Prompt Lost
Excerpt From “The End Of The Age Of Promise” – by Cilian Pyrel.
Of particular impactfulness to the modern reader, when considering the global events of the “Age of Promise”, commonly understood to encompass a period from the early 20th century through the mid 21st, is the chilling sense of foreboding present at every historical step.
In general, throughout the larger course of human history before the present age, humanity’s forebears have acted with unavoidable ignorance of the future. It can fairly be said of civilizations, up to and including the early Industrial revolution, that they resided in a state of true, and therefore unknowable ignorance of the long term effects their actions might have on the course of their species.
Indeed, for much of human history the individual members of the human race were so ignorant of fundamental tenets of science, that the notion of each person being a member of a single contiguous species would have eluded most of them.
However the Age of Promise (“AP”) was markedly different. Our ancestors who lived during this remarkable period of potential cannot rely on the crutch of ignorance to warrant their actions. Until the present day, the AP stood alone as the high water mark of human scientific understanding.
Most remarkable of all, and to the modern reader most distressing, is the extent to which that wealth of data encompassed issues of long term prognostication. It is an unchallenged fact, established beyond all doubt by the records of “Corporate” entities, that our ancestors knew full well that they were rendering their home planet inhospitable to multi-cellular life.
Here we must mention a common practice of the AP, wherein individual human beings conglomerated themselves into groups and acted with a shared purpose to the end of achieving their particular group’s largely economic goals.
This behavior would be unremarkable, similar as it is to the social structures inherent in our society today, if it did not contain a fatal, vestigial tendency toward non-inclusion. The result of this quirk, which served our species so well as hunter gatherers, proved to be inherently destructive in trying to maintain a more advanced society.
No matter the efforts made to defeat the tendency of ancient humans to isolate from each other, no system of governance during the AP was ultimately successful at breaking the habit.
The result was roughly 200 years of human potential ultimately squandered by a human race focused exclusively on achieving the short term ends of their respective groupings. These groups took several forms – whether nation states, religious sects, military organizations, or, perhaps most damaging, although this is far from agreed upon in historical circles, the aforementioned “Corporations.”
It is, as mentioned above, well known today that it was various Corporations, with innocuous names like “Shell”, “BP”, and “Exxon” which ultimately obscured the unequivocal data showing the destructive potential of fossil fuels.
But perhaps more disturbing still is that, even when said data was eventually released for public discourse, our ancestors persisted in ignoring it, which ultimately proved a terminal delay.
This phenomenon, wherein the greater good is systematically ignored in furtherance of the short sighted aims of short term, artificial groupings of human beings, is today referred to as “Association Blindness”, and it was arguably the understanding of this phenomenon which enabled our present society to flourish in its current form.
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