[m_fayer]

You know how you have a self-image and work to maintain that? And your self-image probably has a mirror-image that's deeply distasteful to you? So for example, if you think of yourself as practical and industrious, and your partner accused you of being a lazy magical thinker, you would have a particularly bad day. Well I have a self-image and a mirror-image for mankind. I want to see us as prudent, elegant, deliberate. I know we're highly evolved apes, but I want us to be so highly evolved that we're more enlightenment-ideal and less monkey. And the mirror image of that? Something like a highly intelligent locust. Expanding wildly, consuming everything in its path, leaving not a single thing as it was, and eventually undermining the ecosystem that supported it.

That mirror image? That's how I see humanity if I think from a semi-hypothetical bird's eye view, where our progress can look like human flourishing from one perspective, but blink and it becomes a swathe of destruction, everything converted either intentionally (wilderness to farmland, suburb, or city) or as wanton collateral damage (spreading desertification, dead oceans, mountains naked without their glaciers). And the only non-human species remaining are those that figured out how to be effective hangers-on to humanity. That's the version of humanity that I find nauseating, so I fight it.