Hello, I'm DT, of the Philosophe Knights.
I'm dredging this topic up from the distant past because this topic was 4th on Google's results page for Philosophe Knights, and this post was the preview:
Brad it would seem I have misunderstood the nature of the education and intellect you seek to uphold. It seems that you seek merely to impose your own view of the appropriate tactical response to the zombie situation on the population and will, in fact, happily kill someone meat-shielding a TRP or taking an odds based gamble in resting there for an hour or two on the assumption that they have no good reason to be where they are.
I was under the impression that the Philosophe Knights were attempting to kind of short-circuit Maslow's hierarchy of needs - an attempt to kick-start self-actualisation by threatening safety and physiological needs. I was interested in that. If this is simply a game of "You are fighting zombies wrong" then that is kind of dull.
I got extremely excited and needed to sign up here to respond. And then I read the rest of the thread.
So many words, so much name-dropping, so many quotes. You can only try to imagine my glee.
Before I actually respond to
that post, I want to first tackle this one (in several parts):
Well, to be fair, I'm arguing a little one-sidedly here.
For instance I'm presenting Maslow's hierarchy of needs as universally accepted, which it is not. Mind you one of the criticisms of it is that it is essentially an individualistic viewpoint rather than a collectivist one and I think there is probably a fairly interesting individualism vs. society tension at the core of the Philosophe Knights argument which we've not got into yet (I've been kind of looking forward to that).
Joy.I'd like to address Maslow's Hierarchy: It works. It is difficult to argue with because, well, it's basically true. Healthy human beings are physiologically, and psychologically, in the first four ways that Maslow describes.
However, the Hierarchy works best in a world where death is permanent, any given residence isn't likely to be thoroughly vandalized, and people do not live in constant fear of having their throats torn out by corpses. Trying to apply Maslow to Malton would be an exercise in futility.
How many people in Malton can be described as being physiologically healthy? Most people die around 20 times or more in their first year, even if they live in a nominally green suburb. There's not exactly a reliable supply of fresh or safe (unless you dine as a zombie), and sanitation is virtually non-existent.
The Philosophe Knights do not find his Needs to be reasonable in Malton. Trying to live in a way that accomplishes these needs is impossible. So we have...rewritten the nature of the hierarchy, if you will.
Consider that Maslow's view is that in order to satisfy each Need, one must first go from the bottom and work his/her way up. First you dig the foundation, then you pour the concrete, then you insert the rebar, etc.
The Philosophe Knights see the Hierarchy of Needs somewhat differently. In Malton, since you cannot satisfy Physiological needs adequately, nor is anyone in Malton capable of feeling secure (aside from the truly deranged and delusional), our founders had to re-examine humanity's options.
We feel that in order to satisfy the Maslow's most basic needs, one must first satisfy the Self-Actualization needs. Malton is an extra-ordinary situation, and human survival is now an extra-ordinary task.
Now, when I say Self-Actualization, I'm not exactly sticking to Maslow's definition. The Philosophe Knights subscribe more to Aristotelian Happiness - just as an example - as the achievement of human potential.
In order to remain physiologically healthy in Malton, you need to be psychologically healthy; A Survivor who flees at the first mention of small groups of zombies, flies into fits of rage when someone spraypaints over their messages, or breaks a piece of machinery rarely lasts very long. In order to remain psychologically fit, one must remain physiologically fit as well - being in constant pain, or feeling unwell reduces confidence, causes stress, and generally decreases cognitive efficiency.
Faced with this Catch-22, we must turn to the last of Maslow's needs: Bettering oneself. If a person has a goal to reach - not just staying alive, securing buildings, helping one's friends, or other short-term, repetitive goals - ones mind can tune out momentary distractions such as pain or loss of confidence.
If a person has chosen to remove themselves emotionally from the situation that their physical body is in, and chooses instead to map out their actions by rationally approaching Malton as a single situation, and then seeking to solve its problems through a 'big-picture' approach, they will solve their own problems as well.
(This has some caveats that I will address later on.)
Now, we're not simply turning the Hierarchy of Needs on its head and going from there. We're altogether re-structuring it. We don't interpret the Needs entirely the same either - Physiological needs are not quite as important to us as they are to Maslow: We die frequently, and it hasn't slowed us down. Health is not as important as it used to be - this is an observable fact of life now. Instead of a pyramid of priorities, our Hierarchy of Needs would be more of a...web, I think. The Needs are interconnected, with self-actualization holding everything together.
I've also not looked at all into the literature on the efficacy of corporal punishment in schools which seems to follow from the same basic premise that pain assists learning and, while it is currently out of favour as an educational method, I assume it still has its supporters.
I tend to stay away from comparing what we do to the practice of physically disciplining students for acting out/not performing well in classes. It's the most obvious comparison that springs to mind for most people, given the subject matter, but it doesn't really fit.
We're trying to get people's attention. Not like a school teacher does, because a school teacher has the student in their classroom. The student knows, at some level, that they are in school to learn things. The reason they're not listening is because they're bored, they're distracted, or some other situational impediment is stopping them from attending to the teacher.
We're trying to get people to
go to school. They aren't in the classroom. They have no intention of going inside. They're the people talking on their cell-phones while sipping non-fair-trade coffee at the local outlet of a big coffee-shop chain, thinking about what they're going to buy at the grocery store, and when would be a good time to mention to their significant other that they'd like to go see a movie.
The people we punish are not in the mindset to listen to reason. They haven't even given it any thought. They've mapped out their future without even considering that they may be
missing out on something.
We're not usually in the business of catching students who skip classes, either. Occasionally, we end up clashing with people who are directly hostile to our philosophies and actively seek to destroy our achievements, but it's relatively rare.
