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(not embedding image becauase blood)

disclaimer: the following post is a fever rant and presented as is. do not take any conclusions with seriousness.

i loved Signalis. it is instantly become one of my favourite games of all time for many reasons. but this is not about that. rather, i want to talk about this image in particular. in all honesty, i do not remember which part of the game it is from, but it does what can only be described as haunt me. (edit: the image is from one of the end cards, and i understand the emotions it invokes in me are different from the authors’ intents) i think of it again and again involuntarily (i have to some degree come to peace with my mundane obsessive compulsiveness), and i feel the emotions that it invokes in me. what is this emotion? there is disgust, agony, pity, and all together, there is contempt.

i live in a state of continuous contempt. i don’t know if this has to do with being a software engineer working for a mediocre company in a mediocre country, plagued by problems that make excellence hardly a desirable attribute. i’ve read code that should have never seen the light of day, utter disresspect for one’s craft (especially in the era of GenAI and the like, where programming becomes plumbing patchwork together, except here even a leak is acceptable as long as ‘shipping’ is quick and no cracks are visible). i have seen people in high positions of power so monstrously misunderstand basic college concepts that i do not think i would’ve hired them if the tables were reversed. many a time i have found a piece of code that is abhorrent and ignores all REST design principles, and yet the person who wrote it is now some category of director. i have seen people solve merge conflicts after merge conflicts on each release not understanding that perhaps there is something fundamentally wrong with their VCS flow and it should be razed to the ground.

but i do not want to backhandedly gloat, or be cynical and cry “woe is me!” this post is not about woe, it is about fear. almost every metaphorical roof i have lived under leaks, sometimes subtly, but surely. that there are cracks in a roof is an incredibly effective heuristic. but yet, i cannot see the cracks. i am not a “polyglot”, i cannot parse through so many languages that i run into at work. i can probably reverse engineer what it does, but i cannot see the cracks that will most surely rear their head at some point of time. likewise, it is only logical that my own craft has cracks, has gaps and errors, maladies that are going to be invisible until they are. i can be contemptful of (and perhaps righteously so), code that i understand to be haphazardly hacked together by someone who has no interest (or rather, no time) to study the craft and specific subfield that they are operating in. but is it possible for me to point this contempt towards myself?

i know many a developer who has contempt for C and C++, and consider manually managed memory safety to be beyond the limits of human finitude, especially as code begins to scale. i find myself mostly agreeing with this, as my few experiences with moderately complex C++ have been a disastrous mess of segmentation faults. i may be wrong here, but i do intuitively feel the move to more memory-safe system level languages is bound to happen. should this happen, what would the world think of the C developer a few decades from now? Pascal, Perl, FORTRAN, these are programming languages now considered archaic. i don’t think the average developer of today could, or would wish to handle one of those. there are pragmatic reasons for why some practices become antiquated, and others replace them. this is the process of Time, and this is inevitable. one can say that certain FORTRAN programs were fantastic for their age, but still consider their usage in the current day to be contemptible. this is understandable and reasonable, because the process of Time changes what is reasonable and what is unreasonable.

but now, i ask you for a moment to forget about Time. look at this piece of code, and evaluate it as it is. i ask you with utter sincerity to use the lens of the present to analyse the past, as if those were not different times. this is not a necessarily radical idea, we can say that slavery was an evil idea, regardless of the time period, and in each time period it has had its opponents. the fact that there can be opponents to an idea, to a phenomenon, is a sign that it was opposable in the period that it was largely unopposed it. i do not know if we can have contempt for the people who did not oppose it, but we can have contempt and pity for the fact that the tragedy befell upon us.

for all sociological and historical conditions that an event is contingent upon, it is still perceived in a certain way stripped of those contingencies. one can say, asynchronusly, sincerely, and perhaps truly that thinking of the universe as made of four elements is silly. it may have been excusable at the Time, when it was in vogue, but if one were to make the same argument today (or as far as we know, any time in the future), it would be considered silly. that the alchemists who tried to create the Philosopher’s Stone and achieve immortality thus, or those who drank mercury in hope of the same, were engaging in entirely contemptful activities. people themselves cannot be stripped from Time, but happenings can happen at any point of time, and it is entirely possible to condemn them in the abstract.

a penny for a thought

but perhaps i am being unfair, or unjust, or too judgemental, or too abstract. but consider this thought experiment.

an incredibly competent soldier in an incredibly competent army in premodern England (i’m sure you can correct me on the specifics here, but this is broadly a sensible example) is forged an incredibly competent sword by the most competent blacksmith or swordmaker or what have you. this soul fights valiantly on the beaches of Normandy in some minor kingsly battle and slays a hundred enemies in a way that would have won him some great reward after the battle. simultaneously, an incredibly competent soldier for the British army in World War II fights valiantly and slays a hundred enemies on the beaches of Normandy. through some ill fate they are swapped across time. what happens now?

i would imagine that the premodern soldier would undergo some form of instant psychosis. war is louder, more violent, and death is more of a trifle than it has ever been. if he is fortunate, he dies immediately and has little time to internalise the horrors that he has witnessed. the people around him look at him in awe and contempt. what a fool is this man who has brought a sword to a gun fight? as they look at the charred corpse obliterated beyond recognition, there is no sign that this man was a victim of a cruel Time anomaly. he is contemptible in the present, by the values of the present.

there are many a thing from the past that are contemptible in the present. to mention Freud in a class outside of psychoanalysis would bring many side eyes your way. to speak of the four humours, or the four / five elements would indeed be a contemptible position in a biology or a chemistry class. to attempt monarchy in america would be a contemptible goal according to most. there are also many a thing from the uncomfortably recent past that are contemptible in the present. the handling of the HIV pandemic is by all means contemptible even outside the considerations of the time it was in. inductively, one could suggest that most things of the present would be equally contemptible in some point in the future. i don’t know which it will be, and how long it will take for them.

