From what I’ve been observing, science has almost become a religion of its own — ArtM

This is all too true. I'm Uni-aged now, and my whole life I've been deep into STEM, academically. I meet many people who present themselves as staunch, analytical atheists who pride themselves on their capacity to call-out logical fallacies and on their endless need for material evidence. What initially disillusioned me from the 'framework' you mention was actually seeing, in sixth-form, how my chemistry teacher totally looked down on the humanities and people who enjoy them. It's a common theme in STEM; bashing other people's interests, even transcendent ones like music, literature, and art, on account of a perceived academic uselessness. Then as I started reading Freud and Jung, who often took great liberties with their work (Jung was unabashedly and self-admittedly spiritual), it just clicked—science isn't everything, nor can it explain it.

death seems to be just a transitioning phase for humans and other living beings that possess consciousness — ArtM

That's the part of idealism (or whatever this philosophy is strictly called) that I take the most solace in. It's intuitive that, if the universe is predicated around a primary, fundamental consciousness, then death is not the end, and nor is it necessarily a bad thing. Science can often tend towards some very depressing conclusions; it leans absurd—everything is random, everything is mechanistic collisions and interactions, you blip out of existence when you snuff-it, everything will end in the big rip and the whole universe will be dark forever. Not only is this counter-intuitive (the universe starts from nothing then just . . . dies?), but it just seems so pointlessly macabre, especially when alternatives like the one you and I are discussing now are, and a lot of 'materialists' don't like to hear it, just as likely, if not more so, to be correct. Of course, it being macabre is not any testament to its veracity; dark things do happen, but because science instils in students that nothing has any real meaning and everything is random, macabre 'solutions' are seen by them as intrinsically more likely to be right. I think a lot of STEM students are honestly scared to be spiritual (or even philosophical in any way that deviates from materialism) in any capacity because of the cognitive dissonance that is concomitant with their academia.

What I think is fundamentally flawed in today’s philosophy, physics, and religion is their refusal to coexist or even complement one another. — ArtM

This is true. It's unfortunate too, because there are people, like you and I, and anyone else who could have this conversation, who want to see that cooperation, but the systems in-place, religious, philosophical, physical, and otherwise, are simply too rigid to allow for it en mass. There are too many physicists who see religion as a pure sham and philosophy as 'hokey'; too many religious people unwilling to interact with science that challenges their beliefs. I think it's half fear and half closed-mindedness. Some people would rather exist in one framework than have the behemoth task of making sense of the world whilst integrating three.

The ironic thing is, many 20th century quantum-mechanics pioneers were delightfully open to religion and philosophy because what they were interacting with was, as they recognised it, unexplainable without something more—another exotic term in the equation. Now, though, we seem to largely operate on the predisposition of everything being explainable through science with sufficient work put in.
I think, however, that this is beginning to slow down, and people are, like we've said, finally coming around to other explanations for their reality.

When it comes to Anthropic Principle, I personally have the opposite point of view. I think that the universe was created due to consciousness being present beforehand. — ArtM

That's fair. To be honest, I've never fully consolidated my view on the Anthropic Principle. I've got no concrete beliefs as to its correctness, per se, but kind of view it as thus through a theoretical lens: Consciousness is fundamental. Always there. Life, like us, is merely harnessing it. Since any universe where life could not arise (one that goes unrealised) may as well have never existed at all (for without conscious life to observe and experience it, as mentioned earlier, its lifespan is negligible), only ones where life can arise, truly exist, and so those irrational numbers and other conditions we notice that are fundamental to life are the exact values and states we find them to be.

It's not very complete, and is kind-of fraught with shaky logic. It's still something I'm actively thinking about. Maybe it doesn't link up, maybe it does in some way that's yet to be put together.

