Risk Management and Moral Authority

When South African civil authority opened fire on an apparently homicidal mass of miners protesting a subsistence wage against rising prices, which forces their income below subsistence, the authority to kill the miners, however objectively immoral it may be in the aggregate (in the abstract), is considered categorically imperative within the relative space (the circumstances) at the time (the observed occurrence of the risk).

Civil unrest is in the offing. Managing the risk requires civil action with moral authority--the utility of the greater good, which means we have to define just exactly what that is. More importantly, as Ayn Rand points out, for example, defining what the objective is demonstrates who has the executive power, and therefore the capacity, to decide what "the good" is.

The reaction of civil authority in South Africa demonstrates the greater good is protecting property from those who will loot the wealth of the nation with homicidal fervor. While few reactionaries would disagree with this hypothesis, the first rule of law (what is categorically imperative), according to Ayn Rand, for example, is to renounce violence (not because it is immoral exactly, but because it is sure to demand a command elite, with moral authority, that enslaves the individual to the state, which could include the current power elite who are identified by the stateists as the heavy). Reactionaries are likely to agree with Rand's imperative in principle (in the abstract) but are sure to pose the probability of the risk in practice, which effectively makes the victims (the miners--the looters--motivated with homicidal tendencies) the heavy.

Renouncing violence, it stands to reason, requires eliminating all the probable causes and Rand, for example, says the best way to do that is to let the best and the brightest emerge in the free market to satisfy themselves. Selfishness in a free-market environment cures both shortages and, thus, the motive to be violent unless, of course, the motive is to loot the wealth that has been legitimately earned in the market.

Despite all the selfishness that obtains to reduce the probability of the risk, we currently face shortages in a crisis (gamma-risk) proportion, prompting the President, for example, to propose a distribution from the SPR to reduce the risk. Remember, however, the risk cannot be reduced, but it can be avoided.

While the risk of loss is fully assumed in priority, the probability that it will occur at any particular time can be deontologized (like the President may do with the SPR to relieve the economic burden for the 99%, which, you see, also protects the 1% from themselves) by shifting it to the future. The ontology, existing in priority, however, means that the risk is likely to accumulate mass. If it is not deconsolidated, the mass becomes critically unstable, much like what we have now with civil authorities, having made enquiry, for example, into how dark markets operate to accumulate risk, standing by, prepared to deontologize the risk in the gamma dimension with moral authority.