Thread by @shengokai

Some thoughts from Harold Finch regarding following the rules:

"I was talking about my rules. I have lived by those rules for so long, believed in them for so long, believed that if you played by the right rules eventually you would win. But I was wrong, wasn't I?" (1/n)

"And now all the people I cared about are dead or will be dead soon enough. And we will be gone without a trace. So now I have to decide. Decide whether to let my friends die, to let hope die, to let the world be ground under your heel all because I played by my rules." (2/n)

"I'm trying to decide. I'm going to kill you. But I need to decide how far I'm willing to go. How many of my own rules I am willing to break... to get it done."

So, what's the point here. Simple: there will come a point when our "rules" will have to change. (3/n)

Dewey is actually abundantly clear about this: if we treat rules as inflexible, inviolable, and ultimately permanent, then the rules will become inapplicable to our ongoing experience, especially as the experiences that give rise to the rules change through transaction. (4/n)

Put another way, for Dewey, rules are recommendations for actions, they are tools to be tested against experience to understand the degree to which they resolve the problematic situation we encounter. Rules are updated through experimentation and testing in experience. (5/n)

To the extent that we fail to take up the results of testing our rules against experience, against the situations to which they are applied, our rules fail to adapt to the novel situations that they're supposed to guide us in. This applies for any kind of "rule." (6/n)

By that I mean laws (scientific and social), moral principles, and other structures meant to guide our conduct. All of them need to be tested against experience to see how they resolve the problematic situation. Now, to be clear, not every resolution will be pleasant. (7/n)

And this gets us to Finch: Finch is at a moment where the rules he uses to guide his conduct in experience fail to resolve the problematic situation of a totalitarian artificial super intelligence in ways that enable human flourishing. Following the rules won't work. (8/n)

Hence, he's trying to decide by testing his rules against experience, to determine how many of his rules he's going to have to break or modify to resolve the problematic situation of Samaritan and its agents in a way that enables human flourishing and human survival. (9/n)

This is not unlike the situation of the Democratic party which has allowed itself to become so bound by its "rules," it's "morality," that it cannot see that the results of testing those rules against experience, of not revising those rules, is the loss of our rights. (10/n)

Moreover, it fails to recognize that the inability to recognize when the tools that guide its conduct are inapplicable to the situation at hand, particularly when their opponents control the levers of power and are fully willing to break the rules to retain that control. (11/n)

We can point to the nomination of Joe Biden, the critiques of AOC and Bernie, even the party's engagement with Warren and Harris as evidence of the failure of the Democratic party to revise its rules of conduct in the face of evidence that they're just not working. (12/n)

We can also point to the DSA and other leftist organizations' insistence on purity politics and political standards which acted as impediments to solidarity across and within the left as further example of the failure to revise our rules of conduct to secure an outcome. (13/n)

(I don't give a FUCK about leftist (broadly construed in the widest possible way) infighting about how we got here. We're all to blame because we couldn't get our shit together to build meaningful solidarity towards one FUCKING goal. All of us are at fault.)

To coin Harold's turn of phrase, we saw that our rules weren't working and we couldn't fucking decide how many of the damned things we were willing to break to accomplish the end of stopping the march of the authoritarian right. And now we have Justice Barrett. (14/n)

And now we have to convince enough of us to break our FUCKING RULES to vote for Joe Biden and Kamala Harris, to vote in such a way as to flip the senate. Biden/Harris might not be perfect, and the left leaning candidate in your state might not be as left as you like... (15/n)

Four years of no Trump and a roughly left senate combined with consistent accountability applied to Biden/Harris of the sort that we've developed by surviving (barely) the combined corona/trumpocalypse MIGHT be enough to get some gains politically and socially. (16/n)

But only if we get our shit together, decide to break some of our fucking rules, and do what is necessary to put the fascist/authoritarian right into the fucking dirt and keep them there. And to conclude this thread, here's a quote from someone who shares my mindset. (17/n)

"...we're not going to win this way. We can't afford to lose. When the time comes, you'll know what to do. And I know this is an ugliness you never wanted, but sometimes you have to fight a little."

- Root POI 5x10 "The Day the World Went Away"