The Fifth Science

by Exurb1a

Most humans were not malicious, only drastically misguided and desperate in their loneliness. They learned at some point that there was an eccentric core to their personality and that it was possible no one else shared their own brand of eccentricity.

In all things, across all avenues, a choice must be made: whether to follow love, truth, or power. That choice will consume the chooser. If he follows only love then his wellbeing will be constantly at the mercy of another, though his highs will be sublime. If he follows truth then it will be a lonely journey, but potentially a noble one. If he should follow power though, not only will he come to know a desperate and revolting loneliness, but he will also never experience even a drop of satisfaction in anything.

“We believe consciousness is a force alongside the others in nature, that it is baked into the universe rather than an emergent property. Not only does that mean it could exist on platforms other than brains and electronics, but it goes some way towards explaining what you and I are.”

Youth breeds a certain self-preservation instinct. It is understood on some primal level that one's whole life is ahead, and death or disfigurement now will result in decades of life unlived. At my age another feeling sets in. One knows life will be over soon, that the body will revert to little more than dust and a story. Then only a story. Then an old story. Then a nothing. That tends to nip most fears in the bud. Ageing is backwards. One begins in (sometimes) perfect health and with absolutely no idea what to use it for. The world is strange and its mechanisms are strange. Meaning is in short supply and distractions are everywhere. Then one begins to learn who they actually are, noticing there are passions and proclivities buried down inside and can be teased out. There is a meaning after all and it swims leisurely into focus as the years wander past. And finally when one knows what it is they are looking for in a lover, in a career, in a house or a book, the body is beginning to fail. The spine begins to ache. The legs seize up after too long sat down and seize up after too long standing. The mind is full of information now, but whatever strange search algorithm retrieves the information is as slow and geriatric as the mind it fetches information for. I fear that on my last day, on my deathbed, that is when the meaning of things will enter the room and kiss my forehead and whisper into my ear what it was I should have done with my life, and how I should've conducted my...

I choose to believe that souls know their way home, wherever they start their long journey from.

Perhaps preservation of high order just necessitates low mercy.

If philosophers gave clear answers then surely the whole field would've died out with the Greeks.

Like all wars this one was noble until it wasn't,

Beauty is nice and virtue is attractive, but nothing is more gorgeous than meeting another creature who shares your deepest values.

Let’s pause for a second and acknowledge how easy it is to love from afar. One might see this person three or four times a week, and always in situations where difficulties needn’t crop up. Since the two of you never face a challenge, it is possible to imagine the object of your affection to be free of pettiness, stupidity, self-obsession, and all the other frequent visitors to the human psyche.

In those secret moments, brushing your teeth, walking home from work, you may tell yourself that if only the two of you could be together then nothing would ever hurt again. And since you refuse to admit your affections to this person, you may now live out the rest of your life in a constant and quietly sad state of What if? Inaction is the primary refuge of those who prefer their own constructed realities to the beautiful chaos of the real world.

He felt like a child. And in the way children want to skip all the years of hardship and just ingest their parents’ knowledge for free, he wanted to know what made her face so sad.

It is always like this with idealists. One scorns their passion, all the while secretly admiring their passion.

her life story. It was not unusual: a stuckness, an uncertainty, trapped in that nether corridor between adolescence and some pipe dream of “real life” that one seems to find themselves in during their twenties.

All explanations are an attempt by humankind to divide itself from the world. An explanation without including the explainer is as a tree without the trunk. One is inseparable from the other. No system of knowledge can avoid this limitation. Numbers are not the true face of measure. Words are not the true description of things. The world is the explanation.

Society grows great when old men plant trees whose shade they know they’ll never sit in.

Io said, “You have values here. You believe in things. I miss that.” “Don’t they believe in things on Ertia?” “Not in the same way.” The sphere was in her lap now. She stroked it and the thing purred quietly. “There is a special problem in communications theory. We call it ‘narrative collapse’. When a planet is very connected, a time inevitably arrives when it becomes difficult to work out what is actually going on. Video and audio can be faked. Testimony isn’t reliable. All truths fall into a relative flatness. This is more dangerous than any doomsday weapon. You have a king and, if you don’t mind me saying so, not a very nice one. But at least his population knows when he’s being deceitful or harsh. On my world and the sister world we’ve lost even that. Many still don’t even believe Morae really exists. They claim it’s a fabrication by Al’Hazaad.” She held her beer up to the moonlight. “Doesn’t look like a fabrication to me.” Tisho said, “Why would Al’Hazaad fabricate a whole planet?” She shrugged. “Who cares? All you need is an enemy to take the punches at. Cut the world into us and them, manufacture dichotomies, boil complex issues down to sound bites. Divide and conquer.”

The core of heroism isn’t bravery, or even self-sacrifice. It is a commitment to what one knows to be the virtuous course of action, despite whatever the consequences may be.

I was reminded of another emotion; The Fear. In those rare moments when another human piques your interest, it is accompanied by the quiet panic that you, and only you, are invested so deeply and so quickly. Maybe for them it's just a passing game or fancy, and in an hour or so they'll go back to their life and never think of you again.

Man is a two-thing animal, they said; part beast, part deity.

Where there are tyrants, we’ll bring death. Where there are no tyrants, we’ll call them tyrants and we’ll bring death. Where there is anarchy, we’ll bring laws. Where there is no anarchy, we’ll call it anarchy and we'll bring laws.