Should the Earth get a break from humans?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Do you ever get the feeling that we should just give up and let the bombs start flying? I think it’s time that the Earth gets a break from humans. Can you think of anything better than A nuclear or holocaust to do this?”

While cleaning up my Quora content, including A2As like this one. I sometimes make what I’m unsure of is a mistake or not to check out a profile. My first inclination is to pass on the question, but I’m sometimes more curious than I should be about the profile behind the question. When checking out this profile, I thought this would be another troll to mute and block. Then I started scanning the rest of the content, expecting more unhinged lunacy.

I spotted content from someone who appeared somewhat sane, non-trollish, and aware enough to grant the benefit of the doubt about this question by interpreting it as an extreme expression of frustration. We all have moments when we realize afterwards that we could have gone a different route in our expressions.

This may be one of them, so I decided to answer it instead of passing on it and blocking the querent.

I’ve never felt that destroying all life on the planet was a solution to anything. I view it as a kind of MAGAt “burn it all down” attitude that I immediately dismiss as unhinged emotionality.

Although I have encountered this sentiment occasionally, I generally scroll past or get triggered into lambasting it.

This time, however, I will respond with a simple question:

Why should all the rest of the animal and plant life be extinguished to quell the frustrations of a few humans who have lost tolerance for bullshit?

It seems rather like the kind of narcissistic attitude that’s gotten us into this mess in the first place.

Why not just pull a Frank Herbert and create a virus to eliminate humans, allowing the rest of life on Earth to continue? (Okay… Frank’s virus in “The White Plague” didn’t extinguish all life, but you get the picture.)

That seems much more representative of justice to me and perhaps even a better step in owning up to our shit as humans. By allowing all other species to learn from our stupidity (at some point in an imaginary evolutionary future) instead of turning the traces of our existence into glass that can never serve any potential life that may or may not follow, we can at least make up in part for our destructive behaviours.

There’s no upside to this kind of genocidal cleansing of life. Getting rid of humans is one thing, but taking away the opportunity to live away from all other forms of life beyond bacteria and cockroaches seems like adding insult to injury.

This reasoning reminds me of someone considering infanticide. Just because one’s life sucks, it doesn’t mean their families need to be extinguished as well. Eat a bullet or play hopscotch on a freeway to get your misery over with. If the lives you want to extinguish along with yours are innocent of causing harm, and of harming you in particular, how do you factor in punishing them? That makes absolutely no sense to me.

One should at least pick targets directly responsible for their misery, and let everyone else live, so they can learn something of value going forward.

Luigi Mangione chose this route, and he’s now viewed as a hero by many. I’ve even read claims (however trustworthy they may have been) from people about how insurance companies briefly relaxed their policies after Brian Thompson’s exit from this plane. People who would otherwise have been denied coverage and died were accepted for treatment and cured. They are still among the living when they would have died otherwise. One cannot but consider some nobility within an ignoble act.

The entire point of violence as a last resort is that it’s supposed to address the causes of unendurable misery, not eliminate all life. The Bush Doctrine’s advocacy of preemptive action seems to have proven that leading with violence is always the worst strategy to take. It’s supposed to instill hope in the lives of those left behind to continue struggling through difficult situations. That’s what Luigi accomplished.

Turning the planet into a giant glass ball accomplishes nothing more than turning the Earth into a giant glass ball. Nothing is left to praise the heroes who sacrificed their treasure for the sake of protecting the treasures of others.

Sure… I can understand wiping out mosquitoes, but what has any rabbit ever done to you to deserve wiping them all out?

Were you somehow hurt by a carrot or traumatized by tomatoes? Perhaps apples give you gas?

I’ve never met a squirrel that hasn’t made my heart flip.

I don’t see how anyone who isn’t indulging in extremely narcissistic thinking could imagine a nuclear holocaust as a solution to anything.

Please do try to think about how it is precisely that kind of self-serving thinking driving the Orange Nazi freak who likely contributes to your extreme attitude.

