The Alamo of Human Civilization: A Supplement to “Civilization Is a Devourer”

I have a habit:

A few days after publishing a piece, I go back and read it again.

Not for proofreading. Not for editing.

But in a far more merciless way —

to excavate the flaws I failed to see the first time.

This piece is exactly such a case

:“The True Face of Civilization Is a Devourer — Our Menu Consists Only of the Poor, the Weak, and the Marginalized.”  

It is a topic I have wanted to write for a long time, but kept postponing out of sheer laziness.

It is too big. Writing it will make people deeply uncomfortable.

But it had to be written. And I have written it.

I believe very few authors in this world have truly confronted the questions raised here.

Because by now, most of humanity has already become the fed —

conditioned, pacified, sedated, and mentally castrated by the system.

And yes, this includes many creators who proudly claim to be “independent thinkers.”

This is no coincidence.

It was one of the core proposals made thirty‑one years ago by Zbigniew Kazimierz Brzeziński at the Fairmont Hotel meeting:

“Tittyainment.”

Seeing through their intentions is not difficult.

Refusing the sedation bread is what’s truly hard.

This has nothing to do with education, background, or social class.Reduced to its essence, it comes down to a single principle:

Morality.

Morality is not education.

It is not civilization.

It is not class privilege.

It cannot be eaten.Y

et it is the most primitive, the most fundamental, and the least teachable ability —

the ability to judge the world with clear, uncorrupted logic.

Those who possess morality can see the true nature of things.

And that is precisely what they want to systematically castrate.

With this basic moral sense, I returned to the original text.

I must add one more section.

If civilization insists that “a certain number of years after the author’s death, the work shall enter the public domain,”

then I can accept only one premise:

All works that enter the public domain must be completely and permanently prohibited from any form of commercial profit.

Since the spokesmen of civilization declare that “knowledge belongs to all humanity,”

then the circulation of knowledge must not depend on any profit‑driven industry.

If a publisher wants to reprint Journey to the West, fine —

but since you claim to be performing an act “for the benefit of human civilization,”

you have no grounds to speak of printing costs, logistics, or labor.

That is the logic of business, not the logic of civilizational duty.

If an AI company wants to use public domain works for training, fine —

but every service built upon them must be completely free.

If AI truly exists to benefit all humanity, it has no right to profit from feeding on what belongs to all.

If a corporation wants to use this knowledge to produce goods, fine —

but those goods must be provided to the public at no cost.

What belongs to all humanity cannot become a source of private profit.

Only when there is

“free input and free output” 

can sharing truly be called sharing.

Anything else is not sharing.

It is harvesting wearing the mask of civilization.

Anything else is not morality.

It is exploitation.

Some will say:

“Librarians, public institutions, and non‑profits also use public domain works.”

Yes — and the reason they can be called “public” is that their costs are borne by all taxpayers, not by the creators.

That is true public domain.

That is true sharing.

That is the morality civilization should uphold.

But today’s so‑called “public domain” operates in the exact opposite manner:

Creators bear all the cost, all the suffering, all the years of life.

Capital reaps all the profit — all under the noble banner of “for the benefit of all humanity.”

In the end, they are even praised as moral exemplars —

simply because they hold the power to legally plunder the works of the dead.

When “civilization” becomes the justification for legally seizing works,

it can seize anything.

Your property.

Your skills.

Your life.

And one day, all of it may be taken by an international law signed by them.

I propose “completely free” not out of naivety,

but to force those who monopolize the right to define civilization to answer one simple question:

When you say “knowledge belongs to all humanity,”

do you mean sharing — or plunder?

Anyone with even the most basic moral sense already knows the answer.

If civilization truly believes this,

then the cost of sharing should be borne by all humanity —

not harvested entirely by capital after the creator is dead and buried.

If you cannot achieve real sharing,

then stop using the word “sharing” to disguise exploitation.

If civilization cannot do true sharing,

then at least respect the blood, sweat, and suffering of creatorsand maintain strict copyright protection —

until civilization no longer needs to feed its devourer with the bones of creators.

This is not only about whether civilization will descend into moral ruin.

It is about whether we still have the courage to look the devourer in the eye.

It is human nature to fear the devourer.

That is not shameful.

What is shameful is a human civilization that has lost its morality.

Morality is the Alamo of human civilization.

By VON(壹叔瘋神)

PS： Some may raise a familiar fallacy:

“If we cannot freely use everything created by those before us, civilization cannot progress. Pythagoras discovered his theorem—should we be forbidden from using it?”

This is a false analogy.

The Pythagorean theorem, gravity, the speed of light, entropy, the mechanics of a rolling wheel—

these belong to the realm of natural laws and mathematical truths.

They are objective realities.

They exist eternally, regardless of whether humanity discovers them or not.

The person who discovers a natural law is not a creator.

He is merely the first to notice what already exists.

But literary works are different.

They do not pre‑exist in the universe.

They are not part of nature.

They do not emerge spontaneously without a creator.

They are singular entities brought into existence from nothing—

through the creator’s sweat, pain, labor, spirit, and life.

Natural laws can be independently rediscovered an infinite number of times.

A work of art cannot be independently recreated by anyone.

To equate natural laws with creative works is a fundamental error in the ethics of civilization.