Essay: The Wall of Infancy

The Wall of Infancy

 I’ve written quite a bit on ethics as technology--as an ideological tool, focused on enlightening self and culture so that we can, as a civilization, achieve better consequences [1].  It is similar to how we conceive medicine today, no longer faith-based and instead subject to verifiable, reasonable standards.   The purpose of this essay is to encapsulate and abbreviate previous writings on this topic, while introducing a new aspect; namely, that society needs to break through a specific cultural wall to achieve virtue, mental health, and maturity.  Below, I explain why I call this the Wall of Infancy, and why breaking through it is tantamount to accepting ethics as technology.  In so doing, we reject traditional standards of ignorance-based governance.

 We have the brain- and cultural-plasticity to implement better forms of ethics.  If we don’t, civilization will likely perish.  As Omar Bradley said in his 1948 Armistice Day speech, we are “ethical infants” in control of armageddon-capable weapons.  The dire situation invokes a quintessential imperative:   we must become emotionally competent, break through the Wall of Infancy and grow our knowledge of how best to govern.   

We have been making progress, especially in the last few hundred years, but it must continue with serious expediency.  Our cultural development,  the phylogeny of human civilization, is in a race between clear-headed decency, on one hand, and a short-sighted, greed-fueled doom.

 Human civilization, to this very day, is steeped in ancient, sticky dogma.  Mind-programming, if you will, from tyrants past.  To break through, we must accept a paradigm shift.  The ways of ancient city states--their machismo, warlordism, and puerile might-makes-right--must be rejected once and for all.  If culture is seen as an organizing platform for the human brain, then we need to reject cerebral blinkers and build a palladium of awareness.

 Beating others down to establish a hierarchy of fanatic dominance, while proclaiming oneself a godking, is primitive tech.  Higher ethics starts with common sense:  equality and its logical corollaries, fairness and human rights. 

 While medicine attends to the health of the human body, ethics attends, as well, to the general social corpus.  Imagine the benefits of medicine magnified to encompass the prioritization of virtue over vice, principle over profit, good over evil.  Imagine a system of ideas, of technologically improvable mental tools--married to the praxis of science and engineering--committed to the health of the whole.  Human and environmental flourishing together.  Synergy.  Symbiosis.  Win-win.

 We have the computing power to initiate simulations on how to create better culture, similar to how we simulate weather.  The invention of quantum computing, a few cobblestones away, will make the simulations even more realistic.  If an economic system is like a transistor board, a pattern of efficient and effective flows, AI can help optimize a monetary system where profit is distributed to advance the Good, not batten the wallets of the already bloated uber-wealthy.  

 We don't need AI to design and implement healthier, wiser ways of life and leadership. It is what we have already attempted, albeit crudely, for thousands of years.  The main antagonist to breaking through the Wall of Infancy is ignorance-based government, which is to say, government that doesn’t want truth or decency; that runs on fanaticism and fear. 

Far in the future, civilization could look back and thank us, we citizens of this early phylogenic stage of social growth.  They will thank us, from their perspective in hindsight, because somehow--incredibly, amazingly--we managed to break out of traditional mind-control traps.  We escaped Ignorance, liberated ourselves, opened our minds to truth, and foresaw a potential for Good governance across millions of years. 

Circa the early 21^st century, this barbaric era, we tend to think of five thousand years as a long time.  It is approximately how long our civilization has existed.  And yet, if we continue to advance ethics tech and thereby eliminate war, millions of years of heavenly existence awaits trillions of happier citizens spread across the galaxy, or even beyond.

 The question we face is of the utmost importance:  whether we will adapt more advanced forms of government; or whether we will destroy, maim and torture ourselves due to our inability to rise above the primitive stupidity of war.  Make no mistake, future warfare will be conducted with hellish weapons beyond the pale of what we understand now.

Eliminating war is the only way for our species to survive, and maybe for nature itself to survive.  Note well, it is possible to dismantle cellular replication at the molecular level, whether it is human cells, or those algae or protozoans at the base of the building blocks of all life.

We need a ‘Project of Light’ 

Given the catastrophic threats, we are desperate for a stable platform of virtue and reasonable assessment.  We require new and better forms of decision-making to manage our super powers.  We have a choice:  continue to be immature, reckless, blind progenitors who lack a reliable cultural conscience; or assert our ability to therapeutically build the competency of our minds.   

We need not only summon our better angels, but allow them to effectuate a transition.  The world we live in now celebrates stock market bumps even as 50% of Americans can’t afford basic necessities.  The global scenario, outside the coin-grubbing empire, is even more dismal.

