Humanity Is Not Capable Of Moral Progress

To misquote Charles Dickens, it’s the blackest of pills, it’s the whitest of pills: we need not concern ourselves about warning future generations against evil.

Severian’s mailbag kicks it off.

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We have reached the point where we are definitely watching History in the making. We’re in a period about which there will be libraries’ worth of books written, fought over by huge schools of historical interpretation. Think “Weimar,” if not “The Reformation.”

So here’s what I’d like you to do: Start writing down all your memories of the Before Times, and keeping a journal. Be sure to do it on paper, so future historians don’t have to have access to MS Word or whatever to read it. But also be sure to hide it, so that it won’t show up at your thoughtcrime trial. It’s vital that we do this. Someone has to testify to future generations that not everyone in these years was utterly bugfuck insane.

Why? Why warn the future against repeating the acts of the present? We dissidents can’t even warn the present against the evils of the present.

I’ve thumped a hole clean through my Bible, yet even the Baptists can’t hear me yelling about Sin Number One. It’s hopeless, man. They won’t listen.

Humanity is not capable of moral progress.

Every generation, we reboot from ethical zero. Every generation must meet God for themselves, as if for the first time. We saw this in the Old Testament. We saw this with Plato & Socrates and probably Confucius. There has never been a shortage of sound moral advice. It never makes a lasting impression.

If humanity approached morality the way it approached technology, we would have built a Tower Of Babel out of psalms and proverbs five thousand years ago, and police would have less to do today than the Maytag Repairman.

In fact, when you look at technology, the problem becomes clear. The most reliable sciences are the ones farthest away from the human soul, while the most treacherous sciences… looking at YOU, psychology and economics!.. are the ones which address the human soul directly. Humanity dares not face the Monster From the Id. Our wickedness protects itself even as we examine it.

We cannot warn the future. They will marvel at our grand LARPS and derps, wondering how we could be like that, while they do the same thing themselves. Warn the future? No, let’s MOCK the future for being as foolish as us! Haha, future losers, who’s your Daddy?

This is also a white pill. Humanity is equally incapable of capital-P moral Progress, if you know what I mean. The Blofelds and chumps both obsess over implanting microchips in our brains and dumping us in virtual reality reeducation camps such that we’ll never have the chance to choose righteousness, but they are also doomed to ultimate failure. Stop the signal? They couldn’t stop Tucker Carlson. They couldn’t stop Russia with a million billion dollars and ten years of unopposed preparation.

Nobody is born directly into the families of either God the Father or the Prince of Lies. For all of us, it is a choice to be made and then endured.

Teach your children right, of course, because you love them and you love yourself. That being said, there is jack that you can do, to prevent humanity from repeating the cycle. As much as God wants us to fight against evil and its many forms, He won’t allow us a lasting success. Not that He is the one thwarting us, it’s our own corrupted hearts, but if Satan was crushed before his time, God’s plan would fail as completely as if He abandoned us to the wolves.

Our mortal reality is not a war. It is a factory for making saints.

And apparently, clowns.