Irreni Inroduction: The Least of Us

The Least of Us

Hi! Zappy Friday!

Welcome to YAII! Yet another Irreni introduction!

I was thinking today that my previous introduction, Political Ideas 2018, was going to be my last introduction before compiling the introductions into a book.

But, I had to include an introduction about the least of us.

Least of us, noun:

1. a group of people who noticeably have experienced the least opportunities in life. This includes location of birth, genetics of birth, parenting of childhood, education, poverty, health, bad decisions, unforeseen circumstances,   and just plain bad luck.
2. least of us is not a statement of human worth, we are all priceless.

At issue with the least of us is that some of the least of us cannot manage their own lives and are self-destructive, for example I'm thinking of drug addicts. Because the Irreni MGO has thirty people then what happens to governing when self-destructive, group-destructive people are an important part of the decision making of a supreme government of the MGO? How are the least of us cared for?  How are those who are dependent due to health, age or other reasons adequately represented and taken care of?

I wanted to address the least of us because I find this to be one of the most compelling aspects of improving governing: improving the lives of the least of us.

Here are the talking points and then I will provide some discussion.

1. Proof of life. Irreni MGO experiments must prove life to be better than what exists today. This is true of any question put to Irreni as to how it will be better than what exists today. It is built into the design of the system that we take a baseline measurement of the world around us today and then prove by experiment that MGO governing improves life based upon the claims.
2. Direct responsibility. We live in a world of Nimby-ism today, or not in my backyard. From the problems with the elderly to the criminals we push them out of our lives to nursing homes and prisons. No more. We cannot solve problems we do not acknowledge and face directly. Every MGO must manage all the problems of divorce, crime, health and dependency as a community. If we have to live with these experiences every day in front of us we are motivated to manage them whereas out-of-sight, out-of-mind fixes nothing.
3. Issue leadership. The President of the United States and the President of a corporation represent one superior decision maker. This changes for Irreni. The model today is that the experts give an opinion and some leader makes the call. We live in the information age. It will not be difficult to prove using MGO experiments that leadership should be by experience and expertise per topic and not a single individual for all topics.
4. Fifty-percent Dependency Weight. Much of our taxes and governing effort goes into taking care of the least of us. This effort includes our children, elderly, handicapped, and veterans. Roughly about half our income goes to paying taxes so the MGO will be formulated with roughly a fifty-percent dependency rate.

Proof of Life

Irreni World Scale demands that experiment claims must be proven successful before advancing a new governing idea to a larger population. This design ensures that any claim experiment of an MGO must improve upon today's world or be discarded.

Things will be messy in the beginning for Irreni. We don't have a concrete baseline of the world the way Irreni would demand. That means the initial MGO experiments will have a two-fold mission: to create an improved baseline and to prove experiment claims.

If one spends any time at all studying social science then one comes to grips almost immediately with the fact that there are so many confounding variables in any social experiment that causation is almost impossible to nail down. Take for example the death penalty. It is not ethical to enact a death penalty to kill someone for revenge. The ethical justifications for the death penalty are that the punishment fits the crime, a deterrence within the broader society for committing murder, and to directly prevent the convicted murderer from repeating murder. The ethical reason that gets the most weight is prevention of future murders and then that the death penalty sends a message and this particular killer cannot kill any more.

Is this claim true? Does the death penalty deter crime?

Well, there is no evidence, not even correlation, that confirms solidly the death penalty deters crime. Studies that attempt to find this correlation find that poverty is a better correlating factor with murder. Communities with higher rates of poverty have higher rates of crime, including murder, than any correlation regarding the death penalty.

Further the evidence of repeat murder has been found to drop significantly after the age of forty. Europe has significantly fewer people incarcerated and is not a more dangerous place. Part of their incarceration formula is that a life sentence for murder typically means only twenty-five years. Why? Because after twenty-five years the man will be over forty. Yes, there are some released murderers who then go on to murder again, but the percentage is low enough that Europeans have decided the risk is not worth the incarceration.

All of this is just to prove a point. Claiming the death penalty prevents murder is an unproven claim. Further, European countries have policies of only having life sentences of twenty-five years for murders and these released murderers rarely go on to further murder after that.

This is the death penalty we are talking, literally life-and-death stakes. And yet we cannot definitively prove anything. How can we expect Irreni?

We can make correlation observations the way Europe did about life sentences for murder being twenty-five years. A hypothesis is formed, older men have lower levels of testosterone and and less inclined to violence, and that hypothesis is tested. Do we know the cause? No. Do we observe a correlation? Yes. This is why experiments are paramount: we cannot isolate variables due to confounding factors. Further this is why experiments must be conducted perpetually as a governing body because observing and adjusting for confounding variables will be included in any experiment.

The most difficult human problems we face socially today center around improving their lives of least of us. Irreni provides a high-volume experiment venue to find policies that work.

Direct Responsibility

Direct responsibility simply means we cannot manage our problems if we are not willing to face them.

Each MGO must take care of the least of us. No housing them in nursing homes or prisons. We cannot solve problems we are unwilling to face. If you think that not facing a prisoner is better than facing one day-to-day then you are dishonest with yourself. If someone isn't a criminal before going into prison, they most certainly will be one coming out. Our prison system is a system for manufacturing hardened criminals. How is that even remotely a desired outcome?