Higher ethics tech, by definition, means more psychological skill in the population, which correlates with more health and virtue, less vice and corruption.  The therapeutic tools already exist.  What we need is a delivery device for moral character.  Instead, we get corporate marketers who flood the airwaves with ads that promote tissue-thin vanity ("Please don't squeeze the Charmin"), saccharine consumption and petty insecurity.

Education which stops with efficiency may prove the greatest menace to society.  The most dangerous criminal may be the person gifted with reason but with no morals.  We must remember that intelligence is not enough.  Intelligence plus character--that is the goal of true education.

                                             --Martin Luther King, Jr.

 

 

Human nature does not prevent us

Over and over, people say that ‘human nature,’ whatever that is, prevents us from progressing toward a Good world.  In response, consider this:  all the things that we have been taught cannot change already have.  For most of human existence, a span of two million years or so, war did not exist.  Positive change comes in movements and vacillations.  We have  leapt forward mightily, say, in the last two hundred years, increasing our awareness.  "The moral arc of the universe is long"  and we are stumbling along the curvature. 

It is abhorrent that a mere 150 years ago, America debated whether Native peoples were even human.  In Standing Bear vs Crook (1879), a Federal District judge make the monumental pronouncement … (drum roll) …  that Native peoples are, indeed, human beings.

Standing Bear addressed the court as follows:

That hand is not the color of yours, but if I pierce it, I shall feel pain. If you pierce your hands, you also feel pain. The blood that will flow from mine will be of the same color as yours. I am a man. The same God made us both. [f3]

It is sad how barbaric we were then.  And are still.  And yet it is joyous that we have advanced the methods of ethics to a place where we no longer debate whether people of certain groups are human or not.

Universal Suffrage (1920 in the USA)  broke from millennia of despicable ignorance.  In the mid-20^th century, Virginia Woolf--speaking out in the modern age, when a woman’s voice could finally do so, publicly and durably--wrote about women of the past who she referred to as “Shakespeare’s sister.”  Countless generations of women and girls were never allowed to write, or even to learn to write.  They were, as well, denied so much more, myriad and variegated opportunities to express, achieve and actualize. 

We’ve made incredible progress in the last few hundred years.  And yet the horrors of the past, the unspeakable cruelty of oppression and slavery--and the horrors that exist to this day, in our own vicious, soul-crushing time--are necessary cynosures, if we are find the candid wisdom to light a path for a Good future.

I don’t think [the] practice of acknowledging beauty and denouncing horror is much more difficult than the practice of loving. In fact, I think it is very much a part of the practice of loving.  --  Anna Badhken

 

What is an Angel like?

We can start by admitting that Good and Evil exist, if only as self-fulfilling prophecies, projected from our minds onto the ways we live and shape the world.  As power tech increases, the world establishes, more and more, a reflection of our psychological state, be it broken, shallow and fearful, or hale and apt to sublimate dark emotions with catharsis.  

Our current culture crafts many an image of mythic demons and monsters.  The entertainment industry feasts on them, ballyhooing an ongoing parade of adrenal malignities, complete with realistic special effects.  The result is an expanding lore of horror:  phantasms and chimeras woven into tormented, tortured fates.  Few of us go to libraries anymore, but most of us are handed, via the ghost-ocean of a screen, a mega-compendium of what it could be like to suffer the most fearsome, gruesome, soul-crushing incarnations of evil. 

In contrast to our familiarity with monsters, we know relatively little about the behaviors and potentials of angelic creatures.  How would such beings behave?  

Our ability to create functioning ‘thinking’ robots is nigh.  The main hurdle to creating artificial intelligence that advances the Good may be our cultural preference for monsters.  

Indeed, a case can be made that we will create the scariest, most deadly robots as soon as possible.  The reason is that their invention meshes with the strategy of MAD, that is, mutually assured destruction.  The perverse argument goes as follows:  the higher the threat of a nightmarish response, the less likely it is that anyone would dare to attack us; therefore, we should create as nightmarish a threat as possible. 

This malevolent justification provides the rationale for the world you and I live in today:  a planet pimpled with tens of thousands of ICBM silos, ready to launch and detonate into a nuclear winter, blotting out the Sun for at least a decade. 

 

We can choose to focus on angels instead of demons

What would it take for us to focus on angelic expressions--true guides toward Goodness--instead of Terminator robots, which take us one step closer to creating an actual hell on Earth, a self-fulfilling prophecy of our own worst fears?  Dante's Inferno is fiction--for now.

