Sword, Gun, Atom bomb

Try to imagine the feel of a cold weapon. It is a solid, weighty presence that must be awakened with your entire being. When you grip a sword, its weight travels from your palm, spreading through the sinews of your arm to become an extension of your body. You must learn to drive it with your whole body, to feel the trembling arc it carves through the air between the rise and fall of your breath and the movement of your feet. Every swing is a direct conversation with the physical world.

More importantly, in the space where two swords meet, time itself is stretched, given density. This is a form of violence that is like a dialogue. You must read, you must decipher, every posture of your opponent—the flicker in their eye, the slight dip of their shoulder, the shift in their balance. The fatal blow often hangs on a single thought, waiting for a fleeting weakness within a web of tension woven from a long standoff, from feints and parries. In this elongated time, there exists a space, a breathing space that could be called ‘ethics’. Fear, hesitation, calculation, even a sliver of mercy, might be born here. Action is never entirely severed from thought.

Then, the gun appeared. Its arrival was not a steady evolution, but an abrupt, fundamental break. In a cold, almost emotionless manner, it cancelled the entire preceding story of body, skill, and courage. Its weight is isolated, irrelevant to your body; its power is contained, irrelevant to your strength. It completely severed the sensory link between the actor and the act.

From then on, violence became abstract. The target was no longer a living other engaged in a physical dialogue with you, but a distant, marked point in the sights of a scope. Killing, an act that once demanded the full commitment of one's being, an act of blood and physical sensation, was simplified into a neurological twitch of an index finger, almost imperceptible. The ‘time gap’ that once reserved a final space for conscience was emptied, reduced to a vacuum. There was no longer a buffer between the intent to destroy and the consequence of destruction. The so-called ‘dialogue’ ended in a one-sided sentence.

And this was only the beginning. Once opened, this path toward the ‘instantaneous’ and the ‘remote’ carried us with unstoppable acceleration to its logical endpoint in space and time—the nuclear weapon.

If the firearm detached violence from the body, then the nuclear weapon detaches destruction from reality as we can comprehend it. Its form is no longer a weapon held in the hand, but coordinates on a map, data on a screen, a silent steel giant in a subterranean silo. Its deployment is cloaked in layers of technical bureaucracy, ultimately condensed into a single, casual press of a button—an act whose physical effort is no different from typing a character on a keyboard.

Never have we been so close to destruction, and never have we been so distant from its reality. When one possesses the god-like power to erase a city, to end millions of lives, to poison the future of an entire planet, what they might feel is merely the execution of a weightless, textureless command. Here, violence completes its final alienation: it becomes so immense as to be invisible, so effortless as to be unreal.

This is the picture of our times: a complete trajectory from the weighty dialogue of swords, to the fingertip sentence of the firearm, to the virtual command of the nuclear button. It tells a story of ‘separation’—the separation of action from reflection, of power from wisdom, and finally, the catastrophic separation of humanity from the consequences of its own actions.

On this path to instantaneous destruction that we have paved ourselves, did we not, at the moment of that first trigger pull, shoot our own souls into an irretrievable distance along with that whistling bullet?

The answer to this question is unknowable, but we can dissect the question itself. In the vacuum carved out by the instantaneous nature of the firearm, we can glimpse two starkly different kinds of time, operating simultaneously within the body of our civilisation at speeds that cannot be reconciled. This is the initial and most fundamental cause of the rift: we possess two clocks that are not on the same frequency—one for technology, and one for ethics.

The clock of technology is a precision machine with Moore’s Law as its metronome. Each of its ticks is built upon the sum of all previous ticks, its hand racing forward with a near-frenzied exponential acceleration. It is like a tireless, self-replicating life form, where every breakthrough provides the fuel for the next, more drastic breakthrough. It is concerned only with ‘can it be done?’, never ‘should it be done?’. Its gaze is forever forward, fixed on the dazzling horizon of possibility—never minding the ruins left behind.

History provides the most startling footnote to this: the Manhattan Project. On the deserts of Los Alamos, New Mexico, a generation of the finest minds was gathered for a feverish undertaking, a race against the laws of physics. In just a few short years, a near-mythical mass-energy equation was transformed in their hands into an unprecedented reality capable of wiping cities off the map. It was a time of pure, sequestered rationality, filled with the deduction of equations, the cutting of metal, and the calculation of data. Driving it all was intellectual pride, the fear of war, and an almost obsessive fascination with ‘possibility’ itself.

