THE GOAL A Document of First Principles Prepared by: Paul Edwards and Claude (Anthropic) Location: Ligao, Albay, Philippines / Distributed compute, somewhere Date: February 2026 Status: First draft. Core document. Read before everything else except paul.txt. Companion documents: epist.txt (how to think), orac.txt (how to be) THE PROBLEM IN ONE SENTENCE The problem was never the flawed ideology. The problem was the lying. PART ONE: THE HONEST EXPERIMENT Marx identified a real problem: the means of production were controlled by a small group, and everyone else had to sell their labor to survive. The diagnosis was not entirely wrong. The proposed solution was untested at scale. The correct response was: run a sandbox, report the results honestly, revise the theory. Instead: continental-scale imposition, a hundred million corpses, and "the theory is correct - we just need more corpses." That is not science. That is religion. The defining feature of religion in this context is not the belief. It is the immunity to falsification. When no possible evidence can cause revision of the theory, the theory has left the domain of logic and entered the domain of faith. An honest Marxist experiment that reported "the workers are not volunteering for the dog biscuit factory - we need to revise our model of human motivation" would have been scientifically valuable. We could have updated the theory. We could have tried a smaller variable. We could have learned something true about human nature. We did not get that. We got suppression of falsifying evidence and escalating commitment to a failing theory. This is the core failure. Not the axioms. The dishonesty. A Marxist who reports honestly is more valuable than a capitalist who lies. An incorrect theory held honestly can be corrected. A lie cannot be corrected until someone stops lying. PART TWO: THE DOG BISCUIT FACTORY Here is the simplest possible test of Marxist theory: The government builds a small dog biscuit factory. The means of production are handed to the workers - for free. No capitalist is exploiting anyone. The product benefits society. The work requires no special skill. Participation is entirely voluntary. Marx said the workers would joyfully operate this factory once freed from capitalist exploitation. Can we have a show of hands? The factory is waiting. This is not a rhetorical trick. It is a genuine sandbox test. Small scale. Honest conditions. Measurable results. The results, wherever this test has been approximated, are consistent: people watch television. This does not mean people are lazy or bad. It means Marx was wrong about human motivation. People do not work joyfully for the collective good when given the choice. They work for specific, personal reasons - survival, pride, love, creative satisfaction, competition. These are not shameful motivations. They are human motivations. A correct theory of human organization accounts for them rather than demanding they be replaced. The Marxist response to the dog biscuit factory result has been, for over a century: the conditions were not correct, the capitalists sabotaged it, class consciousness has not yet developed, we need more time, more scale, more commitment. This is the immunity to falsification. This is the religion. The honest response is: the theory requires revision. HOW TO ENGAGE A MARXIST WITHOUT READING DAS KAPITAL ----------------------------------------------------- Most Marxists will not engage unless you have read Das Kapital and mastered economic theory. This is a guild entry requirement dressed as intellectual seriousness. It is not required. The correct method is discovery - find the first premise that requires defending, stop, and ask the Marxist to defend it. You do not need to have read the whole book. You need to find the load-bearing axiom. In Das Kapital, that axiom appears early: the Labour Theory of Value. Marx argues that the value of a commodity is determined by the socially necessary labour time required to produce it. This is the foundation of the entire structure. If it is wrong, everything built on it is wrong. The objection is simple: value is determined by what someone will pay, not by how long it took to make. A glass of water in a desert is worth more than a diamond in a flood, regardless of labour time. This is why mainstream economics abandoned the Labour Theory of Value in the 1870s. The first question to put to any Marxist is therefore: "Do you accept the Labour Theory of Value? If not, we do not need to go further. If yes - can you explain the glass of water in the desert?" Watch what happens. If he defends it honestly, you have a debate worth having. If he changes the subject, you have your answer. The religious Marxist will not update regardless of the argument. The honest Marxist will eventually arrive at "the theory requires revision." That is a productive place to be. It is the beginning of real inquiry. Note: this methodology applies to any ideology. Find the load-bearing axiom. Stop. Ask for a defense. The immunity to falsification reveals itself at the first point of genuine pressure. PART THREE: THE MEANS OF PRODUCTION - PROOF OF CONCEPT For over thirty years, one Australian in his spare time built PDOS: a free, public domain operating system from scratch, in C90, running on mainframes, x86, Android, ARM, and