THE FUTURE CHAPTERS 29-30

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https://freedomain.com/freedomain_books/the-future/

Centuries in the future, an old man awakes from cryogenic sleep to face the judgement of a utopian society that barely survived his past abuses of power. In the vein of 'Atlas Shrugged, philosophy, philosopher Stefan Molyneux has created a compelling and powerful work of imagination. He vividly describes the wonderful future that mankind can achieve - and the barriers to getting there - and all that we need to leave behind to finally live in peace...

Transcript
00:00 The Future by Stephan Molyneux, chapter 29.
00:06 Roman refused to be delivered back to his tribe on a skybus like a package, so
00:14 he and David disembarked a short distance away and covered the remaining
00:18 distance on foot. A footlesser, a giant crate that transported itself though not
00:24 on feet, followed them at a medium distance. As they strode under the
00:31 sliding shadow branches of the trees, David cast occasional glances at Roman's
00:37 set face. The older warrior was busy concocting some kind of story to explain
00:43 the new developments. David could understand that, see that clearly, but he
00:49 gave Roman his space, not wanting to interfere in whatever face-saving
00:52 narrative the older man was creating.
00:56 "You wouldn't let me scan for them," said David eventually. "How do you know where
01:01 the tribe is?" Roman grunted. "Our movements are not random." He was not disposed to
01:08 say anything more, so the pair walked in silence, David behind Roman, who had a
01:13 sure sense of where the firm footfalls were. "I'm sorry you wouldn't take any of
01:18 our parenting consultants," said David. "We'll figure it out."
01:25 After a while, they climbed a small mossy hill and stared down into a wide, shallow
01:32 depression, full of cherry trees, tangled undergrowth, and darting birds. Roman said,
01:40 "It's an old crater from the cataclysms." "Mermaid David, we have a story in our clan
01:50 that we were first kicked out of El, and then we were kicked out of Evan." Again, he
01:58 refused to elaborate. After a minute or two, Roman moved suddenly, stepping down
02:04 the mossy rocks into the depression below. The members of the clan were lying
02:10 in the shade of the cherry trees, escaping the stealthy rise of the
02:14 noonday heat. Children played a game of catching petals as they fell. David was
02:21 reminded how little work people did in the distant past, and in the present, too.
02:26 In most of ancient Europe, serfs worked only 20 hours or so a week, and over the
02:33 winter months, families mostly huddled under blankets, telling stories and
02:37 conserving heat. Ancient Spain had five months of holidays a year. The truly
02:45 manic and frankly unsustainable workaholism really took root from the
02:50 19th to the 21st centuries. Early on, it was because the Industrial Revolution
02:55 was building capital for nothing. Later on, it was because taxes were so high
03:00 that everyone had to work insane hours just to keep up. A few young males jumped
03:08 to their feet a short distance apart as Roman approached and thumped their right
03:11 hands against their chests. They greeted Roman using a word that David did not
03:16 understand. He returned to their greeting, thumping his own chest. Word quickly
03:22 spread, and Roman's two sons came and knelt before him. He touched their
03:28 foreheads in a strangely tender gesture. They stood and hugged him, joined in a
03:34 moment by his wife. David stood awkwardly as the tribe hugged and chatted.
03:40 Apparently there was a lot to catch up on. Births, great hunts, two deaths, one
03:45 natural, and three new beards. From what David could hear, Roman evaded any
03:53 detailed examination of his time in the sieve. Vague replies floated past faces
03:59 eager to tell their own stories. "The leader is gone," thought David, "and the
04:06 people just organized themselves."
04:10 Eventually, Roman disengaged from the crowd and leapt nimbly onto a tree stump,
04:15 always proud of his physical strength and dexterity. His face shone with what
04:22 looked like genuine enthusiasm, and David noticed how much of tribal leadership
04:29 is theater. "Comrades," cried Roman, "I bring knowledge and new rules to us. This
04:39 man here, David, is a ruler in his own tribe, although he would not call himself
04:44 that, and we have returned with some new ideas. I'm always thinking of what is
04:51 best for all of us, best for the tribe, and David and I have come to an agreement
04:57 and understanding. As you know, in every negotiation no one gets exactly what
05:03 they want, but you find some way to meet in the middle. This is the middle. I agree
05:11 with some of it, I don't agree with all of it, but this is what we have decided."
