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Yakubian Ape's avatar

Great work - every bit as beautifully written as thought provoking as I'd expect from you.

In my opinion, there does have to be some sort of thinning of the dissident herd at some point. Numbers are valuable up to a certain point and there will come a time where in-fighting will become a problem. I always return to the parable of Gideon's army when this topic arises; in the end, it's better to have a small but united number of principled individuals than an undisciplined, panicky horde. Another piece of advice I was given pertaining to this very topic of "punching right" or "finding allies" is that any team that openly invites any old gaggle of losers should expect to lose. You're only ever as strong as your weakest link.

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Fukitol's avatar

Love it.

Re: unity, I think this is less important than some people want to believe. If the project in your eyes is "rebuild the American empire" (or whatever dead empire whose ruins you live among) this is the wrong way of thinking about it.

We don't all need to be on the same page and have the same story. It's not that we have been homogenized into the wrong set of beliefs. Homogeneity *is* the problem. Empire is not a desirable end-goal. It's what got us here in the first place, and they're unstable by nature. Where we're going there will be no empires, at least not for a while.

I love Kruptos' ideas about faith-based communities. I want him to succeed. But if he's successful there is no place for me there, because I don't believe, at least not the way he does. I could pretend - lie - and probably pass. But then I'd have lost my integrity, and isn't integrity one of the pillars we're trying to rebuild here?

But this is fine. The world is a very, very big place. And it's a tiny nothing compared to what's beyond it, if we can figure out how to get there. I have my doubts about that, but if it doesn't work out the world we've got is plenty big enough.

There's enough space for tens of thousands of cultures with their own faiths and values and visions, with plenty of neutral territory in between, if they're scaled appropriately. The way they have been for most of history and all of prehistory. The whole map of human space-time is tribes countries and kingdoms, with a few highly visible smoking craters left behind by failed empires. Hundreds of billions have lived the former way, and a few billion at most the latter way. Empire is an aberration.

So may be a dozen or a hundred knightly orders, not one. Until our shared enemy is broken, scattered and ground to dust, we are allies. After that we go our separate ways in peace and mutual respect. Our descendants, maybe not long after, will end up in conflict. This is fine. This is historically normal.

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