Intergalactic Summit

You flatterer, you.

Welcome to PY-RE Aria. I look forward to talking with you.

Entry Three: First Hunt

Locklocklocklocklocklock ...

My will presses into an unoccupied space, thrusting at something that isn't yet there. I'm trying to be in the act of closing my hand when the feather brushes through it. There won't be time enough for reflexes.

It's a quiet moment, otherwise. The sensor boosters murmur. Along with the warp disruptor, an artillery barrage stands primed: the net to catch the prey, the spears to kill it.

The gate fire a moment before was the trap closing: the TLF pilot, cloaked somewhere nearby, was trying to evade not a single pilot, but a hunting pack.

It's my net he's run into.

In a sense, he's fortunate. My will's unpracticed, old instincts either atrophied or just ... gone. I'm not accustomed to overheating techniques, and my nerves are so rattled that it's hard to stay focused on this next, most immediate task, absolutely obvious though it is.

There was another, much larger fight earlier, in which I arrived late, and played, probably, a bit part, shutting down logistics ships that were (I think) already being overwhelmed. That was a fight of battleships and cruisers, a battle of small but well-equipped gangs that, from the targets' point of view, probably started as an attempted easy kill that spiraled out of control.

This isn't that. This is frigate and destroyer, the small and, maybe, personal scale of war. There are others involved, other hunters, but they're not here. It's only us.

The moment stretches. He sees the trap; there's no question. The Thrasher's bristling with artillery pieces, and the sensor booster's telltale distortions would be difficult to miss. I'm more than half expecting to miss him, though; surely he'll be too quick to warp ... so it comes as kind of a shock when my hand closes around a hull, the net falls, and the artillery slams a salvo of fusion shells through shields and into armor.

Only into armor. I look at the damage, and I'm sure I've failed. The ship's warp stabilized, or ...

... and, the second salvo hits, piercing and blasting apart heavy plating and exposing the underlying structure. The third shatters the frigate.

For a moment I just sit there stupidly, staring at this odd little red pod that's popped onto my scanners, before realizing what I'm seeing and reaching out for it. I guess the poor TLF pilot's in even more of a state than I am, because the lock takes, the disruptor activates, and he's snared.

I know this pilot's name, and I sort of know his face, though I've never heard his voice. This feels more transgressive than taking the ship did, even though that may well have cost more, and less-replaceable, lives. And yet, once it's caught, turning the artillery on the pod is almost a reflex. I execute him.

The artillery fires, fusion warheads against a craft the size of a walk-in closet. And there's peace once more.

I take a moment to get my bearings, catch my breath, and check for incoming trouble. I notice a slowly shrinking slice of red on my shield indicator.

I'm bleeding, I think.

Floating in the space between me and the nearby wreck hang five dead and staring eyes: Hobgoblin drones, adrift without guidance, their targeting systems still uselessly locked onto me. I never even noticed the blaster bolts connecting.

One by one, and fumblingly, drunk on adrenaline, I pick the drones out of space, then see what I can salvage from the wreck. There's nobody there-- alive, anyway. If there were survivors, they must have gotten away.

I turn for home, leaving the remains behind.

Entry Four: Theory

It goes something like this:

One of the great puzzles of "capsuler dementia" is that even the most violent capsuleers frequently continue to demonstrate empathy-- if not for baseline humanity, then for friends and associates. It's nothing so simple as progressive psychopathy, or empathy should be decreasing across the board. This oddity is a major hint to what's actually going on.

Apparently, human beings can care about roughly 140 individuals at any given time. That's the amount of room in the average human heart, space enough for a small village or nomadic tribal group. There's a certain amount of willingness to quickly add people to that circle, and a certain reluctance to directly harm other humans generally, but there's no major moral bar to harming strangers (especially for the sake of our village/tribe).

That's us, at factory settings: the human animal.

This works okay as long as we're in tiny, scattered groups living a stone age existence, but gets problematic if there are many of us around. You get theft. Robbery. Kidnapping. General war and death. It's not a great way to have a society of billions on a single sphere, so the first duty of civilization is to find a way to put a stop to that.

Mostly, this works by using socialization (especially in the way we teach children) to insert a few new people in among our 140-- but not real people. These are abstract people, ideas, crafted to expand our circle of "care" to include larger groups. "People who speak my language the same," gets you a ways. "People who write my language the same" gets you further, once literacy spreads-- it helps get around regional dialects.

"Our Nation" is a good one, but works best when you have a handy opposing nation you can define yourself against. "Servants of God" is another. So's "people who love freedom."

"Humanity in general" is a hard one: it's very broad, and simultaneously obvious and really abstract. It does have the benefit of that instinctive reluctance to harm other humans, but runs into trouble because of the scope of what's being asked. Maybe if we had some sapient aliens around to define ourselves against. As it is, even in the Federation your charity drive will probably do better if you show prospective donors a holo of a starving little girl (temporarily filling a slot in the 140) instead of relying on people's goodwill towards humanity in general.

As it is, while not every society thinks you should care about people in general, we have mostly managed to get the idea through that murdering strangers just because they are strangers is unacceptable. This kind of safety is one of civilization's key rewards.

