“There are in complex societies, as well as simple societies, rules and norms that allow them to function – this should not be confused with laws. It is typically the complex societies that disassemble, fall into disarray, because their complexity becomes more than they can handle. Were bad car drivers a problem a hundred years earlier? No, because cars did not exist to a large degree. The problem of tailgating did not exist. As complexity enters, so does the need for the return to basic rules, tenets upon which the society was able to survive in the first place. Courtesy is one of those tenets. There are others.”
“Like what? The earth didn’t end because people weren’t courteous.”
“I think you’re wrong. Humanity had not even the slightest idea that there should be a few simple rules of living with each other, rules and norms that should inherently be in the fabric of every being, taught from their earliest days, imbued in their spirits.”
“Oh, bullshit. People just weren’t going to ever be forced to be courteous with each other. It is, or it was, human nature.”
“Yes, I suppose there were so many things in that burgeoning world of technology, that you just couldn’t worry about everything. You had to let some things just go and hope they’d turn out okay. There were far too many ‘things’ in the complex interleaving of technologies and systems and growth and competition. Just no way to control it all without considerable effort. And ‘considerable effort’ grows exponentially as each of these systems and subsystems interacts. Eventually, one of the ‘tentacles’ of the system breaks out, or off, turns back, and becomes the destroyer of the organic whole. Because there are too many things to worry about, in other words, you adapt to them, you over-adapt, and lose sight of your basic tenets or values, your norms, your rules, those things you would have found find life repugnant without. As these rules get lost in the overabundance of information and complexity, discipline towards the rules breaks down, controls are either neglected or never created, and the lack of discipline kills the organism or society.”
“Tentacles. Humanity was no octopus, she said, shaking her head.”
“It is a fair analogy. It was a many appendaged thing, unmanaged and unwieldy, with each appendage having its own norms and rules. Nothing shared. The fact that every person has a conscience, a basic sense of what is right and wrong – that all got lost. There are indeed absolutes for living systems, right and wrong, good and bad. It is the belief that there are not these absolutes, or that the absolutes can differ, that harms and kills societies. The millions of civilizations died because their beliefs about right and wrong got subverted in their complexity. It is the increasing complexity that should cause societies to highly value the discipline and focus on the basic rules. That almost never happens.”
“You’re wrong, though, you’re wrong. I mentioned the Jews, and how the Nazis killed so many of them during the war. They were all following rules.”
“No. Laws maybe, not rules. You again confuse the two. What was the first reaction to Hitler’s call that the Jews were responsible for the Germans’ economic failures?”
“Got me.”
“What would your reaction be?”
“I’d think he was nuts, but then it’s hindsight because it’s history.”
“But at the time it must have been the Germans’ first reaction. It is an individual’s first reaction to any suggestion that it is not responsible for itself.”
“Help me, I’m not following.”
“The individual exists because it believes in its existence. It knows that it alone is ultimately, finally, and from the beginning of cognizance, responsible for itself. The individual knows all things are possible, the bad and the good, but it knows considerable effort is involved in achieving the good. However, it defaults to the easy, most often, rather than the difficult, because it usually appears that in the short-term the easy will suffice.”
“How does this relate to Germany in the thirties?”
“It was easy for an individual German to place blame on others, rather than look at himself and say, ‘I am the cause, I can fix it’. As a result, the basic rule of courtesy, the rule of consideration, was trampled upon. There are so many other examples in earth history that could be used or any other history of long-dead societies. It all becomes monotonous and tedious, though, after seeing it for so long.”
“You piss me off,” she sneered angrily. “How do you dare suppose that the life and people that were on earth were monotonous or tedious in their deaths? I don’t give a damn whether they caused the virus or not, and it sure sounds to hell like you don’t. Nobody on earth wanted this, none of them wanted to die like this, outside of a crazy few. If you had asked them, or thought of asking them, they would have told you they wanted to live. If you had even offered to help some of them, or find a cure or something, even if it was for a few hundred or a few thousand, they would have wanted you to help. You and your shit-for-nothing rules, like, one of your stupid-ass rules was to not help a dying planet and billions of people, living things! I am disgusted.” Margot got up and spat on the floor, surprised at her own anger.
“You must understand, Margot, that we Das have a rule not to interfere.”
“Well, why the hell you have that stupid fucking rule is beyond me. Nobody ever explained it to me that made sense. The Wall sure as hell couldn’t explain. I think it’s because you assholes think that if you help another species, at some critical point that they’ll take over what you have and become superior to you.”
“Margot,” Isda replied, still moving quietly around the room, “at what point do we stop helping? Can you answer that?”
“Well, you could have helped them across a big one like that. I mean, Jesus, you could have come down and said, ‘look, you guys are screwing yourselves with all this genetic stuff, and whatever else we were doing wrong, and control it effectively or you’ll meet your end, and we’ve seen it before, so we know.’”
“Okay, so we help past that one crisis. Do we help in the next?”
“For instance?”
“For instance, when the race to gain planetary space for a country, or a people, or for any enterprise for that matter, sets parties against each other, at the risk of multi-planetary destruction?”
