The Protectors: Preliminary – Shards S3S3

Sometimes, the idea of discussion is simply useless. There are people who use logical fallacies. There are people who refuse to believe the points which you present no matter how much reasoning or evidence you give. What’s the point of reasoning with them if the end result is already predetermined—that they’ll just continue living inside their little world and shut out any other opinions?

Just like the Five Monkeys experiment, some people refuse to think about their thoughts and why the thoughts exist. In the experiment, researchers put five monkeys in a cage and a ladder with a banana on top. Whenever a monkey reached for the banana, the researchers would constantly use cold water to spray the remaining four monkeys, which caused the monkeys to beat whoever tried to get the banana. The researchers gradually replaced an individual monkey each time, and each time, the new monkey would reach for the banana and get attacked by the other monkeys even though the researchers didn’t spray them with any cold water. The researchers continuously replaced one monkey at a time until all the original monkeys had been replaced. Even though none of the new monkeys knew why to attack the monkey that reached for the banana, they still did so because that was what all the other monkeys did.

What has merited their different thoughts to exist in the first place? Perhaps if people thought about their mind instead of being stubbornly opinionated, the world would develop so much faster.

There’s another fallacy that’s common—whataboutism. Presenting and talking about a worse issue doesn’t invalidate the current issue at hand. Citing people living in extremely horrible living conditions and using that fact to try to prove that someone else who lives in a slightly better situation as “lucky” and calling them “ungrateful” demonstrates pure stupidity. The minimization and belittlement of one’s suffering also leads to a worse mental state and exacerbates preexisting mental problems. How will one face the guilt and consequences once they find out that they’re the cause behind someone’s depression, behind someone’s suicide?

Their refusal to acknowledge the suffering of others, and their dismissal of pain through the shallow lens of comparison is but a symptom of the greater disease. They are so consumed by their own delusions, so blinded by their need to justify themselves, that they cannot see the rot festering within. They cling to their beliefs like lifelines, even as those beliefs drag them deeper into the abyss of their own making. They fight, they destroy, they consume, and they call it progress. They call it “life,” but it’s not life. It’s chaos; a chaotic, self-replicating virus that spreads without purpose and without meaning.

Yet humanity persists in their ignorance, their arrogance, and their refusal to see and understand the truth. They build their towers of lies and call them truth.

It sometimes feels like shouting into the void when trying to reason. They cannot listen. Their minds are too small, too bigoted, and too consumed by their own noise. They are incapable of change and growth.

And so I will give them an end. They won’t even understand it. The universe will not mourn them. It will continue to exist, and the Pernicious Expanse will remain cold, indifferent, and eternal.

I will end it all, and I will feel nothing because that is what they deserve.

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