On Matchist Exceptionalism

The primary goal of Matchism is to define and implement the Matchism Code which will ensure the success of Matchism and the people who live by it.

Matchism is designed to be the next phase of human political, economic, social, and cultural evolution. As such, its purpose is to replace all existing political, economic, social, and cultural systems. Which brings up the question, what about people living under those older systems that don’t want to change? Does Matchism require the elimination and replacement of those systems which the philosophy of Matchism explicitly defines to be obsolete?

The short answer is “no”, the reason being derived from the freedom of those individuals who prefer to follow the old ways or indeed are incapable of adopting the new ones. We have the same sort of obligation to care for these individuals as we do to take care of our children or the disabled, to provide them with the best standard of living and chances for future success that we can.

But this is not any sort of admission that there is equal validity or equal rights for cultures, or that the Matchish have any obligation to preserve those cultures. Study them, sure. Tolerate them to the greatest extent possible without putting the Matchish at risk, definitely. But when (and it is a question of when, not if) the majority of the people in any culture or living in any area qualified to form a Locality decide to throw their fates in with the rest of the Matchish, there can be no consideration of the effect this will have on the old culture during the transition. Allowance of cultural diversity is a crutch, a temporary measure designed to improve the quality of life of individuals during the transition to Matchism, not an end in itself.

How can we be sure that adoption of Matchism represents progress and not just an arbitrary turn in the road and especially not a turn that leads to a dead-end, such as ended up being the case with Communism? The guarantee comes from the Goals, establishment of which is an integral step in the process of adopting Matchism. If we make more progress toward the Goals under Matchism than we do under our existing systems (none of which has even made the breakthrough of requiring a statement of their Goals yet), that is all the proof we need that Matchism is forward progress and so is the inevitable replacement for those previous systems.

There is another reason why transition to Matchism is required, and that relates back to the relationship between our technological development and our moral codes. As technological advancement enables evolution of our moral codes (as described in Our Internal Moral Codes concerning prisons as an alternative to murder, and the development of drug and behavioral therapy as the alternative to incarcerating the mentally ill), we are morally obligated to use that technology to facilitate the evolution of our moral codes. We can’t uninvent electricity or the computer or cell phones and so must instead use them to facilitate the next step in our moral evolution. At least in the US we haven’t seen much progress in this area since the Civil Rights movement of the 1960s, which means we have experienced 50 years of stagnation. In other parts of the world Democracy continued to develop for some time after that, but this process has slowed and even reversed course in recent decades. It’s time to get moving forward again.

Next: Value of Life