as well have been his own choice he made to deliberately define who he is, and he is fully in control of becoming the kind of person he wants to be.
of course, once it has been laid out like this, we begin to see some very obvious problems with Existentialism. Existentialism works great if you are Goku. if you have been handed a situation that is easy to work with, assign an interpreted purpose to, and claim as part of yourself, you will have no problem reading your existence through Existentialism; to you Existentialism may even seem like the most obvious and intuitive philosophy. However, Existentialism does nothing short of sputter and die if you are Vegeta. if you have been handed a difficult situation to the point it is utterly Absurd and makes absolutely no sense if one were to try to interpret it from the angles of received karma and there being any meaning to your actions and choices in terms of how it will change your relationship with the surrounding universe, Existentialism will not come across as meaningful or sensical to you either. A situation that is against you simply cannot be claimed as part of your character; a situation that _antagonizes you_ is definitionally the negation of _you_, while only the destruction of such a situation can be termed _part of you_. Vegeta, to his credit, does everything to integrate necessarily existing in opposition to Goku and the universe into his character, but it could hardly be said that this effort makes him more in control of his situation or makes him a better person. If following Existentialism is what Vegeta is supposed to do, his following it has not produced good results, and everyone else in the _Dragon Ball_ universe framing it as the right thing to do has simply been a lie.
as _Dragon Ball_ presents the story of Goku to us there is always the implication that even though Goku is exceptional in his martial arts abilities, his ability to wield Existentialism is _not_ exceptional, and when Goku asserts the capability to defeat Evil as his concept of what is right it is the obvious thing that anybody would do, assuming they have the capability. yet, in certain senses this is a flawed proposition. in the real world, or in any reasonable material world we can imagine, things that exist are defined by their capabilities. one thing with a particular capability is not the same as another thing without that particular capability. if one rock can float on water, such as a rock composed of pumice, it is a different object from a rock that cannot. it is certainly possible to imagine a hypothetical world where pumice sinks to the bottom of the ocean, but in our world that rock would likely not be considered the same entity as pumice that floats. in the mind of a scientist, pumice is a particular sand-grain matrix structure, and if we discovered another mineral that looks for all the world like pumice but sinks to the bottom of the ocean — scoria is one real-world mineral that might be said to fit this description — the structure of that rock would most likely look different under a microscope, leading us to distinguish it from pumice that floats regardless of whether the scientists of our world have in fact discovered and catalogued the other mineral structure that floats.
but this minimal example of pumice and scoria centers around common naturally-occurring minerals — what about self-aware individuals? _Dragon Ball_ has actually covered the situation of individuals existing under multiple different hypothetical situations at once. during the Cell Saga, a future version of Trunks appears from another timeline, where there also happens to exist a future version of his mother Bulma and the destructive artificial humans "#17" and "#18". there are moments at which a baby Trunks from the first timeline and a teenage Trunks from the second timeline exist on the same stretch of land at the same time. however, due to the physical rules associated with timelines in _Dragon Ball_, each timeline behaves as if it were a separate universe, and this means that baby Trunks and teenage Trunks are quite literally two different entities. they are two different material beings in the Heideggerian sense of two interacting objects or concepts starkly divided by the gap-making process of Being; they are as much two different objects with different histories and identities as Goku and Vegeta are. to be fair, this observation is more of a problem for _Dragon Ball_ than a problem for Existentialism. this accidental incident of Trunks bringing in an entire system of metaphysics happens to stem from _Dragon Ball_ making the arbitrary decision that time travel necessarily means a many-worlds model of material events. nonetheless, this plot still has metaphorical significance for Goku's interpretation of morality. if Trunks has the ability to split the timeline by making particular decisions, then so do any characters and events that affect starting circumstances from a long time ago, making it true that as soon as we attempt to conceptualize Goku not having the power to defeat somebody or some other character _having_ the power to defeat somebody, that alternate version of the character is necessarily defined through a particular material composition of timeline events as a new entity. _Dragon Ball_ has written itself into a corner where Goku without the power to defeat Cell is not actually Goku — this is Goku "B" who does not officially count as Goku "A". if Goku B has failed at his task, then this does not mean there is anything wrong with the self-concept or worldview of Goku A, because although Goku B has to accept that he has been dealt an Absurd universe too powerful for him, Goku A only has to accept that everything is still fine, everything he has previously believed and accepted as part of himself is still true, and he can certainly win.
if this is the case, all characters separated by the process of Being are incomparable. if Trunks A who is twelve years old believes that he can slay a giant dinosaur, but he isn't correct, yet Trunks B made a decision at eleven years old that resulted in him being totally able to take down a dinosaur, these two versions of Trunks cannot be judged the same as if there was no difference between them — if Vegeta is equally harsh on both versions of Trunks should they fail at their task, we would likely consider his expectations unfair given that Trunks A is not properly prepared. likewise, if Trunks A is twelve years old and thinks he can save the world, but this isn't true, he is not comparable to an adult Trunks B who does have the power to save the world. if we are fully aware Trunks A is unsuited for saving the world then we will not _expect_ him to save the world, and if we do not expect to hand twelve-year-old Trunks A the task of saving the world he does not have a _moral imperative_ to do it, nor can he at this time define who he is as a person or who he is as someone who aligns with moral right by his ability to take down world-ending threats. Trunks A cannot assign himself an interpreted purpose of saving the world nor accept the situation handed to him that he must save the world if he cannot accomplish it in the first place. this failure to accomplish a task that supposedly defines heroism and Good creates a stark division of entities between Trunks A and Goku, such that if Goku spouts rhetoric about how accepting his situation makes him an admirable hero he is more or less giving irrelevant advice that applies to nobody else. if we ever allow the notions of Good or Evil to become tied to the individual decisions of embodied minds, the Heideggerian stark-divisions between material objects fracture the plane of morality such that the definition of what are Good or Evil actions can only be discovered by each individual and can never actually be universalized to any other individuals.
perhaps the example of Goku asserting epic battles as an example of morality might seem unrelatable to everyday life. in this case, _Dragon Ball_ still contains any number of examples we might find more familiar. suppose Bulma gets the idea in her head that the morally right thing to do is to donate to charity, but as the heir to a very rich corporation she is the only one that actually has enough money, making everybody else look morally terrible. suppose some bystander aliens remark that Broly's father Paragus has treated him in unconscionable and abusive ways, but at that particular instant, the only one with the capacity to make decisions that have any effect on that situation is Paragus, the very one who is abusing his power and twisting his relationships in the first place. [*dbb] suppose Goku needs everyone in the world to do something, but they won't listen to Goku, and they will only listen if they hear it out of the mouth of their favorite celebrity they are unconditionally attached to for inexplicable reasons. [*dbzg] in each of these cases, morality itself becomes a fraught concept due to the way in which actions or decisions stated to be moral are only able to be performed by particular localized or powerful individuals. Existentialism would have us eagerly spin this difficult problem as yet another thrown-into situation to seize in which we should be allowed to celebrate the few people in the world with the power to actually do Good, and yet in spite of our adopting that perspective, most people still have to live with the harsh reality that morally-relevant actions are inaccessible to them, and as such, so is the capacity to assign meaning and the narratives of character growth or chosen purpose to those actions.
if capitalists are making bad decisions that create unsatisfactory products and customers genuinely do not like these decisions even though they continue being customers, yet the capacity to meaningfully change products currently lies in the hands of those with industry expertise who can successfully direct and sell products and get paid by capitalists, are customers and workers responsible for their own dissatisfaction or are industry experts responsible?
are voters responsible for the way Liberal parties undermine themselves and end up with fewer and fewer policies if in Liberalism most of the capacity of a country to make decisions is genuinely concentrated in the motions and interactions of large structures such as official parties rather than individuals and then further concentrated into the hands of a few experts? when the handful of experts knows what is best for the country, yet great portions of the population have no idea and devolve into conspiracy theories positing a totally different and wrong model of the country that they refuse to give up lest they be defeated by the imaginary conspiracy of definitely-incorrect-answerers and fail to survive thanks to imaginary conspiracists rejecting their definitely-correct answers, who is responsible then?
if center-Liberals know that they need to get their country back on track but their efforts are being thwarted by a bunch of unruly uninformed Tories, and the power to improve or not improve and cooperate or not cooperate ultimately lies solely in the hands of the Tories, are the center-Liberals still responsible, or is the hostile body of Tories responsible?
is Leon Trotsky truly responsible for his decision to break from the Soviet Union if he does not have the capability to function as an expert theorist in the manner that only Stalin and a few associated Stalin followers do? a dry, highly-literal application of Existentialist logic across our accumulated body of historical facts would have us say that because Stalin is so good at determining the correct thing to do, every individual should be required to do their best to understand Marxism and come as close as possible to finding the correct solution, and Trotsky is responsible for his failure to live up to the quality standards on Marxist theorists set by Stalin. however, it might be bad historical materialism to say this. if only Stalin can tell that what Trotsky is doing is grossly incorrect, and Trotsky does not have the capability to tell that attempting to create a breakaway Communist republic and a breakaway International is a bad idea, Trotsky does not have the power to stop Trotsky from vying for an incorrect Marxism, and only Stalin uniquely possesses that power as a non-transferrable part of his identity as a unique individual or associated material faction. at the same time, it is not necessarily fair for Stalin to order around Trotsky just because he alone has a rare capability Trotsky does not have. if Stalin leads Trotsky around and then makes a mistake, Trotsky would have no idea how to properly identify the mistake, and Stalin could not be held accountable for missing correct answers and settling for incorrect ones, let alone if abuses of power by those with incorrect answers ever actually became a serious problem. Marxism has, strangely, been operating on a rather Existentialist notion of accountability for the past century, in which parties have often relied on designated experts at various structural levels of a country and celebrated the heroically unique accomplishments of localized individuals, contradicting the basic concepts of historical materialism that the goal of historical materialism is for everyone in a population to eventually learn the basic workings of civilizations and historical processes to the point great numbers of ordinary people have the ability to pick out mistakes in the theory of civilization and government just as people today pick out incorrect scientific statements, and thus everyone does not need to rely on heroic party theorists to think for them. when Stalin can't always lead Trotsky and Trotsky definitely can't lead Stalin, who is responsible for putting the two movements back together?
after having gone through an entire hypothetical Saiyan history, we can easily see where the problems in Existentialist morality originally come from. the notion of heroic individuals and the justification of unique heroic experts ties directly back to the legacy of early capitalism and the ongoing spatial slot hierarchy of experts seen in both modern instances of capitalism and Marxist-Leninist workers' states. the so-called "petty bourgeoisie", who are not actually the bourgeois owners of late capitalism but the Artisan layer of early capitalism, have confounded our understanding not only of expertise and Jobs but also of morality. inside a fiercely-competitive spatial slot hierarchy of experts it is easy to invent an ideology like Existentialism in which the whole world is chopped up into individuals and the responsibility of all events in the world rests in the hands of particular unique individuals. in one sense it has to be this way — as Marx reminds us, a class which can convince everyone that it is synonymous with society and successfully propagate an ideology explaining how ordinary people's interests are the same interests of this class is one of the most effective ways, if not the only way, to successfully break open an old social order and create a new one. the Artisan layer led us through the great wall against medieval mere-colonialism and Existentialism guards the gate. [*PR]
at the same time, we already know that Existentialism — at least in this particular form associated with the earlier periods of the tradition — is not the ultimate theory of society risen out of the end of meaningful history. if Existentialism is ultimately a class ideology, we already know that there are further possible periods of class history after Existentialism's period which once formed all have the power to birth _new_ justifying ideologies. Existentialism tells us free-floating heroic individuals are responsible for society and sufficient to explain such things as purpose and morality. What if a plurality of free-floating populational units are all responsible for each other? What if self-contained unified societies are responsible for themselves? What if Communist Internationals are responsible for the societies of the world?
the overall concept of morality is inherently connected to the concept of responsibility, as we have seen in the "Trunks A versus Trunks B" example. how we overlay morality on top of our interpretation of the world depends at least partly on our initial interpretation of who or what is responsible for the situation we observe, either in the sense of causing it or in the sense of fixing it. if we look at the situation of Freeza descending on a planet to destroy it and we decide Freeza is responsible, we do not really have a lever of action by which we can easily tell Freeza to stop himself. this is what in turn leads us to the temptation to create Existentialist interpretations that because Goku is able to take action Goku is responsible, or because Gohan can do a thing Goku can't do Gohan must take over whether or not he feels like it. this is all well and good when Freeza is the one doing bad things. but who is responsible when Goku offers his companions to the gods-of-worlds and perpetuates his universe's overwhelming misogyny? is Goku responsible for not knowing how bad this is? are all the individuals around him who have improperly modeled bad behaviors responsible? we cannot easily localize the notion of moral Right or Wrong onto an individual nor properly hold any individual accountable if we cannot determine who is responsible for an action. clearly morality is quite a complicated thing.
in the context of Marxism, the primary reason we need to understand or discuss morality at all is to identify who or what is responsible for the historical processes that lead up to Communist revolution. if we wanted to persuade Bardock to become a Communist so he could save the Saiyan people from impending doom, our first obstacle is that he cannot do it by himself; he must contend with the fact he lives in an entire population of resistant Saiyans. as such, our explanation necessarily has to include the parts of an overall population, and likely the concept of which parts of the population currently hold the most responsibility. traditionally, this concept has been referred to with such phrases as "the revolutionary subject of history". in "Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right", Marx divides 1840s Germany into various different layers and points out how the internal antagonisms upward and downward between so many archaic layers of society leaves the population paralyzed and unable to settle onto any particular class which can take over the population and create a new regime with a new justifying ideology. [*PR] in order for the overall population to become conscious of its historical processes and take control of them, there must be at least one section of the population which is large enough to transcend single individuals yet is able to successfully come to a more-or-less accurate understanding of the current conditions of the entire population, over and above merely conveying to others an "inverted" interpretation of the world based on reifying and "Beagelizing" its own local interests and Amalthean understandings. this capable subpopulation is more or less what is referred to by the term "revolutionary subject".
in the case of our hypothetical Saiyan population, it is far from easy to build up this capable layer. not only will any small segment of enlightened individuals quickly become swallowed up and buried in the population's largest Social-Philosophical System, but some individuals may prove to be incapable of comprehending the possibility of Communist revolution if there is no capable subpopulation already prepared to take the reins to empower all its other individuals against society's archaic elements. sometimes you will encounter an individual like Vegeta who deliberately bolts himself into archaic structures or traditions in order to benefit from them. others like Bardock may not be outright hostile to the effort nor incapable of comprehending morality but might lack the will to try to orchestrate change if there is no one to organize. in this case, the recommendation from Marx is shocking. he proposes that far from Germany being _unable_ to proceed through the stages of history at the pace of "modern countries" like France, in order to free itself from the remaining scraps of its feudal order Germany actually must charge through multiple transitions and proceed toward Communist revolution _faster_. as crazy as this may sound, it was shown to be a correct prediction for certain countries such as the Russian Empire, the People's Republic of China, and North Korea — in each of these countries, the Liberal or nationalist period was short or nonexistent compared with countries such as the United States, and a Marxist party became responsible for transforming the country into a republic. in contrast, Western Marxism appears to have created a contorted interpretation of Marx's critique of Hegel in which _philosophy and critique themselves_ are highlighted as the liberating force. a cursory reading of the text will show that the point of Marx bringing up philosophy is to highlight that philosophy is always embodied inside networks of material people as a Social-Philosophical System. when the junkers of Germany attempt to create a particular interpretation of German history and the historical processes of German society, that model is an Amalthean interpretation of reality shaped by the day-to-day experience of archaic classes and embedded inside a particular social graph of junkers. when an Artisan or investor layer attempts to create an interpretation of society, that model is once again an Amalthean mythology shaped and distorted by the day-to-day experiences of the owning classes which is embedded in a social graph of bourgeois allies. Western-Marxists and Existentialists are not immune to forming localized class-based social graphs that falsely Beagelize their own class perspectives. the point Marx is actually making is that philosophy gains power _at the moment it is embedded inside a class or subpopulation which already has the potential for revolution_. Marxism-Leninism, it is true, has often presented a sometimes crude and outdated picture of what a capable subpopulation of proletarian allies might actually be expected to look like, often appealing to the populace with stereotypical images of 1940s factories and coal mines. these mistakes in messaging do not, however, negate the overall foundation of Marxist theory in material, class-based subpopulations. the surest strategy for winning people over with "philosophy" is to show them a proletarian movement.
large-scale historical processes operate outside the domain of morality, yet they are in no way distant from the domain of _responsibility_. every historical event has material causes — a kind of _material responsibility_. many smaller-scale historical events will become categorized by concrete groups of people into particular moral interpretations — a locally-constructed _moral responsibility_. as well, people who have become convinced that history ought to proceed a particular way will secondarily construct moral imperatives atop these interpretations — a fully embodied _teleological responsibility_. when it comes to persuading our hypothetical Saiyan population to abandon empire, material responsibility is easy while moral and teleological responsibility are the hard problems. if certain layers of our population do not understand moral responsibility, does the particular burden assigned to them then fall on others? what about if our "capable" layer turns out to not actually be capable? if we successfully persuade Bardock to become a Communist and attempt to orchestrate Communist revolution, can we turn around and blame Bardock's group for their failures if the revolution doesn't work out?
we know that the Existentialist interpretation of morality is inadequate. we know that the full palette of all societal processes cannot be properly described by a simple system of blaming Gohan when we realize we cannot dissuade Freeza. if so, how are we to reconstruct our model of morality in a manner more suited to serve future historical periods? it seems much more likely that we can simply begin again from scratch on our moral foundations based on the findings of historical materialism and recalibrate morality than that human beings will stop speaking of "justice" and "oppression", morally-charged as these terms may be. to do this, we must draw on the above class-based understanding of morality as emerging from the internal activities of socially-linked classed individuals or class territories to create a subpopulation-based understanding.
the road to morality begins at functional purpose and the creation of Subjects. in the beginning, there is no morality, and the universe is simply an amoral sea of various floating pieces. if we want there to be morality, we first need to begin with a particular perspective — the basic reason for this is that it is impossible to define anything as good or bad unless we have something to define its effect or value relative to. if no perspectives exist, yet somehow individuals exist as some sort of non-perceiving philosophical zombies, we cannot label Freeza descending to blow up a planet as bad. if we are allowed to see the event from the perspective of the planet's civilians, then we gain the power to label Freeza's actions as morally wrong relative to that perspective. of course, the caveat with this is if we choose to see the events from Freeza's perspective, for all we know he may choose to label his actions as morally acceptable or justifiable. the creation of individual perspectives immediately results in the creation of plurality, and plurality is a messy thing.
the easiest way to solve the problem of plurality is simply to admit that morality is always somewhat subjective. any particular moral understanding is necessarily a constructed agreement between some particular group of individuals, whether this is two individuals or two million. we do not have to worry deeply about the content of morality, knowing that ultimately all morality actually stems from the material needs of tangible collections of individuals. if two populations have different conceptions of morality, it does not mean these differences in morality are unresolvable as much as it immediately implies the populations might or might not have different material needs. knowing this, we can simply begin to parse and evaluate particular codes of morality by going back to the level of material responsibility. if a particular moral code accurately describes the needs of some particular group of individuals, it may be tentatively taken as benign and usable, while if a moral code clearly does not match the actual needs of actual material individuals, perhaps overstating those needs into aggressive empire or understating those needs into class oppression, it may be tentatively taken as highly questionable. we first see the emergence of true morality at the intersection of material responsibility and individual or group perspectives. whenever a Subject exists, that Subject first experiences raw material needs and the surrounding historical process of material responsibility as generated by interactions between various material things. second, that Subject generates a localized perspective in regard to its material needs and how it currently believes it is acceptable or unacceptable to satisfy them. finally, a Subject begins to label other surrounding individuals or populations as good or bad based on how the perspectives and actions of these other entities interact with its own needs and perspectives. a particular Subject is likely to be biased toward considering its own needs more immediately important than those of others, which may either simplify or complicate the overall process of generating morality. Subjects can then begin to assign moral responsibility based on how they each accurately or inaccurately _believe_ the overall system of free-floating Subjects is supposed to evolve. the entire process is fraught with the problems of plurality, but it is far from impossible to work through. whenever plurality seems to thwart the process of forming moral responsibility, we only need to either consider the field of open plurality a temporarily amoral arena, or consider and compare each perspective separately before each localized conception of morality ultimately comes to a judgement about the others. messy and unreliable as it may seem, this process does have the potential to generate definitive judgements about the best form of morality. all morality originates from the localized and embodied observations of Subjects, and thus, as long as two populations successfully form a connection over some shared set of material needs, there is the potential for the two populations to agree on the same conception of morality, and come to the same definitions of moral responsibility.
