Heresy

“The Special mark of the modern world is not that it is skeptical, but that it is dogmatic without knowing it. It says, in mockery of old devotees, that they believed without knowing why they believed. But the moderns believe without knowing what they believe - and without even knowing that they do believe it. Their freedom consists in first freely assuming a creed, and then freely forgetting that they are assuming it”.

Noteworthy to add that for Chesterton “heresy” is defined as the obstinate rejection of a dogma.

See his words: "Nowadays, in civilized countries, heretics only get fired in the metaphorical sense, by losing their jobs. But the structure of the situation is the same: the heresy outweighs everything else. You could have spent the last ten years saving children's lives, but if you express certain opinions, you're automatically fired."

Main relevant bit copied below.

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“ The game-theoretic function of law can make following those simple rules feel like losing something, taking a step backward. You don't get to defect in the Prisoner's Dilemma, you don't get that delicious (5, 0) payoff instead of (3, 3). The law may punish one of your allies. You may be losing something according to your actual value function, which feels like the law having an objectively bad immoral result. You may coherently hold that the universe is a worse place for an instance of the enforcement of a good law, relative to its counterfactual state if that law could be lifted in just that instance without affecting any other instances. Though this does require seeing that law as having a game-theoretic function as well as a moral function.

So long as the rules are seen as moving from a bad global equilibrium to a global equilibrium seen as better, and so long as the rules are mostly-equally enforced on everyone, people are sometimes able to take a step backward and see that larger picture. Or, in a less abstract way, trade off the reified interest of The Law against their own desires and wishes.

This mental motion goes by names like "justice", "fairness", and "impartiality". It has ancient exemplars like a story I couldn't seem to Google, about a Chinese general who prohibited his troops from looting, and then his son appropriated a straw hat from a peasant; so the general sentenced his own son to death with tears running down his eyes.

Here's a fragment of thought as it was before the Great Stagnation, as depicted in passing in H. Beam Piper's Little Fuzzy, one of the earliest books I read as a child. It's from 1962, when the memetic collapse had started but not spread very far into science fiction. It stuck in my mind long ago and became one more tiny little piece of who I am now.

> “Pendarvis is going to try the case himself,” Emmert said. “I always thought he was a reasonable man, but what’s he trying to do now? Cut the Company’s throat?”

> “He isn’t anti-Company. He isn’t pro-Company either. He’s just pro-law. The law says that a planet with native sapient inhabitants is a Class-IV planet, and has to have a Class-IV colonial government. If Zarathustra is a Class-IV planet, he wants it established, and the proper laws applied. If it’s a Class-IV planet, the Zarathustra Company is illegally chartered. It’s his job to put a stop to illegality. Frederic Pendarvis’ religion is the law, and he is its priest. You never get anywhere by arguing religion with a priest.”

There is no suggestion in 1962 that the speakers are gullible, or that Pendarvis is a naif, or that Pendarvis is weird for thinking like this. Pendarvis isn't the defiant hero or even much of a side character. It's just a kind of judge you sometimes run into, part of a normal environment as projected from the author's mind that wrote the story.

If you don't have some people like Pendarvis, and you don't appreciate what they're trying to do even when they rule against you, sooner or later your tribe ends.

I mean, I doubt the United States will literally fall into anarchy this way before the AGI timeline runs out. But the concept applies on a smaller scale than countries. It applies on a smaller scale than communities, to bargains between three people or two.

The notion that you can "be fair to one side but not the other", that what's called "fairness" is a kind of favor you do for people you like, says that even the instinctive sense people had of law-as-game-theory is being lost in the modern memetic collapse. People are being exposed to so many social-media-viral depictions of the Other Side defecting, and viewpoints exclusively from Our Side without any leavening of any other viewpoint that might ask for a game-theoretic compromise, that they're losing the ability to appreciate the kind of anecdotes they used to tell in ancient China.”