We're not Truancy officers.
We're more like publicists. We're trying to get the word out, going on an advertising campaign. Sometimes we have to persuade some particularly resistant viewers, but we don't hit people who know that they
do lack Understanding.
I'm also arguing in the style used by modern western science rather than in the style of the ancient philosophers which the knights seem to prefer. Essentially I am more interested in evidence and raw ideas than I am in the formulation of bon mots or the deployment of the bon mots of others. I have relatively little interest in debate pursued by the swapping of quotations from literary and philosophical figures of old. I suspect I am influenced in that by a tutor who always demanded I explain any quotation I put in an essay since he had a suspicion that I resorted to quotation when I didn't actually properly understand the content of an argument. He was often correct in that. If I were being catty I would say I am more interested in the substance than the style. If I were being really catty I would call the Philosophe Knights pseudo-intellectual snobs. However I suspect this is more to do with the science vs. humanities divide and I'm bringing my prejudices as a practicing scientist to bear in an argument with a group whose background is strongly rooted in the humanities (although that takes me back to my argument about the systemic bias inherent in their recruitment process).
Basing ones argument around evidence in a discussion on human nature and health is a dangerous thing. There is very little actual evidence to support the assertions of most philosophers, and yet their words ring true in our heads somehow. It's not sophistry, it's just that the human race has yet to figure out how to produce a scientifically acceptable study of people practicing different philosophies throughout their lives.
And when they did, as occurred in early anthropology, they ended up arguing about things like 'universal morality', 'relativism', and 'cosmopolitanism', which didn't get them anywhere in terms of evidence.
I advise against it.
I'm also being a little unfair in characterising their approach as "You are doing zombies wrong" since the constraints of the game limit their ability to genuinely pursue a program of education by violence, although even taking that into account their policy seems to be one of assuming ignorance by default which I think you can argue against even taking into account the constraints of the game (I find it ironic, to be honest, that someone suffering from dysgraphia should be pursuing a program which shares the same basic philosophy as that held by Victorian schoolmasters who caned their students for mis-spelling and also shares their attitude that, by default, it is wilfullness that causes such errors and punishment should be meted out without any further consideration of or investigation into causes or reasons).
I'm not sure if this was addressed by the good Duke at some point but saying that we assume Ignorance by default is a little disingenuous, to be honest. Most of us do, in fact, believe that the only thing we know is that we know nothing. We just make the most of it.
We do have a list which we teach to each Knight before they are allowed to join our ranks. While I wont post it here, it is the criteria by which people and/or organizations can be reasonably judged to be foolish and fit for punishment. We have killed people who named themselves after ancient Greek stoics, because what they did in-game, or how they described themselves undermined the intellectual loftiness of their names. We've spared people with leet-speak names because they demonstrated wisdom in-game.
As for the irony you find in a dysgraphic person judging people ignorant, I believe my above distinction between the Knights and Victorian schools should lay that to rest. Our organization was founded by three people, one of whom was dyslexic, and his typing style is characterized accurately on our main wiki page.
While people who are prone to misspellings and grammatical errors might be judged apathetic to academia, it is certainly not a rule.
And just as we are constrained by the game's limitations to provide a rich in-game experience of our role play, the people we punish or leave be are also limited in their abilities to display their Ignorance or the lack-there-of. We try to step carefully, but to build case-files on Malton's people and then act would have gotten us nowhere. We have sometimes slipped up - and we recognize when we were in error - but often times the people our members shoot really do not have much of a clue.
I think there is also an interesting discussion to be had on the comparative utility of spending AP in killing "useless" survivors in order to provide an example and actually using that AP in something of direct benefit such as barricading. I sort of meant to have that argument with the Spartans as well, but I had too much on my plate at the time to start it.
Did I mention
joy?
Oh yes. This. This is a discussion I love. Let's have it. BUT FIRST:
Brad it would seem I have misunderstood the nature of the education and intellect you seek to uphold. It seems that you seek merely to impose your own view of the appropriate tactical response to the zombie situation on the population and will, in fact, happily kill someone meat-shielding a TRP or taking an odds based gamble in resting there for an hour or two on the assumption that they have no good reason to be where they are.
I was under the impression that the Philosophe Knights were attempting to kind of short-circuit Maslow's hierarchy of needs - an attempt to kick-start self-actualisation by threatening safety and physiological needs. I was interested in that.
If this is simply a game of "You are fighting zombies wrong" then that is kind of dull.It is not simply that people are "doin it rong". The ways that people combat - actually, just the way that they react to - the undead can help us seperate those who are Ignorant from those who are wise, but we're not here to coach survivors on more efficient battle tactics.
The Philosophe Knights' agenda is something that our founders may often have wished that they were able to pursue before the Malton Incident, but could not do so due to the structure of society, and the social norms that existed. The pursuit of reason and a rational approach to life as a
major societal goal, starting from quite a young age, is something that Citizen M, Lord N, and Seigneur F had wanted for a long time, pre-outbreak.
Once life as we knew it fell apart, and walls locked us in with cannibalistic corpses, the opportunity to redesign human society beckoned. Our founders had a whole population looking for a solution, for a savior, for someone who knew what they were doing, and they answered the call. The problem? Many people didn't recognize the solution for what it was. And so began the publicity stunt that has become the mask-wearing, gun-toting, philosophy-spouting group that you know us to be today.
It was never about fighting zombies. That's just incidental. Showing survivors their failings and shortcomings in a scenario that they are still emotionally attached to and preoccupied by is just one method we use to hit our point home with them. Explaining the bad tactics of survivors, and helping to defeat the undead is just a means to a much greater end: allowing humanity to realize its true potential through rationality.