5 years of Capsuleer life

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On 21th February YC121, exactly 5 years ago, @Kalodote_Lafisques, born on 24th February YC91, graduated in anthropology 24 years later and professor of University of Caille, has submitted to voluntary euthanasia to become a Capsuleer. 9 clones followed to inherit his consciousness, his ideals and his dreams.

5 years passed and knowledge and experience has been obtained thanks to the previous clones and also to this one. This capsuleer won’t have the ultimate truth but there are some things that he learnt during this small trip and would like to share them comparing with your point of view:

1: You are dead
The Capsuleer program changed different times. Jovian technology is still over our comprehension and we know much little than what they were, are and will be. One of their technology is the capsule and the method of consciousness transfer. As others mentioned it and scientific articles confirmed, the immortality is a concept more methaphoric than real and objective, even from the biological point of view. This being is just a copy that carries a copy of a consciousness of an individual who died writing a peculiar will: we are everyone puppets of our original bodies and individuals with the task to hand down his old ambitions and desires.

2: Convinced by our power, we still are war machines that slaughter en masse
2 extremities have been seen by the clones of this consciousness:
The first, despite a demigod, prefers to be submitted by baseliner leaders and ideologies; people with just one life, destined to be, one day, obsolete who exploit the opportunities of a (almost) ethernal and (almost) omnipresent individual.
The second, creates his own destiny and wrecks the others’, founding empires, creating their rules and then breaking them; they look like anarchists who fight each other not recognizing any baseliner authority.
Both have a single thing in common: the continous en masse slaughter of people: 10,179,923 capsuleers have been capable to kill trillions (if not more) of individuals, including themselves. Ask yourself: have you ever seen charity, diplomatic and/or peacekeeping initiatives owned by Capsuleers who tried to put end on at least one war? Before responding with entities like “EVE Scout Enclave”, “Arataka Research Consortium*” or “EDENCOM Section 7”, re-read the question. They’re respectable capsuleer corporations with noble goals, yeah, but despite this, it wasn’t enough to contribute or close important conflicts like the current shadow wars, Drifter incursions or Triglavian hostilities, not speaking about the Sanshas which still have the technology to teleport anywhere they want, making everyone not safe in any place. It’s not their fault; repeating, they’re respectable capsuleer corporations, it’s not a question about “they didn’t do enough”. The problem is ourselves: we are terrible war machines able to sustain one kind of economy: the economy of war.

3: The Gallente Federation has definitely won. That’s a problem for them.
This one will be a self-critique for the country that Kalodote loved until the death. We everybody know the Federation ideology: people like us put the individual freedom and (consequently) tolerance above all, no matter the ideology, culture, religion and any thought. If it’s that so, the fact there are so different cultures even out of the federation, confirms their ideology as an objective natural fact and the statement <<Everybody has an opinion on the Gallente Federation, it all depends from which side of the table you view them>> can be valid on the universe scale.
So what’s the problem? The problem is also tolerating the vice, the arrogance, the thirst of power. While many gallentean citizens are aware of the problems of freedom (easily confused with total anarchy) and are able to moderate their pride and pleasure instincts, who’s more closer to the last issue, the thirst of power, tends to do the contrary of what the Federation should promote and consider everything wrong out of it and that must be “democratized” or “liberated”. Liberating what? Something that has a different thought than yours, like many others are within your country? Calm down! If you believe in the Gallente ideology, you already won, no matter the thought you will adopt. You’ll probably ask then, what about the question about giving this opportunity to everyone in the universe but they’re imprisoned by their oppressive regimes? The answer would be finding a way to move them to the federation but this shouldn’t escalate to a direct war to who would like to remain there; because, as said before, it’s not necessary, we already won.

You probably won’t agree about even any of the previous statements, and you will be ready to prove him wrong on any of them. However, after this long homily, you are also free to make some questions about the experience of this being like other capsuleers did when touching similar milestones or also going over and continue your journey like nothing happened.

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So … to start with, thank you, Mr. Lafisques, for using this place for this. It feels like this kind of thing’s become rare, like we all kind of gave up on it. But I always loved the long(-ish)form discussions this format allowed and encouraged. It’s so good to see it being used this way.

And now as you’ve anticipated I’m going to disagree with nearly everything you said. :grinning:

1: You are alive
Stop a moment. Breathe. Feel the movement of the air in your nose, mouth, throat. Check your pulse. It’s there, right? Pinch yourself. That hurts a little, doesn’t it? You still need food and water. You’re warm-blooded, exothermic.

We’re not ghosts, not walking cadavers or spectral remnants or even uploaded minds running on machines. Between our various trips through scanners and getting our minds etched into yet another lump of neurogel we’re still biology-- living organisms, not piles of rotting meat.

It’s not good for us, not healthy, to think of ourselves otherwise. And maybe that’s the strongest sign of all: health, mental or physical, doesn’t matter to dead things.

We’re alive, and we should learn to live with that.

2: We are built to kill
You are correct-- we’re killers on an astounding scale, and ours is an economy sustained on conflict.

