The Unrelenting Birthright of Human Comprehension in the Nuclear Era

 By: Jimmy Hackett

Choice connects the present to the future.

Tragedy is living life as if it were an accident.

Survival. Our first step towards a permanent human empire.

Proposal. Stop suffocating the imagination of the youth in a charade optimism of a lousy future.

We are drowning in a sea of spiritual empty calories. We created the pornographic universe. Where everything is exaggerated beyond recognition. We talk in tongues and nod along, satisfied that gibberish necessarily translates with perfect accuracy.

We find ourselves dancing for daylight in a black and white photograph.

Every human has a birthright to comprehend this universe. If ethics is a part of the universe, comprehending the universe will lead to comprehending this ethic.

Knowledge truly is power. The most challenging enemies are scarcity and ignorance. Our challenge is to dominate the universe and to comprehend it. We have not yet comprehended the impact of distributed information of the internet. We are still stuck in a world of learning in previously established orders. I suspect this will change.

Computers in classrooms are only a distraction, because kids have more fun on the internet than listening to a boring lesson. Why are we resisting this? Shouldn’t the lesson be that school is too boring?

The modern cruelty of education is that we force children to learn from standardized curriculums. This is an anachronism with the presence of the internet. We must move the instruction of children into the education of universals that children can then use to learn on their own. 

There must have been a terrible feeling for the first person to comprehend the mind of God. To comprehend an ever-watching eye who never forgets the past. They must have tried so hard to convince themselves that it wasn’t possible. No such thing could exist. The optimist assured themselves that no just universe could allow such an evil as a permanent record of human history. Of that mighty and pornographic struggle from the muddy swamp-land. That awful thrifty creature who huddled in darkness, fearful of the dark and the light. Fearful of the noises and the silence of that out-side world beyond the cave that seemed so large in comparison to the safety of the inner-mind of the first humans. No such record should exist. No God would allow it. No God would allow themselves to exist. Justice cries for mercy. Justice cries for moving on. Justice cries for forgetting. Justice cries, and falls on deafened ears still ringing from the violence of the past from which they came, resting on the shoulder of Monday, waiting for the world to end.

There is no “information age”, or “digital age”, or any other such age that supposedly came after the nuclear age. There is only the nuclear age, and the hope that we someday escape it. We are living on borrowed time.

What makes the nuclear age so troubling is that humans are literally wired to be experiment machines. But here we have no option to “experiment.” To borrow a phrase from Taleb, one data point is too many. A troubling thought is a realization that the human species may – at some fundamental level – be incompatible with the strong nuclear force responsible for atomic weapons. We must learn the lessons of nuclear war from a perspective totally different from the way we have learned every other lesson.

Alas, I have faith. Consider the following, either we are living in the past of an immortal super-race of human beings. Or, we are living before some event in the future where we are extinct. There is nothing in between. Our first step is a choice of a culture that affirms that life is worth living. The second step is a process of examining the world we create to be compatible with that vision. Most people in encounter agree life is worth living. We can consider ourselves somewhere in the process of making that second step. And here, there is one key tool. Persuasion.

Persuasion is the only weapon at our disposal that can prevent nuclear war from annihilating the entirety of the human race. The thought process is simple, how do we resolve differences when the danger of violence is unacceptable? The only answer is diplomacy, which is a pretentious way of saying persuasion. In fact, a lack of persuasion skills is currently a very serious detriment to the current projects of human flourishing. Luckily, we have plenty of tools for developing persuasion, and listeners to this podcast are familiar with many of them.

One important side effect of effective persuasion, as has been pointed out by some of its practitioners, is that it forces the speaker to empathize with the audience. This is key, because actually putting yourself in someone else’s perspective will undoubtedly affect the way you end up viewing the topic you are discussing. When both parties are engaging in persuasive speech, two forces are at work bringing the parties together, the recipient under the influence of persuasive techniques, and the speaker from experiencing the world through the eyes of the other party.

Between us and a limitless future is a set of skills needed for effective communication. Effective communication that leads to the eradication of evil, not through violence, but by humans simply being persuaded to create a world that ensures the agreed-upon superiority of life to death.

In the end, luck will not save us. Because in the end, we will not need it to.