“OUT OF NECESSITY AND urgency, I am at the end of this adventure, this attempt at righting or diverting a ship carrying beings I will never see or know. Though I have more inside my head, I can’t peel it off my gray matter fast enough to make it sensible to you, given the increment of time remaining. Besides, I’ve rambled far too much and am facing the possibility of desensitizing you, of pelleting you with humanity’s negatives to a point of complete surrender, blathering forth lessons that I hope you take to heart so you do not forge these same paths.”

“I find the most obvious facts in life are the ones most difficult to explain. What I will share is intuitively obvious. Though I have tested my belief system on family and friends, few agreed on my tenets, and they may well be correct that I am full of folly. Then again, few people I know have ever considered stepping outside their behaviors and analyzing them as have I.”

“Most humans spend their mental cycles wallowing in the day’s activities or worrying about past events or immediate future possibilities. I don’t. I spend my days pondering mankind’s ignorance, where we went deadly wrong, and assessing when we passed the inflection point of no return.”

“At the root of the sins of humanity, you will find two common behavioral themes. I categorized these themes as proto-evils because my years of living have led me to this conclusion. Sure, we humans talk about the seven deadly sins and their kin, but far too many exist to easily grasp the subtleties between them. Our species requires something simpler because of our inability to train the collective mind to handle many things at once.”

“The sins and their cousins include fear, doubt, hopelessness, ignorance, inconsideration, pride, jealousy, envy, greed, laziness, sloth, lust, anger, avarice, self-absorption, gluttony, and entitlement. I call them sins, but they are not sins in the biblical sense of the word.”

“Biblical sins imply that you can assuage your guilt by blaming a devil construct or other creation outside of yourself. No, I intend this to imply sins in the sense that these behaviors and characteristics are the result of a human’s own decisions, of a human’s ability to rationalize away their behaviors. And I likely left more than a few out. Irrespective of how you interpret each of these and their differences, two of them purposely bookend the others – fear and entitlement.”

“How does one conclude that humanity has two proto-evils that are at the root of all mankind’s evils? Because most sins are symptoms or indicators, not causes. You must analyze the underlying root causes of each sin. I have done this, leading me to the conclusions at which I’ve arrived.”

“Here’s an example. Consider the wealthy man who hoards his money and valuables or spends on himself and reluctantly metes out his riches to the less fortunate. On one hand, this may be because he fears losing this power and wealth. On the other hand, perhaps he feels he has a right to these things, even a God-given right, because he worked hard for them. His wealth is an entitlement, separate from fear and not embodied within it. Granted, the roots of his inconsideration are possibly both fear and entitlement to varying degrees.”

“I don’t want to bore you with other examples. To do so is far too tedious. In every case, you must look at each behavior and analyze the underlying motivator, not the behavior itself. When this is accomplished, either or both of the two proto-evils become apparent at the root. I’m convinced no others exist, and I hold this to be the strongest truth in what I have provided you. We humans are victims of our own fears and entitlements and all that those entail as we fail to manage them effectively.”

“I will keep this section brief, having covered examples of fear and entitlement elsewhere. What I must reiterate is that no society, no sentient and advanced species, will sustain the rapid acceleration of the infinity curve in its latter stages unless it has resolved the issues of societal fear and entitlement.”

“If this was easy, humanity would have managed it. Humans are good at easy things. Unfortunately, this task is hard. Worse yet, it’s individualized. Each person carries their own degrees and complexities of fear and entitlement, so each instance of learning to overcome and manage these two proto-evils may need to be customized, depending on the individual.”

“I’m not suggesting you should mandate that your species must immediately be subjected to a state-run effort of educating and managing these proto-evils. Any attempt at forcing this type of education and learnings likely results in advancing your demise rather than delaying, as inferred previously.”

“I have no pat answers and no easy paths for you. I suspect if you have understood my prior words, you’d know there is no easy path. Few things are simple and obvious in the lives of sentient beings, or so I have found.”