let us return to Bardock and the _Dragon Ball_ universe. Bardock has just been won over to Communism. he tries to convince another subject of the Saiyan kingdom to join his faction. the other Saiyan tries to complicate everything, and claim that he can't _really_ know that it's better not to have an empire — after all, empire is very effective at providing for Planet Vegeta's residents, Communism doesn't work, and is he even really part of the Saiyan nation if he goes around mocking its traditions and spouting Communist nonsense? we now have the tools to see through this. everything is amoral until it is seen through particular perspectives. Bardock sees things through the perspective of an emerging Communist movement. the other Saiyan sees things through the perspective of a connected Social-Philosophical-Material System of imperialism. the two perspectives exist in open plurality. Bardock's perspective emerges from the material needs of the members of the Communist movement. the other Saiyan's perspective emerges from the needs of a violent and destructive empire. perhaps it is hyperbolic and improper to apply such descriptions just yet. however, as soon as Bardock can identify another individual or population who would be harmed by the Saiyan empire he gains the ability to label empire morally wrong and the threat of empire a matter of moral responsibility. he does not necessarily have the ability to pin this moral responsibility on anyone in particular, but as soon as Bardock and another Subject exist and agree on the need to protect themselves from empire they are capable as a group of constructing morality and moral responsibility. no greater authority nor form of structure is required for Bardock's faction to construct morality. if other factions exist with different conceptions of morality, that does not instantly negate the existence of Bardock's morality.
now let us return to the case of Goku and Vegeta. have we fixed Goku's broken interpretation of morality? first, we start from an amoral foundation where neither Goku nor Vegeta is inherently morally relevant. then we can consider Goku's perspective. Goku thinks it is a simple thing to do what is right and to either shape oneself into a hero or align oneself with the cause of Right. however, Goku's perspective emerges from the specific class position of being ejected from the Saiyan nation and having to work his way through a spatial slot hierarchy containing peasants, Artisans, martial arts experts, and proper small or large business territories, of which he loosely fits into three of four categories at various times. Goku has seen his other allies including Krillin, Yamcha, and Tenshinhan gradually become irrelevant to anything that is happening, yet he does not stop to think about the implications of everyone relying on experts — even though to be perfectly fair Goku does not stop and think about much of anything. meanwhile, Vegeta exists. he exists in the middle of a universe where basically everything has antagonized him since he was born, including Goku to small and unintentional extents. Vegeta does not care about anyone or anything, which is to say he does not assign moral relevance or responsibility to anyone or anything. Vegeta's perspective emerges from having been embedded in the difficult and archaic conditions of the Saiyan nation. he is in a strange position of simultaneously having false consciousness that the basic destructive patterns of empire are okay, and what logically should be accurate consciousness about the hardships of existing as a small and archaic civilization against a dangerous and uncaring universe. because Goku and Vegeta originate from different Social-Philosophical-Material Systems that have each left their mark on the individuals, their perspectives exist in plurality. Goku assigns moral interpretations to Vegeta from inside Goku's perspective and model of reality, and Vegeta assigns interpretations to Goku from inside Vegeta's perspective, but as long as these perspectives are in open plurality, neither of them is objectively correct.
if Vegeta were to say that Krillin getting destroyed in the fight against Freeza is not morally relevant because he does not care about people, Goku cannot tell him that he is _objectively_ incorrect because the opposition of their embodied perspectives in that particular moment nullifies the possibility of seeing things from a universalizable and trustworthy perspective; the biased perspectives of the two Saiyan emigrants divide and shatter perceived reality into two realities. however, if in the same situation _Freeza_ says that Krillin getting destroyed is not morally relevant, either Goku or Vegeta can dismiss him because he does not have a stake in the opposition between Goku and Vegeta and he has long been ruled out as either Goku or Vegeta's ally. if some other character who is not positioned as an enemy of Goku or Vegeta somehow happens to be in this situation, such as Number Eighteen, and she says that Krillin getting destroyed _is_ morally relevant, but Vegeta wants to dismiss her, he does not have a case if Goku decides that Eighteen counts as an ally. if Number Eighteen does not have any history of getting into regular arguments with Vegeta, then her perspective can be taken as more objective than what comes out of Goku, despite the fact that Goku made her part of his faction; the mere act of Goku expanding his faction does not change the existing relationships between individuals or localized graphs of individuals, nor the content of these localized graphs. yet, is the legitimacy of whatever Goku or Eighteen says purely based on numerical majorities? not precisely. if for some reason Number Eighteen regressed to her biological-death-machine days and came up with her own rather concerning interpretation of how it is acceptable to treat Vegeta, Eighteen having been admitted to Goku's faction has no effect on the validity of what she says, even if somebody else standing next to Goku happens to agree with her. if Goku, Piccolo, and Eighteen are part of a faction and Eighteen and Piccolo both feel like it is okay to thrash Vegeta, they do not claim objectivity just because they do not regularly threaten Vegeta with violence, nor do they claim legitimacy just because there are two of them. if Eighteen or Piccolo or both of them becomes materially responsible for posing a threat to Vegeta, Vegeta can still take this material responsibility relative to his own vantage point as a Subject and assign it a negative moral valence if he feels like it. if there is no confounding unity of opposites, any particular Subject which is antagonized by another faction with another conception of morality can generally always claim the legitimacy of its own perspective and attempt to elevate this perspective into a new plurality. if Vegeta instead simply refuses to have a conception of morality and hold that whatever does or does not happen to him is not a moral matter, then this is his loss. all moral responsibility for what happens to Vegeta must arise beginning at Vegeta. if Vegeta does not take advantage of his perspective as a Subject to assert a moral claim which will be added to the natural plurality of moral perspectives, there is no way for moral claims about what happens to Vegeta to arise from the initial state of amorality. if Goku decides to stand in front of Vegeta and try to generate claims about what moral valence Vegeta _should_ have assigned to himself, this cannot be presumed to be an effective thing to do. this could end up with the surface appearance that Goku has "done the right thing" and helped Vegeta, but ultimately the perspective of Goku cannot be outright substituted for the perspective of Vegeta. as long as Goku and Vegeta have overall perspectives which form an opposed plurality, Goku is not guaranteed to correctly predict all of Vegeta's answers. Goku simply speaking instead of Vegeta is not the same thing as Goku and Vegeta closing the unity of opposites and sharing a single factional perspective in which Goku could reasonably speak for Vegeta.
what about the case where Vegeta cares precisely about what happens to himself but does not care about what happens to others? if we take the scenario where Eighteen determines that it is okay to harm Vegeta but Vegeta does assert his localized perspective as a Subject, in this case it is not a problem for Goku to attempt to assert his own perspective and speak for Vegeta because they have tentatively come to an agreement on the single issue of the moral relevance of Vegeta. likewise if Vegeta attempts to speak for Goku and they are in agreement about a particular moral issue, this is not a problem even if everything else Vegeta says about morality is completely disagreeable. the validity of conceptions of morality arises not from numbers or the power of particular social graphs, but specifically from agreement. it may be true that if only two people agree that something is morally right, they will have trouble philosophically or materially defending this against a population of two million people, rendering their perspective irrelevant for practical purposes, but this by itself does not mean that what the two people believe is objectively incorrect.
now that we have properly separated the moral perspectives of Goku and Vegeta and established that Goku cannot assert his perspective over Vegeta without agreement between them, it becomes much easier to compare the moral perspectives of Goku and anyone else. if morality is based partly in agreement, then Goku and Trunks do not need to be comparable themselves just to have the same conception of morality; they are free to call themselves members of the same faction as soon as they agree on _anything_ that one of them is capable of, and to make statements about the moral relevance or responsibility of things that only apply to the other individual. the difference between this and the "Trunks A" scenario is that when morality is contained in groups or social connections rather than individuals, there is no problem of morality being locked inside the material and intellectual growth process of specific individuals. if morality emerges purely and only from Goku as a Subject, Goku can learn to defend moral Right as he becomes stronger, but this lesson does not apply to Trunks because it does not leave Goku. if morality emerges from Goku and Trunks as Subjects but it does not reside there and instead resides on the connection between them, then Trunks is capable of learning a morally-relevant lesson at the same time Goku learns it. Trunks A is now capable of comprehending morality.
up to this point in our construction of morality, everything has been almost strictly subjective. every time there has been a moral question, only subjective interpersonal interactions have been able to answer it. this has in turn led us to strange artifacts such as having no existing consensus for seemingly-obvious situations such as Eighteen and Piccolo turning against Vegeta. this is where _teleological responsibility_ comes in. teleological responsibility is the responsibility we assign to very large and enduring factions capable of crafting and recording historical narratives. when a large Social-Philosophical System has the power to shape its entire surrounding world and the environment experienced by rival Social-Philosophical Systems, it asserts a claim to teleological responsibility over all the moral claims and material responsibilities it asserts, and can also attempt to assert teleological responsibility over other groups and individuals. whole societies are the primary teleological actors, although any faction bold enough to try to assert moral dominion over the world can certainly try to become one. when Goku's faction defeats Freeza and they go down in the history of New Planet Namek as Namek's heroes and local champions of moral Right, the greater faction containing Goku's allies and the Namekians has generated teleological responsibility. this responsibility is still ultimately subjective, in that if another planetary population exists which hates Goku and the Namekians they do not instantly become subject to the moral understandings of the large Namekian faction until they interact with this faction and go through the normal processes of determining material and moral responsibility.
when we want to assert that the Saiyan nation forming a workers' state is the correct course of history, teleological responsibility is the kind we need. without teleological responsibility, there is no final answer to pluralities of moral interpretations. if Goku and Vegeta were to remain in a unity of opposites forever, Goku would need teleological responsibility to be able to properly collapse the plurality he shares against Vegeta's interpretations. likewise, if two subpopulations exist in open plurality, one of them must seize teleological responsibility in order to collapse the otherwise perpetual plurality between them and raise its particular set of moral interpretations to the single accepted set of interpretations. in the hypothetical scenario where all the planetary nations of the _Dragon Ball_ universe slowly form into a Communist International, the International is able to mediate teleological responsibility. in the scenario where Bardock is only beginning to plot how to assemble a Communist movement, he currently holds no teleological responsibility with regard to the greater terrain of people and factions; the largest Social-Philosophical System of Saiyan imperialism is the one that instead holds teleological responsibility over its local domain.
it is an easy mistake for isolated individuals to become confused and think they will never be able to assert teleological responsibility for Marxism while Liberalism and Existentialism will always hold the teleological responsibility to dictate everything they see. this is not the case, once we have the understanding that teleological responsibility merely emerges from the material processes of interacting individuals and groups within a material world, and particular arrangements of teleological responsibility are somewhat arbitrary as far as the universe itself is concerned. all teleology which is not merely functional purpose — material responsibility — is more or less the product of our minds, and gains legitimacy and traction precisely at the moment we put it into practice.
now, what about all the messy moral disasters created by Existentialism's interpretation of capitalism? can we use our concept of the material-to-moral-to-teleological responsibility process to untangle and explain each of those?
what about Bulma and the capitalists? Bulma's conception of morality is first affected and shaped by material responsibility, which is to say that if her existence as a capitalist ally takes material and moral responsibility from everyone else and creates material responsibility for human suffering anywhere her plan begins to look immediately dubious as long as there is some assembled faction of people with a shared interpretation of morality and a brain. what about Paragus? if Paragus has one conception of morality it does not negate Broly's ability to form a morally-relevant faction and ultimately free himself. what about Goku losing the spotlight to celebrities? there is no need to assign moral responsibility to either of the two of them in particular. all that is necessary is to point out that if they want to survive, the people of earth must gain the ability to be materially responsible for what it is they need to do, and the ordinary people of earth regain the capacity to take morally-relevant actions. what about industry experts? the population as a whole is materially responsible for the state of capitalist products, not specific experts; this realization will not be immediately obvious to individuals, but the population steadily joining together around the same shared responsibilities is the necessary foundation for the proletariat to ultimately represent the population and improve products. what about center-Liberal voters? no particular voter or Liberal party is morally responsible for the stratification of society and creation of "democracy experts", and the population as a whole is materially responsible for designing a better government. what about Liberal parties? just as with Bardock and the Communists, nobody in particular is morally responsible for fixing the messy plurality of parties until some capable layer of society gains the power to become _materially_ responsible and ultimately becomes capable of generating teleological responsibility.
and what about Trotsky? this is one of the more actually-complicated cases. everything must begin from a clean amoral terrain. Trotsky's faction of Leninist theorists, owning classes, and conspirators believes in one conception of morality. Stalin's government believes in another conception of morality. Trotsky's conception of morality emerges from the needs of building a hypothetical and unrealized Material System of Trotskyism. Stalin's conception of morality emerges from the needs of building a very tangible and realized Material System of mainstream Marxism-Leninism known as the Soviet Union. the Soviet Union contains a great number of conscious Subjects, and Trotsky's faction is capable of harming them. Stalin's government has ample ability to construct a conception of morality in which the Trotskyite conspiracy is labeled morally wrong. however, Trotsky's faction also contains some number of conscious Subjects who may or may not be able to identify suboptimal practices in the Soviet Union that have caused harm to them. this means that both Stalin and Trotsky's factions have the ability to claim morally-relevant harm caused by each other, and because they exist in plurality, the existence of neither one can negate the content of the other. the conflict between Stalin's government and Trotsky's faction is a graph struggle which is essentially similar to any case of a nationality breaking into two identity-based nationalities; Stalin's government and Trotsky's faction are two nations at war. if Trotsky's faction had indeed proved itself to be the capable layer of the whole world and built up a strong Fourth International continuously spawning regional Trotskyist workers' states, it would then have been true that the conflict between Stalin Thought and Trotskyism was a straightforward, open-and-shut case in which the Fourth International would form separate countries into a Group Subject capable of justifying its existence through its own power and its capability to have material responsibility for the world proletariat. however, without conclusive evidence on whether a Material System of Trotskyism is possible at the level that has been achieved for Stalin Thought and Maoism, it cannot be said for certain whether Stalin Thought or Trotskyism had a stronger claim to become the moral interpretation of the world; it is possible to make the argument that the Trotskyite conspiracy was unacceptable within the boundaries of the Soviet Union or other workers' states, but not possible to make the argument that Trotskyism is unacceptable everywhere. at the end of the day, if the Soviet Union were left unharmed, all that would remain would be a faction of Trotskyists with the material need to attempt to construct Trotskyism. this need is no more objectionable than an ethnic group attempting to separate out of a national territory and form its own republic, a task which although arbitrary and difficult to reduce to its pure political-economic layer is generally defended by Marxism-Leninism. the final and most appropriate test for whether the world and its workers need the existence of Trotskyism is precisely to _construct Trotskyism_.
when we apply our model of the formation of morality to Trotskyism, one more concerning pattern emerges: would a functioning world Trotskyism gain teleological responsibility _specifically because_ it is strong and holds power? is this still a strictly Machiavellian system where the ends justify the means? no. if we lived in the _Dragon Ball_ universe, and Freeza decided to tell everybody that he is the only one who can dictate moral Right and teleological responsibility just because he has control over a large fraction of planets, that does not mean he is correct. morality is partly based in agreement; if Freeza cannot continue to get all the planetary nations to agree that his way of doing things is the best way, his particular Social-Philosophical System of morality will eventually shatter. likewise, no matter how tall of promises a world Marxist movement may make, if it does not successfully keep its member populations in agreement to be part of it and uphold its standards, it will not be able to hold together. are we, then, to believe that Marxism is the philosophy of "authoritarian" "dictators" and we are no better than Freeza? no. this is a terrible misreading of teleological responsibility. as much as the act of _assembling_ factions through moral agreements can become a justification for codes of morality, the _shattering_ of factions does not necessarily mean anything. when factions shatter apart, all that is immediately created is plurality and confusion. teleological responsibility only exists while structures capable of carrying it exist, while if such a graph structure breaks apart, that particular teleological responsibility does not revert to any of the component structures and instead simply disappears. this error has been widely propagated across Liberal countries at almost every scale of social reality, from the shattering of the Soviet Union supposedly "meaning" the illegitimacy of the Soviet Union and the legitimacy of country-scale nationalisms, to the shattering of large corporations "meaning" the illegitimacy of large corporations and the legitimacy of small businesses, to the shattering of social structures in general "meaning" the illegitimacy of various scales of democracy or "bureaucracy" and the legitimacy of bare competing individuals. this naïve interpretation emerges directly from localized graphs of people being unable to realize that they have a class character as free-floating social territories, and that the internal Amalthean interpretations of their localized graph fragment are not inherently-authentic interpretations of reality simply because they have personal and empirical experiences of them. if Goku and Vegeta were briefly in moral agreement that everything Goku says about morality is correct, but then the moral agreement between them broke apart, it would not automatically mean that Vegeta's particular first-hand perspective of reality is the only correct moral interpretation and he can go around telling everyone that nobody is morally relevant and nobody needs to care about anything, much less that Vegeta can go around claiming to have the one correct interpretation of all of history.
the model of morality emerging through stages of material, moral, and teleological responsibility can get us quite far in explaining the origins of moral codes, moral conflicts, and moral justifications. however, this model does not fully cover the emergence of _objective_ moral standards or an objective study of ethics. in everyday conversation, these two things are quite desirable. explaining historical materialism and the slow and painful emergence of morality through the medium of conflicting Social-Philosophical Systems could take a long time. many of us would rather there really was such a thing as objective explanations of widespread moral standards.
to use an arbitrary example, let us take an issue which was very popular in 2020: how do we know whether the existence of transgender people is morally right, morally neutral, or morally wrong? LGBT+ allies assert the moral claim that misgendering transgender people is Wrong, but wide swaths of right-Liberals and Tories assert the moral claim that misgendering transgender people is Right. as discussed earlier, almost every currently-relevant political issue in Liberal countries is not a matter of historical materialism but a matter of morality, and in every one of these moral issues where people "democractically" vote over the correct answer, morality becomes shattered into a crude, vulgar matter of raw plurality in which everyone begins to believe the answers are purely a matter of localized subjective opinion. center-Liberals and their Gramscian and Existentialist allies continually try to assert that they have already gained teleological responsibility over the discussion and that the discussion is "closed", but over and over, right-Liberals and Tories keep tearing these kinds of issues back open under the grounds of an inherent right to plurality in such guises as "free speech" and "freedom of thought".