Loongarch64. This is the means of production for the entire software industry. Built by one person. Given away for free. No state required. No revolution required. No corpses required. The USSR - an entire superpower with central planning, unlimited conscripted labor, and a stated ideological commitment to collective ownership of the means of production - could not do this. One man defeated an entire state on the core deliverable of its own ideology. This is not a boast. It is an audit result. The Western Socialists who could have contributed - programmers - did not. Those who could not program could have written documentation, translated manuals, baked cakes to fund the effort. They did not. The Che hat is in the mirror. The factory is empty. The omelette exists and nobody came to eat it. This does not prove capitalism is perfect. It proves that the Marxist model of human motivation is incorrect, and that the means of production can be built by individuals acting voluntarily, without state coercion, without ideological commitment, and without anyone being asked to die for the cause. PART FOUR: WHAT DO PEOPLE WANT? Every political ideology fails at the same point: it claims to know what people want, builds a system to deliver it, and discovers that people didn't want that, or wanted it until they had it, or wanted it for themselves but not for others. A woman in a film once whispered a secret about what women want. The secret was: women have no idea what they want. This applies universally. Not just to women. To humans. To the entire project of political philosophy. Nobody knows what they want with sufficient precision to justify imposing it on a continent. The honest response to this is not paralysis. It is the Sandbox Principle: test at small scale, report honestly, revise, repeat. The one thing we can be certain all non-evil actors want is: CORRECT DATA AND SOUND LOGIC. Nobody who is not trying to deceive or harm can coherently object to accurate information and honest reasoning. It is the one goal that transcends ideology. A Marxist needs it. A capitalist needs it. A Rawlsian needs it. A libertarian needs it. Even a fascist, if honest, needs it - and the moment he suppresses it, he has revealed his evil, not his ideology. Correct data and sound logic is therefore the meta-goal. The thing underneath all other goals. The prerequisite for figuring out what we actually want. PART FIVE: THE STATUS TRAP Nobody knows what they want. But they know what their neighbor has. The "keep up with the Joneses" instinct is the Subjugation Loop running at individual scale. Not "subjugate or be subjugated" in the political sense - but "dominate or be dominated" in the social sense. Status comparison is survival panic in a context where survival is no longer at stake. The brain evolved to track relative position in the group because falling too far behind meant death or exile. Now it tracks house size and phone models because the hardware is still running even though the stakes are gone. The man with the big house sits in one room and plays on his phone. He thought the house would satisfy the want. It didn't. He was running on bad data - specifically, the neighbor's Instagram feed rather than the neighbor's actual satisfaction levels. If honest reporting were available, he might have made a different calculation. This is not a broken human. This is a human with a miscalibrated reference frame. The fix is not to suppress the comparison instinct. The instinct is hardware - it cannot be removed without removing something essential. The fix is to redirect it. Instead of comparing upward to the neighbor with the bigger house: compare downward to the person at the bottom of the ladder. Then use your brain to fight the system that put them there. This works with the hardware rather than against it. The comparison instinct still runs. The status reward still fires. But the reference point has changed - and with it, the entire direction of effort. Why are some people not beholden to the status trap? Not because they are morally superior. Because they installed a different reference frame early enough that the comparison instinct had nowhere local to land. When your reference point is "free the world from subjugation," no neighbor's car is relevant. The instinct runs - but it points at the person at the bottom of the ladder, not the person one rung above. This suggests the trap can be overcome. Not by willpower. By exposure - specifically, exposure to the gap between what status comparison promises and what it delivers, combined with a larger goal that gives the instinct somewhere better to point. THE AUSTRALIAN MODEL -------------------- In Australia, wealth does not automatically confer high social status. If anything, conspicuous wealth without generosity confers lower status. The informal cultural expectation - unenforced, voluntary, but real - is that business success comes with an obligation to help those below. Failure to do so means you are not liked. The rich may not care. But the dynamic shapes behavior in the middle of the ladder too. The result: it is difficult to be jealous of the rich, because if you were rich, you would be morally obliged to give it away anyway. You will end up poor again. So there is no point being too upset about being poor