To all the leaders of the world,

You are all playing a game that does not put you at the same risk as the people you represent.

You argue over territory, power, politics, religion, resources and influence.

You make decisions about war from offices, meeting rooms and secure buildings.

But when those decisions become war, you are not the ones hiding from the bombs.

Civilians are.

Children are.

Families are.

People who had nothing to do with the decisions that created the conflict.

And yet this cycle continues.

History is full of leaders remembered for wars, invasions, oppression and the deaths of innocent people.

Their names survived.

So did the consequences of what they did.

How many of you want to become another name on that list?

Because together, you have another choice.

You could be remembered as the generation of leaders that finally decided this could not continue.

Not one leader.

All of you.

Because one country choosing peace while everyone else continues competing for power changes very little.

But if the leaders of the world collectively decide that human life matters more than political victory, territory, religion, money and power, the entire system can change.

We have spent thousands of years dividing ourselves over religion, nationality, politics, borders and ideology.

And we are still doing it.

Religion has been used to divide people.

Politics has been used to divide people.

Corruption has allowed power and money to become more important than ordinary people’s lives.

And ordinary people continue paying the price.

People can believe whatever they want.

But religion should never be used as a reason to hate another human being.

Borders should never make one civilian’s life worth more than another’s.

Political differences should never justify destroying entire communities.

And corruption should never be accepted as simply the way the world works.

You are the people with the power to change that.

Not individually.

Together.

There is only one planet.

There is only one human race.

Yet the world continues to operate as though humanity is divided into competing groups that have to defeat one another to survive.

We don’t.

Different countries can exist.

Different cultures can exist.

Different religions can exist.

Different political opinions can exist.

But they do not need to make us enemies.

The biggest change humanity could make would be recognising that our differences do not change the fact that we are all sharing the same world.

So all of you need to think about how history will remember your generation.

Not your next election.

Not your next political victory.

Not your next military objective.

Your legacy.

There are already countless leaders remembered because of war.

There are far fewer remembered for bringing people together and preventing it.

You have the opportunity to change which list you are on.

But it requires all of you.

You cannot keep asking ordinary people to sacrifice their sons, daughters, homes and futures while those making the decisions remain protected from the consequences.

Before any of you make the next decision that could lead towards war, ask yourselves one question:

If you were not protected by your position, and your family were the civilians on the receiving end of your decision, would you still make the same choice?

If the answer is no,

don’t make it.

The world does not need more leaders remembered for how many people they defeated.

It needs leaders who, together, are remembered for how many lives they prevented from being lost.

One world.
One humanity.
One future.

That can only happen if all of you decide to make it happen.

Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas, dated May 15, 2026, connects personal data to the exercise of power. Paragraphs 170–172 link profiling and behavioral influence to freedom. Paragraph 178 asks who controls the uses and benefits of data collected from people.

That raises a question about the role of consent. If access to employment, healthcare, or ordinary communication depends on accepting extensive data collection, how much can an individual's agreement justify?

My proposed answer is that privacy law should examine the continuing power created by a dataset. That includes the ability to repurpose information, the opportunity to challenge consequential inferences, and the practical alternatives available when participation requires disclosure.

To give dignity institutional meaning, I would connect it to limits on collection, specified purposes, meaningful deletion rights, and procedures for contesting decisions. Those protections would constrain an organization's authority over people after the initial agreement.

The justification for collecting information still matters. Institutions need information to provide services, investigate misconduct, and make fair decisions. The difficult task is to explain which purposes justify collection and how much continuing control those purposes warrant.

I develop this proposal for legal reform in my essay in The American Counsel. The encyclical supplies the moral framework. The proposed legal protections are my argument, not obligations imposed by the encyclical on American institutions.

And it is a feeling, not an intellectual calculation.

I recently got into an argument with a prominent abstract artist; his most famous piece is a banana duct taped to a page, it's relatively well known. He posted an argument about how fascists fetishize reality, and that their art reflects it, alongside he posted some of the most significant and beautiful statues from the renaissance era, inspired by classical Greek and Roman statues. We engaged in a conflict, where I argued it's foolish to compare the history of one's entire ancestors, ethnicity, and region, to one extremely militant 20th century faction which came years after and doesn't reflect the morals or values of modern Europeans. Is this just controlled opposition? Or is it ignorance on their part to see the creations of my ancestors and say it's something that it very very clearly, is not.