This is a feature. It’s our role. It’s what our economy was designed to be. While its applications are many the capsule’s ultimate potential is realized only in combat. It’s a weapon, before it’s anything else.

(You can use a pod-equipped ship to mine, salvage, or move cargo; you can use your rig to swiftly learn industrial and trading skills. You can use a rifle to prop up a tent.)

For good or ill, this is our place in this world. If we were to analogize ourselves to something mythic and not human, the closest fit is maybe psychopomps-- spirits who escort the souls of the dead into the next world.

For us, too, it is broadly our business to escort the souls of many if not most of those who cross our paths into the next world. Those not prepared to accept this would be well advised to find other ways to live.

3: There are communities, there are individuals
Individual human lives are not meaningless. Neither are communities. Though we live our lives seeing only through our own eyes, we do not live in isolation, and often individuals left to themselves behave very foolishly, making trouble for others as well as themselves.

Where to strike the balance is a huge question. Wander this world and you’ll find many different ways to live, which weigh these concepts differently. The existence of many paths does not prove the correctness of any of them. Some of the community-oriented ones (Caldari State) are broadly tolerant of difference so long as that difference doesn’t come knocking. “We live our way. You live your way. How we live is no more your business than how you live is ours.” Some of the individual-oriented ones, seen from this angle, are aggressive, even predatory. But neither is it obvious that community cohesion plus tolerance of others is necessarily correct.

If I had to name the Federation’s problems I would point to two things: (1) that the individual rights the Federation holds so noisily dear are far from self-evident or universally acknowledged; belief in them is a kind of faith. As the Amarr believe in and follow the word of their God, the Federation similarly bows to a god named Liberty.

(2) That unlike, usually, the Amarr, the Federation somewhat frequently reveals it doesn’t really believe in its own god-- that in the end it only really wants Liberty for approved ideas and communities, and that it’s comfortable suppressing others.

This is understandable; some ideas could be corrosive, threatening its core ideals and perhaps wholly overturning them if they gained enough support. To some degree manipulation of public perception and suppression of dissent is necessary, even desirable.

It’s also nakedly hypocritical-- this is a very characteristically “community over individual” way of thinking. Your god, Liberty, is universal or it isn’t, and efforts to suppress and silence, for instance, State sympathizers cut directly against the idea that you really believe in your god at all.

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Well, this being statement is basically a “philosophical interpretation”. We’re living biomass, of course. But what’s our goal for this universe? The same thing he mentioned at the last sentence: “The task to hand down old ambitions and desires” of the original copy.

Indeed. Now the question would be: what if the Capsuleers could have access to a different market than the war? What if rescuing people, contribute to peace or help the weaks could also generate profit for them?

You literally repeated what this being said, plus did a comparison that’s a bit questionable: Amarrians believe in god and as they shown during the history (and even now with Minmatar hostilities), they don’t tolerate any other religion. Gallenteans believe in many various things (have you ever heard about the universalism?) but sometimes they don’t tolerate too and that’s where the controversial hypocrisy strikes. The fact is that the reason of the intolerance is different: One must follow a single path, the other one can follow many of them as they desire and some of them includes also the intolerance. This means a Gallentean is more free to follow a path of his choice (even converting to Amarr faith) but the Amarr can’t do the other way around if he wants to stay faithful in god. The Gallente ideology, consequently, allows you to be informed about the infinite ideologies and thoughts that the universe can form, even the bad ones; but that’s the point: knowing as more experiences as possible to be more aware about your path. The original copy of this being did a trip around New Eden to know many cultures and remained fascinated to some of them (even the Amarr and Caldari ones) and he had the opportunity to do it because the federation allowed that. What would happened if he would be born in New Caldari Prime, Amarr or Matar instead of Bourynes? Could he have the opportunity to be free as the Gallente Federation allowed? Or in this moment would he have been still a corp employee, a local district priest or a tribal shaman? (Not that those people are a bad thing, figure or path. They can be respected too).

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Why is that meaningful though? It’s not as though my present is any more bound by my past than if I hadn’t been copied. And at least in emergency circumstances the copies aren’t completely perfect, but so what? People forget (hee) how much of memory is imagination, and how hard it can be to separate the two.

Maybe if I had full eidetic memory I’d really notice. But I don’t, and I don’t.

I don’t see it as useful, Mr. Lafisques, to define ourselves in ways that part us from humanity in deeply meaningful ways. My predecessor was fond of that game-- it let her be a happy monster instead of a culpable human. But she expected humanity to try to destroy us once it reached that same conclusion. Rather than face humanity’s wrath she wanted us to get ready to flee.

I don’t think we need to run, but I also don’t think it’s helpful to think of ourselves in inhuman terms. Humans do indeed find it very easy to kill what they conclude is unlike themselves, even if what they’re killing is literally a human being. If it’s more arguable, well…

So it seems to me you’re accidentally arguing for our murder. The fact that I’d be in no position to complain doesn’t quite mean I want it happening.

