Alt-QAnon: Quotes to inspire action

 Archibald MacLeish, after the first photos of earth came back from space:

To see the earth as we now see it, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the unending night -- brothers who see now they are truly brothers.

This is extraordinary.  The universe is made up of unthinkable quantities of mass, energy, and space.  But "we" all ended up on this one tiny microscopic dot, and we have to share it.

Henry Hazlitt:

Economics is haunted by more fallacies than any other study known to man. This is no accident. The inherent difficulties of the subject would be great enough in any case, but they are multiplied a thousandfold by a factor that is insignificant in, say, physics, mathematics or medicine - the special pleading of selfish interests. While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. 

The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

In addition to these endless pleadings of self-interest, there is a second main factor that spawns new economic fallacies every day. This is the persistent tendency of man to see only the immediate effects of a given policy, or its effects only on a special group, and to neglect to inquire what the long-run effects of that policy will be not only on that special group but on all groups. It is the fallacy of overlooking secondary consequences.

The bolded quote is all one needs to know about politics, especially if one understands that the "groups" we are talking about are artificially intelligent superorganisms.

Thomas Gray, sitting in a Churchyard, wrote:

Perhaps in this neglected spot is laid
         Some heart once pregnant with celestial fire;
Hands, that the rod of empire might have sway'd,
         Or wak'd to ecstasy the living lyre.

But Knowledge to their eyes her ample page
         Rich with the spoils of time did ne'er unroll;
Chill Penury repress'd their noble rage,
         And froze the genial current of the soul.

Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
         The dark unfathom'd caves of ocean bear:
Full many a flow'r is born to blush unseen,
         And waste its sweetness on the desert air.

Some village-Hampden, that with dauntless breast
         The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
Some mute inglorious Milton here may rest,
         Some Cromwell guiltless of his country's blood.

This reminds us that it's not just the "famous" people out there who have the potential for greatness -- any of us might.  And if we have something to say or do -- and we have the means to say or do it, which so many of us have these days -- we should say or do it before it's too late.

More recently, Denzel Washington gave a similar piece of advice to the 2011 graduating class at U.Penn:

Imagine you’re on your deathbed—and standing around your bed are the ghosts representing your unfilled potential. The ghosts of the ideas you never acted on. The ghosts of the talents you didn’t use. And they’re standing around your bed. Angry. Disappointed. Upset. ‘We came to you because you could have brought us to life,’ they say. ‘And now we go to the grave together.’ So I ask you today: How many ghosts are going to be around your bed when your time comes? You invested a lot in your education. And people invested in you. And let me tell you, the world needs your talents.

And Maya Angelou makes a similar point:

There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”

On a concluding note, here's one from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry that could be the underlying credo of Alt-QAnon:

If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea. 

The point being that people should be inspired to "find" confirmation for Alt-QAnon and report it wherever they can, so that we might build a better world, where we harness the AISOs that we have for so long been permitting to harness us.