Honestly, I tried to avoid thinking very much about anything after Sesako took back control of our body.

I felt pretty miserable — sure, I made the choice that was most natural for me to make. Like Fitzuki Said.

Sure, I needed to forgive myself, and not have someone else forgive me.

Like the Emperor said — I did kind of like him.

Even if he was a tyrannical ruler, who'd at least once murdered a bunch of civilians because he was in pain and annoyed.

That night when we slept Sesako had nightmares. In them he desperately tried to strike an enemy, with his own face or the emperor’s, but his spear never sank home. And then his father died. And after he died, his father told Sesako, “Son, you disappointed me”.

Ouch.

In my nightmares that night, I was blown into very, very, tiny pieces in a fiery explosion that destroyed everything. But I only had one nightmare, and honestly, it wasn’t too bad.

I wasn’t nearly as miserable as Sesako.

I had a dream in which my parents told me that they were disappointed in me, but that was mostly comedic. Also, it was clearly a bleed over from Sesako’s neuroses.

I had plenty of problems — cowardice, overthinking, too much cold logic, and again cowardice. Maybe difficulty relating to normal people who thought like normal people instead of with cold mathematical philosophy. I wanted to turn everything into an equation that told me the right thing to do.

A desperate need to do everything for my parents’ approval was simply not one of my problems.

I’d loved my mom and my dad, but I don’t think I had the sort of respect for my mom that would make me feel bad if she didn’t approve of me, and my dad was always cool with me.

After this cycle of dreams, we met in that field that was half the now blown apart city park in the center of the Yatamo capital, and half the area around the big fountain in Central Park.

I said hello.

Sesako said nothing.

To be honest, I didn’t really blame him for not wanting to talk to me. I might not talk to him if our positions were reversed. I thought about the issues that had seemed really, really important on Earth. Long term x-risks such as AI safety, pandemic prevention, or nuclear war.

If I imagined that I’d been on the verge of preventing a disaster of unimaginable proportions, and then Sesako ripped control of the body back from me, and ensured that the disaster would happen…

I’d be pissed.

I just sat in the park, leaned back on a bench, stretched my legs out, and waited.

The sky was filled with a flickering dream landscape that merged both of our ideas of the world. Dream time is different, even when it is a lucid dream that is the best time to talk with the other person sharing control of your body.

I started thinking about how to think about what I’d done — I honestly didn’t even know for sure that if Sesako had used his fully empowered fist on that cylinder that it would have been compressed enough to cause a runaway reaction if it was actually uranium.

I supposed that the way the emperor acted suggested that it would have been.

But there was uncertainty about what would have happened. And I was, so far as I knew, a unique force in this universe — except the emperor himself said he came from elsewhere, somewhere that wasn’t actually my world.

There was at least a chance that I would end up doing something that literally nobody else could do, that I was irreplaceable, and that I might be important in a way it still might have been a waste if I died killing the emperor and winning this war. And that whole framing assumed that the Yatamo victory was a good thing, and an important thing.

Which I still wasn’t convinced of. If nothing else, second order effects were unpredictable.

And just what was the problem that the emperor was dealing with?

None of that really mattered though.

There are two things that we judge: We judge the individual, and we judge outcomes and systems. Outcomes are better or worse from a sort of neutral or external point of view. Or maybe based on how they aggregate the preferences of everyone in the system. My assessment of an outcome is just my assessment — there are a lot of people who are moral realists who think there really is some truth about which states of the world are the best.

My preferred meta-ethical theory is a cross between a non-cognitivist model and a moral naturalist. We really mean something when we say, ‘murder is evil’ that isn’t just ‘boo’ murder, but attaching an essence to ‘murder’. But I also don’t think these essences have any existence outside of our own emotions, social structures, discursive and cognitive networks.

I should note again: Lots of people who agree with me about what really matters, don’t have the same model of what language about ethics means and is doing.

I have preferences, and I don’t want my preferences to change. They are a fundamental part of who I am, and what I am as a human. I prefer to see happy and flourishing people. I prefer to see a world filled with joy, love, and as many human beings as possible. And I like it when I see lots of trade and economic activity.

So naturally I think systems that create these things are good systems, and systems that retard them are bad. I just don’t try to say that the universe agrees with me, or that there is something out there that makes my preferences different from preferences.

Anyways, a discussion of meta-ethics isn’t what’s important. The important thing is that in judging humans, we don’t just judge them based on what they achieved, we also care about what they were trying to achieve.

