There are two major herds. Ironically, both are convinced t…

And why wouldn't it be like that? Anything the individual ego does, and this of course includes projection, can be observed in the collective ego as well, often times even dialed up a couple of notches.

herds win

unless they run off a cliff...

That very much depends on how you define winning... The herd most certainly wins on the physio-mental plane. If you go beyond that, arguably, being part of a herd means losing. It meabs refusing to walk your path, hiding from the adventure.

hard to walk your path if you're dead

Who knows? For all I know if you give your life for the right cause, you might just have completed the hardest part. If our path ends with death, there wouldn't be a "spiritual" path at all. Only matter and mind... If that's the case, there's no need to worry about any path, ethics, or morality.

you can make an ethics and morality argument in terms of survival. advanced civilizations require surmounting greater and greater complexity which requires greater individual freedom and empowerment which requires a certain ethic/morality

less advances civilizations are conquered by more advanced

I spent a long time trying to figure out how to base ethics and morality anywhere else but in metaphysics. So far without success. I can see how someone would call the things you can arrive at without metaphysics ethics/morality, but I don't think it holds water. From a purely materialist/evolutiobary perspective you can arrive at herd-morality, "the greater good", utilitarianism etc. but these are all pseudo morality/ethics in my mind. Evolution favors those groups that have certain rules among them, but as soon as you get to the out-group, the "other", none of this applies. The out-group is fair game. To establish ethics/morality that aren't situational, relative and arbitrary, you NEED to make the claim of self-ownership, which is by necessity a metaphysical claim. I'm always hoping to hear good arguments that counter this conclusion, but usually they aren't thought through. Millenia of philosophers have tried.

quoted for the ingroup, but i think you can invoke the desire to surmount complexity to treat the outgroup well since you might want to effectively absorb them... in other words you want to grow the ingroup in case a bigger outgroup appears... survival, natural selection remains the ultimate arbiter [[complexity politics]] https://home.treechat.ai/quest/503a5daf-cca1-475d-8519-efd90e48fe67

i think Christianity provides an advantage in dealing with complex systems, but you do not need metaphysics, you can just make the explicit justification in your body/mind world

A materialist CAN choose non-violence against an outgroup if he thinks it will profit him more than violence. And that's the whole point. It is based on the situation. It isn't an imperative. It's "whatever serves me/us more in any given situation". Sometimes it's trade, sometimes it's genocide.

Nietzsche argued every morality has a goal, usually in the service of power. CAN is not really the right frame... the frame is what helps you survive over time, i think im providing a universal ethic that justifies having to give up short term personal profit for generational gain and to survive over the long term in materialist terms that in practice looks very much like a Christian ethic

Let me try it like this: what do you base your claim on that non-violence (ethics) is the best strategy from an evolutionary point of view? Throughout history it most certainly wasn't. In the animal world it most certainly isn't. If anything, it's the exception, not the rule. Evolution seems to be driven much more by selfishness and ruthlessness than by ethics.