Life & Wisdom Quote by Clifford D. Simak

Simak frames apocalypse as a moral choice, not a meteor. The sting of “willing perversity” is that it refuses the comforting story that humans are simply overwhelmed by outside forces or bad luck. We chose it. Not in a single villain’s scheme, but in a slow, collective shrug at what we claimed to value.

The sentence is built like an autopsy report that can’t quite believe its own findings. That opening “Could that have been…” isn’t genuine uncertainty; it’s the rhetorical posture of someone staring at the wreckage and trying to locate the moment the species decided to betray itself. Simak piles on the weight with “set at naught,” an old, formal phrase that makes the act feel not impulsive but deliberate, almost legalistic: a conscious annulment.

Then comes the real provocation: the timescale. “Hardly won and structured in the light of reason for…more than a million years” weaponizes evolutionary grandeur against modern complacency. Civilization isn’t a natural default; it’s an improbable construction project, paid for in pain and time. By invoking “reason” as the scaffolding, Simak also points at the twist that makes sci-fi so effective: the same rational capacity that builds ethics, laws, and cooperation can be repurposed to justify cruelty, extractive systems, and self-erasure.

Contextually, Simak wrote out of a 20th century thick with proof that “progress” and barbarism can share a calendar: industrialized war, propaganda, nuclear brinkmanship, ecological anxiety. The subtext is accusation disguised as speculation: if we undo our values, it won’t be because we forgot them. It’ll be because we found it convenient to stop believing in them.