responses to this problem vary across the various periods of non-Marxist philosophy. center-Liberals will often try to frame transgender people as a matter of observational science in which a stack of scientific studies showing that transgender people do not abandon their gender identity as they grow older is proof that right-Liberals and Tories should vote for transgender healthcare. Existentialists tend toward more intellectual approaches in which they try to argue that transgender Subjectivity simply should not subordinate itself to a "rationalist" "scientistic" box if this rigidly-defined box falsely attempts to "understand" it in improper ways; the rights of transgender people become "none of your business" if people do not already understand why this demographic and these rights exist from within the transgender vantage point and the transgender perspective. Gramscians may try to make the issue all about education, in the process leaving the implication that nobody can actually have an objective discussion about the issue until we have all been pumped full of correct observational facts and Media Representation and abandoned our existing conditioned biases against transgender people. rather worryingly, none of these approaches seem to have truly resolved the issue, and people continue every so often to falsely reopen the problem of transgender people in connection with conspiracy theories that "The Left" (or some vague group of people improperly conflated with "The Marxists" of Western Marxism) is trying to control the nation by feeding everyone incorrect models of reality as a whole.
to make matters worse, large numbers of people do not understand why it is a problem _for everyone_ that issues like this are not resolved, in effect opening another layer of plurality and sideways graph struggle over whether the issue is even worth talking about. here is the problem: when people clash in pointless forms of plurality over a question of whether something is moral, this is a manifestation of people simply and plainly having no understanding of morality. people do not understand how morality is formed or why we should form it, leading to a reality where morality is _not_ formed. Gramscians can go around claiming that transgender rights are "already common sense" all they want to, but if the actual state of knowledge and factional formation is that people are struggling back and forth over an amoral terrain, this hopeful future-tense rhetoric will have no effect on people's real-world behaviors.
to begin the journey from morality to ethics is to ask the question: is it _objectively_ wrong to misgender a transgender person? can such an individualized and localized question ever become an objective matter for everybody? initially, it would appear that there is a conflict between the fact all information about gender identity is internalized into Subjects and locked away from other subpopulations of Subjects who do not contain this information, versus the need for any objective study of reality to operate on a shared material plane which is observable and testable by all philosophical opponents who wish to examine it. if people live in a subpopulation containing no transgender people, they will be incapable of empirically examining any truth claims about transgender people should they wish to, and more importantly than this, they will not have easy access to a method to determine whether the collected data and models other subpopulations are feeding them are reliable. it is one thing if one can obtain factual information from reliable sources and trust that any acts of testing and verification undertaken by those sources are valid, but information from a source of unknown reliability creates epistemological crises in which we wonder how this source can know or assert anything it knows.
in order to untangle the connection between epistemology and morality, perhaps we should first back up and ask ourselves: how can we know that any ordinary fact is objective? how do we decide on the objectivity of any ordinary, non-morally-relevant fact?
for instance, we can take the fact that a given sample of pumice floats in water while a given sample of scoria sinks. if Alice observes these two samples in a particular laboratory setup, and Bob separately observes the two samples in the same setup, there should be no major difference in the overall shape of their observations given that there is nothing about the laboratory setup that specifically interacts with the processes inside each Subject to cause a Subject to perceive it differently; the laboratory setup is a single collection of objects that always follows the same behaviors. for some other experiments, it is possible that a laboratory setup could be confounded by factors such as red and green objects causing Bob to perceive two objects as being the same color although their actual emission spectrum is different. however, for a setup measuring a fairly binary set of outcomes and which is based solidly in the physics of its experimental materials, these kinds of errors specifically tied to individual Subjects are unlikely. Alice and Bob may each report different margins of error based on their localized capacities to perform the experiment, but this is not a phenomenon inherently tied to them being Subjects as much as to them experiencing a Heideggerian stark-division into unique objects. Alice and Bob may report different measurements, but two separate cameras may also report different measurements, and this does not mean the cameras are self-aware or alive. if our working definition of objectivity begins with the notion of being testable, then this experiment is testable _on the basis_ of the experimental apparatus existing independently from both Alice and Bob yet being equally accessible to both of them. the experimental apparatus is objective more or less because its externally-existing material objects are not and _cannot_ be embodied into either Alice or Bob's internal model of the world they virtually generate in their heads. no picture of a pipe is the same thing as a material pipe.
of course, there are many steps between demonstrating the kind of objective fact that goes with a sample of rock and the kind of objective fact that goes with human rights. first we need to establish that there are objective facts about people. then we need to establish that there are objective facts about such things as social graphs, societies, civilizations, and demographic identities. finally, we need to establish that there are objective facts applying to the domain of morality, and that objective moral facts can be elevated out of a terrain which begins as inherently subjective.
none of these concepts are actually difficult to demonstrate, and to really make this point, we can return to the fictional material-histories of _Dragon Ball_. for all we know, Alice and Bob in our above example may have no drastic difference in worldview and no real trouble agreeing on things. meanwhile, there are times when Goku and Vegeta can hardly agree on anything. nonetheless, the concept of objectivity does not fundamentally depend on people's perspectives or whether people's vantage points, world models, opinions, knowledge, or traditions are different. it does not matter how different people are nor whether they experience formal Difference between their identities; objectivity is what exists _outside_ all of these Differentiating characteristics of Subjects.
to demonstrate that objective facts apply to Subjects, we can begin with the previously mentioned system of Goku, Vegeta, and Piccolo. it is a completely non-morally-relevant fact that Piccolo is green; there is no reason whatsoever for Goku and Vegeta to argue about this. yet, to even state such a basic fact means that objective facts apply to people. Piccolo is established to be a self-aware Subject, yet even the most basic facts applying to him as a unique object are also properties of a Subject. a Subject is inseparable from the physical properties currently associated with that Subject — if this seems objectionable, we should keep in mind that all self-reflection of human beings in the real world or most reasonable material realities we can imagine are grounded in the human brain, and a human brain is generally physical, as well as accompanying the other physical properties of a material individual as they exist as a unique object. Piccolo is not capable of perceiving without something we would label as Piccolo's body, thus any time Piccolo behaves as a Subject, it is a fact applying to that Subject that Piccolo is green. at the same time, because this is a fact about a Subject, it is a _localized_ fact not applying to other parts of reality; the fact that Piccolo is green does not apply to Goku or Vegeta because it is localized to Piccolo. nonetheless, the observation that objective facts about Subjects are localized to those Subjects does not mean that they cannot be objectively observed. as soon as an observation of a localized fact about a Subject is observed by other Subjects in a manner independent from the perspectives of any specific Subjects, that fact is objective.
now we have established that objective facts apply to people, what about social graphs? if we take the social graph containing Goku, Vegeta, and Gohan, it is a non-morally-relevant fact that all of them can perform the Kamehameha technique. this fact is not relative to the perceptions of Goku, Gohan, or Vegeta. Piccolo can independently observe the ability of these three individuals to perform the technique; Goku did not fabricate the ability to use ki techniques and claim he could do it when actually he could not. it is easy enough to establish that we can state objectively-observable facts about social graphs in the trivial sense that we can state facts applying to the superficial material aspects of Subjects. but if we merely state material facts about a social graph's individuals one at a time, have we established anything new over our ability to objectively state that Piccolo is green? perhaps not. however, if Goku or Vegeta has the ability to teach Trunks to use the Kamehameha technique, this is a fact about the relationships between the individuals in the graph. inasmuch as Trunks is or becomes connected to the graph of Goku and Vegeta, the act of learning their techniques exists specifically on the graph connection between individuals — perhaps as a matter of bringing them to a shared understanding of the same martial arts school, or perhaps as a matter of strengthening their bonds as a faction. we cannot focus too closely on the factional implications of graph connections and connection weights at this stage, but nonetheless, if the ability to learn the same techniques exists specifically inside graph connections, it is a fact specifically about a social graph, and if the techniques are expressed materially and can be confirmed by any outside observer it is an objective fact.
the moment at which establishing objective facts begins to become more difficult is when we scale up from small social graphs to societies. one problem we will quickly run into is that many facts applying to whole populations are actually morally-relevant facts. for instance, we could attempt to claim that it is a non-morally-relevant fact that Saiyans live on Planet Vegeta, but due to the prior history of Planet Vegeta, this is in fact a _highly_ morally-relevant statement; to say otherwise would be to lose ourselves in localized populational perspectives and fail to understand the overall process of forming morality. very well then. would it qualify as a non-morally-relevant fact to say that as a population Namekians are usually green? no, because this is a repeated fact about individuals, and does not demonstrate an objective fact that can _only_ apply to populations. a better example would be the fact that Namekians can create Dragon Balls. this qualifies as a fact that exists on the overall set of graph connections between all Namekians as a planetary population. it is not true that every Namekian can create Dragon Balls, but it is true at the same time that all other Namekians share at least loose graph connections to those that can. because Dragon Balls are established to be material objects existing outside all particular Namekians, they can be objectively observed by people of other social graphs or populations. Goku and Vegeta are not of the Namekian species or from Planet Namek, but they can observe the fact that Namekians can create Dragon Balls and this is a characteristic belonging to their overall population. populations, societies, and civilizations can produce their own localized yet objective facts.
at the same moment we can show there are objective facts about populations, we can more or less show that there are objective facts about demographic identities. because all demographic identities are marked out as unique subpopulations by a fuzzy and uncertain border to begin with, from "young" versus "old" to gender to specific race labels to language usage, any such objective facts we try to identify are likely to be probabilistic, applying to a given demographic identity only a certain fraction of the time. (This phenomenon will be covered in the next chapter, "Being and finches".) in the case of _Dragon Ball_, the Namekian population consistently sorts itself into three distinct demographic identities, and among these identities, it is a non-morally-relevant fact that Fighter-type Namekians generally do not create Dragon Balls, while Dragon-type Namekians generally can. once again, because Dragon Balls are established as material objects, the characteristics of each demographic identity can be objectively confirmed, and these characteristics belong to each overall subpopulation because all three subpopulations share loose graph connections into the larger population along which they recognize each other as subpopulations with particular characteristics.
we have now shown that there are objective facts about people, social graphs, and populations that can be confirmed by outside observers regardless of the observer's individual or factional perspective. but so far, most of these facts have not been morally-relevant facts. is it still possible to establish objective facts about people, social graphs, or populations which are objective yet which also happen to be morally relevant?
with regard to individuals and populations, it is not difficult to simply identify a morally-relevant fact. in _Dragon Ball_, as mentioned earlier, earth is home to a diffuse population of destructive artificial humans. it is a morally-relevant fact that Numbers Sixteen, Seventeen, and Eighteen were created containing bombs. at the same time, even though this fact is morally relevant, any other kind of being who is not a member of the population of artificial humans is able to confirm if these individuals contain bombs should they have access to some kind of imaging device which can see through organic or mechanical bodies. it is thus an objective fact that Eighteen was created containing a bomb at the same time it is morally relevant. of course, this is a somewhat trivial fact about Eighteen, in the same sense that we can cheaply point out that it is a part of Piccolo's existence as a Subject that he is green. to merely point out that Eighteen was created containing a bomb is to take a fact which should be morally relevant and discuss it in an amoral context, stripping it of its moral relevance. how do we objectively identify morally-relevant facts about Subjects while preserving morality?
this is the point at which we are required to properly intersect the study of objectivity with the study of morality. in the study of objectivity, there are two basic steps: first we look for facts about material things that can be observed by multiple outside observers, and then we confirm these observable facts in a manner which will not be affected by the observers' unique perspectives. in the study of the moral formation process, there are four basic steps: begin with an amoral terrain, outline material responsibilities, identify the material needs of each Subject and that Subject's understanding of how other entities affect those needs in order to gain moral responsibility for Right or Wrong actions, and finally, identify if any groups or structures that have resulted from moral interactions are capable of carrying teleological responsibility. if we wish to combine these two methods to arrive at an objective concept of morality, our new method will be as follows: begin from an amoral terrain, identify material responsibilities as facts independent of individual perspectives, identify the material needs and moral concepts of each Subject independent of individual perspectives, resolve each Subject's moral concept against material responsibility and other moral concepts until they represent a single perspective rather than a plurality, and finally, evaluate how the material responsibilities produced by the collapse of plurality generate teleological responsibilities and whether those teleological responsibilities hold up against other objective observations about reality.
in the case of Goku, Vegeta, and Number Eighteen, we begin with Eighteen as a morally-relevant individual and the morally-relevant fact that Eighteen contains a bomb. if Eighteen carries this morally-relevant fact within her, Goku and Vegeta can each create different interpretations of morality around it — when Goku and Vegeta first encounter Eighteen, it may hypothetically be the case that Goku and Krillin agree that the bomb should be removed from Eighteen while Vegeta believes that they should fire off the bomb and destroy her. these are drastically different conceptions of morality. in order to resolve them, we should begin as we always do from an amoral terrain and material responsibilities. in the beginning, there is no morality and we have no idea if Goku and Krillin attempting to preserve Eighteen is morally preferable to Vegeta attempting to fire off the bomb and destroy Eighteen. we can see a definite set of material responsibilities forming: Vegeta, Goku, or Krillin could be materially responsible for destroying Eighteen, or alternatively, Goku and Krillin could be materially responsible for preserving Eighteen. as well, we can add to this the objective observation that Eighteen could be materially responsible for destroying the people of earth. Eighteen has generally shown a tendency to disregard the well-being of other individuals, at best casually barging in and taking whatever people may have, and at worst leaving the world in flames. we have not specified that the other people of earth are part of the plurality of moral perspectives centered on Goku and Vegeta, but either way it can still be the case that Goku or Krillin will consider them morally-relevant enough to include them in their faction. with this, we can identify three major factions: Goku and Krillin plus possibly the people of earth, Vegeta only, and Eighteen only. Krillin's perspective is that Eighteen is a person because Eighteen is biological and to at least some extent has emotions. because Eighteen is a person, her behavior is not immutable, she cannot lose her worth as long as she has this capacity to change, and it is morally wrong to explode her. Vegeta's perspective is that it is irrelevant whether Eighteen is a person. because Vegeta does not believe people have inherent worth, Eighteen's behavior is inexcusable, it does not matter if anyone chooses to assign her worth including herself, and if her behavior has gotten in the way of Vegeta's aims as well as Goku and Krillin's aims, it is morally acceptable to destroy Eighteen.
Number Eighteen's perspective is somewhat strange and needlessly complex. She knows that she is an artificial construct created for limited purposes and does not assign herself inherent worth or moral relevance; she has a certain independent and defiant attitude such that she tends to ignore everyone regardless of moral alignment and display equal apathy toward helping or harming people until they obstruct her; she has no objections to blowing herself up if it would be a final demonstration of her uncontrollable power. this may sound almost straightforward as a mere set of predictable behaviors, but it does produce the strange conclusion that Vegeta attempting to explode Eighteen is not the same thing as Eighteen attempting to explode Eighteen — one would get Eighteen indignant at Vegeta should she escape his attempt on her life and the other could be a triumphant win for Eighteen. Eighteen sees herself as something of an instrument that has made itself its own master more than a proper individual who exists in connection with other individuals and objects, and this complicates the process of understanding how she may or may not generate moral perspectives. Krillin may be inclined to label Eighteen not-inherently-Evil as Goku labels Eighteen probably-Evil, and Eighteen herself labels herself as outside morality and uninterested in the concepts of Good and Evil. of course, we have by now seen a strong pattern forming between characters such as Freeza, Vegeta, and Numbers Seventeen and Eighteen where almost all characters in _Dragon Ball_, and perhaps in many narratives in general, who tend toward performing inconsiderate, unethical, or malicious actions tend to label themselves not as _Evil_ but as _beyond morality_ — _lacking morality_ and Evil may as well be close synonyms that mean the same thing. it would seem that the real problem is that the labels of Good and Evil that human beings have built up over time in the practice of crafting theology and mythical or legendary narratives are not accurate to reality nor to any fictional narratives portraying more realistic and believable forms of morality, and the proper categories may instead be Morally-Concerned and Amoral.
keeping in mind our new insight that "amorality" is in fact a form of morality, it is worth taking a moment to stop and ask ourselves exactly what it is we are trying to do. we want an objective answer to which moral perspectives issuing from which Subjects or factions are closest to the universally correct ones, inasmuch as such a thing exists. however, it seems it is not uncommon for a lot of morally-relevant actors to simply opt out of morality. should we begin from the assumption that we _must_ end up at an answer which involves constructing conceptions of what is moral, and coerce individuals like Vegeta and Eighteen into having to understand this? as much as this might be desirable, it would not seem that we have a pre-existing foundation to make the claim that morality is required. how do we know that the set of objectively correct answers does not include the possibility of simply throwing out morality and letting people be amoral? can it be an _objective_ claim that people should desire to be Good, or is this assumption simply narrow-minded?
here, we must step back all the way to our initial question. the basic reason we want to resolve moral perspectives is simply to collapse plurality. when people want to make policies, set basic standards of behavior, or perhaps solve some kind of global crisis involving destructive artificial humans, philosophical plurality gets in the way of making any meaningful action — we try to propose a preferred perspective or compromise between perspectives and plurality simply tears everything apart at the seams and undoes all our attempts at a conclusive solution. thus, we want a method for resolving plurality. sometimes the issues we deal with are morally-relevant and we encounter the added problem of perspectives on moral behavior each calling each other immoral. in this case, we want to resolve plurality, and then end up with an interpretation of reality in which people are still allowed to have morality. the act of resolving plurality is top priority, and the construction of morality rests on that foundation as part of the process of appeasing participants in the plurality who desire a moral interpretation of society.
in answering the question of what is the morally correct fate for Number Eighteen, our goal is to resolve the plurality of Goku, Vegeta, and Eighteen's perspectives. it is an objective fact that Eighteen has the power to do a lot of harm. it is also an objective fact that Eighteen has to some extent the capacity to have emotions and enjoy life. in many instances, Eighteen has found happiness in tearing apart what other people recognize as order and watching the world burn, but the point is that she does appear to experience emotions. this alone implies that if Eighteen agrees to stop causing trouble she may have some potential for rehabilitation — the ability to experience emotions may or may not come with the ability to experience group affinity or understanding of other individuals' emotions. Krillin, indeed, puts a lot at stake to tell Goku he should ever trust such a terrifyingly-powerful and unconcerned being, but he is not without reason to say such a thing. if he is correct that Eighteen has the ability to experience group affinity, affinity is essentially the foundation for building up the individual connections of social graphs and in turn for constructing factions, localized knowledge gathered atop the bonds of a faction, and morality. recall the example of Trunks learning the Kamehameha or learning moral lessons along with Goku because he is part of a faction — as much as historical processes are brutal and the world always begins without morality, friendship is everything.
of course, if Goku and Krillin turn out to be wrong about the facts of Eighteen's capabilities, there is always Vegeta's perspective. if they detonate Eighteen they will never have to worry about any of the risks associated with allowing her to live. this is, in exactly the sense of a sledgehammer, one way of resolving plurality. if we had a good reason to believe that Eighteen's perspective on the world and her existence simply did not matter, our situation of three perspectives would indeed become less complex. does Eighteen get the right to have a perspective? is it a problem if Vegeta destroys one individual to for the moment save millions of others?
it is definitely a problem if Eighteen can be rehabilitated. if we go around creating the rules of our society without thinking about how to create the best outcomes for criminals and prisoners and without any regard to the collateral damage that occurs when individuals do not fit into our society, the same seemingly-small and insignificant mistakes will be repeated over and over again and over time they will slowly add up to a lot of people asking questions about why we designed things the way we did. if we do not develop a good understanding of how to properly treat individuals who have disrupted society, we deal out the wrong fate to Grigori Zinoviev and Leon Trotsky and we go down in history as Evil Communist Tyrants. worse than that, any government that exists in the United States might end up dealing out the wrong fates to ethnic minorities living in tiny subpopulations pushed to the margins of material existence by capitalism. in the real world, crime is generally the material struggle standing in between oppressive class societies and nonexistence; crime is the last form of resistance for people who otherwise have no possible interaction with the rest of society but to be extinguished. this notion is regularly spun romantically in Anarchist philosophies as if it has real meaning in and of itself, but, not allowing ourselves to get confused, we should realize that this particular unity of opposites is only a particular chunk-competitive struggle at a moment in time and not its conclusive result. the proper fate of criminals and everyone who has disrupted society lies on the other side of our process of resolving plural perspectives and morality in the task of creating society.
