Nikola claims he has no hope, either for his civilization or for ours, so he is ready to exit this life, and take Jude along with him. However, time and time again he betrays that he is not completely hopeless. He betrays this by taking care of his body. He betrays this by postponing this death he claims to desire. He betrays this by postponing this death he claims to desire. He betrays this by indulging his curiosity about our world. He betrays this by developing a friendship with me at all. Logically, he knows his civilization is unlikely to change, and will never welcome him back. He knows that the long-term prospects for our civilization are not good. But perhaps this is why he and I became such fast friends, despite such otherwise incredible differences—against all logic, we still have some hope that the inertia of the systems we were born into is not unchangeable.

There are people in this world who look at their fellow humans and see the worst in them, and their solution is a tilt to authoritarianism. They believe that human nature is immutable, not a construct, and therefore must be controlled with an iron boot. Calling the worst, basest impulses we possess a function of human nature excuses us from change and dismisses it as impossible. But this is the reality we now face—our survival as a species may depend on whether or not we are able to evolve past the foundation of cruelties on which our civilization is built, that we might prove both to ourselves and to nonhuman persons that we are capable of change, that we are not immutably stuck in our barbarous ways.

History shows us that liberal democracies and democratic norms are easily exploited when populists capitalize on mass fear for political gain, when they position a fearful majority into an “us” opposed to a nebulous, terrible “them.” The Third Option is only the first step in a long process of dehumanization—one that will be applied first to nonhuman persons, and then eventually to human persons. This phase we are about to enter as a civilization may be our last, and already I am staggered at how short-sighted many have become. These fearmongers provoke the anxieties of an already insecure populace not because they have any strategy regarding our survival as a civilization, but because they desire power. They don’t care about the cost, perhaps because they don’t believe there truly is one.