and yet, is the instinctual contempt of the past not a sign of progress? that one is to disgusted at any serious consideration of plague doctors’ methods is a sign that we have transcended from those. to look at primitive atomic models with contempt is a sign that science has transcended. to look at slavery and monarchy with contempt is a sign that liberty has transcended. to look at needless suffering in the wars and colonialisms of the 20th century is a sign that we have transcended beyond those. conversely, if we seek to transcend the present, should we not have boundless contempt for it?

this is not a radical idea. we already live in contempt. we despise politics as a whole, insofar as “apoliticalness” has become a virtue. we despise poverty, we despise preventable disease. i believe (and many others do) that we can end poverty and starvation as a whole, and ending certain preventable diseases is entirely feasible. we have ended Smallpox, and we can end Measles. and yet, there are people who contemptibly and grotesquely impede these goals by participating in and sustaining a system that prioritises profits over the welfare of Man. this is not a polemic, but a matter of factly statement. there is an inevitable future where our acceptance and compliance towards human cruelties will be seen with ubiquitous contempt. “why were there so few violent slave uprisings?” “why were there so many women opposing suffrage?” “why did we give evil finance corporations bail outs while the people who suffered in their bankruptcy were left penniless?” these questions are answerable and justifiable, but the instinctual contempt towards their happening will only increase with time. the “i can understand why things would have ended up the way that they did” will always be followed by a sigh and a “,but-”.

given this is the case, should a dreamer of radical progress not also be a dreamer of radical contempt? should we not dream of a time where we hold all political leaders of 2025 unforgivably contemptible because they bolstered slave labour states in the middle east for profitable oil deals? should we not dream of a time when all of the indian cabinet is held in contempt for funding a warmongering state through their trade deals? should we not dream of a time where, indeed, everyone is held in contempt for agreeing to participate in a labour-exploitative capitalist society? “my god, gig jobs with no labour protections? it’s better then when people were losing fingers in factories i suppose, but it’s still horrible as hell! i sure am grateful for not living in 2025”

the answer to all of these questions is “i do not know, and for the most part, i do not care.” i write this because this is how i am compelled to feel. this dream of boundless contempt gives me equal parts fear and joy. is this not a logical extension of “being on the right side of history?” in the process of Time, Shakespeare becomes “ugh, Shakespeare”, and all our greatest writers, thinkers, scientists, arhcitects, and indeed software engineers will be seen as contemptfully stupid. it may be far, but i am hard pressed to imagine there will be little difference of competence perceived in a Parmenides and an Einstein. perhaps this is taking it too far.

but this is where i must confess, very little of my emotional state here has to do with the process of History. the truth is, i was a terrible engineer six months ago, and i have to assume that me from six months in the future will consider my work to be terrible in much the same way. i do not for the life of me know how to code a cryptographic system that will be relevant for a hundred years. in fact, i don’t think the things i write will be relevant for five years. i know that i have engineered miserable and contemptible things, and that i will continue to do so in the future.

Doubt

while this societal contempt exists and continues to exist, is it not, in a word, wrong? academics all over the world point at the past and say “oh, that was miserable, but there were some truly novel ideas there too!” and they are right for the most part. in the domain of knowledge contempt is perhaps unjustified, but how often does contempt exist in the domain of knowledge anyway? if one is to reduce the world to clockwork and each action to a robotic response to environmental stimuli, there is no scope for judgement whatsoever. is this not the goal of philosophy as The Gay Science? is this not the goal of psychoanalysis, of political science, to move mishaps from the domain of instinctual blame to the domain of knowledgeable regret.

but humans are not merely citizens of the domain of knowledge, we are also citizens of the domain of instinct. we feel as much as we think, and those feelings are also important to me. when eyes look down upon me, unjustly, they still look down upon me. knowledge of the Truth does not give me transcendence from the domain of instict, and from the thoughts of people around me.

in the process of social contempt over Time there is another asymmetry. the subject of contempt are men in the individual sense, the recipient of contempt is Man as a whole. the prodigal armyman finds himself at a disproportionate advantage is premodern Britain, and yet he runs out of ammunition in a few minutes and can no longer fight. he does not know how to create more, he cannot in a Wizard of Oz-esque way bring knowledge to the previously contemptible folk. because really, he does not know how a gun is made, how the springs inside it work, what metals it is made of and how to cast them, hell, even how to speak the language of the time. while the premodern soldier, with the help of linguists and etymologists would be able to translate Old English to New English, the linguist of the past does not know New English to begin with. the modern man in pre-modernity has now become even less than the premodern man. as a man among Man, he was great and competent, but as a man by himself, he has become miserable. he has also brought with him some germs that will probably change the course of history and get him excommunicated from whatever society he has found himself in.

perhaps, Hell

is hell so appealing because we wish to justify our contempt? as i have said before i consider hope to be contingent upon a Timeless contempt. does contempt for Man give us hope for all men? i don’t know why i find hell such an appealing idea instinctively, perhaps it is a way of extrapolating justice onto a fetish object.

why i do not fear the contempt of the past

i am not afraid of the contempt of “my ancestors”, as many people or rather archetypes of people are. i cannot have empathy for my ancestors in the distant past. i am a person, as embedded in time, with a definite past but no definite future. i cannot extrapolate contempt for the future (then translate it into the past) because i do not know of any future to have contempt for. perhaps this will change with age as i differentiate “past” and “future” as both lived presents, but as for now i am not concerned. i am too busy with contempt for them to be afraid of their contempt towards me.