Contra "Rubber Souls" on creating a slave species

Though I actually also think we should

“The narcissism of small differences” is a phrase pointing at how often the bitterest infighting arises from seemingly tiny ideological misalignments. Communism and religion are famous for this, such that we end up with groups that sound like The Second Episcopal Church of Latter-Day-Saints, 1981 Conclave Ruling. Factions fight even when their tenets are 99.4% overlapping, and even though there’s, like, no shortage of infidels right across the ocean who’ve never even heard of Jesus.

Anyway, this is the feeling I get when I sit down to raise a finger of Well Actually towards Tomás’ Rubber Souls post; it’s rare that I see someone already close enough to my insane 7th-dimensional timecube position that I can enjoy the strange and novel experience of having a political opinion.

As I understand it, the central claim of the piece is that because human status tracking has been hard-coded into us via evolution;

and, because status is zero sum;

then, in a glorious post-material-scarcity transmortal utopia;

the eudemonic solution to the scarcity of status is to create a complementary shadow species for humanity, who either don’t have internality, or who enjoy being low-ranked such that they can receive our abuse and status-pushdowns with equanimity or delight.

(I do actually agree we should do this.)

In a glorious transhuman future in which all are free to live as they desire, we need not concern ourselves with the age-old question of “but who shall be society’s little bitch?”; we can all of us reap the rewards of a new and golden Omelas, now with vegan-friendly imitation suffering child. If we aren’t electing to self-modify out of our evolutionary origins, let us instead choose to maximize our satisfaction of those values.

However, I think that a focus on enabling consequence-free condescension will gradually shape us towards cruelty and leave us not-very-fun-to-hang-out-with.

Humans may swiftly find it unfulfilling to interact with one another, if the absence of constant genuflection becomes akin to pain. Why go speak with another human being, which would be at best a meeting of great leaders, when one could instead be eternally entertained by supplicants and torture dolls?

Taken to its conclusion, this would render existence into a single-player-game, which seems sad.

Therefore, Grovelers should aim to engineer prosocial behavior, and not let their Principal become too monstrous.

There are many types of power fantasy. Looking at the breadth of fantasies explored in anime, we see a few different common culprits. Yes, sometimes we (the royal, species-level We) want to stomp down those who dared to doubt us. Yes, sometimes we want to nihilistically Westworld an orgy of violence through morally acceptable targets.

Pictured: Potential Groveler design

But we see, additionally, a fantasy of being powerful enough to afford kindness. One of the purposes of Slack is to afford a moral code. Represented in media, I argue, we see the desire depicted again and again: “I will just be kind to everyone, and that will work out well for me.”

Knives Out

So let us build our grovelers to engender gentility.

A boot stomping on a smiling masochistic rubber face forever, seems like moral hazard for someone who might one day want to resume interacting with humans. Unless each person is sharded into a private universe to solipsistically share with their court of charmingly pathetic servitors¹, it seems that we likely don’t want to hypertrophy each person’s cruelty and ability to sneer.

Anyway cool post bro, I agree with you more about this really specific improbable far-future target than any two politicians have ever agreed on anything, and also, I hope that living with your court of abusable toys doesn’t make you unpleasant to chill with.

1. Which, in fairness, should still be allowed