Now imagine a universe completely devoid of consciousness. No life, no beings to witness or measure events, just lifeless physical objects. Without observers, does time truly pass? Physical objects have no perception or ability to experience events, create memories, or recognize change. Without awareness, these objects simply exist. Events occur, changes happen, but there is no perception of waiting or intervals, changes become instantaneous. — ArtM

So glad you said that! It's something I too, think about often. In an unrealised universe, birth and death may as well happen in the same instant. This brand of philosophy (I guess it's some degree of Idealism) is certainly picking back up after a long lull—as science has been our go-to for the last century or so—and I couldn't be happier. The classic Hard Problem of Consciousness is as vexing for materialists as ever. People are once again thinking 'How does something as brilliant, as complicated, as individual, and as disparate as consciousness come to be from electrical signals and a squishy mass of pink?'.

That consciousness might be fundamental to existence is a very real possibility and, like say, an idea that's being espoused more and more. It's a topic I love talking about.

The idea that perhaps an absurd, instant, meaningless universe is one with no observers ties into the Anthropic Principle. That perhaps the universe is structured for life to arise, not necessarily by God, but by the very nature of existence. Have you looked into that at all?

This is a good and nuanced question.

I think that whether or not information regarding non-human intelligence should be classified in the first place is a good place to start. The United States Department of State's Foreign Affairs Manual lists 8 categories of information which are eligible for classification:

(of course, these are quite recent and would have been different in 1945, but I think it's a good benchmark)

(1) 1.4(a) military plans, weapons systems, or operations;
(2) 1.4(b) foreign government information (FGI) provided with the expectation of confidentiality;
(3) 1.4(c) intelligence activities, sources, or methods, or cryptology;
(4) 1.4(d) foreign relations or foreign activities of the United States, including confidential sources;
(5) 1.4(e) scientific, technological or economic matters relating to national security, which includes defense against transnational terrorism;
(6) 1.4(f) U.S. Government programs for safeguarding nuclear materials or facilities;
(7) 1.4(g) vulnerabilities or capabilities of systems, installations, infrastructures, projects or plans, or protection services relating to the national security, which includes defense against transnational terrorism; and
(8) 1.4(h) weapons of mass destruction. In this category, design elements only qualify for an exemption from automatic declassification at 25 years.


Of course, as for intelligent aliens and their auxiliary technologies—5, 6, 7, and 8 could definitely apply. U.S. law defines 'foreign person' as 'any individual or entity that is not a United States citizen, a permanent resident alien, or an entity organized under the laws of the United States or any jurisdiction within the United States', so NHIs would be classified as 'foreign persons', legally. This also means, especially if as you suggested, at-least some of the NHIs are cooperative, 1, 2, 3, and 4 could apply.

So it's totally reasonable that intelligence regarding NHIs, be it biological, military, political, engineering, or astrophysical information, would stay under-wraps for a good while. I don't think the populace (and this extends to the rest of the world, too) has any intrinsic right to be made aware of information that may compromise not just national, but global security, just because of weighty perceived ontological implications.

That said, I don't know if the risk of 'Ontological Shock' would be a valid basis on which to withhold said intelligence until the powers that be decide it's ready for release.

Thinking about actual instances of massive classified (usually FOIA-spurred) doc-dumps, like those ceded to the public by the CIA in the past: in my experience, releasing a ton of information at once actually doesn't overload people in the way it seems it would. It usually kind-of numbs all but the keenest of scourers, who then write articles 'dissecting' and disseminating the info in digestible chunks. I bet the number of people who know what MK-ULTRA was far outweighs the number who have read the redacted documentation in its entirety. It seems to trickle down through channels:

Relevantly Credentialed Academics/Government Spokespeople —> General Academics/Science Communicators, people without specialised knowledge but with a higher capacity for digesting thick boilerplate and making sense out of it —> News Media who pick-up those people to pen articles as 'experts' —> The general population who read/watch that news

(This is an assumption I'm making. I feel it's fairly accurate/intuitive, though, and readily observable in modern legal cases and whatnot)

So, maybe an all-at-once dump isn't the worst idea, since existing frameworks that are inherent to a society where not everyone is educated the same kind of dull the edge of such massive information.