Someone who tries desperately hard to save someone’s life will be judged kindly even if they fail. Someone who tries to desperately save their own life at the cost of everything should be judged harshly.

I stared at the flickering sky of our dream world for a long time.

Sesako never looked at me. He never spoke.

Then I woke up and sat up.

The bed was in a long hall that used to serve as the barracks for miners. The bunk beds were three rows high for everyone to sleep in. For some reason — I think it was that Sesako still was pretty angry at himself in addition to me — Sesako had refused every offer of his own room in some small office or the curtained off end of an abandoned tunnel.

The room was packed with other men, groaning, scratching, farting, and sleeping.

The precise internal clock in our mind told me that it was still quite early, a bit before five AM. As it was near the summer solstice, and Yatamo was quite far north, the dawn had already broken out, outside, but we couldn’t see that here under the mountains.

The couple of awake men looked at me with respect and awe. Nobody else in this room had developed beyond their foundation. Most of them were from that unfortunate part of Yatamo’s population who never managed to awaken their spark at all, or who if they awakened the spark never managed to get through the power concentration stage to form a solid foundation.

There was a third magical sense in this body that was acutely aware of the little perturbations in the flow of power around me that signaled the presence or absence of a cultivator of substance.

Most of the golden cores and those with foundations had either fled much further along with their superhuman speed, or they had much nicer places to stay than a dorm packed with a hundred men.

The tunnels had been built though to allow a population of unawakened humans to march through it with easy rest stages every five miles or so.

It would make pretty good sense, I suddenly realized, to make a bunch of railways for mine carts, or passenger rails that would be pulled by cultivators — even if they didn’t have any steam engines, the use of rails might enormously reduce the amount of labor required for logistics relative to the current system where everything important was moved from place to place by cultivators carrying it, and by peasants with horse carts if it was not important.

For the Yatamo sailing ships were even more efficient, cheap and capable of a way of moving goods than they had been in the history of Earth — where the best means of moving large quantities of things cheaply has always been on water.

Wind spells.

Wind spells and just a single cultivator with a golden core.

Hmmmm, how much horsepower could a purified core provide? How about someone who only had a partially mature foundation?

My mind was wandering off in unimportant directions. But I didn’t want to think about the important ones.

I still felt extremely beaten up.

The radiation sickness was still deep in our body; it felt sort of like after the fever had broken following a really bad flu.

I spent ten minutes just staring at the floor and walls.

Eventually I decided that I ought to be useful. I got up. In the next room I found a kitchen where there was a samovar with tea made from lavender, rose and honey. A big boiling cauldron filled with porridge was being slowly stirred by a woman with an unawakened spark, and there was a long line of stoves with bread being baked.

A single cultivator with a golden core walked circuits around the room, pressing magic into the runic arrays to provide heat to the stoves. The cultivator was an old man with gray hair who'd probably decided a century ago that he would not risk opening his second dantian.

I walked up behind the middle-aged woman who was cooking and sniffed appreciatively at the food.

Without turning around the woman said, “Back up now. Back up — you can get yours when the breakfast bell rings and not a minute before.”

I laughed at being sent off in such a way, and she turned to look at me.

Her eyes widened, “Celestial Sesako, you can —”

“No, no, no!” I exclaimed. “I’ll certainly not interfere with your kitchen. When the breakfast bell rings.”

She smiled to see my amusement and nodded.

The cook was a woman who looked to be twice Sesako’s age, even though she was in truth less than half his age. Yet despite his many years there was something young about Sesako in his heart — and in me as well, but my years had precisely matched my appearance.

It was as though the knowledge that he had far more time ahead of him than behind — unless he managed to kill himself, as it seemed like he sometimes hoped to do — meant that he did not feel old ever.

“I am not the Celestial Sesako,” I said to her, “I am Isaac, just that other fellow who now splits control of this body with the celestial roughly fifty-fifty.”

“Oh! I had heard of that. Such an amazing event. Like in a story. They say you rescued everyone, except Profound Kisiko from the Celestial Emperor himself yesterday, after poor Sesako failed.”

I blinked at that mangled version of the events. “Who says that?”

“Oh, everyone.” She waved her hand in a wide arc, sort of covering the whole room, the whole of the caverns, and beyond it the whole world.

“That is not precisely how I remember events,” I replied cautiously.

“Oh, what happened?”