An angelic being requires a sophisticated ethical decision-making process, one that is reasonable, logical, and empirically testable to derive Good results.  It would rely on a body of knowledge both scientific and philosophic, literary and psychological.  The whole of human lore, our reflections on experience and understanding, would be needed to extract a plausible path.

Imagine all the disciplines of academia, all the realms of cultural expression, science yes, but also the arts, from the terpsichorean to the poetic, every manifestation of who and what we are, our hopes and dreams, all of it summoned to approach high-tech answers to ultimate questions like, “What is happiness?”  “What is the Good?”  “What is the nature of health and flourishing?”

Faith-based answers to the deepest, most meaningful questions of life have helped move us forward in some ways.  Perhaps since the day our species first walked the earth, they provided refuge from the ugly, terrible aspects of existence.   Faith gives comfort and love in a brutal world.  But such answers have also--when unregulated by reason and fairness--mired us in superstitious zeal, leading to balkanized schisms.  These, in turn, catalyze crusades, inquisitions, witch hunts, wars, and other titanic injustices spanning millennia. 

As the Dali Lama writes in Beyond Religion, ethics can be a reasonable and universal tool, beyond the purview of any one religion.  This is not an abandonment of spirituality, emotion, passion or even religion itself.  All of these are intimate, honorable aspects of a Good world.  What is required is a leap, not of faith, but beyond the damaging effects of preventable ignorance.  Critical thinking over dogma.  Science over zealotry.  The rejection of any form of credo quia absurdum .  A commitment to psychological skills and an associated suite of equities.

 

Conclusion

With so much at stake, for both civilization and the planet itself, and perhaps the fate of other planets as well, if we reach them, we ought to put every urgent effort into unlocking the potential of our minds to escape crippling social 'brainware,' the sort that incline toward cruel, dishonest intrapsychic walls, which fuel the engines of Evil empires [2].  

In the nuclear age, the real enemy is war itself--Denzel Washington, Crimson Tide

Ignorance, as a kind of capital, has been central to the operation of government for thousands of years.  People are spoon fed ignorance from birth, behaviorized to help spread it, and rewarded or ostracized accordingly.  We live under the pall of ancient, bloody rites of vicious, irrational forces, derived from and delivered by the sword.  The brutality and stupidity of might-makes-right has ramified to keep us down.  It works because we are willfully kept ignorant while we serve to protect and advance that very ignorance.  

We reach for the stars, split atoms, alter the very genetic codes of life; and yet we refuse to consider the simple benefits of a therapist anything but a stigma. We advance STEM research but can't even discuss our feelings with each other, or even ourselves.  We struggle to even know how to deal with low self-esteem, while predators, both institutional and vulgar, feed off it.

In terms of the longitude of a hypothetical galactic civilization, you and I exist in a very early stage, in a sub-niche on a scale that spans millions of years.  We live in what could be called (as I have written before) the Era of Dumbing.  We are dumbed down.  We are ethical infants.  And we are quite likely to destroy ourselves with godlike powers we don't understand, if we continue to let immature, macho males, who have diagnosable mental disorders, sit on their de facto thrones, point their cannons, incline their missiles, and play chicken with each other so that they can snatch the latest flag from some vaunted hill, even if that hill is only a tiny, uninhabited island. 

This is the time of stupidity in which you and I live.  I wager that anyone reading this can imagine a territorial battle for a tiny, uninhabited island erupting into a full-scale global war.   That is how we go extinct.  Poof, just like that.

What can we do?  A good first step is to merely begin to talk about the Wall of Infancy.  Consider the idea that we have potential to be much more mentally aware of our emotions and correspondingly ethical.  It is a known fact that we are now dysfunctional, which demonstrates, ipso facto, that there is a functional.   

Emotional skills are measurable.  And teachable.  

If this seems impractical, if not magical and absurd to you, consider the following real-life, grounded wisdom:

 

Authoritarian leaders, like narcissistic family members, rely on well-worn tactics to manufacture a psychological state of volatile uncertainty — where outcomes aren’t just unknown, but constantly shifting and unpredictable. This overwhelms the brain’s ability to anticipate and prepare, keeping people mentally off-balance and easier to control. The good news: Awareness works like a vaccine, gradually building psychological immunity against further harm.

