"Countless people have been sent to early graves, warning future generations through bone trails dug up thousands of years later. Countless other warnings have been written into the pages of history by the survivors. For thousands of years, people of the past have been trying to warn the people of the future that something isn’t working. Our belief systems are clearly flawed; they clearly don’t work the way we wish they would. Countless times people have proven through their actions that there is no viable substitute for physical power for any population who wants to live free from the threat of foreign invasion or who wants to remain systemically secure against the threat of corrupt, self-serving sociopaths who psychologically exploit and abuse people through their belief systems.

In our extraordinary hubris, we believe we can do better, and we ignore the warnings of our predecessors. We keep scaling our beliefs about abstract power to the point where those beliefs become a clear and present danger to the survival and prosperity of our species. By convincing ourselves early in the Neolithic age that we are above nature, that we don’t need physical power to establish our pecking order, we appear to have set ourselves on a path to destroy ourselves. We keep telling ourselves a lie that we don’t have to spend the energy or risk injury to use physical power to establish our pecking order like the animals we domesticate. We keep avoiding fights when and where they should have happened, where energy expenditure and injury would have been minimal. We keep kicking the can down the road, hoping to avoid the physical conflict for moral or ethical reasons until the hazards blossom into such extraordinary levels of dysfunction and losses that it must be resolved using far more energy causing far more destruction and injury. And now we appear to have backed ourselves right into a corner where it has become too costly to physically settle our biggest property and policy disputes."

- Jason Lowery