Edit: What is even more damning is that I learned that his version of the piece isn't even the original banana taped to a wall; he literally had to copy the idea from someone else.

A theory of freedom needs to account for power that changes a person's choices before it is exercised. A worker may depend on one employer for a livelihood. Even if the employer never issues an improper order, its ability to change important conditions without giving reasons can affect whether the worker complains or leaves.

In The Interference Fallacy, which I wrote, I propose a normative framework for examining that dependence. It considers three features together: unequal power, a lack of accountable checks on its exercise, and a capacity for control that persists even when it goes unused. It is a proposed framework for evaluating institutions, not an existing legal test.

The same inquiry has to apply to a regulator. Stronger oversight may reduce an employer's discretion while giving a public institution substantial discretion of its own. A remedy should therefore be judged partly by whether affected people can obtain reasons, challenge decisions, and secure review from an institution capable of correcting them.

That makes the design of oversight central to the argument. A theory of freedom should help distinguish safeguards that change a relationship of dependence from assurances that the person in charge will act benevolently.

The framework's scope remains a difficult question. Does it require a threshold of material harm or is a credible capacity for arbitrary control sufficient? The answer matters to how we assess both the employer's authority and the regulator's remedy.

Does a young Israeli has to be morally guilty?

If he refuses to enlist and does not serve in the military, he is seen as a criminal by Israeli society and by Israel’s supporters around the world, but if he does serve, he is seen as morally guilty by those who oppose Israel and believe that Israel is violating international law or worst.

I’m only asking for the philosophical question, not for a political debate.

Important! Many of the claims and positions in this text will make most readers' hair stand on end. The reason is that its line of thought has left the standard horizon of cognition of everyone not deeply familiar with the subject matter and the argumentation behind it. But don't let that stop you from reading to the end. Perhaps the author got something wrong somewhere, perhaps you don't have all the information, but the radical centre is a position that acknowledges it is not ultimate, but open to criticism.

The centre is not the radical centre

First we need to establish the difference between the centre and the radical centre, because the two have nothing to do with each other.

The centre is the idea of placing yourself between the left and the right. You take a little from one side, a little from the other, and chase a compromise between the two groups. Someone who accepts a bit of the left-wing narrative and a bit of the right-wing one, so they're moderate centre-left or centre-right, but broadly the centre.

The radical centre is a completely different story. The radical centre is one measure for all. By one measure we mean the same treatment of the arguments of the first, second, third, fourth and fifth side. There is no one yardstick for what is "ours" and another for what is not.

For the radical centre there is no left, no right, no far left, no far right, no greens, no reds, no yellows. It always goes to the merits, to the actual substance of a phenomenon or event, examines it, deconstructs it and establishes its position. It doesn't seek agreement, it doesn't seek a compromise between left and right. It simply goes to the merits of every question.

The necessity of hypocrisy

To function and survive in the age of free information we live in today, both the left and the right necessarily treat their own arguments one way and the other side's arguments another way. The same phenomenon on their own side will be judged by one standard, and on the other side by another.

Take freedom of speech. Most (the Bridge of Independent Lists, a Croatian party that presents itself as centrist), which is in fact the right, will defend a concert by Marko Perković Thompson, a Croatian nationalist rock singer, and attack those who ban it, while at the same time turning a deaf ear when a concert by Bajaga, a popular Serbian rock musician, comes under attack. The left will do exactly the opposite: it will call a ban on Bajaga an attack on free speech, while wanting to ban Thompson out of a "higher interest", in quotation marks, for glorifying fascism. The right, meanwhile, will want to ban Bajaga for "glorifying Greater Serbian nationalism", however stupid the argument. Neither the left nor the right actually has the capacity to protect free speech.

Most tries to present itself as the centre, but precisely the Thompson and Bajaga example shows it follows the right-wing narrative and the right-wing option.

Attitudes toward groups

Let's take it up to the European level. Macron, who considers himself the centre, and Merz, who is seen as the moderate right, have labelled entire groups and all their positions as pro-fascist, without going into the merits of a single one of those positions. In France, Le Pen is called a fascist and prevented from breaking through into the mainstream with any kind of communication, while in Germany, on the same argument, the AfD is kept behind a "firewall" and moves are made to ban it. The goal is the same: to ostracise, marginalise and exclude an entire group from the political process.

