Orion Simerl

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict has persisted for decades without resolution, generating substantial scholarship, international advocacy, and repeated diplomatic initiatives. Despite this, the conditions facing Palestinians have not materially improved, and the prospects for Palestinian statehood have not advanced. This paper argues that existing frameworks for resolution — principally the two-state solution — have failed not because of insufficient advocacy or moral argument, but because they depend on actors whose strategic interests are not served by Palestinian statehood. Through an incentive-based analysis, the paper establishes that neither Israel nor the United States has an interest in creating a Palestinian state, that no external actor possesses the capacity to produce that outcome over their objection, and that behavioral changes by Palestinian actors cannot alter the structural constraints that make statehood infeasible. The October 7th, 2023 attack foreclosed whatever narrow remaining possibility existed that sustained restraint might eventually produce movement. Against this background, the paper introduces the Option: a proposal under which Palestinians would exchange territorial claims in the West Bank and Gaza for financial compensation of approximately $200 billion, distributed at roughly $40,000–$45,000 per person, enabling voluntary migration to countries of their choosing with full citizenship. The paper provides a detailed implementation framework and addresses the application of Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention to voluntary, financially incentivized relocation. The Option is presented not as a morally ideal outcome but as the only mechanism available that addresses the actual interests of both parties under the constraints that currently exist and will continue to exist.

In the bottom half of the income distribution many individuals are trapped in circumstances where most of their time is spent working jobs that only sustain basic expenses. Economic mobility requires investments of time and money to improve human capital, acquire productive capital, or develop new income opportunities. When individuals cannot accumulate money and possess little discretionary time, they cannot pursue activities that are not already accessible within their existing circumstances. Effort alone cannot produce mobility under these conditions; individuals remain confined to the opportunities furnished by their environment. The state claims to address poverty through paternalistic social spending programs such as healthcare subsidies, food benefits, housing assistance, and utility support. While these programs may make the condition of poverty more manageable, they do not expand the opportunity set of the individuals they are intended to help. Instead, they provide goods and services that service the condition of being poor without altering the structural barriers that prevent mobility. In a market economy these goods and services are purchased from private producers who profit from providing them. These same industries frequently contribute to political campaigns and influence the policy process, creating institutional incentives for the continuation of programs that stabilize poverty rather than eliminate its causes. The American Prosperity Proposals takes a different approach: social spending should be directed toward the creation of opportunity rather than the procurement of goods and services. The proposals presented in this book—The Round-Up Service Charge, the Balance Stimulus, the Employee-Termed Scheduling Tax Credit, and Centers for Economic Planning—are designed to expand individuals’ access to time, money, and productive opportunity while preserving market incentives. Each proposal alters structural conditions that restrict mobility, allowing individuals greater capacity to pursue education, entrepreneurship, and improved employment opportunities.

Failures of communication and understanding are a persistent feature of public discourse. This book argues that many of these failures arise from value-protective denial: the tendency of individuals to avoid, ignore, or reject information that threatens beliefs supporting their values. Because many activities and perceptions of reality depend on these beliefs, contradictory information can produce a threat response that motivates resistance to evidence and logical contradiction. The book describes a condition referred to as the supremacy of bias, in which the protection of belief-supporting values is prioritized above truth, learning, or intellectual consistency. When this condition is present, individuals maintain positions despite unresolved contradictions or the absence of supporting evidence. The argument is developed through a series of analyzed social-media exchanges that illustrate recurring patterns of reasoning failure, including authority-based belief formation, the treatment of opinion as fact, and resistance to arguments that challenge existing beliefs. These cases demonstrate how value-protective denial obstructs learning and prevents the establishment of shared factual understanding. The broader implication is that bias-driven resistance to challenging information undermines both individual reasoning and collective decision-making in democratic societies.

The following paper documents and analyzes a series of events that occurred at the Walmart located in Greenfield, WI, on October 4, 2025, between approximately 2:00 p.m. and 3:30 p.m. The analysis demonstrates how introspective observation can reveal subconscious cognitive mechanisms and moral processes that operate through Assignment, Sequencing, and Comparison (ASC). These mechanisms are applied to the observed behavior to explain how emotion, cognition, and circumstance converge to produce both the appearance and the substance of decision-making. Through the lens of Objective Morality, the paper evaluates the moral content of the acts, distinguishing subjective appearance from objective imposition, and shows how general and immediate circumstances accumulate to influence thought, perception, and behavior. Finally, alternative scenarios are explored to illustrate how different circumstantial variables could have generated different behavioral outcomes. The study concludes that subconscious cognitive organization and liberty-based moral reasoning together provide a coherent, universal framework for explaining human behavior and ethical judgment.

