Irreni Introduciton: Civil Impossible

Civil Impossible

Hi! Happy Saturday!

YAII! Yet another Irreni Introduction!

Current events this week have raised the issue of civil discourse once again.

This week bombs where sent by mail to various liberals by a Trump supporter. I watched https://youtu.be/vaLcUxWuzAc?t=82 featuring John Brennan, former CIA director, where he says in the same breathe and same sentence that we should have maximum outrage and yet also calm down:

 "This [bomb, mail event] is something that I think all Americans who really cherish our freedoms and our liberties really should be outraged over and try to do everything possible to bring that the level of discourse down so we are able to engage in a very constructive and productive way to make sure that this country is able to realize its full potential."
- John Brennan, Former CIA Chief.

Which is it? Be outraged or calm down? I think Brennan perfectly encapsulates in this moment what is wrong with our civil discourse, cognitive dissonance.

What is the source of our collective cognitive dissonance? The conservative solution to fixing civil discourse appears to be for mainstream media to just disappear. How is that possible? Short of the mainstream media disappearing then conservatives are admitting that civil discourse is impossible. Conversely liberal thinking seems to be that the Trump genie needs to be put back in the bottle. However, Trump is just a reflection of forty-years of Rush Limbaugh, AM Radio, Fox News, Breibart, and conservative media. Trump is a manifestation of conservative media then, not a novelty genie.

We are at an impasse that defines our cognitive dissonance. Conservatives demand we disappear liberal media to restart civil discourse and liberals want to disappear conservative media to have civil discourse. Neither of these of options are possible in a free country and the first amendment.

Therefore civil discourse is impossible today.

Just as a reminder this blog is about solutions, Irreni solutions, and not just punditry.

How do we crack this nut? Is it really impossible to have civil discourse? Didn't we just have it before Trump?

Let's take a walk back in time to when "Murphy Brown" was on television in the 1990s, right when conservative media was just getting started in the mid-1990s. Murphy Brown broke ground by a single, professional woman having a baby out of wedlock in a prime-time series. A Family Values movement was just getting started then, including having its own political convention. The Family Values movement went on the attack of Murphy Brown being anti-family and anti-American. The civil discourse nut cracked when the left response was, "whose family, whose family values?" This is known as moral relativity. The left started adopting moral relativity as a national platform. This gave rise to a gay rights movement that culminated in gay marriage. Now transgender rights are also rising.

Moral relativity is a problem for any culture. A culture historically is noticeably homogeneous with shared norms, morals, and traditions. And taboos. The thing about taboos in any culture is that just talking about a taboo is immoral. This is a cultural universal and found in all cultures. A new era of moral relativism is going to run up against the problem of taboo. For example, The Family Values folks of today do not believe that raising Dr. Ford's accusations were civil without proof and that women should just stay quiet unless they have body-camera-level documented proof that an assault occurred.

Public accusations of sexual harassment is just one of many taboos in historic American and western cultures. Homosexuality, bi-sexuality, incest, cross-dressing, transgender, bestiality, pedophilia, and pornography are just some of the sexual taboos throughout all of western history that have been immoral to bring up in public discourse, except to condemn them.

Gender roles are another source of taboo. Another way of saying "a woman's place is in the home" is "a woman's place is out of sight, out of mind." After all, a women in the home is hidden and is not in the public. Feminism then also broke a long standing taboo of discussing a woman's place in society within a Judea-Christian culture. Breaking this taboo is why conservatives are hell-bent on being anti-feminist. Conservatives want women to shut up.

Taboos are being made mainstream in public discourse. The nature of taboo is that just discussing a taboo is immoral. This is a root cause of civil discourse now being impossible.

Murphy Brown brought out into the public discussion something that had been going on for decades of women in America having kids and raising them as single parents without fathers. Arguably the facts of women having children out of wedlock gave rise to the "Moral Majority" movement as well as the "Family Values" movement. However, Murphy Brown broke taboo by going public. Breaking taboo redefines society as publicly declaring what was once immoral is no longer immoral. This cannot happen for those who still hold onto a taboo.