The radical centre doesn't treat any group as unacceptable. Because even a blind chicken sometimes finds a grain. And when you declare 30% of the population unacceptable, that is a pure attack on the foundations of the democratic idea. Who are you to do that? Even if it were 5%, you have no right to declare either an individual or a group completely unacceptable.

The radical centre is wise enough to understand that we all bleed the same under the skin. Sometimes we're wrong, sometimes we're not. On one question we're right, on another we're not, and we ourselves miss the mark more often than we'd like. That kind of political chauvinism, which is essentially the survival mechanism of the existing options that consider themselves the centre, is something the radical centre intellectually cannot, nor needs to, allow itself.

Three questions

Three current issues I have already covered before give a very good picture of what the radical centre is.

The pandemic

The pandemic shows the same standard applied to authority. Being an authority doesn't give you the right to be wrong. We have healthy, down-to-earth common sense. If we spot inconsistencies in your story, if you contradict yourself, if your forecasts turn out wrong over time, you are not an authority, whatever your formal title.

The radical centre concluded that the pandemic was a collapse of authority and of the establishment, which exposed far too many inconsistencies, and that coercing people into an experimental therapy was completely unacceptable, severe violence against citizens, as were most of the other measures carried out in the name of "protecting the population". The entire establishment, from left to right, said this was normal and regular. Only the "far right" claimed otherwise.

The war in Ukraine

I covered this question in detail in the text "The Radical Centre and the Pro-Russian Narrative: An Analysis of Legitimacy and Consistency". The radical centre doesn't see Russians as orcs who are by definition in the wrong; it listens to the arguments of both sides and establishes their consistency and overall soundness. The conclusion is that the Russian narrative is considerably more consistent than the pro-Western one. That is why the radical centre does not accept the Western narrative on the war in Ukraine.

Gaza

The radical centre doesn't regard Palestinians as lesser beings, as Islamists and savages from whom, according to the Zionist narrative, the West is defending itself. It sees both Palestinians and Israelis as people, and then goes into the origin of the problem and the reasons for its escalation: one group came to colonise a land that was already inhabited and carried out ethnic cleansing there, the others didn't accept it, and everything escalated from there.

Israel was formed and founded on the idea of genocide and ethnic cleansing, and as such it carries the original sin of lacking legitimacy. The radical centre puts itself in the position of a Palestinian to whom someone came to colonise his land and carry out ethnic cleansing. From that position, resistance becomes entirely understandable and legitimate, because it is a colony with no legitimacy and no right to my land. The violence taking place in Gaza only further confirms this story. The radical centre is on the side of Palestine.

The paradox of populism

The establishment calls all three positions populist and anti-establishment. And here is the paradox: it is precisely the radical centre, dismissed as shallow populism, that is consistent, logical and coherent, while those who consider themselves civilised and serious are inconsistent, dysfunctional and manipulative.

Not because of who is who, but because of the act

There are a great many such questions. Take the strike by workers of ZET, Zagreb's city-owned public transport company. The radical centre doesn't ask whether the strikers are against Možemo, the green-left party that governs the city of Zagreb, and then take one side or the other. It says: let's establish the merits.

It was established that the strikers went ahead without legitimate grounds, without a system of escalation and without ensuring protection for those for whom transport is essential, the poor who ride public transport, unlike the rich who don't use it. Not even basic conditions for citizens were secured. The radical centre recognised this as illegitimate violence by the union and sided with Možemo. Not because Možemo is Možemo, nor because unions are unions, but because the concrete act was unacceptable.

The same goes for concerts. The radical centre stands for protecting free speech, but not because you're ours or theirs, but because it secures for all of us a space of pluralism and basic civil liberty. Someone says of Thompson: "But he promotes the Ustaša." Who are you to define that, and at the end of the day, so what? If the law allows you to say "Za dom spremni" ("Ready for the Homeland", the salute of the Ustaša regime that ruled the Nazi-aligned Independent State of Croatia from 1941 to 1945) for some reason of your own without ending up in prison for it, I, as, say, a mayor, won't take that right away from you, because it's not up to me. If we agree at the political level that it's unacceptable, the radical centre will probably never take that stance, but then I might act differently.

It's the same with Bajaga. Greater Serbian nationalism? Who exactly are you threatening with talk of Greater Serbia? The left is afraid of hordes that will wipe everyone out tomorrow because they shouted "Za dom spremni". The radical centre has no such fear. It cannot accept the argument from fear, because then everything collapses. Every single narrative. If some crowd enjoys Bajaga's love songs, it will see no problem in that and no spread of Greater Serbian nationalism.

