Edwin, I totally understand your predicament. The fact is, justice is a result of the recognition of reality. I constantly ask myself, "why keep bothering with these self deluding parasites? Should I just stop trying to be culturally active? ". On your quid pro quo , "Look at how effective predatory egoist are at achieving cooperation from sheeple"..... Culturally, ridicule and "thinking shallow and talking loud" seem to be the way to advance in most environments. I just have that inescapable conscience that I cant disconnect from pride and happiness in my self. I watch other productive folks with integrity constantly be used and discarded when the tribally preferred shows up. How often have you actually seen mature thinkers change their mind?
Edit: I have a quibble with this "alpha" thing. I am what most people would call an alpha and I have the same complaints you mention otherwise.... Especially the pilfering of my ideas by secondhanded parasites who claim them as their own..
There are ideals one cultivates in their mind overtime, those passions and interests that grow with knowledge and experience, but then there is, also, of course, what is, the current state of Society.
If the State will take away a certain percentage of one's income, then why even try to obtain profit? Isn't it all or nothing, black or white, choose the ideal or don't even bother, go big or go home? Destroy one's creation rather than letting a secondhander have a say in it?
We all have to choose between Rand's, "Don't let your spark go out spark by irreplaceable spark" and "the question isn't who is going to let me; it's who is going to stop me." It's too simple and easy to say the State will stop one, but it may and may not. Some people lose their spark and some are able to keep it.
The Indian government had its heavy hand on every aspect of the Bhopal plant, from its design and construction to its eventual operation. Initially, the facility merely imported raw pesticides, such as one called Sevin, and then diluted, packaged and shipped them. This was a relatively safe and simple operation. But, in accordance with industrial policy, Union Carbide was under constant pressure from the government to cut imports and reduce the loss of foreign exchange. To do this, Carbide was required by its state-issued operating license to transfer to the Bhopal facility the capability to manufacture the basic pesticides and, subsequently, even their ingredients. Everything was to be “Swadeshi.” i.e. “Indianized.” Even the chemical production processes used in Bhopal were developed by Indian researchers .
To produce Sevin, carbon tetrachloride is mixed with alpha-naphthol and a chemical known as methyl isocyanate, or MIC (the chemical that leaked in the accident). Liquid MIC is a highly unstable and volatile chemical, and a deadly toxin. . . . MIC was not required in Bhopal while the factory simply packaged Sevin, its final product. But the logic of “industrial self-sufficiency” and “technology transfer” required the manufacture of Sevin from scratch—and that meant dealing with its hazardous ingredients, including MIC.
So in 1971, the Union Carbide factory opened a small plant to manufacture alpha-naphthol, and began to import and store MIC—a chemical which never had to be in India in the first place, except to satisfy the Indian government.
In 1977, based upon projections of growing demand, the Bhopal factory began to increase its alpha-naphthol facilities dramatically. A new $2.5 million plant—designed, of course, by an Indian consulting firm—was built. Ten times larger than most similar plants, it at once displayed design problems of scale: equipment would not work or would turn out to be the wrong size. Ultimately, faced with an inoperable alpha-naphthol facility, the factory’s management decided to [open an MIC production facility in 1980].
What had begun as a Carbide subsidiary for packaging pesticides was now a government-directed business manufacturing and storing a deadly chemical in a technologically backward culture. Those were not business decisions. Those were political decisions.
One last element of government policy helped lay the groundwork for the pending disaster. The area around the plant had been deserted at the time Carbide moved in. But in 1975 the local government, in a re-zoning scheme, encouraged thousands of Indians to settle near the plant by giving them construction loans and other inducements. In effect, government first helped to make the plant unsafe, and then drew the people into the path of the coming gas cloud.
Add to all this the fact that after the plant was opened, the technologically trained Americans who built and ran it were sent packing and were replaced by under-educated locals—most of them friends, relatives, and cronies of local officials. They allowed operations to continue despite the fact that all five redundant safety systems had been broken for months. One of the incompetents let water from a hose leak for hours into one of the chemical tanks, which caused a dangerous reaction. The night-shift employees were all sipping tea in the lunch room while gauges indicating rising gas pressure in the tank went off the top of the scale—allowing a pipe to rupture and gush deadly gas into the sleeping community nearby.
No, the Bhopal disaster was not the result of American capitalism: no American capitalists were permitted to be present at or in control of the plant. The gas leak was instead the result of technology decisions and subsidies directed by politicians.
Source: “Bhopal: The Fruit of Industrial Policy,” July 19, 1985 The Intellectual Activist, Vol. 4, No. 2 later excerpted by the Wall Street Journal on Dec. 3, 1986.
The fact is that we don't find ourselves everyday in a position where we have no choice but to protect that which we value the most by destroying ourselves because someone else is choosing to destroy it. Most people are benign and merely desire to live and let live. Criminals are the anomaly, not the norm. Or else there would more people inside jails than outside it and insurance companies won't make any money.
So there is very little need to derive ethics from such rare scenarios, precisely because they are rare.
e.g. How would you divide the only slice of bread between you and your partner on a lifeboat? Answer: We don't find ourselves everyday in lifeboat with a slice of bread. So normative behavior under such circumstances must not be subject matter of ethics.
Ethics should concern itself with behavioral norms that is conducive for the life of a rational man.
Having said that, it is not a sacrifice to die for something/someone/"some idea" you would value more than your own life. However it is sacrifice to die for something/someone/"some idea" which you hate or don't know or is irrational and therefore impossible.
Edwin got a reaction from ttime in Is it rational & moral to attempt to end all unjustified human suf
Edwin got a reaction from dream_weaver in Sacrifice