ΞΞΞ
Nearly a decade ago I considered a particular question: what opinion would a hypothetical visiting alien from another star-system form about us? [1] My answer was that the alien would consider us an aggressive, still rather primitive and very violent, species best avoided until such time as we might outwardly demonstrate otherwise.
Subsequent to that I pondered four related questions. First, is there any land on planet Earth, any of what are now called countries and nations, that over the past three thousand years that has not been fought over or subject to the clash of opposed armed violent groups of mostly men? Second, how many countries or lands now, for whatever reason or because of whatever excuse or whatever supra-personal causal abstraction, are not the subject of some armed conflict domestic or foreign? Third, how many countries are still plagued by homicides, robbery, theft, fraud, rape, domestic violence, subsuming hatred, poverty, dishonesty, and corruption political or otherwise? Fourth, have we as a supposedly consciously-aware species capable of reason and of honour [2] learnt anything from thousands upon thousands of years of such conflict, hatred, and such violence personal and impersonal?
In seeking answers to such questions I was and am painfully aware of my own, decades-long, past of violence, extremism, conflict, intolerance, hatred, incitement, and selfishness. Of whether my own fallible ‘learning from experience’ and attempt at expiation, as manifest in my weltanschauung of pathei-mathos, [3] has any meaning or relevance external to myself.
But that weltanschauung is all I have in answer. The answer of a personal, a non-interfering, empathy, compassion, humility, and of a personal honour in the immediacy of a living moment. [4]
Will we, can we, as a species change? Evolve away from the violence, the mistakes, the hatreds, the dishonours, of our past and of our present?
David Myatt
July 2023
[1] https://davidmyatt.online/wp-content/uploads/2026/10/non-terrestrial-view.pdf
[2] Sophocles, Antigone, v. 334 & vv. 365-36:
πολλὰ τὰ δεινὰ κοὐδὲν ἀνθρώπου δεινότερον πέλε […]
σοφόν τι τὸ μηχανόεν τέχνας ὑπὲρ ἐλπίδ᾽ ἔχων
τοτὲ μὲν κακόν, ἄλλοτ᾽ ἐπ᾽ ἐσθλὸν ἕρπει
There exists much that is strange, yet nothing
Has more strangeness than a human being […]
Beyond his own hopes, his cunning
In inventive arts – he who arrives
Now with dishonour, then with chivalry
[3] https://davidmyatt.online/wp-content/uploads/2026/07/numinous-way-pathei-mathos-v7.pdf
[4] Honour, The Numinous Balance, https://davidmyatt.online/2026/10/13/honour-the-numinous-balance/
ΞΞΞ
Image Credit:
NASA: Earth and Moon as seen from the departing Voyager interplanetary spacecraft