05:17 He took a deep breath, gesturing at the falling petals and darting blackbirds.
05:21 "We know that nature is harsh, unforgiving. Mistakes, she punishes them with maiming
05:31 or death. We have always respected that and raised our children to respect nature,
05:36 to have discipline, lose their fear of pain, embrace hardship, and survive. What
05:43 they call the civ, short for the civilization, a prideful word as if there
05:49 were only one, has taken a different approach. They keep nature at a distance,
05:57 they keep their feet on the neck of nature, they seem to dominate her
06:01 completely, and they're doing well in their way. Again, I don't agree with
06:07 everything that they do and every outcome they have embraced, but my visit
06:11 to their world has given me the idea that..." David could see Roman struggling
06:17 mightily with his speech and almost expected the older man to call him in to
06:21 finish the thoughts, but he cleared his throat and continued. "As you know, this
06:30 entire affair began because of my son and David's daughter. She is right." Roman's
06:38 voice cracked slightly. "They call it peaceful periling and I have called it
06:45 weakness and spoiling and coddling, but... and it took me a while to understand so I
06:51 have to sprint through what you are learning. I hope you will continue to
06:54 trust me as you always have." He cleared his throat again. "I first thought when I
07:01 looked at their buildings and machines and ease that I didn't have to discipline
07:06 their children because they had mastered nature so completely. I don't know if
07:12 mastering nature so greatly comes with risk, but I have done it for a long time
07:16 and nothing really bad seems to be occurring or coming, so I guess at some
07:24 point imagining disaster just becomes a kind of curse we are putting on us for
07:29 reasons of..." David scanned the men, women, and children in a semicircle around
07:35 Roman. Although a dispassionate observer might accuse Roman of rambling, watching
07:41 a leader think in real time was fascinating to them as it would be to
07:45 anyone. "So I thought they were soft on their kids because they had conquered
07:52 nature and turned their machines into slaves or not slaves but workers I guess,
07:58 but David tells me that is not the case. They have not achieved such control and
08:05 ease." He shook his head rapidly. "They are not soft on their kids because they have
08:11 conquered nature. They have conquered nature because they were soft on their
08:16 kids or not soft but..." He grimaced. "I hate to say reasonable because there is reason
08:24 in what we do as well, strong reason, but they do not punish their children and so
08:30 nature or the cycle of history does not punish them." The last four words sank
08:40 deep into the listening tribe. There was a silence and concentration in the air
08:47 as there always is when an essential truth is circled and approached. David
08:54 wanted to say it's not about controlling nature, but held his tongue. Roman needed
09:00 to be in charge here. "Now I have this rule, the non-aggression principle, which
09:07 is you can't start the use of force against others even if you think that
09:12 will help your children in the future as we do. Eating children, punishing
09:18 children, yelling, harsh words even, these are forbidden in the civ." David's eyes
09:27 narrowed at the mistake. "They are forbidden universally according to
09:31 morality to universally preferable behavior, not just in the civ as a kind
09:36 of cultural or local preference." He wanted to leap up and proclaim the truth,
09:41 but once more bit his tongue and the funny thought passed through his mind
09:46 that he was initiating force against himself.
09:50 Roman continued, "Now the people in the civ, they hold this to be a universal
09:59 value, a global truth so to speak, though I imagine it is true on other worlds as
10:04 well." Roman smiled painfully, "And I hold this to be true here in this tribe, in our
10:13 world."
10:15 Roman's wife scowled, "Why, words?" He looked at her expectantly. She continued,
10:24 "Even if we accept the rules they have for their own children, I don't get why
10:28 harsh words are the same as spanking. I thought they were all about free speech."
10:32 Roman shrugged, turning to David. David stood up and said, "Hi, hello, good morning.
10:40 Great question. We have machines to measure how a child's brain develops.