Contemporary moral philosophy frequently appeals to objective reasons said to hold independently of desire. Yet when such reasons conflict, no non-arbitrary criterion exists for determining which should prevail. This article introduces Objective Morality, a liberty-based framework grounded in the invariant structure of conscious agency. Because conscious awareness necessarily involves preferred orientation, desire is a constitutive feature of consciousness, and liberty understood as non-imposition emerges as the necessary condition for action. On this basis, the article demonstrates how this structure subsumes influential moral frameworks by resolving their foundational tensions. It shows that Scanlon’s reasonable rejection reduces to the rejection of liberty-imposing principles ; it provides the missing criterion to resolve Parfit’s conflicting objective reasons ; it identifies why Berlin’s positive liberty collapses into unjustified coercion ; and it reframes the Capabilities Approach as a derivative function of adequate opportunities to acquire time, money, and know-how. By situating liberty as a structural precondition rather than a contingent value, the paper provides a unified normative framework capable of grounding moral judgment without contradiction.

This paper develops a structural account of ideal existence based on the universal features of consciousness. Consciousness consists of awareness that produces desire, making non-imposition the only moral system consistent with universal desire fulfillment. From this foundation, ideal existence is defined as a state of perfect liberty and complete opportunity. Yet ideal existence contains an inherent limitation: knowledge is finite while time is infinite, causing novelty to eventually exhaust and existence to become burdensome. This is a God’s Problem—one that any eternal being must face. The universe solves this problem by functioning as a random generator of complexity, producing new objects, experiences, and conscious beings that expand the total pool of knowledge and preserve novelty. Moral duality—creation versus control—further explains the divergence of conscious motion and the necessity of separate domains. An evaluation of atheistic, Eastern, and monotheistic explanations shows that only ideal existence is morally consistent, logically sufficient, and compatible with observed reality. The paper concludes that if existence is ideal, the structure described herein is what existence must be.

This work presents Assignment, Sequencing, and Comparison (ASC), a theoretical model of conscious decision-making derived from the structural features of understood existence. ASC begins from the observation that experience consists of objects and motion, and that motion consists of cause-and-effect relationships producing feelings within conscious beings. Within this structure, consciousness arises through awareness of objects and changing conditions together with orientation toward preferred forms of motion. From these conditions emerges a continuous decision process in which agents assign significance to perceived objects, sequence potential actions, and compare the anticipated feelings associated with anticipated outcomes. ASC was identified phenomenologically through introspective examination of conscious experience, including reflection on the processes by which thoughts, perceptions, feelings, and actions arise. By examining why particular thoughts occurred, why particular feelings were experienced, and why particular actions were taken, the structural mechanisms of assignment, sequencing, and comparison were identified as the underlying processes organizing conscious activity. Experiential case studies are presented as illustrations of these mechanisms as they occur in ordinary experience, demonstrating how complex decisions emerge from structured sequences of assignment and evaluation across changing circumstances. ASC also proposes a novel account of intelligence grounded in the structure of reality and knowledge. Because reality consists fundamentally of objects in motion organized through cause-and-effect relationships, knowledge consists in the identification of objects and their sequencing within causal structures. Since individuals capable of defining objects and sequencing cause and effect are in principle capable of understanding any domain of knowledge, differences in intelligence arise primarily from differences in values rather than inherent cognitive limits. Individuals who require understanding in order to pursue valued outcomes develop greater intelligence, while intelligence is limited where values do not require intelligence, or encourage the preservation of beliefs through self-deception. By describing decision-making as a structured process grounded in objects, motion, and feeling, ASC provides a unified account of consciousness, knowledge, motivation, and purposive action.

This book presents a systematic account of objective morality grounded in the structure of conscious experience. It argues that consciousness begins with awareness and orientation toward what is perceived, giving rise to desire and purposive action. Because conscious agents necessarily pursue preferred states within a shared environment, moral principles must be derived from the structural conditions that allow multiple agents to pursue their ends simultaneously. The book argues that liberty, understood as the absence of imposed interference among agents, provides the invariant basis of objective moral truth. From this foundation, the work develops a model of ideal existence defined by universal opportunity for the exercise of desire within conditions of non-imposition. The theory provides a unified account of moral obligation, social cooperation, and institutional design while offering a critique of alternative moral frameworks grounded in authority, tradition, or subjective preference. The book also examines religious and secular explanations of existence, arguing that systems grounded in ultimate authority or finite annihilation fail to provide coherent accounts of moral reality and ideal existence. By deriving morality from the universal features of conscious experience rather than from cultural norms or theological premises, the book proposes a comprehensive framework intended to explain the structure of moral reasoning and the conditions under which rational agents can coexist without domination.