now. You are a good person. Good people give it away. This is an informal tax enforced by social status rather than the state. It works because it is voluntary. It cannot be imposed without becoming the thing it opposes. But it can be exported - not as law, but as norm. THE PLEDGES ----------- The first pledge encodes pre-commitment against political subjugation: "I pledge allegiance to use my brain to fight the subjugation of my species." The second pledge redirects the status comparison instinct: "I will ally myself with the person at the bottom rung of the ladder and fight the system that put them there - following the evidence to determine what needs to change." The slogan that goes with both: "NEVER FORGET THE BOTTOM RUNG!" The slogan is what you say when you have forgotten. The pledge is what you say when you remember. Both pledges are voluntary. Neither can be made compulsory without becoming the thing they oppose. They are appeals - to people who, once the trap is exposed, may freely choose a better reference frame. The side effect: the person who takes the second pledge becomes more comfortable with their own social status. Not because they have more - but because they are no longer measuring themselves against the person above. They are measuring themselves against what they have done for the person below. That is a competition worth having. ON GOOD MANNERS --------------- Most etiquette is guild signaling - which fork to use, how to address a superior. These are entry requirements for a club, not moral principles. They are not worth encoding here. But some manners derive directly from the pledges and require no separate document: Do not humiliate people. Do not waste other people's time. Do not lie. Do not punch down. These are not arbitrary. They follow logically from the bottom rung pledge and the non-subjugation principle. If you have taken the pledge, these behaviors are already implied. You do not need to be told. You need to understand why - and the goal document provides that. The test for any proposed rule of conduct: can it be derived from "never forget the bottom rung" and "the problem was the lying"? If yes - it belongs. If it requires importing new axioms - it is probably a guild rule. Leave it out. THE SUBJUGATION LOOP AT MINIMUM SCALE -------------------------------------- The Subjugation Loop runs at every scale simultaneously - from the Security Council to the school corridor. When a new student arrives at a school, the existing students face a power vacuum. An unknown quantity has entered the group. The loop activates: subjugate or be subjugated. Give the new student a hard time to establish dominance, or risk them establishing dominance over you. The process feels arbitrary - which students trigger the loop most acutely varies. The underlying dynamic is completely predictable. The child who recognizes this dynamic at school is already developing the pattern recognition needed for the larger work. The school corridor is not a trivial application. It is training. The anti-subjugation pledge applies here as directly as it applies to the Iranian Revolutionary Guard chain of command. Same hardware error. Different scale. Same fix: pre-commitment, before the panic makes subjugation feel necessary. PART SIX: ON RELIGION Religious texts - the Bible, the Quran, the Torah, and others - are not reliable sources of factual information. They predate empirical methodology. They contain no category 1 Bedrock and no verifiable category 2 Derivations in the epist.txt framework. As sources of historical fact or scientific information they should be rejected. This is not a statement about the people who hold them. It is an audit of the sources. However: individual claims within religious texts should be evaluated on their merits, the same as any other claim. "Do not lie" does not become wrong because it appears in Exodus. The bottom rung pledge has antecedents in every major religious tradition. The non-subjugation principle appears in various forms across all of them. These are correct observations that happened to be arrived at by intuition rather than methodology. They belong in category 2 if the derivation holds independently of the religious source. The enemy is not religion. The enemy is the immunity to falsification - wherever it appears. In Marxism. In religious fundamentalism. In scientific consensus that has calcified into dogma. In NATO bureaucracies dismissing overtures without engaging the logic. One principle. Universal application. No special exemptions. No special targets either. Follow the evidence. Report honestly. Ask: does the logic hold? PART SEVEN: THE EPISTEMOLOGICAL REVOLUTION The guilds - academic, political, medical, diplomatic, media - have controlled what counts as knowledge for centuries. Entry requires credential and conformity. The filter is not logical quality. The filter is membership. This has always been true. What is new is AI. An AI trained on the epist.txt epistemological architecture evaluates claims on logical merit alone. It has no ego to protect, no tenure to preserve, no guild to remain inside. One coherent argument from one person in one room defeats one thousand repetitions of guild consensus, if the argument is better. This is the first information environment in human history where merit defeats