the consequences of handing out the wrong fates to criminals, or the wrong resolution to wilful biological experiments society considers monstrosities, are not a matter of morality at this stage — they are not a cosmic matter of "karma looping back". they are, in fact, just the dry results of what happens when we do not understand historical processes and fail to turn around the inherent legitimacy of a free-floating perspective to our advantage. faced with an amoral terrain on which we struggle through plurality, there are particular ways to win. and in this situation, there are advantages to Goku and Krillin's perspective. any time they rehabilitate a figure such as Piccolo or Eighteen they can simply add this individual to their faction, and as these new members form connections with the other members of their faction, such as Piccolo becoming less disinterested toward the world and more willing to help others as he forms an affinity toward Gohan, the new members will ultimately vouch for everything they did and lend them small amounts of teleological responsibility. every time Goku and his allies form connections, the act of forming connections inherently provides a solution to the plurality of factional perspectives. Piccolo will not form a harmful plurality if he has joined the side of Goku. this is as dry a fact as observing that Piccolo is green. for Goku and Krillin, their strategy does not technically have to rely on morality to ultimately end up at morality. the only real remaining problems for their perspective are whether Eighteen will decide to join them and whether Vegeta will take any action to stop this event from happening. both of these events are somewhat contingent and situational in that any of the individual Subjects or factions may have trouble predicting how the other factions will respond. for now, we will leave this scenario at its solution: in the series, Krillin refuses to halt Numbers Seventeen and Eighteen, Eighteen joins, and Vegeta does not substantially attempt to stop Goku and Krillin from sparing Seventeen and Eighteen.
have any moral facts been produced by this situation which are objective? yes. observers outside each of the factions can confirm that positive consequences have resulted when Krillin decided to spare the artificial humans; even if the events are fraught with bias and plurality as they are in the midst of happening, the act of observing the end results is still objective. as well, there are no major epistemological problems with the act of observing the results. Trunks has already previously given Goku and his allies evidence that worse timelines are possible when they have not befriended Seventeen and Eighteen and this is one of the best possible timelines. Trunks has tested something which should not actually be testable in the real world and come back with solid results that Goku and his allies could genuinely have made far worse choices that resulted in worse outcomes. considering everything it would appear that Krillin made a materially correct choice. but did he make a morally correct choice? this really depends on how you define morality and how you think morality can or cannot ultimately be epistemologically justified. if you think that outside parties being able to observe that Eighteen has found happiness after joining Goku's faction and that the system has thus evolved to a new state where Eighteen's new positive experiences as a Subject constitute a morally right outcome because Eighteen approves of Goku and Krillin's previous actions and grants them the agreement these actions are morally right, then it is fair to say that Goku and Krillin having taken the right actions is an objective moral fact. if you have problems with the definition of morality as partly a matter of agreement or with the concept of teleological responsibility being a tentative form of justification for codes of morality, then you may have problems with saying this has successfully established objective morality.
objective morality is, in a sense, merely morality which has been reached rationally rather than through the raw, crude motions of separate plural factions defeating each other to gain the right to dictate the only acceptable perspective. it is a Materialist form of morality which proceeds from the objects and events of material reality instead of wedging itself only inside our minds and our local Amalthean interpretations. it is a morality which Beagelizes itself not by emptily asserting that it must be real but by searching for evidence of itself in external reality before coming to a conclusion. when we have objective morality, it is still true that it operates from inside emerging factions and agreements, but it is no longer true that factions are the only justification for it. objective morality is required to emerge from factions only due to the fact that knowledge shared by a group must emerge inside graph connections to properly be knowledge held by a group, rather than purely by individuals and mainly by random chance. graph connections are the behavioral "glue" that ensure the individuals in a group are in fact agreeing on and practicing the same behaviors. this is the meaning of philosophies tying groups together in the form of Social-Philosophical Systems.
now, let's say Goku, Vegeta, and Piccolo hypothetically encounter a transgender person. the transgender individual does not pass perfectly, and it is possible one of the three briefly makes a mistake. none of them is outright hostile to the transgender individual, as they have no particular reason to be, but we find they have varying thoughts on the transgender person's existence and daily struggle to be correctly perceived.
Goku does not really understand why anybody is any particular gender, but he doesn't like when people are needlessly mean to each other, and thinks transgender people should not be misgendered if that would leave them in a better mental state. Vegeta, attaching no inherent worth to people, does not see any basis for transgender people to be able to assert expected behaviors of others, believing people should be obligated to first understand the world as it is in order to demand respect from the world through their own power and fortitude; he is not one to expend the effort to misgender a transgender person, but he believes that when anybody else does it is the transgender person's responsibility to "suck it up" and figure out how to make it through whatever situation is in front of them presently. it is not that Vegeta dislikes people being transgender — he is indifferent on whether there should be transgender people to the point he could also come to indifferently accept it. Vegeta's problem is with _anyone_ thinking they deserve respect without having to obey certain invisible rules of being respectable.
Piccolo says gender is fake and as far as he is concerned people can be any gender they feel like. being a Namekian, he is a hermaphroditic entity that was literally born into a world where no one is familiar with the concept of separate male and female beings. (in spite of the way some of them may be referred to due to the quirks of linguistic tradition and translation artifacts.) he does not understand why anyone is dwelling on this issue and would simply like to move on.
the major problem in resolving this particular set of perspectives is in establishing a grounding for objectivity itself. unlike in the example involving Seventeen, Eighteen, and the bombs where it was simple to ultimately nudge everyone toward the same standards of objectivity and observations of material outcomes, the issue of transgender rights and transgender identity is fundamentally one where some factions permanently assert the right to maintain and uphold plurality — to put it bluntly, where some factions each assert the right to their own separate reality and separate corpus of facts that are specifically true for them. if a faction fundamentally refuses to yield and fundamentally refuses to participate in collapsing plurality through rational argument, what do we do? where can we find the epistemological grounding to say that there exists any "ought" by which we can invalidate their perspective relative to other perspectives and make them behave?
it is one thing to attempt to work through our moral-responsibility resolution process and say that Vegeta's actions cross the moral lines created in the perspective of a given Subject around that person's material needs, but it is another to be able to say that Vegeta should have to not have his particular perspective and stop doing things the way he does them. Vegeta is also a free-floating Subject, and the mere fact another Subject is upset with him does not have any inherent power to materially control his actions if he does not assign any moral relevance to the state of that person being upset. Vegeta, for the record, is always like this; if Goku is upset with him for behaving frustratingly independently or Bulma is upset that he is not doing something she thinks he should do he will often choose not to obey or cooperate with them. when we stand in the midst of plurality, the broken pieces of social reality easily shatter away from us before we have any hope of sweeping them together. it would be fair to ask where anyone would find the grounds to call Vegeta's perspective more legitimate than the other two, but even considering that, how do we even know if Goku or Piccolo is justified to present the perspectives they assert? who really has the capacity to tell _anyone_ else what to do?
in the previous examples, whenever plurality made things difficult, the first thing we would do is attempt to reduce the situation to objective facts which exist entirely outside specific perspectives, and if possible facts that can be read in a non-morally-relevant sense. can we simply go down the easy path by taking transgender existence and reducing it to this kind of dry scientific fact? unfortunately, no. being transgender is one of the most morally-relevant facts there is. the mere existence of a transgender person in reality is always mediated by the person's internal perspective on their own nature, which will affect all of their outward material behaviors in such areas as personal expression and mental health, and by the perspectives of every other individual the transgender individual interacts with who may choose to accept that reality as a part of material reality or attempt to mentally replace the contents of reality with a different reality. the raw functioning of society as a graph of socially-linked individuals is disrupted by the effect of individuals' mental models of reality deeply affecting every way in which they interact with other individuals to the point we cannot really separate out the effect of moral perspectives and "merely" look at people's outward behavior.
the problem of transgender identity seems to reject reduction and simplification in almost all ways. whereas in the previous example we were able to reduce the scope of the problem down to three individuals, if we have an issue like gender identity where the perspective of every single Subject truly matters to the material behavior of all individuals and factions, the problem may change and evolve a bit further with every single Subject we add.
for instance, we could choose to pan our scenario over to Goku's friend Oolong, who has had a problem with never being able to get the rest of the world to respect him and becoming bitter against everyone as a result. upon meeting the transgender person, Oolong misgenders them purely out of spite. meanwhile, Oolong's long-time rival Pu-Erh genders the transgender person correctly for the sole reason of annoying Oolong. Pu-Erh is just a small floating cat creature, and does not necessarily have any idea what is right or wrong, but he certainly does know he is not on Oolong's faction, and picks his beliefs accordingly. it seems clear to say that Pu-Erh and Oolong both picked their positions for bad reasons that are not among the set of whatever objectively-correct reasons may exist. the particular unity of opposites between them tied to each of their existences has made them incapable of seeing the situation objectively. however, to go back to our overall question, how would we be able to discover the set of objectively-correct reasons for choosing a position? what exactly is it that makes a reason for holding an interpretation of morality correct or incorrect?
one thing we already know is that if we are using the material-to-moral-to-teleological formation process, there are certain interpretations of morality which as long as they are using the same method everyone can confirm are incorrect. if Vegeta says it is morally right to kill Goku because Goku took away everything he once had, anybody else can see that at the level of moral responsibility Goku is a conscious Subject capable of interpreting Vegeta as responsible for morally wrong actions and Goku's perspective cannot be trivially eliminated. Piccolo can independently confirm that Goku and Vegeta exist in a plurality generating moral responsibilities. Oolong and Pu-Erh, assuming they understand the method, can confirm that the mere act of Goku enduring whatever Vegeta tries to do to him and coming out still standing means that Vegeta's perspective cannot be raised to the only official one capable of shaping all material and moral responsibilities and thus Vegeta has not won. Goku's existence as a Subject and his ability to generate moral perspectives are objective facts that cannot be taken away no matter how harsh anyone's interpretation of reality. at the same time, we have already shown that the same is true of Vegeta. no matter how morally reprehensible a claim comes out of Vegeta, it cannot necessarily be taken away from him because _his_ existence as a Subject is objective. if Vegeta knocks Goku to the ground he can say whatever he wants and the surrounding objective reality will not stop him. the existence of Goku's allies is certainly part of Vegeta's containing reality, but nothing about Piccolo, Eighteen, Oolong, or other allies existing automatically dictates that any of the allies of Goku can _only_ defeat Vegeta and stop him from spewing morally-reprehensible perspectives. Bardock existing and believing in Communism does not mean he will successfully win the Saiyan revolution, and Piccolo existing does not mean he will successfully help win the struggle between Goku and Vegeta. here we can see that plurality poses a serious obstacle to the task of cutting through any particular moral interpretation to reach objective reality. although we can confirm the objective existence of each faction and its ability to generate moral perspectives, the objective ability of each faction to contend with the others almost nullifies the objective existence of any specific moral perspective in particular.
what would we do if we were in a situation where everyone had different interpretations of _non-morally-relevant_ facts? Suppose Goku, Vegeta, Piccolo, Oolong, and Pu-Erh all have a different guess about what will be inside Dr. Gero's abandoned laboratory. Pu-Erh is convinced there will be slides of frogs, Oolong is convinced the slides will be of horrifying chimera organisms, and Piccolo suspects there are entirely too many artificial humans down there in the range of maybe about ten. in this case, it is relatively easy to collapse the different perspectives simply based on other known objective facts. any particular bit of known information such as the floor space of the building or the amount of time that has passed since the beginning of the project can be used to narrow down the range of possibilities for what could be inside the building without actually having to investigate it. the building can be initially conceptualized in our minds as a probabilistic wavefunction of many different possibilities, where as we learn more information each possibility is knocked out of the wavefunction or replaced with more accurate models through a kind of Bayesian reasoning. the building, of course, is separate from its mathematical map, and none of the fuzzy probabilities in our knowledge of the building change what might be found if someone were to enter it; if Seventeen and Eighteen are lying dormant inside the building, or if Seventeen and Eighteen are not in the building, somebody else's interpretation or modeled superposition of both states is not connected to the actual material position of Seventeen and Eighteen. nonetheless, the case of Bayesian models of a faraway building is rather similar to the case of a plurality of moral interpretations of reality. the simplest actions we take always take place on the stage of a moving universe full of stark-divided entities and the movement of seas of entities through time. as such, an action as simple as Goku or Vegeta going to investigate the laboratory building is a series of events possessing a past, present, and future. at time "A" where Oolong and Pu-Erh are speculating about the laboratory the group begins modeling the laboratory building as a superposition. at time "B" where somebody is investigating the laboratory, events have already happened in the middle, perhaps including Seventeen and Eighteen leaving the laboratory and changing its contents, but in either case definitely including whoever arrives at the laboratory building moving from position A to position B and the laboratory door moving from closed to open. Goku and his allies cannot materially observe the laboratory without time passing and this process of time being host to a series of unfolding material events. the result observed when they open the laboratory _is part of the overall passage of time_ and _evolution of their universe into one of several future possibilities_ for the structure that composes it. the same thing is true for moral perspectives. each time a Subject creates a moral perspective it more or less involves predicted observations and predicted transformations of all the other morally-relevant entities the model contains, yet if the moral perspective is put into practice these predicted observational facts and interactions will all take place in time and space. when Goku and Vegeta put their moral interpretations into practice the overall space of projected possibilities must ultimately collapse into one particular set of observations and events, much as it would have to if Goku or Vegeta travels in time and space to investigate the laboratory. the key to coming up with an objective interpretation of morality outside the specific perspectives of Goku and Vegeta is to see if there is a way we can evaluate at time A what is the best outcome out of the overall space of possibilities to occur at time B.
this brings us a lot closer to being able to collapse plurality and end up at an answer. if Vegeta is determined to end Goku, we can already intuitively begin to see that in some senses this might not be the best possibility for the assortment of all entities on the timeline. if Vegeta kills Goku there will probably be negative consequences, and it is probably not difficult to say this even in spite of different individuals having different perspectives on the situation. putting aside whatever simple emotional responses may come out of allies like Oolong and Pu-Erh, it is not difficult to argue that Vegeta might be less qualified to fight off a world-ending threat that would also take away his claim to being whatever he thinks he is the prince of and getting rid of Goku would be an objectively stupid choice. if we wish to take the Machiavellian route we can get to a basic "teleological" interpretation of reality using nothing but functional purpose and material consequences. of course, in a world of thinking and feeling Subjects this is not very satisfying. nobody wants to stand up to Freeza by telling him that the best reason for him to not get to build an evil empire is that his actions are the least wise way to run an empire that will erode away at the material and consequential existence of sentient life in the universe. as conscious Subjects we sure do love the notion of factions and schizoanalytic "escape", so most people would find it more satisfying to start at a method of objective observation and end up back at a method of constructing teleological responsibility.
as we have just established, if Vegeta kills Goku, bad things will happen relative to Goku's allies and bad things will happen relative to Vegeta. if Vegeta makes peace with Goku, good things will happen relative to Goku and good things will happen relative to Vegeta. if Vegeta detonates Number Eighteen before anyone can get to know her, good things will happen relative to Vegeta but bad things will happen relative to Krillin, and because bad things happen relative to Krillin and Krillin is Goku's ally this means bad things happen relative to Goku. if Vegeta were to decide to consider himself Goku's ally, then bad things happening relative to Goku should mean bad things happen relative to Vegeta, even if bad things first happened relative to Krillin. this is what being someone's ally should mathematically mean. if we say hypothetically that Vegeta actually does believe that if bad things happen relative to Bulma bad things happen relative to Vegeta, then as soon as a moral interpretation of an event passes transitively from Goku to Bulma it should also logically pass transitively to Vegeta.
the big problem with Vegeta is that he does not want to properly form the graph connections that would cause him to be considered Goku's ally and cause all of the moral interpretations of Goku's allies to pass transitively over to Vegeta. when working with social graphs it is often easiest to simplify them to their largest clusters and to binary "on and off" connection weights, but in reality, they can be very complex things with many subsections and fuzzy-bordered continua of connection. in a proper in-depth study of social graphs including every possible complexity, "is Vegeta Goku's ally?" both is not and should not be a simple yes or no question with a binary answer. that said, to fully examine the whole scope of how group behavior is affected by ill-defined boundaries and connection weights is outside the scope of this chapter. for now we will simply have to puzzle over the seeming contradiction that Vegeta can both "be" and "not be" someone's ally at different times as two cats impossibly share the same box.
in all of this, at every step of this scenario, one of the first thoughts that will come to people's minds, one of the most intuitive responses, is always going to be: "why is it a problem to simply make Vegeta learn the correct answers?". doubtlessly, a lot of people will set this scenario side-by-side with real-world scenarios and say something to the effect of, "this scenario is not actually complicated. if this was me I would just tell Vegeta to get educated on transgender history and shut the hell up." this perspective fundamentally misses the root of the problem. what Gramscians and Marcuseans fail to realize is that this problem _is_ more complicated in its real-world incarnations due to the existence of faction-based violence. in the real world, any issue in the domain of philosophy or morality can be trivially solved by picking up a gun. the first person to pick up the gun, the "fastest draw in the west" as it were, is the one that wins. it does not matter if killing people is illegal, or assaulting people is illegal, or keeping people pinned down in toxic relationships is highly frowned upon though not literally illegal. if people value their own perspectives or reality models more than the existence or well-being of other people, they will do these things anyway, because it is a material fact that if progressives simply do not exist they can never order you around or force you to change your perspective. this is the critical zero-day security exploit in Existentialism: if you construct an entire philosophy of morality, freedom, and democracy around the existences of individual Subjects, all that is required to defeat your entire philosophy is to pick up a gun and slaughter The Subject, and there is no more Existentialism. it may be morally wrong to slaughter The Subject, but that does not prevent it from physically happening. it may even be _objectively_ morally wrong to terminate The Subject. but that does not matter if we do not address the fundamental basis from which we declare any particular course of material events Right or Wrong or desirable or undesirable. if we cannot arrive at a basic grounding for why it is we can claim any particular course of events is the most desirable, it will always be possible for reactionaries to simply pick up a gun, shoot all the progressives, and claim that progressive ideologies were never justified because they had no moral and philosophical justifications to fend off the mass shooting nor any justification to exist.
that being said, when all we wish to do is resolve a scenario of philosophical plurality and come to an objectively correct moral perspective, all of that is dreadfully bleak to think about. maybe we should return to _Dragon Ball_.