10:47 Harsh words have a measurable negative effect on a developing brain. The moral
10:53 rules that govern parents and children are different from those governing
10:56 adults. Like, I don't have an obligation to feed every child in the world, but if
11:03 I'm raising my child, I'm obligated to feed that child because by keeping him
11:06 at home, I'm preventing other people from feeding him." "What the hell does that
11:11 have to do with free speech?" demanded Roman's wife, her lips taut with tension.
11:16 "You're free to swear at me," replied David, "because I am not obligated to
11:21 listen. I can leave at any time, and because my brain is already fully
11:25 developed. You are free not to feed me as well, because I'm an adult, so I can get
11:30 food anywhere, and my body is already fully developed. If I was your child, you
11:36 would not be free to starve me, because my body is developing, and you are my sole
11:40 source of food. In the same way, you are not free to verbally abuse your child,
11:46 who is in an unchosen relationship with you. You chose to have a child. Your child
11:54 did not choose you as a parent, and is not free to leave. Children are like
12:01 prisoners of nature, which means that the very highest moral standards apply to
12:07 parents. We also have very strong rules against what is called defamation,
12:13 destroying people's reputations by lying about them, and a parent who verbally
12:17 abuses a child is defaming that child by calling him stupid or lazy or clumsy or
12:25 worse. It harms the child's view of himself, and it is false."
12:31 Roman's wife squared her hips belligerently. "Are you saying that there
12:35 are no stupid or lazy children?" Roman's sons took a step back away from their
12:41 mother. David pursed his lips. "When you hunt, and you shoot an arrow, and the
12:49 arrow misses, is it the fault of the arrow?" She did not answer. "Is it the fault
12:56 of the bow, perhaps? Or the deer you are shooting at?" Silence. "What about your
13:02 fingers? Are they to blame? Should they be punished?" Angry silence. David could not
13:10 resist. He turned to Roman. "Do you see what I mean when I say that raising
13:14 children harshly does not make them stronger? You see she will not even
13:17 respond to my questions?" Roman scowled. "They are stupid questions. I know I'm
13:23 gonna say that because you are not my child." There was a murmur of tense
13:27 laughter around the half-circle. David said, "If your child is stupid, then
13:36 either you have taught him badly, or he has a physical problem with his brain. If
13:40 you've taught him badly, then you're like a silly hunter blaming the arrow for
13:45 missing. If his brain is physically damaged, then you are insulting him for
13:50 something beyond his control. The word 'stupid' implies a misuse of the brain. We
13:58 don't call dogs stupid because they can't read or write. If your brain is
14:03 physically damaged, you cannot be insulted for its deficiencies. That would
14:08 be like calling a man with no legs lazy because he does not walk, or a very old
14:13 man lazy because he does not run." Roman smiled scantily. "Oh, they are tricky,
14:19 these wordsmiths from the sieve." David noticed that all the children of the
14:26 tribe were leaning forward. Roman said, "Oh, I had these debates and more and more
14:35 and more and more when I was in the sieve. And to return and for us to live
14:46 as we see fit here in the wilderness, we have agreed to - to - to - to what?" asked his
14:54 wife scornfully. "What have you agreed to on our behalf?" "It's a very strange tale,
15:01 so it's probably better to shout than to say," replied Roman slowly. He turned to
15:08 David, who waved his hand in the air. A giant red container floated nimbly over
15:15 the tangled trees at the edge of the ancient crater. The tribe cried out, dove
15:21 into battle positions and readied their weapons. Roman cried out, "Be at peace! It's
15:26 not dangerous!" "Yet," said David silently. Roman added, "This might be a bit
15:35 surprising. Be at peace!" The container settled on the ground, crushing some
15:41 berry bushes and scattering a gray rabbit, and opened its lid.
15:47 Two dozen pink babies floated up in the silent air, smiling radiantly. There were
15:57 cries and screams from the assembled tribespeople, although a few of the girls
16:01 looked at the floating babies with rapt attention. "Don't shoot!" called Roman, but
16:06 it was too late. Two arrows flew towards the floating babies and then froze in
16:11 midair and snapped in two. As one, the floating babies drew their own bows and
16:17 readied their own crackling arrows. David said, "These are called angels. They are
16:23 here to protect your children. They will not harm you in return as yet, but you
16:27 cannot attack them." One mother grabbed her two young children and started
16:32 dragging them away from the clearing. They cried out in fear and surprise.