Even worse, we send men to prison hoping they get raped. How many times have you heard in your life that justice will be served when a man gets raped in prison? How is that a responsible ethic? Our recidivism rates are so high because our process produces it. We are all a product of our environment and putting criminals in a criminal environment just makes them more a criminal. When they are let out then they go on to create crimes, perhaps even impacting you.

Direct responsibility means that we all must deal with the least of us on a daily basis. This is the only way to optimize opportunities for the least of us is to induce daily empathy directly. Everyone has to be involved. This is not because of fairness. This is because of daily empathy.

However, having said this there will be some weighting of what constitutes the least of us. A person that requires around-the-clock personal care may be weighted on some formula of dependency weight. What this formula is itself a concern for future MGO experiments. My first cut will simply be a crude number of hours spent per person taking care of someone else.

Direct responsibility simply means we cannot manage our problems if we are not willing to face them.

Will you build a prison in your home to house a criminal? Would you personally kill someone you know to enact the death penalty? The answer to these questions is up to each MGO, but one aspect of human nature will remain true, our compassion when we are directly responsible is higher than than our compassion for out-of-sight, out-of-mind.

Issue Leadership

Will each MGO elect its own President? I look forward to proving out that the single-person leadership model is the worst decision model in the information age. Why would someone who knows nothing about computer programming, my chosen vocation, be able to make the right decisions about computer programming? Pure rubbish. Some of the first experiments we should run once MGOs are up and running is to perform comparisons between the presidential leadership model and the issue leadership model. I can predict with 100% certainty the issue leadership experiments will pan out.

But even then things are not that simple. Even brilliant people on some issue can be self-destructive and group-destructive. To whit, each MGO will need to tailor make a issue decision structure based upon the exact make-up of the MGO members. Figuring this out is one of those things that I believe will take two-hundred years of constant improvement. Humans react differently when mixed with differing types of personality.

One thing is for sure though, the overly simplistic model of choosing a single person to be a final authority on all decisions will prove to be the weakest and least effective model for making decisions.

How will this help the least of us?

Even the least of us has something to offer. The MGO is the opportune place for a group of people to enable  the least of us with opportunity to contribute. Issue leadership means that even the least of us who may require a high degree of care otherwise can still be the leader on certain issues.

Two types of the oppression the least of us experience today is a lack of voice and lack of power. Issue leadership provides that opportunity for voice and power. Someone who is mostly dependent can still contribute on whatever limited capacity they possess, whereas today one either has a job or one is on government assistance.

Fifty-percent Dependency Weight

The spectrum of human dependency will be as wide and varied as the spectrum of human experience at large. This means we cannot afford to exclude some MGOs from the responsibility of managing the least of us because some dependent person may be best managed with people in that group.

If history has shown us anything it is that it is our human nature to misjudge those who are considered more worthy. We also misjudge those who are the least of us. History is one big experiment of hedging our species survival on a bet of providing a large imbalance of opportunity and resources to the few or the one. That has been bloody hell.


Monarchies and Empires were forced tyrannies of government and not experiments at all, but even then then they would make claims justifying undo resources on the few or the one. We now know from history that these claims were false.

The corollary of this for Irreni MGOs cannot be formulated to be the only comprised of the most of us,  those with high IQ and other best opportunities. The defect in this thinking is lack of human compassion. The necessity of Direct Responsibility within Irreni is to induce empathy and compassion by direct interaction. This is the most effective way to scale empathy. We don't scale empathy by considering seven-billion people. We scale empathy by facing the reality of individuals, individuals less fortunate than us day-to-day. In other words empathy is not scaled by every person having empathy for everyone, but immediate compassion for those immediately around us taking care of the least of us. In other words, actually taking care of people.


The fifty-percent dependency weight number then is simply meant as a reflection of one-half of us in an MGO helping the other-half of us because on some issues even the most of us will be dependent and require care from the least of us.

Measuring success

A measure of any human society is first and foremost a measure of how that society manages the least of us.

Irreni World Scale has built-in design features specifically for performing that measurement of the least of us via its experimental system as well as providing for the maximum opportunity for opportunity by rejecting out-of-sight, out-of-mind and embracing direct responsibility forcing all of us to care those less fortunate with direct responsibility.


How does a group of people pay for expensive care that overwhelms thirty people? The answer is no different than today, MGOs will pool resources. MGOs are building blocks for larger social groups. MGOs will create larger governing organizations from MGOs, including for health care.  Further explanation of financial scaling is beyond the scope of this introduction but rest assured, it does exist.

Freethinkers unite!

Freedom!

Party On!

Let's get cracking!

Voluntarily Reject Demagoguery!

Politics as Science!

Demand Irreni World Scale!

Anti-theism is feminism!  

Think disruption!

Empathy for all!

Moral relativity: think it, breath it!

Prove it or lose it!

Conversations equal consensus! 

Welcome to the 21st century!

Scale your empathy, scale the world! 

Find your tribe!

Be sexy people!

The future is coming! 

Innovate at a rapid pace!

Slow speed ahead!

Well come! and well met!