That said, aliens are different, and I respect that. Public reaction to the CIA experimenting on its own employees wasn't as bad as it should have been, but public reaction to the DoD hiding decades of NHI research, and just the definite existence of NHIs in-general, would be much more tumultuous, and, as you say, has genuine ontological implications.

I think a gradual declassification would just amp-up public disdain for governments, stir people to protest (enhanced Freedom of Information, National Security Standards, etc.), and encourage conspiracy-theories/diminished trust in science/anti-intellectualism. If people, especially people who don't necessarily understand the wider national-security/research considerations of it, can say:

"Our government has been hiding aliens from us!

It quickly becomes a hive for pseudo- and anti-intellectuals and breeds public distrust. Maybe a mass-dump under the guise of a:

"We want to bring you up-to-speed on an ongoing national-security situation we've been handling that is starting to be of public interest."

—would work better. Regardless, there is a major public shitstorm; people don't like being lied to and often take it quite personally when they are part of the electorate—whether they voted to instate the leader(s) that lied or not.

Back to the main question: I feel that the reason for the concealment being, on-record, the risk of an Ontological Shock in the case of public disclosure would come off as really patronising. According to PEW, 65% of Americans believe intelligent life [NHIs] exists on other planets, so perhaps the ontological impact actually wouldn't be as big as you'd expect. Obviously not all of these 65% would take it well—the actualisation of their opinion, which is likely based on the old statistical argument of:

"What are the chances we're the only intelligent life in the universe?"

—might shock them. For many people, it might even renew their optimism, though. Just a theory, but if, right now, the U.S. or UK government announced they had reverse-engineered an alien warp-drive or some sort of microwave-propulsion or Alcubierre Drive or something that'd revolutionise and greatly cheapen space travel over the coming decades, making all of our Star-Trek, Star Wars, and otherwise Sci-Fi dreams that much more feasible; allowing for interstellar exploration, taking off global-warming pressure, and generating a paradigm-shift in human technology—people might just be stoked.
Many would be upset, scared, or would go into crisis, but I don't think public reception would be wholly negative.

That's right, I'd somehow forgotten about that. Now that I think of it, it plays at the very start when the Earth, moon, and sun are shown; the scene where the Hominids are smashing up the bones; and at the end when Bowman's looking down on Earth, so it's kind of a leitmotif for man's evolution/transcendence. Nice catch.

It has been a long time since I read Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey novel. It was written in 1968 concurrent with the production of the film, if I recall, but differs thematically from it.

It's sort-of implied in the film; in the novel, it's explicitly described how the monolith instils premonitions of modern industrial civilisation in the minds of the Hominids, who are on the edge of extinction in a veldt in Africa. Their streams are running very low, they are constantly in futile conflict with rival tribes, and they are oft visited by an aggressive leopard that picks them off in their caves, at night.

After encountering the monolith, and touching it, they are inspired to manufacture tools from bones, rocks, and wood. They kill the leopard, and then, if I recall correctly, the monkey whose POV the reader assumes mounts the leopard's head on a club and beats the leader of the rival tribe to death with it to establish hegemony over their water-source.

I've always just seen it as something of a seed. The monolith essentially actualises the innate potential of prehistoric humans that otherwise would not have been actualised; they'd have gone extinct. We know the aliens in Space Odyssey, for whatever reason, seek to 'harvest' or perhaps 'foster' intelligent civilisations. Maybe they are totally benevolent super-conscious life forms that seek only to advance technology in the universe and spread a kind of eudaemonism; a system that transcends traditional morals. Perhaps these lifeforms have already ascended to this degree and want to guide other civilisations to total ascension. They may be in a state of omniscient 'perfection'. There are ostensibly similar themes in Interstellar and Arrival.

