Humans

Morality

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I have engaged in the international time waste that is the Facebook debate for as long as there have been people to debate on Facebook. I don’t know that debate is the proper term, the discussions seldom follow rules, and there is often a disconnect between the participants that prevents meaningful discussion. Recently, I was engaged in a discussion that spanned some 23 pages of text. It was sparked by this article advocating the repeal of drunk driving laws.

(A transcript of the discussion is available here. At over 16,000 words, it should kill a solid portion of your day.)

A topic that came up over and over and over again was morality. I am not moral philosopher, and when I do give my opinions on morality it should be interpreted as the opinions of a lay person. I didn’t make that clear enough during the discussion and it came back to bite me. That being said, if I were to offer the most succinct version of my own morals, it would be a morality leaning moral relativist. That is, at best, disingenuous; going back to elementary school lessons, I have just used a word to define itself.

People fear moral relativism, because it relies on the morality of the person using it. “Well, if I kill him quickly, it would be less bad than killing him slowly. By moral relativism, killing him quickly is moral.” I just made your argument for you, no reason to make that argument in the comments unless you really want to. That’s the point, though, and the point so few people want to address; morality is deeper than a single layer paradigm. (Sorry about the words there, that sounded douchey, but please let me explain.)

Many would claim to be Biblical moral absolutists, that the Bible, being the height of all moral teaching, should be adhered to in all things. That being said, when you ask them about some of the Bible’s less tenable teachings… Well, they will say they would jump if God said jump, right up until they saw the cliff. That tells you that they are not Biblical moral absolutists, they are … Something more complicated.

In the same way, a moral relativist may not be able to draw binding lines in the stone and say “I will do all that lies between these lines and nothing else,” but there is some other moral judgment at work. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, that my motto, my creed, my life goal, and a piece of short philosophy that defines many of my choices is the idea that “I will bring more happiness into the world than I take out of it.”

While it may not contain any explicitly moral content, a friend has been teaching me (with great resistance) to read more than what words say. When I am presented with a moral choice, then, I have to weigh things in the case of many decisions. Some are concluded before ever reaching my conscious mind (will raping this person bring more happiness into the world right now?), and get resolved before the question is ever asked — but even then, something in my subconscious has to have a bearing for this choice, so I assume somewhere in my brain these questions are answered.

Moral gray areas are much harder to resolve, as the debate referenced above pointed out in great detail. It ended up as an argument hinging on what I am going to call moral chaos theory versus moral order theory. The other participants may disagree, but let me explain.

My argument is something akin to moral chaos theory; letting a drunk driver into a driver’s seat begins a chain of events that could lead to the death of a person or people, and the irreversible alteration of an untold number of lives. By this chain, I could be indirectly responsible for the loss of happiness of hundreds of people, or a thousand people, even if they never saw my hand in it. If I extend that idea to the Police force, their not enforcing drunk driving laws is similar; by allowing drunk drivers on the road, they may end up indirectly responsible for untold numbers of drunk driving related accidents. Therefore, by my own personal moral chaos theory (I still find that to be an over simplification, but it at least illustrates a picture), allowing drunk driving is immoral.

Moral order theory, while again a term lacking in the required depth, is somewhat akin to that preached by my discussion partner(s). This morality theory does not plumb as deeply, though that is disingenuous (DAMN YOU, KYLE! My realization that words suck is your fault!). In any case, his approach was that of the fact that potential harm is irrelevant and shouldn’t be weighed against the real harm done by a police officer enforcing the law. The irony is that despite what became a very heated discussion, I believe our morals (my opponent and myself) would align in most cases.

The point I am trying to make here is a point as old as words themselves; trying to reduce a human being, in all of their complexity, down to a single word, or a single sentence–that is impossible. Trying to describe my morals would take a book larger than any written, and taking longer to write than the lifespan of the universe. The thing is, while morals may boil down further and further, they lose integrity as they are simplified.

Morality is more than your religion. It is more than your upbringing. It is more than your genetics.

And do you know what? For all of history, humans have fought to prove who is the most moral. “Killing in the name of peace,” is something that probably doesn’t sound unfamiliar to most reading this.

And yet… Here we are. I got in a heated argument to prove my morals were better.

I am a monster.

Radical Anti-Felinism

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For context, the wording of this post should be noted as a direct satire of this.

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The reality of our oppression is so erased that we tend to forget that real persecution, captivity, and control are what prevents us from freeing ourselves from cats, not just the effects it has in our head: even though breaking us down mentally is one of the intended effects of our oppression. Our freedom lies very concretely in cats no longer being able to assail us, not in gaining more understanding of cats. Intentional cat dominance isn’t just something in our head we need to get rid of by becoming anti-felinists, but outside ourselves, real, something we have to concretely escape and free ourselves from.

Liberal humans in modern homes say cats are “companions”, “friendly”, and “cuddly”, because they project their own feelings of loneliness onto cats and accept what is otherwise a parasitic relationship, and erase the idea of the mental torture that goes into the felinarchy that controls them. They believe our torture is something imaginary and symmetrical, that cats love us as much as we love them, as if we are equally influenced by “pets” and “cuteness”, as if our subjugation were not merely opportunistic cats abusing our better nature, as it we aren’t brainwashed by toxoplasma gondii, unwittingly controlled by them. We thus play a part in reproducing the issue of cat control by sharing pictures of them, videos of them doing cute things, not because we want to, but because we are forced to.

