Seriously. With the amount of anger regarding the Epstein files, I have zero confidence that real consequences will be paid by the perpetrators and those who looked away. I’ve even less hope in justice for the victims…
This is all being revealed in 4k, in the most technologically “dense” period in history. Scholars, budding politicians, students, leaders and researchers and artificial intelligences are going to studying every angle of this story for the next several centuries learning about human failings, about how the wicked manipulate the masses to accept the worst things, and how nations can fall to fascism and terror.
In the coming years and decades, many of the people who have done the worst things will live out the rest of their lives with only a nagging worry that it will come back on them, but not much else. We do not get our satisfaction in them. Nor will we ever get our satisfaction for the thousands upon thousands of other “Epstein gangs” that have lived and died throughout history without ever facing consequence for doing far more brutal things to far more people.
We live on the top of a mountain of skulls and sorrow that grows by the day, and that’s just something we have to live with. We don’t even have enough time as individuals to make a dent in the suffering that roars past us every day.
But it hasn’t been for nothing. The reason we can now know about it, the reason we have a society now with order and law and systems at all is because there are enough people who want a better world and they will fight this kind of evil as a group. Our quality of life has improved so far beyond what it was a thousand years ago, that the people of those times would think we’re in some kind of literal heaven if they could see it. We do not broadly face terror every day, we do not broadly starve, we do not broadly get our villages raided by men with swords who will stab us and take our women and daughters.
We are slowly but surely carving away a better world, but we’re always going to be fighting ourselves. As the world gets smaller and people connect more, that fight will grow smaller, it just takes more time than we have to see it through. As long as we’re each doing something towards it, we will still get there… between pendulum swings.
Someday our descendants will leave Earth, some AI or hybrid entity utterly unlike us at all, far, far beyond us in thought and feeling and mental capacity, and it will be able to read our whole history and know how much we sacrificed and how much we suffered to get there. It might even see this post and know how much you’re hurting in this moment.
Let’s call it the “Empathetic Basilisk Theory” I like it a lot better than the other one.
They wont suffer in life. Most of them will be brushed under the carpet, and history will forget them. That doesnt sound like much of a consequence, but these are people who had the chance to leave a lasting legacy for being great, but in 100 years realistically only a small handful will enter the history books and it will be as villains.
Not even a “good” villain like Hitler, who despite the evil had a good shot at conquering the world.
If I had a chance to be remembered as a great leader, or a super philanthropist, or being Iron Man, or even a supervillain, and instead my legacy is to be completely forgotten by the world at large and my existence actively attempted to be covered up by anyone I ever had dealings with, I’d be a bit mortally upset.
Its not much to hang onto, and we can still hope and pray they face justice in life, and we can hope for a morality-based afterlife so they may face justice in death, but they will at least face justice in the history books.
Oh, wow. 😏
➖
Seriously. With the amount of anger regarding the Epstein files, I have zero confidence that real consequences will be paid by the perpetrators and those who looked away. I’ve even less hope in justice for the victims…
I really need some hope in this. Please. 😞
Look beyond today.
This is all being revealed in 4k, in the most technologically “dense” period in history. Scholars, budding politicians, students, leaders and researchers and artificial intelligences are going to studying every angle of this story for the next several centuries learning about human failings, about how the wicked manipulate the masses to accept the worst things, and how nations can fall to fascism and terror.
In the coming years and decades, many of the people who have done the worst things will live out the rest of their lives with only a nagging worry that it will come back on them, but not much else. We do not get our satisfaction in them. Nor will we ever get our satisfaction for the thousands upon thousands of other “Epstein gangs” that have lived and died throughout history without ever facing consequence for doing far more brutal things to far more people.
We live on the top of a mountain of skulls and sorrow that grows by the day, and that’s just something we have to live with. We don’t even have enough time as individuals to make a dent in the suffering that roars past us every day.
But it hasn’t been for nothing. The reason we can now know about it, the reason we have a society now with order and law and systems at all is because there are enough people who want a better world and they will fight this kind of evil as a group. Our quality of life has improved so far beyond what it was a thousand years ago, that the people of those times would think we’re in some kind of literal heaven if they could see it. We do not broadly face terror every day, we do not broadly starve, we do not broadly get our villages raided by men with swords who will stab us and take our women and daughters.
We are slowly but surely carving away a better world, but we’re always going to be fighting ourselves. As the world gets smaller and people connect more, that fight will grow smaller, it just takes more time than we have to see it through. As long as we’re each doing something towards it, we will still get there… between pendulum swings.
Someday our descendants will leave Earth, some AI or hybrid entity utterly unlike us at all, far, far beyond us in thought and feeling and mental capacity, and it will be able to read our whole history and know how much we sacrificed and how much we suffered to get there. It might even see this post and know how much you’re hurting in this moment.
Let’s call it the “Empathetic Basilisk Theory” I like it a lot better than the other one.
They wont suffer in life. Most of them will be brushed under the carpet, and history will forget them. That doesnt sound like much of a consequence, but these are people who had the chance to leave a lasting legacy for being great, but in 100 years realistically only a small handful will enter the history books and it will be as villains.
Not even a “good” villain like Hitler, who despite the evil had a good shot at conquering the world.
If I had a chance to be remembered as a great leader, or a super philanthropist, or being Iron Man, or even a supervillain, and instead my legacy is to be completely forgotten by the world at large and my existence actively attempted to be covered up by anyone I ever had dealings with, I’d be a bit mortally upset.
Its not much to hang onto, and we can still hope and pray they face justice in life, and we can hope for a morality-based afterlife so they may face justice in death, but they will at least face justice in the history books.