The Parable of the Alien Black Hole
How would it feel living on a planet, circling a distant star, orbiting around an alien galaxy, which is slowly being sucked into an enormous black hole?
Every day you’d get up in the morning; make yourself breakfast; go outside; and look up into the sky.
Instead of our own orderly Milky Way spreading out before you, you’d see an enormous swirl of nearby stars - slowly – spirally - sucked into a nothingness in the sky.
The visible universe would, in the night sky, appear like a spiral getting smaller into a point. And at that point, there would be a nothingness so complete that it hurt your eyes to look at it.
Every morning you’d wake up, and if your people were advanced, you’d understand what was happening. The universe was being eaten.
Even primitive intelligences could see something was amiss, I think. Something that filled you with dread.
Dread that your own people would soon be destroyed in the nothingness.
Maybe that’s what Evil is. A Giant Black Hole – its only purpose to eat, to devour, to destroy. Mindlessly.
It consumes everything while contributing nothing but an emptiness where there was something before.
The final victory of entropy.
I’d think, if that were what you saw out the window every day, you’d be pretty fatalistic as a people.
You’d either fight with every breath to survive, like human beings do for the most part -
or you’d give up, accepting your fate, and prepare yourself for the inevitable end.
As for me, I’m all for survival. We should ignore the petty in fighting and squabbling that distract us as a species and always have. So much of politics is really just the powerful fighting the powerful in the name of the rest of us.
I think the big picture is that we all have to work together, commit together to the betterment of life on Earth. Appreciate what we do have and try to make things better for the future. Make it so more people have more happiness and less misery and poverty.
Some people justify their selfishness as a neo-conservative philosophy. But they’re just selfish. They want to hoard more of the precious resources for themselves.
I say, let the entire human race work together for the betterment of every single solitary human being, and not just for the Forbes 500.
When I hear them say “ownership society,” what I hear them really mean is that those who own things are encouraged to own even more. Those at the bottom end of the economic chain are left with fewer resources. They are all controlled by greedy people who are not sharing enough.
Period. You can call it whatever you want, but people should be sharing more. The CEO of a company should not be making more than maybe 30 times what the person at the bottom of the totem pole makes.
It’s like gamma in a photograph. Just take the economic spectrum, and flatten the curve more. Bring those without money up to the point where they can participate in the process. And bring the top end of the spectrum down closer to the middle class. But it doesn’t affect the middle at all.
And I’m not just talking about bettering the lives of the poor in the United States. We all have it relatively well compared to the less developed parts of the world. Everybody can eat here. You can get a meal for less than $2 at Taco Bell, which is a tiny amount of money here.
But that’s not true in Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s not true in parts of Central and East Asia, in parts of South America. 1/5th of the world is starving.
We need to spend less money on guns and tanks and more money on tractors and industrial equipment given to the peoples of the world. We need to be less selfish and share what we have more.
Greed is not good. We all choose our own happiness, and choosing lust for money to be the main purpose to your life is choosing a dead end. You can never have enough. You will never be satiated, full. You always desire more. You will never achieve happiness, pleasure – defined by Epicurus as satiation, being full. You can never be full from a lust for money or power or fame. They are all emotional dead ends.
And then that selfishness means that you’ve taken more than your fair share, and there is so much less left for the rest of us.
It’s the philosophical idea of the Commons – that the Earth and its resources belong to all, and we all must share equally of those resources. It goes back to the idea of community grazing land that was shared by everyone equally.
For an individual to show up in that commonly held land and start to overgraze it or otherwise deplete what was there for the rest of us, they are being selfish, and showing us by their actions that they do not respect us or think of us as an equal. By that act of disrespect, they prove themselves to be outside of polite society, the community of people who act civilly to each other, with kindness and respect.
They are no longer of the tribe but are attempting to exploit the rest of the tribe. They are to be, therefore, removed from any position which would give them power over us, and removed to a place where they can no longer attempt to harm us. Forcibly, if necessary.
But we should not allow these bullies, con men and thieves to steal our birthrights from us.
We have to object, and loudly, to the cries of the oppressed.
We have to stand up, all of us, against the people who control too much.
We must all share more and be less selfish.
Only through cooperation will we survive in the long haul.
We have a once-in-a-species-lifetime opportunity, if we all cooperate together to make life here on Earth better for all.
To promote morality, as a society, we ought to punish vice. We ought to not allow it. Greed, covetousness, hoarding of shared resources, not sharing – these moral offenses ought to be disallowed in a moral society.
Morally, we all have a responsibility to each other, and to all mankind. All the other humans on Earth are our brothers and sisters, and we ought to treat them as such. If your sister or brother were in trouble, you’d help them, wouldn’t you?
Those who want to hoard everything to themselves and not share equally among us all (obviously they never learned anything in Kindergarten) shall be banished from amongst us. Only those who share can be allowed to coexist peacefully within a peaceful, progressive society. Those who have not learned that basic human necessity ought to be kept from having power over we who do choose to play by the rules and help each other out.
We obey the rules; we love our neighbors and help them out. But the neoconservatives don’t. They violate international law and the universally morally agreed upon “Just War Theory.” They torture people who were totally innocent of any crime, and have never been convicted of anything. They steal our commonly held resources – National Parks, National Forests – and mine them, suck the oil out of the soil – for private profit, not for the profit of all Americans. We ALL own it jointly – that’s what it means to be a National Park in a Democracy: it is land owned in common by all. But only A FEW people will profit by an oil company sucking our property out of the ground – the stockholders of that company.
