In order to examine what brought us to the verge of honor breakdown, we have to go back to the root causes: during the postmodern push, almost all institutions and moral codes were subjected to intense scrutiny and critiquing, including what we might have referred to as systems or forms of honor. This process of deconstruction is allowed to proceed under the motivation and authority of the pursuit of justice. Justice, as an ideal, is itself undeconstructable, famously according to Derrida. In order to justify (ugh) such a lofty claim, we need to take a closer look at that.
While along with honor notoriously hard to pin down, we can consider justice to fall into three main categories or pillars:
Integrity, when it comes to claiming facts or property of oneself or events that transpired. Clearly, justice needs to be built on a foundation of truth and integrity is one’s commitment to truth and one’s promised course of action.
Dignity and essential rights of all persons, equally. The idea that every human has a right to exist and certain basic liberty could be considered one of the founding issues of the Enlightenment, but actually goes back farther than that within religious traditions. One can argue about the extent treatment should be considered dignified, but there is fairly broad consensus in Western societies that at minimum these should be protected.
Beyond what we consider basic human dignity, people should get what they deserve, as a result of their actions towards others. We shall come back to this one.
After an admittedly cursory read of the Western tradition, it seems that there is broad agreement and few objections to the first two elements as they have been laid out since the Enlightenment. These are both necessary for justice, and both together are sufficient for a minimal form of justice. If we simply consider dignity untouchable (up to some point) and integrity to be basic or foundational honor, then we have arrived at basic or foundational justice. That is certainly not to say it is the end of the story or even enough for society to function. However, governments the world over try their best to guarantee these core elements through their authority, whether through police actions or legal systems and courts, to varying degrees of success.
We can also mention the awkward reality that integrity of our institutions and media have been failing for a while now, as covered ad infinitum. Information overload has allowed misinformation to take over with few social repercussions. While this failure is serious in its own right, most people do at least like to pretend they have integrity, and would gladly accept reality as it suits them. We can in part recognize that a failure of accountability in our institutions allows for integrity to degrade, as prescribed by the third pillar.
The third pillar of justice presents more of a categorical problem. While converging on clear definitions of dignities and rights is fairly natural, anything more than that becomes murky. Right away, what it even means to “get” or “deserve” is unclear. Because these are tied to an individual’s or culture’s values, and these can vary wildly from place to place and time to time. And so we see that whereas very little contention arises regarding foundational justice, philosophers, the humanities, and many other social scientists have been engaged in furious debate about more advanced forms. What ends up happening is that the intellectual in question ends up arguing for a system of values, which can then be subjected to deconstruction in a way basic justice cannot. Therefore, because any value system can be assaultable in this way, worldviews with higher ideals are at a disadvantage, even intellectually, because they appeal to fewer people.
We seem to have reached a dead end, a dilemma, the ultimate destination. How can we achieve escape velocity from the black hole of deconstructability? Ah, but there is a way out; and it has been staring us in the face all along. We need some structure that is formless yet effective. An unattackable, yet incredibly powerful organizing principle. What we need, and indeed already have, is the value framework itself, and how it translates into reputational bonds within and between us. This framework is the Honor Construct, and it is both universal, and endlessly diverse.
Why is the Honor Construct immune from deconstruction? In general, it operates on whichever value system it is given, according to one’s own personal values and judgments and in concert with the community’s values. We can therefore define what one gives or receives from the construct as honor, as determined by what is deemed worthy of honor, denoted by such a community. As a result, one can always say that it is not honor that fails to achieve justice, but the values it is given. It’s your values and your culture’s values to blame, not somehow those of honor itself. It can be applied equally to the most benevolent entity one can imagine as well as the most hideous group we can imagine. It is morally empty until honor is distributed as we direct it.
The few daring souls who have tried to attack the honor construct head on have had very little practical effect on it, except to redirect or undermine a few value systems. Nobody apparently tried to defend it directly, but nobody had to. The Honor Construct barely noticed, and even those with academic objections fall into its clutches in their own circles. See, people will always have reputations in line with each community’s standards of how its members relate to it. That’s what it does. In addition, honor’s effect can also be tailored to each community. It can yield status, influence, money, or only just the good feeling of praise for one's accomplishments.
What did happen, perhaps as a long-term consequence of the world wars, was that we stopped talking about honor directly, perhaps because it became so associated with nationalistic fervor. So the philosophers did cause our language to change, which made establishing solid value systems more challenging. When social scaffolding for maintaining one’s unique values erodes, it becomes very easy for people to seek the easiest default. For our society, that default has become money. Since honor simply takes what it’s given, it’s happy to operate within the confines of material wealth, if that’s what people decide to do. For its own part, the market is just as happy to accept the motivational energy that comes with the pursuit of honor. Unfortunately, most people are not happy with this arrangement, because outside some material needs, the market does a terrible job of actually matching its prices and flows to what people would value given freedom and support to choose themselves. The market doesn’t even give much concern towards deconstructive critiques or the issue of justice at all: it’s too busy making money to care!
On the bright side, the honor construct is alive and thriving within our societies. The problem is that the value system it supports has become warped and ossified. Also in our favor is that if we can clearly evaluate the ways that the market fails to achieve honor, it is in our collective power to shift the construct towards more beneficial and meaningful ends. The difficulty comes in stepping outside of what one could call the Money Matrix. If we consider a “Matrix” as a system of control that enlists our mental models to manipulate our selves, then the financial system we are embedded in certainly applies. Many crypto folks believe they’ve already broken out of it–and it is a step towards freedom to cast a skeptical eye at fiat currency offered by corrupt governments. However, by replacing it with one’s preferred crytpocurrency, has the Money Matrix has merely been translated into a slightly higher-quality substrate? On a more decentralized network but with the same organizational hierarchies as before? While it may have been different in the early days, as the markets developed and liquidity has entered the picture, there is less and less distinction to be made between crypto and fiat, as assets.
And so it is natural to ask if we can take this process a leap further. It has always been in our power to assign honor to whomever or however suits us. What is missing is a digital format that is flexible enough and maintains properties of sovereignty and neutrality. In this case, true sovereignty requires a firmer boundary between currencies and symbolic honor. A semipermeable membrane instead of chasing and replicating fiat culture. This radical orientation needs to be explicitly chosen by an organization’s members, because otherwise the market simply dominates.
Accepting this mission is the essence of taking the goldenpill—the act of separating our personal honor construct into a new, orthogonal dimension from money. When one takes this pill, we realize that doing so allows for not just one new dimension, but many. The good news here is that the tech infrastructure is within reach and progressing quickly. All we need now is to build the social consensus around emplacing our deepest values within an honor construct that is available and open to all.