Lawrence Sheraton
At its heart is a deceptively simple idea: money should be based on energy — something real, measurable, and universal. Energy conservation becomes wealth. Energy efficiency becomes prosperity. Nuclear weapons become currency. Our sun that falls equally on every nation becomes the foundation of a monetary system that belongs to everyone. This is not utopia. It does not require better humans. It requires a better operating system — one that makes the rational thing and the right thing the same. The transition from a Star Wars civilization to a Star Trek one is not science fiction. It is an engineering problem. The designs are on the table. The builders are needed.
One man stands at the center of this story — not because he was uniquely villainous, but because he was uniquely positioned: at the helm of one of the world's most visible corporations, at exactly the moment when a set of deeply flawed ideas needed a champion. He gave them one. His ideas spread. The damage accumulated quietly, below the waterline, for decades before anyone was forced to reckon with it. This book uses Mr. Neutron's story as a lens. What it examines is the systems we build, the ideas we adopt without question, and the human cost of getting the foundations wrong. It is a warning, a diagnosis, and an argument for something better.
Every major tradition in moral philosophy is prescriptive. Aristotle gives you virtues to cultivate. Kant gives you duties to follow. Mill gives you outcomes to maximize. Rawls gives you principles derived from an original position. Each framework produces verdicts. Each asks you to accept its premises. The Sheraton framework does something categorically different. It gives you a method, and trusts that applying this method honestly will produce ethical truth in the same way that applying mathematical reasoning produces correct answers. The tools for finding ethical truth are not found in a sacred text, tradition, or institutions. They are inside you. The capacity to feel, to ask honest questions, to imagine yourself in another person’s position: these are not learned behaviors. They are innate and the foundations which ethical understanding is built.