Because, very simply, there are plenty of us who found Heth to be dislikeable.
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One Iâd add, my lord:
- It takes a nostalgic, even worshipful view of a glorious mythic past, which through violent struggle may be attained once again. Only by a violent purge of all obstacles and enemies may this idealized past be recovered. Typically this manifests as a rejection of both present and future changes from a nostalgically ârememberedâ time that most likely never existed in so ideal a form to begin with.
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Iâm not. Iâm telling you what youâve told me. Itâs been in posts like this one. Or this one. Here, or here, or even in how important it is to you to choose your words carefully.
Now, Iâm sure youâll tell me that Iâve misunderstood your words⌠but I donât think I have. I think youâre subconsciously choosing to be inconsistent because you donât like me doing to you what you just did to everyone else. And you shouldnât like it. So donât do it.
As for the Caldari outlook⌠I donât think it does. I think itâs pretty foundational to the Caldari outlook. Itâs expected that people will make the choice to serve. When they donât make that choice, itâs offensive to a lot of Caldariâweâve seen that again and again on this forum, and I donât just mean from She Who Shall Not Be Named.
If the choice itself werenât critical, it wouldnât be offensive. Itâd just be âwell, youâre dumb, but whateverâ. It may not get analyzed enough to consciously determine âthis is why it angers meâ by those folks, but people donât get offended by things they donât consider important.
And such regulation will usually take the form of directives given to still privately-held industry, rather than the direct nationalization / assumption of public ownership of those industries.
Itâs more that realityâs more complex than language conveys. I can talk about choices made, sure, but thatâs mostly because I donât have more precise, specialized language for talking about choices as a determinist.
Which you already know full well I am.
So, sort of. But a lot of work is done to make sure that for most of us, itâs never really a choice. The ideal Caldari is basically a unit, like an organ or even a cell in an overlapping collection of meta-organisms (family, corporation, State), serving an appropriate role given their characteristics.
(I wouldnât ever have been a very good Caldari I donât think, though even jaalan like me have our uses.)
For the Amarr, also, uniformity is important. Youâve probably heard the litany of warnings against free thought, etc. That said, they do believe in free will even if that free will must be subordinated.
Maybe personal agency is sacred, Arrendis, but I think itâs sacred to you. There are others to whom itâs an issue, a bug to be worked around, a flaw, a bringer of discord, something to be minimized or controlled to the maximum degree possible.
And if thatâs offensive to you, then we may finally have found your faith.
And yet, here you are saying non-deterministic things. âI kinda wishâ indicates a preference rather than the acceptance that all things are inevitably going to be as they were always going to be. Which, of course, is perfectly in keeping with determinism, because you were always going to express the non-deterministic sentiment. The illusion of free will wouldnât be convincing to anyone if it werenât impossible to disprove, after all.
But by the same token, your determinism isnât also fatalistic. It never has been. You get angry at things, you attempt to push your will on the universe around you. You do it every time you fire your weapons, or get annoyed at He Who Has Yaks. Youâre not simply resigned and accepting, though you sometimes express a desire to be.
Heck, you engage in discussions of personal responsibilityâwhich, if things are truly deterministic, is a moot concept. If nobody ever had any ability to not do the things they do, they cannot be responsible for those actions any more than they can be responsible for the weather on a planet in another star system: there was never a way to change those events.
You exist in the region of determinism that accepts that even if the universe is deterministic, we will always act as though we have agency. Attempting to live as though we donât means being purely reactive, and ceding everything we do as a complex cascade of stimulus-response incidents, even if itâs one thatâs so complex, we can never isolate all of the variables, and so never truly predict it all.
If that sounds familiar, itâs because you and I have discussed exactly this issue in the past. Weâre getting very close to the point where youâll be unable to refute any of this, and will loudly declare yourself bored with this conversation and so done with it⌠again.
Which, in the end, is still a choice. Thatâs what gives virtue and faith in the Amarr system value: you could choose to sin, but you instead choose virtue, rather than instant gratification of doing what you want to do.
That whole âuniform thought vs free thoughtâ litany? Thatâs not a denial of agency. Itâs a celebration of it. The Amarr are called upon to invoke their personal agency⌠in sacrificing their personal agency. And sacrifices have value because the thing being sacrificed has value.