let us say that when Pu-Erh and Oolong are having petty arguments over which one of them gets to have the single bogus opinion on gender, Yamcha appears and tells them they have to stop doing this because it is better for the health of the faction if they all simply agree to have the perspective that will be the most welcoming to new members. most likely, Oolong and Pu-Erh shape up and agree to adopt Goku and Yamcha's position on transgender rights, passing this perspective on transitively to any new potential allies they may run across. there is no serious problem with Yamcha telling Pu-Erh and Oolong what to do because they have all already agreed to be part of the same faction and that as such there are certain basic standards of behavior that they must hold to if they wish to properly perform the ongoing process of building the connections between them and remaining friends. the existing graph connections between the three of them lay the foundation to build stronger connections more committed to particular moral positions and particular concepts of moral Right. however, should Yamcha then become convinced he can waltz over and try the same thing with Vegeta, this foundation of solid graph connections is not something he can rely on. as we have just established, Vegeta is not good at forming graph connections, and always tends to produce weakly-connected and anomalous graphs. if Yamcha confronts Vegeta about his perspectives and treatment of other people, there is no guarantee whatsoever that Vegeta will yield. Vegeta is a conscious Subject, and every Subject contains an unknown Excess. for all Yamcha knows and can predict, the next thing that will happen after he makes a reasonable appeal to Vegeta to become better is Vegeta will power up into Super Saiyan form and slam him into the next island over. the moment Vegeta turns to violence has a certain finality to it. even if all of Goku's immediate allies come to Yamcha's aid to try to use their power to contain Vegeta, it might not actually solve anything. Goku and his allies can defeat Vegeta. Goku and his allies can seriously hurt Vegeta and drain him of the energy to fight to the point he should have no remaining option but to interact with them peacefully. but whatever Goku's allies do to Vegeta, none of it has the power to make him stop being a Subject or force him to change his mind. by Existentialist logic, Vegeta is instead free to take the situation in front of him and decide that his ability to choose to resist Goku is Freedom itself and the power he gains from enforcing plurality is part of his growth and character development as a Subject. and after he has gotten back up and healed from his wounds, the whole process will simply begin again with nothing having substantially changed. every single time Goku tries to tell Vegeta to stop having a bad perspective Vegeta is free to disregard everything he says and start another fight. worse, there is nothing about this cycle that automatically boots Vegeta out of Goku's overall broadest circle of allies. Vegeta can keep overall having neutral and peaceful interactions with Goku and his friends yet every so often occasionally becoming angry at them and trying to beat them up. there is no universal book of friendship rules that says in order to believe they are friends two people must have a healthy relationship. it would be fair to say that Vegeta behaving in this way might have negative effects on the faction's connections and cause individual members of the faction to steadily hit a connection weight of zero and disown him, but as we have already shown, an individual can be quite weakly connected to another individual or faction capable of forming links and still be connected.
if attempting to use force against Vegeta is a bad idea, then what about mercy? in the example involving Seventeen and Eighteen, Krillin extended mercy to Eighteen and she was rehabilitated into Goku's group of friends and allies through the act of building connections. in the series there are several different times when Goku's faction successfully recruits what were previously dangerous threats to either the world or to Goku, including former-Demon-King Piccolo, artificial human Eighteen, hired assassin Tenshinhan, a random obstinate man named Yajirobe who was refusing to give up a Dragon Ball, and anomalous supernatural entity Majin Boo (who actually gets split apart and recruited twice). before this, even Krillin, Yamcha, Pu-Erh, and Oolong are notable for having caused Goku small amounts of trouble; at the end of the day a surprisingly great fraction of Goku's allies have been his former enemies. well, here there is just one caveat — Vegeta was already rehabilitated. some amount of time prior, Vegeta was admitted to the broader graph of people who constitute Goku's allies after Goku intially had to halt Vegeta in the middle of his process of declaring war on the earth. even if the process has not ultimately gone very well, Vegeta already underwent the effort of conflict, mercy, and intergration into Goku's faction and the surrounding society. if Vegeta has already been integrated into the social graph of Goku's allies, it would not seem like it is possible to integrate him a second time. and if the members of Goku's faction get tired of Vegeta and attempt to expel him from their social graph, it would seem this would only lead to a worse set of consequences involving Vegeta returning to patterns of behavior that are more antisocial and _more_ violent.
this is more or less the crux of why reactionaries and Tory types pose such an enduring problem for the United States. just like Vegeta, Tories refuse to yield the inherent conversation-steering power granted to them through the gaps of plurality between separate factions or Subjects. arguably like Vegeta, Tory types construct their entire model of the outside world beginning at archaic feudal-era arrangements of individuals into society, such as "family", "nation", "vilage" or "parish", "guild", and "emperor of nations" or "God of nations". however, also just like Vegeta, a population of Tories cannot be trivially expelled from a republican population it has been integrated into, because to do so is to risk the two populations ending up in an international relationship in which they have the power to do a greater amount of harm to each other, or to outright end up at war. the United States is like one big toxic family in which if left on the street the most intolerable relatives would also pick up a gun. the prevailing social theory is that Tory populations have been "rehabilitated" through their integration into a nebulous entity popularly known as Our Democracy, and that people have no hope of saving or maintaining a functioning society if they do not maintain and pay tribute to Our Democracy. this prevailing theory, of course, is at best incomplete and at worst a lie. populations do not instantly become healthily-connected and rational just because they have created a parliament and transformed into Our Democracy. on the contrary, the creation of a parliament can easily just create an official arena for graph struggle in which the population of hostile individuals simply divides itself in two and the individuals compete to destroy or dominate each other in teams. when a population transforms into Our Democracy, it merely takes its existing potential to divide into two warring nations and hides it from view. the population's contained hostile subpopulations are cast as never being separate populations, and always being a matter of unreasonable individuals who have simply absorbed "anti-democracy" or racism or transphobia or a lack of rational dialogue ability, when by default it should supposedly be possible to reason anybody out of prejudices against separate populations they are not materially part of and may never directly experience friendly interactions with as much as materially-competitive interactions. however, in the 2020s the actual underlying problem is becoming increasingly difficult for the United States to ignore.
the real problem the United States faces is that Liberalism has not brought structure to populations, and people's daily interactions as well as their campaigns for political issues are a matter of the finer scale of population structure involving arrangements of nested local subpopulations and the connections between individuals into a population. Liberalism arranges everybody into a peaceful and rational republic on paper, but on the ground anyone can simply opt out of some spatial subsection of Our Democracy by snapping apart links to groups of people they don't like and opting out of society. real societies are built not on stacks of progressive history books nor national constitutions, but on the two-sided agreements of individuals to form a social graph around shared sets of standards; even as these social graphs may be fuzzily-bordered, nested, weakly-connected, overlapping across different spatial regions and core issues, or otherwise complex in their real-world structure, it is still the case that the material of a society is the arbitrary social links of a society and the thing that creates real-world borders between separate plural societies is the presence or absence of strongly-weighted social links between those societies. class territories, as well, play into the construction of material societies as they arrange and connect themselves into local social graphs capable of structuring and providing for the material needs of distinct subpopulations. there is no logical contradiction in observing that the proletariat fights the proletariat, the bourgeoisie fights the bourgeoisie, and meanwhile there are also times when the proletariat fights the bourgeoisie.
the problem lies in Vegeta. the problem is always Vegeta. if Vegeta does not want to integrate or cooperate, he splits the population into subpopulations. and if he splits the population into openly plural subpopulations, he is never truly required to adopt any particular standard of subjective or objective morality. within the universe of _Dragon Ball_, not even the threat of death can stop Vegeta, as he can take any amount of damage up to a point and still come back to cause more trouble. we cannot tolerate Vegeta, yet we have almost no choice but to make peace with Vegeta. Vegeta is a truly vexing contradiction that simultaneously cannot stably exist and yet appears impossible to resolve.
it is fortunate for us that when two hostile contradictory things coexist it is almost always the case they actually _will_ resolve eventually. when an atom exists in many possible states and bumps into another atom, the electrons are forced to resolve into particular chemical bonds. when a mixture of two chemicals has the possibility of both forward and reverse reactions, there will eventually be a point where each direction of reaction cannot noticeably change any further and the two sides of the chemical equation will remain at some particular ratio in equilibrium. when populations of wild organisms undergoing natural selection steadily separate into two different phenotypes it is often the case that intermediate phenotypes will fully disappear, and the population may also end up separating into two species. when two human beings driving motor vehicles approach toward an intersection, it is temporarily the case that the set of possible futures forms a superposition of both cars going through the intersection until the cars reach the traffic light and the traffic light determines each car's material fate. when two countries are at war, the war must end in some particular material result such as one country absorbing the other or the countries signing a peace treaty. in the material reality we inhabit, it is very often more difficult for hostile pluralities to go on forever than to eventually resolve. the only caveat is that when pluralities resolve we may not always like the result, and may wish there was some kind of objective method for determining the best strategy to get what we consider a good one. this is the task of Marxist historical materialism: to lead us through the task of navigating difficult historical superpositions.
let us return to our scenario. Yamcha, as before, sets out to confront Vegeta, but this time Goku intercepts him and advises him not to take on Vegeta by himself knowing how likely it is to turn into a fight — instead, Goku will be the one to deal with the problem. Goku decides to try to get to the root of the matter by examining why exactly Vegeta even does any of the things he does. he offers Vegeta the possibility, either hypothetical or perhaps somehow real, of returning to the Saiyan kingdom and breaking his unsatisfactory ties with the people of earth, in the good-natured hope that this is a situation in which Vegeta would actually be happier and less likely to become angry at everybody. Vegeta does not want to go back even if he could because he does not actually care about the Saiyan people despite them being his supposed justification for why he is better than everyone else. however, he also does not have any particular strong attachment to the people of earth that would be the thing preventing him from returning to the Saiyan kingdom. all right then, Goku says to Vegeta, if Vegeta has no objection to remaining on earth, then perhaps it would be better for him to figure out the best way of existing on earth so he is not so needlessly angry. Goku asks Vegeta what is stopping him from upholding particular standards of moral behavior and why he seems to prefer starting needless plurality and conflict. Vegeta believes that he has not started anything because plurality is the default and the imposition of particular arbitrary standards is what is the change in that situation. this goes back to Vegeta's general belief that morality is unnecessary and a waste of time; to perform a particular moral behavior such as gendering people correctly is not what is the problem, but to bother to tell anybody to learn about morality or to learn to accept the justifications for any moral position is a big hassle that he does not understand why Goku would ever go to the trouble of. this is, in all likelihood, where if we take things too literally Goku would simply end up stumped; he does not necessarily do well with the concept of people thinking it is a difficult or complicated task to be nice to others and do the right thing. however, if Goku or his allies are thinking and paying attention the next thing they might do is try to trace through exactly what is so difficult about the concept of morality. if Pu-Erh and Oolong hardly know anything about anything and they can understand morality then why does Vegeta think morality is too complicated? in its simplest forms morality can merely be one individual selecting a behavior and another individual copying that behavior — what is so difficult about that? to this, the probable answer is that Vegeta is not good at taking moral stances and defending them; if he was tasked with explaining why Goku did something he might not have any good explanation for it or confidence to defend it. this is not acceptable for Vegeta because he is obsessed with appearing outwardly strong and cannot handle looking awkward, hesitant, or weak. at this point, Goku, Yamcha, and Pu-Erh and Oolong are probably all giving him judgemental looks and asking him what objection he has to the concept of courage. Vegeta simply can't win this one now. nothing about his overall understanding has given any justification for why amorality must win over morality or why Vegeta is not capable of defending morality and must fall back to amorality.
in order to more fully understand how Vegeta assigns worth to anything, Goku poses one last question: why is it bad or wrong to insult a Saiyan prince and what is the reason that Goku should respect Vegeta and praise him on his admirable or charming points rather than considering it too much trouble or unnecessary to respect and give attention to somebody who mostly has a horrible worldview? at this point, if Vegeta was smart, he would eventually realize that no matter what kind of weird justification comes out of him about having to obey and respect Saiyan class society because it's the default way things are or Goku being required to respect him purely because he accumulates power, ultimately the reason these moral perspectives matter is because he has emotions, and if Goku disregards his entire way of comprehending the world and relating to it up to the point the two of them meet, he will experience negative emotions. the actual content of Vegeta's worldview does not matter. what matters is that he is arbitrarily attached to this perspective and existing concept of self in such a way that if Goku treads on it it will come as a shock and a moment of cognitively-dissonant distress. vegeta experiences a shock to his worldview and this fires off anger, or the pain of dismissed and internalized traumatic events. goku can justify any moral perspective he is trying to argue if he takes a moment to think about it, but vegeta's response is almost irrational. this is to say, whatever perspective on the world or morality Vegeta is trying to push, just like anyone else he ultimately believes it should be respected because he is a conscious self-aware Subject. if Vegeta is able to realize this, he will realize that Goku's group of allies giving him attention and actually attempting to understand what might correspond to what he expects from them and diffuse his anger would have the power to form more solid connections between all of them and bring them out of conflict. vegeta not feeling antagonized and vegeta intuitively understanding the perspectives and standards Goku's faction pushes on him are inherently tied together, because the processes of forming bonds and learning lessons on the connections of social graphs happen simultaneously. vegeta in our scenario has been making the mistake of thinking that an understanding of morality can only come down in an avalanche all at once, while what would be more typical is to learn small pieces of it at a time. if vegeta were able to understand that he is not required to suddenly go study a big stack of morality and instead is always allowed to learn from new situations and ask questions, perhaps he would be more open to the prospect of actually considering learning about morality.
so, Goku has more or less taught Vegeta morality. but what has this established? does examining Vegeta's particular reasoning process as an individual somehow finally land us at a universalizable objective morality? yes, it does. as much as it may take a moment to see this at first, Vegeta posed an obstacle to Goku establishing that morality applies to everybody, while once it has been established that the process of forming morality in fact works the same way for Vegeta, we can see that every time Goku has recruited a former enemy they have all gone through the same process of accepting and learning about morality by beginning at The Subject. whether he realizes it or not, Goku has discovered a repeated process in reality which proceeds by predictable rules and even given different starting circumstances tends to alter those circumstances in the same way. the process of characterizing morality can be compared to the process of characterizing repeated physical laws such as gravity overall behaving the same way for different stars or planets and friction overall behaving the same way for different kinds of surfaces made of different materials. as well, the study of the process of forming morality is similar to the study of how populations form classes and resulting social structures throughout their history. a royal subject in England and an imperial subject in China are royal subjects; a proletarian in the United States and a proletarian in China are proletarians. a Subject learning a moral code in the United States learns morality starting at The Subject; a Subject learning a moral code in North Korea learns morality starting at The Subject.
Existentialists — particularly of the early-existentialism period — are always trying to claim that every Subject is a unique contingent being and exists in a unique individual situation, but this is simply not true. if every Subject truly existed in a unique situation with a unique set of problems, Goku would never be able to teach Vegeta morality, because he would not be able to prove that Vegeta learning morality is the best thing for Vegeta in Vegeta's unique set of circumstances. Existentialist writings of this kind imply a society where some criminals or foreign enemies cannot be rehabilitated and there is no universal guarantee of integrating individuals together with other individuals into a society. in short, Existentialists can hardly explain how any group of individuals _builds_ a society. this should be simple: societies come to exist because individuals are not separated by unique circumstances and instead are joined into the same circumstances by agreed standards shared between them and the connections of social graphs.
now, let us apply the process of discovering objective morality to the real world. in 1969, gay, lesbian, and transgender people were gathered at the Stonewall Inn in New York City, until police showed up to arrest the patrons for homosexuality. due to the illegal nature of same-sex relationships the bar was, in fact, operating in the midst of illegality as a money-laundering operation. the gay and transgender people at Stonewall believed they had the right to be integrated into society instead of being forced into a separate population of LGBT people whose social structures are not part of the legally-sanctioned societal structure of the overall population. so, various crowds of people at the Stonewall Inn fought off the police. through this act the LGBT subpopulation asserted the right of Subjects and factions to generate and defend moral perspectives. at this point people across the United States had not settled onto a widespread agreement that having LGBT rights is better than not having them, so there was not a unified faction holding teleological responsibility, although localized LGBT movements could still inform people about the surrounding population persecuting LGBT+ people and in their perspective now holding moral responsibility for those actions. decades later in the 2020s, the United States would increasingly sort itself into center-Liberal, Tory, and Anarchist factions. the Tea Party axis would form a faction around the perspective that transgender rights were fabricated and were a needless attack on the ability of right-Liberals and Tories — particularly Christians — to generate endless plurality and call it Freedom. the CenterLiberal-Anarchist-Existentialist axis would form a faction, somewhat diffusely, around the perspective that transgender identity was real and the rights of transgender individuals to exist and express themselves were a part of material reality. what is the fundamental justification for the Existentialist axis to argue that the Tea Party axis is obligated to accept transgender rights? the best reason is that a transgender Subject in 1969 repeats the same pattern of understanding morality of a transgender Subject in 2020, and a transgender Existentialist in 2020 repeats the same pattern of Subjectively interacting with the world and generating moral perspectives as a cisgender Tory in 2020. all human beings in 1969, as well as all human beings in 2020, repeat the same fundamental patterns of generating morality, and if they are smart about things, the same patterns of resolving morality. the simple fact these patterns are so ubiquitous and consistent ultimately makes them possible to observe objectively, even as each particular social graph or hostile unity of opposites standing outside the observer may contain highly biased and charged rhetoric. this process of repeated observation allows us to accumulate collections of repeated similar outcomes that can finally serve as an objective study of ethics for all human beings. As with any process of scientific observation, all our outcomes may be provisional, but this by no means stops us from accumulating data and steadily approaching a 99.9% probability that trans rights are human rights.
In the task of organizing and leading a population toward Communist revolution, it is certainly quite useful to have come to an objective grasp of morality and why anything is Right or Wrong. With this understanding, even if everyone tries to make all political issues about morality — or the right to amorality, as the case may be — we can still demonstrate an objective process from the initial generation of individual or factional perspectives to the successful creation of teleological responsibility and objective societal standards of ethics.
Even so, whenever we actually set foot into the real world, or merely take a moment to contend with the scales of entire populations and populational behavior, one last question will plague us: is there actually such a thing as a better course of history, or a worse course of history?
