Cooperation, Not Conflict

No annoying miracles required

The Context

In a series of back-and-forth replies in the Notes section of Substack, I found myself repeatedly agreeing with Stephanie Bortnem. There was something about her attitude that resonated with me. Even though it’s likely that we don’t agree on everything (few people do, after all), when it came time to reply to yet another comment that I grokked, I got to thinking about how easily we seemed to click.

Well, the thinking exploded into something way beyond a Notes reply. Hence, this article.¹

It’s what happens when I encounter a responsive mind. I don’t necessarily mean a mind that agrees with me; rather, I mean a mind that is circumspect—one that doesn’t view what might appear to be nuanced disagreement as an impediment to further communication and exploration.

Besides, in my own experience, I have found that with a little clarification, definition of terms, and having the simple human decency to say, “I’m not sure I’m understanding exactly what you mean. Can you clarify that for me?”, it’s often true that what appears to be disagreement is really just semantic noise—communicants using the same words to mean different things.

Anyhow, Stephanie, you “provoked” (heh…by which I mean inspired) the following reply.

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No Annoying Miracles

And once again, Stephanie, I am glad to know that we agree. And jeez…HOLY COW! Will you look at that? We managed to do it without either one of us coercing the other! Miracles do occur!

Sorry…that’s my mutant sense of humor. It’s not a miracle at all. In my lexicon, a miracle is (by definition) an occurrence that violates natural law—the laws of the universe. You know…God’s² laws.

Miracles don’t happen. Strange things happen. Completely unexpected things happen. Things we can’t explain happen, but that’s because we’re not omniscient. But violations of the laws of the universe don’t happen. God does not violate God’s own laws.

The thing is, we’re finite human beings. We don’t know everything, and that includes the laws of the universe; we don’t know all of them, and even the ones we think we know aren’t The Whole Story™. We only know the laws as an approximation, until we gain a deeper understanding.

As a scientist, I know that. Everyone who understands what science really is knows that.

Sir Isaac: He wasn’t wrong.

Approximations To Reality

For example, Isaac Newton’s law of gravitation governs what we experience in normal everyday life. Then Einstein came along and discovered that, while Newton’s law works fine in everyday life, under relativistic conditions, Newton’s law is not the whole story. It’s just a really, really good approximation that applies under the special conditions of everyday life.

Uncle Albert: He wasn’t wrong either.

But there are other conditions outside of everyday experience, and to cover those, we need a more general understanding. Newton’s law is a special case subsumed under the more general understanding of general relativity. Einstein was clear on this point: Newton wasn’t wrong³; he just didn’t know the whole story. Newton’s word wasn’t The Last Word™.

And Einstein’s understanding won’t be the last word either. Like Newton’s law, it will remain perfectly true in the context in which it was framed. But there are other contexts we have yet to discover—that we have yet to understand.

The greatest scientists have great humility. When Einstein (who was alleged to be an atheist) was asked why he pursued his quest for ever-deeper understanding of the laws of physics, he replied, “I want to know the mind of God.” Doesn’t sound like much of an atheist to me. Sounds more like a man who recognizes that there are things he doesn’t understand. Yet. Or maybe ever. That takes humility.

The Meaning Of “Right”

Anyhow, it’s not a miracle that two people can agree without coercing each other. It just means that they share a common understanding of right and wrong. Right comprises two elements: rationality and morality.

Rationality

Rationality comprises truth and validity. Conclusions must be true, and they must be logically valid. You might say,

• “They must be in accordance with God’s laws”, or

• “They must be consistent with reality”, or

• “They must be ontologically consistent”, or

• “They must be consistent with the laws of the universe”.

Those are all equivalent statements.

I try to build bridges between the way I say what I mean and the way others say what they mean. (It’s a “birth defect”.😎) The words shouldn’t get in the way. Communicating to understand is just as important as communicating to be understood. That’s part of rationality.

Morality

Morality is everything that is not immoral. Immorality is interfering with others against their will. That does not apply to defense. If someone is attempting to interfere with you against your will, you are morally entitled to defend yourself. All defense is moral.

