CHRIS CRITTENDEN is working on a doctorate in environmental ethics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. He works with members of the Foundation for Global Sustainability to protect East Tennessee and especially the Great Smoky Mountains from the encroachment of pollution.
Leaving aside the too-often-ignored fantasying of children, to the best of my knowledge I am engaging in an unprecedented pursuit, writing not to my fellow citizens, those who inhabit the globe at this precarious time, one perched on the edge of annihilation, but to the future. Moreover I do not intend this correspondence for the following generation or the one after or even the next several in the chain. I suppose it will be quite some time before those I wish to contact are born. Perhaps they will arrive at the end of the new millennium about to emerge from the excruciated womb of social chaos. Quite probably my words will have to be translated out of what will have become an archaic dialect.
I am aware of the "time capsules" sometimes immured in the cornerstone of buildings, or dropped into the bathyal trenches, or even rocketed into space. I admit a certain ignorance regarding the content of these capsules and the procedures encompassing their creation and implantation, but what glimmers of knowledge are at my disposal do not at all hint that these testimonies are anything but impersonal, factually oriented, frivolous, and pompous in their naive braggadocio: 'This is what we've done, here's a Coke, a dollar, a compact disk, pictures of the beautiful people rollerblading and bungee jumping, this is our poetry, song, dance, and politic, we hope in your time you realize the benefits of the programs we've instigated and enjoy world peace' and so forth. My letter to the future is nothing like that. It is very personal. I speak from the depths of my soul; I will not tout the "wonders" of my age or bask in ostentation or jingoism; mine is primarily an ethical and spiritual communication, one that paints the contemporary ugliness in a naked light, eschewing euphemism and not even attempting to conceal my shame at being a member of this society and hence culpable; for I live in a time when one cannot get by without playing the venal games that riddle our neurotic institutions through and through; indeed, I could not afford the luxury of this letter if I had not earned the opportunity through participation in our oppressive social structures. As much as I have tried to be good, I cannot wholly escape the influence of my culture. Whether this is an inevitable fact of psychology or due to a weakness of will I cannot say, but it remains a blight on my conscience and forever shall. No doubt, this message is a feeble attempt at amelioration.
But I am jumping ahead and should return to the subject of my intended audience. It must already be evident that I seek a mindset radically more advanced than the current one, but temporal distance provides no guarantee of such an improvement. If we carry on in the present fashion, most probably the human race will annihilate itself, rendering my letter futile. Conceivably, however, our bellicosity might only (only!) wreak vast destruction, leaving, hopefully, a horror-stricken remnant of reform-minded survivors, but more likely a vicious vestige of itself that will continue the stupidity, perhaps over time rebuilding to the present level of danger and then ushering in another era of vast destruction leading to another vicious vestige and so on through some nightmarish cycle of death and woe, millennium after millennium. If this hellish fate occurs then people 10,000 years hence will be no more ready to receive my message than my fellow citizens. This letter is not addressed to anyone infused with the spirit of my era. I call out to those who have broken out of the vicious cycle, who escape epidemic ignorance, the kind that infects all levels of consciousness, resulting in egregious moral pathology and psychological dysfunction. Those I seek necessarily look upon my time as one ravaged beyond redemption by consummate greed, violence, oppression, and barbarism; they must see it as an age of unprecedented destruction and persecution, as a tortured time when humanity ruthlessly earned fitting condemnation as a cancer strangling all life on the planet Earth, indeed, sucking away the vitality of the great globe itself.
I want to enter into some detail concerning my disgust, detail that would be superfluous granted that my intended audience is historically informed regarding the latter half of the second millennia c.e. But the availability of the relevant knowledge I do not assume; warfare may have wasted civilization into almost nothing in the centuries serving as a conduit to the transmission of this letter. Plausibly most archival material has been destroyed, leaving history a tattered garment riven with gaping holes. Perhaps the most outrageous fortune will allow my effort to survive while documentation much more secure against extinction falls prey to the worst of fate's vicissitudes, or the worst of human brutality, that manifested when Columbus and his successors raped, pillaged, and murdered whole continents full of exquisite cultures; or when the Nazis butchered and tortured the Jews, attempting to expunge even a hint of their existence; or when, what will likely happen given the current course, nuclear war not only immolates the great cities and their repositories of art and scholarship, but saturates the countryside with deadly poison, preventing for many years the trespass of anything larger than a cockroach.
