Two Visions, Two Futures

I see it — don’t you? No?

Look further. Leave the cave.

Because here is what I (humble, doubting I) see if you continue to mistake flickering shadows for glimmering reality:

I see more plagues.

I see war — unintentional war, but an august of war, and (consequently) a winter of humanity.

Worse? I see a species utterly entrenched in history that thinks itself absolutely exempt from it— from plagues and from wars, from famine and from evil. Like all such prior men.

As one wise man said:

Everybody knows that pestilences have a way of recurring in the world; yet somehow we find it hard to believe in ones that crash down on our heads from a blue sky. There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

— Albert Camus, The Plague

I see a humanity that, puffed up with such gruesome inhumanity, fails to realize that with great power comes great responsibility. That though an atom can be used to light the way, it can also— terribly — be used to darken it.

I see a sea of suffering and confused souls led by deluded and malicious prophets. I see fools worshiped; angels, mocked; and (most of all) a teaming yet powerful flux of suffering souls, so many souls, too manysouls, degraded and made to suffer for no other reason than that their hypocritical lords — inhuman men, machine men with machine minds and machine values— covet money and power and utter foolishness.

BUT:

I also see good people. Lost people—as are we all. But good people.

For: “Not all who wander are lost.” And even the smallest of us can triumph — but only — only — together.

In fellowship.

…

And you? What do you see, friend?