The monolith found millions of years later dubbed TMA-1 is seemingly identical to the one that was planted in that veldt, which I think suggests that their distribution is not a manual, metered process, but rather something autonomous. The monkeys had no inkling that its proportions were in a nearly-perfect 1:4:9 ratio. They couldn't sense its magnetic field, nor interpret the radio signal it emits when Heywood Floyd investigates it in Tycho. People always touch it. The monkeys touch it and are imbued with the will and ways to pioneer tool construction. The lunar astronauts touch it and their comms are blown out by an HF signal that's directed at one of Saturn's moons, Lapetus (it may have been a Jovian moon in the film, though, I don't remember). Another monolith is found orbiting Lapetus and once it's touched, Bowman is transported and shown the entire, timeless developmental breadth of alien civilisations, before being rapidly aged in what appears to be a tailored hotel room, and immortalised as a Starchild. Again, this is more ambiguous in the Kubrick film.

The three monoliths are proxies for a civilisation of immortal Starchildren to guide other civilisations, once sufficiently intelligent (which humanity was) to become them. What's weird is that Bowman, now a Starchild revisits Earth in the book and is nuked. He is totally unaffected. He feels no anger or indignation, linking back to that eternal eudaemonia thing, though humanity's hostile reception to him perhaps proves they are not yet ready to ascend wholly. Maybe the monoliths are not objects of fate, but tests for openness to dimensional and existential metamorphosis.

I'm just riffing here, but maybe it links back to Nietzsche too. Maybe the Starchildren are analogous with the übermensch—that evolution beyond passive nihilism, which is clearly still a species-wide institution when the non-hostile lifeform visiting Earth is not investigated, but attacked. Maybe Bowman in his new form is the superman who will save humanity. I don't know. Just my two cents.

So, a restricted voting class can result in superior policy if the voting class is wiser than the general public. — Brendan Golledge

How do you quantify political wisdom? Do you have any evidence to back-up the idea that only giving, say, degree-holders the ability to vote on policy-changes results in a greater benefit for wider society?

Voting does not necessarily entail consenting. It doesn't have to. You can vote for a candidate or their policies whilst only supporting them in-part. What if you don't care about their policies on national security but have a vested interest in changes they say they'll make to the corporate tax structure? If you are willing to accept the risk that their national security policies, which you are uninformed on, may disbenefit you, because the prospective benefit, to you, of their corp. tax policy-changes are worth that risk, then in voting, you are knowingly acting in the capacity of a partially-informed person and assuming responsibility for any consequences resultant thereafter.
If 40% of the country is willing to accept such a risk, that something they don't understand may come back to bite them, because they appreciate the prospective benefits and believe them to be worth the risk, then who are these so-called 'politically wise people' to decide otherwise, based on a perceived superiority? You speak about power disparities between the state and the people, but entrusting decisions that effect the entirety of the voting-population to a group of people deemed politically intellectual is innately non-democratic and approaches oligarchal structure.
You also assume that all of these 'wise' people possess no personal biases and make informed decisions, never privy to logical error or emotional irrationality, solely to the benefit of the less-informed general population. Of course, this is unrealistic. Also, you talk about vote-rigging, but isolating a very particular group of highly-informed intellectuals and entrusting them to vote on the behalf of everyone else eliminates an essential facet of voting, in general. Votes are supposed to return the preferences of a wide cross-section of the people affected by the outcome of the vote. Barring people you think aren't smart enough to understand politics/economics is no different from barring certain races, women, or the disabled. It sets a precedent.

