Transcending Identity Politics
Less Empathy Toward Outsiders
"The inability to identify with others was unquestionably the most important psychological condition for the fact that something like Auschwitz could have occurred in the midst of more or less civilized and innocent people.
What is called fellow traveling was primarily business interest: one pursues one's own advantage before all else, and simply not to endanger oneself, does not talk too much.
That is a general law of the status quo.
The silence under the terror was only its consequence.
The coldness of the societal monad, the isolated competitor, was the precondition, as indifference to the fate of others, for the fact that only very few people reacted.
The torturers know this, and they put it to test ever anew." - Theodor Adorno
An ancient hypothesis of the original pre-Singularity ur-civilization, a zombie was a non self-conscious entity that acted just like a conscious one: it laughed, cried, talked, ate, and generally behaved just like a real person, and if questioned, would claim to be conscious - but behind its superficial behavior, there was nobody home, no internalized model of the universe it lived in.
The philosophers had hypothesized that no such zombies existed, and that everything that claimed personhood was actually a person.
But the mammalians - those rugose, endothermic anthropoids with their ridiculously small incisors and anarchic social arrangements - knew better.
They also knew that you don't fight an infowar attack with facts and figures, any more than you attack a railway locomotive with spears and stone axes.
You don't fight a reptilian replicator attack by throwing energy and matter at hatchlings that will just use them for fuel.
The more a mammalian is forced to corrupt empathy, the more she aches inside, and the more he grieves, the more they hate the reptilians.