burning city topics

The Codex Is Not Law

In this Thought I want to address a common trap of systems of thought that I want the Codex to avoid.

It is tempting to want to derive legal frameworks from the Codex. This should not be done. At least, not literally as a one-to-one copy. The Codex speaks of laws and rules, but these are metaphysical. They are to be understood within the framework itself, not stamped directly onto criminal codes, constitutions, borders, prisons, schools, hospitals, and people’s bodies.

Some Cities make the mistake of trying to apply religious rules as the basis for a legal framework. The resulting laws are disturbing from the perspective of the Codex. They push their religions into a shape they were never meant to be moulded into. Myth becomes police. Ritual becomes punishment. Metaphysics becomes bureaucracy. And then everyone acts surprised when the whole thing turns ugly.

I wish to pre-emptively address that the Codex should not ever be used to justify a specific law by itself. The Codex can inspire questions. It can guide thought. It can help reveal hidden costs, broken Stone, Crimson incentives, fake Order, and starving Blue. But it cannot be used as a rubber stamp.

Three Things the Codex Must Never Become

• Never can the Codex be used to justify discrimination. There are no better Earthborn in terms of race, gender, sexuality, origin, culture, or history. Never. Don’t even try to do it.
• Never will the Codex replace science. The Codex is meant to be in harmony with science: pushing toward new avenues of research while being strengthened by the latest insights. The science versus religion debate is manufactured by history.
• Never should the Codex be used to inhibit technological progress. The Codex has a strong stance against the abuse of novel technology, especially when the technology aims to substitute a natural world that was already functional. But the Codex is not anti-progress. The most basic principle of the Codex is FORWARD, after all.

This matters. If the Codex ever becomes a Tower that crushes Earthborn under its own symbolic weight, then the Codex has failed. The point is not to build another system where someone says “the sacred text agrees with me” and everyone else must kneel.

None can hold One. That includes me. That includes you. That includes any future Timeseer who thinks the Codex gives them permission to rule other Earthborn like furniture.

How the Codex Can Still Help

This does not mean the Codex is useless when thinking about government policy. Rather than a strict law, the texts can be used as a guide of thought.

The Codex asks different questions than the Crimson City. It asks what a policy does to Stone, Truth, Love, Peace, and Order. It asks whether a law protects public Stone or merely performs moral theatre. It asks whether a prohibition actually prevents harm, or only hides the harm under shame. It asks whether a system is built around Life, or around punishment, control, profit, and fear.

The examples below are my interpretations of the Codex. These are not closed questions with final answers. And unsurprisingly, some conclusions may be controversial to Crimson City values.

Homosexuality

This is a subject that hits home: I’m gay. Very gay.

Almost all existing major religions have found some way to say that I am not natural, unclean, broken, disordered, sinful, or worthy of hellfire. Well, that’s fun. To those religions: go fuck yourself.

To deny my sexual attraction for the sake of your comfort would be a direct attack on Truth, Love, and Peace for the sake of your pathetic idea of Order. I will not even defend this one in depth. I am not interested in begging for my humanity in the courtroom of people who decided before I was born that my Love should embarrass them.

I am natural. I am clean. I am worthy of respect.

Goodbye, haters.

Gender Identity

This subject is a modern controversy that rose during the 2770s AUC. How someone dresses, speaks, moves, names themselves, or presents themselves should not be anyone’s concern. As long as the behaviour of someone is not a direct attack on your Stone or that of society, stop hating.

The Crimson City gets strangely obsessed with bodies that are not its own. It wants to inspect, label, mock, punish, diagnose, expose, and legislate the way another Earthborn exists in the world. This is not Order. This is fear pretending to be structure.

The Codex does add one careful warning on this subject. Body modification is costly, and promoting it mindlessly can entail more costs than foreseen. Irreversible modification of the Stone you received at birth may not be the answer to the discomfort you feel. But that does not make the Stone public property. You are free to own your Stone and adapt it as you wish. Just be mindful of the costs, please.

A serious society would not answer this with hatred or blind celebration. It would answer with information, time, care, protection from coercion, protection from humiliation, and respect for Stone sovereignty.

Euthanasia and Stone Sovereignty

Death should be a fundamental human right in my opinion.

If we truly want our Stone to be sovereign, we should be able to decide when it ends. Naturally, rushed decisions are not what the Codex pushes for. Despair, pressure, loneliness, poverty, lack of care, or being made to feel like a burden are not sovereignty. How this should be framed legally, the Codex does not prescribe. But the main point, sovereign Stone, should be enshrined.

This point also touches on the freedom to harm one’s body. Smokers, drinkers, drug users, and fast food lovers should have the right to govern their Stone how they wish. Information, alternatives, and help are generous gifts. Shunning, criminalising, and punishing those who are conscious about their choices is a direct infringement of Stone sovereignty.