Have you ever read Animal Farm? It illustrates well how oligarchies, or by extension, systems approximating them lead to totalitarian control and the marginalisation of those you don't see as intelligent enough to have a say. It's food for thought.

~~~

As for your system in-general: It's a cool idea. You're operating under some pretty macabre precepts but I don't wholly disagree with you.

A problem with all systems of government is that whenever a person is given power over something, he can do whatever he wants with that power. — Brendan Golledge

Can he? Perhaps in unregulated tribes. In developed nations, though, we've recognised this vulnerability for millennia and worked to control it. Rome illustrates this well. In Republican Rome (pre-44 B.C.), there were two rulers instated by an electorate (the Centuriate Assembly), which, like your later idea, placed greater weight on certain types of people considered to better reflect the productive public interest (not the intellectuals, but the old and wealthy). These rulers, consuls, were largely kept in-line by the senate, which consisted of a few hundred people who, from 312 B.C. onwards, were sort-of popularly elected. In truth, they were appointed by censors who were themselves popularly elected, and so were trusted to reflect the desires of the citizenry in their appointments of senators. Also, censors could impeach senators at-will.
The senate held great influence over the consuls and had their own administrative power to some degree. In 44 B.C., the senate, unhappy with former-consul Gaius Julius Caesar's military actions, his ambition, and his self-asserted status as dictator in perpetuity, conspired to and succeeded in murdering him.
The fact is, there will always, in western civilisation, be a balance between a leader and their subjects, and when that leader becomes autocratic or establishes an undue oligarchy, that balance becomes highly volatile. In the years after Caesar's death, the Roman Empire was born and here we see the political landscape that arises from a position of absolute power being filled by a single man.
Apparently, from 27 B.C. to 476 A.D., 33 of 77 Roman Emperors were assassinated or executed. In contrast, very few (I cannot find an exact figure but it's certainly much smaller) consuls suffered either of these fates.
If you take a look at which emperors these were (perhaps Caligula is a prime specimen for such analysis), you'll notice that many of them behaved in ways that were borderline solipsistic and often rested on victimising everyone else.
It's never as black-and-white as: 'He has unchecked power, so he will abuse it with impunity'. That kind of power imbalance always tends towards a forceful balancing, whether by usurpation, assassination, a coup, an exodus, et cetera. So I don't feel that this is a problem that plagues governments with administratively-empowered, elected regulatory forces like the Roman senate. The UK monarch and prime minister each have a lot of power (in theory), but the genuine sway held by the voting public and their skepticism, and the suite of other politicians who constantly watch what they do prevents them from wielding said power carte-blanche and abusing it. The USA, too, again, in-theory. Even in countries under dictatorship, one can only act so obliquely against their populace's collective interests before that populace forcibly removes them from office.

So, this is an extreme assertion to base a whole new socio-economic system on. It's just too easy to negate in practice.

An example might be that citizens vote to fund a police force, but then the police extract protection money from all the local businesses in excess of what the citizens were intending to pay in taxes when they set up the police force. If you set up a higher government over the police to police the police, then what stops that higher government from doing something similar to what the police were doing? — Brendan Golledge

Police extortion is a very real problem. It's also illegal. It happens, sure, but it's not like the police are forcing money out of the populace who have no recourse, because their government, the ones allocating the taxes, are supposed to do something if their police force is systemically and invariably corrupt. I understand your point and agree on principle, but again, a real government, which is innately required to have an operating police-force and tax structure should abate this problem with regulation. Appoint new section chiefs, punish corruption, restructure, etc. I've never heard of an anarchical society with a police force.

Voting causes another set of problems, in that votes can be rigged, and voters can be ignorant. — Brendan Golledge

True, but this is assuming the worst again. Votes can be rigged, but that's why they are regulated, often both internally and externally. If one man, or a small group, are running a vote, then sure, they can manipulate it. But if hundreds of people across multiple organisations of different mild biases are running the vote, and have no contact with the candidates, it's unlikely it'll be rigged by said candidates. If you are talking about a totalitarian state headed by an autocrat, then yes, votes are often rigged, but that is in the absence of the regulatory bodies I've been talking about. So this, once again, is solved by an institution that predates Jesus.