At this point, with populations in the trillions, we can pretty firmly say that all four empires have established working models of what a civilization needs to be to get the job done. The Amarr focus more on faith; the Gallente on certain ideals; the Matari and Caldari on their shared history and culture (and cultural resentments).

All of them have demonstrably succeeded, more or less, in establishing themselves and impressing their populations with a set of loyalties and concerns much more sophisticated (and workable on a large scale) than the human factory settings.

So, what of us? Well....

You can tell a lot of a civilization's aims, what it tries to provide, by looking at its laws. Laws do a lot to shore up the society's social programming: they reinforce the lessons taught at a younger age, encourage even the disaffected to do as is expected of them, and provide a basis for "correcting" (in one way or another) those who violate the society's rules, or for removing them altogether.

Capsuleers go through grueling training that risks our lives and taxes our sanity, then thrust into a highly-cosmopolitan environment where the only really enforceable laws are the ones we literally cannot break. Even CONCORD's laws are more obstacles than actual protections.

Even among the civilizations into which we were born, we essentially live in a wilderness. Our connections to our home cultures are eroded, and, at the same moment, we find ourselves potential victims at every turn-- apt to be robbed and murdered for wandering through the wrong gate. (Well ... sort of robbed and murdered. It's really hard to come up with a good baseline analogy for getting podded).

Uprooted, empowered, and consigned to this strange wilderness all at the same time, it's no surprise if those abstract "people" we were taught to care about start fading or dropping out of our circles. We form tight-knit communities, and stay mostly with those. Some manage larger associations by playing those same sorts of civilization-creating tricks, but we mostly associate on a pretty limited level.

The Demented aren't inhuman; quite the opposite. We're reverting to factory settings, becoming what we are at base: the human animal.

The Black is just the hostile wilderness where this takes place.

More later.

I believe pilot Jenneth is will be aiming less towards the ethical status or biological taxon this subset of capsuleers occupy, and more towards the social structures they form.

If there's a bright line I'd draw there, Directrix, it's the distinction between affection for an individual, "natural person" and affection for an abstraction.

Feeling an emotional/empathetic link towards "Nicoletta Mithra" is a somewhat different thing from feeling that same link towards something so attenuated (and, as you and I have previously explored, difficult to define) as "the Amarr."



Here, I think we may differ entirely. Humans are not rational beings. We are rationalizing beings. Reason shores up decisions already made, or, more rarely, serves as a tie-breaker when we can't make up our minds.

Expecting otherwise will lead to disappointment, time and again.

(Democracy would be a less-ambiguous blessing, otherwise.)

It's natural, if you think about it: it stands to reason that "reason" itself would develop, initially, as a pathfinding tool-- a way to achieve desired aims in increasingly clever ways. It would only be likely to shift beyond that point if (as is generally the way in evolution) something made reason (as a drive) a desirable trait. I hope you'll forgive me if I observe that the most rational people are not necessarily the most likely to survive and reproduce.

The ability to reason is a powerful tool, but a tool, and not a primary motivator, it remains.



Would you really say that your old debating opponent had degenerated her ability to reason?

It seems to me she still had it ... but that her reasoning was motivated in part by guilt and bitter anger. She concluded she could not be human, first, because being human meant being bound by human mores. That was unacceptable: it would have meant, by her cultural beliefs, that she'd become something too horrible to live.

If that was not true before her grandfather's death, it was surely true after.

The rest followed from that.

She followed her fears and desires, then rationally justified the choice. As do most of us-- and not just capsuleers.

Now ... as for getting our empathy (however much or little we might naturally possess) toward outsiders un-habituated, that I can sort of agree with. More on that later, though.

And that's exactly why I'd call her defective in her ability to reason. She followed the wrong motivations to reason. She cared more that the conclusion is according to her desires and expectations than according to truth. She subordinated reason to her desires, when one should do it the other way around. She thus turned herself into the worst enemy she could possibly have, driving her towards ending her life: Just as the hypothetical rats in my example above.

I think those are very clear signs that her ability to reason was in fact degenerated. And I don't say so because I despised her or feared her. The feeling I had when facing her was sadness to see her in such a sorry state, unwilling, maybe by then unable to turn back. She certainly wasn't in the worst state a human being could have: But certainly in one of the most sad.


I'm looking forward to it - expect me to critically accompany you in this.

I don't think we've ever claimed to be morally superior to anyone else. As for honour, I'll show you mine if you show me yours beautiful.

If this is the case, why are TLF pilots even allowed to undock. Through sheer incompetence, I'd say the Minmatar militia's capsuleer division has killed more Matari citizens by proxy than the Amarr ever did.

Evi has only posted once in this thread so I'm not quite sure what you're referring to.

It's rather interesting that you're using the same propaganda techniques as Goonswarm, arguably one of the most successful groups of murderers in the cluster, if we're talking about how much baseliner lives matter.

It's very effective you know? If you play yourself down and then we fight, and I win, you can just claim to be new and that I'm being a bully. But if by some self admitted miracle you win then you get all the bragging rights, which going by your posting so far may cause the forum to literally implode.

As for immortals killing anyone, I guess you have a great deal of experience with killing mortals, considering you've never killed a capsuleer. You've never even died properly.

We're not morally superior. We're just plain ol' superior.