I am not the only one crying out in anguish, but as a whole those sharing my convictions are stigmatized as "doomsayers," "misanthropes," or "idealists." Our idiosyncratic behavior is relegated to coffee table conversation where it serves as a source of idle amusement. Those who dare face the frightening truth shrug their shoulders and appeal resignedly to human nature. The vast majority of the population is too afraid to confront the approaching armageddon or too wedded to conformity to dare generate an original ethical thought and act on it. Our economic system, corporate capitalism, is a major transmogrifier, promoting egoism paired with a ravenous insecurity never more than fleetingly satisfied by compulsive consumption of vacuous products; concomitantly there arises a deep-seated apathy regarding concerns outside one's little consumerist bubble. In other words, consumers are addicted to a created need tailored to fit a created self-identity and easily controlled by those possessing the desideratum, which itself is a fiction: money. My world is run by an oligarchic plutocracy that puppeteers the teaming masses who form the stout base of the socioeconomic pyramid. They toil so drainingly to eke out a subsistence that no energy remains for reflection. In this category I include not just the lower but the middle classes as well; yet even the aristocracy languishes in the web of deceit and illusion darkly nurtured by a twisted need to control. Insecurity breeds insecurity.
Loathsome as it is in isolation, the economic tendril is but one protuberance of a monstrous mechanism of social control finely interwoven with the cultural fabric and relying not so much on physical as mental warfare to achieve its soul-deadening ends. One might call this scourge "acculturation," but it is more than that, it has a life of its own, it reproduces offspring and grows. It is an insidious presence, an underhanded presence, and perhaps most terrifyingly, one that perhaps cannot be stopped. Those in power are as harnessed by the mind control as those they manipulate. Everyone wears the bit of the beast, whose economic component alone is enough to snake through every mind, erecting a labyrinth of unhappiness; but the bit is multi-sided, multi-strapped, secured by many bonds twining and weaving with each other and the human soul, knotting into a complexity of tormentive shackling no one could unravel let alone convey perspicuously to paper. For instance, the beast fosters bigotries and rules of privilege that immiserate everyone, especially the subordinate groups who serve as outlets for the dominators' frustrations, but the latter also suffer, for their callous actions require callous minds that by their very closed-mindedness cannot be free or know the true beauty of existence.
I am not proclaiming that the human race is the hapless victim of an alien force, we are not innocent pawns, we are complicit in our debauchery. We recreate and perpetuate the monster of tradition, institutionalized values, social mores, protocol, and etiquette everyday in our ordinary routine, which we carry out like so many ants in a hive, thinking it is nothing but innocuous and practical that we behave so, whereas the true effect is ugly and evil yet wholly denied by the vast majority. Some of the horrors blithely glossed over include sexism, racism, homophobia, speciesism, colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, militarism, elitism, and many more.
The psychological effects of life in this cauldron of injustice are devastating: self-hatred, xenophobia, insecurity, shame, guilt, anger, and many others resulting in various defense mechanisms: denial, repression, projection, reaction-formation, displacement, and so forth. The defense mechanisms worsen the pain, which in turn stimulates a greater use of the defense mechanisms, setting up a spiralling cycle leading quickly into major disorders like alcoholism, drug abuse, and other compulsive behaviors, major depression, various personality disorders, sadism, masochism, narcissism, and violent predation of the weak. More defences are adopted to avoid the horror generated by crime and abuse. Ultimately so many masks and defences crowd the psyche that afflicted individuals can no longer be honest even with themselves. In this fashion the virulent social programming produces equally malignant personalized programming, a process that gradually coats the healthy soul, vitiating it like diseased boils creeping up a noble oak until it is a scabrous carcass. You don't know how painful it is to watch this process happen to the children, to watch the light in their eyes wane, to watch their exuberant love for life turn into misery; to watch their creativity crash into a sea of drear.
