The Saht

What is a Saht?

Every living thing has at least two Sahts, and each one may have a varying strength. The combination of all of a person's Sahts, taking their strength into consideration, is their Sati.

A being has a Saht for each group of which it is a member. All beings have at least two Sahts because they are members of the community of life, and the community of themselves. A creature in a pack, tribe, nation, community, team, or any other group also has a Saht associated with each such group.

The strength of a Saht is determined by the group it is associated with, the person in whom it resides, and the power of the group over the when the Saht is given. A Saht given to an adult by a club may be very weak unless the adult values the club highly. A Saht given to a child by a community may be so strong as to seem unarguable. A Saht given to a being by power of being a link in the community of life is, in almost all regards, indistinguishable from instinct.

The nature of a Saht is to seek the continuance of the group it is associated with. Every action taken, every choice made, is passed to a person's Sati for review, and their Sati judges it: Disruptive, Irrelevant, or Fostering.

Any group which cannot establish a strong Saht for itself in its members is doomed. Though an action may be Disruptive to the group, a person's Sati may judge it Irrelevant or Fostering because, to the Sahts of other groups in the person, it is so, and those Sahts are stronger.

Any group which cannot establish an accurate Saht for itself in its members is also doomed. Though an action may be Disruptive to the group, their relevant Saht may falsely judge it Irrelevant or Fostering, for lack of foresight. An accurate Saht is one which can reliably decide if an action truly is Disruptive, Fostering, or Irrelevant to its group.

The community of life has long endured, and must, thereby, have the capacity to instill a strong and accurate Saht in most of its members. As the community of life communicates not in words but with inborn instincts, most living things have, in their Sati, a strong voice that speaks in favor of the community of life.

Similarly, any species that has endured, must also give its members a strong Saht. Strong enough, even, to be heard over the voice of the community of life's Saht if it is not in agreement, for the message of one Saht does nothing to benefit another where they are not in agreement.

Should a species give its members Sahts which are too strong and too much at odds with the community of life, however, then the Sahts of the community of life must call for the destruction of that species, or the community of life itself will become Disrupted and fall apart. As no species of life can survive if there is no life at all, the accuracy of a species' Sahts depends on not being too much at odds with those of the community of life.

Likewise, for any group whose existence is predicated on the existence of another group, the first group's Sahts must, to be accurate, reflect sufficiently the Sahts of the other group. This aspect of accuracy may also be called compatibility. This is relevant both to a smaller group which is part of a larger group, and thus dies if the larger group dies, as well as to a larger group composed of smaller groups, which falls apart if its members do not hold together.

Thus, each Saht of an enduring group reflects and strengthens the Sahts of each group upon which it depends, and thus a person's Sati may often seem to speak with an unambiguous, incontrovertible voice: A judgement made on behalf of the community of life, on behalf of the species, on behalf of the nation, on behalf of the community, and on behalf of the individual, that is a judgement whose voice would seem impossible to deny as obvious.

Given long stretches of time in which different groups, through the effects of their Sahts on their members, can compete both against each other and against their own structure, the natural order is for those Sahts which are strong, accurate, and compatible to survive and be passed on, while those which are weak or inaccurate (especially due to incompatibility) are either abandoned by their group, or die with their group.

The great enemy of strong, accurate Sahts is rapid change of groups or their environments. Each Saht is a product of the environment of the group it is associated with, and should the nature of the group or its environment change too rapidly, the Saht may become unequipped to be accurate any longer, and the group will be doomed unless it takes up a new Saht. In an environment of rapid change, however, a hastily adopted Saht may have little time to be tested and proved before becoming itself irretrievably inaccurate and abandoned.

In particular, the Sahts which arise in a rapidly fluctuating collection of groups may never feel the pressure to reflect the Sahts upon which they depend - the effect of the changing playing field is more urgent than the gradual requirements of enduring existence. Subjected to rapid change, Sahts are forced to be nimbly accurate for the short term, under a wide array of possible conditions, rather than enduringly accurate in the long term for a stable set of conditions.

Such Sahts are not truly accurate. They can only hope that the next step taken will be Fostering... or at least Irrelevant... and not Disruptive. Not every upward slope leads to a high mountain peak, however, and only looking a step ahead, such Sahts only achieve accuracy by coincidence. In particular, there is no reason to hope they are even compatible.

It is, it seems, the peculiar misfortune of humanity to be able to not only change its environment and groupings rapidly, but to be able to do so at an ever increasing rate. While this can throw confusion to the Sahts of other species, requiring them to adapt the enduring old ways or risk ceasing to have any way at all, it afflicts humans with a bewildering array of Sahts urging their Sati in conflicting directions.