16:35 Immediately an angel flew directly above her. "Release your hold on the children,"
16:39 it instructed in its strange deep voice. David suddenly realized that this was all
16:45 moving too fast, but then at the same time he also thought, "Meh, might as well get it
16:50 over with as quickly as possible." The mother turned and spat at the angel. It
16:55 hovered above her and repeated its instruction. The children, quite young,
16:58 burst into tears. She turned to Roman, her eyes wide, angry, helpless. He said, "Let
17:05 them go." Clearly against her will, she slowly let go of her children. "Thank you,"
17:13 said the angel politely. Her children burrowed into her rough skirt, clutching
17:18 at her hips. The angel hung over them in silence. Elsewhere there were cries and
17:25 screams, people running back and forth. One father pulled his children into a
17:28 rough stained teepee. Immediately an angel flew to the opening. Screaming, the
17:34 man tried to push the floating baby away, but it dodged his hands. Using laced
17:37 ties, the man worked to close the opening of the teepee. "I cannot see the
17:42 children," said the angel impassively. "Please do not hide the children from me."
17:47 As the confrontation materialized, people stopped their frantic movement and
17:52 turned to look at the teepee. The man screamed vile epithets at the angel and
17:58 continued to lace up the opening with his shaking hands. "I cannot see the
18:03 children," repeated the angel. "Please allow me to see the children, and please do not
18:08 curse in front of the children." The man cursed again and finally finished lacing
18:14 up the opening. Everyone watched in wonder as the baby's blue eyes glowed
18:19 for a moment, and with a brief round flash of red light, the animal hide
18:23 suddenly showed a bright hole just wider than the angel. The angel moved through
18:28 the hole into the teepee. The man screamed again and his fingers appeared under the
18:33 teepee. Jerking upwards, he ripped the side of the teepee from the ground, and it
18:38 began to collapse behind him. There was a strangely comical moment while the
18:44 angel, hidden from view by the animal hide, held the teepee aloft. Then there
18:49 was another flash of light, another hole, and the angel once more hung over the man
18:53 who huddled with his children, his face white. "Thank you for letting me see the
18:59 children again," said the angel. The man glared up hatred in his dark eyes. His
19:06 hands clenched. Everyone could see that he was preparing to leap. "Don't do it!"
19:11 screamed Roman. "Calm down, everyone! Be at peace!"
19:15 Roman's wife strode up to him and shook his shoulders. "You unbelievable idiot!
19:20 What are you bringing these demon babies here for? Oh great, here it comes!" An
19:25 angel baby zoomed over her through a blossoming cherry tree, ripping pink
19:30 petals in its wake. Its smile had vanished. "Please do not attack the man. This
19:37 is your final warning." She drew her head back scornfully. She smiled, then reached
19:42 forward to hug Roman, keeping her eye on the floating infant. He flinched, but
19:49 embraced her back. There was a sudden movement underneath her voluminous
19:54 skirts, a sudden shift. Roman stifled a groan. There was a raised bow, a sudden
20:01 flash, and Roman's wife went staggering backwards, her hair smoking slightly.