How and why does this ethical travesty continue? From birth we are socially programmed, slapped repeatedly through the years with dogma and doctrine applied in a highly complex, structured, efficient manner from all sides: parents, community, school, media, religion, government, and big business. The stages of development are taken into account and specialized indoctrination procedures bombard the young member of society appropriately. They are threatened, cajoled, scolded, disciplined or rewarded as required for the desired level of subjugation and hopelessness.
Yet it would be wrong to think that a consciously orchestrated conspiracy to enslave is taking place; that is perhaps the most terrifying element of it: the indoctrinators are as unconscious of their role as the indoctrinated.
Inevitably something like a virus or computer program - a computer virus then - is ingrained in the very essence of the person. And there it remains - barring some combination of good fortune, uncanny insight, and courage - until death, reinforced throughout the course of life by procedures similar to those used on the young. It haunts our ethical and religious views, our hopes, goals, and dreams, our values and customs, almost every idea wells up through its invisible filters, and so in effect the machinery of this program sculpts our self-image, our cultural image, our 'cosmic picture' - in effect our reality in all its critical aspects.
But, sadly, it is in no way inevitable that humanity must be so diseased; we are capable of free-willed thought that, coupled with our ability to radically alter the environment, allows many possible worlds, the full spectrum from heaven to hell. To deny that we can radically alter the environment is absurd, only a pettifogging sophist would dispute it. To deny the other premise, that we have free will, is to fly smack into the wall of common sense. If as individuals we have within our power the ability to make crucial choices that change the course of our destiny - again, something only ivory-tower academics and anachronistic scientists would challenge - it is not unlikely that as a whole we can do the same, given that people can cooperate en mass to achieve a desired goal, a fact overwhelmingly verified by history.
Hence, the present world of selfishness and wanton cruelty was not a foregone conclusion, nor I think is its continuation; for although a parasitic soul-sucking mind control enslaves us, we can burst the chains and rewrite our reality. We can enact a transfiguration that will put decisions back in the hands of the people by dissolving ignorance, dissolving neuroses, dissolving the barriers that keep us from knowing ourselves and others. In short, we can engender paradise.
Those in the future, to whom I write, know this is possible and might find it curious that I belabor the point. Why am I writing this letter? My purpose, I suppose, is to share my mind and express my feelings: I want you to know that I am deeply ashamed of my society and that I worked against its malignity both professionally and privately. I want you to know that some of the citizens of late 20th-century Earth escaped the programs and challenged the system. I also want you to know that for us "radicals" life was hell. The process of deprogramming is like going through an emotional grinder; one emerges with no social edifice to cling onto for support, terror strikes as the prospect of slipping away into a void of meaninglessness becomes all too immediate; stability is lost, feelings reverse: love becomes hate, contentment sorrow, respect antipathy, reverence disgust. Relationships die or dwindle amid anguish and reproach, guilt soars, family and friends pull back, lost or forever distanced, extreme sensitivity to social cues leads to a feeling of siege by the ubiquitous prodding of a morally bankrupt culture, there is no escape and yet screaming is not allowed, one must continue amid the oppression, avarice, and corruption, which taunt against the backdrop of the looming visage of armageddon; the evil that subsumes almost everyone yells out "liar," "sinner," "traitor," the deprogrammed individual must struggle onward, hobbled by the disappointment in the subtle gestures of those close and the hostility similarly conveyed from afar. There is always the threat of assault - not to be taken lightly in a violent gun-glorifying society.
