if you're trying to slay Moloch in any realm other than the territory of the human heart, you're gonna fail over, and over
you might fail in interesting and scintillating ways -- but you're gonna fail
River Kennax.comif you're trying to slay Moloch in any realm other than the territory of the human heart, you're gonna fail over, and over you might fail in interesting and scintillating ways -- but you're gonna fail
“Whenever I have encountered any kind of deep problem with civilization anywhere in the world [...] somewhere at the end of the long chain of events that gave rise to the problem at issue I have always found one and the same cause: a lack of accountability to and responsibility for the world.”
The Convivial Society • Amulets Against the Spirits of the Age
Sometimes what's wrong with reality is deeper than individual moral failings; sometimes our problems are greater than an inability to see each other's point of view. And boiling everything down to a failure of individual understanding can work as a neat and deliberate deflection away from those problems.
Lyta Gold • Dangerous Fictions
"Once one agent learns how to become more competitive by sacrificing a common value, all its competitors must also sacrifice that value or be outcompeted and replaced by the less scrupulous. Therefore, the system is likely to end up with everyone once again equally competitive, but the sacrificed value is gone forever. "
slatestarcodex.com • Meditations on Moloch
The problems of failure are problems of discouragement, of hopelessness, of hunger. You want everything to happen and you want it now, and things go wrong.