Amerika

During the early years of learning to write code, becoming fascinated with sorting routines seems like a rite of passage. After you write your first bubble sort, it seems that everything else is an optimization on that.

First, you learn to treat the task as a human — optimized by millions of years of natural selection before even the hominid stage — would do: you break the list into small segments, and figure out how to estimate how many high numbers each one has, moving those toward the top of the stack while moving low numbers to the bottom.

Then you strategically sort each segment from high to low, and knit them together while taking into account overlap, ending up with a nice spectrum from low to high. There are many other shortcuts, each of which can be the foundation for a technique of sorting.

For years, those of us who are not Denialists — those who want to believe that the conjectured society of equality can function, and who therefore fear and hate those who offer competing ideas that by their existence invalidate that conjecture — have looked for a term to describe what we are.

We have a different morality, one based in outcomes in reality and not human social perceptions. These moralities are distinct:

• Denialists: good to the good, and good to the bad, a.k.a. “equality.”
• Sortists: good to the good, and bad to the bad, a.k.a. natural selection or morality.

The latter is unpopular because it requires people to contribute something — productivity, creativity, order, beauty — in order to be assessed as good or bad, and therefore be rewarded (or not).

It serves as the only form of actual meritocracy, a system where those who do good experience reward, and everyone else gets less or nothing. Meritocracy is the opposite of equality, where everyone is in advance assumed to be good and entitled to some rewards, usually taken from some of the others.

Sortists recognize that society is not a static thing, nor are populations. They must always keep producing good people in order to have enough of a ratio of good to bad that the society can survive.

This works best in a homogeneous society because only those can have a cultural standard of morality, and therefore make choices about what is good and what is bad for that group, in order to reward some and exclude others.

A really good society will have a constant outflow of bad people who, unable to find reward, move to places that operate by “good to the good, and good to the bad,” like the third world, which is run by warlords who depend on a high bad to good ratio.

Those who see the wisdom of Sortism realize that civilization is first and foremost a biological entity which depends on the health, including moral health, of its population. Without that, it fails, no matter how many laws it has.

As democracy winds down with a high balance of bad to good, new societies are appearing. These are not parallel societies, but incoming successors to the dying Regime of the Denialists.

Tags: morality, natural selection, sorting, sortism, sortists