Wow! That was a very sad story – I hope you’re okay!
Although it would be scary if your past incarnation resurfaces!
It would be like a self-dialectic on who is the real Aria Jenneth! Or maybe like a lengthy legal battle.
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So I was reading an article about a research study from the University of Caille that said some really nasty things about the Caldari State! Supposedly authoritarian regimes and cult institutions use the same techniques to control behaviour, information, thought, and emotions to alter reality through what they call the “BITE” method. Then the study said it applies to the State in the following ways:
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Corporations seek to control the physical reality of citizens and who, how, when, and why they associate with. Examples would be corporate control of housing, mass surveillance of the public, and promotion of membership within clubs and associations of those belonging to similar socioeconomic classes.
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When, how, and with whom a citizen has sex with. This can be seen by social strictures on pre-marital sex and the control exerted by corporate marriage authorities on marital sex and their ability to promote marital sex solely between those of similar ethnicity and socioeconomic class.
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Corporate control of clothing, dress, and hairstyle through determining what is and what is not deemed appropriate in the workplace or socially.
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Financial reliance on corporations through the scrip system. Gambling and consumerism is promoted with the aim of reducing potential savings and continued reliance on corporate employment.
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Discouragement of individualism, and encouragement of group-think. Individualism is decried as morally reprehensible or selfish whereas subservience to the group is promoted as heroic or selfless.
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Behaviour modification through a system of incentives and disincentives for citizens.
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Dissent or questioning corporate authority can lead to physical violence or punishment.
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Creation of an Outsider versus Insider doctrine (Us vs. Them). The State is portrayed as being in a struggle for survival against outside forces framed as evil or malicious requiring the constant sacrifice of the citizen.
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Compartmentalization of information into Outsider versus Insider. Outside information is distorted, misquoted or taken out of context, or deemed evil, wrong, or malicious.
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Extensive use of propaganda and censorship to maintain cultural, historical, and political narratives.
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Those capable of critical thinking or constructive thought are tightly regulated and controlled. For example, scientists and technicians are forced to live in separate enclaves.
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The forbidding of critical criticisms of leaders or policy.
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Use of jargon, jingoism, and cliches to suspend critical thinking and reduce complexities into platitudes or buzz words.
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Promote “good and proper” thoughts by teaching thought-stopping techniques to stop negative or critical thoughts such as with “mind tool” promoted by the corporations.
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Make citizens feel guilt or unworthiness. Meritocracy is used to blame the citizen for their own lack of success not the system or leadership. Heiian culture is used to promote feelings of shame over loss of honour or prestige.
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Instill fear of leaving the corporation or State by promoting shunning by former friends and family, the threat of becoming a non-entity, and persecution as a traitor.
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Encouragement of spying on others on behalf of the corporation or State.
Altogether I think it was all just more libertine propaganda out of the Federation!
I don’t believe anyone would think someone from the State sounds like they’re in some kind of cult!
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A lot of those would have been more directly on-point during the Heth regime, Ms. Ryuzouji. Taken together, yes, a lot of it seems to be what Federals would expect to see in the State rather than what’s actually there. For example, jalaan dissidents in the State aren’t looked especially well on and can have trouble finding work, but are mostly tolerated. After all, a regime that closes its ears to criticism is closing off the most straightforward route to self-improvement.
It’s something regimes that are afraid of their own people do, stifling dissent. The State mostly doesn’t need to be: given the choice, it’s doubtful the Caldari as a people would want to become a democracy even if they got to vote on it. They’re not that naïve (or, as a Federal might put it, “optimistic”).
Really, the Caldari as a people are pretty authoritarian, if that means being community-minded, trusting of authority, and willing as a rule to leave the big decisions to people qualified to make them.
Keep in mind that lists like the one you cited get promulgated by people content to be ruled by the winners of popularity contests held before an impassioned mob, which has itself produced at least one fully fascist regime. It’s not necessarily wrong (at least in all ways), but it’s not clear they’ve got a better idea.
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Thinking on it a bit, I think unless you’re an anarchist (who are silly anyway) there’s always a loss of freedom and autonomy if you’re a part of a society. Some of the points made in that University of Caille study could just as easily apply to the Federation itself or anywhere else really where people make social groups. Even capsuleer nullsec blocs seems to have hierarchies, rules, in/out groups, propaganda, information control, and the like.