Hmmm. Sort of.
But.
Only to the degree that the concept cannot itself influence outcomes. Which it can, so, not moot.
Thatâs the point, Arrendis: how we talk and think about things is an ingredient in how our decisions will work, and the outcomes reached. Part of mine is that I favor context over agency, which means when dealing with âevilâ I look for causes, reasons, instead of moral failings.
Someone whoâs sick might be curable or at least treatable. Someone whoâs hurt might be able to heal. Seeing such things in this light makes it possible to imagine salvaging someone the world doesnât think is worth saving. Moral pronouncements just get in the way.
So agency, and the related âchoiceâ between right and wrong, can get stuffed.
The two arenât just not mutually exclusive, though, theyâre directly complimentary. Someone suffering from a condition that can be treated is a mitigating factor in determining responsibility. Factors like thatâcontext, in other wordsâis an important part of agency. Acting under duress, under the influence of chemical substances or impaired function, and so on, are all part and parcel of these considerations.
Agency is not about morality. Itâs not about âevilâ or âright and wrongâ. That framework hasnât even entered into this until just now, when you inserted it.
It was there from the start, whether we acknowledged it or not. Maybe not for you, though you have a very active habit of moralizing such âdecisionsâ as continued loyalty to the Amarr Empire.
Definitely for me.
This is your worldview, Arrendis, not mine. And youâre talking about different factors than I was, anyway-- factors that inhibit or limit choice, rather than factors that go into generating a decision.
Column A: âwas drunk; was emotionally unstable.â
Column B: âwas raised in an environment that normalized and celebrated violence; witnessed or was subject to multiple acts of domestic violence from a young age.â
The morality of decisions has nothing to do with the agency involved in making them. Such a decision can be moral, immoral⌠heck, it can be completely a-moral, with no moral weight whatsoever, like âwhat flavor of ice cream do I get?â
Decrying a decision as immoral is not in any way, shape, or form, a comment on the value of the agency that goes into it.
No, Iâm just using different examples to illustrate the same point. Just as an individual from column A has compromised agency, an individual from column b has compromised agency until they are exposed to other ideas and environments, until they have the chance to evaluate such environments and choose to be something other than what they have been.
Heck, maybe until they go on an extended Sojourn around the cluster and choose where it is they feel they belong. Everyone is a product of their developmental environment, and it shapes their agency.
And if you want to try to claim that I donât absolutely 100% believe and practice that, Aria, look at who the feck I live with.
Canât agree at all. A decision made without agency is by its nature morally weightless. Itâs like calling a gun evil because it fires when its trigger is pulled. Unless youâre defining âevilâ as âharmful/dangerous/predatoryâ or something, as a lot of stories in practice seem to, itâs hard to treat something simply functioning according to a series of interacting causal mechanisms as morally culpable.
When confronting something ⌠really awful ⌠though, even I sometimes forget that. After all, moral judgment, correct or not, is common to the human experience. In a way such a judgment is really just a judgment about the appropriate reaction to the entity responsible for some horrid thing, and the survival reaction is going to be, âAvoid or, better, get rid of the threat.â
Itâs the safe, practical response, even if itâs not fair. It seems to be how weâre wired.
So even if all it does is get in the way ⌠Iâm not immune to strong feelings, either.
I was actually thinking more in terms of the individual occupying both, but whatever. I kind of like your notion of background stuff as a form of compromised agency; it meshes well with your worldview, helping to excuse those for whom it would have been hard to be any other way.
Hm. Yeah, I like that bit of nuance.
Heeeeey, can I get smilies too?
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Oooh, bad news then, because youâre not disagreeing at all. 
Saying âthe morality of decisions has nothing to do with the agency involved in making themâ is very much not the same as saying âthe agency involved in a decision has nothing to do with the morality of the decisions madeâ. If I choose to do something moral, I had agency. If I choose to do something immoral, I had agency.
If I had no agency, then whatever I did has no inherent morality or immorality. It simply happened, and I never made a real decision to make it happen. Gravity accelerating me toward the ground doesnât have a moral implication, but then, I didnât have any agency in whether or not that acceleration would happen.
