Seriously. With the amount of anger regarding the Epstein files, I have zero confidence that real consequences will be paid by the perpetrators and those who looked away. I’ve even less hope in justice for the victims…
This is all being revealed in 4k, in the most technologically “dense” period in history. Scholars, budding politicians, students, leaders and researchers and artificial intelligences are going to studying every angle of this story for the next several centuries learning about human failings, about how the wicked manipulate the masses to accept the worst things, and how nations can fall to fascism and terror.
In the coming years and decades, many of the people who have done the worst things will live out the rest of their lives with only a nagging worry that it will come back on them, but not much else. We do not get our satisfaction in them. Nor will we ever get our satisfaction for the thousands upon thousands of other “Epstein gangs” that have lived and died throughout history without ever facing consequence for doing far more brutal things to far more people.
We live on the top of a mountain of skulls and sorrow that grows by the day, and that’s just something we have to live with. We don’t even have enough time as individuals to make a dent in the suffering that roars past us every day.
But it hasn’t been for nothing. The reason we can now know about it, the reason we have a society now with order and law and systems at all is because there are enough people who want a better world and they will fight this kind of evil as a group. Our quality of life has improved so far beyond what it was a thousand years ago, that the people of those times would think we’re in some kind of literal heaven if they could see it. We do not broadly face terror every day, we do not broadly starve, we do not broadly get our villages raided by men with swords who will stab us and take our women and daughters.
We are slowly but surely carving away a better world, but we’re always going to be fighting ourselves. As the world gets smaller and people connect more, that fight will grow smaller, it just takes more time than we have to see it through. As long as we’re each doing something towards it, we will still get there… between pendulum swings.
Someday our descendants will leave Earth, some AI or hybrid entity utterly unlike us at all, far, far beyond us in thought and feeling and mental capacity, and it will be able to read our whole history and know how much we sacrificed and how much we suffered to get there. It might even see this post and know how much you’re hurting in this moment.
Let’s call it the “Empathetic Basilisk Theory” I like it a lot better than the other one.
We’ve survived pretty apocalyptic situations in our rise on Earth, with far fewer tools. I know things are going to be hard but they’re not insurmountable, we will go on.
What stings about it is that this coming one is self-inflicted despite plenty of warning, and now it’s tool late and the ones who will suffer the most are the ones least responsible for it, the people in developing countries, and of course the animals of our world.
Still, life will continue, people will live on, the world will change. A million years from now will happen with or without us, and by then it will be a whole new world with a whole new set of issues, life forms and problems.
When one focuses on the whole, they can see the positive progression of humanity. It is indeed better than ever. Humans are living longer and healthier and with more dignity than before. But… it’s much too slow. I’ve only this single life. We truly are capable of so much more… if we really wanted.
It’s too bad I wasn’t born much later. I’d like to see humanity at its best. But I suppose there’s just as much chance that we’ll obliterate ourselves.
There is very little I can affect and experience in my lifetime, and so I will do with my time what I might. But goodness, there are some hard days… and years.
I’ve only this single life. We truly are capable of so much more… if we really wanted.
I know well this frustration, I am statistically older and have had to face this much sooner, that despite being born on the cusp of our species truly being capable of doing something totally new and amazing, we’re going to be stuck in this hell forever, building and tearing ourselves down because there’s always going to be a few who want for themselves rather than build community, always someone who will want to control others rather than be part of a functioning whole.
It’s a feeling of “And that’s it? So I just get a peek at this absurd universe that almost came so close to having meaning and direction but then just ‘nah’?”
Probably the reason I rewatch so much Star Trek. I love seeing what humanity is capable of.
(Yes, I still read/watch dystopic and apocalyptic stories, but I’ve been doing this less and less because it’s honestly depressing when I look at society today and realize this seems to be where we’re heading instead).
My belief is the future is going to be a combination of both the fantastic and the apocalyptic. From my experience in forward-time-travel for decades now, I have seen that every prediction of the future fails to predict just how much more of everything there always is. For example, we live in a world that simultaneously has AI machines decoding proteins and deciphering whale language, we have fusion reactors close to coming online and can read the shape of distant black holes through gravitational waves. Some true star-trek shit happening every day… but across the fence from all that exist shanty-towns and subsistence farmers and squalor and poverty and humble people living like they did three centuries ago.