“I’m A Psychologist Who Specializes In Narcissists. Here’s What We Need To Do To Stop Trump,” -- Jocelyn Sze, 

https://www.yahoo.com/news/m-psychologist-specializes-narcissists-stop-115203532.html

 

Maybe the most important sentence in the quote above is “awareness works like a vaccine.”

Have we even attempted to give this vaccine to ourselves as a society?  As a population?  Has it ever informed a motto for any of our institutions?  We inoculate ourselves against measles.  Why not vaccinate ourselves against a  narcissistic takeover that could destroy everything we've worked for?  

Even talking about a Wall of Infancy is extraordinarily hard for us.  It requires a capacity for deep honesty, which is the first thing that our cultural programming takes away.  In a world of gaslighting, power to decide what (or who) gets seen, let alone discussed, is given to imperious leaders inclined to dysfunction.  

"There's no Ignorance.  What are you talking about?  We live in the best country ever!"

No one born in civilization, at any time, has lived in a Good world.  Or seen a Good culture.  Not me.  Not you.  No one.  Our acculturation patterns fight against vision. 

"There's no sexism, racism, or anti-LGBTQ that I can see!  Stop being so woke!" 

What we do know, and what most of us will acknowledge, is that culture can change.  So-called human nature has not prevented us from major paradigm shifts.   We know, if we consider for a moment, that our own culture will be very different in ten years than it is now.  

Despite the depressing, molasses-gooey pace of the struggle--so it seems from the perspective in which you and I are embodied, that of a single human life--truth has managed to advance.  From the vantage of an historical framework, the changes have accelerated since the late 18th century, when Mary Wollstonecraft wrote A Vindication of the Rights of Women.  

The legalization of gay marriage in 2015 was met with surprise and joy, which towered against the inevitable fury of the predictable backlash of Ignorance. 

Let’s at least start talking about the Wall of Infancy [3].  It is not a nuclear weapon, or an AI-generated pathogen; but it is the reason we cannot properly manage such dangers.  The greatest threat to our existence, then, is not a specific super power--it is our immaturity in regard to super power.  

Trillions of far-future citizens could be grateful to us, if only we dare to raise our heads.  Moreover, if we do not, they will never get a chance to exist.  

 ===============

Footnotes

[1] I've written a whole bunch of essays on this blog that go into some of the concepts here more deeply, such as:

Lightcraft:  ethics as technology
On Hate
Sustenance and Darkness
The Purgatory Principle
It's the Dicks who are infected and deranged
The Apotheosis Problem
Godlike Technology Requires Democracy

[2]  https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2026/08/essay-its-dicks-who-are-infected-and.html  
See the four stages of 'complicitous gravitation.'

[3]  What I've completely avoided discussing in this essay (until this bitter end) is patriarchy and its effect on men, saddling them with normative male alexithymia (an inability to recognize or talk about one's emotions).  In previous writing, I have situated our survival as a species in the question, "Can men be taught to truly accept women as equals?"  If the answer is yes, we can survive and eliminate war.  If not, then no.  However, talking about patriarchy and men's inability to self-verbalize shuts down entire sectors of audience.  And, of course, it's not just about men.  The big question is whether emotional competence can be established as the cultural norm for everyone.

11/8 ... edited through it ... I feel this dream-like sense of dread, of missing something crucial... more edits later in the day, very tired, ought to be grading papers...more editing at night.. can't do anymore .. 

11/7 ... tried to start editing... very tired...

 

 

Quote, "Acknowledging beauty and denouncing horror ..."

 ====

I don’t think this practice of acknowledging beauty and denouncing horror is much more difficult than the practice of loving. In fact, I think it is very much a part of the practice of loving.

--Anna Badkhen, Amsterdam Review interview
https://amsterdamreview.substack.com/p/reaching-for-meaning-rediscovering

====

This sort of thought, this salubrious congruence, is part of the ongoing advance of the collective consciousness of civilization, as we struggle toward a higher level of psychological awareness and ethical maturity.  

Our level of ethics technology has risen and continues to rise, even in the face of horrific backlashes and clutches of ancient norms of ignorance-based governance and hate-monger politics.  As I've written, we have the brain- and cultural-plasticity to continue to advance out of the Ignorance Vortex and reach a place where we put ethics first, not power-lust or greed, and end the curse of warfare. ("The Purgatory Principle," "Sustenance and Darkness," "The Apotheosis Problem," "Lightcraft: ethics as technology," ... etc.) 