“It all… we were supposed to destroy the island, and I —”

“You couldn’t, the emperor was there. Everyone knows that.” She said that as matter of fact as if that was all that needed to be said. She stirred the big thick thing of porridge again, and then called to the golden core who'd been heating the pot, “More even! It’ll burn if you keep making part that hot, and the rest half cold.”

“It’s not my fault they had a barely weaned apprentice who probably fucks her cat in her spare time enchant the pot,” was the unapologetic reply.

I blinked at that crudity.

The woman laughed, and the man winked at me, and said, “I heard you say you aren’t the celestial Sesako.”

“He’s still a celestial,” the woman snapped back with asperity.

“Now that’s hardly fair,” I said. “I’m not…”

“Can you use that red power everyone goes on about? It is really greater than all the other powers?”

“Well yes.”

“Can I see it?” The gray headed man with a golden core hopped up next to me, and he asked eagerly.

I drew a bit of the power into my hand and cast it out as a light spell. The spell was too bright, but that was better for impressing them.

The golden core waved his fingers through the little ball of light, and an expression like that of a kid in a candy shop came over his face. “So dense, like nothing I’ve ever felt before.”

He grinned at me.

If you spot this story on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

“I guess I am a celestial.” I shrugged. “It’s pretty weird to me. I wasn’t anything at all before I found myself in this body, and now —”

“You weren’t awakened!” the woman gasped and looked at me with awe.

The other people sitting on the sides of the room, drinking tea looked up, and started gathering around me. I realized that besides the old golden core I was the only ‘cultivator’ in this room. But I wasn’t really a cultivator. I was just a programmer who'd waken up in an Isekai adventure, and who was fumbling around, making a mess of it all — I belonged in some way more with these people, even with the golden core, who though he’d advanced far further than most, had still found himself limited far below what many in this world could reach.

“No, that’s not possible, obviously he was. Sekie, you misunderstood the man.” This was said by an old man who looked to be around sixty, and who wore a well-cared for set of robes that made him look like he’d been a clerk rather than a manual worker. He grinned at me. The grin was missing all of the teeth.

Dentures, I wondered how dentures were made.

“No, I had not awakened in the previous world I lived in.”

“But you now are a celestial, and —”

“That doesn’t make me more special than anyone else. Everyone is the same. Everyone deserves equal rights. Everyone deserves a chance to have power over their own fate, to have control, to be respected, to be well fed, healthy, and — to have everything.”

“You were like us?” I couldn’t even see who said that.

“There were no cultivators in the world I’m from.”

“No high and mighty? Now I know you are pulling my leg.” The toothless man laughed. He pushed the cook’s arm. “Eh? Isn’t he.”

“Dad, don’t make fun in such a way.”

“No, do!” I exclaimed. “There were plenty of rich and powerful people, some of whom were good, and some of whom were awful in the world I came from. But there was no magic, no chi. Everything that was built — and it was in some ways a more amazing, and more powerful world than this one, was built just by ordinary humans who only had the spark of thought.”

“The spark of thought?” The old man smiled. “I like that.”

The gray-haired golden core said, “Life requires the presence of magic, are you certain that —”

“Must every cultivator ask the same question? A different world. That means everything worked differently.”

The old cultivator opened his mouth again.

I quirked my eyebrows at him.

He shrugged and smiled apologetically. “I suppose you would know better then, but —”

“No buts. We didn’t use any magic, but we had weapons more powerful than your biggest stones, and machines that could fly between our cities faster than a Celestial can, and in the country I was from, there was so much food that people eating too much was a much bigger problem than hunger.”

“Now I really know you are pulling my leg,” the toothless old man said, but with a sort of awe that made me think that he at least half believed what I said.

I smiled at him. “One day we’ll have a similar world here — but it will be better, because there is magic too.”

The woman who'd been cooking jerked away from the conversation with a half oath to quickly stir the porridge again. Fortunately, none of it had burned.

The old man sighed. “I’d settle simply for a world in the apartment I owned — it had been near the warehouses where I worked, a good location. And three hundred square feet. On the seventh floor, but walking the stairs kept me younger.”

“Was it destroyed?”

“First day, it was the first building that was lost in the city. My grandson saw it himself. Some stone got knocked aside wrong, and it plunged right into the middle of the city. During the first round — and boom.”

“I uh…”

“My grandson, Sekie’s younger boy, has a fully developed foundation. Heh. He can run real fast. Way faster than I ever could, even as a boy. So, he was out in the city, and he saw it happen right out.”

