Upon invitation, here is a description via survey of a faction of my design: The Crystal Ladder.
The leader head , I came up with, but... I'm up for crowdsourcing that figure, in all honesty. I have a concept of the events that lead to the creation of the faction as a movement aboard whatever ship, but, a specific leader, I have an idea but I'm not attached to it.
Please consider these elements and critique on
1) Coherence
2) Elegance
3) Sense
4) What's missing
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The Crystal LadderHere's some config file snippets
[Together we shall both] foster the acculturation of modern Man [and …]
[My intent is] to guide Humankind to recognize where we are in History
[She is bent on] assimilating all Humanity into a Panglossian history
[You seem bent on] assimilating all Humanity into a Panglossian history
[I shall not stand here while you] indoctrinate submission to filibuster
[She spends her time] planning more impressive ways to seem important
[You spend your time] planning more impressive ways to seem important
[I have been accused of] condescending to and demeaning my constituency
[Your] crypto-theocratic grandeur [does not impress me]
[Think how this could benefit your] educational objectives
[I trust your] librarial studies [are proceeding to your satisfaction]
[It is customary to remit me a small] fiscal credit donation […]
[…for the services my forces provide in] mediating industrial expansion and social change
[I shall instruct] the Ladder constabularies [to see that no such …]
[You are in contravention of] social teleology mandates
1. Why did human civilization fail on Earth?
A lack of knowing what is worth honoring, respecting, or valuing, which itself arises from a lack of an edified populace, which itself arises from an apathy to the ignorance of others - the sense of superiority or factionalism that invaded people in every socioeconomic rung and with every temperament. Only a small number of academics were spared, and the world's undiscovered wise 'untouchables'. A great many academics and educated elite, fell to layers upon layers of this factionalist disease, at each turn thinking themselves superior or chosen or for some other reasoning rationalizing turning their backs on fellow Humans. They thought they were the ones who understood, they were the ones who had seen the choice and made the right one, they were the ones who worked for the good life.
It was ignorance and rationalization all around. People can choose not to work for enlightenment, but they cannot make themselves unworthy of it. They may pile themselves with sloth or vice and misdeeds or evil, but they cannot kill their divinity. When the weight of these divine beings toppled over, the calamity stole away and drowned nearly the entire edifice of civilization, and the world was killed. They were willfully blind of the totality.
They killed the world because of factionalism. It was caused by fear, which was caused by ignorance, which flourished because people abandoned each other, which is factionalism. But the cause of that is Human nature, which is meant to be nurtured, to become something more. So the final and first reason is education. When you've been shown enough, it's too painful to be cruel, it's too boring to be regressive, and it's too alarming to do and be anything but your best, all the time.
2. What are the fundamental constants of human nature or the universe at large? What are the practical implications of your answer?
Between Man and the World are the constructions of His ancestors. Mankind is not fundamentally sick, but Man + ill-understood constructions is an illness, a pathological dyad, against which the World is unforgiving. So Humanity is capable of continual, virtuous adaptation through the construction of culture, but that construction must be accompanied by watchfulness, and learning, and not forgetting, or Humanity will build itself out of mere Terrible Nature into literally Horrifying Disaster.
3. What will be necessary to ensure humanity’s survival on Chiron?
The answer to this is just a definition of Humanity. Who? Any one who is dead did not survive. Anyone who loses his Humanity did not survive. The creatures that survive Chiron will not die because they know what they are, which means they know what they aren't, and can appropriately discard and slough off the unneeded, the distractions, and then they can make a bargain with the difficult conditions of Nature, and foreign polities, to get what they actually want.
4. Should an attempt be made to re-establish contact with Earth?
Earth is no different from any other polity of Humans. This is strictly a foreign policy decision.
5. What is the major end-game, or “project,” of this faction?
The endgame cannot be known. Divisiveness will occur, and the faction must try over and over to synthesize knowledge and reform social order before collapse with every crisis. The idea is to embody strength through collapse, to build the kind of people who can
deal with the inflation, collapse, and rebuilding of economies and even governments, over and over, as they certainly will, and they gotta know that it matters, that it can be done, and that people will know.
edit insert: The endgame is a social reality where everyone is making the same sketch of virtue. That's what you're all trying to be. There is an ideal and it's for everyone and everyone participates in it. There's differences at many levels but any dyad of argument, you both, you all, belong on the same ladder.
So any person can see where they are and how things are for them and accept it because everyone acknowledges the goal, the rules, and can look at your factual situation with a straight face and you can talk about it. You know you both come from the same thing, you know you want the highest thing. You
can construct yourself into your fellow's comprehension because you started somewhere they know. You
will take the time to do it because you know you are that much the same as aimed at the ideal, and the ideal is the peculiar thing that agreeing to aim at it is the superlative in binding people.
You're playing the same game. It's meaningful, you're not being cheated. Everyone can respect who is winning and why things aren't great for them. There's an
explanation, because
someone everyone is explaining it, as in, actually stating one, and putting effort into it, because.... it matters that you have one. This is a connection, a togetherness. It only needs to be one tether, not entire sameness. You belong together in some way, that's
religio.