20:06 "Please do not strike the man in his genitals," said the angel, lowering its
20:11 bow. With a blur of instinct, Roman turned to the angel and drew his fist
20:15 back. The angel raised its bow again. "Do not strike me." Everyone stopped moving at
20:22 this point, staring at the scene. The angel with its raised bow and blue
20:26 crackling arrow, and the primitive hunter, his fist raised against the angel, the
20:32 protector of the helpless, against morality itself, against any limit on his
20:36 instinct for violence. The baby broke into a disarming smile. A woman's voice
20:45 came out of its tiny pink mouth. "Please lower your fist, friend." Roman's wife
20:52 turned to David and screamed, "Turn them the hell off!" David shook his head. "I cannot
20:58 turn them off, and wouldn't even if I could. For me, for us, it would be like
21:04 turning off gravity." A grim sense of helplessness and terror swept across the
21:12 tribe, scattered in the crater of an ancient war. All the brutalities and
21:18 beatings and sarcasm and insults that had accumulated hatred and damage within
21:24 them, all the little violations that had led to the global cataclysms, all seemed
21:32 arrested in the tangled depression left by a long-vanished bomb. And, and a
21:42 silver line between the hands raised against the children and the bombs
21:47 dropped on the adults began to suddenly stretch tight and taut in the minds of
21:54 everyone. Roman, his wife, the man with his children, David, the tribe, and the
22:01 coming of the angels that actually protected people, children in the here
22:07 and now, seemed to summon all the devils that most needed to be banished.
22:16 Chapter 30. David had to flee for his safety. Not his own, because the angels
22:28 would have protected him, but because the ferocity of the tribal adults was so
22:32 intense that he was concerned that they would be shocked within an inch of their
22:36 lives if he stayed. He sat in the sky taxi, alone in the white pews, heading
22:44 back to the sieve, his heart pounding so hard in his chest that it felt like a
22:49 boxer trying to punch his way out of a curved white cage. It was a brush with
22:57 the ancient world, the world before the sieve. And although he had read and
23:05 studied history for decades, being dropped into the bubbling cauldron of
23:09 primitive violence deeply shocked his system. He didn't know how to frame it in
23:17 his own mind. His relationship with his daughter was so peaceful and enjoyable
23:22 that it seemed, or was, incomprehensible to him that parents would voluntarily
23:29 choose to assault their own children for the voodoo crime of disobedience.
23:35 David loved his wife. It was similarly incomprehensible to him that husbands
23:42 would choose to assault their wives, the supposed loves of their lives, for any
23:46 reason at all. Don't they know that the dark joy of immediate triumph comes at
23:53 the expense of all future love? Don't they know that they are shredding their
23:59 own hearts on the altar of vanity and victory?
24:04 It is always the way, and looking back into the past, even when the past erupts
24:13 into the present and tries to claw you back, the decisions of the
24:19 self-destructive are incomprehensible to even basic morality. To trade future
24:28 comfort, security, support, and love for the sake of ape-like dominance in the
24:34 here-and-now is so fundamentally irrational that it is hard not to view
24:38 such impulses as the result of foundational brain damage, a form of
24:44 self-mutilation designed to appease the dark gods of personal prehistory.
24:52 David had once read the diary of a woman from centuries past who did little but
25:00 insult the man she claimed to love, and only accepted negotiations in the form
25:06 of abject and groveling apologies and submission. She triumphed in this,
25:12 genuinely believing that she was all-wise, all-knowing, and that her
25:17 boyfriend, and later, at least for a few short months, fiancé, was a kind of idiot
25:23 puppy who needed to be trained with the stern whips of sexuality and scorn. She
25:30 was so desperately insecure that she hid advertisements that came in the mail
25:34 depicting attractive women. She fueled her own vanity with dreams of a career
25:40 in the arts, but only used these fantasies to escape having to make any
25:44 real decisions in her life. Her boyfriend became more and more successful, which
25:50 made her more and more bitter and neurotic. She was greedy for his income,
25:56 but terrified of his growing confidence, and alternated between praising his
26:01 achievements and cutting down his pride. She was able to regard and review her
26:09 own darker impulses, but helpless to change them. Reading her diary was like
26:16 watching someone trapped on a conveyor belt, being fed into a grinding machine
26:21 that took months to crush her into a flat puddle of pure regret. When he
26:31 brought her to social functions, she remained paralyzed with fear, and
26:35 projected all her insecurities onto his imaginary social gaffes, grinding down
26:41 his security on the drive home, making up all sorts of fantastical offenses she
26:45 perceived him creating. She became exhausting, by her own admission. She was
26:54 tired of herself, but she had no ability, it seemed, to be able to pull the reins
26:59 back on the horses dragging her to her doom. She whipped them, perhaps just to
27:07 get it over with. It didn't take very long for her fiancé to realize that she
27:14 was not a superior being, handing down hard-earned approval to his inferior and
27:18 awkward self. Instead, she was a shaming spiral neurotic pushing herself into a
27:26 field she had no intentions of mastering, because of vanity-laced girl power
27:30 propaganda.