I know most rantifels (the word I just made up to describe radical anti-felinists, of which I am the first (and possibly only)) are on board with criticism of cats. The problem is, most don’t even realize the oppression isn’t symmetrical; it is even reinforced by those subjugated by cats. This is felinarchal (cat overlord) reversal. Cats take the moment we are already colonised and captive to say “see, there’s symmetry! I feed and provide a home for her, and she loves me!” This omits the decades of carefully planned domestication of humans by cats that their race had to execute in order to obtain this result.

Even if we look at things purely from the perspective of ideas, they aren’t equally shared by humans and cats, nor is there the same power in turning beliefs into reality. We have the ability to observe that cat’s influence over us, and yet we somehow choose to ignore it. When cats believe that there is a felinarchy, it exists. There’s a coherence and integrity between cat’s felinarchal beliefs and their actions; they abuse this position of power they have over us. If they believe humans should be treated as “warmth batteries” and “food dispensers”, they will effectively treat humans as such. If cats believe that a human’s home is just a place to be looted for their own continued ends, they will force humans to treat them as gods. That’s because they have the oppressive power to enforce their felinistic beliefs and turn them into actions!

One thing that is important in free choice is knowledge. People can’t make free choices until they understand that they are infected with toxoplasma gondii. You wouldn’t choose to own a pet if you knew it would poison you! BUT IT’S TOO LATE! If someone gave you a pet, telling you it is cute and cuddly, it can’t be said you accepted the pet knowing it would become your feliarchal overlord. The choice you thought you were making was only to accept a loving, lovable pet into your home. You accepted the cat out of deception.

Knowledge is something the oppressors reserve for themselves, to maintain their oppressive system. Cats know their domination. They know they’re the dominant species and need to exclude humans from it, and know how to treat cats and humans distinctively to maintain this dominance. It’s very clear to them what constitutes an affront to them and what doesn’t. While they might not know all the ins and outs of the felinarchal system, they do know perfectly well where their interests lie–in keeping humans subservient to them–and know how to go about doing it. And that’s all they need to know. Access to this knowledge is part of their birth-right, and transmitted to humans by other animals, before they even entered the home.

This isn’t so for humans. We don’t “share” their ideology and reproduce it willingly against ourselves and other humans, as the intents and workings of felinarchy aren’t clear to us at all (ok, maybe it is). We simply don’t have access to the knowledge (or maybe we do). Cats prevent us from seeing it by excluding us from their rituals (and best know they have rituals) where they openly laugh at their dominance over humans, where the important decisions are made, where all the crucial knowledge and skills are transmitted and where they bond over degradation of humans (hahahaha, they clean our poop!).

Cats don’t even hide their true intentions; anyone with an open mind can see the open contempt in their eyes. They do, at the least, know how to fake love, interest, cuteness, to fake the emotions that should make good pets, they know how to reverse reality (we are their pets), to blur our perceptions. They do, however, have a very clear vision of what they’re subjecting us to and why they’re doing it, while they methodically destroy our consciousness of their own actions against us, as well as all material that could be used as evidence of their organized crimes.

It takes us a considerable amount of effort, millennia to unpick the lies from the truth (they’ve been our masters since the times of ancient Egypt). It will take a cat a split nano-second to react and know what to do to make us still believe they love us. All they have to do is roll over onto their back and purr, and all our thoughts of their evil, domineering ways are forgotten.

In this condition it can’t even be said that humans believe in the felinarchy and thus won’t choose to get out of it, but that our consciousness of cat’s control over our reality has been deliberately disintegrated by evolution. We are prevented from even wanting to get out. We are cut from the information we need to see the whole picture, to see cat’s sinister conspiracy against humans. Cats know how to oppress, they have been doing it for a very long time. In this condition of forced confusion it can’t be said we consent to anything they subject us to.

The game is rigged for humans. Cats need toxoplasma gondii to deceive us, play tricks on our minds. They use it to keep us obedient and confused. And they expect us to believe it is spread unwittingly, as though there is not an open conspiracy between species to have humans serve cats! Such psychic warfare saves them a great deal of coercive effort.

Cats are devious and ethically crapulent (have you ever seen them play with their food?!), they will never, ever attack us on level ground. Imagine if cats came up to humans and instead of pretending to “love” us, just said outright “my only intention is to use you to provide me oxytocin, food, and shelter, and then use you to take care of my every want and whim, to slap you in the face. Slavery is the most barbaric thing you can do to a human being, and I intend to make you my slave. I will make you a slave for the rest of my life, and for the life of many cats who come after me. You may think I am making you happy, but I am using you until I am done with you. Now open your door and make me a damn sandwich.”

We’d never let that happen. All of a sudden they wouldn’t seem so cute. It would complicate cat’s business of enslaving us, that’s for sure.