Breaking taboos and then redefining culture as morally relative to "who's family" has been going on since this country was founded, not just with Murphy Brown. However, the pace picked up in the latter half of the twentieth century as technology gave more voices to more people to promote their family values as normal and acceptable and the rise of citizen journalism.

Culture has never been observed to be morally relative as is being practiced today. The emergence of moral relativity as unprecedented is the source of  "winning" arguments by conservatives today. Human nature historically requires some degree of certainty and homogeneity. A culture requires some degree of a single agreed upon set of norms, rules, and morals to function as culture. This is conservatism defined.

If we as a people, if we as Americans, cannot agree upon a single set of norms, rules, and morals to function as culture then we cannot have civil discourse.

The culture wars today are not about about two competing, distinct cultures boxing it out. No. The culture war is between a historical single identity versus moral relativity and redefining culture today as anti-culture. Culture war is moral relativism being established to exist in some collective fashion that we call the United States.

We are in uncharted territory.

Taboos are intrinsic to human nature. Every single person has taboos as surely as we all experience disgust. Historically a country defined cannot be anti-culture where every taboo is open to public acceptance and discourse, this is impossible relative to our understanding of anthropology. This taboo argument is the best argument for conservative politics today. Trump voters who are anti-immigration, anti-gay, anti-trans, anti-atheist, and anti-liberal are on solid human-nature ground. Anti-culture has no human nature precedent. America needs to have a cohesive set of morals as a single body. This is the conservative argument. Furthermore the conservative argument is that traditional values are the only ones because  continuity is also required, cultures also need a continuity of identity.

Anti-culture is unprecedented, breaking new ground. Conservatives are correct in pointing this out and further pointing out the high risks. Further conservatives are justified in pointing out all of the ongoing failures we are experiencing because of the upheaval we are attempting with anti-culture.

Which brings me to another current event, Ben Shapiro's opinion piece that just came out in Newsweek magazine.

Ben Shapiro is a conservative who is advocating a return to historical American religious culture. The thesis of his Newsweek opinion is based upon new studies published that show that virgins who marry and stay faithful in marriage are happier than other marriages.

Here's what I have to say to Ben Shapiro, "Fuck Off". I want to be uncivil. Why am I being uncivil to Ben Shapiro?

Because I feel Ben is acting in bad faith and is a bad actor. Ben knows what he is peddling is an impossible in today's society.

Here are the facts that Ben Shapiro is fully aware of that he hopes you are ignorant of.

Facts Ben Shapiro knows:
1. 80% of Americans surveyed over the last twenty years say the lost their virginity before leaving high school at the age of 18.
2. 90% of Americans say the lost their virginity by the age of 21.
3. 30 is  average age of first marriage these days.
4. 50% of marriages end in divorce.
5. Divorce rates are falling not because we are doing marriage better, but because we are not getting married.

Now lets think about this. If people are 80% likely to lose their virginity before the age of 18 and on average don't get married until they are 30 then Ben Shapiro is full of shit.

Other facts Ben Shapiro knows. Why are Americans waiting until they are 30 to get married?

1. Kids are expensive.
2. First marriage is about having kids.
3. American birth rates are below 2 and therefore negative replacement.
4. Kids were an economic source of income as labor historically that made large families attractive.
5. Kids are now economic sources of large expense.
6. Life expectancy has increased to 70.
7. People are delaying marriage and kids because they are being responsible about the expense as well as realistic about their life expectancy.

Conservative values have never been realized against these extreme modern family conditions compared to historical conditions. In fact, they are invalid and impossible.

Ben Shapiro knows all the facts just presented. However he's hopeful and confident that Americans at large remain ignorant of these facts.  Because Americans are ignorant of them he's hoping they are willing to guilt themselves into believing our culture should go back to promoting virginity as a marriage value once again.

Playing on people's ignorance and requiring people to remain ignorant to pull off his agenda means Ben Shapiro can go screw himself. He's a bad actor.