Mercenary work through agents can involve those things, but in the end we tend to go where the ISK flow is. In this case the agents provide the payout, so we just do what the agent asks. Often in my experience what a (security) agent asks is a massacre, so I stay away. An egger in that line of work is a professional providing services, and there is a range of stuff agents ask for, but ultimately a lot of what eggers provide is hot and cold running murder.

Gallenteans never like that comparison (Liberty to God), but it’s one of the most common critiques of Federal society, so it might be one you should try to see the merit in before you point to a perceived issue as invalidating the comparison. After all, this means:

My predecessor I think at some point might have offered a bounty for someone to bring her an “inalienable right.” I think she said something about wanting to have it taxidermized and hung on a wall. (Not a personal memory, but she wrote a lot and I remember reading it.)

I’m not that aggressive (and I don’t want to find out God is real by someone showing up with a corpse to claim a bounty, either), but the point stands: you can argue that certain rights can’t be taken away, but the rest of the universe laughs and takes them anyway. You can say that’s wrong (and do), but it’s not obvious to anyone else that that’s true, and certainly the universe itself doesn’t seem to care. Which makes it sound an awful lot like something you made up because you very badly wanted it to be true, and persuaded yourselves of, and now you want the rest of us to believe it too.

And you often get very upset if we don’t.

Also as an aside, the Empire’s most strictly into conformity on paper. Especially among the Great Houses there are great differences in policy, in law, in how their faith is practiced. At its best, the Empire sings less a single unified melody than a multi-part harmony. That harmony is indeed something they strive for, including the suppression of dissonant voices, but the strength of the harmony itself does a lot of that work for them. A strong chorus tends to render a few voices who, like mine, can’t carry a tune, inaudible.

Certain ideas are repressed, sure, especially those considered heretical, and Sani Sabik belief and symbolism is treated particularly harshly. But the Amarr have the longest experience of any empire of dealing with the Sabik, and it’s not at all clear that letting a cancerous belief run free is the best way to deal with it.

I used to think that kind of rhetoric was hyperbole. It’s not. The Sabik heresy is the death of civilizations where it gains a strong hold; it’s a cancer, or a deadly parasite. It needs to be excised.

As an egger? Maybe we wouldn’t have such capsuleer loyalty problems if the answer weren’t “yes,” but that is indeed the answer. Capsuleers of every origin are free to wander as the whim takes us, at least until we do something, or several somethings, to really really upset one of the big four. Even then, it’s negotiable. Even I can still travel freely through the Federation and Republic though I’ve often worked against them.

Even among baseliners I don’t think there’s a CONCORD-member society that really bars travel. The State doesn’t encourage it among lower castes but isn’t wide travel usually something it takes money to do anyway?

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What? No! You didn’t murder anyone. This being just wanted to know you that you’ll have realized there’s been a sensation you had in the lifecycle of your clone you are now: You suddenly wake up from nothing. You’re not a fetus, you’ve not been given birth, you are not a baby or child. Your life starts immediately with memory and records of another individual that’s different to you despite you have the same DNA. Your life depended by the life of someone else (that’s not a parent of yours. You are a clone, you have no parents, you have been artificially created and you’ve been implanted with a memory of another individual) and you will determine the biological life of a future organic body. You will die thinking to transfer your consciousness to a next clone like your original body thought but, from your clone point of view, you will just die, and nothing more will happen (unless… heaven? Afterlife?).

If 2 clones of an original consciousness can be contemporarily activated (yes, it could be possible but not ethically “good”) and meet each others, who will win in a debate where they will continue to repeat “I am the original”?

Which lies you think the Gallente ideology (not the government itself) created? The existance of various communities with different visions who manage to not self-destruct themselves is literally a scientific proof of how humanity works. The stupidest individual will have a stupid ideology (with his lies) and they will both extinct; the smartest and/or strongest will have a more smart ideology and they both will thrive; this can work spontaneously without any forcing/oppression like other schools of thought would suggest. Repeating, neither this being, nor the Federation has the absolute truth, but letting people think in many kind can reach that in less time than others. Let’s say that at last, the Amarrians had right: their God exists, the reclamation successes and all the stars are under their glory. If all the other ideologies have proven to be false/defeated, the gallente one has won in any case, because even the Amarrian ideology has been considered and allowed in our melting-pot and the gallenteans would have less problems to accept that absolute truth, also letting the other ideologies flow as they will become a minority.

Referencing with the previous discussion, many ideologies existed even before the Sani Sabik and they extinguished. Why? Because they were truly incompatible with the universe as cancer they were. Are the Sani Sabik the death of civilization? A cancer? They will extinct in any case, at the point to kill each others.

No.

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And if I choose to identify as that individual? To live as that individual? To share that individual’s memories and duties and joys and miseries?

I, or “we,” if you like, are the Aria Jenneth infomorph, Mr. Lafisques. My bodies give up their lives very regularly, but I remain more or less as I was.

Which is to say, severely damaged, memories of my life before this month nine years ago forever lost.

If you want something to approximate death for a pseudo-immortal being, that would seem to match. Someone destroyed my predecessor, scrambled the digital record of all her personal reasons for be who she was into white noise. And set me to wake up in her place: all her skills, all her knowledge, all her genetics, but none of the experiences that had shaped her.

