The technical error in the capitalist/communist story

[Mighara Sovmadhi]

The ideological war between capitalism (or various notions close thereto) and communism (and socialism, etc.) is presented in such apocalyptic terms that one wonders whether economic questions really are so morally pivotal. Now, to be sure, the Christian theorist Paul of Tarsus says something like, "The love of money is at the root of [all kinds of] evil," so perhaps there is some merit to the apocalyptic image in question.

However, this proposal is technically mistaken. We can "demonstrate" this by a relatively simple line of reasoning. Suppose, first, that there is a real set of moral questions. This is a nonwell-founded set: i.e. it exists in descending order, even infinitely so. This is because ethical truth devolves, mathematically, upon the notion of transfinality: we take the infinite universe of sets, and because in other terms there is no final finite number, neither a largest infinity thereof, yet if we recapitulate this universe in descending order, we do indeed have a largest infinity: but no smallest, then. (The descending order never determinately intersects the ascending one.) Among other things, the correlation between free will and absolute infinity guarantees this: although deontic cardinals are comparable among themselves, all of them are inaccessibly greater than morally neutral cardinalities, and moreover, then, are advergent under the total of the set universe.

I know, I said I was drawing on a "simple" argument. The above detour is just meant to underwrite the following assertion: there are final offenses, i.e. types of sin (or evil or wrongdoing or whatever) that are worse than any others. Due to the descending quality of the realm of deontic advergence, there are even only a finite number of these types, hovering around the start of the descending sequence (and therefore in the shadow of the apex of the universe). Now the question is: how many are there?

There are only three. This can be illustrated a posteriori: stipulate (correctly, after all) that the final offenses are "entangled": committing one is substantively implicated in the commission of the others, directly or indirectly. Then, once we have exhausted our historical reflection upon various facts of evil, we should see that there are only three ultimate types of sin that are thus entangled. Why three a priori? The principle of opposition in ethics is just that the concept of evil is reducible to "the opposite of the good." And though it is true, then, that "good is the opposite of evil," we can characterize good independently. By contrast, there are no free-standing negative imperatives: any prohibition must be inferred from a positive moral condition against which it stands. In terms of deontic logic: the obligated has precedence over the forbidden, even among concepts. (It is even a subtle and catastrophic moral error, exhibited by a slew of Christian thinkers especially, to suppose otherwise: witness the horror of the doctrine of "total depravity," which makes sin into the reason for everything, even the Incarnation and the advent of the Holy Spirit.)

So, if goodness in itself is first threefold, then so is evil in itself. The triplexity of good has a basis in transcendental logic: ethics is prescriptive but also assertoric, the pure erotetic operator mediates the truth-aptitude of prescriptive arguments, so ethical reality is a perfect fusion of the three syntactic forms that underscore all other logical form. Kant also illustrates the triplexity of goodness in his image of the threefold formulation of the categorical imperative, and Christianity sanctifies such images in the doctrine of the Trinity. "QED" (or: "and then we are done").

Having sufficiently accounted for a very special threefold negative finality in ethical fact, we now proceed to the issue at hand. So which three types of sin are the worst, as such? Objectively, they are murder, rape, and torture, after all. But subjectively, the abstractions that motivate the most severe, even sociocultural (political!) forms of these things, are: romantic injustice, transcendental delusion, and recursive disgrace.

Romantic injustice becomes a constellation of situational crimes: the theme covers things like patriarchy, child molestation, base grounds for marriage, certain kinds of promiscuity,* etc. Recursive disgrace is a shadow of the error, discussed above, in ordering pure deontic concepts, but now instead of starting with the concept of evil and deducing goodness therefrom, the terror here is to exalt punishment over forgiveness and apologies and redemption: to prioritize retribution over restoration in the sphere of justice. And transcendental delusion is the whole form of disorderly moral concepts, specifically in terms of evidence for moral claims: and this is the core of all evil whatsoever, no less, for inasmuch as it is not possible to will evil in itself for its own sake as such, then the root of evil is a lack of attention in the construction of ethical standards, not a fully conscious decision to violate the possibility of such standards. I will leave it to the reader to assess my claim that these sins are "entangled," though I doubt it would be hard to do so (consider: there are abused children who grow up with distorted perspectives, and their particular rage becomes the flame of general vengeance; and so on).

[*Although, to be sure, this subtype of sexual wrongdoing is actually not that bad; displeasing in general, perhaps, but nothing worthy of atrocity by way of reply!]

So this is where the capitalism-communism metanarrative goes awry: both of these ideologies imply that there is a fourth final offense. In capitalism, the notion of fundamental "property rights" and an attendant horror of theft are the problem; in communism it is the doctrine of "exploitation" that is exaggerated; both, despite their hostility to each other, inspire condemnation of "the lazy" or "unproductive" person. But in fact, doing harm is worse than allowing it: or else we are responsible for the good we allow, too, on pain of deontic contradiction (that is to say, if we are responsible for the evil we allow but not the good, then we find a mass of evil greater than good, conceptually, which goes against the priority of the concept of goodness as such). Yet "allowing" good is just what we ought to, ergo... So, the "indolent" are not sinners thereby. Perhaps, in the light of Apollyon (the false "axiom of destruction" in the moral universe of sets), laziness is even a little commendable, just so far as "being lazy" means doing less and therefore using up less energy (hence, contributing less to that hungry entropy that roams the world, the Cerberus of Apollyon's gates). Yet we don't have to go that far: we can just admit that by itself, there is nothing unspeakable about indolence, even if we are constantly tempted to "push people to do things" (to manage them, but then to become lazy ourselves, after a fashion: and therefore hypocritically, which is extremely wrong, whereof the effluence of transcendental delusion's inverted moral logic).**

**[EDIT: Hence the difference between akrasia and acedia is significant in these terms: acedia is not quite actually evil at all, though akrasia is implicated in the question of all of evil whatsoever.]

And money is not so important, anyway, neither "working hard" to gain it. Nor is having a lot of money when others don't, such a wicked thing. Or: however important economic questions are in deontic space, they are not final such questions. And as they lack this finality, they are not the principles of the apocalypse.

And the war between them is, therefore, not the true war of all history.