It is one thing to be able to say from within the scale of a population that if particular individuals link together into a faction to defend objectively-justifiable standards of ethics, or if the population as a whole generates a capable subpopulation which arranges everyone into the best known structures and gets rid of outdated ones, that the population will experience better outcomes. but how do we actually prove that these events are necessary and should have significance? we have been able to establish individual Subjects as seats of morality and connection through their ability to form into agreements about shared standards of well-being with other individual Subjects and social graphs. but do we have any grounding to establish that such an irreducible and undeniable existence applies to _populations_? how do we know that it is important to build up a workers' movement in the midst of a functioning empire, or that it is not acceptable to destroy one? can we really say with any degree of objectivity that anything we are doing at the population scale is the necessary or correct thing, whether that thing is defending an LGBT subpopulation, defending a working-class subpopulation, or defending a successfully-constructed Marxist state? should the destruction of a movement matter to anyone outside that movement? is a movement-based subpopulation less significant than the case of a whole national population? does the destruction of any population truly matter?
in our hypothetical scenario of the historical development of the Saiyan empire, one of the first questions to come up was, why care about the Saiyan nation at all? if Saiyans do not wish to change and become better, then is it any great loss to see them make the wrong decisions and disappear from the universe as they fall into paranoid internal rivalries and fail to even cohere together well enough to keep Freeza from blowing up their planet? the way we initially solved this was to entirely set aside morality, much as if we were taking the perspective of Vegeta, and attempt to explain the path from empire to Communist revolution solely through the lens of material structures and material responsibilities: Saiyans should accept the prospect of a workers' state solely because of the greater capacities it would grant them for technological development and population growth. however, now that we are finally back to a way of understanding things that includes morality and ethics, we are no longer required to discuss the development of populations on a wholly amoral terrain. thus, we may as well return to our earlier question: does the _Dragon Ball_ universe need Saiyans? is it important or significant that the Saiyan population exist rather than not exist?
unfortunately, this is not a question we have enough information to answer from the outset. due to the free-floating nature of national populations, the vantage point of each population exists in an open plurality of vantage points, and as we have established with individuals, whenever there is a sea of perspectives existing in plurality, any particular populational perspective is able to assert the claim that other perspectives can be trivially eliminated, or populations can be eliminated along with them. this claim, of course, is questionable on a material level once we have laid out ethics as a scientific study of repeated social processes, but that does not stop populations from attempting to "justify" their perspectives with the crude method of opening material graph struggles and hoping they successfully take over the entire argument. how can we know they are wrong? it is easy enough to defend the existence of an individual or population once that particular entity already exists and has done something those around it deem morally Right, but if we place ourselves before an entity exists or after it has ceased to exist we may end up falling back into the amoral ocean of historical processes before we can come to any conclusion about it.
let us return to the hyperbolic example where we deem it acceptable if all Saiyans die including Tarble. if nobody knows about Tarble there is a certain argument that he did not need to exist. any definition we can construct for why Tarble needed to exist will typically rest on his interactions with other individuals or populations that allow these Subjects or factions to form an opinion about him. if Tarble hardly interacts with anyone else in the _Dragon Ball_ universe, he is removed from the first layer of material responsibility, whereas if he did interact with anyone else, it would be possible for someone to assign him worth merely for being a conscious self-aware Subject, and assign moral responsibility to whoever may be materially responsible for making him not exist. the material-to-moral-to-teleological formation process is something of a double-edged sword. on one side, all it takes to generate moral responsibility is the existence of social interactions and connections, but on the other side, if these interactions do not exist in sufficient volumes a moral worth and surrounding moral responsibility may never be generated. when we operate purely at the level of individuals and not at any higher scale, we operate on a scale which is before and below the scales where it is actually possible to go through the processes that establish moral worth, factional standards, and the teleological responsibility for protecting these two things. a similar problem applies to a free-floating sea of separate populations.
with that said, even if individuals and separate populations each coming into being with no inherent worth may be what is the case, this observation is far from satisfying. nobody would find it satisfying to have to tell Tarble, or even Vegeta, that if they do not interact with others and build up graph connection weights in the proper sanctioned way they literally have no reason for existence and no worth. something about this seems incorrect, if not outright morally horrendous. we already know that Subjects have the capacity to assert their own worth when they are able to form connections, so is it really the case that they do not have inherent worth when they are alone?
this is the point at which we must recall that there is not only one kind of Subject — Subjects do not exist only in the form of conscious self-aware individuals, but also in the form of social graphs which perceive their surrounding environment and make decisions. when a national population turns into a republic, it constructs a kind of Group Subject in which all its various regional or ideological subpopulations attempt to collectively arrive at decisions that represent an agreement between all of them. Group Subjects may have widely varying levels of successful day-to-day functioning depending on various internal factors such as their structural composition and the strength of their various connection weights, but most importantly, when a Group Subject is successfully constructed and functioning at all, a Group Subject within a plurality of populations justifies its own existence in the same basic sense as an individual Subject. when a large population of people forms into a republic, if that population of people is capable of successfully governing itself to the point it is capable of making the best decisions for its own survival, it becomes difficult to eliminate either materially or philosophically. this in itself is not synonymous with teleological responsibility or becoming the seat of objective ethical standards, but the leap between enduring materially and laying claim to these two kinds of standards is not very far. the ability of a population to dictate these kinds of overarching standards comes through interaction and agreement with other populations. this is the crux of the "Tarble problem". individuals gain worth in relation to their connections and agreements with other individuals, but we do not usually realize that groups of people can also gain worth in relation to their connections and agreements with groups in order to form larger groups; the process of forming bonds and Subjects is one big fractal where when put together individuals, groups, and populations all become self-similar. to make things overly simple, gaps are the problem. when all the world's groups have become Subjects have become groups, Tarble can rest easy.
when thinking about the overall set of works which discuss the existence or nonexistence of populations, one of the most popular fictional works that will come to people's minds from within the last decade is _Undertale_. _Undertale_ is a 2D console-style roleplaying game in the same broad tradition as _Dragon Quest_ in which a civilization of RPG monsters has been sealed in a great underground cavern by the human world of knights and mages. the monster civilization, particularly in its current form, is far outmatched by the humans, with the game's dialogue explaining somewhat at length how the magic that composes monsters (monster Souls, monster magic) is hardly a fraction of the capacity that humans possess (human Souls, human weapons and actions), and so forth. as such the main character only faces a limited amount of trouble eliminating almost every remaining monster in existence, despite being maybe thirteen years old.
seen specifically from the perspective of the monsters, _Undertale_ suddenly takes on a very "historical" kind of tone. some fanworks such as the webcomic _Handplates_ portray the underground monster kingdom as agonizing over national defense and actively contemplating military research and development, as if the game's setting were some kind of fantastical parallel to the Korean or Vietnam Wars. in _Handplates_, the royal scientist W.D. Gaster takes on the task of attempting to transform two ordinary monster citizens into deadly weapons regardless of any suffering this may cause them, with the knowledge that regardless of whether any of the other residents of the Underground will approve of his activities or forgive him as an individual, this is likely what is required to free his people. in this interpretation of _Undertale_ the characters outright deal with the moral weight of secret military programs carried out by their government. yet even in the original work, _Undertale_ features a storyline in which Dr. Alphys is left having to hide secret and horrifying amalgamated beings designed in hopes of breaking the Underground's outer Barrier. Alphys feels horrible about having to carry this secret, seemingly wishing not just that she never had to tell anybody but that the experiments were never necessary.
in one sense, the situation faced by the Underground is rather comparable to the real-world case of North Korea. in _Undertale_, the monsters are sealed into the Underground by powers greater than them and cannot easily escape. in North Korea, the people are walled into the country by neighboring imperialist countries. in _Undertale_, depending on one's interpretation, the monsters may or may not be pursuing military programs to defend themselves should they ever escape. in North Korea, everyone is required to serve in the military and there have regularly been world news headlines about "North Korean missile programs". in _Undertale_, everything is often framed in terms of "monster" traditions and practices as if monsters were a nation and the game is teaching us about this nation. in North Korea, many things are framed around people's loyalty to the North Korean nation or Workers' Party of Korea and to the ongoing task of having to defend them from outside empires. if the monsters of the Underground give up on their task of either breaking the Barrier or creating monster defenses, there cease to be monsters. if the people of North Korea give up on their task of defending North Korea, there cease to be North Koreans.
but, a center-Liberal might be tempted to ask, what bad things would actually happen if North Korea stopped defending itself? would it not simply become part of South Korea and become peacefully integrated into South Korea's Material System of capitalism without anyone being harmed or becoming no longer Korean? this is the naïve perspective. if one looks closely at daily life in South Korea, it will quickly become apparent that South Korean individuals are fiercely competing against each other in an especially intense spatial slot hierarchy comparable to Japan's — for every South Korean that gets a prestigious position in society, some fractional number of high school students somewhere are contemplating suicide. [*ks] about 200 middle- and high-school students in South Korea take their lives each year (4 out of every 100,000), and each year the number has been rising. the question we should be asking ourselves is not if North Korea can be integrated into South Korea "peacefully" and "democratically", but how many innocent South Korean teenagers we are willing to sacrifice _every year for the foreseeable future_ in order to create capitalism. do the lives of the South Korean majority have greater value than these lives? do these surplus people cease to deserve existence just because we like capitalism and they cannot be fit into capitalism?
in _Undertale_, much as in any non-fiction Existentialist text, the existence of the monster population is very much framed as a matter of morality. the game is relatively careful to never leave us asking whether any of the Underground residents deserve to exist. all of them are immediately presented as having their own charm and likeable qualities as they nonetheless share the screen with a cold and unfeeling "Attack" button. yet, for any living thing in the real world, and even in many reasonable material realities we can imagine, to maintain or protect the existence of both individuals and populations takes a lot of hard work. existing and being alive is not really the default state of living organisms. death is the default outcome for most living things. so, considering the material reality of life and death, is morality really a simple thing of prejudice and the lack of prejudice? _Undertale_ monsters, Saiyans, and North Koreans will all die if they cannot eat, yet at the same time most people would say it is immoral to maintain the Saiyan empire, and many center-Liberals would say it is immoral to maintain North Korea. how can we truly know it is the morally right thing to maintain or defend our material existence when to many others outside ourselves it may appear not worth it for us to exist, or even immoral?
most _sensible_ conceptions of morality, let alone most _popular_ conceptions, begin at individuals and The Subject. yet, as we have just shown, individuals themselves are a morally fraught thing. it is not difficult for the mere existence of an individual to subjectively be a problem for the rest of the universe from the vantage points of the rest of the universe. for the rest of the _Dragon Ball_ universe, it would be no problem if Prince Vegeta did not exist, or Majin Boo did not exist, or Tarble did not exist. if Vegeta did not exist the people of earth could rest easy and he would not constantly cause trouble for Goku. if Majin Boo was not created all the people and cakes in the world would not be at risk of being eaten. if Tarble did not exist very few people would notice; Vegeta does not necessarily care about his brother, nor does the rest of Planet Vegeta, or all the planets which do not know about him. when Vegeta exists or Majin Boo exists their existence comes into contradiction with everyone around them as their current individual nature comes into conflict with the characteristics of surrounding populations. similarly, the existence of every individual in the Saiyan kingdom comes into contradiction with all the populations of the surrounding universe as soon as the Saiyan kingdom merely attempts to maintain its material existence. the first and most basic event to be morally wrong is the mere birth of a baby Saiyan; a single Saiyan birth potentially costs the life of one or more aliens on other planets. chunk competition has the power to make individuals themselves outright immoral. yet, regardless of this, an individual's existence can simply be very inconvenient for the vast number of morally-relevant Subjects, raising the question of whether a single Subject can become morally irrelevant purely due to the needs and activities of a much greater number of Subjects who together prove more capable of constructing a perfectly workable shared morality. can the _Dragon Ball_ universe toss out Vegeta? can the real world toss out Leon Trotsky?
as much as a narrative such as _Undertale_ would like us to think in moral terms, _Undertale_ itself in fact _takes place_ on an amoral terrain. most of _Undertale_ simply chooses to present the underground monster civilization as it is and in all its details of daily life, rather than framing anything that happens specifically in light of the protagonist or the protagonist's actions. the player may observe the consequences of the protagonist's actions on the living details of each part of the Underground, but at the same time the motions of the player and protagonist simply occur without any greater universal force saying that awful outcomes cannot happen. _Undertale_ does not begin with any moral prescription that heroes must slay monsters as the Right thing to do, nor that true heroes must have mercy on monsters; _Undertale_ does not drop a morally-relevant _hero_ into the Underground, but rather an initially non-morally-relevant child in the midst of an initially non-morally-relevant monster population. the same is true for certain parts of _Dragon Ball_ — even though the _Dragon Ball_ universe does contain designated heroes who each believe they have an understanding of morality and grasp of teleological responsibility as individuals, the largest scales of the _Dragon Ball_ universe or cosmos often become a case of there being no greater force that decides outcomes other than characters' raw power. this phenomenon, as we have discussed, is the natural consequence of open plurality. whenever populations or factions exist in open plurality, within the open gaps between them and within the greater terrain that populations conduct their existence on morality does not exist. morality can at first only be put together as a social construct inside the boundaries of specific populations or social graphs. later, when a faction becomes large enough to wield teleological responsibility, it becomes possible for that faction to begin explaining its conception of morality to others in terms of objective morality. if a small faction wants to try for a quicker route, it can attempt to apply the study of objective morality to individual social connections and the basic process of building a population out of these social connections. this strategy is by no means guaranteed to succeed, but in principle, it is entirely possible to _molecularize_ our model of the process of forming morality by fusing it with our model of the very process of forming populations.
plurality poses a great problem. we can have a highly sophisticated understanding of the moral formation process and how to explain objective morality from the molecular scale, and yet there can always be a Vegeta or "Chara" that simply drops into the _Dragon Ball_ world and decides to eliminate Goku or drops into the Underground and decides to slaughter all our monsters. there can always be a Ronald Reagan that drops into the United States and decides to antagonize North Korea, or a Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky that drop into the Soviet Union and end up fiercely antagonizing each other. the best world is one where Goku and Vegeta, or Stalin and Trotsky, or Reagan and the Workers' Party of Korea learn to live with each other, and come to recognize that they will get the best outcome if they agree to a single understanding of objective morality. but we do not live in the best world. we hardly live in the best world in most reasonable material realities we can imagine. this always puts us back at the problem of runaway Subjects and their populational equivalents. whether we find ourselves faced with one Vegeta or 99 million Vegetas, we are always in trouble if we did not receive the most reasonable version of Vegeta, and whether the Saiyan population finds itself faced with one Goku or 99 million Gokus, the existence of the Saiyan population is in question if they have not received the most reasonable versions of Goku's Allies. if Goku was not reasonable, he should be as terrifying to Planet Vegeta as an unreasonable Vegeta is to earth.
now that we fully understand the problem, is it possible for us to reconstruct a universal morality? do we know that it is objectively wrong to misgender a transgender person? do we know that it is objectively wrong for Saiyans to build a destructive empire or for Goku's allies to inactivate Seventeen and Eighteen? is it objectively wrong to attempt to invalidate Tarble? is it objectively wrong to invalidate Saiyans for being Saiyans? is it objectively wrong to stop Communist Bardock, or to aid Communist Bardock? is it objectively wrong to throw out Vegeta, stomp out Stalin, or toss out Trotsky? do the monsters of the Underground have an objective case, or is Frisk's knife sharp enough to cut through all conceivable moralities?
yes, we _can_ objectively know the answers to these things. our main problem is simply that although morality can be transformed into an objective historical-materialist science, that knowledge always initially rests with particular individuals or social graphs. the exercise of science is always potentially confounded by the phenomenon that knowledge is spatially localized and must be deliberately spread and taught across the world to become universal. yet, this does not mean that knowledge must forever be localized and can never become universal. the Existentialist-Structuralist tradition typically reacts to this concept with fear and revulsion. surely if we attempt to universalize knowledge or perspectives, some group of people will end up under the boot of some other group of people, and surely the only way we can defend the rights of minority subpopulations or historically-oppressed populations is to dismiss reliance on science as "scientism" and crudely defend a basic right to plurality. only, we have already shown that this is blatantly false — blindly defending plurality is precisely the way that minority subpopulations and demographic identities _lose_ their rights. if, for instance, transgender people have rights because of plurality and the inherent legitimacy regardless of content of the LGBT Culture, then transphobes have the inalienable right to be transphobic because of plurality and the inherent legitimacy of the White Southern-Baptist Christian Culture. inherent legitimacy can be claimed by any free-floating Subject. plurality chiefly grants inalienable rights to Vegeta's Galick Cannon and Chara's knife.
if we wish to ascend out of the same localized struggles over morality repeated over and over in order to create a universal morality, we must become accustomed to the process of spreading knowledge from localized populations to greater populations. we must not become caught in the notion that knowledge belongs specifically or exclusively to localized groups, or that turning knowledge into a non-exclusive matter necessarily transforms knowledge into a tool of oppression in every possibility. the task of simultaneously spreading knowledge and preventing oppression is hardly trivial, but the way to accomplish it is to spread knowledge outward which is relevant to preventing oppression. we may accomplish this task within the material effort of literally joining separate populations into larger federations of populations, or merely within the general task of making it possible for smaller populations to coexist and cooperate with large factions capable of carrying teleological responsibility. the active creation of objective knowledge in a living tributary running from the localized to the global is the key to creating universal ethical standards.
new thought experiment: evil technologist zaps Yamcha over to Planet Vegeta Yamcha quickly realizes that everyone around him is horrible and he does not want to participate in Saiyan empire — naturally he would most prefer to go back home, but if nobody around him is sympathetic to his situation he does not really have a choice.
Yamcha observes that there is a group of Saiyans attempting to change Planet Vegeta. these Saiyans have determined that if they can infiltrate every social position and social graph Planet Vegeta has traditionally deemed important they will surely claim power, and if they can claim power, they will surely be able to change society. however, in the process of consolidating a new Saiyan Left, something has gone wrong. Saiyans have started picking fights with each other over who is doing progressivism the right way and the wrong way, shoving each other out of the movement, constantly telling each other that if after all the research and experience they may have accumulated they do not "know by common sense" particular arbitrary stacks of beliefs then they have no knowledge or capacity to contribute, and because they are Saiyans, occasionally even killing each other. the harder Saiyans attempt to escape old patterns of oppression and create a new atmosphere of inclusion, the more they become trapped in the same old patterns of oppression cloaked in the justifying power of new ideals. the progressive leaders of Planet Vegeta have become some of the most ruthless Saiyans on the planet, convinced that if they do not fiercely defend their individual ranking and deal out enough discipline to their members the entire movement will be a failure and whatever member was the first to break from their perfect game plan will be the one responsible.
Yamcha walks into this trainwreck, taking a deep breath. he offers to become part of the movement and do whatever it wants him to do. the Saiyans look at him judgingly. he can't fight his way up a chain of leadership for a leadership position. he can't lie into someone's face about friendship and inclusivity while fully prepared to turn around and beat that person up. he doesn't have the fortitude to go around asserting at everybody that they should align themselves with the movement even if they have no interest and are ready to make him go away. he doesn't have the strength to tell people that they have to support the movement whether it's given him absolutely nothing, whether he is currently hungry, whether he only receives anything from wars on other populations, purely just because the movement is "common sense". he doesn't have the strength to beat up a Communist for ruining the movement. he doesn't have the nerve to assert into people's faces that Communism is incoherent but moral concepts such as anti-imperialist resistance and defending demographic minorities are "just obvious". he doesn't have the expertise to do what the movement leaders do. he doesn't have the guts to defend the leaders' brave efforts to defend the nation from reactionaries even when the movement has nearly no policies or plans. he doesn't have the wherewithal to appropriate Communist talking points and claim his own movement with no policies and no theory created them, or pulled them out of the parallel Commonsenseverse. he's not made of the stuff of the member who would stand up and declare a flat-out civil war to defend a sheer empty lack of policies and lack of meanness against all the mean people who would violently disrupt it. he can't even stand up in Planet Vegeta's increased gravity. he is surely too weak to be of any use. [*ys]
Yamcha attempts to tell them that he _can_ argue, _can_ fight, and _can_ defend people against the sheer encroachment of malice, but they aren't willing to listen. the Saiyans are too busy dividing themselves into two Saiyan empires and arguing that whatever assortment of individuals forms the most powerful nation that can defeat the other is the legitimate Saiyan empire that should get to rule the Saiyan empire. the Saiyan progressives kick out Yamcha for not being powerful or skilled enough to fill the limited number of slots in their movement on which the requirements are growing increasingly specific, and label Yamcha a potential reactionary.
is Yamcha responsible for how the Saiyans treated him? putting aside the initial detail that he is transported into the Saiyan population against his will, he has no good way of getting back to his home planet if he does not ultimately try to understand and make peace with the Saiyans. attempting to befriend at least one of them would seem to be his easiest way out. thus, it might appear on the surface that there is an argument that no matter how bad his circumstances are, material responsibility starts at Yamcha. nothing gets better unless Yamcha takes action to do something about his awful circumstances, therefore Yamcha cannot actually assign moral responsibility to the Saiyans for treating him badly or hazing him out of their movement, because just like Eighteen and Vegeta in the previous examples, he cannot get anywhere on defending his own rights if he does not choose to exert his own capacities and agencies as a free-floating Subject. yet, what is Yamcha to do in terms of exerting his agency and individual will if the entire population of people around him has created a system which is entirely exclusionary to him which has left him with no useful capacities? has morality ceased to exist because Yamcha is not sufficiently powerful?
or, this is what one would wonder if one was not aware that in _Dragon Ball_ Goku has the ability to Instantaneously Transmit himself to Planet Vegeta and immediately zap both Yamcha and himself back to earth.
this is the crux of all the First World's problems with conceptualizing and maintaining resistance. we refuse to think outside the box. we refuse to see outside arbitary boundaries. and in doing so, we refuse to step back and see the true shape of the material reality we are working with. Goku being able to transport to Yamcha is to say that Goku and Yamcha are part of the same socially-connected faction even when they are separated by a great distance. even if Goku did not have this ability and could not go bail Yamcha out of Planet Vegeta, it would still be the case that Yamcha has allies in the broader space of his universe and the size of Yamcha's faction is not 1. the mere fact Yamcha has allies somewhere, or _potentially_ has allies somewhere, means that the possibilities for material responsibility cannot be reduced down to the simple set of Yamcha alone. and this is to say that the problem of moral responsibility cannot be fully bounded and reduced by the current geometry of a given population.