One of my first trips across Asia I was in the deep back country, mist-filled valleys and ancient villages, and saw a farmer in his rice field pushing a plow with an an oxen (Carabao) and he was staring at his phone and scrolling as he worked. This is what science fiction misses, for better or worse, the collision between past and future that is always happening.
In some ways the future will be more interesting because of this, we are going to see a lot more things we never expected, but we’re also not going to see a homogenous “lift” to our species where we suddenly all become space socialists. Not without significant artificial modification of all our brains, we’re too human, too primate. We will not have the stars in our current form.
They wont suffer in life. Most of them will be brushed under the carpet, and history will forget them. That doesnt sound like much of a consequence, but these are people who had the chance to leave a lasting legacy for being great, but in 100 years realistically only a small handful will enter the history books and it will be as villains.
Not even a “good” villain like Hitler, who despite the evil had a good shot at conquering the world.
If I had a chance to be remembered as a great leader, or a super philanthropist, or being Iron Man, or even a supervillain, and instead my legacy is to be completely forgotten by the world at large and my existence actively attempted to be covered up by anyone I ever had dealings with, I’d be a bit mortally upset.
Its not much to hang onto, and we can still hope and pray they face justice in life, and we can hope for a morality-based afterlife so they may face justice in death, but they will at least face justice in the history books.
Unfortunately, I won’t care what the history books will say because I will long be dead and forgotten as well.
I cannot hope in the hereafter because there simply is no plausible basis for such, as nice as the thought of justice in the hereafter would be.
No. If there is justice to be had, it would need to be in this lifetime to be considered such. Anything less is our failing of today.
sighs Such a crummy species we can be. The only thing I can hold on to is the fact that human progress has trended towards the better and hopefully it will continue that direction (presuming we don’t obliterate ourselves). It’s too bad I won’t be around to see that.
Oh, wow. 😏
➖
Seriously. With the amount of anger regarding the Epstein files, I have zero confidence that real consequences will be paid by the perpetrators and those who looked away. I’ve even less hope in justice for the victims…
I really need some hope in this. Please. 😞
Look beyond today.
This is all being revealed in 4k, in the most technologically “dense” period in history. Scholars, budding politicians, students, leaders and researchers and artificial intelligences are going to studying every angle of this story for the next several centuries learning about human failings, about how the wicked manipulate the masses to accept the worst things, and how nations can fall to fascism and terror.
In the coming years and decades, many of the people who have done the worst things will live out the rest of their lives with only a nagging worry that it will come back on them, but not much else. We do not get our satisfaction in them. Nor will we ever get our satisfaction for the thousands upon thousands of other “Epstein gangs” that have lived and died throughout history without ever facing consequence for doing far more brutal things to far more people.
We live on the top of a mountain of skulls and sorrow that grows by the day, and that’s just something we have to live with. We don’t even have enough time as individuals to make a dent in the suffering that roars past us every day.
But it hasn’t been for nothing. The reason we can now know about it, the reason we have a society now with order and law and systems at all is because there are enough people who want a better world and they will fight this kind of evil as a group. Our quality of life has improved so far beyond what it was a thousand years ago, that the people of those times would think we’re in some kind of literal heaven if they could see it. We do not broadly face terror every day, we do not broadly starve, we do not broadly get our villages raided by men with swords who will stab us and take our women and daughters.
We are slowly but surely carving away a better world, but we’re always going to be fighting ourselves. As the world gets smaller and people connect more, that fight will grow smaller, it just takes more time than we have to see it through. As long as we’re each doing something towards it, we will still get there… between pendulum swings.
Someday our descendants will leave Earth, some AI or hybrid entity utterly unlike us at all, far, far beyond us in thought and feeling and mental capacity, and it will be able to read our whole history and know how much we sacrificed and how much we suffered to get there. It might even see this post and know how much you’re hurting in this moment.
Let’s call it the “Empathetic Basilisk Theory” I like it a lot better than the other one.