But maybe we can chalk that one up to a lack of clarity on my part, and the original statement should have been âThe agency involved in making decisions is not dependent on, nor influenced by, the morality of the decision being madeâ. Since, you know, you were in the middle of claiming that context and agency are directly conflicting concerns, that you have to choose one over the other.
BTW?
Thatâs an argument that agency itself has value, in both the Caldari system (which calls choosing to put personal good over collective good immoral) and the Amarr system (which very definitely assigns moral weight to the choice of sinning or not sinning). People are expected to behave in a moral way⌠which means their agency isnât just important, but necessary, and âgoodâ, because it is what gives their actions moral weight.
Itâs not about excusing them, though. Itâs about understanding âwhyâ. Because without understanding âwhyâ, you can never get past the conflict to move toward harmony, and harmony is always better for serving the larger needs of the whole.
So⌠just to illustrate what I mean⌠3 people, all raised within the same larger culture. Obviously, some variations in their upbringing, but with the same fundamental world view, and who interact harmoniously for many years with a singular commonality of purpose.
Person 1 is exposed to something that challenges their worldview. They explore that challenge, and based on what they learn, made a decision that their prior worldview was flawed. The decision to explore that challenge is made under compromised agency, but within the context of what agency they had, the decision is a perfectly valid one that then sets them on a path to having to make a decision with moral weight afterwards.
Person 2 is exposed to a similar challenge, and rejects the challenge entirely. Their worldview remains unchanged. They are also operating under compromised agency, which informs their decision to reject that challenge. The decision itself isnât necessarily moral or immoral, and the resulting continuance of their worldview certainly doesnât have moral weightâit just happens to them.
Person 3 is also exposed to the same kind of challenge, and engages with it. After confronting this new knowledge about the limitations of their worldview, they decide to adhere to the old worldview despite knowing it is fundamentally wrong. The initial decision is made under the same compromised agency as the first two, but the resulting second decision has a different moral value than Person 1âs decision. Not that Persons 1 and 3 are making decisions with different moral weight, but simply different moral value. A 1 ton block of âyesâ and a 1 ton block of ânoâ have the same weight, but different values, after all.
Now, the reason the initial decision doesnât carry an intrinsic moral weight is that compromised agency means âthis is what I know, and I am adhering to what I knowâ is a perfectly valid way to be. We arenât obligated to accept those challenges when they arise. But once we do engage with them⌠well, then weâre responsible for how we respond. 
Look! Smilies!
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Oh, good. The statement as I read it seemed like an odd statement for you to be making.
I ⌠donât ⌠think thatâs quite what I was arguing. I donât really treat agency as a âthing.â That doesnât quite mean I think itâs necessarily inconsistent with context; I just donât think itâs a real thing. Which I seem to recall youâve conceded in the past may in fact be the case, but that it doesnât matter anyway because we canât really tell.
I think it does matter, because treating it as though it isnât real lets us ignore âfree willâ (with its moral baggage) and get down to addressing whatâs actually going on.
(It might have negative effects as well. Fatalism is something I personally struggle with just a bit, but actually I struggle with a lot of stuff so maybe thatâs not unique and special enough to be a real problem on its own.)
I feel like this is maybe the point of the conversation where you and I converge until weâre fiercely debating two faces of a single ancient coin. For me itâs not about âexcusingâ-- thatâs part of a whole discussion of culpability that just ⌠itâs not very helpful? Like, even to get into?
I upset people sometimes with this because it sounds like Iâm taking the side of unconscionable things. Iâm normally not, though; Iâm trying to understand them in greater depth and detail so that I see how they fit into the scheme of things and what, if anything, is to be done.
So, again, the Amarr believe in free will (they just think it has to be subordinated to God), so theyâre kind of on your side in this. Thatâs no contradiction. For the Caldari itâs maybe more ambiguous, but definitely agency isnât taken as, well, sacred.
Speaking for myself, though ⌠this is something I donât think Iâve gotten into deeply with you, and you might understandably think Iâve been avoiding (I have, but, maybe not for the reasons you expect).
So, language and its traps.
Are you familiar with the idea of True Names, Arrendis?
(If anybody isnât, itâs the idea of magical names for things that directly address that thing, usually some kind of spirit but depending on the tradition it can extend to virtually anything, at the root of its very nature, usually either as an invocation to make that thing appear or followed by some kind of command that that thing is then forced to obey.)
