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Aimhem
Culture and Society > Cultural Factors > Groups and Organizations
Culture and Society > Cultural Factors > Institutes
Galactography > Sephirotic Empires > Negentropy Alliance
Culture and Society > Cultural Factors > Institutes
Galactography > Sephirotic Empires > Negentropy Alliance
 Image from Anders Sandberg |
Aimhem emerged during the ComEmp era in the Negentropy Alliance to deal with the increasing amount of schismatics, mental suboptimisations, wild memes and general chaos brought by the destabilizing cultural influences in the wake of the Version War. Originally a mental health maintenance corporation on Everydike IX, it began allying with a number of other MHMOs, memetics associations, psychological defence think tanks and the Alexandria Directorate of Psychological Law. Together they formed the Association in 5434, and has since then grown closer and into a single unified mental monitoring organization.
Aimhem's main goal is to uphold the Axioms (especially axiom two and five) in the mental sphere. To this end it acts as a accreditation bureau for mental auditors, sets up standards, organizes conferences and science courts to improve the understanding on the promotion of mental health, run several psychological education networks and coordinate the many other groups involved in this aspect of psychology and sociology.
At the same time, it has a strong investigative part, the Proactive Branch. The Proactive Branch actively monitors and investigates threats to mental and social health, reporting them to the relevant authorities. The Branch is a mixture of a secret police, public health service, inquisition and roaming psychologists. It acts both on the global and local scale: globally it monitors overall trends in culture, the spread of memes and how people react to the world, analyzing this and warning for potential sources of trouble (this part, Proactive Global, is currently mainly dealing with the NoCoZo situation). On a more local level planetary or national sub-branches do similar work, but also have field agents doing spot checks.
Perhaps most feared are the cybernetic monitoring teams, authorized access to nearly anything by the highest levels of the Negentropic legal systems — including the thoughts of citizens. The monitoring teams scan mental states (directly from bots, vecs and AIs, and either remotely detected using a ranged imaging device or downloaded from bioid brains with extensive cybernetic enhancement). While they are extremely few, have no reason to monitor everyone, and are themselves scrutinized to an extent unthinkable to most beings, just their existence is enough to make many Negentropics straighten their minds and try to think correct thoughts.
Persistent rumours say that the Aimhem has secret agents (especially cybernetic monitoring teams) outside the Alliance. This is never denied or confirmed, as Aimhem patiently points out its widespread interstellar network of collaboration with other mental health or ideology maintenance organizations makes it impossible to define what "secret" means in this context.
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Development Notes
Text by Anders Sandberg; slightly modified by M. Alan Kazlev
Initially published on 31 December 2001.
Initially published on 31 December 2001.
