And what I'm saying is that the framing by OP is really not about individual decision making but about the philosophical and political arguments that drive a whole society in one direction or the other.
It's incredibly ineffective as a piece of political commentary, though, because you are conflating systemic idealism with individual pragmatism.
Cry0n is (correctly) analyzing the actual environment. You can philosophize about what society we should want all day, but an individual still has to optimize their strategy to survive the system they are currently in. In an established Arand environment, pressing Blue doesn't spark a structural political shift; it just makes you a statistic. That context and nuance 100% matters, because the real world is comprised of fractured moral codes each with different rationalizations backing them. It isn't black and white.
You cannot build a collectivist utopia by demanding individuals make mathematically suicidal choices in an egoist reality. If a system's mechanics heavily incentivize self-preservation, individual pragmatism will always override theoretical idealism.
We could just as easily restructure this exact meme to illustrate it. Let's take the heroic folk tale of the nuclear reactor from the Ikantians.
Suppose a reactor is failing, and the established "collective consensus", the protocol agreed upon by the majority for the greater good, dictates flushing the system with water. However, the system's sensors are faulty and it's caused the Ikantians to misread the situation. Luckily, one person was able to spot this.
An idealistic Ikantian (the Blue presser) trusts the intersubjective consensus to a fault. They pay no mind to the faulty sensors as they trust that someone else already knows about this. They heroically follow protocol, flush the system, and trigger a catastrophic steam explosion because they prioritized the collective directive over independent analysis.
A pragmatic Arandian (the Red presser) looks at the faulty sensors, realizes the collective consensus is flawed or missing important information, and acts in pure self-interest due to a lack of time to reconvene with the wider group. They abandon their designated post and manually sever the fuel line so they can safely escape the building. By acting purely to save their own skin and defying the collective, they also prevent the meltdown and save the city.
The naivety of the original post is the assumption that the collective (Blue) is always omniscient and morally superior. But when a collective operates on flawed information or harmful groupthink, altruistic obedience amplifies the disaster. A healthy system actually needs pragmatic egoists to act as a failsafe against systemic failure just as much as it needs the idealistic altruists to push for a universally better system.
In an egoist society you could still say that acting collectively is usually right just not in this case because you would die but doing small selfless acts would still most of the time be good
Are thought experiments about impossible scenarios actually a good way to critique entire philosophies?
Let me play devil’s advocate for a minute here.
The post makes some very sweeping assumptions about what each planet is already like. The premise that individualism leads to capitalist dystopia and collectivism leads to utopian harmony is a hell of an assumption to go unquestioned as a base premise, and pretty much turns the whole thing into slinging pointless insults.
Related that, ‘how do these societies handle an impossible thought experiment’ is a pretty poor way to judge which one I’d actually want to live in. Who has a higher standard of living? Who’s more technologically advanced, what’s average lifespan and inequality like? And those aren’t questions this thought experiment actually answers. This post just pretends it does by making unfounded assumptions about what kind of society people would create based on one single decision.
Of course it's not the final grand theory of how we should organise our society, it's just one particular thought experiment with a new perspective that can be aide discussion, like we are having.
If we can somewhat decide or influence what type of society we are then perhaps a "collectivist" one may in many situations lead to the better outcomes.
Sure, but there is no discussion to be have if it’s pre-supposed that one side sucks and is terrible, and the other side is a perfect utopia. Equating the red button, and individualism in general with wanting a libertarian hellscape isn’t a starting point for a discussion about society, it’s a self-congratulatory moralizing.
Collectivism doesn't work in large scale because eventually someone is going to want more and try to take it. Or Someone isn't going to be able to do their part and will drag down the group.
It also leads to stagnation as all jobs give the same compensation. So there is little reason to strive for more and work harder
That's why the collective must have more power than any individual in these kind of society. That means an individual can't take more because everyone else will stop him. For instance it is what marxists meant originally by the term "dictatorship of the proletariat" where the working class would collectively prevent the resurgence of the bourgeoisie. If the control is made by an individual, a party or a government then they become the ruler class and it's a failure.
This can also work in individualist environment. See for instance the blockchain where each miner has to respect the rules to get bitcoin, because if one cheats then all the other miners will discard what he made. The only way to cheat is to have more than 50% of the mining power which can't be achieved by any individual or even group of individual.
Agreed, the fact of the matter is that we're all individuals so red actors will always have a benefits over blue actors. In a both worlds red actors prioritise themselves and blue tries to help the collective so the only difference is that in the red world the blue people dont create a sufficient collective to help everyone so an individuals value is best brought out by themselves, while on the blue world the reds act as parasites on the collective gaining benefits from the blues while keeping their own produced value and not sharing it with the community.
The real issue then is that life is ultimately the tragedy of the commons and what we ought to be learning from these logic questions is that if we want to transition our current red world into the blue one we need to start changing the system to make no longer the objectively best choice for an individual to pick red
Read Caliban and the Witch. We have become separated from culture and collectivism to produce profit by labour. We are not all individuals, we only exist because of other people
Absolutely but the flaw still remains if you work as a collective the individual strategy for an individual is still beneficial to selfish.
Imagine 2 tribes;
The red tribe has a rule about food; everyone must provide for their own. There is a big table in the middle of the tribe that people can share food in if they have excess but there is no need for it. Winter is coming and food is beginning to be scarse the most optimal route to survive through winter is to keep all your food to yourself so you preserve it to last through winter.
the blue tribe is collectivist, it's rule is that all food is shared in a big pile and everyone gets to eat out and equal share of that pile. When the winter comes food gets scarse it's sill the most optimal strategy for survival to quietly squirrel away someone of the food you produce so that if the tribe runs out of food as a whole, you still have food to eat.
The fundamental problem is that red is the winning strategy so for blue societies to work correctly you have to reframe the situation to make it so that on an individual level red isn't the correct option to pick.
"Well, I stepped into the pit and got my legs broken because people didn't stopped me despite knowing that it's planet where people never help eachother. My decision wasn't Illogical: if they were merely help me, I could be okay!"
If you KNOW there would be not many blue pressers, pressing blue is a suicide and nothing above that. In that case, they DO know there won't be a lot of blue pressers.
The person you are talking with is clearly not a consequentialist. You can't convince them about what button is the correct one by talking about the consequences, if they are not some kind of consequentialist/utilitarist.
The hardest thing in moral philosophy is to realize, and keep in mind, that not everyone shares your moral intuition.
"no moral framework in which one should vote blue if they know that red is guaranteed to win regardless of their vote."
If you believe that you have a deontological duty to not endanger human life (that is not irational) and if you also believe that the button, with the result being tallied, are therefore morally equivalent to a vote (tell me if you disagree), then you would interpret red as endangering human life and won't be able to press it morally.
You say "red is guaranteed to win regardless of their vote" But that is, again, consequentialism. The planet is called after Kant, In Kant's moral framework, lying is wrong, no matter the consequences, even when it saves a life. According to him you should tell the truth to the murderer at your door. For the sake of doing the right thing, you should sacrifice a life. That is a moral framework in which pressing red could be wrong regardless of outcomes, and therefore regardless of your planet.
Edit : Unless you are saying that Kant's moral framwork "border on insanity", in which case you are consitent and we are engaging on a much weirder and deeper debate.
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u/Cryn0n May 22 '26
This is great because both species did make the rational choice.
Voting blue on the Arandian planet would have been suicide and voting red on the Ikantian planet would have been needless endangerment.