Poem: Song for a Banana

 

Song For a Banana

 

satyr-horned

and moon curled,

 

a sway

of sweep-nosed

zest,

 

our baskets your stage, girds

for your golden waist,

 

you who bow to rear,

smoother than fingerpads,

 

passion-strung—

 

you who furrow banquets, 

lift them mellow

for our reap—

 

you prow of the bowl,

altar of tastes,

 

feed us with your seamed ascent,

your bright arc.

================================

This is a re-worked version of a poem published in Lucid Rhythms in 2010.  Around this time, I was absolutely enspelled by Neruda.

Poem: Looking Over

 

Looking Over

 

if the ocean were flows

of mirrored chalices,

carousels borne on froth

and mane,

 

would it not sparkle

of romance and satin,

galloping raves in whirls of stars?

 

would life itself,

the whole parade of fierce exuberance,

not glisten across a theatric canvas?

 

joy and orgy,

illusion and mélange,

pendulum and pointillism,

ravage and feast?

 

if the ocean harbored such players,

would it not then be

a chrysanthemum

fickle from fleet yet immortal petals?

 

such dangers and prizes,

juggles of cauldrons,

airy with cocoons of

unsolved legends, what if

 

the ocean were the crux

of this dissolute comportment--

would it not then be

what we dream?

 

 

 

 

========================

10/29/26 ... eds throughout day ... very tired from grading ... classes stuffed with students, way beyond enrollment norms, pay low ...  

Poem: Plastic Shred

 

Plastic Shred

 

crude gusset of bat

high on wind, dislocating

every bone it doesn’t have

to creep once more

in the company of dirt.

 

a paroxysm fawning,

fated to delve and sniff,

to bootlick with an amble

in a muddle of slithers.

 

alert then slothful,

part yoga then lounge chair,

chasing some ort

invisible to the scrawl

of its unhinged grasps.

 

limp moods sidle

as the choreography waffles.

breasts flail

and odd teeth gnash,

born of their own writhes.

============================

This was originally published in Bacopa Review in 2013.  I am republishing poems here, as well as posting new ones, to consolidate.

Poem: Messages from God

 

Messages From God

 

they come fast as meth

in jiggers of holy water,

monstrous spices, dashes

of swords and tyrants,

Dracula when you

first meet his grin,

 

or tarantulas without legs,

but somehow still there—

warning signs, forbidden

as the first impulse

to murder.

 

friends can’t see

and churches don’t forgive them.

think of visions

slipperier than lies,

nettles on a porcupine

whose barbs are debts—

 

mildew on your masks,

or flies raining instead of tears,

prophecies that split into hooks,

using you as bait—

 

you want to defuse and reject them,

to salute and grin—

but they are hot as fangs

pushing through your lips,

making you shriek—

 

decrees no one will believe

or condone.

===============

This poem was published in Cerulean Rain in 2008.  I am republishing older works, alongside the new ones, to consolidate.  Like many of us, I have an ominous feeling of end times.  All I have to offer, in the end, are these poems, as well as my unpublished novel, and a few scribblings.  

Poem: Seasoned

 

Seasoned

 

gushes of green,

a planet-sized rush,

unable to stopper

the primal hunger,

riding it full crave,

headlong of flutter,

a gallop toward the sun,

always the sun,

chasing that chariot,

gilt of the golden gift,

lush of leafy stampede--

how it scintillates

and stings as legions rise,

brazen and zealous,

thickening and ripe,

strong with solar pulse,

over and over, so much

power only to darken and

wither into a grimace of masks.

outraged now, sunken down,

impaled on a sward.

====================

Poem: Waterless

 

Waterless

 

a mile means nothing,

swallowed by a dry riverbed.

fish in the stones,

so it has always been:

the dead swim petrified

in waterless water.

and those false angels, the stars,

swim the oasis of night.

but the day is a mermaid,

she who won’t let me scream,

who stays nearby, blurry

through many happy, infinite

somewhat real encounters.

i remember, even so,

that it is not possible

to make love in the hot sand.

dunes aren’t tables or beds,

can’t hold an epitaph

like those clay tablet of old

safe somewhere in a museum.

there is no clay, however,

here in this dessicated contrivance, this

death-rich diorama

which those of us too weary to be wary

still sought to avoid.

but it will end.

such is the fate of archers

who shoot too-fast prey

from too-fast chariots,

burning the wheels to survive,

while they crush the bloom

of long-gone flowers

risen from a devil’s bread of stones.

 

NYT op-ed, "The US is no longer the conductor ..."