The only social succor comes from other escapees, but many bear psychic wounds as a result of their ongoing ordeal. Depression, anxiety, neediness, anguish, rage are not uncommon. Some poke their head only part way out of the programs, others retreat into denial to avoid the pain of being an outsider. We are a fringe community of courageous individuals who nevertheless are affected adversely by our ceaseless struggles and wrenching self-explorations. There is, furthermore, friction among us, we are not ideologically consonant. I use the word "community" very loosely, a collection of sub-communities would perhaps be a more appropriate description. To give you some hint of our differences, consider this: the mere fact that I am a man prevents friendship with some of my fellow radicals; that is how completely they have come to distrust men, and though I suffer for it, I do not blame them, for I also hate what patriarchy and the dominance of masculine attitudes has done, and most men are arrogant perpetuators of both. In my day, it is claimed that one in three women will be raped in their lifetime, and 75% of rapes are by someone the victim knows and often trusts, and so why should my women allies trust me when they have seen equally trustworthy men turn out to be power-mad werewolves?
So far I have offered few specifics of this crazy world in which I live. I am tempted to assume that no detail is necessary, that you already know what went on; but to be sure, and to fully bear the burden of my soul, the unthinkable must be presented. What I am about to relate is the sort of thing that might lead you to ask, "How could humans behave so atrociously?" I hope you have an answer available, for I have none. There is no excuse for what is happening.
I don't know where to begin, so many wrongs scream out from every sides, all interconnected through the diseased mindset already discussed at length. The mistreatment of women, touched on above, is a good place to start.
I already mentioned that one in three women are raped. This despicableness alone is an awful indictment, but there is much more: the leading cause of serious injury to women is battery by a husband or partner, accounting for more serious injury than car accidents and muggings combined. Despite recent reforms, women are overwhelmingly treated as inferior to men. They earn far less, are channelled into the supportive and service jobs, and only a few hold positions of corporate or governmental power. Moreover the underlying attitude, reinforced by the media, advertising establishment, and the legal system is that women are property, sensual objects intended to sooth the males and perform domestic duties. Many are driven into the sex trade, where they are even more vulnerable to abuse and face serious health risks.
A misogynous theme runs through society: acts of violence against women commonly provide the central plot in our recreational stories. Incredibly the situation is often much worse in other countries. Over one hundred million women in Africa and the Middle East have suffered genital mutilation - clitorectomy and removal of the labial tissue. This despicable procedure is inflicted on pre-adolescent girls, who having endured the agonizing procedure, often carried out with an unsterilized knife, are then "sewn up" to insure their virginity until marriage, when they are cut open and their husband forces his way in even while they bleed. There are other horrors. In one Asian country, it is a trend to burn one's wife to death in a "cooking accident" if she proves unsatisfactory in the husband's opinion. In several countries, ones with an increasing role in international politics, there are only 75% (or less) the number of women as men due to female infanticide. Certain countries specialize in "sex tourism" and have forced a large number of girls into prostitution under slave-like conditions. Beaten and sometimes chained, they are displayed in cage-like cubicles occupying enough city blocks to form an entire district.
I have detailed only a small portion of the misogyny that grips my world and yet it should be obvious that it is a very violent world, a very sick world, dominated by men who harden themselves against emotion so that they can concentrate on increasing power and profit. In the midst of our crisis, as we hover on the brink of doom, it is especially urgent that caring and connection replace aggression and competition as the prime motivators of domestic and foreign policy; but caring and connection, and love and passion and beauty, anything spiritual that places the individual in a web of mutual dependence with others - with all life, in fact - is "womanly" and fanciful and idealistic; for human nature, according to those who denigrate the most precious emotions, the gifts that infuse life with meaning, is innately wicked and hateful and must be kept in line with force; and since humans are innately wicked our country must forever guard against invasion by maximizing our military and economic power, which requires exploiting and colonizing other countries, and if we are not strong enough to take what we want from them, we must compete with them in the way most likely to maximize our self-interest (that is, the self-interest of the plutocrats): which means lying and backstabbing and weapons accumulation and military posturing, in other words a repulsive game that spits on anything decent, on the virtues that are hypocritically touted as exemplars of citizenly conduct, on love and beauty, on anything "womanly."
