In the biggest scope, on the geologic time scale, the life span of a species, such as ours is about 400,000 years, so our time is almost up. We could kill ourselves off or some catastrophe of nature could end up like it has millions of other species. So what is our legacy beyond some scattered fossils? Perhaps it is a random sample of artifacts, which if some suitably intelligent life form from here or somewhere else happens to recover, could figure out what were about.
While we are around we are concerned after we reach a certain age about what we leave behind besides our genes and wonder that even though certain significant people did not leave their legacy in genes but artifacts while most people do not leave much of value at all besides their genes if that. In fact the human condition seems to be that most people are fools who squander what they got from the past and waste what they could give to the future. By a pure stroke of luck these few words could survive both my end on earth and the extinction of mankind to be read by some sentient being. I am not saying that this being would necessary find anything of value in my words, nor do I humbly expect that of human posterity.
More than likely a flood of gibberish will survive for a time at least. Any examination of the flood of images, words and sounds that a beast like the Internet now allows to be splattered into interstellar space will be faced with the task of culling from it what is significant. That is likely to be something that is uncommon, not the consensus, but the exception. A medium as democratic as the Internet multiplies the conventional, banal, consensus. It will reveal a Ship of Fools, that most people didn't think and didn't realize their potential and wasted what they had. Very few among us are lucky enough to find that resonance of emotions and insights that transcends the consensus and at the same time it is the exceptional insights of a very few of us that has changed our world permanently and far beyond the original context of our deeds. It is not that I would have it any other way than it is now, the rights of the rabble, the din of the ordinary, but just that nullification leads to the contribution of the outliers, that if change is what is needed, that it comes from the edge, not the center. We may become aware of a idea as new to us when it has penetrated the center, and already signaled its death, but it started in obscurity.
So what distinguishes those who really matter from the rest is that they begin by knowing who they are in a deep an enduring way, not by comparison to what others tell them. If the human condition is not one of power; that one really cannot get four people together to agree to anything of consequence, ending the myth of conspiracy and grand plans, that human groups are processes of degraded information flow and fragile consensus, explaining the paradoxes if the current global economic crisis not as some grand plan but as the confused chaos of a breakdown of trust and expectations, then the foolishness of people becomes obvious. That seemingly smart and ambitious people who exercised power were deluded both about who they are and the reality of their existence, and their legacy is likely to be not what they imagined. It is likely to be what they caused to be wasted, not what they created. Nothing of their time of earth will endure because they never committed to an artifact who they were.
The people that really matter almost can't help themselves and they seem to get past all the pressure to fit into some mold, that all of the other fools fit into, by the sheer momentum of who they are. History cleanses the collective memory, which by the way is a consensus of fools, by allowing for time to winnow those who promoted themselves and did not really contribute anything tangible, even if that artifact is but a few well-chosen words. The irony is that that author seldom knows that his words will endure.
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