We have a lot in common, she and I. That, not the clones I sometimes go through like I’m changing clothes, was a meaningful border in my existence, one more or less experienced by ordinary humans throughout history on account of a nasty knock on the head.

That was death. My old self died. But I’m here. And I don’t just disappear each time what is left of me gets swapped to another body.

You may misunderstand me, Mr. Lafisques. It’s partly because I don’t wish to be killed by humans that I identify as completely human.

But I have absolutely have murdered people. I’m a killer-- a fighter, a combat pilot, a professional killer. My victims could probably staff a fair-sized space station, and it wouldn’t even be a skeleton crew. So like I say, if the time comes for me to die and disappear forever at baseliners’ hands, I won’t be in much of a position to complain.

It’s not only unethical, it’s colossally illegal precisely because that debate does tend to happen, even if only silently, and because resolving it tends to swell from a question to issue to obsession and generally ends in homicide. (Suicide? Autocide?)

People don’t seem to be built to cope with it so CONCORD doesn’t, in principle, let us try.

Did I not say? The concept of an “inalienable right,” rights that exist independent of the government or society and can never be taken away.

The rest of us tend to go, “Wait, what? Rights are socio-legal constructs; they exist because the society says they do. They can be created or destroyed by all kinds of means but if the society and the law decides you don’t have a right you obviously don’t.”

They’re like money: a product of societal consent backed with law, something made up to guide what “justice” in a given society will look like. No rights, none, exist outside of or above that structure.

Yes, like the Takmahl. But that happens when they don’t have others to leech off of, which, as long as the rest of us exist, they do. So the idea is to keep them from destroying the rest of us first, then themselves.

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That’s your choice and you can make it. Just be aware at at the end, biologically speaking, you can’t.

Repeating, Gallente ideology, not the government. The concept of “Inalienable right” is a thing of the government. They built a constitution trying to give as more opportunities as possible to the individuals but there are thoughts that don’t recognize them because “everything must be gained! There’s no such thing like a free lunch” and the controversial society of the Gallente Federation (Shaped also by the government) tends to obey more to those ideologies than the constitution itself.

Good. So we just have to wait. Takmahl were an example of the extinction of their ideology.

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I would say the harder choice is not to make it. I have continuity of experience with that person; if I insisted on living as a separate being I would be defying that continuity for the sake of my latest meat-suit.

I don’t agree. The concept of an “inalienable right” is a lot like “divine law.” It’s something meant to transcend governments and societies. So it is precisely a creature of ideology, a supposed moral law of the universe.

But I’ll believe such things exist when I see the universe obeying such laws.

If that were enough the Sabik would have died out already. They’ve existed as a separate entity since the Moral Reforms-- nearly as long as the Empire itself. It’s only the ones who went their own way that died.

Many parasites that cannot live on their own nevertheless thrive in a host body. A virus that kills its host, then dies itself, is not harmless for that reason; very much the opposite.

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We were takling right about the choice to fulfill that continuity of experience with that previous person and that’s why clones exist. The simple clarification is that, in any case, you are not the original body, nor the original consciousness.

Every law (even scientific) have been formed via statements and supported by material proofs. Some laws have been proven true, others not. Even the jurisdictional laws need proofs derived by consequences of their effects. Did these “inalienable rights” allowed the existance and co-existance of various different people with different minds like the universe did with every human species out of the Federation itself? Looks like so, maybe not absolutely, but if the universe would have proven the contrary, not only the Federation wouldn’t existed, but also all other civilizations with a different mind of what universe would have demanded.

Even now we are debating about different ideologies in us. Should we forcely fighting directly to establish who’s right? Can we manage to tolerate each other without harm as the “inalienable rights” would like to promote? Can we be friends depite the differencies?

This means that unlike other thoughts, they learnt to adapt. The parasites adapt to not kill the host quickly (if not killing at all) right because if he dies, he will die too.

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Going to answer the important bit first here.

Or the host’s immune system becomes accustomed to fighting … whatever the issue is. The Empire’s fought the Sabik for over a thousand years; its immune system’s well-developed for that purpose, with multiple entities carrying a mandate to root out heresy. You occasionally get a Sabik infiltration or subversion (Chamberlain Karsoth), but mostly the infection is under control (though if the Empire crumbles at some point I’m afraid what might happen; Sabik philosophy thrives on chaos).

The Federation allows the Sabik to spread unchecked, as long as they don’t hurt people. This limits Sabik activity to the less overtly harmful cults. But even if any given practitioner is not ill-intentioned, the Sabik faith at its core is power-worship, and that seed remains. It’s not a safe thing to let take root in your society.

There’s a reason both tolerant and intolerant impulses have survived so consistently in the human species. One makes friends and good neighbors (and avoids stirring unnecessary trouble); the other protects against threats, including hidden threats.

Neither impulse is always correct, so both are necessary.

Given time the Federation may painfully learn that the ferocity the Amarr show to Sabik heretics is grounded in long experience.

