If you accept with full and overriding belief the founding truth of a holy scripture, the words of a sacred priesthood, the urgings of a social media influencer, the fashion of a world-famous artist, the platform of a political party, or the unquestioned authority of even your parent, then you are exhibiting the presence of one of these hooks, the sites of exploitation, in your soul. These are examples of the delegation of authority over one’s own fundamental truths of life. These hooks are perhaps the only basis of exploitation human beings exercise over each other.

Conversely, any person who learns how to establish, through a disposition and practice, a sincere relationship tethering his world-model to his own lived experience and desires, through his own inborn capabilities, cannot be exploited and remains sovereign in the world as an agent in the way that matters, ie. in liberty.

Each person inherits as a birthright her own unique and organically derived truth. This truth is assembled by learning with the bias of life’s purposes. There’s a sort of contract in place between an individual and Life itself. That contract, which establishes what is True, must not be assigned, usurped, or undermined, but it of course must be educable through a sincere process.

One way of capturing this idea is to say “After the first lie creeps in, the second lie becomes easier to implant.” Exploitation comes from inserting lies into folks’ epistemic core like hooks into a fish. These particular lies of interest produce a dependency on an authority, esp if they are of a certain design.

The most dangerous type of lie that can be used in this way is the one which places the victim in a sort of bubble, a paradigm which has a dependency built into it which sources authority from other than one’s sincere interpretation of one’s lived experience.

The reason I hit on these ideas now is because of the near-simultaneous exploration around the ideas of:

• Assertion of non-reality of self and world, ie. simulation theories, etc. esp. in our conversation about BK, who was the most scientifically founded user of this method I’ve seen to date. He inserts a simulation mislabeling onto the self or the self’s world.
• Story of illegal immigrant slaves in the Ohio chicken egg farms, who believe they have debts to pay and no recourse to legal help. I’d create programs to reach these people with explanations of their access to representation, etc. without risks.
• Interactions with the Bahai at the meetup in Portsmouth. Something about their scriptures uses this method. They for example believe in the notion of a spiritual being having a physical experience. This lie of the eternal individual soul shows up all over, ie. esp in most monotheistic religions.

The reason these notions touch on the “strange inversion of reasoning” (MacKenzie on Darwin) is because the strange inversion is the scientific basis of the dispelling of that very class of error. The error divorces the self from its true lineage as a natural organism manifesting many intricate levels of emergence all the way up to self-consciousness and social participation (the next level).

We should recognize and define that the liberty we care about socially to make it a “right”, ie. one that is ontologically distinct (due to domain difference) from individual notions of freedom of will etc, is the freedom from involuntary capture and application to another’s will. This is the basis of the societal desire to save women from polygamy, etc. We are obligated to ensure that such individuals are aware that the society around them avows their right to reject the culture they are in, but we must not require that rejection. This, then, becomes one of the tenets of “required education” of any citizen, ie. that they are “read their rights”.

Individual sovereignty (or “freedom” as socially defined, better let’s use “liberty”) depends on an ability to choose one’s associates, including the operating agreements, express or implied, by which they associate.

But is a person entitled to his own truth? Let’s contrast this against a person’s ability to assert his own gender as it were his own subjective truth. Well, to each his own truth, but that goes all the way round. If you assert a gender which you can’t demonstrate to my satisfaction, our truths will be in conflict. Too bad. There’s no avoiding conflicts among truths. It’s the way it is as long as persons are free and tethered to their living heritage in sincerity. Better to build and exercise our relationships with each other from the consensus we can find, because scratching the scab of a truth not shared only exacerbates wounds.

Note that those who believe in teleology in any of its forms (God’s will, Metaphysical Consciousness, Platonic forms, Materialist-determinist, etc) are to some degree outsourcing or disavowing their personal agency. They are saying they’re not responsible for their choices due to some other agent’s design which presumably influences their lives even perhaps against their will. Even a person who believes there’s some perfect notion of a tree out there is working for that vision, and claiming that vision is independent of himself. This notion of who controls the vision of what will happen is the root of power. “The nondisruptable master player” vs the “infinite player, ever playing with the boundaries”.

Light and things create shadows. In the same way, the shadow of evil will always be with us, for we live in a world of things and light. The good news is that the shadow of evil is nothing more than a dirth of light, sometimes partial, sometimes profound, but always only the result of a specific configuration of the things and the light. Things can be moved and light can be made such that areas in shadow can evaporate into the nothingness they always were.

The mechanism of power is what came to me. And the exercise of power is exploitation.

The antithesis of power is care, which can be expressed in great strength without harming. Care is the enacted love of the larger self, the larger self being recognized through the wisdom that comes from the awareness of the magic of the web of life, the richness of ecosystems, the order of nature’s coherence.

There ought to be a whole area of study about the nature of and relationship of ontological domains. For our purposes here we need to know certain truths about certain ontologies, but strictly speaking we’re not founding all our assertions here, leaving you to either take on faith or

Hypothesis: Universal ontologies all afford the same (set of universal) principles.

But what’s a “universal” ontology? (most likely an ontology which exhibits those principles) and

What are principles? They are patterns, like “natural laws of the universe”. But those old terms are problematic because