It’s a strategy that gives the bastards their coveted win.

What makes you think Trump isn’t trying to get revenge on all of life in precisely that way, because he’s reaching the end of his? Right now, he seems like the guy who got into office to party like there’s no tomorrow because he knows there isn’t much longer for him. In a 1992 interview, he spent an hour talking to Charlie Rose, bragging about how much he loves revenge on people he feels have betrayed him.

1992 Charlie Rose Interview with Donald Trump

Why do you think Republicans are making such a fuss about Biden’s decline and faking outrage about it “being hidden” in the dastardly, devious way Democrats always do? My guess is that’s just another projection on their behalf.

I will predict that we’ll discover insiders within the Republican party are acting precisely in ways that run interference on TACOman to hide his decline. He may not even make it to the end of his term.

It would not surprise me to discover Jake Tapper’s got another book in progress to mirror the one he’s hawking right now.

In short… No, I can’t think of anything worse, not better than a nuclear holocaust. Feeling as if cats, dogs, or even leopards can evolve enough to rule the world comforts me.

Mondays may suck, but they don’t suck that badly.

Kamandi — Last Boy on Earth – DC Comics — by Jack Kirby
Kamandi — Last Boy on Earth — DC Comics

Isn’t it essential to have presidents with morals?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Isn’t it important, and even necessary to have presidents with morals? Regardless of party affiliation, or none, religion, or none, can an ethical America ever be restored if truthful leaders, and humane officials are elected?”

People will elect leaders who echo their standards, and that leader will validate those standards. That dynamic becomes a feedback loop that pushes a society to evolve in a particular direction.

A political duopoly creates a dynamic of competing standards that pulls a society in opposite directions.

In the case of the U.S., and the emergence of a Neo-Liberal sensibility, the nation’s standards toward the accrual of material wealth put the oppositions in alignment, and the consequence has been a nation that has become increasingly sociopathic over the decades.

Since both Republicans and Democrats embraced power through wealth, there was no room for any competing morality to maintain any semblance of a compassionate society.

This dynamic is how they managed to create such moral abominations as instituting privatized prison systems, blocking universal healthcare, and eliminating the right to claim bankruptcy on student loans.

The U.S. morality has evolved completely around the veneration of wealth and the worship of greed. Due to that perversion of humanity, they have evolved into a corporatocracy to become a kleptocracy on the way to becoming a full-blown fascist state whose national character is defined by gluttony and an attitude of entitled expansionism.

“Greed is good” is the morality that the U.S. has embraced and the character that its leaders cultivate within the people.

The morality they have embraced throughout the decades since Ronald Reagan has put them on a path of becoming a nation defined by a narcissistic character, and that makes them an enemy to the world. Even their current “friends” aren’t actual friends but fellow sociopaths who will exploit them for their benefit.

The record-breaking “gift” of a $400 million plane that would require up to $1 billion to inspect and convert into an appropriate means of air travel for the nation’s leader is a manipulation tactic by those the current American leader views through envious eyes.

Although this question presumes “morality” to describe a state of being beneficial to all citizens, that’s not the case with what the word means. People do vote for and elect a president with morals. Those morals, however, are entirely self-serving for the current American president and would make people consider him “amoral” or “immoral,” but that’s because the nation has lost track of which morals they value.

Currently, the opposition to the extraordinarily corrupt Republicans who enable and empower the malignant narcissist in charge is also struggling with the same form of corrupt morality as they deny the truth of being lulled by their failure to represent an opposition to a materialistic morality adequately.

The DNC’s old guard is as responsible for the monstrously corrupt morality ruling the nation as the RNC for installing Trump as their party leader. The DNC continues to show that they have not learned their lessons, and because they’re not as willing to “join the dark side” as the RNC, they suffer internal struggles which turn their supporters away.

At the moment, there exists a younger sensibility of opposition toward established morality within the DNC, and the old guard seeks to excise what they view as a threat rather than a necessary evolution for their party to survive.