At a deep level, there are still the Sahts of the species and of the community of life, voicing commands that are often dubbed 'conscience' or 'innate knowledge of good and evil': Do not weaken your group by killing its members, do not endanger yourself by eating flesh whose maladies you could acquire, do not treat others in ways you would not wish to be treated, do not weaken your group by denying aid to those who need it when you have aid to spare. Being the deepest-seated of Sahts, these judgments are almost impossible to completely avoid hearing.

At the same time, however, the human gift for language allows for a rapid spreading of Sahts by word that far outpaces the spread by genes. As rapidly as groups and conditions shift, inaccurate new Sahts can be spread down through generations, modified to be more versatile while less accurate, spread to another generation, modified again, and spread even to members of the current generation, without having to so much as be present from childhood anymore to truly take effect.

While the presence of the deep, accurate Sahts remains strong... as it necessarily will do, given how slowly it is able to change... the new, inaccurate, language-communicated Sahts becomes ever stronger as well. How could it not, given that the only ways to dethrone a Saht are to eliminate its group or replace it with a stronger successor? This encroaching doom, in the form of the increasing inability of human's Satis to make accurate judgments concerning the long-term Fostering of any group, is, as they say, the bad news.

The good news is twofold. First, humans have at their disposal imagination, forethought, logical prediction, and generally the ability to understand the potential results of events without the events needing to occur. In an actual field where natural, long-term competition between Sahts breaks down and yields self-destructive victors, humans have the potential to extend the field of competition into the realm of the possible, where Sahts could again be weighed against each other based on their accuracy. Second, the deep, accurate Sahts have not yet vanished from the Satis of humans and, thanks to the rapidity with which humans can change, they may remain accessible for much longer than we would need to re-establish accurate... and so by necessity compatible... Sahts.

The bad news, however, is also twofold. The encroachment of inaccurate Sahts is the first part. The second is that the good news only speaks of potential, not of inevitability, and to realize that potential may require an almost unimaginable amount of work, energy, and dedication. It is not enough to learn to listen carefully to the deep, accurate Sahts that speak of how the community of life can survive, or how the species of human could once survive. Such listening is, without a doubt, a very difficult, taxing, and most of all important first step, but it is no more than a first step.... for it does not reveal the other Sahts which are necessary for sustaining any part of humanity... only the species as a whole, it only shows how those other Sahts must be compatible.

The task ahead is to equip people with complete Sati, not merely ones which have some accurate and overwhelmingly strong Sahts, but ones in which all the Sahts are balanced in strength and, in their accuracy, are all compatible. The chance of any one person being able to do this alone is low, but it need not be done alone. Some may have an ear well-tuned to their deep Sahts, others may have imaginations that can supply the potential fields of competition. Some may have the range of insight to see what Sahts would endure in the imagined fields, others may be skilled in the art of translating one person's vision into a picture that others can understand. Some may lack any of these tools, but may know what tools are needed and how to bring them together, while others may contribute 'simply' through care and maintenance of the tools of others.

The human capacity for rapid change, and the power of symbolic language to feed that change and the alteration of Sahts which accompanies it, has been an accidental tool we have used to set ourselves up for self-destruction. Like any tool, however, it is as much a blessing as a curse, as it provides the means to not only undo its previous work, but to go further and improve.

To those who dream: Share your dreams, for they may shed light on the future
To those who predict: Listen to the dreams of others, and see where they lead
To those who listen: Turn your ear to your conscience, and share what the deep Sahts understand.
To those who understand: Discover what tools you and others have, bring them together, and put them to use.
If we do not settle for an unwhole Sati... either by succumbing to the new inaccurate Sahts or submitting to the old partial ones... there is not simply the hope of restoration from our current depth, but the possibility of rising as far above as we are now sunk below.

Mission Statement

Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people.
In a similar regard, a blog will not, and cannot, change the world. It can, at least, be waved around threateningly, however.

By way of parables, essays, and the occasional diatribe, I aim to collect and correlate existing wisdom for my own benefit. To come to a better understanding myself, I will seek to form my presentations as if they were the benefit of others, and operate under the pretense that someone out there is listening.

While I have some hefty analytical tools at my disposal, I will seek to use discretion in my choice of weapons and avoid overkill when attacking an issue. While there are times when an industrial sandblaster may be the only reasonable tool for the job, it would be sad to turn away capable amateur diggers when no more is truly needed than a stout spade.