But it is just these "womanly" qualities we need to elevate to save ourselves. If profit and power continue to oppress compassion and sensitivity, my letter is wasted, it will be read only by the radioactive deserts of a dead planet. It is true what some feminists assert: that without men there would be no war. This is true not because men are inevitably adversarial and women inevitably passive; rather women retain a depth of emotional understanding that men usually suppress early in their lives, so enthralled are they with power and competition and all the wonderful things that can be had by force. Theirs is a perverse lens through which to view existence: through urges to beat others down, uphold oneself as superior, degrade emotion, dominate and conquer, harness and enslave. Underlying it all is paranoia, a vast fear of a savage world populated by warring people, animals, and disasters. Ironically this fear creates in the fearful the very monstrosity they imagine. And gradually their delusion constructs a planet of its own design, and so quite possibly we might all soon be living in a very real hell forged in the fires of a masculine anti-fantasy.
The obsession with power is not confined to the objectification of women and the attendant fear of what they represent. The craving to control infects every corner of the masculine mind, building obscene hierarchies and walls. Yes, women should be kept on their knees, but so should the poor and the weak and anyone who interferes with the monstrous program. The program keeps the powerful powerful, it keeps the meek meek and obedient, to challenge it is to challenge the very heart of the oligarchic plutocracy. What if such a challenge should receive widespread support? What if it dawned on the billions of downtrodden that the system is evil, that it would be better to fight it than live burdened by its yoke?
The elite, in their anguished obsession, strive to insure that this will not happen. Thus in the nonindustrialized countries cruel dictatorships are funded, their militaries trained and armed to keep the lower classes in line. The infamous "death squads" are a product of this mentality, those dark-clad terrorists that "disappear" activists in the night, torturing them and leaving their mangled bodies to be found as a warning - or sometimes the bodies are never found, there is no record, the person is simply gone. Commonly whole villages must be taught a lesson, sometimes whole provinces "infected with socialism" are brought to heel by soldiers ordered to kill, rape, and pillage. Whenever a people's revolution succeeds or a third-world government shows signs of disobeying its western masters, the reaction is swift: embargoes, economic sanctions, withholding of aid, covert operations. There is a word the first-world uses to describe the toppling of governments not to its liking: destabilization. Often destabilization is horribly bloody, like the US-backed overthrow of Sukarno in Indonesia, in which 500,000 people were hacked apart with machetes. In any case, things are quickly set aright, a new puppet dictatorship is installed, one ready to torture anyone who challenges Western hegemony, and exploit the people as cheap slave-labor for the multinational corporations and the rich.
Hell is created in most countries so that the West can parasitically suck profit and live comfortably; but even most people in the wealthy first-world countries do not enjoy a leisurely life of luxury. The middle class is constantly busy, rushing here and there in the scramble to make enough money to pay the bills and maintain an appropriate position on the socioeconomic ladder. The lower class must work even harder except for those at the very bottom, who are frequently unemployed and lured by the enticement of quick money through the criminal networks that thrive in the ghettos. Conditions in these ghettoes, filled with racial minorities who are the victims of rancorous prejudice, approximate those in third-world countries. In my country, the United States of America, the very worst off people are the aborigines or Native Americans, who the white colonists killed and imprisoned in a various treacherous acts of genocide. The original slaughter, occurring mostly in the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries, decimated the proud peaceful tribes, destroyed their cultures and tried to replace their environmentally sound world views with capitalism, which sees nature as something to carve up into commercial resources and exploit. Hence the death of the Native American culture also saw the death of the old-growth forests, the unmarred mountain ranges, the pristine plains, the great herds of buffalo and other free-roaming animals. Today the remaining aborigines have been legislated into "reservations," often dusty sterile wastelands lacking modern facilities and hygiene. The average life span of a Native American is forty-six years, while that of a white is seventy-five. The genocide continues.