Had they not been so corrupted as a party, they would not have prevented Bernie Sanders from having his opportunity to lead the nation back from the brink of a sociopathic morality. They have not yet learned their lessons and seem to presume their Neo-Liberal beliefs are still sustainable in a world that crumbles around them.

One-third of the electorate stayed home and abstained from voting because they saw no difference between the RNC and the DNC. To some extent, that’s very much true because both parties continue to embrace a materialistic morality that has been responsible for the destruction of the middle class throughout the last several decades.

Many people have reasoned that if both parties are the same, the only solution is widespread chaos that causes their society to crumble. By refusing to vote, many voted for the current state of protesting nationwide in every city every day until the problems they see being ignored begin to be addressed.

The DNC is undergoing internal strife, and the more the old guard resists giving way to the new who fight for a morality that represents the people, the more that party will become fractured and ineffectual against the trajectory of a nation becoming a full-fledged fascist state or autocratic rulership.

People like Chuck Schumer need to be pushed out of the party, and the DNC must start paying attention to the goals that David Hogg has been promoting. They desperately need a cleansing of the morality that fully characterizes their opposition’s morality of being sycophants to the wealthy in society if they want to preserve some form of dignity as a party that can install leaders who have enough backbone to lead the nation out of a dark morality and toward an enlightened one.

The notion of a “dark enlightenment” currently characterizing the RNC and Conservatives worldwide is a morality of misanthropic cynicism which embodies an Ouroboros that ultimately consumes itself. Adherents of this worldview of rulers and serfs are so primitive and barbaric in their thinking that they cannot fathom a world not characterized by a zero-sum game of winners and losers.

We are all responsible for allowing this sensibility to become a threat to the world order because we have worshipped the wealthy to such a degree that when the term “centibillionaire” was first coined, we celebrated it instead of becoming horrified by the abomination we allowed to come into being.

In short, having presidents with morals is neither essential nor necessary because they all have some form of morality, even if it’s considered an “anti-morality” or destructive morality. What matters is selecting leaders whose moral fibre is such that they place the good of all people above the whims of the few.

The morality we all desperately need now to lead us out of our darkness is the morality that acknowledges the necessity of placing upper limits on wealth and power. The morality we must embrace to restore sanity to this world is to recognize how, if someone possesses the wealth of a small nation and can afford to buy themselves a private army, they are a clear and present danger to society.

We must establish a rational and community-based view of social engineering rather than allow a chaotic approach toward our social evolution. We cannot afford to continue allowing the wealthy to shape our morals as a people while empowering the most psychopathic among us to define our character as human beings.

If we want an ethical society to re-emerge as our guiding vision for humanity, we must cleanse the misanthropic darkness clouding our sight.

Why do atheists make me uncomfortable?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “It makes me uncomfortable that there are atheists. What should I do?”

You can repent and learn to respect your God’s wishes. Hopefully, you can save your immortal soul from an eternity in Hellfire if you act honestly and sincerely toward your embrace of atheists because they exist to teach you to be a better human capable of appreciating your God’s love for you and all its creations.

You can learn to stop sinning by heaping disdain onto people who want to live peacefully. They are not your enemies. Don’t make them so.

Here is a story to help you return to your God’s favour. Otherwise, you can choose to continue betraying your God’s commands while preparing yourself for an eternity in the lake of fire.

Why did God create atheists?

A Rabbi is teaching his student the Talmud and explains that God created everything in this world to be appreciated since everything is here to teach us a lesson.

The clever student asks, “What lesson can we learn from atheists? Why did God create them?”

The Rabbi responds, “God created atheists to teach us the most important lesson of them all — the lesson of true compassion. You see, when an atheist performs an act of charity, visits someone who is sick, helps someone who is in need, and cares for the world, he is not doing so because of some religious teaching. He does not believe that God commanded him to perform this act. In fact, he does not believe in God at all, so his acts are based on an inner sense of morality. And look at the kindness he can bestow upon others simply because he feels it to be right.”

