In the early hours of March 4, 2026, in international waters off the coast of Galle, Sri Lanka, the USS Charlotte, a Los Angeles–class nuclear-powered attack submarine, closed in on the IRIS Dena, a new Iranian Moudge-class frigate.
Submerged, the Charlotte fired a heavyweight, acoustic-homing torpedo at the hull of the Dena. It missed. It fired another. It connected. The periscope footage of the attack was released by the United States Department of War. It shows the shockwave of the torpedo fracturing the Dena’s hull and sending its helicopter flight deck metres into the air.
Within seconds, what was left of the Dena was plummeting to the depths of the Indian Ocean, carrying at least sixty of its crew of 180 to their deaths.
Some moments later, an email was sent from US Indo-Pacific Command to Sri Lanka’s maritime rescue agency. Twenty miles from Galle’s coast, a ship is in distress. Sri Lanka immediately engaged a search and rescue effort that included its air force and navy. The surface of the sea contained clues that a vessel had been attacked and had likely been sunk. But it was not clear whether the attack had come from above or below. They were able to rescue thirty-two sailors, and recover the bodies of eighty-seven others, many of whom had mysteriously broken legs.
The Charlotte had long vanished like an apparition beneath the waves.
This was on the fifth day of the US–Israeli war on Iran, 2,000 nautical miles from the immediate conflict zone.
Now that the United States is trying to do a Russian Ukraine upon Iran…
yyyyeah there is no moral highground anymore.
just an immoral crater filled with mud and viscera.
No state is moral. People are (or can be) moral.
honestly TRUUUUUUE!!
This is the case with pretty much all collective entities, they’re all cut from the same cloth:
businesses, sports teams, fandoms, private clubs, political parties - they’re all manifestations of tribal instinct and one of its “”“features”“” (which, in this very synthetic habitat we’ve created for ourselves can become quite maladaptive if not toxic) is the displacement of personal accountability.
I’m saying, yes, groups are not moral but people can be moral - and I am hypothesizing THAT is why.
Parallel processing has enabled humans to do absolutely incredible things.
But it has also enabled humans to do truly heinous things too.
Bystander effect, “just following orders”, toeing the party line, passing the buck, riding the bandwagon… I think it’s not enough to teach people that only people themselves are capable of making moral judgments, but that we absolutely should also teach people that abstract gestalt entities that we become part of, that we allow to subsume us, are not.
Even the ones that aren’t outright evil are only so by the individual decisions of the people it comprises–through either luck or mindfulness–steering it away from brutal shortcuts that spend others’ lives for the sake of its own perpetuation.
It’s kind of ironic though that the people who decry “groupthink” the loudest are the ones that seem to be doing it the most. I’d sure like to think that we’ll learn to do a better job of identifying that blindspot (which such distributed collective entities exploit to enhance their own survival odds) and countering it, then teaching the next generations to look for it and counter it too.
… if we’ll even be around to see any generations that may exist after us.