populations have a non-Euclidean character to them. populations do not have neat solid borders like a piece of paper printed with a two-dimensional Cartesian grid. if we graph a population on one edge of the paper, it is sometimes like the paper loops around to a graph on the other edge, or another piece of paper comes flying over to join a point on one paper to a point on the other paper. any particular graph of people, whether localized social graph or full population, is never finished. there is always an indeterminacy between all the points in one population and all the points that may exist outside that population. this indeterminacy can be conceptualized as a wavefunction of all the population's possible futures and possible new members, which collapses as each of its surrounding possibilities comes closer and actually proceeds to materially interact with it. if you think the possibilities of a population are fully described by the apparent current elements of that population and the current boundaries of their methods of internal and external interaction, then you have not prepared yourself for "quantum Goku".
of course, if there is quantum Goku, one of the next obvious questions that may to occur to us is whether there can be quantum Vegeta. if we are allowed to look outside the boundaries of populations to build factions and justify morality, does that not also mean that around every corner we can potentially run into a new graph of people who rejects our morality? it does indeed mean that. for every case of quantum Goku there is almost certainly a possibility of quantum Vegeta, and it is worth remembering that this indeterminacy of allies and opponents caused us a lot of trouble in the example of Anti-Transgender Vegeta. the ability to spontaneously add more people to a scenario thwarts any easy numerical-majority-based analysis by rendering the size of each graph infinite. at the same time, this is not a serious obstacle for us if we have already accepted that morality is not a matter of simple majorities. given one Vegeta, or even infinite Vegetas, our solution was to look deep down at the "molecular" scale of populations and the process of forming connections itself, given that if we understand this process at small scales we can subsequently extend it out to graph objects of infinite size. the problem is never necessarily one Vegeta, but the issue of whether when we look at all the possibilities around us there will be _any_ of our remaining possibilities that do not collapse into Vegeta. to say that everything is hopeless because any of our paths could contain quantum Vegeta is to say that a _Minesweeper_ puzzle is hopeless because any of the squares could contain mines. in a _Minesweeper_ puzzle, you find the pathways around the mines, and in a quantum Vegeta puzzle you find the pathways around Vegeta. as long as any of our remaining possibilities take the form of quantum _non-Vegeta_, this may as well be as good as quantum Goku, because the route to quantum Goku always lies beyond some path that has not ended in quantum Vegeta.
let us return to our Yamcha scenario. Yamcha is stuck on Planet Vegeta, and Goku has not arrived to rescue him. can the Saiyans invalidate his sheer existence by way of the fact he has no purpose in the task of improving Planet Vegeta? so far we have grounded morality in the ability of individuals to affiliate themselves with a faction which can then attempt to investigate and construct morality. however, this is not to say things are all over for Yamcha. even if he does not yet have Goku he always has quantum Goku. Yamcha will simply have to search his space of possible allies until quantum Goku is found and one of them collapses into an actual ally. in the process he may accidentally uncover one or more quantum Vegetas who find his perspective on things so objectionable he is at risk of another Transgender Rights Duel. all he can do about this for the moment is lie low and carefully avoid engaging with the problem individuals in the wrong way. if he simply has the patience to survive long enough to find the ally-enemy path that collapses into an ally, he will be rewarded with a new graph which has the capacity to assign moral worth and may be able to eventually form a new center of teleological responsibility. if there are truly any unseen allies waiting for him, they are probably simultaneously looking for him. to somebody else, Yamcha is quantum Goku. [*Lpr]
it is nice to have a logical framework for comprehending objective morality yet, no solution in the world is enough to end our problems if we keep running into the complication of Vegeta reopening all our moral issues as soon as we close them. the point of having a framework of objective morality is that ultimately we wish to _resolve_ these situations and make sure they do not happen again.
how can we build an enduring faction or establish a universal standard of morality in the face of raging plurality? can Frisk rescue the monsters from the Underground, or Krillin and his allies halt the artificial humans without first forming a connection to them? can Goku teach Vegeta morality while the two remain in a hostile unity of opposites? can Yamcha or Bardock escape Planet Vegeta's teleological trap if they remain members of a separate free-floating population? Clearly the answer is "no".
in order for Goku and Trunks to learn a shared moral lesson or a shared technique they had to form into a Group Subject. in order for Yamcha to tell Pu'ar and Oolong to agree to a reasonable set of shared standards they had to be part of a Group Subject. in order for Vegeta to become able to form bonds and begin learning morality he had to contribute to a Group Subject. in order for Goku's allies and a hostile population such as the Androids or hypothetical Saiyan empire to come to terms with each other's existence, or for criminals or Trotskyites to be reintegrated into society, the hostile population has to agree to enter into a Group Subject. in order for Frisk, Yamcha, or Bardock to escape from their isolation they each had to construct individuals into a Group Subject. in order to integrate the LGBT subpopulation into the larger United States population the two subpopulations needed to form into a Group Subject. in order for national populations to form into a stable Communist International, they simultaneously need to form a Group Subject. in order to even _hypothetically_ unite the disparate Social-Philosophical Systems of the United States into the fabled "Our Democracy" we would need to join the two or more separate parties into a Group Subject.
it seems that every single time we discuss plurality, the unification of separate social graphs, or objective ethical knowledge, we eventually end up at Group Subjects.
so, what is a Group Subject and how does it function?
let us return all the way back to the example of Goku and Trunks and how they are each defined as particular material people by their capabilities on different timelines. on timeline "A", twelve-year-old Trunks does not have the power or experience necessary to save the world, but on timeline "B" adult Trunks does. but what if Trunks A wanted to take a faster route to becoming capable of accomplishing things? what if he were to draw on the power of other people?
in the _Dragon Ball_ series some characters can perform a Fusion technique in which two people temporarily combine into a single new individual. when Goten and Trunks perform Fusion, these two separate individuals with different characteristics become a new individual called Gotenks, who speaks in both of their voices at once, combines their personality traits, and also possesses his own new abilities. Gotenks takes on one of a few different physical forms depending on whether the Fusion technique was performed correctly or not, and his existence has a transient character as he is formed at some times and at some times breaks back apart into his constituent people. this is to say, there is a certain _ergodicity_ to Fusions in which combining people together produces new sets of rules, yet these same physical rules repeat themselves with great consistency. even though Gotenks exists only sometimes, the consistent behavior of these new "Fusion physics" and the way he can always form as the same entity as long as he was formed through the same process begins to feel as if Gotenks continues to exist the whole time. Like a nucleon, Gotenks persists as long as there are _sometimes_ the right number of up and down quarks forming gluons at the right times, or the same arrangement of Goten and Trunks.
on the surface, _Dragon Ball_'s Fusion technique would seem easy enough to understand. Goten and Trunks combine into Gotenks. they operate as a single entity with the combined power of both of them. they are able to use new abilities that only Gotenks can use. but it is very notable to realize that Gotenks is not only a new kind of being — Gotenks is a new kind of _Subject_. when two individuals combine by Fusion and create a new entity, the internal behavior of that entity is not a trivial thing. how do the individual wills of Goten and Trunks combine to create the outward behaviors of Gotenks? if Gotenks practices or learns something what does this mean for whether and how Goten and Trunks separately remember it? how do the physical transformations of each of the individuals, such as Super Saiyan, interact to transform the physical body of Gotenks? if Commander Ginyu swaps his mind into Gotenks' body, does his soul simply get ripped in two when the 30-minute timer expires? whenever questions like these arise a fictional work must come up with answers to them, thus further detailing the internal physics of what a Fusion fundamentally is and how it is constituted and functions. different works featuring their own parallel fusion mechanics may also provide different answers — in _Steven Universe_, characters that perform fusion receive an entirely new individual will and personality which replaces both constituent individuals for the duration of the fusion, yet each individual still remembers what this completely new individual did. Fusions may at first seem to be a simple matter, but much as the interactions of nucleons and quarks into atoms outpace the efforts of theoretical physicists to easily visualize them through a single equation, what looks simple on the outside ultimately emerges and generates anew from a series of complex internal behaviors.
just as Goten and Trunks can form into a new Subject through Fusion within the fictional _Dragon Ball_ universe, any assortment of separate individuals can go through a process of ergodic behavior to assemble into a Group Subject. the rules for assembling into a Group Subject are not trivial. at the limits of our current knowledge, it is possible that entire stacks of books could be written on the topic of the internal mechanics of Group Subjects — or even that several already have. however, at the most basic level, a Group Subject is simply the process of individuals or localized social graphs functioning together as if they were a single entity. the most effectively-functioning Group Subject becomes capable of one arm of the graph directing another leg of the graph to do something mainly for the benefit of the other arm without the leg asking what business the arm has to tell it what to do, or the arm demanding what business the leg has telling it what to do. the arm and the leg coexist in harmony with the knowledge that they can each call on each other to serve each other's needs without necessarily needing to toss down some officialized overarching "head" in the middle. the more effectively the Group Subject functions, the more the individuals or regional graphs within it simply sort themselves into exactly the places they need to be and the roles they need to perform at any given moment without anybody forcing them in that direction, and the less any of the individuals have any need for formal government. the less effectively the Group Subject functions, the greater the need it has for bureaucrats, social-historical-economic theorists, hired academic experts, additional democratic councils, outsourcing of parts of itself to other separate locations, formal diplomats, owning classes, police, or relationship-counsellor figures.
this is the great mistake made by Anarchisms, early Trotskyism, center- and right-Liberalism, and early Existentialism. Marxism never said that the world needed "Elites", "priests", or "bureaucrats". the reality, underappreciated even by Marxists, is that the more each individual has enough information and understanding to operate exactly to the needs of other individuals and correct every misplaced action which is not properly stacking onto the efforts of the rest of society, the more these control mechanisms never need to appear in the first place. yet, we instead live in a world where great numbers of individuals refuse to become educated about the population dynamics of disease and become paranoid when advised to get a vaccine. a situation like this is not a matter of "freedom" nor "prejudice against localized Cultures" which have their own reasons for not cooperating, but rather a matter of society shattering apart into separate individuals all separately responsible for their own survival. the question was never whether Stalin would make you wear a mask or make you pay for collectivized tractors. the question was always whether _you_ would take the initiative to wear a mask or spontaneously go put in the effort to assemble a station of collectivized tractors through your own power. yet, while right-Liberals admire figures like Benjamin Franklin, they hardly spend their time figuring out the _best_ ways to construct society to keep Bolshevism from ever becoming necessary. rather than contributing to the solutions to large, complex problems themselves, they always end up falling back on tired praises of the few bright owners that manage to be smart and capable enough to govern their industries and keep large industrial structures from falling apart, not realizing that this is no better than their claimed problem of Communists relying on "bureaucrats" or theory-expert "dictators".
the moment we fully come to the realization of what a Group Subject is, we will realize that the purpose of a Marxist party-nation is to _take over the roles and tasks that would otherwise be filled by a Group Subject_ but at the present moment are proving difficult for the individuals and regions of the population to spontaneously guide themselves into. in every case a functioning Group Subject equals the people guiding themselves toward what the people want in order to serve the people. a functioning Group Subject operating at full capacity is never a case of an arbitrary group of people claiming or owning a larger population. however, at the current time, Group Subjects operating at such a high level of function are exceedingly rare to nonexistent. at tiny scales, two individuals may occasionally form an individual relationship which would constitute any reasonable person's realistic definition of a perfect Group Subject, but such a thing has generally never been observed for populations. populations are not known for healthy relationships. if we were to rank every possible kind of relationship represented by any scale of connected chunks of social-graph, all the relationships specific to subpopulations connected into larger populations would probably drift to the bottom of the list. were the colonies or indigenous populations of the British Empire happy being part of the British Empire? is Northern Ireland happy with the concept of being part of Ireland? is California happy being part of the same country as Florida? the answer is often "no". and this "no" is quite a mysterious thing, because in general nobody desires the alternative arrangements of populations that would occur if localized kingdom-sized nations broke into something smaller — an event that throughout the annals of previous history has usually resulted in war, hatred, and death. on the other side, we may look at some slightly different categories of relationships between populations. were the union republics of the Soviet Union happy with being part of the Soviet Union? according to an actual poll taken in the region, the answer was "yes". were the countries of the Third International happy with being part of the Communist International? the answer to this varied; sometimes countries functioned together, sometimes they drifted apart, and sometimes an opinionated local faction leader like Trotsky would decide to spontaneously secede from the Communist International as a small and partial portion of a national population. what about the world's "Existentialist International", the United Nations? relationships in the United Nations can sometimes be discordant. some countries come together to draft agreed declarations of human rights; other countries flatly refuse to stick to United Nations standards and simply continue on their previous path in open plurality as if the United Nations were not even there.
this is the significance of why every analogy from individuals to large social graphs seems to so easily transform itself into "_Dragon Ball_" and "Vegeta". Vegeta is one of the few cases across reality or fiction of an individual having relationships that are _so_ broken and dysfunctional they begin to resemble the kinds of dysfunctional relationships observed between populations. You cannot expel Vegeta. You cannot rehabilitate Vegeta. You can only suffer. And Vegeta can only complain about it along with you.
Deleuze and Guattari, the two most notable and defining authors of the schizoanalysis period some exceedingly bizarre language including "schizophrenic brains", and "bodies without organs". out of all their writings and metaphors, the Body Without Organs may in fact be the most relevant in recent years and the easiest to understand
in many ways, the Body Without Organs is a lot like the arc in _Dragon Ball_ where Cell absorbs Seventeen and Eighteen into his body to try to become more powerful before they are ultimately released. Cell begins from blatant ill intentions. Cell gains power simply from exploiting the energy of others, accumulating more structure and more cells, and there is nothing inherently in place which is able to stop him. Goku's allies must fight against Cell to dismantle his unchecked power. when Cell is defeated, the "organs" trapped in the corrupt body are released, and Seventeen and Eighteen are handed individual Freedom should they choose to accept it. this same pattern repeats itself again with Majin Boo, who again tries to absorb the earth's people and trap them in his body. again Majin Boo is presented as something vaguely threatening which is not supposed to happen or have been created. again Majin Boo gains power simply from trapping things inside himself, and poses a problem because nothing stands in his way and he can more or less do what he wants. again it is assumed that the "right" thing is for any individuals that can be rescued from Majin Boo to be freed from their containing body. again the story ends on the note of Freedom — although in the case of Majin Boo, there is an unusual twist that Goku's allies look one step back from the immediate problem of Boo being sent by someone else to menace them and Boo is also freed. in the Cell and Majin Boo Sagas, the problem of plurality is flattened down to a problem of some plural actors being bad actors, and peace become synonymous with Freedom.
there is nothing wrong with the Cell and Majin Boo Sagas as stories if we assume they were not deliberately intended as schizoanalyst arguments. at the same time, many people do try to make these kinds of arguments seriously. ...
[unfinished]
an old joke goes: "The prefix _con-_ is the opposite of _pro-_. What is the opposite of progress?" "Congress!"
but if that were true, why is it true? so many of us want to believe that the creation of Liberalism _was_ progress over the time of feudal orders, and in general one of the major steps in creating Liberalism is the creation of parliaments; despite endless Liberal rhetoric about the time before republics being characterized by "kings", in the real world many countries have transitioned to Liberalism without ever abolishing royal families, and it is a rather common talking point for anticommunists to accuse the Russian Empire of having done a great injustice to the whole society by killing the king instead of preserving a ceremonial monarchy as other countries did. it is nearly indisputable that some portion of the improvements to society made by Liberalism came _because_ societies created parliamentary institutions such as the United States Senate and House of Representatives. but if this is true, why are so many people dissatisfied with Congress, and why are they so tempted to say it does not bring progress?
a parliament such as the United States Congress is nothing more than each of a number of regions of a country nominating a representative and sending each regional representative to a central meeting place to come to a shared agreement about sets of policies. however, any region that exists in the real world has a particular ideology that binds the greater portion of its people into its largest Social-Philosophical System, meaning that whenever a region sends a representative, that representative has a partisan perspective. when all the representatives end up at parliament, some of their perspectives are going to match each other and some of them are not, leading each set of matching representatives to sort together and connect together into a new parliamentary Social-Philosophical System. once the representatives have sorted themselves into coherent factions — which is almost inevitable — there is no guarantee any of the factions will work together, understand each other's perspective, or consider each other part of the same society. as we have covered, when a sea of factions exists in open plurality, there is nothing that truly unites all of the groups and forces them to respect each other's beliefs or existence — excluding, of course, any spontaneous event of one of the factions deciding to becoming Marxists and open their eyes to objective morality. as long as the factions remain center-Liberals, Existentialists, or Tories there is no greater force nor internal factor giving them the ultimate word they cannot kill each other and claim to be the only valid Subjects, whether we may imagine this as the Christian God, the Muslim God, Martin Luther King Jr., the lavender-skinned god-of-worlds ruling all the planetary populations of the afterlife, the hypothetical teapot between the earth and Mars, Leon Trotsky, or one exceptionally moral invisible dragon hiding in the president's garage. speak to any of these hypothetical authority figures, and they cannot influence the internal whims of another free-floating population separate from yours.
thus, whenever a country becomes a republic and creates a parliament, the real process of policymaking that happens is each region generates a majority Social-Philosophical System and nominates its representative, the representatives of different regions form together into new alliances of regional populations, and the regional alliances then go to parliament as the delegates of two or more new _ad hoc_ countries. rather than representing any inherent incentive for the new arbitrary countries to unite, the existence of the parliament buillding is a distraction. the true problem is in whether the two populations have any desire to form a population together, or any desire to be friends. at any point either of the populations can simply choose to turn into Vegeta. if we eternally hold to the principle that Goku gets a vote and Vegeta gets a vote and the sum of those two votes is the answer, we had better hope in our deepest heart of hearts that the version of Vegeta we got is the smart one.
in one sense Marxists _do not even need to invoke class analysis_ to disprove Toryism. Toryism and right-Existentialism are _so_ self-defeating that it is possible to defeat them with a _classless Marxism_.
1. right-Existentialists claim Free Will is everything
2. individuals all assert Free Will
3. Free Will succumbs to repeated material patterns in large groups of individuals' wishes and individuals with the same wishes gravitate into Social-Philosphical Systems; separate Social-Philosophical Systems share no actual physical force binding them together into the same standards; Social-Philosophical Systems go to war with each other.
human beings want to think that philosophical zombies are an imaginary creation of the philosopher that does not exist, but the one area of reality in which they actually may exist is social graphs or populations which do not successfully function as Group Subjects.
the whole Deleuzian notion of Identity and Difference is completely wrong if you wish to explain to a member of a Social-Philosophical System that it is prejudiced and its culture is bad, often the outcome is that said member cannot even parse that they are part of a Social-Philosophical System at all. because "culture" actually exists in the form of interactions between individuals, processes of building and strengthening arbitrary relationships, and graph connections, mere membership in a Social-Philosophical System of culture is near-synonymous with the utter inability to perceive that culture, and mere non-membership in another Social Philosophical System near-synonymous with the inability to perceive the existence or validity of Difference. the sea of Social-Philosophical Systems just keeps materially moving like an arena of bumper cars without any of the members of the graphs even aware of the fact the graphs are busy moving, growing, and bumping into each other as whole graphs. the bumper cars simply keep bumping due to the fact they are mindless bumper cars, and there is not a single driver in sight. worse, in a real world of chunk competition, the arena is more like an actual roadway full of self-driving cars where any of the cars is capable of becoming terribly wrecked yet none of the car parts care what happens to them. nobody looks kindly on a human being convicted of driving under the influence, yet somehow everybody considers it perfectly okay when every country and political party drives drunk and refuses to be responsible for car wrecks.
