7. Transcendental lessons

I had an invigorating conversation yesterday with a friend, and he pointed out how, in even our longest-term imaginations of the future, we are anchored by our own lifetimes. We rarely think beyond the year 2100.

That got me thinking about what lessons can we possibly transfer from today to the far-future, say 1000 years from now (assuming that mankind still exists and is the apex species, neither of which is a given).

There is already a sufficiently advanced system in place that allows all the scientific knowledge that to be captured and built on by future generations. However, I do wonder if lessons that we have learned through generations of cooperating will be captured. We have dogmatized these lessons as ‘values’ — our society works better if everybody plays ‘friend’, and so we have put in place strong incentive systems to push people to play ‘friend’ (legal system and values such as honesty and empathy). These values helped humankind scale better. While we have come a long way since the Law Code of Hammurabi, our legal system still has at its core the concept of justice. We have layered on top of justice several other values and ‘absolute truths’, the most prominent (and recent) one being the concept of equality. Hammurabi lives on.

Law Code of Hammurabi, made around 1750 BCE

“I wish the future could remember to have empathy.” That was one of the first statements that came to my mind. Let all of the future be built on empathy, like we built the past 4000 years on ‘justice’. I just hope empathy scales in the future the way it has helped us scale so far — empathy not just to every human being, but to every form of life.

I don’t have a playbook to ensure this happens, but I really hope it does happen.

[What a cop-out way to end a post].

Finding Satisfaction
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