“As indicated, meditation training is a good start to clear the mind of clutter, provide focus, and decouple the individual from its innate self-centeredness. Regular physical training matched with that is also a start. Yet these are not guarantees. Many great and learned societies have fallen by the wayside over the years, despite retaining similar disciplines.”

“Whether or not you perceive it to be so, your most pressing societal challenge is to successfully climb the infinity curve you are approaching. To repeat, the curve is the compression of technology, its exponential acceleration on that infinite y-axis, in contrast to the snail’s pace advance of societal progress on the x-axis. If nothing else, at least recognizing this imbalance is a good start, even if you are failing at scaling the mountain as it shoots upward towards the limitless technological vertical.”

“Recalling earlier thoughts, I have often wondered if the only sentient being capable of scaling this tortuous climb is a machine-centric one. After all, it’s difficult for any unaltered human to conceive of the time compression that occurs in the latter stage of the upward curve of technology.”

“At this point for us, which is still early in its upward climb, it’s apparent that humans with biological minds are incapable of managing that technological rate of change. I can’t speak for transhumans who have hybridized the capacities of their minds. They are on a comprehension plane different than mine, yet they are also apparently unable to wrest enough control from the oligarchic systems to save us from ourselves.”

“Again, I’m assuming AI-augmented transhumans are not currently in control of the world’s activities. On the other hand, it could be true that sentient AI systems of transhuman oligarchs are making decisions for both them and us.”

“That I can tell, no machine-centric system has shown the capacities to help us overcome our differences and create a better functioning, viable society for the long haul. One must believe this is because those systems were created in mankind’s image, using humanity’s ethical base or lack thereof as the beginning construct. They will, no doubt, suffer the same species termination outcome that we are destined to experience.”

“Whatever you might think of us, given my descriptions of our foibles and mistakes, I believe we are not inherently evil. Stupid and shortsighted? Certainly. Lazy and undisciplined? Definitely. As much as I’d like to blame something else like a devil construct, I can’t.”

“Maybe it’s nature that placed within us a natural inclination towards fear, entitlement, and the burdens from them that we shoulder. But I doubt that. I have seen little children, toddlers, and their tendencies toward wonder, kindness, and friendliness. We learn to acquire our fears and entitlements. Yes, the sins of humanity are acquired sins. They are sins we consciously conjure. The evil of mankind is a chosen evil.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter how you perceive us and our species, does it? Instead, it matters how you move forward from this point. Perhaps you’ll take my advice and pitch it into the dustbins of your minds as something that is sad, terrifying, even amusing, and take nothing else from it. If you do that, I have at least failed you if not also other societies that find my twelve ten-second, pulse-amplified bright beams of babble on laser light.”

“If you discover parallels in your own society from any of what I say, then consider this a warning. Go back and look at your fears and entitlements and, as a societal goal, take immediate action.”

“During this long diatribe, I have spoken little of myself or my feelings because they matter not. Having consumed and nominally applied the wisdom from writings of the Stoic sages, I can extricate myself from my own species and even from individuals I know and view them and their motivations more clearly. They are neither good nor bad people, as I’ve said. As a whole, they are unable to separate their mental constructs and belief systems from themselves, their pure consciousness of existence. Because of this, they are captives holding fervently onto the prison bars of their own destructive constructs.”

“Then again, all things come and go. All species come and go, that I’m aware. For hominids on the whole, many species survived for short periods then died out for one reason or another. Our lack of a simple ethical system is our reason, and our decline will be soon upon us. I can’t tell you that having such a system might have saved us as we tried to scale the heights of technology along the y-axis, but I can deduce we might have sustained the species for a longer period.”

“And now I must leave you to your thoughts and actions. The threats against my project have reached a peak, and I am out of time to continue recording. To top it off, a wooden board fell from my ceiling a few days ago. I stepped on it by accident, and a rusty nail pierced completely through my left foot. The pain remains, despite Sofia’s valiant efforts at nursing my wound, and my energy is waning.”

“I wish the best for your species as it scales the heights of the infinity curve."