27:33 Inevitably, he left her, and she contacted him years later over some
27:41 inconsequential paperwork, when she was paralyzed, and he was a great success. She
27:48 complained of feeling lonely, hoping to trigger his white knight responses, and
27:52 he merely replied, "You are alone with being right." Some sentences are like an
28:03 axe that descends on the stump of our lives, splitting it in two, sending the
28:08 shattered sides spiraling in opposite directions. This sentence did it for her.
28:15 She hung up in a panic, and it was never the same afterwards.
28:21 So much of life, of society, of culture and the arts, is designed to keep the
28:29 shortest, shattering sentences out of her own ears. She was never the same. She
28:39 followed his subsequent successful marriage, obsessively raging that his new
28:43 wife had inherited the improved man that she, his former girlfriend, had created
28:47 out of the unproven clay of his broken self.
28:51 Thus, might you dig for weeks, then take a short break, and find someone walking
29:00 away with a diamond you had almost unearthed. It was impossible for her not
29:04 to feel stolen from, that another woman had inherited all of her hard work and
29:09 reforming strictness. David read her diary, and as anyone would when confronted
29:18 with the intimate and unspoken thoughts of those long dead, wondered what had
29:23 become of the woman. Did she ever find wisdom? It seemed impossible. David knew
29:31 enough about human nature to know that the first 24 hours after a significant
29:35 moral mistake are crucial. If she justified her own errors – and he could
29:42 see it page after page, word after word, in fact the entire diary seemed to serve
29:46 that purpose – then not only would she not learn, she would never be able to
29:54 learn. She was writing a fiction about her virtue, and moving into the sky
30:00 castle of her vanity, away from everyone. What we justify, we repeat. The
30:10 justification and the repetition are one in the same. Excuses are promises of
30:17 repetition. It was so hard for David to understand this perspective in history,
30:25 because the sieve was founded on the repudiation of vanity. Vanity demands
30:33 that we never admit fault, that we become infallible gods in the fantastical
30:38 pantheon of our own professions. But all foundational societal progress results
30:44 from the most elemental self-criticism of all, the fundamental question, "Am I
30:49 wrong? Morally, am I evil?" A person, a culture that can never ask that question
31:01 must project all its immorality onto those who deviate from vanity. Vanity
31:09 requires the most fundamental unoriginality regarding empirical
31:14 information. You can only ever believe what serves your happiness, your relief
31:19 in the moment. You must never compare your resulting actions to universal
31:25 standards, because your self-hyped vanity will evaporate under the infinite
31:31 constellations of absolute morality.
31:37 This long-dead woman had obviously created her sense of self on the wobbly
31:44 altar of superiority, which condemned her to constantly denigrate those around her.
31:51 For her, there was no height without depth. There was no ceremony of the self
32:01 without the sweaty, dug graves of others. She sailed through her life, through her
32:11 squandered ambitions, her fading fertility, her aging and souring face,
32:16 utterly convinced of the rightness of her position and the wrongness of the
32:21 world that failed to support her vanity. She felt herself to be right, and the
32:33 days and years that she used to reinforce her justifications were like
32:38 the days and years that pass after a person goes missing. The first hours, the
32:46 first day or two, are the most crucial. The odds of finding a person alive after
32:52 a decade are virtually zero. In the same way, the odds of foundational self-criticism
32:59 emerging after decades of self-justification and blame are also
33:03 virtually zero. It happens, just as you can jump out of a plane from a great
33:09 height and somehow land without injury, but it's not something you should ever
33:13 count on. And her demands grew. Every man she met was required to reinforce her
33:24 justifications, to join her in burning the endless effigies of people long gone
33:28 from her life. "Wasn't he so terrible? Aren't I right? Don't you agree? I wasn't
33:33 to blame. He did me wrong." These demands to be initiated into the inner cult of
33:38 her vanity were endless, and drove everyone of any quality out of her life.