But suppose that tax payers were able to vote for their own tax rates, and voting power was proportionate to taxes paid? And suppose the vote took place via crypto, so that the results of the vote could neither be rigged nor ignored? — Brendan Golledge

If I'm understanding right, you're saying that tax-payers should be able to vote on a, as you put it, 'consensus rate' which is then payed equally by everyone? I might be being slow, but, how does that avoid rigging? You say they can vote over crypto; if that meant everyone paying exactly what they felt they should pay, then, once the results are in, receiving either a bill or rebate commensurate to the amount they paid and the difference between that and the calculated average or 'consensus', then that would make sense to me, but surely without that, they still have to do a 'classic' vote for the consensus amount? Please do correct me if I've misinterpreted you.
In general, I don't know how you'd 'ignore' a non-crypto vote. What's the point in running a vote if you intend to ignore the outcome?

declare an "income wallet" and an "expense wallet" — Brendan Golledge

I feel our banks already do this with our non-crypto money. Isn't this basically a more awkward (you have to preempt future expenses) version of a retroactively-issued transaction report like the ones we receive monthly?

declare some items as tax deductible, such as items flagged with "groceries", "healthcare", or possibly "rent" — Brendan Golledge

So, the people vote for tax-rates, but the government decided what they get to pay less on? You can bet that 'rent' would not be a tax-deductible in this kind of state. Prices on everything, including houses, would be very high. In a world where everyone pays the same universal voted-upon tax-rate, poor people are extremely poor, because the combined upper and middle-classes have much more 'voting-power' than the working class. The middle and upper classes presumably have some societal awareness and want a balance between functional public infrastructure and low tax-rates. Low tax rates for them do not necessarily mean low-impact for the working class.

A business owner, in addition to his basic necessities, can pay for business expenses by his expense wallet. All his business income would come in through his income wallet. — Brendan Golledge

How does he pay his employees? Also, taxes cannot be the same for corporate entities as for individuals or you get massive inflation and a general disincentivisation for business activities. Business becomes untenable.

An investor, before he made an investment, would put the money he intended to deploy in his expense wallet. Then he'd buy his investments through the expense wallet. Whenever he took profits, he'd take them through the income wallet. — Brendan Golledge

Investing becomes a pointless and fruitless tedium if you start taxing every single capital gain. This also ties back to your meritocracy thing; wise people ought to hold more sway in policy votes. Most people do not care much for the stock market. A percentage do. Naturally, if these tax votes are entirely popular, policies affecting investors in-particular are going to be neglected in favour of more widespread, everyday activities. If you start levying a de-facto inverse VAT on stock sales, non-super-rich people will buy less stocks. This will negatively affect businesses. However, without traditional value-based capital-gains tax, the super-rich will be able to make more money than before profiting on extremely high-value stock sales, because if the rate happens to be lower than the existing CGT, you've effectively just given them a tax cut without need for a loophole.

if Steam sold a game which they flagged as entertainment, but the buyer tried to flag it as groceries to have it be tax deductible, then there would be a discontinuity which an automated system could easily pick up on. — Brendan Golledge

This would incentivise companies to categorise recreational products differently to avoid your voted-upon taxes. It's also a massive administrative cost incurred constantly to manage this system, and it's a big breach of privacy to have all of your purchases not only tracked, but logged. It also prompts questions about what is considered as tax deductible. Are condoms? What about pain-meds? Prescription meds? Non-essential groceries like sweet-treats?
Another thought: What if I buy tons of bread from the supermarket, all of which is tax-deductible, then sell it at a fixed, lower price externally? Will people compromise on present-wealth for the promise of a rebate at the end of the tax-season? Rational consumers, like the Homo Economicus, maybe. But most aren't, and most wouldn't. I would be raking it in legally. In fact, couldn't a person literally do this exact thing instead of a job in this kind of economy? They could monopolise groceries, sell at a short-term loss, and claim the reliable rebates at the end of the season. This is very bad for the economy.