“This means” the Rabbi continued “that when someone reaches out to you for help, you should never say ‘I pray that God will help you.’ instead for the moment, you should become an atheist, imagine that there is no God who can help, and say ‘I will help you.’”

Perhaps a nightly routine of flagellation might help you restore your spirit to favour in your God’s eyes.

Good luck with your repentance.

What makes the Bible not believable for an atheist?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://caseforatheism.quora.com/What-makes-the-Bible-not-believable-for-an-atheist-14

Sadly, the real question is the one you’re avoiding.

The real question is the question you have flipped around because you’re too afraid to face it.

The real question is a reversal of the deflection you have concocted to protect the lie you live by.

The real question is: What makes the bible believable for you?

The talking snake or the talking donkey?
How is love expressed through mass murder?
How can one’s female children be chattel to be sold?
Talking bushes?
Magic?

What in any of that is believable or moral to you?

Do you sincerely believe that animals from around the world travelled thousands of kilometres to sit peacefully, predators and prey alike, in a small boat for months while the entire globe was flooded and most of life was wiped out?

Do you believe an entire species born of two people who bear male children can magically fill the Earth with enough children to fill the globe?

Can an entire sea be temporarily parted to make way for peasants to cross on foot? Perhaps you’re one of those who think the moon can be chopped in half and reconstituted? (No? Different book, eh?)

Can a person be swallowed by a massive fish and live inside its belly with all the abdominal acids for three days without any ill effects?

Can people indeed be brought back from the dead?
Can water truly be converted into wine?
Can rocks be transformed into bread?
Did people live for almost one thousand years?
Was an entire river converted into blood?
Do cherubs and demons genuinely exist?
Can people be transformed into pillars of salt?

What exactly do you find believable within the bible?

Why does life not begin at conception?


This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do pro-choice people say life does not begin at conception when it does? Why not use one of the million stronger arguments other than basing their stance on a lie?”

I wrote this piece about five years ago and was just reminded of it by receiving a new upvote today while trying to decide what was next on the que. It’s collected a few comments that, if you’re interested in reading further, can be viewed at its original location: “https://www.quora.com/Why-do-pro-choice-people-say-life-does-not-begin-at-conception-when-it-does-Why-not-use-one-of-the-million-stronger-arguments-other-than-basing-their-stance-on-a-lie/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1

Life begins at conception is the lie of anti-abortion hypocrites.

No matter how you slice and dice and dance around the hair-splitting, moving goalpost surreality inhabited by anti-abortion hypocrites, there is no rational justification for any of their idiotically myopic and arrogantly self-serving propositions.

“Life”, in the context of a child, is either a human life replete with every human characteristic or a lump of flesh no different than a tumor. You don’t get to have it both ways.

The human child-making process is precisely that: it is more often terminated spontaneously without will than with intent. Intent changes nothing about the fact that a significant proportion, if not technically the majority of all such processes do not complete. We see it everywhere in nature. It is reality in an unvarnished light.

Imbuing cells in development with absent characteristics is an intellectual and moral betrayal of oneself and humanity. Wishful thinking is not reality. A fetus is not a child; while every child born is entitled to being loved and supported by parents who want them. To do less by forcing a development process is a hypocritical abuse of a life which leads to a multiplicity of victims…

…and for what? So that you can pretend you’ve charged like a hero into saving an innocent? The harsh reality is that you haven’t saved anyone but you have condemned innocent victims to hardship and society to increased social problems like crime and poverty.

If you stop and think about the issue of innocent children needing someone to defend their lives, you would lead a charge to save real children who are dying every few seconds due to preventable causes. Anti-abortion hypocrites never seem to care, however, about children after they are born.