People who attempt to control what others say are interfering with them. The only exception — that is, the only case where it is not interference — is in any instance wherein there is already a voluntary (uncoerced) agreement between them about what they can and cannot say. And in that case, the agreement should specify the remedy if one of them breaks the agreement.

Again, that’s all voluntary. No one is coerced. It is not moral for one party to arbitrarily impose constraints on another party who has not agreed to such constraints. That’s coercion.

The Real Problem

See, the coercion is the problem. Coercion is always the problem. It’s what happens when people are retards—that is, they deliberately embrace idiotic behaviors. They are too stupid (deliberately ignorant) to rationally and morally sit down and work out their disagreements like civilized humanoids.

That would require civilized intent. And there’s the heart of the matter.

The Real Solution

Civilization is the solution to coercion. Civilization was invented by some unknown genius who figured out that, in a world that can be very hostile to human survival, a good long-term strategy for humanoids who want to survive is cooperation for their mutual benefit. That’s the purpose of civilization.

Not murdering each other, apparently…until the assholes show up

But that’s not what assholes do. Cooperation is not their preferred operating mode. Instead, they choose conflict. Conflict doesn’t work. As a long-term strategy, it’s success-proof.

Again, I’m not talking about defense. If someone has already chosen conflict, your only choices are to let them interfere with you, or defend yourself. I choose defense. Defense is moral.

Conflict is what idiots choose. It’s not rational. It’s self-perpetuating. Those who choose it don’t have the imagination to figure out how to cooperate, or they’re too lazy, or too impatient, or too hateful. It’s easier to hate other than to cooperate with others. Hate is the lazy-ass way of interacting with others. Hate sucks. And the hell of it is, it poisons the hater.

Yet, we are living in culture that promotes hate, that normalizes it out of one side of its mouth, while coercing the living shit out of those it arbitrarily identifies as “hateful” out of the other side.

That’s what politics does. The only thing they can come up with is the same old bag of dog-shit behavior that has always failed: They must be coerced—legally, of course—into not hating, as though such an idiotic thing is even possible. “You must not use (insert list of prohibited words)…”, none of which does a damned thing to stop hatred. In fact, it exacerbates it.

It’s just more conflict.

“Punish them. Shame them. Cancel them. Derogate them. Ridicule them. How dare they disagree! We must silence them! We are the arbiters of Justice And Virtue™. And here are The Rules to prove it! If you disagree, you’re the problem. You don’t get a say.”

How’s that working out?

Kindred Spirits

But not you, Stephanie. You don’t strike me as the kind of person who would choose conflict over cooperation, except in self-defense. Me too.

That’s just an impression; you’re free to straighten me out if I’ve got it wrong.

But if I’m right, that’s why we agree. In that sense, we are kindred spirits, and I am glad to know you, Stephanie. 😎💟🙏

1. Actually, there’s another, more practical reason for my recent decision to keep long-form replies out of Notes and Comments—namely, Substack does not provide any way to save or archive them. As of this writing, Substack’s Archive function pertains only to Articles (which they also call “Posts”, just to make sure users are confused…er, I mean paying attention). Evidently, in Substack’s view, Notes are like tweets, or Xweets, or whatever they’re called now. If you don’t save them to your own (local) storage before you post them, there’s no way to recover them except by finding them, one by one, and manually copying them and pasting them into a local application on your device.

2. Whatever you mean by “God” is probably not what I mean…although, in a certain fundamental sense, I recognize the likelihood that we both actually mean the same thing. We’re just using different words to represent it, and we each have a different relationship to the thing we call God. But that’s a subject for a different discussion, which I’d be happy to have.

3. Yeah…I’m well aware of Richard Feyman’s proclamation, “Newton was wrong!” in his famous Lectures on Physics textbook. I encountered that as an undergraduate. But that’s just Feynman being Feynman. He used shock and awe as a teaching method. He knew damned good and well that Newton wasn’t wrong in the context in which Newtonian laws apply. And he knew that he was standing on Newton’s shoulders, consistent with Newton’s own famous statement acknowledging his ideological debt to the giants who preceded him, like Copernicus, Kepler, and Galileo. He said, “If I have seen farther than others it is because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.”