 

Trump has decided that the U.S. is no longer the conductor. The U.S. is now a player in the orchestra, a big-bully player. He came to power with this slogan, “Make America Great Again.” But what he’s doing, basically, is making America little at last. Because the idea is now: We are going to make America a nation-state like others. It’s no longer this kind of top power, this hegemon who is hovering around the world. And since it has this very, very large amount of power, it can pretty much do what it wants. Which, of course, the adventure in Iran is revealing that not to be the case.

            --Rahmane Idrissa

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/10/14/opinion/usa-decline-trump-global-powers.html

=======

A fair historical analysis is that 11/5, the day Trump was elected for a second term (November 5, 2025) is one of the worst days in all of human history.  It was a day that tilted the world.  It de-stabilized the post-WWII order at a time when tens of thousands of nuclear weapons are posed to go off.  The President recently ranted that he would "wipe out an entire civilization" in regard to Iran.    He has effectively blocked any world coordination on global warming by calling it a "giant scam."  He refuses to even attempt to regulate AI, when even experts in the field are crying out about the dangers.  Apparently, in about three months, AI will have the ability to self-replicate, house itself throughout the internet, and create 'worms' that break all sorts of programs [1]).  The recent Lancet Report cites "AI creation of biological weapons" as one of the two current apocalyptic threats to our survival as a species, alongside nuclear winter/famine [2].

This idiotic man has brought us to the edge of the end.  I've vented about this before, if you're interested [3].  I can't overstate my anger at the people who supported him and thereby cursed us with 11/5.  I channel this anger into writing and poetry.  But I struggle to talk to people who are Trumpers.  I have cut 'friends of friends' out of my life, including half the family of a friend of mine, people I used to joke around with and tolerate.  The craven, pitiable Republican politicians should go down in history as exemplars of lickspittle gutter-diving.  Of cesspool toadyism.  I can't come up with enough labels of shame to properly describe them.

Students of human psychology take note: 11/5 is a civilizational example of our capacity for incredible idiocy.  However, we are also capable of creating better and better culture.  We have ethically improved our ethos and it can keep going.  In effect, it's a fight between Good and Evil.  Susan Neiman has made a solid case for using the term "Evil," which she presented recently in a condensed quote-worthy book:  Call It Evil:  Understanding the Trump Era.    

(((Why does it have to be argued at all, that Evil is in play, when genocide and ethic cleansing are taking part in Gaza?)))

See also my various essays on this blog about ethics as technology, including empirically verifiable definitions of Good and Evil grounded in psychology, science and critical thinking.

===========

Footnotes

[1] https://www.anthropic.com/research/self-replicating-ai

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/oct/11/nuclear-war-and-malicious-use-of-ai-threaten-end-of-humanity-by-2100-says-lancet-assessment

[3] https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/10/one-of-worst-days-in-human-history.html

Quote, Nuclear famine and AI-created biological weapons

 ===========

"Malicious use of AI, including bioweapons, and nuclear conflict with nuclear famine carry risks of extinction in the next 75 years," the [Lancet] report said, adding that while their likelihood remained low, they had the potential to end humanity in the case of nuclear conflict by injecting enough particles into the upper atmosphere to block sunlight and cause famine, or via AI-created biological weapons ... "The scale of harm, should they be realised, would inflict an apocalypse on humanity."

https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/oct/11/nuclear-war-and-malicious-use-of-ai-threaten-end-of-humanity-by-2100-says-lancet-assessment

===========

These god-like weapons (nuclear and biological) require the utmost maturity.   However, upstream from such necessary wisdom is another grave problem:  the reckless, myopic dictators that our primitive culture enthrones.  These petty parasites value ignorance of the masses over reasonable assessment.  It serves their short-sighted, macho egos.  You could argue that the greatest threat to our future, then, is our propensity to put such mentally disordered, thrasymachian men in power.  

The President of the USA, Donald Trump, has effectively quashed the world's ability to mitigate global warming.  He has said he will not regulate AI.  He makes nuclear-level threats, such as his remark, directed at Iran, to "wipe out an entire civilization." 

Can we educate people to spot such dangerous, deluded leaders, these 'strongmen,' and to not vote for them?  Absolutely.  I've written a blog essay on this very subject (The Apotheosis Problem):

https://owlwholaughs.blogspot.com/2025/09/essay-apotheosis-problem.html

Note: Leaders such as Trump and Putin are not 'strong.'  Psychologically and ethically, they are the weakest sort.  They are parasites--I call them enervators--who suck the vibrancy out of a country to bloat their own quantity-obsessed (money, power, praise) egos.