Of course few in the middle and upper classes will admit that genocide occurred or is occurring, that a colonial invasion of the Native American regions is in its final phases of completion, that people in the third-world suffer hell for our benefit, that the poor are anything but lazy and mulish. Perhaps this is the most obvious frightening ironic manifestation of our sick mentality, this denial: a complete lack of acknowledgement that systematic evil is taking place coupled with a blind faith in the innate decency of our government and traditional values. The denial fills our television screens, theaters, magazines, and for the most part our books and educational institutions. The denial is a fundamental part of the program, and as such is not even consciously adopted, nor is the afflicted individual aware of the affliction. This is the extent to which our minds have been warped; we can sheepishly accept the most glaring contradictions and plod onward in our monotonous routine without a second thought. Moreover these contradictions do not concern trifling issues, but those most central to living a healthy life, one of integrity and honesty, one filled with love of self, neighbor, and nature. By accepting the wall of denial into our hearts, we effectively condemn the large majority of humanity to needless excruciation, condemn ourselves as shamelessly immoral, and sacrifice the potential of life to be precious and beautiful and fulfilling. So why do we accept the wall? Why?
Mine is a disgraceful society, more so in light of the wondrous heights to which the human soul can aspire. I said that for those who escape the programs life is hell, but it is also heaven because of the incredible freedom. One can feel in deep sensitive ways. The shallow waters are left behind and the treasures of life encountered. One is no longer a puppet, there is integrity, and feelings of self-worth; to love in a healthy way is not possible unless one stops living the grand lie of the wall; but once that wall tumbles love is possible, the most fantastic soaring love, love of self, love of others, love of animals and trees, flowers, leaves scattering in the wind, rain, clouds, mountains, the magnificent unity of creation against which the hoarding of metal and paper seems vastly pitiable. This is a quality of love transcending selfishness; the conception of self is transformed, one is no longer isolated, competing, anxious in a hostile world; the world is home, a gift, a lover, a cradle and the self is all those things for the world.
I have tumbled out passionate thoughts that you might find unconnected to escape from the programs, and it's true that consciousness raising is no guarantee of finding love and happiness. It would be mistaken to claim that consciousness raising is an all or nothing affair, that there are not many intermediate possibilities. For instance, some who decry sexism, racism, homophobia, anti-semitism, and so on - unfair discriminations against types of persons - do not extend their sympathy to the plight of animals. They see nothing wrong in the vast animal factories, chillingly like concentration camps, in which cattle, pigs, chicken and other hapless creatures are processed into homogenous slabs of meat. They shrug unempathically when confronted with the caged lives of minks that are slaughtered fifty to a fur coat, a coat worn as a vain status symbol.
What is apparent in this insanity is the contradiction in its most raw form: the combination of immense and wanton suffering with the ordinary routine of the proper citizen. Every bite from a hamburger condones the torture of sensitive intelligent animals for hedonistic comfort, and hence condones utterly selfish indulgence, one of the primary tools of consumerist capitalism. Eating hamburgers also supports the huge corporations oligopolizing the meat trade, and thereby promotes their values and dismisses their unethical behavior as a serious source of concern. Of course most consumers never consider the underworld of business that delivers meat to the table. It is a stinging irony and a mordant indictment of my world: the mask of innocence, fully believed not to be a mask by the wearer, a wearer who dutifully works through the day, partaking in many economic and social activities that depend on torture, oppression - evil - for their efficacy. This is more of a hell than the hell imagined by our "great" religion Christianity, for that imagined hell at least lacks the impudence to disavow its nature, whereas our torture chambers do not even have the courage to proclaim themselves as such.
