"The gift of gratitude came from the searing flash of near-death knowledge, a glimpse 'from the outside' of the alien, incomprehensible world in which the narrative of self has ended."
-Val Plumwood
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"We need decentralization because only thus can we ensure that the knowledge of the particular circumstance of time and place will be promptly used"
-F. A. Hayek: The Uses of Knowledge in Society
The Sanders-Musk exchange is an illustration of Liu Cixin’s thesis that there are only two types of civilisations: inward-looking and outward-looking; and that their aspirations and goals are often mutually incomprehensible. Only one has long-term survival prospects.
"Only thought is capable of inventing the fiction of a State that is universal by right, of elevating the State to the level of de jure universality."
-Deleuze and Guattari: A Thousand Plateaus, 375
"Moral obligation would disappear (...) because man, no longer taking into account any instinct, would absolutely conform his conduct to reason."
-Jean-Marie Guyau
"Why, even now the world's life is in decline, and the earth is so exhausted that she has difficulty in producing tiny animals, though she once produced creatures of every kind and bore wild beasts of huge size."
-Lucretius