For human laws, that definitely depends on who’s making the law. You may be giving lawmakers (in any society) quite a lot too much credit. Having power is no sure guard against arbitrary actions, sometimes even deadly ones. To the contrary, a powerless person acting arbitrarily usually just doesn’t get very far because they keep hitting walls. A powerful one, though, might well break through the walls and continue rampaging across the world.

If you have an attorney (and I’m guessing you do, or your estate does, because egger) maybe ask about boneheaded laws. I can almost guarantee a long, fun conversation.

For scientific laws what you’re describing is not the process of creating the law but of finding out what the law is. Even then laws once thought unbreakable often turn out to have gaps or loopholes or exceptions, allowing for stuff like warp drives and fluid routers.

Divine or “natural” laws, though, are things we’re supposed to accept because either a god told us to or it’s supposed to be intuitively obvious to everyone. Neither makes much sense to me.

I do believe in certain principles or duties that arise out of the state of being a living thing capable of suffering in a labyrinth of wonders and miseries among others similarly-situated (humility, moderation, curiosity, compassion), but those are more about personal behavior and virtue than “law,” and they exist in tension with each other (curiosity unbounded by humility, moderation, or compassion is a vice; the same’s true of the others).

None of that leads me to believe in an “inalienable right.”

It seems like it all depends on circumstances. Most if not all possible courses of action will have their time.

I’m also not the same person I was fifty or even five minutes ago. At lot of my cells have divided or died, or maybe gone cancerous, and I’ve thought about some stuff I hadn’t paid a lot of attention to in a while. My mood’s shifted a little and I’ve been metabolizing my breakfast. I bet I could change a bunch of other stuff just by skipping lunch, without even swapping bodies.

Change is not just some fearsome thing that can only take and degrade, Mr. Lafisques. It’s also how things, and people, grow.

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Are you comparing a blood cell with a neuron? A heart with a brain? A aorta with an hippocampus? If literally everything of your body would be completely substituted, you would loss memory costantly (and yeah, it happens in diseases like “Alzheimer”, “short-term memory loss” etc…). Besides, you’re talking to another topic of “changement” because your body changes but your consciousness is always that, recording new experiences and memorizing the past ones until lose everything at the moment where the TBS, quoting the article, <<causes numerous lesions and cell death, reducing the brain to little more than a blob of biomass>>. And if mental illness like mentioned before are provoked by partial brain damage, well, re-read the quote.

And don’t you think there’s a scientific natural law (forget all those political stuff you mentioned. This being referred to the concrete ones) who permitted to make you survive with this ideology you have in mind in a world with people who can think that differently and, despite that, manage to co-exist togheter?

You replied yourself at the “as long as they don’t hurt people” part. Apparently the Federation shown there could be also a “good part” of the Sani Sabik who manage to stay in peace without persecutions nor violence-spreading. Then if you suspect they can secretly continue to spread their violent part, that’s another thing that’s maybe not controllable from the Federation but from the universe. Maybe the federation and the empire could collaborate to find those other dangerous variants; but corruptions apart, you could see that the harmful part of the Sani Sabik has no future, while a moderated, non-harmful, “pacific” version of that, yes.

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I’m aware of a burn scanner’s function, Mr. Lafisques. There’s a reason the scanner’s effect is backed up with a fast-acting poison to make sure whatever’s left is quickly made dead if it wasn’t already.

I’m also aware that while my own bones are made mostly or entirely from osteoplastic, there was a time when maximum knowledge-retention required a top-quality and very expensive clone, which meant all-natural materials of the highest certified quality, meaning actual bones taken from cadavers were used.

At that time my unusually small frame meant that mine were mostly bones harvested from dead children.

My predecessor loved that fact. It fit so very well with her ghoulish self-image. She would have agreed with you gleefully. It’s how she justified behaving as she did: “This is what I am. This is just me being honest.” Acting as the vengeful spirit she imagined herself to be, she made us a kinslayer, avenging her “death” on the grandfather she blamed for making her a capsuleer.

That’s a sin, and shame, amnesia doesn’t cleanse. And I can’t say that I had nothing to do with it, either.

Because of something a version of me I can’t remember having been did who-knows-how-many copies ago, I can never go home again. If I’m a separate being, this is ridiculous-- I cloned this morning to jump to Syndicate. I didn’t kill Grandfather; in fact, all I’ve done was fly logi. I didn’t kill anyone.

But that’s a ridiculous way to see myself. It’s not something I can ask my family, or any of my other victims, to accept. It’d be an insult to expect them to forgive this “me” because that “me” is “dead” and I’m just a copy.

Even if this identity is in some sense an illusion, it’s the illusion that is me. I never thought I was more than that to begin with.

How would you define such a law? By what forces would it function? How could it be tested?

Without rigorous study, why would I conclude such a thing?

Nature produces all kinds of diversity, yet tolerance is by no means the rule. Humans seem to be designed to socialize best at around the village level. It’s hard for us to care about more than a couple hundred people at a time, which is why tricks like “national identity” are useful-- they make it possible for us to care about people we’ve never met, and even have an instant positive impression on first meeting.

