Letter To A Lady

Dear girl—First of all I thought you had said you were (currently) married—this in the email you sent me to tell me about yourself and your place and position in the world right now—which I am grateful for I’d like to say.  Are you married? I can’t figure it out!
         But I’d also like to add one proofreading improvement from the last, what you considered resentful email from yours truly (me).  It is as follows: I wrote,

I don’t have enough for myself to bother giving away, and if I were willing to do that in a “Darwinian” city like New York, there are many who would not accept it—not enough. Believe me on that please…

when I should have written, in the interests of accuracy and clear communication, not simply “not enough,” but “I don’t have enough to offer them for them to want it in the first place,” resulting in,

I don’t have enough for myself to bother giving away, and if I were willing to do that in a “Darwinian” city like New York, there are many who would not accept it—I don’t have enough to offer them for them to want it in the first place. Believe me on that please.

I suspect the first instance sounded as though I meant not enough people would accept what I gave, when what I meant was I didn’t have enough worldly items for them to want to accept any of it.  (In short, I don’t have what it takes, at least right now, to “buy” myself into proper society, if you will.  I’m not “eligible” (as they used to call it) in this city per the kind of partner I would feel most comfortable with—more simply, I am not “marriage material” here because I simply don’t have the dough.  I’m a (pretty much) poor, though well-taken-care-of writer “without a future” as they say.  Who am I? What am I? I’m a nobody—truth be told—at least by the prevailing standards which are highly influential upon the perceptions of people I might add—and I don’t quite entirely blame them because I’ve come to understand (what I consider to be) reality on a socio-biological level—something like primatology I suppose.  You might try reading some Richard Dawkins, an evolutionary biologist with mucho kudos to his name—British, the whole kit and caboodle.  But that’s not important.  What’s important is that he recognizes that there’s a battle at hand (per my previous references to war, combat and so on (in the “resentful” email)), and the battle is fought out in varying ways in varying places and at varying times.  Even the various “holy books” of the world assert that some kind of “final” battle, or all-determining battle (between “good” and “evil”) will erupt in the future and define the nature of human existence for--well, in the case of the Bible, eternity (the battle happening after that first thousand years of peace).  So there has always, I believe—especially since the dawn of what we like to call civilization—been an awareness of battle, war, eventual epic conflicts and so on—therefore a recognition to varying degrees that we, human beings, are part of some kind of interrelatedness to each other (will explain the connection) and therefore that what other organizations believe is of import to our (own) organization(s) (these “other organizations” believing differently from “ours”—e.g., communists versus capitalists, etc.), of import because of this interrelatedness—that is, what they believe has an effect on us and vice versa—so because of this a battle is headed our way to determine, in short, who will be in charge of the scene—who will determine ideas, language, culture, concepts, sexual relations and ideas, ideals, preferences, modes of existence and economics and so on.  The American government claims we are at such a crossroads with certain elements within the world of Islam—one influential political theorist/academician called it, famously, a “clash of civilizations.”  I don’t happen to subscribe to that point of view per our current problems with certain Muslims and so on, but that’s neither here nor there.  The point is battle.  There are enemies in the world my dear lovely girl; the Muslims see that, the Christians see that, the capitalists see that, the Republicans, the Democrats, the left-wingers, the atheists, the feminists, the Nazis, the secularists, the Humanists, and many individuals in terms of their perceptions of each other as competitor enemies—and finally what I believe is the widespread perception that the world itself is the enemy—a wicked place and so on—Christian religious literature abounds with such references. 