Maybe having to deal with such things is just a part of the human condition and part of the cost of entry in being part of a polity. It’s probably less a question of what’s right or wrong in absolute terms, but what you can personally stand to live with.
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Individual freedom is not about the ability to do whatever you will, it is about ability to choose freely which associations offered you take and which you discard, which ones not offered to you naturally you apply for and which one you don’t. We’re all part of something; the question is to which extent we choose what we are part of, or not.
Loyalty not freely given is worth nothing.
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Well, it’s always amusing how someone committing something bad blames others in doing so left and right. First of all, they say that ‘authoritarian regime’ or ‘totalitarian regime’ like something bad, which certainly isn’t, the real bad regime is democratic. But anyway, I was going to point a different thing: cult institutions. Our cult insitutions are wayist shrines and they have absolutely nothing to do with corporations. Moreover, ones who are thoroughly brainwashed and follow awkward cult of freedom are gallenteans themselves, who are indoctrinated into infallible goodness of freedom, which makes them obviously unintelligent fanatics who can’t accept facts.
And, lets see, the mentioned ways show that they try to judge us like a filthy jaijii, like outsiders who don’t even bother to understand what’s going on in the State.
The gallenteans simply cant realize that these are just services the Corporations provide to citizens. What most of our citizens would do without the housing rent that Corporations offer them? Sleep on streets for a dozen years before they earn to actually buy themselves a tiny tiny house hundreds of kilometers away from the place where they work?..
Gallente with their brainwashing into individualism simply lose their humanity, because humans were forged to be social. Among thousans and millions of people with different interests it’s really hard to find a group of similar interests, and we are grateful to our corporations they do this job to us. But what for humans is good, for subhuman gallenteans it’s clearly something bad.
AKHEM… Excuse me, lets not descend the conversation into submarginal zone by discussing in public taboo topics like this act itself, that sholdn’t even be mentioned in a civilized setting, leave these talks for uncultured swines. So, lets talk about the marriages themselves without touching the taboo side of it.
It’s quite saying that gallente don’t even realize how Marriage Agencies work. They again don’t understand that it’s a service provided to citizens. And that it’s done by scientists, not corporate leaderships. It’s a science, it’s eugenics, it help us grow happy healthy pureblood children, they make a good matches for spouses so they don’t fight each other in the morning. Thinking that it’s political - it’s just ignorance. These scientists they don’t take instructions from corporate leadership, because they are professionals, it’s their job and they know it way better than any CEO or board of directors. Telling them whom they should marry with whom is about the same as my superior officer would tell me use in all my combat operations only beam lasers with scorch crystals because he likes the color! And then you sit and think… how you even suppose to put scorch into beam Just like I am a professional in choosing what weapon and ammo to use, they are professionals in choosing whom to marry to whom. They make families that are happy in marriage, they have proper children, then have content parents…
And if you see at statistics, we have high marriage rate, and very low divorce rate: if you have a harmonic family, you just don’t get a reason to divorce! In comparison with Federation - they have very low marriage rate and very high divorce rate.
Our system is better, our system works. Because it’s based on science!
That part is actually… backwards, because what is appropriate is dictated rather by a society, while the corporations accept that and enforce the rules to get rid of troublemakers who with their appearance annoy the rest of the citizens.
The only thing that is dictated by corporation itself is the uniform if the corporation requires workers to wear a proper uniform, but even that uniform always shall always follow social standards. Imagine what happens if a corporation introduces an uniform that citizens consider inappropriate… I don’t think that even combined Navy and corporate police will be able to stop that riot!
Have gallenteans ever wondered what does it mean to stop citizens from gambling?..
No, really, risk is everything, it’s a very huge motivator! A lot of us gamble with our lives, others gamble with whole enterprise and family wealths. Others, who are not so daring resort to simple gambling games with limited sums of scripts just to use that as an outlet. What our lives would be without risk? Pure freaking BO-RE-DOM! Gallente just don’t know how to have fun, they are boring creeps like grey mud pools who don’t understand the risks and gambling, and they think it’s something bad. That’s why we don’t go to live in Federation, we’d just die of boredom among these hedonistic swines.
