Prophecy of purpose

"One fine day, a purely predatory world shall consume itself. Yes, the devil shall take the hindmost until the foremost is the hindmost. In an individual, selfishness uglifies the soul; for human species, selfishness is extinction.
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If we believe that humanity may transcend tooth & claw, if we believe divers races & creeds can share this world as peaceably as the orphans share their candlenut tree, if we believe leaders must be just, violence muzzled, power accountable & the riches of the Earth & its Oceans shared equitably, such a world will come to pass. I am not deceived. It is the hardest of worlds to make real.
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A life spent shaping the world I want Jackson [his son] to inherit, not one I fear Jackson shall inherit, this strikes me as a life worth the living.
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He who would do battle with the many-headed hydra of human nature must pay a world of pain & his family must pay it along with him! & only as you gasp your dying breath shall you understand, your life amounted to no more than one drop in a limitless ocean!
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Yet what is any ocean but a multitude of drops?"

- From: The Pacific Journal of Adam Ewing (Cloud Atlas by David Michell)