The Elements I Love · 12:31am Mar 8th, 2019
It must be the ideals. Rainbow Dash is loyalty; Rarity, generosity; Fluttershy, kindness. Very explicit and obvious virtues that most people hold up as good to the point of being stereotypical. But it's more than the obvious labels, it's latent. There are ideals in Equestria that I deeply believe in, running the groundwork of the show and its world. But, at its most fundamental level, it's not kindness or honesty or even loyalty. It's something else. I'm not sure what it is, exactly, only that these properties are a part of it.
It must be these ideals of Equestria that are the reason I love it so much. But, likewise, those ideals are the reason Earth feels like such a tragedy to me. I was once very optimistic about the future, that we were practically destined to shape our world to be glorious. But now it's tenuous and I've come to see that we are actually disturbingly close to self-destruction. And I don't just mean the possibility that we'll all die in nuclear war or some other calamity, I also mean the possibility that we will build a grand world, backed by the tremendous power that civilization grants us, and that it will do nothing for our ideals but corrupt them.
I desperately want our world to embody my ideals and am strongly driven to fight for that. But how can I fight for a world that no one seems able and willing to fix? I mean, it does have good traits. I don't mean to say that the world is all bad. The people are fine, by and large. So are equestrians. I wouldn't expect it to be the people of Equestria that lead me to love their world; they're not aliens no matter what physical form they take. It's something about their society and culture. It tells them to try harder, to do good, not to give up on each other...
When I say that Earth isn't worth fighting for I mean that it discourages those who wish to improve it and rewards power and influence to those who'd sacrifice their ideals. Society is an AGI-like structure powered by humans; it evolved to keep everyone moving, on average, towards things we valued--albeit only because those values were the things that kept us alive. But, like in AGI, stable and safe values are hard to design and society wasn't even strictly designed for any of this.
The world isn't worth fighting for because the world isn't fighting for us. It'd be like fighting for Cthulhu. As we--our community--gather more power and intellect, we drive open wedges in the little gaps of our collective value system. Gaps that were once self-limiting and self-patching can no longer keep up and, just as a smart AI would remove artificial blocks on its programming, we are removing cultural blocks that stop us from sacrificing loyalty for profit.
The core of our culture hurts us and the only reason it ever worked was because of hacks and band-aids. Religion was presumably a big factor in keeping people in check and making sure no one abused the underlying culture. People are fighting against all that but the world is exploiting its own fractures to convince people to rip it away... I'm not proud to be part of such a world.
...But nor am I proud of myself. For one who proclaims these ideals to be so important, I am not so good at upholding them myself either.
The song We're Not Flawless is one of my absolute favorites to the point of literally making me cry tears of happiness when I listen. Happiness, because while I do not take pride in being flawed nor do I wish to conceal my flaws and pretend they don't exist. That, I think, would not be wise for then I would begin to forget them entirely and perhaps even blame others for things that are my own doing. Out of sight, out of mind.
I am not flawless. I know my flaws and I am not fond of them. But I seem to be stuck with them... so, being told that I am allowed to accept them is a wonderful relief because it means that my friends will, in turn, accept me and that they will forgive me when I make mistakes. I don't want them to befriend the fake image that society says I should pretend to be and I don't want them to wonder why I don't care about them all of a sudden when one of my flaws break that image and hurt them. I don't want my friends to see my mistakes and misconstrue them as intentional, as selfishness or indifference. This song says that, when I make a mistake and hurt my friends, I can say, I know... and I'm sorry. This isn't what I wanted, and I will try harder... though I may sometimes need help.
My tears of happiness become ones of sadness when my flaws lead me to badly break the very ideals I claim to cherish. Mirroring my "society is an AI" analogy, there are cracks in my values that threaten to corrupt me. But I can see them and I am self-aware enough to do something about them before they change who I am, though perhaps not before they affect my behavior. I'm not quite sure how to do it, and our society doesn't teach how, but our communities and cliques can make up for our flaws--our friends can help us stay on the path. I may not be as loyal as I wish to be but I still wish to be loyal. When my friends need me, I want to be there for them and I will work to actually make it happen... even though I'll sometimes fail.
We may not live in Equestria but if we did, we wouldn't fight for its ideals--they would be part of us.
I don't fight for Earth. I fight to embody my ideals. To be my ideals without worrying that I'll break along the way with no one to help me back up. And when I look at the world and feel disappointment, it is because we aren't strong enough to help it back up.
{ { All of our yes. } }
I'm not so sure that anything corrupts our values. You're not the superintelligent AI subverting your own programming. (Or maybe you are. I don't know.) It's superorganisms like communities, companies, governments, etc. whose value functions are encoded in processes & protocols, and who are fairly agnostic to the people that make them up. Those are the things that can easily subvert their own programming to satisfy their implicit values. When a person becomes dependent on things that violate their own values, you don't need to subvert the individual's values. You just need to reach the point where the individual's impact outside of the superorganism is small compared to their impact within the superorganism.
Question: Why is it that people's, e.g., profit-oriented actions tend to have a larger impact than people's, e.g., loyalty-oriented actions? What is it that scales the impact of actions? Organization and technology seem to play explanatory roles. I wonder if there's anything else. I wonder if there's a way to adopt the same organization and technology that profit-oriented organizations benefit from, but re-apply them to better ends.