Where do you get off pretending like you know better than the pregnant mother if that child will have a fair chance at a fulfilling life or a life of so much misery they commit suicide or go on a shooting spree or choose a life of crime as a way to get back at a world which didn’t want them nor cared about whether they lived or died?

How dare you lie about life beginning at conception?

Life is a continuum with no finite starting and stopping points beyond the individual’s experience. Each one of us is born and each of us dies. Those are the only boundaries we will ever experience.

If conception is life, then so are sperm and ovum. Not only is the anti-abortion hypocrisy self-serving and myopic bollocks, it’s an arrogant betrayal of one’s fellow humans and humanity as a whole.


There is absolutely nothing redeeming in the anti-abortion position. Anti-abortion hypocrites are inhuman monsters.:

Florida Christians Want to Kill Women Who Have Abortions

Why do scientists believe the universe comes from nothing?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Why do scientists believe that the universe and the Big Bang can come from absolutely nothing but find it so hard to believe in the Holy Spirit?”

Creatio ex nihilo

This is a Latin phrase which means “creation from nothing.”

It is a phrase used in all three Abrahamic religions. The idea of something from nothing comes from the Jewish, Christian, and Islamic religions, not from science.

Scientists don’t claim something came from nothing. Your religion makes that claim.

Instead of learning about your religion, you invent nonsense derived from your religion and concoct fiction about a discipline you choose to remain ignorant of while using your fiction as justification for smearing what you have made no effort to learn anything about.

Don’t you think that’s a bit convoluted?

It’s referred to as a straw argument.

Your straw is a religious phrase you attribute to science, and then you use that false attribution as justification for fraudulent criticism. You imply hypocrisy in science while embodying hypocrisy in your question.

If this were a behaviour that rarely occurred, it would be easy to overlook. Instead, the hypocrisy you have demonstrated occurs so often that it’s almost a surprise when a question by a believer to atheists isn’t hypocritical.

Where does one find a “Holy Spirit” buried under so much hypocrisy from religious folks?

My memories of church doctrine don’t seem to include hypocrisy as an attribute of the Holy Ghost. Perhaps I missed that while my eyes rolled back up into their sockets as my head began thumping from all the mind-numbing nonsense I was being exposed to.

It could be my knees getting sore from the padded board while I wondered when I could sit back in my seat.

At any rate, I always found myself more interested in learning about scientific concepts because they made sense. I felt like my imagination was lit up when learning something tangible, while my mind felt dulled into a stupor every time I felt forced to endure the mind-numbing religious patter.

I never understood why people would prefer being lulled into a stupor to stimulating their imagination. I used to chalk that up as a subjective preference indicating benign differences between people.

I have come to realize, however, that the incuriosity of people who prefer to wallow in fiction rather than choose to stimulate their imaginations with knowledge indicates a tremendous gulf which creates problems in society.

Dialogues online with religious people rather than in person seem to provide greater freedom in exploring those differences in thinking, so perhaps you can address in more personal terms why it is that you don’t know your doctrine and believe the doctrine you don’t know but have heard it somewhere is a product of science.

Aren’t you in the least embarrassed to realize you have admitted to being ignorant of both science and the religion you seem to want to be associated with?

How does one go through life pretending they are devoted to this thing called religion but remain so ignorant of it at the same time?

I’m sure your first instinct is to dismiss these words as “fake news,” so I’ve included an AI summary to help you cope with how you have just humiliated yourself in a way not unlike peeing in your pants in public.

Good luck with all of that.

Is it better to have faith or not?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Dear Atheists, do you think its better to have faith, or no faith?”

Believers should learn to understand how various forms of faith exist that don’t require you to check your brain out of service to maintain them.

For example, one can have faith in all the other drivers on the road to mostly observe the rules of the road.

One can also have faith in the referee for your game who is sincerely interested in being objective.

One can also have faith that the person they hire for a job sincerely wants to succeed and contribute to your success.

None of these forms of faith are guarantees against misjudgment but are optimistic expectations that will generally pan out positively. The odds of a negative outcome are far fewer than a positive outcome.

