The Fifth Science

by Exurb1a

In the face of an intangible problem, ignorance is generally the safest option.”

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

All mountains worth climbing have their tricky inclines.

“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.

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.”

“If the worst happens, keep your head.” Then, quoting the old line, “Learn the flowers, go light.”

Go live in hell's sandbox then with all the other toddlers.”

Maybe you're thinking racing boxcars and drinking is a baseless existence, but to that I'd say: well, what's the purpose of your life then? Look deep enough into whatever it is you love, and you'll find the black nothing at the bottom too.

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.

you don’t convince the living to behave in a proper way, you just wait for them to die and hope their children grow up a little kinder and wiser than their parents.

Either a whole society is subject to the dictates of one mad ruler who imposes their vision on the whole, or the society is self-driven and strives after its own ends individually, among the whole.

Why is there never an objective? And now I think about it, if there were, what would it even be? The answer is perhaps the same for us here at the end of history as it was for our ancestors millions of years ago at the beginning: to live well, to live quietly, and to die without too much of a fuss. And if we are very, very lucky, to love properly at least once.

All our stupidity and violence, we took it out into the black, tucked away under mathematics and uniforms. Sapiens made it to the heavens. The animals came too, hiding inside us.

Man is a two-thing animal, they said; part beast, part deity. He wants to kill. He wants to know. He should suppress the first and encourage the second. One day we’ll learn to take the beast out entirely and pop it in a little bell jar. There’ll be no violence then. There’ll be no strife. That is the paradise the myths have been pointing to and we’ll make it with knowledge, not magic. We’ll tame nature and tame our own nature. We’ll sell the universe back to ourselves at a reduced cost.

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.

sounded a little sad again. “On some level I envy you. You’re wise enough to understand what you are, but still sufficiently primitive to let that knowledge go when it serves you. No species will ever do that again.