Push The Button
We’ve been thinking about this all morning, readers.
To the point where we’d vote for any party pledging to implement it at once.
It’s the best such moral-dilemma question we’ve ever seen, and the absolute key to the state of humankind as a species. It’s a near-perfect practical illustration of the concept of “suicidal empathy”, and suicidal empathy is the root of some of the world’s worst problems, including the debates around both gender ideology and immigration.
Because what it does is encode the idea that feelings, ego and virtue-signalling are more important than sanity or material reality.
Rationally, there is no reason for anyone to press the blue button. If you press red, you definitely live no matter what. You only risk your life by pressing blue, and you get nothing for it. And in the same way that there’s no reward for pressing blue, there’s no cost to pressing red. There aren’t a limited number of survival places. Everyone can press red and everyone will live. Nobody gets killed against their will.
Literally the ONLY thing you get out of pressing blue is the ability to tell people you pressed blue. It’s a chance to trumpet your empathy. And even then it makes no sense, because the question notes that it’s a private vote. You could press red and still TELL people you pressed blue, and nobody would know.
Press blue and you’re literally risking your actual life in order to virtue-signal, even though you could virtue-signal just as well WITHOUT the risk. That’s the “suicidal” part of “suicidal empathy”. Although the word “empathy” in that sentence would of course be better replaced with “stupidity”.
To be honest, folks, we wouldn’t even bother counting the votes. If you pressed the blue button, the machine would just fire a poison dart straight into you immediately.
(NB Let us reasonably assume, or specify, that as with all other voting scenarios we don’t let children or the mentally incapable vote, and that only those who pressed the blue button actually get killed. Any children orphaned by their parent’s idiocy will have to be brought up by red-button people, which will probably be for the best anyway.)
Wings has actually already proposed something along related lines as a method of resolving the debate about capital punishment. And we’ve often quoted a pertinent clip from one of the greatest TV series ever recorded.
Because humanity really can’t afford to keep being stupid. This isn’t even a case like in movies where the villains in No Time To Die or Kingsman: The Secret Service are baddies because they want to massively cull the human population (ostensibly for its greater good) without consent. Here, no-one’s saying “sorry but we need to do this for the environment”. The rational outcome of this experiment is that NOBODY dies.
But in the event that the planet’s dumbest (and most harmful and annoying) tossers want to VOLUNTEER, well, if we’ve already explained why they shouldn’t and they’re determined to proceed anyway, who are we to interfere with their personal autonomy?
Earth thanks you for your sacrifice, dumdums. More food and oxygen for the rest of us, and maybe we can go back to telling the truth as well.
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(Choose your soundtrack to taste.)
I am more interested in the motivation here. The fact there is a condition set on the blue button, 50%, and none on the red button should concentrate the mind. Or in other words, accepting that everyone staying alive is a good thing without question, its about logic and not morality. Why would people take the option that places 49% of humanity at risk. How does that appeal to the ego? That confuses me. Where is the appeal to the ego in it? Its maybe in the wording, being a saviour, I don’t get it.
I hope if it wasn’t just a chance to look good on twitter with no consequences ( and I am confused in this instance as to why that would be the case) instead of being a choice with real consequences then X users might choose differently. Then again we have the fake social justice stuff, a child abuse cult, etc from the US and that has had consequences. However, I’ll file that questionnaire result in the elitist category (with its built in disdain for the masses) and continue to place my faith in the decency and good sense of ordinary people, who are probably not in a majority on X.
“accepting that everyone staying alive is a good thing without question”
Why would you accept that?
Is it August?
“…there’s no cost to pressing red.”
God might take a different view… His intelligence being infinite, and His logic somewhat more extensive and nuanced than that of humankind.
Aside from the theological implications, the question posed offers up a choice between precarious and miserable survival in a world populated with the self-centred and selfish, or living a richer, fuller existence in a kinder, sharing and more beautiful world.
Beautiful blue or wretched red, the choice is yours… although, looking around at the current state of this world, I’m reasonably certain humanity has already been asked this question and overwhelmingly opted to press the red button.
Maybe, if asked the same question again, humanity might go blue next time.
Free-will… what a curse – even the angels, having been spared it, don’t envy us.
The buttons should be black or white.
Keza Dugale cannot even push a button .
All a bit too binary and simplistic, but that is seemingly the new standard with the all to prevalent internet “like and hate” mentality of button pushing players that spend way too much of their time and life in online bubbles, and not enough time oot n aboot interacting with and working alongside the diversity of wider humanity.
“Earth thanks you for your sacrifice, dumdums. More food and oxygen for the rest of us, and maybe we can go back to telling the truth as well.”
It’s going to be a real laugh watching the internet based folk try to wean themselves off being spectators in life leveraging their existences off the backs of others, and they then have to go and actually do the real jobs that maintain the basics of life as we know it on this planet, which is unfortunately currently run by despicably behaving destructive and greedy roasters.
The notion that AI, and big corporate interests with their controls and influence over what are the essentials of sustaining our existence are acting in our best interests is laughable.
Smashing Pumpkins – Bullet With Butterfly Wings.
Rats in a cage.
link to youtube.com
Anyway, it’s back to the soil for me on this fine spring day and planting seeds for this growing season.
“There is no spoon”