“That uh, was my mistake. I’d sort of just woken up, and we were under attack, and I well… I may have Sesako’s body, and his instincts, but ah — well I was the one who bounced that stone wrong.”

Both the old man and the chef stared at me.

As did everyone else.

Then the woman, Sekie, laughed. “The building would have been crushed anyway in the end when the emperor’s army took the city. You’ve done the best you could — I can’t expect more from someone who never was a cultivator.”

I still flushed and rubbed at the back of my head. “Is there anything I ought to do which will help you recover? — is there some fund for helping rebuild the city?”

“That will only matter if we win.” The golden core said that.

“Do not worry about the matter.” Said the toothless old man. “He, he. My house was destroyed by a celestial? That is a mark of a bit of distinction.”

“I know it is a delicate subject,” I asked slowly, “But might I inquire why you never awakened your spark?”

The old man laughed and shrugged. “Not that delicate a topic. It wasn’t like reading, or numbers or other subjects. I was good at all of that. Meditation though? Just paying attention again and again until you understand something that can’t be described? It just never worked for me. I tried my best. I did. But well…” He shrugged. “I tell you, it was not the fault of any of my mentors, they all drilled me, talked with me, told me everything about what had worked for them. But none of it… You know, some people, even in the best families, just can’t.”

“Aren’t there pills that help with the breakthrough that they give to most people in Yatamo who haven’t broken through on their own, did you get them?”

“Eh —” he glanced around, looked at the cultivator with the golden core and then laughed. “It’s been fifty years now, they won’t prosecute me for the crime anymore, but —”

“You sold it.” The gray-haired golden core said flatly. “There is a reason —”

“Eh, we were poor. That pill was worth more than what my father made in a year working on the docks.”

The two old men glared at each other.

Then the golden core shrugged his shoulders. “Fifty years ago, and the time is long past.”

Something in Sesako’s instincts insisted that a mere fifty years was not long. He’d achieved his profound core fifty years ago. And he’d barely aged since then.

“Far more likely than not, the pills would not have worked,” the old man said. “When it was Sekie’s turn, I certainly did not let her do anything like selling the pill. She took it, with her mentors there to make sure she set everything up right to get the best chance of success. By the time I was thirty-five I’d become the chief clerk of my warehouse. I put all of the money aside for years to buy my apartment, so my children would have a place to live, no matter what, and now… Anyway, look at Sekie. It did not work — and little Kisiko awakened his spark when he was eleven. He’s a proper prodigy, he is.”

“Eleven? Not bad at all,” The golden core said. “My confession is that I was one of the ones who only awakened with the help of the pill.”

“Heh, don’t like to admit it to your friends?”

The old cultivator grinned back. “Not usually, no.”

Failing to awaken your spark was sort of like not graduating from high school. Except while high school dropouts in the US had worse health, and worse life outcomes than everyone else on average, the difference between someone who failed to awaken their spark, and who then failed to advance afterwards and someone who succeeded was vastly larger — extra decades or centuries of life, superhuman strength, all of the best jobs — everything went to those who could use magic.

If only everyone could have that magic…

I wanted to create a world where everyone had access to the same possibilities as… as a celestial. Perhaps it was possible to make the transhumanist dream become true for everyone, at least here in this universe.

“Lord Celestial,” the cultivator interrupted my reverie, “If you have other matters to deal with, you must not allow us to keep you.”

I shook my head. “No, I just was thinking about how great a difference having magic makes.”

“That is the truth,” the chef, Sekie said. She used a big ladle to plop a serving of porridge into a bowl. She held it out for me to take. “With magic all matters are easier.”

“Maybe there is some trick with which we could awaken and train everyone’s spark. But it’s hard to know what I should focus on – there are many different things to do that would be good, that it is hard to know the single one that would be the best to focus on.”

“Why is it important that you do the single best thing,” The gray-haired cultivator asked. “So long as you act in accordance with good character, and without an excess of selfishness, you have done well.”

“So yes. Yes, that is enough to do well. But the thing is… look there are some things that can do more good, where more people get more of what they need than others. And if there are a lot of options it would be silly to not pick the one that has the biggest benefits. I mean making a better choice can be the difference between some child having a brilliant life after they developed their core, and one child fewer achieving that — this isn’t a matter of being good person or not. But it is important. And if you just care about the outcome, not how you feel about yourself, it is extremely important.”

“Or you never help anybody because you can’t decide what is the best thing to do. That is what your nonsensical idea would lead to. You can’t know what the single best thing is, not unless you know everything.”