What we have, then, at the root, is a vampiric society that has made itself unaware of its vampirism through the unconscious though highly sophisticated perpetuation and nurturance of a mental virus hiding behind the rubric of cherished icons such as tradition, capitalism, patriotism, family values; infecting the minds of our citizenry with moral and psychological diseases; and serving as a prerequisite and impetus to unspeakably evil yet systematic practices. Although vampiric mythology originated thousands of years ago, it is fitting that in my society the symbolism has a pervasive allure probably without rival in the annals of history. The sadomasochistic sexuality of the vampire is extremely captivating to Americans. The theme generates huge profits from movies, books, television plots, fantasy games, comics, magazines. Sociologists lecture and write monographs on our obsession. The obvious question is, What does this say about our society? and the answer, in the context of the multiple atrocities and sicknesses I have presented, is forthcoming: although we will not admit it, even in our own minds, we think of ourselves as vampires, and act as vampires, and gain some sort of twisted elation while at the same time knowing our behavior is horribly and utterly wrong.
It is seductive to be dominant, to have the rest of the world available as cheap labor and raw material for the inducement of pleasure. And it is comforting to think that the victims enjoy their victimization, to perhaps couch the exploitation in sexual symbolism as a sort of seduction in which blood is yielded up willingly to the murdering fangs. But this is just another lie, one with a semblance of truth because it admits of monstrosity, but still an attempt to hide the ugly reality in a veil of romantic mystique. It is a despicable attempt at excusing the inexcusable: "they wanted to be victimized, their pain is really pleasure." But this is so tenuous a veil that even the meagerest attempt at honest verification rips it away. The vampiric image does not serve well as a psychological shield and more likely finds primary use as a means of enhancing the thrill of predation - though even while we revel in our parasitic grip on our brothers and sisters, we know deep inside that we are rendered repulsive and wretched by our actions.
I am writing this to you, the people of the future, out of desperation, a need to relieve my psychic pain and there seems to be no outlet here, no one who can truly grasp what I'm saying. This is not a plea for leniency in your history books, my society deserves whatever harsh description is invoked. Perhaps it is best if you are very harsh and do not try to be charitable by rooting out the positive and blowing it out of proportion. Certainly, as you must be aware, it would be foolish and immoral to excuse our actions because they occurred in a certain historical context. That is what our historians say of the 19th century slave traders, We must view their actions in light of the times, and thereby the holocaust of kidnapping, beating, torturing, chaining, and raping becomes an object for academics to ogle, not a morally repugnant phenomenon, not something for which the enslavers should be blamed. But most certainly they are culpable, as we are culpable, and to deny it is to contribute to that evil and condone future crimes against humanity, for the instigators of the atrocity can assuage their consciences by appealing to historical context, social circumstance, economic necessity and the like: "Yes we are killing and exploiting but the history books will absolve us." In this fashion, tyrants contravene the critics who demonize them, appealing to the higher authority of the court of the future.
It is imperative that you do not pander to this mentality. Do not gloss over the horrors of my time. As for who to blame, the wealthy and the powerful deserve the largest share, followed by the sheep-like middle class, content not to challenge the status quo as long as their field of clover remains undisturbed. In general men are more to blame than women, for the former group has more power, though the bourgeoise are not to be relieved of all fault. Do not honor our leaders, our military "geniuses," our captains of industry; they represent the most selfish faction among us. Many are sociopaths and the rest are mostly so; how else could they go through life choosing mass murder and oppression for greedy purpose?
My torment brings me to urge you in two things: first, do not forgive us and second, raise memorials to honor the victims of our depravity. Many strong souls resisted till the very last hint of life was tortured from their eyes. Please, do not forgive us - or forgive only after our shameful immorality has been emblazoned for all to see, especially those who will come in your future. Never again should the Earth face imminent doom from human actions, nor should people live in terror of death squads, or huddle squalid and starving in cardboard boxes, or toil for a subsistence, emotionally broken and roboticized. Animals, our brothers and sisters on this great blue-green spaceship, should enjoy a quality existence. Women and other oppressed groups must remain forever free. Keep hierarchy and contractual obligation prostrate before caring, compassion, and a heart-felt responsibility for all life. Do not lay the seeds for a recrudescence of the late 20th-century horror, I beg you with all my heart.
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