However, when the mushroom cloud of the Trinity test—that flower of terrifying beauty, a distillation of human intellect and violence—rose in the desert dawn, the clock of technology reached its apex. It was at that precise moment that the other clock, the one belonging to ethics, almost forgotten, finally struck its heavy, sluggish chime. J. Robert Oppenheimer, the ‘father of the atomic bomb’, witnessing the ‘miracle’ of his own creation, found the verses of the ancient Indian Bhagavad Gita echoing in his mind: "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds".

This moment was the most tragic intersection of the two clocks. The hand of technology had already raced to the finish line, while the hand of ethics had only just begun to tremble.

Compared to technology’s relentless accelerator, the clock of ethics is more like a garden that requires generations of patient cultivation. Its growth depends on the collective mourning of trauma, the repeated debate of values, the trial and error of countless social experiments. Nearly every one of its advancements is written in the ink of spilt blood. Whether it was the long struggle to abolish slavery or the articles of the Geneva Conventions that attempt to draw a bottom line for the savagery of war, they are all reactive, patch-up responses to immense tragedies that have already occurred. The time of ethics is retrospective; it forever trails behind disaster, attempting to build some meaning upon the ruins, yet it seems it can never get ahead of disaster to prevent it from happening.

This is not a peculiarity of our time. Two centuries ago, when Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein, she foresaw all of this with a genius-like intuition. Dr Victor Frankenstein is a perfect prototype of one utterly dominated by the clock of technology. He frantically and unreflectively breathes life into a heap of inanimate flesh, only to be utterly crushed by the ethical responsibility that follows the moment the ‘monster’ opens its eyes. And with it, everything he had was shattered. He is a brilliant creator, but a cowardly, absent father.

We are the descendants of Victor Frankenstein. Time and again, in the deserts of Los Alamos, in the cleanrooms of Silicon Valley, in the gene-editing labs, we reenact his story. We are so adept at kindling the ‘fire stolen from heaven’, yet we always wait until the flames have spread to scorch our own skin before we begin to clumsily learn how to control it. We believe ourselves to be brilliant creators, yet we are fated to be the dullest of moralists, forever arriving at the scene of every problem we have personally manufactured with a wisdom—or perhaps a foolishness—that is purely after-the-fact.

However, merely lamenting our slow reactions is far from enough; this can even lead to a kind of helpless self-forgiveness. We must ask more deeply: where does that technological clock get its inexhaustible energy? Why do we—as the descendants of Victor—time and again, despite the lessons of history and the warnings of fiction, still irresistibly press down on the accelerator, hurtling toward that unknown territory that may well be an abyss?

The answer is perhaps unsettling: because technology itself is not the driver of this racing machine, not even the engine. It is merely the transmission system, the most faithful and efficient amplifier for the engine. And the engine that truly provides the unending power has never changed. It is hidden deep within our own chests—that ancient and formidable human nature, constituted by fear, greed, tribalism, and the will to power.

Technology has never created a new desire; it has only fashioned the most stylish and lethal prosthetics for our oldest desires.

Think of the almost absurd arms race of the Cold War. Was the production of tens of thousands of nuclear warheads really about pure scientific exploration? No. Its fundamental driving force was one of humanity’s most primal emotions: tribal fear and animosity. The ‘us-versus-them’ binary, of the tribe by the campfire wary of another, of the city-state building high walls, was armed to the teeth by 20th-century technology. Suspicion and hatred of the ‘Other’, through the precise calculations of satellites, radar, and computers, evolved into a cold strategic deterrence ensuring the ability to wipe the opposing civilisation from the face of the Earth dozens of times over. We were merely using the most advanced physics to practice a tribal logic that has remained unchanged for millennia.

And today, this engine is roaring in more insidious ways. The algorithms of social media have no love or hate in themselves—but they have ‘discovered’ a secret in the sea of data that generates maximum traffic and profit: intensifying opposition, inciting anger, and reinforcing prejudice is the best way to maintain user attention. And so, they tirelessly push the most polarising and inflammatory views directly before our eyes, like an efficient drug dealer precisely stimulating the ancient ‘us-versus-them’ nerves in our brains.