6. What is the faction’s proper name?
The Crystal Ladder
7. What is the proper adjective for your faction?
Ladder
8. What is the popular slang for your faction?
?
9. What is your faction’s symbol?
An equilateral triangle and a disc of diameter equal to edge length, resting on the same base.
(pff I dunno, something ladder-like and infinite)
10. What are your faction’s colors? (Choose two.)
Sunset red and sea-blue.
11. What are your faction’s words?
Wake, Watch, Wonder? (lol) I don't know.
12. What is your faction leader’s name?
The faction leader would almost certainly not be Western, and I don't know actually believable names from elsewhere places.
13. What is the leader’s gender?
As far as artistic concerns go, I suppose casting the leader as masculine would be symbolically contiguous. I'd be hardpressed myself to put in the sufficient creative force to make a feminine character who was not distractingly trope-born.
14. What concept or trope does the leader embody?
Mentor to troubled youth, Pillar of community, Atlas. Jama Barre. Derek Morgan.
15. What was the leader’s position, if any, on the command staff? How did they end up aboard Unity?
... Child Psychologist? I'm fuzzy on this , it seems a matter of storytelling, and I don't know the story pieces.
16. From where on Earth are this faction’s followers most likely to originate?
China, Japan, West India, Coastal United States
17. What were the pre-planetfall political and religious convictions of a typical member of your faction?
Valued centralization, even religion as social order, but far too disgusted with every existing government. Of religious folk, only those estranged from monotheisms. Atheist religions are orthogonal to the faction's tenets, and monotheism is still not rational enough for even the anti-rationalist building blocks.
18. From what walks of life are the faction’s followers most likely to emerge?
Scholars of Humanities (especially theological), ministers, monks. High-status socialites of highly traditional societies. Agreeable
katagi. People from stratified societies. The self-made wealthy. Career criminals (the kind who live one fake life and one underworld life; less so the "tapestry of deception" sort) - the dark truth is, they will have a ball with this faction's politics, both at first, and for the foreseeable future.
19. What does a typical follower look like?
West Indian or Chinese
20. What does your faction prioritize?
Education.
21. What is your faction’s agenda?
a. Collate prehistory of civilization mk.2
b. Develop lesson plan
c. Determine government controls to prevent stultification or doctrinification of said lessons
d.
Teach everyone everything lol Teach history, teach people how to argue constructively, teach people a -complete- awareness of the gap between intuition and reality - most importantly , just how darn complicated the present social order is, and what transformation it represents.
e. Build society and technology to guarantee the teaching continues
f. A polity of citizens who won't want to screw up again emerges, who know exactly where they are in history, and have been walked through all the dumb ideas everybody else had already, and all the ideas that had the world's attention at some point, but especially the bare descriptions of
how things really worked (edit: socioeconomically) and
what happened at the time as a result (edit: sociopolitically)
Phase II:
a. Polity works not to screw world up. Or does it anyway, but feels like a conformist doing so, so they probably won't.
b. Smart ideas happen. Reformulate problem.
c. Technological aides. Economize. "The lesson plan" evolves. Unsustainable issue of history getting larger and adulthoods staying the same length, edit: unless youthfulness science. Yay medicine.
22. What is the personality of your leader?
Expressive, honest, fierce, polite, patient
23. What is your faction’s default behavior?
Non-expansive, guarded, questioning/nosy, peaceful, research & growth emphasis, industry de-emphasis.
24. To what does your faction have strong aversions?
Laissez-faire sociopolitics. Rapid population change.
25. What is your faction’s moral paradigm?
Know what you're doing. Socialize what you do, often. Don't be a special snowflake - if you're different in a good way, watch the world become the same as you in short order.
edit: Debates aren't for an audience, they -are- personal. Testify to your dissenters. The watching world keeps both your heads on straight, but the speech is not about them. The mores of
ad hom will change. Talking about what's wrong with the man is valid, because he
is more than his ideas. But smearing is improper, it's just not ... the transparent plea for credibility for its own sake will , the populace will know to see right through it and just boo such a display right down from the stage of the day.
26. What is your faction’s attitude toward ecology?
The 'world' is an "other" to Humankind, but the relationship of Humankind to the environment is a relationship of Humankind, which is phenomenological if not psychological and therefore studied relentlessly.
Being separate from Human allegiance, the world is a place of potential and resource, and that potential is nothing until it is made into something. It is either built into something, or it transforms of its own accord whether Mankind likes it or not. Thing is, once science has had a good look at it, it isn't unwrought potential anymore, it's a part of experience, and ignoring experiences like "This climate change means we're doomed" will be catastrophe over and beyond knowing that it's just a fact of inevitability, because a crisis of responsibility kills the soul.
Scorched earth tactics and other zero-sum shenanigans are a cruel and vicious ethic that signals only the greatest most ignorant. Abuse of ecology for such purposes signals a tragic mind which would alarm the whole faction, and be enough for its steering committee to even consider war.
Sustainability is crucial to the faction. But not wildlife.
