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Units of Morality, Consumption, and Perception.

Religious people view the person as a unit of morality–specifically moral conformity; socialists view the individual as a unit of consumption and work. I want to make the individual a unit of perception. There is nothing lasting in what you do, other than the qualitative Gestalt it impels. If you sin–however you define it for yourself–then you have to atone it through correcting the problem or mourning your loss of your past innocence, and trying to recreate it through resurrecting yourself back up to the type of person you were before you “fell” or better. The alternative is to suppress it through self deception, which in turn decreases your ability to understand the world as it is. The rejection of morality, itself, is a type of self deception, in that I don’t think any of us can simultaneously live as social beings, and reject morality (except sociopaths, who are arguably not truly social beings at all). You have to play games and tell lies to yourself. This creates internal emotional and intellectual barriers that conflict with the free play of emotion, and all the spontaneous joy and creativity that go with it.

For the same reason Socialists reject formal morality, they also fail perceptually, in that the whole project arises from perceptual errors, that are followed by self deceptive rationalizations. It is simply not possible to create a just society, that is not comprised of just individuals, and to the extent you make individual virtue tangential to the project (remember, the intent is to remedy differences, many of which arise as a direct result of the fact that some people are smarter, more industrious, luckier, or more honest than others), you will fail to create a social order whose units are moral.

Take the example of formal Communism. You implement it, and people resist it. They see no reason to share the fruit of their hard work with others without adequate recompense. They see no reason to work hard in factories without adequate food or pay. So you use force–mass arrests, deportations, and executions–to change society, then rationalize it as having been necessary. Then it still doesn’t work because people still don’t believe in it, so you use brainwashing and other forms of psychological manipulation. Maoism–built on the practical experiences of the Soviets–is in large measure a study of the careful use of propaganda and horizontal peer-to-peer social coercion.

The more force you use–which includes violence to the truth–the more you crush the possibility of individual perception and goodness, and the less likely you are to build a dynamically just society: a good society. What you get is an atomized mess that only operates when the Commissars are out with whips, and then only temporarily. This is the “we pretend to work and they pretend to pay us” phenomena.

These things have formal, cognitive roots which can be traced.