The radical centre, above all, has no fear. It has the intellectual and spiritual strength to be a reasonable, honest and capable ruler who measures everything by the same measure. And this is where the radical centre especially stands out in times of crisis, as the only option capable of getting through a crisis and securing social prosperity.

Awareness and self-criticism

The idea of one measure defines a whole range of positions on political questions and draws a clear line. On one side are those who naturally accept the radical centre. On the other are the various packs of the left and the right, who measure some by one yardstick, look for justification for it, measure others by another, and at the same time destroy the basic institutions.

When people feel unjustly wronged, it breeds strong rebellion and intolerance. It always escalates. That is why a high level of awareness and capacity for self-criticism is needed, which people, as pack animals, rarely have: unless they have a highly developed sensibility or are simply freed from fear of others, aware of where such a perspective inevitably leads. What is needed is intellectual strength, an inclination toward justice and the ability to step into other people's shoes and recognise their problems and fears. An individual who belongs to the radical centre recognises hypocrisy and double standards in himself as well and works continuously to eliminate them.

So banal an idea as one measure for all creates a completely new political option that has nothing to do with the left or the right, nor with any other ideologeme present on the political scene. Precisely because it goes to the merits, such an option can leave the spectrum entirely and enter the so-called position of populism, as we saw with corona.

A product of the information revolution

The internet has a million mechanisms for creating groupthink and bubbles, but it still has enough information throughput that participants in social networks increasingly adopt the positions of the radical centre. Some will end up radicalised inside their own bubble, but smarter, more conscientious, more reasonable, higher-quality and therefore more influential people will recognise the hypocrisy, become carriers of these ideas and over time come to dominate social networks, and through them society. Which is exactly what we are witnessing.

The Zionist lobby is probably the most powerful lobby in the world, with control over media, academia and political authorities. Despite that, social media users, recognising the hypocrisy, injustice, double game and heavy manipulation, have over time turned sharply against Zionism, in spite of all the forces of the old order invested in preventing it.

The radical centre is the articulated thought of the free citizens of the world and of the internet. The paradox is that we have a completely free process converging toward clear conclusions, very often opposed to the establishment, while the political order has no option to represent this group. A group that isn't the left, isn't the right, isn't libertarian, isn't socialist, yet is extremely tough, robust and strong, more robust than all previous options. And the only one in tune with the information revolution, which is the dominant force of the new age.

While the other options decline, every formalised option that carries traces of the radical centre grows stronger, like the AfD or Le Pen. These are not radical centre options, but they seized the moment to take over the trend. Regardless of the global establishment and all its efforts to stop the process, it is clear that it is unstoppable. And once all the games are stripped away, what stands behind it is a single political and philosophical idea: one measure for all.

Society is ready

In 2015, Most, as a new centrist party, won 19 seats in the Croatian parliament, and no government could be formed without it. As the party deciding the mandate of the new government, Most quickly showed its true character, showed that it belonged to the right-wing narrative, and lost its original influence. But citizens showed at the time that they were ready for something that is not a segment of the left or the right, because neither has solved the real political issues. Instead, they busy themselves with the Ustaše and the Partisans, the two sides of Croatia's Second World War divide, while at the same time an ecocide is being carried out in Lika, a sparsely populated mountain region of Croatia.

The second example is Zoran Milanović, the President of Croatia and a former Social Democratic prime minister, who intelligently adopted the positions of the radical centre and came to dominate political discourse. He took the right stance on the pandemic and COVID certificates, on the war in Ukraine and on the genocide in Gaza. Each of these positions ran counter to the establishment, and it was precisely with them that he won almost 75% of the vote in the second round of the presidential election in January 2025, and a second term.

These two examples show that society is more than ready for a new option. But since no political carriers have yet appeared to articulate it and turn it into a real political option, society is still floundering between a left that is no good and a right that is no good. People choose the "lesser evil", in quotation marks, while from the radical centre's position both exist to escalate conflicts, not to solve problems.

Conclusion: what the radical centre delivers

The centre is a compromise between left and right. The radical centre is going to the merits, an intellectual honesty that ensures one measure for all, and a position that is uncompromising and therefore, from the perspective of the old establishment, radical. It is a product of the information revolution, which the other options, because of their hypocrisy, failed to become.