I want to believe that is true, but meanwhile biosphere collapse is getting ready to assrape our civilization. Things are about to get feral.
We’ve survived pretty apocalyptic situations in our rise on Earth, with far fewer tools. I know things are going to be hard but they’re not insurmountable, we will go on.
What stings about it is that this coming one is self-inflicted despite plenty of warning, and now it’s tool late and the ones who will suffer the most are the ones least responsible for it, the people in developing countries, and of course the animals of our world.
Still, life will continue, people will live on, the world will change. A million years from now will happen with or without us, and by then it will be a whole new world with a whole new set of issues, life forms and problems.
When one focuses on the whole, they can see the positive progression of humanity. It is indeed better than ever. Humans are living longer and healthier and with more dignity than before. But… it’s much too slow. I’ve only this single life. We truly are capable of so much more… if we really wanted.
It’s too bad I wasn’t born much later. I’d like to see humanity at its best. But I suppose there’s just as much chance that we’ll obliterate ourselves.
There is very little I can affect and experience in my lifetime, and so I will do with my time what I might. But goodness, there are some hard days… and years.
I know well this frustration, I am statistically older and have had to face this much sooner, that despite being born on the cusp of our species truly being capable of doing something totally new and amazing, we’re going to be stuck in this hell forever, building and tearing ourselves down because there’s always going to be a few who want for themselves rather than build community, always someone who will want to control others rather than be part of a functioning whole.
It’s a feeling of “And that’s it? So I just get a peek at this absurd universe that almost came so close to having meaning and direction but then just ‘nah’?”
Probably the reason I rewatch so much Star Trek. I love seeing what humanity is capable of.
(Yes, I still read/watch dystopic and apocalyptic stories, but I’ve been doing this less and less because it’s honestly depressing when I look at society today and realize this seems to be where we’re heading instead).
My belief is the future is going to be a combination of both the fantastic and the apocalyptic. From my experience in forward-time-travel for decades now, I have seen that every prediction of the future fails to predict just how much more of everything there always is. For example, we live in a world that simultaneously has AI machines decoding proteins and deciphering whale language, we have fusion reactors close to coming online and can read the shape of distant black holes through gravitational waves. Some true star-trek shit happening every day… but across the fence from all that exist shanty-towns and subsistence farmers and squalor and poverty and humble people living like they did three centuries ago.
One of my first trips across Asia I was in the deep back country, mist-filled valleys and ancient villages, and saw a farmer in his rice field pushing a plow with an an oxen (Carabao) and he was staring at his phone and scrolling as he worked. This is what science fiction misses, for better or worse, the collision between past and future that is always happening.
In some ways the future will be more interesting because of this, we are going to see a lot more things we never expected, but we’re also not going to see a homogenous “lift” to our species where we suddenly all become space socialists. Not without significant artificial modification of all our brains, we’re too human, too primate. We will not have the stars in our current form.
Pardons across the board
They wont suffer in life. Most of them will be brushed under the carpet, and history will forget them. That doesnt sound like much of a consequence, but these are people who had the chance to leave a lasting legacy for being great, but in 100 years realistically only a small handful will enter the history books and it will be as villains.
Not even a “good” villain like Hitler, who despite the evil had a good shot at conquering the world.
If I had a chance to be remembered as a great leader, or a super philanthropist, or being Iron Man, or even a supervillain, and instead my legacy is to be completely forgotten by the world at large and my existence actively attempted to be covered up by anyone I ever had dealings with, I’d be a bit mortally upset.
Its not much to hang onto, and we can still hope and pray they face justice in life, and we can hope for a morality-based afterlife so they may face justice in death, but they will at least face justice in the history books.
Unfortunately, I won’t care what the history books will say because I will long be dead and forgotten as well.
I cannot hope in the hereafter because there simply is no plausible basis for such, as nice as the thought of justice in the hereafter would be.
No. If there is justice to be had, it would need to be in this lifetime to be considered such. Anything less is our failing of today.
sighs Such a crummy species we can be. The only thing I can hold on to is the fact that human progress has trended towards the better and hopefully it will continue that direction (presuming we don’t obliterate ourselves). It’s too bad I won’t be around to see that.