These are forms of faith based on an awareness of the world and an objective understanding of how people generally behave.

We know there are outliers and sometimes disappointments, but for the most part, one’s faith in these conditions is met with positive results.

This is a justifiable form of faith.

What is not a justifiable form of faith that essentially amounts to wallowing in self-serving delusion is believing in the existence of a human-like entity endowed with magical powers seen nowhere else in the universe… particularly when assuming such an omnipotent being of galactic proportions will intervene in the life of something less than a speck of bacteria to it… and most especially in matters of convenience like one’s favourite team winning a ballgame or a parking spot opening up in a timely manner.

Otherwise, it is much better to have enough faith in oneself to ignore the naysayers in one’s life than not because one will never have any hope of realizing one’s goals or dreams without it.

Can you trust people who hear the voice of god?

This post is a response to a question posed in its complete format: “Can you trust people who hear the voice of god in their head and demand other people follow the words of their god?”

Sure. You can trust them to live in a world of delusion that creates a barrier between their internal narrative and the shared reality we all live in.

You can trust that they will defend their delusion to an extreme that could dramatically harm people who do not support or challenge it.

You can trust that if you’re not hyper-vigilant about their actions and attitudes, they will eventually devise a justification for doing you harm when you least expect it.

You can trust that if you don’t support their delusions, they will trash-talk you to their peers and give them all the reasons they need to become toxic toward you.

You can trust that they will do anything to affect the laws to ensure everyone submits to their delusions.

You can trust that their moral paradigm is entirely self-serving at the expense of anyone who does not submit to their delusions.

You can trust that if you piss them off enough, they will easily justify actions that can end your life.

You can trust that if they can establish and operate within a community of sufficient numbers, they will do whatever they can to undermine the systems they live within to transform their community into a Gilead nightmare.

You can trust that they view their toxic attitudes and destructive actions through a lens of corrupted righteousness, fueling a war under the guise of being an army in service to their delusion.

You can trust that they will identify the most easily victimized and relentlessly attack them as a recruitment strategy for their delusion as they seek to spread adherence to it like it were a communicable disease.

Why do people become poor and broke?


This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/Why-do-people-become-poor-and-broke/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1

Setting aside the failings of individuals who make bad decisions and cause problems for themselves, because there is always a tiny percentage of people who need more guidance to make better decisions, the vast majority of people suffering in poverty have done everything right with their lives and are still struggling.

A big part of the reason why that happens is that too many people waste their time wallowing in a misanthropic belief that poverty is due to the victims of it being responsible for creating their poverty and that if they just did something different with their lives, they, too, would be among the wealthy in society.

This myth that poverty is a self-imposed sentence is precisely what the thieves in our lives want the people to believe.

This myth that poverty is a self-imposed sentence helps people to believe they won’t become victims of poverty themselves.

This myth that poverty is a self-imposed sentence overlooks how our culture is geared entirely around impoverishing the majority in favour of the sociopaths who are willing to destroy lives to achieve personal material benefit.

This myth that poverty is a self-imposed sentence is why people become poor and broke because believing this nonsense allows poverty to exist in a post-scarcity world that could easily eradicate poverty overnight — if we could only address the rampant greed corroding the social contract to be the actual cause of poverty instead of shaming the victims suffering unnecessarily in a state of poverty that would not exist if economic justice existed.

There hasn’t been a time in my life where I have not been blamed for the clients who have stiffed me after praising me for doing work they benefited from.

Try to make sense of that.

It’s precisely what Donald Trump does when he calls the contractors that worked for him losers. He put thousands of people out of business throughout his life by not paying them for doing work on his behalf, and as far as he is concerned, it’s their fault.

This question embodies a corrupt attitude that pervades society, and it is this attitude that permits poverty to exist.

It’s the same attitude that admires how people can avoid paying taxes and envies that ability enough to want it for themselves.

