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@ hodlbod
2025-04-26 13:29:46
"Each generation exercises power over its successors: and each, in so far as it modifies the environment bequeathed to it and rebels against tradition, resists and limits the power of its predecessors. This modifies the picture which is sometimes pained of a progressive emancipation from tradition and a progressive control of natural resources resulting in a continual increase of human power. In reality, of course, if any one age reallly attains, by eugenics and scientific education, the power to make its descendants what it pleases, all men who live after it are the patients of that power. They are weaker, not stronger: for though we may have put wonderful machines in their hands we have preoprdained how they are to use them. And if, as is almost certain, the age which has thus attained maximum power over posterity were also the age most emancipated from tradition, it would be engaged in reducing the power of its predecessors almost as drastically as that of its successors."
- Joseph Minich, Bulwarks of Unbelief