Moral people need to stick together, and not allow wolves in sheep’s clothing to pretend to be moral when, in fact, they are just selfish.
Every day you’d get up in the morning; make yourself breakfast; go outside; and look up into the sky.
Instead of our own orderly Milky Way spreading out before you, you’d see an enormous swirl of nearby stars - slowly – spirally - sucked into a nothingness in the sky.
The visible universe would, in the night sky, appear like a spiral getting smaller into a point. And at that point, there would be a nothingness so complete that it hurt your eyes to look at it.
Every morning you’d wake up, and if your people were advanced, you’d understand what was happening. The universe was being eaten.
Even primitive intelligences could see something was amiss, I think. Something that filled you with dread.
Dread that your own people would soon be destroyed in the nothingness.
Maybe that’s what Evil is. A Giant Black Hole – its only purpose to eat, to devour, to destroy. Mindlessly.
It consumes everything while contributing nothing but an emptiness where there was something before.
The final victory of entropy.
I’d think, if that were what you saw out the window every day, you’d be pretty fatalistic as a people.
You’d either fight with every breath to survive, like human beings do for the most part -
or you’d give up, accepting your fate, and prepare yourself for the inevitable end.
As for me, I’m all for survival. We should ignore the petty in fighting and squabbling that distract us as a species and always have. So much of politics is really just the powerful fighting the powerful in the name of the rest of us.
I think the big picture is that we all have to work together, commit together to the betterment of life on Earth. Appreciate what we do have and try to make things better for the future. Make it so more people have more happiness and less misery and poverty.
Some people justify their selfishness as a neo-conservative philosophy. But they’re just selfish. They want to hoard more of the precious resources for themselves.
I say, let the entire human race work together for the betterment of every single solitary human being, and not just for the Forbes 500.
When I hear them say “ownership society,” what I hear them really mean is that those who own things are encouraged to own even more. Those at the bottom end of the economic chain are left with fewer resources. They are all controlled by greedy people who are not sharing enough.
Period. You can call it whatever you want, but people should be sharing more. The CEO of a company should not be making more than maybe 30 times what the person at the bottom of the totem pole makes.
It’s like gamma in a photograph. Just take the economic spectrum, and flatten the curve more. Bring those without money up to the point where they can participate in the process. And bring the top end of the spectrum down closer to the middle class. But it doesn’t affect the middle at all.
And I’m not just talking about bettering the lives of the poor in the United States. We all have it relatively well compared to the less developed parts of the world. Everybody can eat here. You can get a meal for less than $2 at Taco Bell, which is a tiny amount of money here.
But that’s not true in Sub-Saharan Africa. That’s not true in parts of Central and East Asia, in parts of South America. 1/5th of the world is starving.
We need to spend less money on guns and tanks and more money on tractors and industrial equipment given to the peoples of the world. We need to be less selfish and share what we have more.
Greed is not good. We all choose our own happiness, and choosing lust for money to be the main purpose to your life is choosing a dead end. You can never have enough. You will never be satiated, full. You always desire more. You will never achieve happiness, pleasure – defined by Epicurus as satiation, being full. You can never be full from a lust for money or power or fame. They are all emotional dead ends.
And then that selfishness means that you’ve taken more than your fair share, and there is so much less left for the rest of us.
It’s the philosophical idea of the Commons – that the Earth and its resources belong to all, and we all must share equally of those resources. It goes back to the idea of community grazing land that was shared by everyone equally.
For an individual to show up in that commonly held land and start to overgraze it or otherwise deplete what was there for the rest of us, they are being selfish, and showing us by their actions that they do not respect us or think of us as an equal. By that act of disrespect, they prove themselves to be outside of polite society, the community of people who act civilly to each other, with kindness and respect.
They are no longer of the tribe but are attempting to exploit the rest of the tribe. They are to be, therefore, removed from any position which would give them power over us, and removed to a place where they can no longer attempt to harm us. Forcibly, if necessary.
But we should not allow these bullies, con men and thieves to steal our birthrights from us.
We have to object, and loudly, to the cries of the oppressed.
We have to stand up, all of us, against the people who control too much.
We must all share more and be less selfish.
Only through cooperation will we survive in the long haul.
We have a once-in-a-species-lifetime opportunity, if we all cooperate together to make life here on Earth better for all.
To promote morality, as a society, we ought to punish vice. We ought to not allow it. Greed, covetousness, hoarding of shared resources, not sharing – these moral offenses ought to be disallowed in a moral society.
Morally, we all have a responsibility to each other, and to all mankind. All the other humans on Earth are our brothers and sisters, and we ought to treat them as such. If your sister or brother were in trouble, you’d help them, wouldn’t you?
Those who want to hoard everything to themselves and not share equally among us all (obviously they never learned anything in Kindergarten) shall be banished from amongst us. Only those who share can be allowed to coexist peacefully within a peaceful, progressive society. Those who have not learned that basic human necessity ought to be kept from having power over we who do choose to play by the rules and help each other out.
We obey the rules; we love our neighbors and help them out. But the neoconservatives don’t. They violate international law and the universally morally agreed upon “Just War Theory.” They torture people who were totally innocent of any crime, and have never been convicted of anything. They steal our commonly held resources – National Parks, National Forests – and mine them, suck the oil out of the soil – for private profit, not for the profit of all Americans. We ALL own it jointly – that’s what it means to be a National Park in a Democracy: it is land owned in common by all. But only A FEW people will profit by an oil company sucking our property out of the ground – the stockholders of that company.
Moral people need to stick together, and not allow wolves in sheep’s clothing to pretend to be moral when, in fact, they are just selfish.
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