Page 37 - Liberating Liberals V2

Liberating Liberals
The tragedy of the planet is that scientists found ways to extract time from the topsoil and oceans and the atmosphere — to heat their homes and power their speedboats and fertilize their crops with it; to eat it; to make clothes out of it; and so on. They served time at every meal and fed it to their household pets, just to demonstrate how rich and clever they were. They allowed great gobbets of it to putrefy in their overflowing garbage cans... The patriotic bonfires were the worst [when] a million years of the future were put to the torch in honor of the birthday of the queen.
But by the time [the occupant] was fifty,
only a few weeks of the future remained. Great rips in reality were appearing everywhere. People could walk through walls. His own speedboat became nothing more than a steering wheel. Holes appeared in vacant lots where children were playing, and the children fell in.25
The Vicuneans fled their planet. We earthlings haven’t figured out how to escape ours. Nor probably will we ever escape the great sadness inherent in parts of the human condition. But that still leaves plenty of potential for happiness and progress.
Vonnegut wrote that we’re still in the “Dark Ages.”26 And though this sounds bad, a good aspect is that it means there are immense areas in which we can progress. And thanks to the fact that liberals are already fairly liberated we can now continue the investigation of the universe with useful tools rather than arbitrary assumptions. Not only are we freed of ancient quandaries such as the mind-imprisoning scholasticism of Thomas Aquinas, but we’re also
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