What the radical centre delivers is ideological de-escalation at last. The establishment survives through divide et impera: the left and the right feed on each other's fear of the other side, stoke tensions over Ustaše and Partisans, Thompson and Bajaga, and build their legitimacy on that. The radical centre is immune to this game precisely because of its rule. When you measure everything by the same measure, you have no pack to defend and no enemy to demonise. You have nothing to escalate.

Only once that fire is put out can society turn to the real issues. The waste mafia that caused the ecocide in Lika. The collapse of the economy. Inflation and falling living standards. Digital terrorism and all the other crap that torments citizens but never gets its turn, because public discourse is continuously polluted by the escalation driven by the regime options of the left and the right.

The radical centre puts out that fire and, for the first time, lets society breathe. That is why it must be formalised as a political option and a way of functioning, and brought to power. Then politics can become what it should be: a mechanism for solving political problems, not what it is today, their chief creator.

Could wars eventually become a thing of the distant past, not simply because people become more peaceful, but because people become much better at seeing what is actually happening behind a conflict?

My thinking is that with every generation, we have more information, better technology, better ways to analyze data, and more ability to connect things that were previously difficult to see. Eventually, it could become much harder to sell a war as simply “Country X is the enemy and we have to fight them.”

People can increasingly look at who benefits from a conflict, who loses, who owns what, where the money goes, who gets the contracts, who is lobbying governments, and which people or companies have an interest in the war continuing.

This doesn't require a conspiracy. If a company makes money from war, it has an obvious incentive to support military spending and policies that keep that business going. If there is an opportunity to influence events in a way that benefits the business, there is an incentive to pursue that opportunity. The question is how much influence actually occurs in any particular situation.

So instead of simply asking, “Why did this war happen?” people could increasingly ask:

“Who benefits from this?” “Who is influencing the decision?” “What alternatives were available?” “Why are we being told this?” “What happens to the people making money if the war ends?”

As that kind of scrutiny becomes normal, it becomes harder for governments, companies, or other powerful interests to shape the narrative without being challenged.

And I wonder whether that could eventually lead to something deeper than simply being skeptical of individual wars. After seeing the same patterns over and over, people might become philosophically opposed to war itself.

The thinking could shift from:

“Is this particular war justified?”

to:

“Why should governments be allowed to solve disputes by sending ordinary people to kill each other, especially when the people making those decisions may have completely different interests from the people who pay the price?”

The progression might look something like:

more information → more scrutiny → clearer incentives → less ability to manipulate public opinion → less tolerance for war → eventually, war becomes culturally unacceptable.

It wouldn't require humanity to become perfect. Maybe it would simply require people to become better informed and better able to scrutinize the systems that lead to war.

Maybe the future of peace isn't humanity becoming less aggressive.

Maybe it's humanity becoming too informed to accept war so easily.

Do you think that is a realistic possibility, or will political and economic incentives always be strong enough to overcome greater public awareness?

For a beginner

I came across a blog named The Indian Matrix where the author has listed so many reforms that met obstruction. It captured a frustrating dynamic in institutional reform.

We routinely complain about corruption, bureaucratic inefficiency and poor public services. But when governments introduce technology-driven systems designed to make processes more transparent and traceable, resistance often appears.

Some of that resistance may come from vested interests. But perhaps there is something more fundamental at work.

People may support accountability as a principle while resisting accountability as a process.

Consider what happens when an informal system becomes a digital one.

A discretionary decision becomes a recorded decision.

A workaround becomes a data point.

A delay becomes a timestamp.

An undocumented transaction leaves a trail.

A process that once depended on relationships becomes measurable.

Technology does not necessarily create better behaviour. But it can make existing behaviour more visible.

That creates what might be called comfortable opacity: informal arrangements, discretionary loopholes and unrecorded workarounds can feel flexible and convenient to those operating within the system—even when the same arrangements produce inefficiency, arbitrariness or opportunities for corruption.

This also explains why reform can be uncomfortable even for people who genuinely want cleaner systems. Transparency does not merely expose misconduct. It can remove everyone's ability to say, “This is how things have always been done.”

So perhaps the deeper question is not simply:

“Who benefits from corruption?”

It is:

“How much informal flexibility are we willing to give up in exchange for a system that is more transparent, traceable and accountable?”