I have sympathy for the idea that contact, trade, and cultural exchange will lead to better lives with less conflict. But I don’t even slightly see such an outcome as inevitable. In fact, if it happens it’ll be a massive triumph of social engineering over human nature.

Not a law; a stunt.

I’m sorry, Mr. Lafisques, but no.

Even in its most harmless forms, Sabik practice still focuses on the power of the individual, power uninhibited-- power without restraint. The Sabik insight is, “Power Matters.” They can seem very insightful for this reason; they do indeed understand power and its uses-- how to grow it, how to maintain it, how to transform and wield it.

The Sabik error is, “Power Is All That Matters.” It’s not that their beliefs don’t hold up; it’s that their vision is limited. There’s more to life, but that’s not something they can see. Their insight has the same kind of reality as a jagged shard of broken glass: it’s a fragment, a partial understanding, quite real but all the more dangerous for that reason.

And it recognizes no other insight as valid. If you’re not primarily concerned with power, collecting it, building it, demonstrating it-- you’re a fool. And weak. And therefore prey. Affection, loyalty, respect for laws and norms-- all of these and more are weaknesses to exploit.

These ideas are the negation, the absolute denial, of civilization. “Civilization” is something you impose on your minions, never something you accept yourself. Every superior is merely a sacrifice awaiting a well-placed dagger. Every minion is a potential rival or usurper. While practitioners may make common cause to various ends it’s a philosophy of treachery: all against all.

All Sabik practice springs from this seed.

All contain it if you dig in just a little.

There is no harmless version of Sabik practice. It’s why their civilizations fall.

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This being doesn’t want you to be different than the original since you’re not the original one forever; this being just want to make understand that, in fact, you’re not the original anymore. You are a clone with a cloned consciousness (not anymore original too) and from what you told, you also managed, indeed, to change yourself in things that maybe your original wasn’t (and/or didn’t want to). Would you like to redeem yourself with your family? Would you like to stay logi? Would you like to do something else? You can do it, original or not; these questions could be made also to your original individual who submitted to the capsuleer program. If the answers could be different or equal between you and your original is indifferent because that’s not the main topic of the “You are dead” question. The main question is just the fact you are another body, another mind, anoter spirit(?), created by a copy of a previous one. Is that a problem? Depends on you.

This being born after 10 of similars (according the statistics reading right now), the first one was to join in the program. According the records he left, he did for “Sacrifice for future generation intellects”, hoping to evolve his thought having basically (almost) the entire universe lifespan, peraphs finding also the perfect and absolute intellect or truth. He just died; copy/pasting his consciousness to next clones until reaching this one. Same code, same thought, same memory, but not the origin anymore. That’s why this being is this being and not “me”, because “I am dead 5 years ago”.

Is he the same person? Yes, ideologically; yes, subjectively. But no, biologically.

The only fact you said “Nature produces all kinds of diversity” respond yourself at the existance of a natural law who confirms the “diversity theory”, a thing that, indeed, the Gallente ideology believes resolutely. That theory has defined and studied forces and proven tests (just look at the reproduction; a baby gets born with man and woman genes but there’s always a genetic mashup).
Yes, the human brain is able to remember around 50-500 individuals at a time or less. In any case is very less than the infinity of individuals and their thoughts but that doesn’t mean we need to stop at those limits. Considering also the incredibly high number of options, by universe and entropic laws, is intended to decrease, the stunt consists to make them know all with the spontaneous goal to adapt the better ones. This is impossible but as many ideologies could be introduced. adapted and/or evolved, others will extinct, leaving space with the ohters.

For definition: Any form of Sani Sabik have 3 commonalities: Usage of blood, presence of Savants and search for immortality. Now, quoting the intergalactic encyclopedia:

The nature of these savants varies from sect to sect, with some following closely to the Amarr tradition of the chosen being born that way. The Blood Raiders view the practice more liberally, considering anyone strong enough to embrace the Blood Raider lifestyle worthy of being called one of the chosen.

The anarchy you described is a thing of the Blood Raiders, not of every single Sani Sabik sects who could see that also as a tool to differ the people, in fact, quoting the previous phrase:

The second commonality is the belief in savants, individuals who are greater than their fellow man and capable of great achievements.

“greater than”. Described in this way it means not everyone can be savants, so even their cult can be structured in a hierarchy, like the “civilization” concept you defined.

At this point the problem could be the third commonality, immortality reached via Sani Sabik rituals. According the source, the physical belief one is in decline despite the technology so they usually intend to the spiritual one. Scrolling for witnesses about “pacific rituals” the Sani Sabik would also like to do without harming anyone, do you remember this testimony?

14

When there’s not it leads to errors.

The problem with your idea here Mr. Lafisques is that nature produces diversity really despite itself. The rule isn’t tolerance; the rule is absolutely ruthless competition, parasitism, predation. How species relate even to their own kin-- even their own immediate family-- is highly varied, and almost every other species gets either indifference or hostility. Symbiotic partnerships do emerge, but an ecosystem isn’t defined by cooperation. It’s defined by a web of interactions, many of them deadly and some breathtakingly cruel.