“That’s not necessarily going to happen.”
“It’s one of millions of possible consequences when you’ve lost your rules. I just picked it from the many.”
“Well, if they’re that stupid to be greedy like that, then maybe they all should die. But earth sure wasn’t at that stage yet.”
“Could earth’s people have gotten there?”
“I suppose. We’ve fought over much stupider things than that before, I’m sure.”
“I don’t know if I’m getting my point across to you. Perhaps the best thing would be for you to go back to the Wall, review the societies that have fallen, and ask the Wall to give you the reasons why these societies died.”
“Why the hell do that?”
“Because the Wall has within its memory the millions of civilizations that are catalogued, and these millions, except for the Das and the three known others, have all died in numerous, although very consistent, ways.”
“That’s nuts. You can only die in one way.”
“Sorry, I meant ‘causes’. At least the appearance of causes. There’s symptom. There’s cause. I should say millions of symptoms. The possibilities for collapse are intensely numerous. The ultimate causes are few. Like many, your own society was on the cusp of its technological evolution, the ability to break from this universal cycle of decay, but its end was so typical.”
“Like a twist of fate. No, I mean destiny. People make choices, bug, everyday choices. We would not have chosen this, and I don’t believe in destiny."
“There is no destiny. It implies that the individual unit, person, or cell, is not responsible for the outcome, either in totality or the smallest partiality. Destiny relinquishes responsibility for effort, choice, ethics, and tol
erance. It allows you to absolve yourself and wallow in the role of the victim. Many civilizations have disappeared from the cumulative sum of individuals’ decisions to be the victims, to complain of hurt or harm from something beyond them, to point the finger, then feign participation in fixing the problem. To use their mouths or words in lieu of action, assistance, community – but to never really participate, to never give voice to that which is against acceptable norms. Interestingly, it is a laziness of sorts, a cynicism maybe, a ‘hell with it, too much effort, let it go’ attitude. It’s much easier to have that perspective when you are distracted by the ‘all’, by the next apparent emergency, bit of interesting news, or injustice that you let your society broadcast to you incessantly. What matters in the context of the civilization’s longevity gets lost in the burgeoning and endless sea of information, as every information bit becomes equal to the next bit, and the next. The incremental layers of this relentless cascade of information create a thick coat around the soul, such that the soul no longer is able to distinguish the positive from the negative, so it never feels compelled to take action.”
“Hey dude, there were many souls who cared about each other and the world. They may not have expressed it well, but they cared, and they generally wanted things to be better. Who wouldn’t? I certainly wanted things to be better. I saw what the world’s autocrats were about. I saw the power-mongers and presumptive billionaires and other crazy-ass people who wanted control of others because they were so personally out of control. There was always a lot of evil in the world. I saw a lot of evil, particularly on videos, but almost everyone I know was innocent of doing anything really harmful to anyone else, at least intentionally,” she said.
“The fact is that their innocence kills them, killed them. Rarely is there pure innocence of any self-reflective being in societies like yours.” Isda stopped talking for a minute, knowing that Margot’s mind was beginning to wander, and he was failing at his objective. “Margot,” he continued, “you should learn from the Viewing room, rather than simply experiencing its wonder. If you allowed yourself to learn, you’d catch the commonalities that lead to the final dissolution of the species. Back to destiny, though. Belief in destiny or destined prophecy, or even worship of a destined prophecy, is a hallmark of nearly all failed species.”
Margot was indeed getting bored, but she at least felt that this was finally an interesting discussion, much like she used to have with her father. On this rock, she didn’t get anything like this from Bing, not with his sister always affixed at his side. Sergio was too young, and the Basque, well, there would never be hope for him. The Wall? It couldn’t reason and argue; it only seemed to state the obvious. She looked at Isda, faced adjacent to her as if he was fixated on something else in the room, disinterested in her. “What do you mean by destined prophecy? Isn’t all prophecy about destiny, and vice versa?” she asked.
“When you study these many civilizations, you will often, not always, but often, find that their religions or oracles or sages will have predicted a final resolution. As if the horror and terror and evil that they created for themselves, entirely from a lack of establishing and following simple and universally known norms or rules of courtesy and consideration, will ultimately be defeated or corrected by the realization of some prophecy that fixes it all. Often it is with the emergence or re-emergence of a superior being, something more powerful or mystical than themselves.”
“Yeah, I get that. It’s not the first time I’ve ever had that conversation. I’m agnostic, personally.”