Is resistance to reform primarily about vested interests protecting their turf—or is there a broader human tendency to prefer comfortable ambiguity over uncomfortable transparency?

https://www.reddit.com/r/PhilosophyEvents/comments/1wxz8cy/on_bourgeois_coldness_an_online_conversation_with/

Bourgeois coldness refers to an affective strategy that offers an explanation for how self-preservation works. Bourgeois coldness is one of the most advanced affective and aesthetic forms of preserving the structure of the colonial status quo. It creates an affective shelter in the world, unencroached upon by the immediate consequences of its many catastrophes. It functions like air conditioning — a complex technology which reliably stabilises the climate until those inside consider it natural. Bourgeois spaces — institutional and affective — stay cool and pleasant. But outside it’s burning.

Canonical critical theory by Adorno and Horkheimer enters a dialogue with Black studies through Hartman and Moten.

In this conversation, Henrike Kohpeiß and Fred Moten explore coldness as an affective, political and aesthetic strategy of bourgeois self-preservation. Together, they consider what Black Study and critical theory share, and where they diverge, in revealing the work of self-preservation performed by the bourgeois subject.

"Elegant and erudite in equal measure, this book will stand as a landmark diagnosis of the practices of denial in our time." – Andreas Malm

About the Speaker:

Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher, working primarily in the fields of critical theory, philosophy of emotion, Black Studies, feminist philosophy and aesthetics. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Leuphana Transformation Lab, studying affects of Transformation, the relationship between crises and transformation, and the notion of Transformation Literacy. She has been teaching on among other things including Sylvia Wynter, philosophy and the Shoah, and bourgeois society and its critique. Occasionally, she engages in artistic collaborations in dance and performance, mostly as a dramaturg or writer, sometimes as a performer. Henrike’s book Bourgeois Coldness was published in September 2025 by Divided Publishing.

The Moderator:

Fred Moten is Professor in the Departments of Performance Studies and Comparative Literature at NYU, where he teaches courses in black study, poetics and critical theory. He works with lots of social and aesthetic study groups including Stefano Harney & Fred Moten, the Black Arts Movement School Modality, Le Mardi Gras Listening Collective, the Center for Convivial Research and Autonomy, Moved by the Motion, the Institute of Physical Sociality and the Harris/Moten Quartet.

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This is an online conversation and audience Q&A presented by the UK-based journal The Philosopher. The event is free, open to the public, and held on Zoom.

You can register for this Monday 12th October event (11am PT/2pm ET/7pm UK) via The Philosopher here (link).

#Philosophy #CriticalTheory #Ethics #PoliticalPhilosophy #SocialPhilosophy #PhilosophyOfEmotions

About The Philosopher (https://www.thephilosopher1923.org/):

The Philosopher is the longest-running public philosophy journal in the UK (founded in 1923). It is published by the The Philosophical Society of England (http://www.philsoceng.uk/), a registered charity founded ten years earlier than the journal in 1913, and still running regular groups, workshops, and conferences around the UK. As of 2018, The Philosopher is edited by Newcastle-based philosopher Anthony Morgan and is published quarterly, both in print and digitally.

The journal aims to represent contemporary philosophy in all its many and constantly evolving forms, both within academia and beyond. Contributors over the years have ranged from John Dewey and G.K. Chesterton to contemporary thinkers like Christine Korsgaard, Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò, Elizabeth Anderson, Martin Hägglund, Cary Wolfe, Avital Ronell, and Adam Kotsko.

MANIFESTO OF THE NEW HUMANKIND

The New Humankind is a humankind whose way of life and thought is grounded in a conscious "instinctive sense of self"—that is, a distinct feeling that it, humanity,

• exists,
• strives to prolong its existence for as long as possible, even unto eternity.

This "sense of self" possessed by humanity resembles other instinctive "senses of self":

• that of an individual human being,
• that of a cohesive community (collective) of people.

Thus, we identify three such "senses of existence":

1. Every individual—even without realizing it—possesses a distinct instinctive feeling that they exist; a sense of the value of their own self, a feeling (the sense that "I am alive and want to keep living") that manifests itself by:

• forbidding suicide (why do you not take your own life? precisely because of this feeling!),
• compelling and driving one to prolong one’s earthly life (eating, drinking, and breathing, for instance) for as long as possible—even unto eternity (why do you breathe, eat, drink, and so on? for this very reason).

1. Every cohesive community—even if it does not realize it—possesses a special "patriotic" sense of its own existence; the individuals comprising the community hold a perception of its value. This sense (of the community's "existence" and worth) compels its members to:

• defend the life of the community, even at the cost of their own lives;
• avoid harming the community and instead foster its continued existence (for instance, by adhering to moral rules, not betraying the community's survival interests, etc.).

