Every ten years, a new social nexus, from Usenet to Reddit. Every day, a flame war. Every year, a great leader that wins flame wars, convinces people to follow them. The question is, what happens next? What do you preach to the gullible masses you won over?

Every single time it gets to politics, and then, to philosophy. Yet, there are no large strides in sight to world peace.

You've seen that meme where everything is just applied math. Well, math is applied philosophy, and philosophy is a product of misunderstanding the language.

In the end, the flame war you won never mattered. Archived threads, Wayback Machine, inactive Usenet mirrors. Acres upon acres of human thought, passionately expressed in computer text, roamed by no one but web crawlers. Give them three days, and they'll forget what you taught them.

WWI had shown us that we couldn't improve the masses with art and education. There is no vaccine against stupidity.

Life on Earth is hell. People are hell. Living among people is hell. If your life isn't hell, you're fortunate enough to be paying criminals that are stronger than other criminals around them, for protection.

Only the habit of systematically denying yourself pleasures your inner animal wants, plus a healthy dose of doubt, can make you human. Without restraint, a man is merely a greedy beast.