If a citizen, for instance, loved the military, loved his local government, but hated the monarch and the state, he could vote for taxes for the military and his local government, but vote for a tax rate of 0% for the monarch and state. — Brendan Golledge

How could that actually be done, though? I have to vote for like 15 different specific departments? Also, like you said, this is a collective, 'consensus'-based tax, so even if I hate the monarch, I still have to pay him if I'm in the minority. Also, one govt. dept. kind of has to be responsible for actual money-allocation, right? What if we defund them? Then, there is no legislative body to proffer taxes to the others and the system stagnates.

If they stepped out of line, either they would be punished by higher branches of government, or defunded by the public. — Brendan Golledge

If there is an administrative body that sits hierarchically above them that can punish them for stepping 'out of line' by that body's own standards, then they are by definition not autonomous.

There could also be a problem that some actors could vote for a billion percent tax rate in order to skew the average. I have thought of two solutions to this problem:

Have a maximum allowable tax rate for any government agency (maybe like 3-5% sounds reasonable to me).

Anyone who votes for a tax rate more than 1 standard deviation above the mean would have to personally pay whatever tax rate they voted for, whereas everybody else just pays the average. — Brendan Golledge

This is good. I think 1 s.d. above the mean is a little mean though. Doesn't it break the collective consensus system too, if some people are punished for not conforming to the status quo? Isn't that the whole point of the system, to avoid people having to pay more than others based on what they voted for?


~ ~ ~

This is good stuff, and you've articulated it well and clearly put a massive amount of thought into it. It's very interesting. Please do know that, although it's hard to convey tone over a forum, I'm not trying to rip on your idea whatsoever; I'm just giving my thoughts and critiques. I'm happy to be corrected or enlightened if something I've said is wrong. Keep it up, it's a cool system.

—S

I feel that violence is inherently loaded with intent, so I don't see any way you could plausibly liken natural disasters (sporadic, physical events not dictated by a consciousness) to interpersonal violence. It's think we have all, at some point, accidentally injured, however minorly, a friend or family member whilst excited, or preoccupied, or perhaps just not aware of their presence when turning a corner or opening a door, etc.

Is this a violent act or mere unfortunate happenstance?

Conflating physical destruction with violence wholly is a little nonsensical, because in reality, they only really solidly and consistently overlap in very human environments. I suppose it depends on how you really define 'destruction', but in most other animals, I'd argue the extent to which they 'destroy' in order to enact 'violence' is minimal, or better yet, strategically minimised. That is, animals that kill others tend to aim to do so as efficiently as possible; jaguars incise the skull, lions incise the jugular, owls decapitate. Hunters do not use machine-guns or C-4 to kill deers because they aren't aiming to 'destroy'.

So I think there is a line to be drawn there between violence and obliquely destructive violence, and the two are not synonymous at all. Nor are they inherently synonymous with destruction itself. As is exemplified above, most violence that happens on earth is done in a way that the victim is preserved; there is a purpose, it is not indiscriminate. There has to be an element in nuance in how you treat violence and destruction in relation to one another.

You said that:

Innately, since at least two distinct beings have existed on our planet, there was some form of violence or discord — gadzooks

But that doesn't necessarily hold true. Can bacteria really be violent to one another? Again, there is no intent there. Is a rotting fruit being violently destroyed by fungi/bacteria?

Violence and destruction are neither mutually exclusive, nor mutually inclusive, so your question is flawed.

As for art: it isn't a question anyone else can answer for you. Do you consider it as art? What is art? I see where you're coming from on the beauty x brutality dyad, but I think that stems a lot more from human psychology than your physical environment. I trust the brutality you find beautiful is not meted out on houses, or lampposts, or motor vehicles, but on living things that want to resist it, or existing 'beautiful' things you enjoy seeing ruined.

Many philosophers have written on this very transgressive desire of people to see beautiful systems (including other people, unfortunately) destroyed. It could link back to your typical l'appel du vide or some variation of it. I suppose many people probably do consider destruction/violence art/beauty.

If you've got the stomach for it, and are still interested in the question, maybe try reading some transgressive lit to form a personal psychological basis for your views on violence and their artistic connotations: Bataille, de Sade, Ballard, even Anaïs Nin to some degree, though keep in mind, these are very macabre and intentionally disturbing.