Between Diagnosis and Prescription
Systems designed for perpetual stalemate also breed perpetual conflict
Pericles' Funeral Oration by Philipp von Foltz 1877
1
A diagnosis is a description of the way reality is.
A prescription is a claim about what we ought to do if a diagnosis is accurate.
IF diagnosis DO prescription.
If we haven’t agreed on a diagnosis, then we can’t begin to agree on prescriptions.
Most discourse is lost in the maze of value-specific prescriptions despite having never agreed on the diagnosis or values.
2
Science is the process of falsifying diagnoses.
A scientific theory is indefinitely subject to falsification efforts.
The more falsifying effort a theory survives, the more legitimacy we grant the theory.
3
Prescriptions about what we should do are dependent on values.
An ideology is a hierarchy of values that guides an agent facing a choice.
Ideologies are the North Star for both personal and assembly languages.
Order of operations:
Diagnosis
Ideology
Prescription
4
Ideologies can catalyze mutations in a shared language.
It is easier to change what a word represents than change your opponent’s position.
Changing what a word represents is easier than changing the laws your opponent’s infrastructure runs on.
The same diagnosis interpreted by two different ideologies can create two different diagnoses.
If a diagnosis can be viewed more or less compatibly in strategically favorable ways for an ideology’s goals, then the ideology can protect itself from counter diagnoses deemed threatening.
The broader the adoption of the mutations of the language, the more unresolvable conflicts of meaning become, effectively creating walls around ideologies that render them independent from the collective discourse that relies on shared meaning.
5
To keep conflicts of meaning from physically enforced resolutions (war), the infrastructure of the governing system only needs to maintain a state of stalemate across the conflicting ideologies.
Conflicts of meaning that can’t be resolved via information transfer or physical conflict can peacefully coexist by ignoring opposing ideologies.
The US governance system, which enables ideological stalemates to limit concentrations of power, also requires all ideologies to engage in governance to avoid being conquered by the opposition.
The core function of peacekeeping via maintaining stalemates is fundamentally in conflict with the idea of ruling over one another via a majority vote.
These conflicting incentive structures pose an existential threat to the system as it is.