Those who mandated the ‘proportionate’ killing of their own citizens for the sake of public health are now conducting a ‘proportionate’ genocide for the sake of national security. Anyone who accepted the utilitarian argument in the context of public health will find it difficult to defeat its application to national security, or to any other normative domain. Once proportionality is accepted as the ultimate norm, any moral violation is permitted. Since the measure of proportionality is not objectively verifiable but subjectively asserted by those who make the judgement of proportionality, the argument is circular, practically unlimited, suggesting an ulterior rationale.

The argument from proportionality is of course only a story intended for the mass audience; the killing is not done indiscriminately, for the most part, but against designated target-demographics whose collective moral status is systemically determined as deficient. While demographic generalisations by the rulers and the social/economic/ideological coercion occurring at the population level inevitably capture many outsiders and moral dissenters in the meat-grinder of systemic adjustments, a degree of choice is continuously facilitated, and is apparently integral to the process of systemic determinations of moral worth. In short, there is a narrow path through the meat-grinder, with a lot of sense and bit of luck, or with a little sense and a lot of luck.

In every political conflict, both sides make a moral choice a long time before the conflict becomes kinetic, before mutual killing begins. Every totalitarian dystopia is unwittingly brought about by the moral deficiencies of the majority. Beyond this point the system becomes wholly deterministic, driven purely by animal forces, and only total exhaustion of energy and resources can return the agitated demographics to a non-deterministic, partially conscious state.

An individual who is committed to the laws of sense, immune to the prevailing ideologies and affectations, cannot regard the deterministic majority as equally consistent and true to kind. Humanity, being a synthesis of conscious rational agency and phenomenological affinity, is a matter of degree. The largely invariant baseline of phenomenological likeness-to-kind typically dominates in any stable society, but it too can be degraded by the dehumanising inconsistencies of those who 'merely look alike'. The compulsive projection of feeling seeks to mirror itself, to unconsciously repeat itself without rational invalidation, and if the reaction is not passively reciprocal then one is instantly dehumanised and excluded. This is the limit of unconscious communication: passive re-enactment of conditioning without meaning-creation. The persistent signalling by others that You do not belong in their circle of validation genuinely alienates, but also polarises conscious agency on the ontological level. We evolve as different, incompatible kinds, and only one kind can prevail.

It is not enough to merely survive, but to endure without mirroring and thus psychologically internalising the aberration in the negative sense of 'opposition' or 'resistance'. In order to prevail one must step aside of the deterministic, social moment, and this requires a lot of sense and a little luck. One must disassociate from the animal forces mediated by others without losing the reflexive connection to humanity, including the phenomenological affinity for the subtlety of conscious presence. One must see deeper than the idealised human form, discern the likeness of those who are intentionally present, who consciously look into you and invite you to look into them, from those who are unconsciously carried by the forces of nature, going with the flow towards the great fall.

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