Itâs a popular concept in a lot of traditions, but to me itâs one of the most frustrating concepts out there because it places language as directly superior to, and able to reashape, concrete reality. Reality is hard enough to navigate without this idea that our ham-fisted attempts to communicate about aspects of it are somehow the REAL reality and that the landslide coming down on top of you knows and cares whether it has one name (âlandslide,â âavalancheâ) or many (âthree five-ton boulders, eighty one-ton boulders, six thousand five-to-ten-kilo rocks, vast quantities of miscellaneous gravel, pebbles, and dust, and a hell of a lot of effectively liquified dirtâ).
Really I think if thereâs a feeling all that matter is having in that moment it would probably be closer to a relaxing sigh.
Language is clumsy and imprecise, even when itâs describing relatively easy stuff. Thereâs a lot of vague pattern-matching and interpretation involved. And as I think youâre already aware Iâm perfectly comfortable with the idea of useful illusions.
Words (abstract symbolic representations of concepts, not the concepts themselves) are a great example. But, like all illusions, they tend to be misleading at least on some level.
I use words because theyâre the tools I have, not because they perfectly match what Iâm trying to convey, Arrendis. If mine seem sometimes to contradict what Iâve said elsewhere, often itâll be for this reason. I use the tools Iâve got.
(Sometimes though itâll be because Iâm in the middle of feeling my way through something or else because Iâm human and therefore squishy and inconsistent. Or a hypocrite. Probably everybody does that sometimes, too.)
Yay! 
I have never liked you, and never agreed with you on any topic of substance.
That aside, it is nice to see an old face and even better to hear this. I do honestly wish happiness and joy on you and yours. And am pleased to see life is in general on the upward trend for you.
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Ok, but then we get back to you existing in the part of determinism that accepts that âeven if we donât have free will, we have to always act like we doâ that you already responded to withâŚ
And by the way?
Just to make the point: If the universe is deterministic⌠no, it canât. Nothing can, because the universe is deterministic. Everyone was always going to make the decisions they make, because they never had any way to not make that decision. So, you get either determinism or personal responsibility. Canât have both. Those two are mutually exclusive.
So wait, is culpabilityâyou know, personal responsibilityâmoot or not?
All of Caldari morality is predicated on it, because agency is a prerequisite for moral significance. And the State definitely adheres to concepts of morality that they claim (and I tend to agree) guide their actions.
Of course.
Evidence suggests that âconcrete realityâ may be illusory in the first place. At the very least, we know that our perception of reality is definitely illusory. So the reality that humanity experiences is, in an ironically real way, a shared hallucination, communicated through shared symbolism and interpretation. The laws of physics, for example, arenât actually laws that bind anything. Rather, theyâre our best attempts to explain⌠what?
The universe? Not really, because we canât agree on an objective universe. Different people in different places experience things differently, event to the point of not experiencing events in necessarily the same order. At best, they experience causality in the same order.
So, our physical laws are actually our best attempts to explain our experience of the universe. Theyâre symbols intended to convey interpretations.
In that regard⌠yeah. Our ham-fisted attempts to communicate about aspects of it? They do define part of the reality we each experience. That doesnât mean they necessarily define it predictively, and doesnât mean you need language in order to experience something, mind you. Experiencing a sudden, massive series of kinetic impacts doesnât need language, but informing others about it does.
Similarly, the concept of True Names (or Truenames, in some constructions) doesnât change your experience of âyouâ⌠it just serves in those frameworks as a symbol to authoritatively reference a specific individual.
I doubt very much thereâs any âfeelingâ in all that matter, but since âobservationâ in physics is just a shorthand for âinteractionsâ in part because physicists use the term mostly in the framework of communicating, not directly experiencing⌠all that matter is âobservingâ that moment. The quantum fields that define that matter are interacting with other quantum fields.
Itâs only relatively easy stuff because youâre used to accepting the framework of your senses⌠which, after all, we know to be both illusory, and pretty well wrong. For example, that mass of matter youâre talking about?
Describing it accurately either requires vaguely omitting a massive amount of detail⌠or a massive amount of math, covering each of the dozen-and-a-half or so different quantum fields⌠for each particle/string.