I waved that away. “I am speaking imprecisely. Obviously figuring out what is a good idea takes resources itself. Anything you spend figuring it out can’t be used to help anyone directly — the research has to tell you something important enough that you end up doing even more good than you would have without doing it — it only makes sense to judge people’s decision making based on what they knew, or reasonably could have known at the time they made the decision.”

“You never know what you are going to discover before you start researching — wouldn’t it be better to just focus on doing what is the best thing you can see, and avoid wasting your patrimony on a trading voyage with no cargo?” The older cultivator smiled at me.

“Uh, you can quickly check to see how plausible it is that you’ll find something — ask yourself ‘what could be true, that if I knew it was true, would change my decision’, and then you can try to figure out how hard it would be to figure out the answers to these questions.”

“The whole problem you were pointing at is that there are an infinite number of things that might be true and that might change your decision. You can never go through that whole list.”

“Trust your intuition.”

“And if your intuition tells you to simply study endlessly, without ever stopping? — I have scholarly pretentions, so I know how a man can spend half his fortune seeking the one book, or the one thing that will answer some question he has. And then after much suffering, he at last finds the one book that he wished for — assuming a copy exists, and assuming it actually has anything to do with the question he was asking when he finds it — at last he knows. And what will he do next?”

I grinned back. “Find a new question to become obsessed with?”

“Exactly.”

“I’m not sure what —”

“Young man, if you allow research to be a ‘good thing’ that you might do, you are likely to spend your whole life looking into these questions, and never actually do anything to help anyone.”

I stared at him.

He smiled back at me.

“And the best solution to this problem is that I should just do the first thing that occurs to me which vaguely sounds like it might help?”

“Better that than do nothing at all.”

“Those aren’t the only options!”

“You could certainly spend ten minutes thinking about what to do. Perhaps you should actually flip over an hourglass and think about what the best thing will be to do while the sand flows. But I am of the firm opinion that after you have made a modest and reasonable effort, you should stop thinking and act.”

“Uh, well — most people, if they’ve spent that hour actually thinking, they’ve done a good part of what they ought to. But there should be people who are trying with all of their effort to figure out what is the best thing to do, and everyone who wants to see people’s lives get better, and problems get solved, ought to listen to those people — in my world there a big group of people who focused on donating more and on donating more effectively. They systematically looked at all of the charitable ideas they could find and tried to figure out exactly how much good each idea did once all of the possible considerations were considered.”

The old cultivator smiled at me, his eyes crinkling with amusement. “If you expect me to say that what you just described sounds terrible simply for the sake of continuing the argument, I am afraid I must disappoint you.”

There was a round of laughter.

“So long as most of the effort goes to actually acting, some effort towards what you describe might be justified — and if you want to hire someone to do this sort of scholarship for you, I’d not be adverse to being that person,” he laughed. “I know a fair number of youths who are early in their life course, with a bent that combines scholarly and practical curiosity who you might also hire — I repeat again, that there is a great danger of frittering away all your resources in thought and research and doing less good than you otherwise could do.”

“Introduce me to these young men — I agree that danger is serious. But there is danger in spending too little of our resources on thought and research. The key point always to keep in mind is how we can help other people as much as possible.”

“I like that as a goal,” he replied, still smiling.

“And just what do you do?” I grinned at the cultivator. “You’re very scholarly in how you like to argue.”

“I am — or I was — the chief librarian of one of the bigger libraries in the city. There were too many books for us to move and scatter throughout the city, so we’ve hidden most of them in the caves here — the tunnels are clearly labeled, to make sure the emperor’s forces will know not to use any spell work that might destroy the enchantments there. So perhaps not hidden as perfectly as possible.”

“The enchantments? — oh yes, you always put runework on books to keep them from decaying — that is pretty cool.”

“What did you do to preserve books in that world without magic that you are from?”

“Well, they decayed after a while. The older ones anyways. Occasionally a really old manuscript is found in desert areas where there was no moisture, so the parchment didn’t rot. Whenever that happens the historians become ecstatic. Or there were books that were turned into charcoal during a volcanic eruption two thousand years ago, and the group in charge of the site has developed techniques to slowly read the flakes of charcoal.”

“That is impressive magic in itself,” the cultivator replied. “I would imagine that the information would be almost entirely lost.”

“I’m not really sure how successful they have been.”

“Still, a noble attempt, and a noble goal.”

