Life & Wisdom Quote by L. Neil Smith

Smith laces a doomsday imperative with a market pitch, and the abrasion is the point. “Prevent the annihilation of the human race” is the kind of moral absolute usually reserved for governments, prophets, or solemn institutional campaigns. He yanks it out of that register and hands it to “individuals,” then spikes it with the phrase “unprecedentedly profitable.” The move is deliberately provocative: if you want people to act at scale, don’t just shame them with apocalypse; bribe them with upside.

The subtext is classic libertarian science-fiction confidence: institutions are sluggish, self-serving, and structurally incapable of solving existential risks without turning salvation into bureaucracy. Individuals, by contrast, are imagined as nimble, inventive, and properly motivated when the incentives are aligned. Profit isn’t treated as a moral taint here; it’s framed as the only engine powerful enough to convert abstract species-level danger into concrete, repeatable action. He’s not pleading for altruism. He’s arguing for a system where doing the right thing is also the smart thing.

Contextually, this sits in late-20th-century anxieties (nuclear war, environmental collapse) filtered through a writerly worldview that distrusts centralized authority and romanticizes entrepreneurial problem-solvers. The hyphenated asides function like stage-whispers: “unprecedented” signals the scale of the crisis, while “unprecedentedly profitable” punctures any sanctimony. Smith’s intent is to make the reader uncomfortable with their own assumptions about what counts as a legitimate motive - and then to leverage that discomfort into a bolder claim: survival may depend less on collective virtue than on personal agency married to self-interest.