Time & Perspective Quote by David Brin

The sneakiest villain in Brin's warning is the one wearing a halo. "Self-righteous people" aren’t just annoying moralizers; they’re portrayed as cognitive escape artists, capable of talking themselves into amnesia about membership and obligation. The phrase "part of a civilization" lands like a rebuke to the fantasy of purity: you don’t get to denounce the system while relying on its infrastructure, knowledge, freedoms, and inherited norms. Brin’s target isn’t dissent. It’s dissociation.

"Feed on that culture, bringing it down" is deliberately parasitic imagery. It frames cultural sabotage as something that can masquerade as virtue, drawing strength from the very thing it undermines. That’s the subtext: the threat doesn’t always arrive as open barbarism; it can show up as performative righteousness that treats compromise, pluralism, and institutional trust as moral contamination. The danger is less "they disagree with us" than "they refuse the premise that we share a we."

The historical line - "It's happened many times in the past" - is a science-fiction writer’s way of invoking civilizational cycles without naming names: late republics, purist revolutions, ideological purges, movements that begin as reform and end as bonfires of legitimacy. Brin’s context is the liberal, tech-enabled modernity he often defends: messy, incremental, dependent on mutual restraint. "It could happen to us" punctures the comforting belief that collapse is something that happens to other, lesser societies. The intent is prophylactic: a reminder that civilization isn’t a trophy you inherit, it’s a practice you can quit.