None of that is immediately intuitive.

No, it is immediately intuitive. That's exactly the problem. We have to run from it constantly lest the light break through. Go to a Christian funeral for some horribly murdered victim and see how much of the time is spent talking about a loving God.

Listen to anyone who has gone through religious deprogramming. The energy isn't spent accepting the truth, it's spent desperately clinging to beliefs one-by-one, coming up with rationalizations and logical backstops until finally they are untenable.

If your argument is that discovering the truth burns too many calories, I think the evidence shows us the opposite--that we burn very many more calories to hiding the truth from ourselves.

I think there’s a certain nihilism in dismissing the fate of an entire species, because you look around in disgust at a lot of young people who desire something as crass and fleeting as Love.

I'm kinda scratching me head here. Did I do that?

Lazing around naked in bed with a full belly and another warm body and a bit of free time?! Don’t you realize death still exists? Don’t you realize that someone, somewhere is being treated unjustily?! You’ll doom us all!” Its just a bleak attitude to carry as you go through your life.

Or that? Because if you have have love, a full belly, and a warm body, and a bit of free time, I'm certainly not going to begrudge you that. Those are all things you can enjoy in this life, which is a difference from the material utopia of the future that will never come.

Any college student who aspires to be a daycare teacher rather than an office manager or a civil engineer rather than a petroleum engineer, just for starters.

Yes, those people exist. (And a quibble: I don't think people CHOOSE any of that so much as their values choose those things, and people do not, as I stated before, choose their values. Jeff Bezos could no more choose to be a day care teacher than darling Mrs. Lewandowski from my Montesori could choose to be a ruthless capitalist.) And if I were Q, judging the human race, they would sway me to save it.

But there is no Q and I am not here to judge the human race. The human Mrs. Lewandowski's of the world are teaching day care and the human Jeff Bezos are running companies and governments. Both exist, but only one will consistently take and accumulate power. Psychopaths are concentrated at the top of the org chart.

And I have seen with my own eyes that people--seemingly good people--will support and defend evil in institutions to preserve and advance their status... and it is fealty to those self-serving systems, systems large enough to encompass the globe and last centuries, that will be our filter.

Just a going theory, anyway.