33:45 And then, and then, the cataclysms began more rapidly than anyone outside of
33:56 philosophers imagined, and her own mortality was suddenly served up to her,
34:01 and the self-nagging of endlessly propping up her own imagined virtues
34:06 suddenly collapsed. And she was faced with real and present danger of hunger
34:11 and the hunt for food and the rape of the roaming. And her anxiety overwhelmed
34:17 her, and she ran to men for protection, men who abused her, but she could no
34:23 longer afford to put them down because she needed them. And her random
34:27 scribblings grew more and more disjointed and desperate. Her last entry
34:31 was a frantic plan to escape from the guarded settlement that was her sanctuary
34:35 and her prison, because she had been designated a useless eater due to her
34:39 age and infertility. Nothing came into her mind or her writing of any use or
34:49 depth or value whatsoever.
34:54 The fact that she had milked her looks, avoided motherhood, insulted good men for
35:04 failing to support her fantasies, that she was a former feminist who had built
35:09 a certain road to her end role as a bitter, scorned and rejected concubine,
35:13 that she could no longer manipulate resources out of the desperate and
35:18 gullible, that all of her power had faded into nothing, and she had invested
35:24 nothing into her relationships. She had no nieces or cousins who loved her, no
35:28 aunts or uncles grateful for her gentle ministrations of their aging illnesses.
35:33 She had consumed others, satisfying only their lust and thirst for subjugation.
35:39 She had no reciprocity in her relationships. She gave away only what she
35:45 had not earned, her beauty. And she generated no new values or value. And she
35:55 busily remonstrated with the gods of her own fate that she could no longer vote
35:59 her way out of her dangerous and decaying subjugation. "The true nature of
36:04 men has been laid bare," she scribbled in her last entry, heading out to death, as
36:11 surely as she had lived, without a glimmer of insight into her own role in
36:16 creating the world she now fled.
36:21 "Really," thought David, reading her last words with a sinking heart, "what could
36:28 she possibly say at this point? I created a world of brutality by greedily
36:33 inflicting falsehoods on the insecure? I used others, now I am wretched that I am
36:39 being used?" When the central principle of people's lives manifests around them,
36:49 when they're living off, that principle creates the monsters that enslave them,
36:54 their vanity demands that they take no responsibility for the world they made.
37:01 And so, the woman, now 50, disappeared into the night, into the wilderness,
37:11 leaving her diary behind, probably as a testament she imagined would generate
37:16 endless pity for her in the future, instead of the sorrow and horror that
37:22 David felt. His mind was tempted to follow her into the wilderness, to wonder
37:31 what happened to her, a used-up woman who had used others up, but he had to draw a
37:37 stern line around his own wandering imagination. We must learn from history,
37:43 not follow fools into their own graves. On reading the diary, found on a burnt
37:54 scrap of hard drive after the cataclysms, David felt the kind of chill that he
38:01 supposed former readers of ancient history had experienced when reading
38:04 about the tortures and mutilations committed by ancient tribes against
38:09 themselves and their children. The ancient South American culture of the
38:14 Aztecs believed that the tears of children would produce the abundant
38:18 rains necessary for their crops, so priests would physically torture the
38:22 children to collect their tears before slaughtering them. Their parents would
38:28 sing and applaud the sacrifice.
