David’s blog

Necrology is the study of how death, and avoidance of it, impact human decisions. The premise,  in its purest form, is that all decisions root from survival, and that the decisions we can choose are dependent upon the power that we have. Similarly, to expand our decisions, we also attempt to expand our power. Nothing else has any major influence in this equation.

Survival: The process by which we continue our presence in a chosen environment.

Power: What we can influence in order to proceed with our search for survival.

If you’re driving comfortably, and the sun is blaring into your eye so vibrantly that you can’t see anything but it’s unforgiving rays, you’re likely to bring down a device, be it a cover or a set of sunglasses, to mitigate its pressure. What are you likely to do if the person next to you is shining a light into your eye? I can’t say the details, but in some manner the person there, usually described in unkind terms, would quickly see that they are at least on similar levels of power to you, if not lesser.

To this end, it’s useful to understand nature itself as an authoritarian. The acts of nature have nothing to do with our survival, and natural disasters, changes in clime, and simple weather mishaps have deposed billions of their lives. The earth and the sun, as physical objects, have an amount of power over us we cannot ever hope to compete with, beyond the point where we’ve developed Matryoshka Brains and can actively terraform. Not dealing with if something will happen, but instead trying to reallocate our own resources to compensate for the damage it will cause, is a precise clue of how power is functioning.

We interact in environments based on how much power we have, or how much we think we have. Notable that a misimpression of how much power we have is usually a good sign that an authority is in influence, but no matter how much power we think we have, the power we actually have comes forth no matter what.

This is important as a pretense in relation to culture. Culture does not influence decisions to any reasonable degree. Survival dictates to what extent we follow culture, and power determines it’s form. Active solutions, active creations, in a personal or political environment, always involve disposing of cultural elements in favor of actually looking at survival elements. One need only inspect the way we solve interpersonal social problems, usually caused by misapplication of cultural elements, involve boiling down to base survival needs.

We act, we learn, and we move forth by the principle of survival, backed with power. We develop our cultures, understand moralities, and do what we can because of these principles. It’s almost disappointingly simple.

We often imagine how different politics would be with change in time, or with technology, or with changes in scope. We often picture the future as involving complex decisions with more intricate part, less internal bickering, and with less human strife on a scale we’re not prepared for. Now, I won’t underscore the importance of human achievement in general. However, who can honestly state that political development has grown into a revered, functional, and appreciated field? Bickering caking bureaucracy is the only way the whole ordeal is ever described. What is key to understand, from a survivalist location, is that those in politics are there trying to both maintain and expand their survival.

Utopian politics generally seem alien, but have a pattern to them we’d recognize. Without scarcity of resources, political power itself would become far more vital, as would general presence and prominence. Even without shortage of resources or distribution, survival isn’t a flat check box, and old wants would become new needs. This is expected and expanded on, and occurs within the subsets of resources that do reach post scarcity in their core environments. But politics inherently has human components, and the first human, or even organic, component is action towards survival.

What then are the politics of the immortal?

Let’s set the basis. We have a society. Within that society, different resources are manipulated. Within those manipulations, individuals come up to get the majority stake in them. This happens whether death is a threat or not. What’s different?

The resources, naturally, but also the methodology. If your survival, or the relevance of your life, is not dependent on how much time you can spend influencing those resources, the entire environment is upended. You would see politicians acting for exactly as long as they think they need to, and not any more or less. Political survival itself would not be a priority, because the nature of the way one values their own existence is different. Politics in an immortal society would have little distinction from AI managed politics; complex comparisons of needs to maximize general output.

Notably, I’m not referring to state politics. If your position is not one of “The State, in some regard, needs to be dissolved if humanity is to see any positive progression” then by this point you’re just not paying attention. I’ll leave late night discussions and even later night blog posts to address that point. What I refer to when I say politics in this case is simply the methods by which different individuals position and attempt to approach resources. Power is complex and difficult to imagine in a setting where survival cannot be threatened, and it is precisely that difficulty that is brought about through this thought experiment.

Take your time with this. Think on the structures that would form. Think on the decisions that you, as something without a resource upkeep cost, would make if you were interacting with someone else in a likewise position. Even in an abstract sense, it’s hard to conceptualize our positions there at all. Even when put in such thought experiments, we usually default to seeing how we would survive in such a situation.  It’s a delightful exercise, but no doubt among your conclusions will be the absolute vital aspect that survival plays in how we make even our most esoteric decisions.

Establishing just how strange the politics of the immortals is a precise and vital step in understanding Necrology.

 

In ancient times, those who learned from corpses were dubbed necromancers, in much the same way that those who wished to manipulate resources were decried alchemists. In time, genuine research took as a field, and alchemists served as precedents to chemists. Death, and how desperately we avoid it, can teach us much, and so necromancy serves as the precursor to Necrology as a study.

A name and a vague comparison are useless alone, so I will present what this research helps us understand.

In the start of the 20th century, there was mass protest of working conditions within the northeastern united states. This protest caused zero political change or influence. As protestors, primarily women, made rallies and gatherings, police forces subverted them at every step. It was a relatively typical case of power subverting those calling for change, and progress was unlikely.

The history of the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire is fairly well documented. Any could do a better record of it than I could, but as a short summary: A factory fire caused by the stupidity of authority left 150 corpses, 120 of them women, thrown onto the streets of New York. Following this, massive worker rights changes followed.

Necrology is the understanding of why this isn’t just a horrifying incident, but a Shakespearian tragedy. A decade of loud, inconvenient protest moved nothing. A disaster caused by what the protests were trying to prevent left the scent of death on the streets of New York. Immediately, change followed, and even set the pace for the move that after 80 years would allow women to vote.

In North Korea, for over 2 months at the time of this writing, testing of nuclear weapons has ceased. Decades and administrations did nothing to stop this abhorrent research. Sanctions, threats, jokes, and isolation were repurposed into propoganda. When did it end?

When the stench of corpses in the street was so bad that even disorganized, propogandized citizens were willing to organise. When walking the distance it took to gather was no longer too large a price, when the time investment was no longer too large to spend, the protests began. Too afraid of assassination, KJU has ceased a dynasty’s efforts.

The first dictator then president of Ghana, J J Rawlings, democratised not out of culture, but out of desperation for political survival. The dictator of Zimbabwe, Robert Mugabe, is getting deposed under similar standards to what KJU is experiencing. Vladimir Putin has expressed plans not to run next election in a country tired of death, and now willing to scream in constant protest.

These are people who have fostered the cultures of violence and control in their political spheres, not only getting deposed, but deposing themselves, out of sheer need for political survival, in jeopardy due to the loss of lives of those they believed had no power.

Power is the capacity to influence the survival of individuals in an environment, your own survival included.

Power is a resource, which one can liquidate for resources, or attain through exchange of other resources.

The more survival is risked, the more someone will liquidate for survival. This can be either to lose base resources to gain power to gain survival, as with protestors, or to lose power to gain survival, as with dictators.

This is the first premise of Necrology.