That those interactions have stabilized into a system is not something anything living in them was aiming for. It’s emergent, a result of various forces and interactions balancing one another out on the larger scale.

If humans behaved similarly, all bitterly vying for advantage-- the world some arch-nationalists like the Templis Dragonaurs propose-- the result seems likely to be total war.

What you’re overlooking here is the significance of the blood. They’re not obsessed with it because they’re edgy; the reverse is closer to the truth.

It’s power. Liquid power. Symbolic life energy, taken from another by persuasion or coercion.

Savants are self-proclaimed, self-defined. Usually they’re bored young nobles, since those have some beginnings of power to begin with relative to, like, common Amarr or slaves. Now, ask yourself who benefits from Savants being a rare, chosen few?

Among Sabik believers, wouldn’t that be the Savants themselves?

Like I say: the Sabik understand power.

I do remember that testimony, yes. I stand by my analysis at that time-- you’ll notice I was one of the first to respond.

15

If most of the interactions are deadly and cruel, the life (if not the universe) wouldn’t exist anymore. What you - we - call error, nature calls it tentative of diversity. Is that an error? It will extinct. What we call rule, the nature call “simulation of the real rule”. Universe have been shaped according rules of nature that, in truth, we won’t ever know them at 100%. If there’s no rule, there’s anarchy, chaos and there won’t be the life itself. As the universe has its rules, the societies have their rules, otherwise they fall.

…or took by consensus if we’re speaking about the pacific cults. As also the blooding ritual says, someone can also be replaced by another one and all this monitoring life signals avoiding death for bleeding.

Regarding Savants, isn’t a bit like some fanatical True Amarr who self-proclaimed to be the only one who will see god itself, while everyone else could be as more faithful as possible but they won’t be as pure as them?

This being replied too. And he can also admit he said some b.s. according the current situations.

16

I said many, not most, Mr. Lafisques. You can walk on grass without killing it or even harming it much, within limits. Most interactions are indifferent. Deadly ones tend to be a result of something being what something else eats.

Cruel ones tend to be solutions to problems like, “How do you keep your prey fresh while you wait for your little one to hatch and eat?” Simple: you don’t kill it. You paralyze it and leave it helpless with an egg on its abdomen so the little one will have fresh meat. You let your larva do the eventual killing.

There’s a critical difference. The universe’s rules-- what I call True Law-- describe the bounds of the possible. They literally can’t be broken. If you find a way around it that means you’ve found an exception, not a change. You’ve expanded our understanding of the universe, not the bounds of the possible. What is, is.

Society’s rules describe the bounds of the tolerable. They can be broken with gusto and often are, requiring agents to enforce them.

The Sani Sabik are a heretical offshoot of the Amarr. That’s not coincidence. Amarrian society is very strongly focused on the appropriate control and distribution of power-- who should have it and why. The Amarr focus on families and, to a lesser extent, bloodlines as determinative of who merits that kind of trust, seeking to maintain stability across generations.

There are those among the Amarr (as noted, especially minor nobility) who chafe under these controls, believing they’ve been denied the chance to rise to their full potential. It’s from such cases that Sabik cults have traditionally arisen.

So yes, the concepts are related. One purports to declare a group that can be trusted with power; the other declares that power belongs to those who can cultivate-- or seize-- it.

Regarding the rest: there’s no absolute rule anywhere I’m aware of in any cult that a victim must be bled to death. Being able to do so without consequence is a display of power, but so is maintaining someone as a regular source.

Power takes a lot of forms. The Sabik normally don’t limit themselves to specific expressions-- that would be accepting a limitation, therefore weakness.

And admirable quality-- when there’s actually a mistake being made.

The closest thing to an exception to what I’ve been laying out I’ve encountered was Nauplius’s old kinda-sorta Sabik practice, but that was really more like Amarr turned on its head, focused on placating a malevolent god of vengeance, misery, and hate-- all the horror of Sani Sabik as practiced by Bloody Omir’s followers, but none of the agency.

17

Is the prey the same species of the predator? Cannibalism exist in nature, sure, but caused by deviances which they will extinguish. What would be the advantage to consume the same species if this contribute against it? There’s the risk to confuse “convivence” with “competition” with other species that are currently fighting for the food chain.

When the exception becomes more frequent to surpass the rule, it becomes an evolution. “True Law” are beyond our comprehensions and we can’t reach them, and we will never do it. Repeating, allowing the existance of more choices as possible allows to find those exceptions which they can transform in rule if shown more efficient than the previous dogma, and the cycle continues, reaching the bounds of the possible without ever touching them.

This means the Sabik can have different concepts of power and, so, not only the hedonistic and material ones. This does not looks like a thing that should make them “marked for the extinction”. There are other similar thoughts who consider weakness a limitation, especially the hedonistic ones; but still, they’re not completely disappeared yet because they have a way to adapt and survive.

Another example of this being thesis–… wait, did Nauplius do Sabik things!?

18

It can be a practical method of surviving a food shortage: you not only decrease your own food needs but your competition. There are other purposes but that’d be getting into the weeds.