I honestly think it is selfish to preach a perfect life. It comes close to assuming that you hold One, and that is hubris in Codex terms. Your perfect Life may not be mine. Your idea of health may become another prison. Your fear of death may become another law forced onto someone else’s body.

Abortion

Yes, this one is going to sting.

In Codex terms, the pregnant woman is sovereign over her Stone. And our biology has made the woman sovereign over the fate of offspring until birth. This may be a shocking conclusion, even for people who broadly support abortion rights, but think it through carefully: pregnancy happens inside one body. The state cannot make a pregnant body public Stone.

She gives her body for the child. Until birth, the child exists through her body, her blood, her organs, her risk, her pain, her time, her future, her Stone. You may feel many things about that. Good. Feel them. But feeling strongly does not give you ownership over someone else’s body.

Obviously, the Pool of the Body informs us again that any modification of the body can have hidden costs. For abortion, this holds. I am not saying we should legalise abortion at the end of term as if it were the same as the first few weeks of pregnancy. The hidden emotional costs might be enormous to the aborting mother. The medical situation, fetal development, risk, timing, coercion, grief, and circumstance all matter.

Again, I think information, alternatives, and help should be provided in such cases. Support should be generous. Care should be real. But criminalising the pregnant body is not Love, not Peace, and not Order. It is the City trying to seize Stone that does not belong to it.

Environmental Policies

This one is different from all the previous points because the environment is public Stone.

Nature does not belong to one Earthborn, but to a collective of species of Earthborn. Forests, rivers, insects, soil, air, oceans, fungi, animals, fields, mountains, bacteria, and human cities all share the same world. If we go full Crimson on nature — if we exploit, drill, pollute, reshape, poison, burn, and flatten everything around us — we will end up killing ourselves.

This is more of a City-level concern than an individual Earthborn concern. You can govern your own Stone. You cannot simply destroy public Stone and then call it freedom.

We have gone so Crimson that mass extinction of the human species is not a silly hypothetical anymore. We need to take action. All together.

The problem with many current policies is that they are Smooth City policies. Let’s blame the individual Earthborn. Let’s tax meat to promote a new bio-industry. Let’s replace one toxic pesticide with a newer toxin just to appear to change. Let’s shame people who need their car to go to work while keeping the entire City designed around cars. Let’s point at AI data centres, meat eaters, cheap flights, plastic straws, farmers, tourists, corporations, or consumers, depending on which scapegoat is most convenient today.

No. All of us need to change.

We need to realise in the West that our current way of living is not sustainable unless a lot of people die. And I mean a lot of people need to die to sustain this. We cannot have eight billion humans living full Crimson — just imagine all the inflatable swimming pools filled with chlorine water we would need to produce.

I am exhausted by the debates. We find strawmen to avoid looking at ourselves. The meat eaters. The AI data centres. The people who depend on their car to go to work. The corporations. The politicians. The poor. The rich. The foreigners. No. Crimson living is addictive. Stopping it is difficult, almost like stopping with a drug. But it is also exhausting.

I find it so strange that despite our “modern” progress, people seem to be unhappy, exhausted, lonely, and overworked. Why do we keep pushing for more work? Why do we keep building concrete jungles when the bees are dying? Yes, insects are a nuisance. So is our current toxic corporate work culture. But the insects give us wild flowers. Corporate work culture gives us depression and performance anxiety.

This is not the place for a full diatribe on a return to nature. But I built the Codex by looking at nature first. Humans are way too noisy to clearly see the beauty of the Universe.

Immigration

Immigration is a favourite subject in our days — so exhaustingly old in reality.

To keep it brief: look at how Rome flourished by absorbing stranger norms. The Empire stood because it understood how to treat foreigners in a time where slavery and barbarity were the norm. Rome was not soft. Rome was not borderless. Rome was not innocent. But it understood that a City can grow stronger by absorbing, translating, and organising difference.

Yes, a City can collapse by absorbing immigration badly, especially if it gives away Stone freely without Earth or Order. The City is allowed to guard its culture and values. After all, the immigrants do come to a functioning City because of its structure in the first place.

But using the age-old xenophobic tendency of humans to promote your fascist agenda is not supporting Truth, Love, Peace, and Order in any way, shape, or form. Some politicians are not defenders of Order. They are Crimson merchants using old fear to rot the City from inside its own Tower.

A serious immigration policy would not be naïve. It would protect Stone. It would require Earth and Order. It would also protect Truth from propaganda, Love from cruelty, Peace from social fracture, and the immigrant Earthborn from being turned into a political object.

Conclusion

Voila, this was me adding some fuel to the fire of our already burning Crimson World.

I will emphasise again that these views are mine and I can be wrong. The Codex should not become law. These are interpretations, not commandments. To attain Peace, we all need to keep an open mind, keep exchanging Flowers, and perhaps one day we can flush the Crimson from our City and trap a Sapphire Sky.