Longtermism
Longtermists would map these claims and conclusions on to humanity itself, as if humanity is an individual with its very own ‘potential’ to squander or fulfil, ruin or realise, over the course of ‘its lifetime’. So, on the one hand, a catastrophe that reduces the human population to zero would be tragic because of all the suffering it would inflict upon those alive at the time. Imagine the horror of starving to death in subfreezing temperatures, under pitch-black skies at noon, for years or decades after a thermonuclear war. This is the first tragedy, a personal tragedy for those directly affected. But there is, longtermists would argue, a second tragedy that is astronomically worse than the first, arising from the fact that our extinction would permanently foreclose what could be an extremely long and prosperous future over the next, say, ~10100 years (at which point the ‘heat death’ will make life impossible). In doing this, it would irreversibly destroy the ‘vast and glorious’ longterm potential of humanity, in Ord’s almost religious language – a ‘potential’ so huge, given the size of the Universe and the time left before reaching thermodynamic equilibrium, that the first tragedy would utterly pale in comparison.
The ideological backing of neofeudalism , in the same way that religion formed the ideological backing for feudalism in years past.