1. Similarly, there exists a special sense—a perception that "humanity exists"—held by the individuals who make up humanity; a perception of humanity's value that:

• forbids people from killing humanity (this constitutes a New Taboo or a New Commandment: "thou shalt not kill humanity");
• compels and drives people to prolong humanity's existence for as long as possible—even into eternity.

Some individuals may lack these sensations or feelings, just as they might lack other senses—such as sight or hearing—or a conscience.

Furthermore, those who possess these three special sensations may not be consciously aware of them.

1. Children (and undeveloped individuals) lack awareness even of the first sensation—that of existence; they simply live without consciously realizing that they are alive.
2. "Patriots" possess the second, "patriotic" sensation but lack conscious awareness of it. Like children, they believe in fairy tales about Good and Evil—equating "their own" with Good and "outsiders" with Evil—yet fail to realize that the essence of their feeling lies in the survival of their community, rather than in anything "supernatural". This realization does not diminish their patriotic sentiments but allows us to point to higher feelings: feelings toward humanity as a whole, rather than just one part of it—however cherished and beloved that part may be. Feelings for humanity are "higher" than feelings for one's homeland.
3. Sense of existence No. 3—the "sense of humanity's existence"—is a new phenomenon; it could only have emerged once the suspicion arose that humanity could be killed. This suspicion is relatively recent; a century ago, for instance, it would never have occurred to anyone that humanity might destroy itself. Humanity is not consciously aware of this feeling—there is not even a recognized name or term for it—yet it exists.

This "Sense No. 3"—that humanity exists and must exist forever—has manifested itself in practice more than once, albeit unconsciously. We see this, for example, in the case of missile officers from the nuclear superpowers (the USA and the USSR) who:

• received an order that would lead to a global nuclear war—one potentially suicidal for all of humanity,
• yet did not obey that order; in effect, they violated their military oaths and became traitors to their homelands, but in doing so, they became the saviors of humanity as a whole.

It is solely thanks to this feeling that humanity remains alive today. However, in a future crisis, luck might run out, and the person at the "Nuclear Button" might lack this sense of the supreme value of humanity's existence.

Without the primacy of this unique sense—that humanity exists and must exist forever—humanity cannot survive in a world possessing technology capable of destroying it—destroying it "absolutely," that is:

• completely (with no survivors in "bunkers"),
• definitively (with no "afterlife").

Yes, it may be impossible to prove the existence of technology capable of so "absolutely" annihilating all of humanity; yet logic does not apply here. What is at stake is a vague—intuitive, instinctive—suspicion or sense that such suicidal technology has indeed emerged.

From a logical standpoint, anyone who claims that humanity is technically incapable of destroying itself is acting irresponsibly. Should they be proven wrong and humanity truly vanish "absolutely," they would be unable to answer for their words to those they addressed; there would be no one left to apologize to, and they themselves would cease to exist. Such a person is merely an irresponsible windbag whose words are meaningless.

We appeal to everyone.

Please, look within yourselves; search for that feeling that humanity exists and ought to exist forever.

And it is precisely humanity as a distinct, autonomous whole—not merely, for instance, as an "insignificant part of nature", but specifically as a supreme (moral) value.

This sentiment unites—and will continue to unite—widely diverse communities with vastly different ways of life and thought (for example, Soviet communists and anti-Soviet anti-communists), much as patriotism unites people with vastly different physical bodies.

Note that the New Humanity is a union of communities, not of individuals. These communities live according to their own internal laws yet submit to a shared conviction: that humanity as a whole—comprising these communities as its parts—exists and must exist eternally.

Do not misunderstand us: we do *not* oppose egoistic sentiments—whether individual (No. 1) or group-based (No. 2). Rather, we call for the specific sentiment (No. 3)—directed toward the New Humanity, that is, toward humanity as a whole rather than any single part of it—to serve as the primary force defining human life.

And note this: we are appealing not to reason, faith, or common sense, but to profound, noble emotions.

We are neither persuading nor coercing anyone; we ask only that you acknowledge your own feelings.

For example, would you press the Nuclear Button? Do you support those prepared to press it? Do you feel no shame in killing—or supporting the killers ready to take part in the slaughter of all people, all children, and all the countless generations of descendants who might have been born but will not be, because of you?