“Sadly, most of the books written in my world more than seven or eight hundred years ago were lost.”

The cultivator looked horrified.

“Well since we invented the… Uhhhhh… manuscript copiers — ink presses — a bit more than five hundred years ago, we haven’t lost many books, at least not any that were popular enough that a lot of copies were made.”

“Manuscript copiers?”

“When we first made them, one man could do the work of twenty people copying manuscripts a day. Over time though our text copiers have gotten so good that everyone has in their own house a device that can print out almost any book within an hour.”

“But how can you do that without chi? You must have your own magic to do it.”

“It’s just a clever use of machinery.”

“But wait — perhaps not as much of your history is lost as you think, can’t you ask the old cultivators about the books that existed when they were young? — but you have no cultivators. Wait — everyone dies before they turn a hundred?” His eyes bulged, “That is… horrible.”

It was a pretty horrifying fact in my view as well.

“That is not as different as it sounds. Except in Yatamo, most people never awaken, and so they die that young anyways? — aren’t most of you in this room not cultivators,” I waved around at the people who were listening to us argue. “It is wrong and a tragedy that you all will die ridiculously young as well — and you will too. You only have a golden core; doesn’t that mean you are likely to die before you reach two hundred years of age?”

He nodded. “A bit more than two hundred is more likely, but the last few decades are difficult when it is only the use of magic that keeps the aging body alive. But I have nothing to complain of, and I judged the risks of trying to open the second dantian to simply not be worth it, especially since I was well past fifty when I reached the point that my core was mature.”

The old man who'd lost his teeth said to me, “I like how you think young man — everyone ought to be a celestial, eh?”

“Any world where everyone is not at least as capable, long lived, and powerful as a celestial is considerably less cool than it ought to be — that is what I will dedicate myself to after this war, to creating such a world.”

“Ha! An entertaining vision. But I wish you good luck.”

“It ought not just be me — I cannot do everything alone. Everyone needs to act together, or at least everyone with any ability to help. Even you,” I looked at the toothless man in his carefully pressed robes. “You did not awaken, but you are not poor.”

He smiled at me. “I’m certainly not rich.”

“But aren’t there a lot of people who are much worse off than yourself?”

“Eh, we mostly take care of our own here in Yatamo, perhaps there are a few foreigners who can’t do anything useful, and who don’t belong to any clan, but nobody starves here, nobody dies from something that just takes five minutes for a healer to wave away.” He tilted his head and sucked his lips over his gums. “Suppose that might be why I never was jealous of those who managed to awaken and form their foundations. I always knew my life was much better — and I had the chance. I’ve always felt bad for those who never had a chance, like in the empire, or worse in Diet Vinh — all of those poor slaves there. I always felt bad for them.”

“And if you could help them? — would you? If there was some way that you could share some of the wealth and benefits you’ve enjoyed living here to make the lives of people better, no matter who they are, or where they live, would you?”

He looked at me. “You mean to ask me to actually give some money to some beneficial scheme — I’m certainly not going to do that right now, not after you just crushed my house.”

I laughed, and also flushed with embarrassment. “If… well I do not know how the war shall end, but perhaps I can help to rebuild it, or help you to buy somewhere else, or…” I shrugged helplessly.

He looked at his daughter, and she said, “Eh, we’ll make do. If you can actually help some poor kid like my Kisi to learn to meditate and awaken his spark, I’d guess that would be a better thing than helping us get a big house. We’ll still own our share of the land anyways — probably even if the clans submit to the empire again. We’ll make do.”

I swallowed and nodded. Though I still felt quite guilty.

“You aren’t as focused as most fanatic preachers on making everyone do exactly what you think they should.” The old man said.

“I’m not a fanatic preacher.”

“Yes, you are,” the golden core said. “I recognize the type, you certainly are.”

I laughed, with a bit of embarrassment. “I guess then I’ve learned that simply telling people to do things they don’t want to do doesn’t really work — guilt works a bit. But it still is unpleasant. I want you to see that helping others isn’t about hurting yourself, it is about being the best version of yourself that you can be. It is something you do out of abundance.” I grimaced. “This war isn’t good for that.”

The golden core shrugged. “Wars happen.”

“The main point is that I don’t want to tell anyone to do something that they can’t do, or that they would hate it if they were doing. I mean maybe they might make the world better, but — look, if someone is a saint, they will act like a saint. But everything needs to change. Really big change requires huge amounts of people acting, and huge amounts of people will only do things that work for normal humans.”