         I try not to avoid seeing something just because it might be disturbing or upsetting.  The Vatican was upset by the implication of Galileo’s “discovery” (really wasn’t his entirely) that the sun didn’t revolve around us.  It was an upsetting, discomforting, nerve-wracking idea because, in my opinion, it meant we were not as important as we thought we were--this challenged our already wobbly, uncertain self-esteem I would imagine.  My point is that people did not want to see it because, for various reasons and to various degrees, it was not pleasing or happiness-inciting. So “feeling” is not the truth automatically.  And I do feel (oops) there is material truth in the world, that it’s not all just a matter of perception, not all simply “how you see things.”  You can see dry concrete as soft, but when you bang your head against it you might find otherwise.  So the camera lense you referred to can deceive.  (At Playboy they used to, I used to hear, use Vaseline on the lense to make the girls look even better.  Truth?  After all, the viewer “saw” them as more beautiful perhaps than they were, but did their seeing it make it true? Plato deals with this question from a different angle, so does Marx, so have visual artists (painters) who have argued between (and quite viciously at times) social realism on the one hand and abstract art on the other.  As an obvious (I think) over-simplification, but quite valid for “our” purposes here, each side represented a different political reality, each side claimed theirs was more real than the other’s.  The abstract painters had the wealthy behind them, such as Rockefeller (this especially so in the 50’s (and sixties) I believe), so you can guess that he chose them for a reason, not just because he thought their paintings looked nicer.  The social realists tended to appear dangerous to those with real wealth and power, so people like Rockefeller attempted to squelch that movement by endorsing and supporting, in this case, the “alternative;” again, abstract art.  Now one could say, well, it’s just how you see it.  That’s what makes the “truth.”  One school of painting was therefore just as good as the other; all it depended on was how you saw it.  In a way that’s right—depending on what one means by truth.  But the point is that art shapes how we, as human beings and as cultures, see the world; how we see the world influences social political economic reality; if we see, for example, economic inequality as God-given, natural, etc., then that kind of societal condition/situation will be more likely to persist into the future; if we don’t, we might question the distribution of power and wealth in our society.  Rockefeller recognized this—he knew that the artistic movement of social realism questioned that power and wealth arrangement in American society (and the world for that matter), and so he felt, I would imagine, (justifiably) threatened by it.  He saw the power inherent in its “how you see things,” (real power—power to influence nations and world events and affairs—life and death power—how we see things not only can but does change human history itself—and quite radically so), and so he promoted abstract art because it apparently wasn’t as politically and economically threatening to people in his economic and social strata. (As an aside, I would think it’s interesting to note that abstract art itself was (and is—at least partly) about “what you see” in the painting; i.e., the subject isn’t usually apparent—a solid color on the canvas, or two colors etc.—unlike social realism, on the other hand, which attempted to make the subject as clear as possible—which, admittedly, could get darn annoying.  But that’s not the point.  The point is that Rockefeller and his like not only understood the power inherent in how people saw things in terms of its influence upon the very world, but (and the others with him) understood that abstract art itself was less politically and economically dangerous/subversive because it promoted the idea that political/economic/human-rights “types” of truths were not all that important in art and, more importantly I think, that this kind of truth was best left unsaid because, after all, truth was all a matter of interpretation and “subjective” perception—and so it became “bad,” inartistic, uncultured and unsophisticated and so on to actually present an ideological point of view, or more gently put an opinion, belief or conviction politically, economically and/or societally speaking in one’s art: It was “inartistic” or “didactic,” “preachy,” “stuffy,” “obsolete,” “simplistic” and “naive,” perhaps “well-intentioned” but certainly “only his/her ‘opinion’” and so on—as well as verging on if not plain communist. 
         Having an opinion about things besides oneself and one’s “personal choice” about how to see things, dear, can be dangerous and threatening to others.  So-called intellectuals, artists, journalists and writers—and of course political organizers for the normal (economically speaking) person—are the first to find this out under certainly repressive governments in the form of, well, need I say?  (Okay; I’ll say: torture, rape, dismemberment, theft, murder, mutilation, and generally speaking other not so nice things that you can do to people.)  Thinking is dangerous, dear.  Did you like The Matrix?  Boy does that story at least try to tell it, eh, like it is (as they say), and I think it came pretty darn close frankly and for all intents and purposes—and the two creators were apparently well-versed in historical and historic political theory—as well as contemporary—Found this out years ago from my very smart ex-girlfriend (smart just like you).

(Modern, abstract art was in and of itself about subjectivism, “how you see things,” etc. another reason it wasn’t dangerous, because it attempted to make no statement I suppose—all “up” to the viewer—who can “decide for himself,” etc.)