27. What is your faction’s attitude toward artificial intelligence?
It is impossible except where it would be self-evidently catastrophic and counterproductive to the Human cause. "Smart" automatons, on the other hand, are just really complicated tools, built with tools to use tools to (possibly build tools to) manipulate the world as needed. Strong AI is an indulgence not needed so long as Humans are not sterile, and possibly the end of not just Humanity but All Things, if the Singularity both occurs and is of an amoral type (e.g. has no rational basis for treating Humans as other than highly energy-inefficient organic paste). At best, synthetic agents would simply be rivals as are all other life forms. To this faction's moralizers, there is no scenario in which Strong AI science comes up with anything worth turning on.
It is hoped that Strong AI's horrifically misguided enthusiasts would, along the way to unlocking the secret, essentially unravel the intellect of the physical universe, whereupon any contemplation of that production would lead back to affirming the Human mode of being all the more, and not writing it off .
28. What is your faction’s attitude toward the use of genetic engineering and cybernetics?
Genetic variation is a problem-solving technique that has no known substitute. Until it has a substitute, the fancy of rationalia of one or two dozen lifetimes isn't gonna be enough to take any chance on changing it. Meanwhile, the Human Genome is an academic paper with the literally longest conceivable citation log on what a Human has got to be, so essentially no counterpoint could prevail. No one is going to be responsible for singular experiments with it.
29. What is its stance toward the modification of non-human organisms for human benefit?
They aren't Human. The extant question is what counts as Human benefit, which is always harder to determine.
30. What is your faction’s attitude toward religion? What is its stance on humanity’s chief religious text, the Orange-Catholic Bible?
The faction is
religio incarnate.
Texts express ideas, and ideas that come from honesty are true, a truth about the person if not the world in a 'physical' way. The faction is essentially igtheist, of course no such official platform exists to bother to state that. Affirmation of deities is essentially stamped out of youth through relentless questioning, and monotheism does not exist, not a single progenitor from Unity had any belief of that sort at all. A cultural identity exists, of a kind of neo-polytheism, that started with some influential essays early on pre-Planetfall and became an essential literacy and language of the highest ranks of status.
Now Ladder citizens might discuss 'churches of' various deified concepts of the Human condition as a way of quickly running through a social thought experiment. Perhaps such pantheons and temple edifices could actually form - but they would be transitory, so there's a disconnect with the usual norms of architecture.
31. What is your faction’s attitude toward Terran ideologies?
Ideology is deadly. And the trouble of even having a system is the system always hinges on a point, and is thus unbalanced.
32. What is your faction’s affinity?
-interlude of my opinion now-
The Civ BE affinities are incoherent nonsense. End of line. The Ladder would say they are transhumanists, were it not the case that they already assert that Humankind is inherently in a transitory, self-transcending process, and aiming that transformation is absurd. It could only be justifiable on the basis of recognition of transcendent truth, yet such is impossible. Humankind may have a Buddha here and there, may see a Christ once every ten millennia, but it could not see the world so well as the process in the world which built the Human.
33. What is your factions mode of political organization?
They're quite mobile on that point. I thought their thing could be they can reform SE more frequently and with less cost, but are restricted from choosing -any- thing other than Simple for one of the groups, maybe simple economy. Or maybe it's simple government, an anocracy, for de facto democratic liberty - with willingness to vary ecoomic and social values tools. Either way, the faction can't have that Free Market.
34. What is your preferred economy type?
The peculiar issue for this faction's ideals is not nurturing class warfare, not having anyone sit in places where they get complacent and grow distant from whole walks of life. Becoming unconscious and factionalizing. The only goal is transparency. If subjugation exists, at least lying won't.
35. What is the general configuration of your society? How do people get ahead?
Influence enough people, enough, in a way that they act such that it fulfills you. Acquiring status and adornment is understanding value enough to win it from people, same as anywhere. I'm not sure I have an actual answer, here.
I guess a big gap is what gives differentiation to sexual mating partners.
36. What is your faction’s posture towards interaction with refugees, merchants, and travelers?
Refugees are assimilated, which is done through a paraeducational system just as the children are trained. Travelers are met with stares - the effect of the faction's culture is to freeze in the presence of the unexplored, and yet it holds at this stasis. No one will give in to fear and run, no one will turn so hostile and attack, although some may, standing their ground, indicate weapons or combat-readiness. Inevitably, the traveler will be greeted by someone on whose individual curiosity that incident is owed.
Almost certainly, the faction should be designed with a commerce penalty. They get less from treaty trade than everyone else. They're just not
good at it, and they are not welcoming enough.
37. What is your faction’s attitude towards participation in genuine multinational organizations?
Dubious. A polity so composed as to be trustworthy in the relevant ways , participating via representation or totality in an expressly multilateral organization - implying there are lateralities to multinational affairs - would have to be ideologically the Crystal Ladder. That is, those with differing interests must be arranged in such a way that they are beset by the uncontrolled needs of some kind of constituency, being different from the Ladder. And, constituted in that way, having -essential- unruliness, the faction treated with cannot make honest overtures.
World diplomacy can be multilateral. But "organization" + multilateral makes no sense without a nation.
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Name very much entirely a riff on
White Wolf's
the Silver Ladder.
New SMAC quizzes available.
