Life & Wisdom Quote by Clifford D. Simak

Simak’s line lands like a rebuke wrapped in a contingency plan: if we’re not willing to call ourselves barbarians, we’d better earn the denial. The provocation isn’t anti-machine romanticism so much as an indictment of a culture that treats technology as both morality and destiny. “Other than the present barbarism” frames modern life as a polished savagery - efficient, networked, plausibly civilized, yet still governed by domination, extraction, and the thrill of power. The sting is that barbarism here is compatible with comfort.

The sentence structure does sly work. “If mankind were to continue” sounds almost bureaucratic, like a memo about species survival, which makes the moral judgment colder and sharper. Then the hammer: “a new path must be found.” Not “should,” not “might.” Simak writes like someone who has watched the 20th century’s grand inventions get conscripted into war, propaganda, and accelerating inequality, and has concluded that better gadgets won’t fix the operating system.

The subtext is a critique of technological solutionism before it had that name. Simak isn’t arguing that tools are evil; he’s arguing that a civilization “based on” technology reduces human choices to engineering problems. That orientation makes cruelty scalable and turns ethics into an afterthought. Coming from a science-fiction writer, it’s also an internal challenge to the genre: imagine futures where progress isn’t synonymous with hardware - where the radical leap is social, spiritual, ecological, even quiet. Simak’s demand is for an alternate center of gravity, because the current one keeps reproducing the same violence with newer interfaces.