This is why I am concerned about it when people say, “it’s all how you see things.” In certain ways I certainly do agree, but there’s more to it than that.  Seeing something a certain way, more positively (emotionally) for example, can make us, yes, feel more positive and so like and enjoy life more.  But that in itself will not mean the world around you is in fact more positive than it was when you saw things more negatively.  In other words, I don’t believe in pure subjectivity—that it’s all “just how you see it.”  I subscribe to the notion, what I consider, dare I say it, the quite-more-than-possible fact, that there is something called reality that is larger than our mere perception of it and that we better learn to see and recognize it so we can deal with it better—but in my case and scenario this truth is not God—and although this truth is not simply a matter of perception, nevertheless it can be perceived and understood because it is there to be understood; in an important, but not complete sense, it is not “our” truth (or your truth or my truth or...), but it is the truth and there are those who see it and accept it.  (So, for example, to use religious literature anyway, in the Old Testament Noah foresaw (sic) the coming flood, so he prepared and survived (you know this of course). According to the story therefore, he saw what was indeed “material” reality and survived—the others who apparently “chose” to “see” differently, died. Of course you could “see” death in a different way, or even the death of the entire race, in a more “positive” light and so not in fact become upset at all about our extinction!  I understand that.  But where does one draw the line? We will die if we choose to “see” certain things and “not see” others.  If you don’t see the bus coming, it’s still gonna flatten you. Where will your (I mean “one’s” by that) so-called interpretation of things (it’s just how you see it) be after the city bus has rolled over you and you’re dead (and they’re, as it were, “scraping you off the sidewalk”)?
         To conclude the Rockefeller story, he did not want us to see the economic power arrangements in society—it was a threat to him for ordinary people to see such of it clearly and explicitly and starkly.  He wanted people to see differently—probably a whole lot more “positively” in the sense that a canvas of just black or orange, yellow, etc., doesn’t elicit negative feelings towards a certain, indeed, real socio-political condition in society in a way that a painting like Guernica does.  How we see things, then, influences and even determines who is in charge in our country and in our world.  One way of seeing things allows certain ideas and thus certain institutions and their ideologies to persist and thus have power over us; other ideas further the interests and the power of other institutions, which in turn give them power and influence in society—their ideas instead become more common practice. 
         Thus, my dear, I believe there is an unspoken war going on between competing ideologies, and how you choose to “see” things is, whether one recognizes it or not, a part of that war.  We are, or most or many of us are, unwitting pawns in a vast ideological chess game, for a lack of a better analogy.  What we say to each other, what we “see” in the world, determines, ultimately, who has power and who doesn’t. Plain and simple.  If you “see what’s good” about slavery, “you” and the nation for example, slavery is likely to persist.  If we choose instead to see what’s bad about it, it’s less likely to persist.  Now seeing what’s bad about it is likely to discomfort us, sadden us, disturb us, and cause us great moral qualms, especially if it’s currently in practice—so much so that a country can be torn apart physically, in reality, by the mere fact of how people “see” it, slavery.  But does that mean we shouldn’t try to see it for what it is (i.e., bad)? If we always try to see what makes us feel good, and not pay attention to what makes us feel bad, we will, quite simply, blind ourselves to certain realities, certain truths, and in the process indirectly perhaps allow these negative truths to continue because we and others will not resist them and try to do something different about them and as regards them.  How can we resist what we’re not aware of—in this case what we choose not to be aware of, choose not to see—because it makes us feel better to not see it?  Galileo saw, and not only figuratively—and it made certain people, eh, well...unhappy.  Should he therefore not have seen what he saw?  Should we ignore reality? And yes, I mean reality, and I use the term unabashedly and without cynicism or self-centered, subjectivist, solipsistic cynicism.  There is reality, and one reality is that there is a mostly “cold” war going on over what will be considered reality by the people of our nation and by the world (not always so cold (i.e., by that I myself mean non-physical, and not in open, outwardly armed conflict)). There is a war between people in the know, people behind the scenes as it were (in this case I mean the good guys), fighting for how we, as a people, species, and a race comprehend and perceive and understand life itself—existence, our place upon the planet and our place within all of existence—indeed not only our place upon the planet, but our planet’s place within the universe (indeed the universe itself—and more—much more).  