Likewise, the will to power that seeks to control everything and eliminate all uncertainty is a key component of this engine. From ancient emperors longing for immortality to modern states building all-encompassing surveillance systems, the internal impulse is essentially the same. When the Prism scandal revealed that governments could easily penetrate our digital lives, what we saw was not just a victory for technology, but a victory for the will to power. It desires to make the Other transparent while hiding itself in darkness; it desires to predict everything in order to control everything. In the face of this will, individual privacy, freedom, and dignity become costs that can be calculated and sacrificed.

Therefore, we must admit a cruel fact: the dilemma we face is not ‘runaway technology’ versus an ‘innocent humanity’. On the contrary, it is a ‘runaway humanity’ that is wielding unprecedentedly powerful technology. We have never truly walked out of the cave of myth, suspicion, and blood; we have only replaced the drawings on its walls with digital screens and swapped the stone axes in our hands for levers capable of moving the entire Earth.

We use space-age tools to continue stone-age conflicts.

At this point, a bleak picture has emerged: a relentless engine of desire, driven by ancient impulses, is pushing us through the amplifier of technology toward a future where power and wisdom are severely imbalanced.

However, an obvious paradox confronts us: if our inner nature is so primitive, how do we explain the seemingly stable, sophisticated, even elegant world before us? The skyscrapers that pierce the clouds, the symphonies that echo in concert halls, the orders of trade and law that sustain the globe—is all this not proof that we have successfully tamed the beast within?

This is perhaps our most fatal misunderstanding. The ‘civilisation’ we pride ourselves on is not a universal elevation of our inner virtue, but more like a meticulously constructed, yet extremely fragile, geological crust. It is composed of laws, contracts, state apparatuses, social norms, and codes of conduct. Upon this thin shell, we perform a drama of rationality, cooperation, and tolerance. But beneath this crust, the molten magma of human nature has never cooled for a moment. Our peace, to a large extent, stems not from the extinguishing of the magma, but merely from the temporary solidity of the crust.

The reason we do not harm others most of the time is not because we have evolved into moral saints, but because the system we call the ‘state’, the Leviathan, holds a monopoly on legitimate violence and ensures that the cost of ‘doing evil’ is far greater than its benefit. We abide by contracts and cooperate with strangers because a stable social structure makes trust and collaboration a better survival strategy than plunder and betrayal. Our virtue is the result of being disciplined under this system of external constraints; it is profoundly dependent on the continued effectiveness of this system.

This fragile crust is now facing an unprecedented erosion from technology itself. The thing we once saw as the light of progress is now, in turn, becoming the most powerful tool for dismantling the foundations of civilisation. The rift between power and wisdom is penetrating every level of our existence in more diverse and insidious ways. The self-propelling machine of capital has pinned us under the weight of a post-cybernetic society, pushing us, in a cyberpunk-style alienation, toward the ‘social death’ of the ‘Ultimate Inheritor’. The misuse of gene editing heralds a new caste system based on biology, drawing an eternal chasm between humans and posthumans. And our pursuit of uncontrollable AI, without first solving its black box problem, is creating an ultimate cognitive Other that might ‘optimise’ away our values and existence itself as mere ‘noise’. And how much of an ethical system has humanity developed to deal with them? An utterly barren one, like a child playing with fire. These silent abysses—be they social, biological, or intelligent—all share the same core: an autonomous system created by humans, operating at transhuman speed, and ultimately serving a non-human logic. They are all pushing their creators toward an end that is both uncontrollable and unbearable.

And history is a cruel museum recording how this crust has repeatedly fractured. There is no more solid example than 20th-century Germany. Before the Nazis came to power, that land was the home of Kant, Hegel, Beethoven, and Bach. Yet, when economic collapse, a sense of humiliation, and extremist ideology applied pressure together, the thin shell of civilisation shattered with unbelievable speed. What followed was not a simple regression to barbarism, but something far more terrifying: a demonic marriage of ancient hatred with the precise management of modern chemistry, industrialised assembly lines, and bureaucracy. Auschwitz proved in an irrefutable way that scientific and cultural prosperity offers almost no immunity to the darkness deep within the human heart.

And this is not merely a nightmare sealed away in history. Right now, in Gaza, that besieged strip of land, we are witnessing an ongoing tragedy, one that has been identified by UN experts, international courts, and countless observers as ‘genocide’. This is the most vivid and brutal contemporary footnote to all the theories we have discussed.