So it seems we are at a civil discourse impasse. On one hand the conservatives are absolutely correct in pushing the fact that human nature has never experienced the kind of anti-culture that liberals are pushing today. Cultures have always had taboos like homosexuality; subjects that are immoral to even talk about. These are subjects that invoke a humans strongest feelings of moral disgust just by the mere mention of them. And yet? On the other hand the realities of modern society have erased any chances of traditional culture functioning at all, so fuck the right off Ben Shapiro.

One could argue that perhaps we could just agree to find a new homogeneous culture that squares with the modern society? The Murphy Brown retort of "who's family" gives us the reason why this won't work. Women no longer want to be defined as single role of  having only kids. Homosexuals should have a family. Transgender families need to be accepted as normal as well.

Anti-culture is a fact of reality today. And yet this is antithetical to everything we know about anthropology and culture.

Irreni World Scale provides the solution, a solution you can best understand by focusing on a single word: scale.

The insight to understanding solutions to anti-culture come from understanding scale.

Today the word "civilized" doesn't just mean people who live in cities, but people who live in countries. In other words there are almost no uncivilized people living within country borders where as historically people outside of cities had country values. Everyone is expected to meet social standards of cities. This is unprecedented in history. The city of New York with ten-million people probably has more people than every lived in the Roman Empire at any one time. We have scaled the meaning of civil well beyond the original understanding of possibility.

In computer science, my chosen profession, it is understood that what works at a scale of 10 doesn't work at 100, what works on a scale of 100 doesn't work at 1,000, and so on.

Yet in political science our arguments do not change as scale changes. We act as if representative democracy can scale from five-million people to three-hundred million people without change to say the second amendment. The inability to scale is our civil discourse root cause of failure. What works at one scale does not work at another. Does not work. Does not work. It is not a question of "if".

Irreni Word Scale breaks the world monolithic scale of country culture into 300 million MGOs (micro-modular governing organizations). This brings any one person's day-to-day cultural experience down to a scale of thirty people first. These thirty people can agree to set of norms, rules, and morals. Culture scales outward to combining MGOs of shared common morals and agreed unshared morals.

Irreni World Scale then is an inevitability. Anti-culture and moral relativity require it. We need it to have a plurality of taboos and family values that can co-exist. As the saying goes we can't put a round peg into a square hole and we can't force a round culture into a square culture. We can chain them together though.

Civil discourse requires an agreed upon set of ideas about culture. We do not have a monolithic culture today, any single agreed upon set of ideas today and there is no going back, Ben Shapiro.

We need to redefine civil discourse then just as we need to deliberately transition from culture to anti-culture, from moral objectivity to moral relativity. Irreni World Scale first does this by re-establishing immediate culture with taboos via the MGO. Civil discourse outside of MGOs happen when MGOs of diametrically opposing moral world views communicate via intermediate MGOs that have something in common with both. Once these communication pathways are established then disparate groups of cultural morals can coordinate as large groups of less common purpose and loser cultural boundaries, fewer taboos. These larger groups have defined pathways of civil discourse that are ephemeral and well defined. However,  MGOs have they only sovereign power over the members and therefore will disengage from these alliances when taboos are broken. This says that any two diametrically opposed MGO cultures will engage in civil discourse when they knowingly agree to do so under the umbrella of some common larger group.

The solution of the Irreni design is that universal civil discourse is not desirable or functional. Civil discourse is localized to those cultures of MGOs that agree upon the morals. The overlap of various cultures will allow humans to aggregate as larger groups where these larger groups are required to address larger problems. The Irreni design civil discourse of culture as six-degrees of separation where a spectrum of cultures communicate across that spectrum where otherwise diametrically opposed MGOs would not directly.

I will never get along with Ben Shapiro morally. I can communicate with people who are sorta like Ben Shapiro and who sorta like me morally.

Relative discourse via six-degrees of separation is the future of civil discourse. The future of civil discourse cannot be universal because of objective taboos.

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!