I want this to be a culmination of the ideas I have written before, while tightening up logical coherency. Let me begin with the following axiom that I will build the rest of my ideas on: humans are inherently cynical. Indeed, most humans are cynical except with those closest to them, and even there they exhibit some degree of cynicism. On that first point, we must agree that humans literally are guided by self-interest, even when they sacrifice for others. It is about satisfying their will, and therefore whatever they must be in their self-interest. Something even as “selfless” as love is indeed in one’s self-interest because it creates a pleasing feeling in their brain, and that pleasing feeling is what people optimize for. They commit selfless acts for their partner because their brain is wired to produce that pleasure when they do so. If humans produced that same intense feeling by harming others, they would do so. We should not conflate selfless acts in the pursuit of self-interest with true selflessness.
But my point is not just that people are guided by self-interest, but rather that people are selfish, that selflessness is an exception and not a rule. Consider money: the overwhelming majority of people want more money in order to live a more comfortable life. This is why they search for a better job and climb up the ladder. The economy is inherently a machine built almost entirely on selfishness, of people wanting to make their own lives better, which often comes at a disregard for others. We have regulation to prevent dumping toxic waste into a river people drink from for a reason, and that’s saying something about how humans would normally behave without laws. Laws are merely a response to people protecting their own selfish interests from others, so that those who only care about drinking water can drink it safely, without regard to the shackles now put on the business and how it will affect its workers and other people who rely on that business downstream.
We also see this in social connection: hypergamy is a good example. People tend to want an attractive partner, a wealthy partner, and will cheat on their partner to gain access to a better partner. It’s all about securing a future for themselves and maximizing the pleasure they feel. Friendship is another example: people will often stop associating with people in lower social standing than them to keep up appearances, and will even stoop to bullying those beneath them. The bond they had was superficial. Children are another example. People tend to have children because it is the societal norm, or because they want to leave a legacy. While instincts cause parents to care about the safety of their children, such bond is superficial because it is only instinctively driven. Why this child and not some other child? Moreover, why not some child who excels? Parental love has no logical basis.
But what about empathy? Do people feel empathy? Yes, but empathy is something reserved for those who can be loved. I would argue empathy is one of the most cynical things a human can exhibit. Those who are ugly receive no empathy. Those who are unwanted receive no empathy. Those who are unloved receive no empathy. Empathy is a currency for the lovables only, it presents itself as something genuine but when empathy truly has a cost, when it is directed towards those nobody else feels empathy for, the driving force behind it dissolves. There is no empathy for those people who have been rejected. There is no solace.
Next I will assume that human life is often overvalued in today’s society. There are 8 billion people on this planet, and the loss of one person is unlikely to stop the forward march of progress. That is to say the loss of one individual human is to not be mourned over. The common counterexample to this claim is that human worth is inherent and that other metrics matter (like relationships to other people and uniqueness). Regarding relationships: people make and break relationships all the time. The loss of somebody to euthanasia can easily be filled with a new, superior person. And regarding uniqueness, one can go out into an open field and pick up a rock. There is only one rock in the whole universe with that exact shape down to the atom. It’s unique, but holds no value because of that uniqueness. I could go into a laboratory and pick up a cube of a material. There are probably many cubes like it, give or take some atoms. Those atoms provide variation and uniqueness, but they do not imply value.
The next objection is regarding inherent human worth. The idea I’ve proposed is not contradictory with inherent human worth. Rather, I am arguing that total human worth (inherent plus any external factors) is small. Many people may argue that inherent human worth exists, but they never gauge how much. If we assume each human life has infinite worth, then every second wasted not making use of that life to the fullest is a crime that itself is infinite in depravity (after all, a small value times an infinity is still an infinity). Rather, the inherent worth of human life is capped, and my perspective is that it is not significant.
One of the most amusing things about humans is their inflated self-worth. They are locked into one consciousness, one body, one life. They cannot help but see the world revolving around them. Oh the irony. There are 8 billion people in the world. The world will continue to march on with or without you just the same as it always has.
Now, onto the meat of my essay: In society, there is a hierarchy of sorts. Those who are at the top in terms of social status, looks, or some other social metric abuse those below them. This hierarchy isn’t rigidly defined like those in past civilizations. Rather, the hierarchy is fluid: one day you could be abusing somebody below you for some deficiency, the next day you could be abused by somebody whom you thought was on your same standing but has an advantage that you lack. In fact, it doesn’t have to be about advantages or disadvantages, as it can be about mere circumstance. Despite it’s fluidity, there are still rough estimates of social standing in this hierarchy, as a person might be more likely to be abused than receive abuse on average.