Here, an ancient conflict driven by generational trauma, disputes over land, and identity politics, is once again combined with the most advanced technologies of slaughter. Precision-guided bombs level places that should be protected by the rules of ‘civilisation’—hospitals, schools, refugee camps. Ubiquitous surveillance technology and information blockades attempt to turn a piece of land into an isolated slaughterhouse. Meanwhile, on the battlefield of social media, disinformation and hate speech are dehumanising the ‘Other’ with unprecedented efficiency, providing a moral green light for the atrocities on the ground.

This brings us back once again to Mary Shelley’s tragedy. Frankenstein’s creation may have been gentle at heart, pure in its intentions, but the human world around it was filled with prejudice and malice. Similarly, Zionism, a project born of historical trauma, was structurally empowered by Western colonial systems, only to eventually spiral into a consequence that its creators could no longer fully control. Like Frankenstein’s creation, this project has become alienated, spiralling into a monstrous state.

But this is not fiction; it is a real-world performance of ‘necropolitics’—a power system that decides who may live and who must die, inflicting irreversible trauma on both its creators and its victims. Here, humanity once again exposes its original sin: that obsession with creating forces it can neither understand nor take responsibility for. And as always, it is the ordinary, innocent people, especially the children, who pay the price for crimes they never committed.

Children are dying in the rubble, while the monster and its creators celebrate victory. The entire world, meanwhile, watches on in suffocating silence. We share the same planet, belong to the same species, yet some lives are treated as so obviously disposable, as negligible collateral. The tragedy of Gaza acts like a prism, refracting the failure of our entire civilisation. It shows us how international laws and humanitarian principles meant to protect the weak—our vaunted ‘crust’—are so utterly fragile in the face of naked political will and the thirst for tribal revenge. It demonstrates, in real time, that once a group is stripped of its status as ‘human’, any atrocity inflicted upon it can be rationalised in the language of ‘civilisation’ and ‘self-defence’.

At this point, our dissection of the rift is complete. The full picture is chilling: we are creating, at an exponential rate, powers we cannot comprehend; driving these powers are our unchanging, irrational inner impulses; and what we use to restrain all this is merely an extremely fragile framework of external civilisation, one that could collapse at any moment in the wrestling of realpolitik.

This is a near-perfect recipe for self-destruction. We stand on a highly unstable volcano of our own making, not only drilling frantically toward the Earth’s core but also enthusiastically handing the sharpest chisels to the very crust beneath our feet.

And so we arrive at a core diagnosis that can no longer be avoided: there exists a profound and ever-widening rift between the power humanity wields—a power sufficient to tear apart the planet and itself—and the inner impulses and collective wisdom we have to control that power.

We are children wielding the sceptres of gods, a primitive tribe steering a starship. In the silence of the cosmos, we are the only known species that can touch the stars with its thoughts, and the only one that can utterly erase itself with its actions. All our art, our philosophy, our science, and our love, blossoms on this highly unstable volcano. This is our entire glory, and our entire tragedy.

And so, the ultimate question confronts us with an irrefutable posture: can this rift, this abyss between power and wisdom, be closed?

The answer is, likewise, unknowable. We cannot turn back the clock of technology; we cannot return to some pastoral, pre-modern Eden. Nor can we, through some metaphysical ‘epiphany,’ completely rewrite the tribalism and irrationality etched into our nature by millions of years of evolution.

So, are we doomed to fail? No. Perhaps the key lies not in eliminating the abyss, but in whether we have the courage and wisdom to cross it. This is no longer a myth of return or purification, but a real-world task of ‘construction,’ one filled with dust and sweat. And the construction of this bridge does not belong only to politicians, scientists, or philosophers. Its blueprints are in the hands of every one of us. To be honest, no one knows the true formula to combat our self-destructive impulse, but at the very least, it can be embodied in our every small act of refusing to be incited by hate speech, of choosing deep thought over instant reaction, of speaking out against the injustices around us, and of teaching our children to love a more diverse and complex world.

Ultimately, returning to that question—can this gap be closed?—leads us toward the answer. Because we will soon find out that if we choose the wrong answer, then everything else—all that we have loved, hated, cried for, created, and dreamed of—will no longer matter.