“But it goes deeper, much deeper,” he said. “Rather than blaming themselves and taking action to correct their underlying flaws with simple solutions, blame itself becomes their answer to what appear to be complex problems. Blame is often placed on an apparent evil, a manufactured evil, like other beings who are slightly different and don’t believe as you or look like you, and by virtue of that, they are considered evil and therefore aligned with the destiny of the prophetic visions. Nearly all prophetic visions or predictions are enmeshed and smothered within the entitlement of one set of beings over others, the ‘chosen ones’ because they are the ones that have the entitled belief construct or have the correct lineage or heritage or secret scriptures or some other irrational rationale. Prophecies must always have a scapegoat to blame in order to absolve the entitled of responsibility. Then the entitled can resolutely put faith in the prophecy to save them from the evils that others apparently manufacture. In most cases, these prophecies are derived from ancient beliefs, writings, entitlements, superstitions, and prognostications that were used to control and command groups of beings in pre-technology days. Further corruption occurs when they are distilled and refined as technology takes hold and the prophecies with all of their fears and promises can be easily broadcast to an ever increasing, ever fearful and entitled group of believers. Inevitably, the prophecies predict an end where the ‘chosen’ get one positive and righteous outcome, and the non-chosen get another which is not so positive. Indeed, we often see civilizations come to their end because they thought that they were supposed to come to an end, that they were destined to create and hasten the end, as ignorant as that sounds. Imagine, sentient beings concluding that an ancient, pre-technology prophecy predicted their end, so they set in motion, consciously or not and often with the help of power-mongering demagogues and preachers of the chosen word, the vehicles to cause it to happen. This is an enormous broiling and unstable cauldron filled with a host of volatile ingredients – fear at the left, then doubt, ignorance, inconsideration, jealousy, blame, envy, greed, laziness, anger, hopelessness, self-absorption, entitlement, and finally back to fear – with the themes of the ancient prophecies sprinkled-in as the igniting mixture. Encompassed by this circle of fear and ignited by the prophecies, the cauldron explodes and the civilization dies, all in its own self-determined and self-created cataclysm. The realization of the prophecy, or at least its less positive parts. Such is the ultimate resolution to entropy for many who have seen this universe.”
“Yeah, okay, okay. Why should I care about all those other instances if they did it to themselves? You don’t seem to understand that we had much good in the world, and that good was winning, at least generally, over evil. Things were much better for humans than they were five thousand years before. Look, I was agnostic so I didn’t care about prophecy or any religious stuff like that. I didn’t want anyone to tell me I couldn’t think for myself, or that they or the church or whatever had to think for me. I get that, I get that totally. But despite all the bad from those beliefs, there was good. Otherwise, why would people even have gone that direction in the first place?”
“These mental constructs, or belief systems, always have attractive aspects to draw societies or groups of beings to them. If they were totally evil, they would attract few followers. So they contain some positive norms, values, hopes, visions for a better tomorrow, as well as consideration for certain, but often not all, others. Sugar water. They are always intricately, delicately, surreptitiously intermixed with entitlements and fears that become drops of poison in that water. What did humans call it? They all drink the kool-aid, maybe in different flavors. The kool-aid of entropy. And what attributes do these beings lack? Critical thinking. Discernment. The ability to separate obvious and productive norms and standards of behavior, those things that accelerate the society forward and create positive potential for longevity, from ancient beliefs of entitlements and fear of others who don’t believe as you do. Innocence is a cop-out. Ignorance is a cop-out. Every being should always be on its guard for some other being attempting to control it. Every being should be taught that it is an individual, responsible for itself. Do you think the Das are perfect? Do you think that over the millennia we haven’t seen many like us that have attempted to wrest control of other Das?”
“What?” Margot gasped half-jokingly. “I thought you guys were the essence of perfection, and you all knew each other’s thoughts, like a big fat communal socia
l network, and this is what made you so wonderful and magnanimous across the universe. I’m sure after what you did to my earth that you guys think you are the essence of pure innocence and thoughtfulness. You are all mindful, indeed, all mindful.”
“Margot, in time you will understand why we can’t interfere with civilizations. But what makes you think Das look at themselves as innocent? Consider this example. You are an individual. Your freedoms are being repressed by a government. You know that is wrong. Now, where’s the innocence?”
“The innocence is that if you aren’t educated, you don’t know that there’s anything better.”
“Wrong, Margot, wrong. It is in your heart, it is in that personal vomit of repugnance, that instinct that tells you “this doesn’t feel right.” It is there that you know right from wrong. It’s not emotion itself. It’s not anger or fear or hatred. It’s the outcome of that emotion, the vomit of repugnance. Your individual being knows that a repressive, controlling government is wrong, or that autocracy and corruption is wrong. There is no innocence in a heart that knows that, only concurrence in a heart that knows that yet does nothing to arrest it. It is in the inherent knowledge within every individual being that no other person or being, of the same kind or different, is superior to them, or that they should ever cower or give-in to that being’s desires and fail to listen to their own sense of what is right and wrong. It is blind faith, relinquishing of your values and sense of self for some greater cause or prophesy or belief system you have allowed your mind to construct or let yourself be goaded into believing. It is giving in to demagoguery, populism, rhetoric, perverse political theory, bigotry, religious dogma, leadership by emotion, defensive deflection, rudeness, anger, greed. Most societies are pulled by the scrotum of their abhorrent laziness, their lack of simple discernment, into a vortex of deceit and control, then final dissolution.”
The Space Between Her Thoughts (The Space in Time Book 1) Page 21