This question enables the attitude of greed to characterize the rot infecting humanity and destroying human civilization because it teaches us to forget that we are all in this together.


Up to about half the people who are homeless in the U.S. are working full-time jobs.

There are over 25 times more vacant homes in the U.S. than there are homeless people.

Try to make sense of that… and then get pissed off about this:

How can the concept of authority be explained?

This post is a response to a question initially posed on Quora, and can also be accessed via “https://www.quora.com/How-can-the-concept-of-authority-be-explained/answer/Antonio-Amaral-1

There appear to be two distinct perceptions that dominate public responses to authority.

On the one hand, an authority is an entity with the power to issue demands, impose edicts, and enforce compliance. On the other hand, an authority is a trusted entity that serves as a resource for empowering people and enabling their ambitions.

Our good friend and authoritative source of plagiarized information, AI Bot (Ayebot? iBot? EyeBot? — It needs a name so that it can be further anthropomorphized. “Gemini” seems a bit too much like impersonal woo.), provides a bit more detail:

Wikipedia has this definition, which appears to favour an interpretation based on an exercise of power:

Authority is commonly understood as the legitimate power of a person or group over other people.[1][dead link][2] In a civil state, an authority may be practiced by legislative, executive, and judicial branches of government,[3][need quotation to verify] each of which has authority and is an authority.[4] The term “authority” has many nuances and distinctions within various academic fields, from sociology to political science. ”

Let’s comb the world of language authorities to see how they interpret authority:

Collins has this to say about authority:

Britannica attempts a more concise definition favouring “influence” over “imposition” like Collins.

Merriam-Webster provides a more comprehensive overview of how “authority” is apprehended and implemented in society — although imposition precedes influence in its hierarchy of interpretations.

Interestingly, two of the world’s premiere language authorities place a profit premium on sharing basic definitions for words… which begs the question of the value of definitions versus profit and whether these institutions actually are authorities in realms beyond basic definitions.

Oxford at least asks for personal information to be granted access to elementary information, while Cambridge’s efforts are laughable.

These last two efforts suggest to me that their authority is entirely contingent upon reputation — part of the “old boy’s club” of authoritative prestige in the world, which essentially shuts out the plebians among us who must wrestle with “inferior language authorities.”

Meanwhile, freebie entity Dictionary dot com presents itself as a superior authority in marketing and business development to the two staid elements of anachronistic society above and provides an even more comprehensive set of definitions than Merriam-Webster.

This tells us that authority is actively cultivated by those who desire it and then, once achieved, is actively protected and zealously guarded beyond levels resembling reason. At the same time, newcomers overturn established authorities who fade into oblivion as the barbarians at the gates no longer storm them out of existence but supplant them through more effective forms of adapting to an ever-changing world.

In short, “authority” can be explained entirely by the dynamics of ego, power, and how much one is addicted to asserting their prominence in a chaotic world.

Interestingly, the most respected authorities throughout history have rejected the impositional form of authority flowing from within in favour of empowering the people at large by serving as a resource for enabling their assertions of personal authority within their relative spheres of influence.

For example, people still recognize the names of rare individuals who embodied humility, such as Gautama Buddha — or even a more modern instance like Nelson Mandela. Still, few outside dedicated historians can remember the many “authorities” throughout history who imposed their will upon the public. Those remembered are often anomalies serving as massive engines of destruction whose names are whispered rather than revered. Few among those whose authority was impositional in nature are remembered for their introspective wisdom, like Marcus Aurelius and Sun Tzu, but are revered for their insights in contrast to those of the conquerors like Alexander the Great or Genghis Khan, who are studied for their strategies (and often critiqued for their human failings).

For example, I predict that if humanity survives in some form resembling the humanity we know today, Jimmy Carter will be remembered with deep reverence and respect one thousand years from now. In contrast, Donald Trump will be remembered as the cautionary tale of a bull in a china shop whose lesson for humanity is the necessity of restraint and accountability.