And even then⌠the description will probably still be wrong, for a bunch of reasons, ranging from âcanât measure everything accurately all at onceâ to âour experience of reality is an illusion we build one 80-100ms packet at a timeâ, with things like âis all of space-time a projection into our awareness of a far more complex topography that weâre not capable of comprehending?â
Because the evidence weâve got suggest it might be⌠and if we canât comprehend whatâs actually real⌠then yeah, Aria⌠all we have is symbolism.
Oops! I forgot to add smilies! 
Well, most of those donât apply to either the Caldari State or the Empire, so I donât see why that term is applied to them.
In fact, I suspect this term âfascistâ is just more Gallentean exceptionalism nonsense, based on how the Garoun âWorld Democracy Leagueâ subjugated the other nation-states of Gallente Prime.
I wrote a post once about why Federal citizens often behave patronisingly towards people from other cultures.
Seems to me that this term âfascistâ is another such patronising thing. Calling other cultures by terms that only ever really applied to the subjugated nation-states of historical Gallente Prime.
Tedious, really.
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So ⌠I usually leave the contradictions to you, but I donât think you understand the determinist model very well, Arrendis. Itâs not only the outcome that is determined; itâs all of it, cause leading on to an effect that is itself a cause, and so on.
Sure people always, at the same point in time, make the decisions they make, but they also make them for the reasons they make them. The whole process works, simply, how it works. It may work differently somewhere else depending on the many-worlds option for explaining quantum weirdness, but a person who succeeds because they try hard was only going to succeed because they tried hard-- but they were also always going to try, and try hard, and always for the same reasons.
Itâs not that outcomes occur magically, acausally. Itâs that the flow of cause and effect is all-encompassing, including what subjectively looks to us like âmaking decisions.â
Subjectively it feels no different from âfree will,â but the underlying reality is just things rolling along to cause other things.
That was at least halfway a joke, imagining all that tension and potential energy sprawling happily out in languid entropy, but sure.
Is okay.
You said a lot of other interesting stuff Iâll have to mull over for a bit, but let me go back to something you said before.
I suppose this might explain why you seem to find me so frustrating. I tend to engage and even enjoy philosophical challenges, within reason (I like exploring reality; I do not like being a practice dummy or chew toy). Do you feel like I know, or should know, better by now?
Doesnât that rely on the assumption that the conclusions I would reach after extensive travel and exploration are the same as your own, though?
Yes, obviously. Thatâs exactly why no, personal responsibility cannot itself influence outcomes. Because nothing can. And on top of that⌠there is no personal responsibility, because determinism.
And those reasons were always going to be what they are in that moment. The moment the universe existed, those choices were already set in stone, because everything will play out how it plays out at every moment in between.
I feel like youâre still looking into the challenge to your worldview, and more, refusing to make any decision until youâve found every possible challenge to it.
No, because thereâs no assumption that any of the examples involved have anything in common with me. I might be person number 3, neh?
Technically, yes, but the concept of personal responsibility could be included, or not, in causal chains (fractal webs, really), likely leading to different outcomes.
Itâs not so much that we canât change the outcomes; itâs more that weâre tangled up in the outcomes in such a way that whether we will include certain concepts is not actually a choice we make. Itâs likely to feel like one, though!
Maybe some other Aria in some distant quantum universe makes a different call, because some particle scatter tips things a little somehow. Wouldnât it be amazing to see some of the worlds where things worked out a little differently, especially long ago?
In such-and-such a world the Prophet Gheinokâs next-door neighbor opted to grow a crop of cucumbers instead of potatoes. What changes? Oo, that would be so neat to see!
Anyway, Iâm not 100% on everything really being worked out from the universeâs start (because quantum weirdness) but yes, it does seem pretty clear to me that what I think and the decisions I make are less âmineâ than most people might like to believe: all a bunch of stones and such tumbling down a hill.
And one of the ways we bump and jar against each other is the ideas we trade. Thatâs a form of influence, and it is included in the outcomes.
That ⌠is ⌠a very interesting notion. Iâll have to think about that.
Hmmmmm. True, but you do tend to be pretty confident in your perspectives you know? âNo, Aria,â could have been your personal tagline for, like, months, a few years back.
Maybe not forever, though. Weâre all objects, processes, in motion after all.