FICTION
The Last Human in the Milky Way — 10
Excerpt from Chapter 10 Something had happened
10
He sat in the dark in the living room in front of the black TV screen. He felt alone, stranded, lost.
It was long past midnight, and he sat listening for something inside.
He felt an incipient unrest rise inside him. It was clear that something had happened that he had not perceived.
Was it anxiety he felt? Or just a vague uneasiness?
He thought about the article he had saved on his computer several months ago. He had retrieved the article now, “On moral relativism. Nothing is objectively true.”
The basis for conspiracy theories and the division of people in the world today lies in the unlimited flow of information and the amount of information that circulates.
The basis for the division of people into groups where most of them are against you lies in the bizarre certainty that some people have within them that nothing is objectively true; you yourself can choose what will be your truths.
Morality is not, as in the past, something that we all in our society agree on is right or wrong.
Morality has become the same as the right to think and believe in one’s own more or less private rules for action between people. Anyone can change their morals to anything at any time.
You can say today that you stand for honesty and truth in speech, writing and action, and you can say that empathy and compassion for the underprivileged is a human virtue that everyone should stand for.
Tomorrow you can say that all that was wrong, because now the valid truth is that I myself am the most important person in the world and nobody should come here and tell me what to think and do. For everything that I can appropriate and put my stamp on, it is mine and only mine!
Tomorrow you can throw all this overboard and say it was wrong. You have now found the new, the only correct truth, the only right thing to believe in.
He sighed. He muttered half aloud to himself in the dark.
We can call it moral relativism. And moral relativism is about to kill the world and the societies we have built, societies that we have created in agreement to cultivate a society where everyone has their rightful place.
(…)
The author is currently reviewing, rewriting, and editing the manuscript for the novel The Last Human in the Milky Way. Excerpts from selected chapters will be published as previews on Medium.
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