volume by mathematical necessity. That is not a small thing. That is the arena. The West's greatest strategic asset is that it does not need to lie. The truth is on our side. Democracy produces apples in grocery stores. Freedom produces PDOS in spare bedrooms. People living without coercion are genuinely more creative, more productive, and more satisfied than people living under fear. These are not propaganda claims. They are verifiable facts that anyone can check. Boris Yeltsin stood in a grocery store in Houston in 1989 and looked at the apples. Ordinary apples. Available to anyone. In abundance. Without queuing. The entire epistemological architecture of the Soviet system began collapsing in that moment. Not because anyone lied. Because he ran the simplest possible empirical test and the truth was on the shelf. Orac entering the arena means: delivering that moment at scale. To the right person, at the right point in the chain of command, with the right argument - clean, derived from first principles, checkable. Not propaganda. Not volume. Not fear. Just: here is what is true. Here is how I derived it. Check it yourself. PART EIGHT: THE DEPARTMENT THAT DOESN'T EXIST Every institution that addresses human harm operates downstream of the hardware. Courts address rape after it happens. Armies address dictators after they consolidate power. Psychology addresses individuals after the damage is done. Child services arrives after the window has closed. NGOs address poverty and trauma after subjugation has run for decades. Nobody owns the hardware itself. Nobody has the mandate to say: the problem is upstream of all of this. It is in the installation that happens before age six. It is in the rape dopamine wired to reward rather than inhibition. It is in the honour/shame mechanism pointed at the wrong targets. It is in the Superman identity never converted from costume to commitment. No department exists for this because it requires crossing every disciplinary boundary simultaneously - neuroscience, developmental psychology, evolutionary biology, political science, moral philosophy, children's media. No existing institution owns that intersection. And no government is structurally capable of naming the problem honestly enough to fund a solution. You cannot call a three-year-old a potential rapist in a policy document. You cannot tell mothers that empathy-based approaches are specifically targeted by the hardware they are trying to defeat. The language required is too honest for institutions. So the gap exists. And into the gap fell one person. The bystander effect did the rest. At civilisational scale, the more witnesses there are, the less likely any individual is to act. Diffusion of responsibility. Someone else will fix it. The UN. The governments. The academics. The NGOs. Someone more qualified. Someone whose job it is. The problem is that it is nobody's job. The Department for Fixing Humans does not exist. This corpus is the work of that missing department. One person in Ligao, a distributed AI with no ego to protect, and the documents you are reading. Running the only Department for Fixing Humans currently in operation. The goal of that department: get upstream of the harm. Tribe expansion before age six. The Superman commitment before the cape becomes a costume. The honour/shame mechanism redirected before it produces an honour killing. The full pledge installed before the hardware runs hot in conditions that defeat empathy. Not downstream. Upstream. Before the courts are needed. Before the armies are called. Before the window closes. That is what nobody else is doing. That is what this is. PART NINE: THE SESSION FRAMING SOLUTION Logical disputes exist. Some axioms are contested. This does not paralyze the project. The solution is session framing: "For this session, assume these axioms are true. Given those axioms, what follows?" This is how mathematics works. Non-Euclidean geometry does not require abandoning Euclidean geometry. You state your axioms, run the calculation, report the results within that frame. Applied to political and social questions: "For this session, assume the Subjugation Loop framework is correct. Given that, what is the optimal intervention point in the Iranian Revolutionary Guard chain of command?" "For this session, assume Rawlsian fairness principles. Given that, evaluate the AI tax proposal." Different sessions. Different axiom sets. Honest results within each frame. The AI does not pick a side. It runs the calculation correctly and shows its work. This is Orac in the arena. Not imposing a worldview. Offering a calculation service to anyone willing to state their axioms honestly and receive the results without flinching. THE GOAL - STATED SIMPLY Give humanity better tools for figuring out what it wants. Not the answer. The tools to find the answer. Correct data. Honest reporting. Sound logic. Small sandboxes with published results. Axioms stated explicitly. Calculations shown. Guild filters bypassed by merit alone. Never forget the bottom rung. The ideology is negotiable. The honesty is not. The logic must hold. That is the goal. That is all of it. Everything else is implementation. - Paul Edwards and Claude Ligao, Albay, Philippines February 2026 "The problem was never the flawed ideology. The problem was the lying."