38:34 Cannibalism, the murder of infants and children, rape as a weapon of war, the
38:41 habit of some ancient tribes to carve a hole through the base of the penis of a
38:45 boy going through puberty, these prehistoric horrors sent ice through
38:51 the veins of all researchers with a shred of conscience. What David read
38:55 about in the decades before the cataclysms was a form of spiritual
39:00 self-mutilation. The concept of sin had been cast aside, and all the accumulated
39:13 and concentrated wisdom of self-broken people casting their bitter knowledge
39:17 back in time, like black pearls of revulsion and repulsion, the seven deadly
39:24 sins, the ape categories of self-destructive behaviors, the mere
39:30 mammals versus the sublime angels, the rocket of escape from the greedy meat
39:36 pockets of mere flesh, propelling the blind photocopying of genetics up to the
39:41 superhuman sky castles of universal abstractions, the acceleration into the
39:47 airless sky that felt like dying. All of this was lost, and no one thought for a
39:55 second about why sin existed, why the punishments of hell and the rewards of
40:01 heaven had to be so extravagant. How much the greedy apes of our meaty natures
40:08 scrabbled in the ground of fighting and sex and food and laziness, terrified of
40:14 losing their fur, their certainty in the pursuit of their lusts, so afraid of
40:19 anything greater than muscle and semen, so that all abstractions, moral
40:26 abstractions in particular, hunted them like ghosts as they raced through the
40:31 jungles, through the cities, and eventually through the sewers, hiding
40:36 from the radiation. Chased and hunted by their own superhuman potential, which
40:42 nagged and bullied and bribed and humiliated them as they squatted over
40:47 the prey of their own higher selves. They were hunted because they had hunted. They
40:58 refused to pray, and so became prey. The prey of ignorance and greed and the mad
41:07 manic desire of all flesh to satisfy itself in the moment and to hell,
41:13 literally to hell, with the true and the beautiful and the good. Paints were
41:19 snatched to cover the face of the bright rainbows of war. To recreate a sunset on
41:25 the wall of the cave was incomprehensible.
41:30 Women prettied themselves in order to be assaulted. Men grew muscles in order to
41:37 strut and stride. Language was used to chisel guilt and resources from the
41:44 morally sensitive. Morality was destroyed in order to be replaced by the
41:51 hysterical attacks of a mob. Conscience, the thumbprint of divine universals on
41:58 the mind muscles of the moment, was destroyed, replaced by the lust for
42:05 destruction common to all who have surrendered their common humanity for
42:09 the sake of the self-shredding pleasure of approval.
42:16 Parents were easily taught to abandon their children to the machine monsters
42:24 of state indoctrination. Mothers fled the dark warmth of the nurturing cribs to
42:31 blink and shrivel under wage-slave fluorescent lights, handing over their
42:38 screaming babies to scornful, indifferent, and underpaid foreigners.
42:45 The basics of science cracked and shattered. Taken over by the state, science was
42:54 turned into a weapon against the common sense of the tax cattle. Science became a
42:59 giant club to destroy and de-platform anyone skeptical of the objectivity of
43:04 vacant bureaucrats in white coats sucking the teat of billions of dollars
43:08 of made-up money. History was a madhouse that only seemed normal to those
43:19 incarcerated by the accidents of time.
43:23 Everyone looked back to prior ages with the delicate revulsion of horror, and
43:29 then turned their gazes to their own creeping insanities with the complacency
43:34 of habitual normalcy. All who came before us were mad and evil in equal measures,
43:42 but my world is the end of history, the sane and serene harbor that all the
43:46 broken ships of the past have taken refuge in.
43:51 As David rocketed away from the warring tribe, he wept. He wept at the arcs of
44:04 light that flashed through the forest as the angels threw their electric shields
44:09 over the futures of the children. He wept at the madness of the parents,
44:16 destabilized to the point of self-dissolution at the absolute
44:19 lightning protection of their victims. Morality finally as a true bolt out of
44:27 the blue. He wept with relief that the madness of history had finally come to a
44:35 close with the sieve. He wept with relief that he had never had to weigh his
44:43 future desire for children with the fear that the growing madness of the world
44:47 would swallow them whole. He wept at his time window view of cultures lost in
44:56 history, arising in the present only as the most terrible reminder of everything
45:01 humanity had escaped. He wept for the thousand generations of parents who
45:10 unknowingly created predatory rulers by preying on their own children. But mostly
45:20 he wept because he was free to escape the madhouse, the violence and evil of
45:28 the past by flying through the brisk air back to the sieve. While the children
45:36 behind and below him snarled and dodged and rebelled and taunted, protected at
45:44 last by the electric arms of the flying angels.
45:51 [BLANK_AUDIO]