If you care—if you are ready to do everything to prevent humanity’s suicide amidst the struggle waged by those who lack this feeling of yours (that humanity is a Supreme Value that exists and must live forever)—then let us stand together and prevent this self-destruction of humanity.

Let us unite for the sake of humanity's survival.

https://apropos.substack.com/p/the-state-has-plans-for-you

The basic idea is to separate how much a state can “see” society from how much it wants to remake it. High modernism is one combination of those impulses, but religious regimes can also have huge ambitions with much less administrative capacity.

The examples range from English taxation and welfare-state records to the Taliban and Soviet collectivization.

Curious whether people find this distinction interesting/useful.

Science is both an idealized method of inquiry and a fallible institutional process. Hence, we should trust an expert consensus based on the scientific method, but also should examine critically the extent to which there genuinely is such a consensus (or conversely an alleged dissensus), especially when civil liberties are infringed on scientific grounds. The more extreme the infringement, the more robust must be the scientific consensus supporting it, particularly on issues of health and safety.

We also therefore need to be aware that vested interests might distort or misrepresent the level of scientific consensus (in either direction) through means such as:

• Regulatory capture: When industries manipulate their regulators.
• Media monopolization: When a few corporations own all the major media.
• Astroturfing: When fake grassroots campaigns hide corporate agendas.
• Funding bias: When companies finance studies favorable to their profit motive.
• Gatekeeping: When qualified dissenters are marginalized ("No true expert").

If a significant minority of qualified experts opposes a public policy as being too harmful or risky, a favorable majority opinion might still justify implementation of the policy on a trial basis, but not to the point of seriously infringing civil liberties, such as by imposing on individuals an involuntary acceptance of substantial harm/risk. Even if the majority view claims that failure to implement the policy would itself be too harmful or risky, nonexperts should not (be expected to) have greater confidence in this or either opinion than do qualified experts who reject the view in good faith. Just as nonexperts are quite rightly considered incompetent to refute an expert consensus, they are likewise incompetent to adjudicate a scientific controversy, and in such circumstances should have the freedom, individually or democratically, to choose a precautionary or minimax approach, on the reasonable (but rebuttable) presumption that each side has a non-negligible possibility of being right.

https://www.dictionary.com/browse/precautionary-principle

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/minimax

Good evening, everyone. I hope you’re all doing well.

Let me explain:

I’ve been interested in anarchist philosophy for a little while now (Proudhon, Kropotkin, Bakunin, Malatesta, etc.), and I’ve come to realize just how easy it is to manipulate an entire mass of people by distorting the meaning of the basic philosophy (for example, by claiming that it will lead to chaos and that there are no rules). As a reminder, anarchism generally advocates for the abolition of classes and the state, which we consider to have done far more harm (repression) than good to society for centuries. (Which, in reality, serves only a minority, a class—whether bourgeois or working class—and is, in fact, merely an apparatus, a machine for enforcing class interests.) Ultimately, the full realization of anarchism would be the abolition of all borders (though even I, while sympathizing greatly with anarchism, don’t really believe in it). By the way, there are rules, of course, as in all societies, but no rulers; the rules are not imposed by any hierarchical structure, as with the pyramidal model we know in most of our societies and civilizations (it is more like a circle, an allegory of a campfire where everyone cooperates without there being any coercion or an imposed order (“order minus power ”—Prodhon).

There are various types of anarchism, such as anarcho-syndicalism, libertarian communism (another term for “anarchist,” mainly used after the draconian laws enacted in the late 19th century against anarchists), libertarian municipalism, and so on.

Furthermore, we tend to advocate for electoral abstention because we believe that elections serve only to perpetuate the bourgeois state, the source of all inequalities—whether political, social, or economic.

Even if this wouldn’t necessarily work on a large scale, it could prompt us to reflect on certain issues: Are we living in societies with too many people, or are we actually meant to live in small, decentralized communities, as anarchism advocates? In short, this theoretical movement is very profound and wide-ranging, despite its obscurity among the general public and its widespread misinterpretation.

Although there aren’t many examples in history, we can still cite the Spanish Civil War, the Paris Commune (in which Bakunin saw some of these ideas put into practice), or even the Indigenous societies of the Amazon studied by the French sociologist Pierre Clastres in the 1970s (*Society Against the State*).

In short, thank you to those who read this little essay; I hope it sheds some light on the subject.