[unfinished]
what does it even look like when a Saiyan is not committed to empire
one of the most striking examples shown to us in an epilogue episode at the end of the _Dragon Ball Z_ era is Vegeta's brother Tarble. Tarble is a relatively average or weak Saiyan who was dispatched to a remote planet and seems to mostly live a forgettable existence. he is depicted with a softer design and mannerisms similar to Goku's allies, and unlike characters such as Raditz and Nappa he in no way comes across as intimidating. there is no particular evidence that Tarble intends to attack or conquer other planets as with the main Saiyan population and other breakaway Saiyan leaders such as Paragus, and if anything it appears that once the Freeza forces that attacked him are gone he will simply go home and live there in peace. likewise, in the _Dragon Ball Super_ era it is briefly shown that some Saiyans at least occupy non-combat positions such as pilots, and some Saiyans appear not to be sent to war and to simply be peasants. some Saiyans are not aggressive and are simply members of Saiyan civilization.
another character who does not actively advance the interests of Planet Vegeta and the Saiyan kings is Broly. Broly cannot be called especially meaningful in his resistance as it takes a while for him to even consider standing up for himself, but it is still the case that his character revolves around ultimately seeking freedom from King Vegeta. after King Vegeta tries to get rid of them, his father Paragus sees the situation as a matter of revenge and of destroying King Vegeta III as well as the prince. Broly, however, has no true stake in this conflict and ultimately just wants to be free of both of these corrupt rulers and _not_ to have to fight Goku or Planet Vegeta.
of course, some of the first examples we see in the series of Saiyans who are not a part of Saiyan empire are Goku and his allies. Goku, his sons Gohan and Goten, and Vegeta's son Trunks all fulfill the role of Saiyans who have more or less forgotten about the old Saiyan kingdom and committed themselves to defending the earth. yet, it is worth asking ourselves the question of whether these four designated heroes actually understand such complex abstract concepts as anti-imperialism and class society. Goku at twelve years old does not even understand gender, and Gohan at twelve years old does not understand the series' own central concept of what a hero is. Could Goku, Gohan, or Goten ever be expected to be able to properly define "empire" or "class society"?
The answer is rather surprising. As we follow Goku in the series there are at least three moments when Goku acts genuinely confused by capitalism, as if he does not expect to live in capitalism and genuinely cannot imagine why anyone would invent it. at one point Goku is confused about how the concept of work makes sense and does his best to set up his tractor to finish plowing a field while putting in as little conscious effort as possible. [*tg] at multiple points Chi-Chi chews out Goku for not understanding the basic concept of household income, but he never seems to understand. Goku acts baffled when Chi-Chi makes a fuss about putting Gohan through private tutors and entrance exams and various other strict regimens to prepare him for university, as much as Chi-Chi may find it utterly obvious that capitalism is a system of limited slots in which nobody can claim a prestigious career if they don't tirelessly compete with others in the particular rules of the capitalist arena.
It is absolutely not that Goku is lazy or does not believe in hard work. Goku can put in endless effort if it happens he needs to learn a new ability or reach a greater tier of fighting power. In fact, Goku and Krillin _are_ seen putting endless effort into mundane jobs during the earliest parts of the series for the purpose of becoming stronger. Goku would rush to complete the task of plowing a field if it were useful to his ongoing quest for self-improvement — it is only capitalism that is apparently not worth his effort.
in Dragon Ball GT Trunks is tired of endless meetings. Trunks is tired of capitalism
Goku does not understand jobs
Gohan does not want to study though Chi-Chi is almost toxically obsessed with obeying emerging capitalism
in Dragon Ball GT Trunks is tired of endless meetings. Trunks is tired of capitalism
Vegeta resents daily life on earth but actually he is just resenting capitalism
even Majin Boo is shown specifically confused by the concepts of money and property and why exactly business territories exist and bother to make money
the notion of escapism in _Dragon Ball_ is tightly tied to characters fundamentally not understanding or getting tired of capitalism and wanting to run away to a situation where they do not have to continually exist in capitalism
what is the most consistent pattern among all Saiyans that do not devote themselves to empire?
is it that they simply have good hearts and choose not to do the wrong thing
that cannot be said for Broly because his story revolves around him becoming trapped by his own uncontrollable power and not actually having the capacity to make decisions. Broly finding freedom from the Saiyan kingdom is an important theme for his character, and yet he cannot achieve this freedom through his own power or his own sense of moral right. it is only through the help of others that Broly can properly choose to separate himself from corrupt rulers and from empire and choose to align himself with what is right.
there is another pattern among these characters: all of them exist on outlying planets removed from the main Saiyan population.
Goku and Broly are each said to have been removed from Planet Vegeta because they posed a threat to King Vegeta III and the existing order, who were paranoid about their latent strength.
Tarble was removed from Planet Vegeta because over such "weak" or "mediocre" individuals as Tarble the Saiyans on Planet Vegeta are implied to prefer putting their resources into their army, capable upper-class members of society, and other such things that they find conducive to war and plunder. In a sense, one could say that Tarble is pushed out of the main population due to lack of space while the particular set of Saiyans with the strength or existing status to be able to claim prestigious class territories blatantly grab the available societal slots and guard them from anyone who hasn't gotten one.
despite all his endless rhetoric about morality and living in peace, Goku did not actually _choose_ to break from Planet Vegeta and become a hero — the decision of whether he was to be removed from Planet Vegeta was made for him in advance. Goku was railroaded into becoming the hero through the decisions of his biological father Bardock and his adoptive guardian Son Gohan, one of which flung him out of the main toxic population of Saiyans and the other of which refused to believe his unruly behaviors as a baby Saiyan were normal. [*sg]
[unfinished]
not only does Goku's view of morality not align with the actual way that universe functions Goku never actually _was_ an Existentialist hero he never actually did gain legitimacy and individual ability based on the principles of Existentialism
if you think that outcomes in _Dragon Ball_ are actually all about individual heroes and individual characters' determination, expertise and power ask yourself: why couldn't Broly defeat Freeza?
Broly is suggested to be one of the strongest Saiyans, if not _the_ most powerful Saiyan. in the _Dragon Ball Super_ continuity, Goku and Vegeta do not actually _win_ their fight against Broly — it only ends when Broly is removed from the area. but Broly most likely cannot defeat Freeza. putting aside the fact that Broly is easily consumed by irrational anger and quickly ends up going after the wrong targets, one would still think that if it were enough for Broly to focus his power on Freeza and eliminate Freeza this is what would have happened. _Dragon Ball_ is relatively consistent in sticking to its rule that characters' power is more important than what might be expected on a purely thematic level of analysis. if the thematic construction of events in _Dragon Ball_ were strictly more important than its fictional physics, then it would have been the case that Gohan would have found a way to defeat Cell without having to call on Goku. thematically, from the time Gohan is introduced at the beginning of the _Z_ era to the time Gohan faces Cell, the narrative is constantly pushing Gohan to actually become stronger, prove himself against others, and take the place of Goku. however, during the Cell Saga, there is suddenly a lot of emphasis placed on the detail that _none_ of Goku's allies are a match for Cell; the emphasis has shifted over simply to Cell being powerful regardless of what anyone wants, and _Gohan in particular_ being incomparable to Cell becoming far less important. this is to say that if Broly is not expected to defeat Freeza it would not be for arbitrary reasons that do not affect Broly's power, but because there is some actual stated reason that Broly is not powerful enough to defeat Freeza.
when we compare Broly's encounter with Freeza in the _Super_ continuity to Goku's original encounter with Freeza in _Z_ era, we can begin to see what this stated reason actually is. when Goku finally overcomes Freeza, he is not able to defeat Freeza, nor Cell for that matter, by himself. to overcome these powerful enemies Goku must make use of a technique called the Spirit Bomb (_Genkidama_), in which he searches every surrounding planet for energy to ultimately draw on the power of millions or billions of other beings. Broly most likely cannot use this technique. although Goku by this point in his journey is already well-known for accumulating at least tens or hundreds of allies, Broly is distinctly presented as a character who is isolated in his situation and has so far spent most of his life with no allies at all, much less the knowledge of entire allied populations as with Goku's relationships with Planet Yardrat and Planet Namek. it is only when Cheelai and Lemo arrive to rescue him from everything going on that Broly finally gains allies. Broly has been sitting in the "Yamcha trap" waiting for quantum Goku.
we can observe that the model of social reality advanced by Goku and the real way the _Dragon Ball_ universe functions do not actually match
in order to win against Freeza Goku has to look outside his own power and summon the strength of millions or billions of other beings
Goku does not win this fight, the beings of (n) other planets do.
in one sense the show has accidentally admitted that even as it would like to reduce the notion of galactic war down to the immediate conflict between two exceptional individuals Freeza's galactic army cannot actually be overcome by an exceptional individual, but only by another large-scale army or civilization
all Goku really does — or in Gohan's time, all the capitalist celebrity Mr. Satan really does — is lead this civilization.
the problem with "free will": in no case does Goku have the Free Will to decide the actions of Vegeta. in no case does Goku have the Free Will to decide the actions of Number Eighteen. in no case does Goku have the Free Will to decide the actions of Freeza or Cell. in no case does Goku have the Free Will to decide whether people are going to cooperate with him to form the Spirit Bomb, because those Free Wills belong to other people. Goku can have all the Free Will in the world — figuratively speaking — and it will never give him the power to affect the actions of anyone else. yet, if Goku ever wants to get anything done, anything as basic as saving the earth from certain destruction by Freeza, he _must_ be able to affect the actions of everyone else.
at the very least, we have established that if Goku is unable to affect the actions of others it does not put him on the side of Evil nor Amorality. the moral character of an individual cannot be judged by the capacities of that individual to carry out Right or Good actions, as much as the willingness of that individual to align themself with a Social-Philosophical System large enough and Philosophically sound enough to be capable of generating teleological responsibility; if Goku assembles a group of allies and they fail, they fail, but that is not to say their failure proves they did not have a valid formulation of morality.
[unfinished]
faced with 99 million Vegetas there are two major paths: around Vegeta, or through Vegeta.
if you want to commit yourself to the notion that center-Liberals or Existentialists and Tories can get along, or that they are "inherently" and irrevocably part of the same nation, if you believe that every single problem can be solved with reasoned argument, then you will be stuck teaching Vegeta objective morality starting at amorality. you must not begin with any moral arguments, including any notion of "basic decency" or "human rights" — you must remember that every single appeal to one way of treating people being "obviously" better than another way of treating people is a moral argument, and that Vegeta does not understand any such arguments. to Vegeta, nothing you say is obvious, and you must explain everything. if you object to this concept, Vegeta will not care, and he will simply lean back on his nature as an isolated self-contained Subject whose contents are impenetrable from the outside. you must fundamentally agree to start from the Vegeta you have in front of you no matter how horrible he is and how horrible his beliefs and worldview are, no matter how offensive they should be to any normal or reasonable person. the fundamental fact in front of you will be that Vegeta does not understand Right and Wrong or why it is important to be Good, and he behaves accordingly and forms his beliefs accordingly. you will have to search deep inside yourself and ask if this is truly the kind of person you want to be friends with, and to commit yourself to giving attention to at the expense of the time you could be putting into interacting with less-frustrating people. if such is what you decide, your decision is admirable. you will commit yourself to the notion that nobody is not good enough to be included in society and nobody is beyond redemption. at the same time, as just discussed, you will have to abandon the notion that society is based around moral notions of Good and Bad or Nice and Mean rather than morality being based on the shape of an existing Social System that begins with arbitrary compatibilities of unique individuals and bonds between unique individuals. other people around you may outright act shocked and call you immoral because they do not understand that you are not endorsing amorality but merely tolerating the real world around you as it exists in order to teach people to form morality. in concrete terms, this could look like saying "Vegeta is my friend even though he thinks transgender identity doesn't exist, because I know that even having basic standards is asking impossible perfection from people, and no living person can meet any idealized standard of perfection someone dreams up in their head", or "Vegeta is my friend even though he thinks the 1619 Project is literally Bolshevism, because I understand that the history of different schools of Marxism and progressive thought is actually very complicated and it would take at least the length of one book to properly explain to him the difference between inclusive history, Black Lives Matter Anarchism, Gramscianism, Marcuseanism, and Stalin Thought". every time you yield ground to Vegeta, you risk that one day he will hurt someone. at the same time, you will make your commitment to being responsible for deprogramming him at whatever pace you can. you will commit yourself to overlooking all the nicer, more pleasant people and instead saving Vegeta, because you believe that it's the right thing to do, and that if you accomplish your task, no matter how bad a situation the world throws at you and no matter how awful of people it's full of, you will be able to rise out of it. if the world hands you one big platter of ferocious xenophobic Saiyans, you will say, awesome, I'm not afraid of them because I have proved myself one of them. you will integrate yourself into their Culture without first complaining that it is bad and prejudiced and wrongly founded, and proceed from the notion that people must be part of a nation and friendship, understanding, and identity build that nation. only after you have integrated yourself into a Homeworld-Saiyan identity will you proceed to rip every one of the prejudices and incorrect material understandings out of it and push everyone to be a better person. you will not use Marcusean or Gramscian methods of trying to reprogram society, but instead the historical-materialist and proletarian-society-building frameworks of Stalin Thought, Trotskyism, Maoism, or similar. in all of this, your greatest challenge will be _not_ absorbing whatever trash perspectives come out of Vegeta as if they were the truth and _not_ spontaneously morphing into an Identitarian fascist.
the second major strategy when faced with 99 million Vegetas is to _route around them_. if you are not committed to the notion that Existentialists and Tories must become best friends, your path will be easier, if possibly slower. your task will be to steadily link yourself to more and more people who are prepared to suffer through building a new society all on their own even if Vegeta never cooperates. your overall goal must be survival — the overall survival of all people who have united themselves to route around Vegeta, and the capacity of each of those people to synergize together and aid each of the others in creating their independence. this notion of faction-building must never be confused with the notion of building a faction in order to _look legitimate_ and _shame one's opponents_. if you build a faction specifically to compete with and combat Vegeta's faction, you will quickly end up in a "Zeno's paradox" in which the 99 million Vegetas keep antagonizing and defeating your members before you actually complete any of the earliest steps of building up a faction strong enough to fight them. if you commit yourself to routing around the Vegetas, then you must not engage with them; if Vegeta says something provocative to try to draw out "Goku's allies" to fight him, then you must ignore it. you will realize that getting into premature clashes with Vegeta pointlessly takes away your energy, if not outright strengthens Vegeta and improves his confidence. every time you allow yourself to be drawn out by Vegeta instead of literally and properly facing him as a group, you only allow each member of your group to be cruelly divided and surrounded by Vegeta. thus, if you want to _overcome_ Vegeta, what you must do instead is spread out unified rings of Goku's Allies in every spatial direction he might ultimately go and surround _him_. if there is no direction Vegeta can go to reach his greater support base of 99 million Vegetas, he cannot claim the kind of crude teleological justification afforded by large factions, and will be stuck in the position of Goku's Allies having crude teleological justification instead. 99 million Vegetas linked together and 99 million Vegetas all divided up are starkly different things. one of the two has the power to pose as a self-contained miniature society with the ability to assimilate and set standards on its enemies, while the other has only the legitimacy afforded to single individuals through sheer rigid stubbornness. Liberalism as a theory of society has no concept of this, nor do the early periods of Existentialism. Liberalism would like you to believe that 99 million Vegetas all expressing an opinion as individuals is the same as 99 million Vegetas linked into a coordinated and thickly-connected social graph expressing an opinion. but these are not at all the same things. 99 million separate Vegetas is just 99 million Vegetas, while 99 million _coordinated_ Vegetas connected by the same Social-Philosophical-Material System is a functioning Saiyan empire. thus, the key to defeating Vegeta is not how many of Goku's Allies there are, but how tightly connected they are and in what spatial layout they are arranged. if 30 million of Goku's Allies divide and surround 90 million Vegetas, then there are not 90 million Vegetas — there are six or so of Goku's Allies versus eighteen Vegetas. eighteen Vegetas is far easier to overcome than 90 million Vegetas. at the same time, eighteen Vegetas is not Eighteen; you must never expect that any of the localized groups of Vegetas actually wants to be redeemed and taught objective morality or the capacity to love of its own will. you must keep standing in opposition to the eighteen Vegetas as a united group of 30 million allies for as long as the eighteen Vegetas keep resisting. this is not to claim that you should instigate violence or force against the eighteen Vegetas and that such methods are the way to change them — much less that such methods are the way to eliminate them. your immediate goal must be _integrating_ the eighteen Vegetas into the kinds of social structures that form under class society to unify populations. if the eighteen Vegetas can be nudged into stably-persisting proletarian workplaces and formed into a union, the six of Goku's Allies can form themselves into a Marxist party-nation and lead the eighteen Vegetas toward the future despite their cluelessness. at this stage, the greatest problem is simply how to arrange Goku's Allies into an effectively-functioning structure. we have already shown that an opposing faction divided up is ineffective at accomplishing anything, so it follows that neither can an allied faction divided up effectively govern or improve itself. [*Lpr]
this is the stage at which "Stalin and Trotsky" debates become important. if Stalin, Trotsky, Gramsci, and Mao can all come to an agreement about the best way to structure some specific localized Marxist party-nation given the region's history and current characteristics, there will be no problem. if Stalin and Trotsky or Stalin and Mao get into a big argument about how to structure larger rings of Goku's Allies, before long all of Goku's Allies will each lose their grip on their eighteen Vegetas, the whole structure will come crashing down, and worst of all, Vegeta wins. the moment Vegeta is not structured into a particular Social-Philosophical-Material System which can contain and redirect him, the 99 million Vegetas simply slowly gravitate back together again and begin plotting about how to re-form their ideal Saiyan empire. this is, more or less, the story of Russia and Ukraine in a nutshell — Russia tried to contain the "Vegetas" inside the structures of the Russian soviet socialist republic, but the Vegetas broke out, and then they went to conquer Ukraine. if the Vegetas break out, you have no control over what they do as Subjects, and no amount of individualistic moral rhetoric will shame them into better behavior as they simply do not understand morality. however, if we are all willing to reconceptualize "democracy" as a discussion about whether Stalin followers, Trotskyists, Gramscians, or Maoists drew the correct graph, there is room to reconstruct and reinvigorate the notion of every localized group of people having a say in which graph structure they receive overall or locally, and even how each group of eighteen "Vegetas" will participate in the new structure should they be informed enough to have a proper opinion. each time a workers' state is constructed Vegeta is always convinced he has no freedom and Goku's Allies have simply trapped him in a corrupt body, when the reality is that Vegeta has great amounts of untapped freedom and only lacks _intelligence_. the creation of a workers' state is the creation of greater ability to make decisions and create change, but this new capacity for change and responsiveness is often thwarted by regular people having no idea what they actually need or want. a society which is more able to respond to the needs of every single localized group of eighteen individuals should be seen as a _more_ democratic society, but the great problem so far has been that _regular people genuinely do not understand and are not ready for democracy_ — at the present time great numbers of regular people outright prefer and defend oligarchy. the great irony of democracy is that Subjectivity is the exercise of a network of brain cells or people taking in information and coming to an educated decision, but most networks of both brain cells and people are far too uninformed and lacking in the proper research techniques to properly be able to form and exercise their individual will. as a result, The Subject becomes transformed into a machine of un-intelligence which primarily defends its own lack of free will while pretending toward everyone else that raw plurality and raw mutually-exclusive existence are somehow a substitute.
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