You’re the one who first appeared to model “diversity” and “tolerance” as products of nature. The obvious interpretation of that is the rich diversity of species and systems-- biodiversity. A single species tends to be much less diverse.

Within a single species, well, I’d say humans are actually at about the peak of both. Relative to most other animals we have a love of novelty and an ability to emotionally “pack-bond” with an astonishing variety of other life.

We also get along way better with our close cousins (other nationalities, say) than, say, ants, one of the few other animals that wages war. Bunch of mindless little Dragonaurs, those.

We might never find the outer bounds but we run afoul of it constantly, usually because we’re too wrapped up in our ideas of how the world should be according to our own ideas and ideals to notice how the world is.

“That doesn’t work” is True Law passing judgment. Ignoring a predictable failure while making other plans around it is a common way to achieve a calamity.

Don’t say that like it’s a good thing. Remember, it’s a parasitic entity-- it thrives as long as it exists as a subversion, not a dominant culture and belief system.

Sabik practice is difficult to eliminate because it’s not so much wrong as a colossally bad idea. Its beating heart is the rejection of community at all levels and the wholehearted embrace of the will to power. The ideal Savant is a person who exists only for themselves.

They may build cities. They may lead armies. But neither the city nor the army serves any cause greater than the Savant. They may band together in common cause, but as colleagues and rivals. Loyalty is an exploitable weakness in their eyes, after all. They may serve a stronger power, but even that will be for their own survival.

And remember that the person at the heart of a Sabik cult almost always takes the title of Savant. Any limits or tests or qualifications on such a claim exist to limit competition.

(Bloody Omir’s innovation is to make Savant status open to anyone, prisoners very much included, adequately capable of atrocity. His Blood Raiders are a group bound together by the horrors they’ve all committed and their shared will to survive regardless, at war with essentially the whole world.)

(To my eye this is less a real innovation than an unmasking: rejection of even the outermost limits civilization places on us and full embrace of the self even if it means becoming monstrous is precisely what defines a Savant.)

Yes-- sort of. His was a sort of hybrid between Sabik and Amarr practice, though the main Sabik qualities were the Red God and a fixation on blood. He had a particular “thing” for large-scale blood sacrifice and other “horrors” he believed his Red God found pleasing.

(Even the more mainstream Amarr do still consider blood important; my oath of service to Directrix Phonaga is sealed in this way.)

His faith in the Red God ultimately broke, and he reverted to the Amarr faith. He even stuck with it for a while, until a certain person persuaded him it was safe to start listening to his own accursed pathological ego again, so of course he’s once more a heretical prophet.

If anybody happens to meet Morgana Tsukiyo, please kick her for me. Hard.

19

Do you know ecosystems can be totally destroyed because the extinction of one species who was coexisting with other similars (and differents) and (also involuntarily) contributing to maintain that equilibrium of the biodiversity? And do you know that cannibalism leads also to 100% lethal illnesses like prion infection? Cannibalism decrease food needs, competition and also your survivality; if it’s short-term, sure it’s for survival primal necessity, caused by the “selfish gene”.
Humans adapt more than other animals since biologically more intelligent compared to animals.

Indeed. And that’s why we need as more diverse “own ideas” as possible; to find the one always closer to the “true law”.

You responded yourself and the question persists: Isn’t a bit like other fanatical/zealot amarr holders think? Just changing “Savant” with “god” or with “empress”.
For the rest, you told about the Blood Raiders; not the Sani Sabik in general.

Hm, there aren’t many information about this “Red god”. Should he ask Nauplius or do you think he will negate that?

20

So remember that the Sabik parted company with the Amarr at the time of the Moral Reforms. Those reforms weren’t named on a whim; they can be thought of as a moral purification of the Amarr faith.

So, yes, there’s a relation: Savants think the way a very bad Holder thinks.

Service is basic to Amarrian ideals. Every level of the hierarchy can be described as servants of one kind and another, up to and including the Empress. A common Amarrian response to objections to slavery is that they’re all slaves-- all servants to those above, and ultimately to God.

Sani Sabik hierarchy tends to look superficially similar (often on a similarly feudal model) except that what’s basic to Sabik ideals is mastery/dominion.

It’s the difference between in principle ruling a realm for the realm’s benefit and ruling a realm, even in principle, strictly for your own.

There’s … some variety there is my understanding. The Red God isn’t a universal concept in Sabik practice. Remember that the Sabik were once Amarr of a kind; the Red God is their answer to, well, God. In some versions (I seem to remember Dr. Valate talking about this), the Red God desires immortal Savants as companions. In others a Savant’s ultimate purpose is to replace the Red God (possibly even by the wishes of that same being).

Specifics can and likely will vary from cult to cult.

In Nauplius’s case the “Red God” was basically just God imagined as a sadistic, vengeful, pitiless, spiteful, hateful being whose main focus is harming people “he” (not going to dignify that with a capital H) doesn’t like. By, like, torturing them forever.

That version of a deity seemed a little unpleasant even for Nauplius, though. He definitely has his own deep-seated hatreds but at least towards the end it seemed pretty clear he was following this dire vision largely because he didn’t want to get tortured forever himself.