> While Nature can’t do its selection on ethical grounds, we can, and do, when we select what kinds of companies and rules and power centers are filling which niches in our world. It’s a decentralized operation (like evolution), not controlled by any single entity, but consisting of the “sum total of the wills of the masses,” as Tolstoy put it.

Alternatively, corporations and kings can manufacture the right kinds of opinions in people to sanction and direct the wills of the masses.

Indeed. Tolstoy does a deep exploration of this in War and Peace, using the example of Napoleon.

Of course, this gets to the heart of the free will debate (to be settled in a future post ;)). Both are true at the same time - organized people and dictators and other factors simultaneously wrestle for influence in complex ways in which causation is impossible to measure.

My own two cents, though, is that the Categorical Imperative is a tremendously important and underappreciated tool for raising the self-consciousness of groups.

A practical implementation of it is linked at the bottom of the blog post.