I mean, individualism is almost a synonym for selfishness, it’s just promiting personal ideals for the sake of yourself. Without the moral side, factually it is selfish, whether you consider selfishness good or wrong. For the person’s internal viewpoint being selfish is good because it means doing what that person needs. But it’s just becaue gallenteans are too selfish and too myopic to see needs of other people around them they consider individualism good… or maybe it’s just their brainwashing by their government that intentionally turns them into monsters.
Well, I probably could go through the rest of points as well, but I believe even this is enough to see that they simply have no idea what they’re talking about it’s better to quarantine Federal transmissions from the rest of the cluster, because answering all their points is a useless waste of time.
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I am looking for a specialist in Caldari history. Especially interesting is the Raata empire.
A good point!
Although sometimes I think a lot of the problems in the cluster come about when one tries to impose one’s own choices on those who have chosen differently of their own volition – usually said to be “for their own good”.
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individual freedom does not exist in the new eden…
In a world where you cannot fully satisfy your needs on your own, your personal freedom = the personal responsibility of the director, or vice versa, the dedication of employees.
As a philosopher, I insist that there is personal freedom in the new Eden, although this is achieved only through interaction.
there will never be individual freedom in the dungeon… and the more connections the greater the loss of freedom… God has left the world open, man has left it closed…
Can’t tell if you’re trying to lure out the dissidents, or those willing to go on record toeing the line at any cost.
Either way, interesting.
Interesting, I don’t disagree. Is loyalty freely given to two different parties of equal worth?
The saying itself simply states that forced loyalty has no value; it is not really intended to imply there is some kind of particular value or measure to loyalties in general.
That said, I think most of us have some kind of internal scale of which of our loyalties override which; if in a pinch we will pick alliance or circle, clan or corporation, sister or lover. We have assumptions of others to follow the cultural norms of such scales, or in the very least to inform us if they do not. I make it no secret myself that if push really comes to shove, the Free Tribes come before Edencom, my clan before my alliance, my tribal circles before the current Republic, my loyalty to my commander before that to my friends. I can do this because I trust that none of the higher loyalties will abuse this; that they will not ask me to break a lower one unless it is absolutely necessary. A lot of associations are temporary, for now.
I think we all also have what I call ‘primary loyalties’, those that are non-negotiable and (we believe) unchangeable. Rare as it is, when those conflict, the only traditional way out of it is the ‘way of the knife’, where either someone causing the conflict (rarely) or the person experiencing the conflict (more usually) dies. My mother died of a broken heart like that, and I have been in that situation too - though obviously in my case both me and the problems are still alive and I have no intent to change that at this time. Higher loyalty to the survival of what those loyalties represented, I could say. Also maybe that I am more of a coward than the esteemed clanswoman I was born of.
Typically, obviously, most of this is rather than a leading cause of death, an endless source of saga plays and holovids, traditional tales and modern rock songs, and teenage drama and tears.
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I think I’m too much a simple and wholesome woman for deception or ulterior motives!
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There are people who argue that the Caldari and Matari have more in common with each other than with their respective allies. This saying might mark the precise line where that analysis fails.
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Loyalty and Duty are close, but not the same.
The Caldari life is usually one of extreme duty, and sometimes that duty antagonizes with loyalty. (Good of the many > Good of the few)
That said, i do not see the statement as the divisory line, at least not loyalty being it.
How I was raised, we don’t see duty without loyalty. Duty follows from having loyalty - even if it is to a big thing, to Fate or andesh, to humanity itself, or, I guess, to God.
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He might come to know this now you’ve mentioned this in a public forum.
I just watched the recording of this attack again, knowing it formed you in part. I’m wondering why you deserved it. Were you really lying to her?
Does it, though? If someone feels a sense of duty or obligation that compels them to be loyal, it’s still their choice to be loyal. I’ve a duty to my Clan and my Tribe, but I choose to honor that obligation with my loyalty. I could easily work at cross-purposes to them, all while smiling and maintaining the appearance of loyalty.
Forcing someone to be loyal… that puts them in a position where… ugh, no. It’s like trying to say that there’s honor in obeying the laws of gravity.
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