Knowledge is power
The modern Library of Alexandria in Alexandria, Egypt.
Knowledge is mankind’s greatest weapon. it is what sets us apart from all the rest of the animals. Learning from our predecessors and building on top of their work has allowed humans to evolve into something more powerful than any other animal on the planet. Yet, our human nature presists and inbetween all this knowledge are long periods of forced ignorance and domination and voilence.
One of the biggest losses of human knowledge came at the time of the burning the great library of Alexandria. At the time it was the world’s biggest collection of books and scrolls that spanned civilizations behind in history.
So much of the ancient civilization’s secrets, documented for prosperity and education for the generations to come, lost forever to the mysteries of time.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana
Now we face another problem. too much information. because of the internet and it’s great depths of information, it’s become weaponized against us in the form of misinformation and confusion overload.
People don’t know what to trust anymore so they end up not trusting anything. this is a great danger as it targets our greatest strength as humans.
The pessimist in me sees this as a point of no return, a collection of circumstances are currently interplaying a quite dark view of the future for humans. The internet is the modern day information revolution, like the printing press x10000, but sadly we don’t have the luxury of time to iron out the kinks as previous generations had, due to the exponentially increasing doom of global catastrophy caused by the climate damage we are still causing.
The optimist in me thinks that humans will prevail non the less, our quality of life might get worse, it’s already getting worse for everyone, some parts of the world moreso than others. Not caring about global climate crisis is a first world privilege that people don’t realize and because of the constant bombardment of information we constantly get subjected to (and actively seek out and consume almost as a drug at this point) we have no mental capacity to process what is going on in the world and what matters most.
I’m grateful for the infinite amounts of knowledge available on the internet, i owe it so much, my career, my hobbies, my friends, even you, dear reader. Let’s hope we can all wake up from the information overload and finally be able to parse out the important and truthful information as part of our new survival instincts.