Divinity Social and Insensitivity

I’ll be completely honest here: finding it would take me quite a lot of time and it’s late, so I’m going to play for time here on my way to rack out for the night, and hope @Uriel_Paradisi_Anteovnuecci swoops in with his encyclopaedic knowledge of these things1 to say ‘oh, here it is!’ and swoop on out again. If that doesn’t happen, I’ll go rooting through the threads of the last 30 months in a sort of shambling lurch until I dig it up for you2.

There is no synthesis of binary propositions. You cannot, for example, answer the question of ‘do we exterminate the rogue drones or not?’ with a middle ground. There is no middle ground. Either you exterminate them, or you don’t. If you kill some of them, that’s still not exterminating them, so it remains one of the two binary options, not a middle ground.

There’s a lot of issues like that, and even when there is synthesis to be achieved, being one of the parties contributing to it remains an exercise in control. Being the group not contributing is, after all, powerlessness.

A final answer to the question. Right now, that question’s still open-ended, ie: not settled.


1. Which would be terrifyingly freakish if he wasn’t one of the people producing most of the actual research. Instead it’s just gratifying that he knows his own material well.

2. And, you know, if it turns out I’m wrong and misremembering the research that’s been done, I’m sure he’ll point that out, too, only, you know, with actual citations of ‘no, look, here. This is what it actually said, stupid’. Only, you know, with less ‘stupid’ because I’m a jerk, he’s not.