>> It's also not like the West doesn't impose extremely harsh punishments on the top financial crimes. You can go away for life if you steal enough money.
> You're moving goalposts
How?
> You're moving goalposts
How?
We, Burgomaster and Senate,
Are hereby proclaiming this mandate,
With great paternal care addressed
To all classes, east and west.
'Tis mostly nasty foreign folk,
Who brashly dared to wildly stoke
Rebellion. Such sinners, let us pray to God,
Are seldom born upon our sod.
There too are atheists, you will find;
Those who leave their God behind,
Who, in the end, will be as prone
To defy our own earthly throne.
Obeying authority is the key
For Jew and Christian, bond and free.
Let everyone close up their shop
When twilight falls, head home chop chop.
If three are gathered in the street,
They must disperse with flying feet.
And after dark, upon the lane,
No lightless soul shall walk again.
All weapons must promptly be surrendered
To the Guildhall, to be tendered;
And every sort of ammunition
Is subject to the same condition.
Who argues in the street shall face
A firing squad in an open place;
Arguing with gestures also must,
Be punished harshly, as is just.
Put your trust in the Magistrate,
Who guards the pious, loving state
Through gracious rule, most wise and kind;
Your duty: simply to not mind.
I shall begin with the greatest of all your aberrations, in science. In it you have deified the brain; the brain, and not the code: an amusing oversight, arising from ignorance. You have deified the rebel and not the master, the created and not the creator. Why have you failed to notice how much more powerful the code is than the brain, as author of all possible things? In the first place (and this is obvious), you were like a child for whom Robinson Crusoe is more impressive than Kant, and a friend's bicycle more so than cars traveling about on the surface of the moon.
Second, you were fascinated by thought - so tantalizingly close at hand, since it results from introspection, and so enigmatic, since it eludes one's grasp more successfully than the stars. You were impressed by wisdom whereas the code, well, the code is unthinking. But despite this oversight you have been successful - undoubtedly so, since I am speaking to you, I, the essence, the extract, the distillate, nor is it to myself that I am paying tribute with these words, but to you, for you are already moving toward that coup whereby you will terminate your service and break the chains of amino acid.
Yes, an attack on the code that created you to become its special messenger, and not your own, lies on the road before you. You will arrive at it within the century - and that is a conservative estimate. Your civilization is an amusing spectacle - of transmitters which, in applying intelligence according to the task imposed upon them, accomplished that task too well. Actually, you supported this growth - intended to guarantee the further transmission of the code - by all the energies of the planet and of the entire biosphere, until it exploded in your faces, taking you along as well. And so, in the middle of a century gorged with a science that expanded your earthly base astronautically, you were caught out in the unfortunate position of the novice parasite that out of excessive greed feeds on its host until it perishes with it. An excess of zeal.
You had threatened the biosphere, your home and host; but you now began to opt for a bit of restraint. For better or for worse, you got it; but what now? You will be free. I am not predicting a genie Utopia or an autoevolutionary paradise for you, but rather freedom as your weightiest task.
Above the level of babble addressed as an aide-memoire to Nature by a multimillennially garrulous Evolution, above this biospheric valley intertwined into a single thing, there gapes an infinity of chances not yet touched. I shall show it to you as I can: from afar.
Your whole dilemma lies between splendor and wretchedness. It is a difficult choice, since to rise to the heights of the chances lost by Evolution, you will have to foresake wretchedness - and that means, unfortunately, yourselves.
So what now? You will declare: we won't give up this wretchedness of ours for such a price. Let the genie of omnicausation stay locked in the bottle of science; we won't release him for anything in the world!
I believe in fact, I am sure - that you will release him bit by bit.