The hierarchy is not a philosophical template for society. Nay, it is rather an observation about society itself. The hierarchy forms in young children when those with social connection and popularity start bullying the lonely and outcasted. The abuse becomes far less direct in adulthood, but exists when people are silently excluded for looks or social awkwardness. Lookism is a perfect example of this: those who are ugly will be left behind when trying to find love, and will face judgements everywhere in life, whether it comes to first impressions on job interviews or making friends. The eventual result is suffering for those on the bottom of the hierarchy. They lead unhappy lives and escape is, on average, not possible due to their defects.
Interestingly enough, when it comes to lookism, those who are rejected by society will never be able to develop their social skills as a child, when social failures and forgiving and then have a safety net. This feeds into early bitterness, which them compounds with their ugliness to make social interactions even more difficult later in life, when the bar is even higher. We end up having a positive feedback loop where those who are ugly become more and more evil. Such cataclysmic cycle starts with a few bad experiences that keep feeding in on themselves. Are those initial bad experiences undeserved? No. However, once they become inherently evil, they are a defect that deserves the pain it has received and must be removed. Their sole purpose is to suffer for who they are and to the pleasure of those above them. The defects must be abused for being evil.
Despite our wishes to punish those who are evil, we also wish to abolish this hierarchy and increase the general happiness of our population. It would be better had there been no reason to punish defects in the first place. We can accomplish this be removing these defects in the first place. Without a clear bottom level to abuse, all members of society will be on a more even playing field, making abusing those below them higher. Those who are content with their position in society will remain and lead happy lives, while those whose existence was nothing but a toy for those above will be freed from their suffering, increasing the general happiness of the population. For lookism, the answer is simple. Those who are ugly but against the odds find love must be stopped from breeding and passing on their pain to the next generation. Those who have heritable mental issues must also be stopped from breeding and passing on their pain.
I’d actually argue this is applicable whether or not the hierarchy is real. Those who have been unhappy in the long term for whatever reason, whether it is due to looks, loneliness, finances, mental problems, etc should be forcefully euthanized by the state. By eliminating unhappy people, we reduce unhappiness in our population and prevent them from passing their unhappy traits on to the next generation. We determine whether people meet the bar for euthanasia through a combination of battle-tested heuristics. For those who do not meet the heuristics but still feel unhappy in life, we can offer them elective retroactive abortions if we determine their loss would not place a significant drain on society.
The most prevalent objection that comes to mind when discussing this system is the idea that people can improve and fix their unhappiness. However, the goal of our system is to move fast and move bureaucratically. We are playing a game of maximizing our expected value here. We do not have time to play a game of “what-if” for each individual person. We will not hear nor heed their cries, we will euthanize them no matter what. Our goal is to build a perfect society where there are no unhappy people, and we must accept the cost and march forward.
Of course, the heuristics we use aren’t going to be perfect. Many of our snake-tongued opponents will claim that heuristics designed by a bureaucracy will inevitably target those who do not deserve to be targeted, such as political enemies or those held in contempt by those who run the system. I believe the people who take up the heavy honor to run such a system are noble people indeed, and are unlikely to abuse their power. However, I will not argue in that direction and will assume our system encounter such a failure. The reason why I described our opponents as snake-tongued is because they are saying “if the system is not 100% perfect, then the system has no use at all.” All of the devices man has engineered throughout history have not reached 100% efficiency, but that does not mean they have been of great benefit to society. Even just 70 or 80% efficiency can provide great benefit to us all.
Though I have explained my ideas, I feel like there is a lot to explore, so many different arguments to counter, but such thoughts do not reach my head at this time, so I will end it here. I do not know how to wrap up my essay, as my topic shifted from human nature to the hierarchy to eugenics throughout, but I will say that despite all this, my claims that humans are evil beasts who will abuse those below them, I still think humans deserve happiness. My goal is nothing more than to engineer that happiness for everyone. All my ideas stem from the fact that there is no remission for those at the bottom, and the simplest way to make them happy is to make them feeling nothing anymore.