And my belief (and I believe it’s more than a mere belief (ad infinitum)) is that one side, ultimately, is wrong, and the other side, ultimately, is right. Too simple? Admittedly perhaps. But to continue anyway, one instance of the wrong side in terms of perception and concept is the widespread popularity of everyone wanting to see only the so-called “positive” and not more of the so-called “negative.”  Indeed the dichotomy itself is absurd because reality is neither in fact--neither positive nor negative.  It simply is—and it’s entirely lacking in inherent character or inherent attribute.  There is no meaning to it dearie.  To none of it.  It’s just existence—and we live and die in the midst of cosmic indifference.  The universe is, as it were, a blank slate.  It has no positive and/or negative qualities to it.  What it does, ehh…“have” is genuine indifference—genuine non-morality—non-goodness and non-badness. Nada except matter. How you see it doesn’t change that.  The truth, then, is that any good that you see is not really there—it’s not there intrinsically.  It’s the meaning that you give it, dear lovely one, that counts—because to us it has no meaning without us here to give it meaning.  It does not exist to us if we do not exist because then we are not here to see that it exists.  So my point is that the universe is a black, amoral (not immoral), non-intelligent, entirely indifferent, therefore non-caring phenomenon.  It does not give a hoot for us.  Neither does nature (on earth I mean).  None of it does, and the consequences of seeing such a reality are crucial to our political state of affairs—if we believe that the universe can “be” good if we choose to “see it” that way, then we may not, just as an example, prepare for an incoming asteroid by developing the necessary technology to ward it off.  I think it was Senator Boehner who very recently said he really wasn’t concerned about global warming because he didn’t believe God would allow the human race and/or the planet to perish—so everything was ok therefore.  He “saw” the “good” in the situation—that God would take care of it all for us—and he had “faith” in that.  He saw the good!  He was “cheerful” about it, and he probably felt a whole lot happier about all of it than the vast majority of climatologists who see things differently.  He’s happier, they’re sadder (to put it quite simply obviously).  Perhaps I should see things, then, in Boehner’s light and be happy?  Perhaps I should?  Maybe I would be being “negative,” and “bitter” and “resentful” if I were to feel upset over global warming and the possible destruction of life on the planet, or at least of us?  Why not see the good side of things? Plenty of people do—just like Boehner.
         So see then, please.  How we see things has an impact on our very survival as a people, as a race, and as a species—ultimately speaking I mean.  And in the example of global warming I just gave, it’s not only how we see things that can have (and does have) an influence upon us (as a so-called “race”), but it’s also about one way of seeing being accurate, or true, and another way not.  True seeing (not to sound arrogant here) often causes, I believe, at least some unhappiness; untruthfully seeing (in this case, per global warming—could think of many others) produces greater levels of happiness!  Now according to The Secret, Eckhart Tolle (I believe), and other popularizes of certain historical subjectivist philosophies, it would seem one could take their argument to lead logically to the conclusion not to see the bad, the badness of global warming, and to see the good side instead, the good side of global warming—in Boehner’s case, that God wouldn’t allow it to destroy the earth (I have “faith,” etc.).  There are many varieties of Boehner’s proposition—there is religion-lite—e.g., I have faith that everything’s going to turn out alright; it’s all part of a plan; don’t worry—you worry too much (and I personally don’t worry that much—but my mother does. Rather, I think—at least that’s what people tell me); and to continue:  “all you see is the negative”—but especially the faith thing.  If one cares about our survival at the most basic, elemental level—food, water, air, etc.— faith is useless.  It does not guarantee any of those.  And there is no guarantee of any of those.  Nature is indifferent to our welfare—Now a person with “faith” can say, well, even if the human race disappears it doesn’t really matter because I have faith that “everything’s” going to work out anyway and that “it all” has a purpose that is beyond our understanding and we shouldn’t question it too much etc.—and that if we dare to presume to “question things” too much, well, that is hubris, it’s not up to us to decide, who do think you are—God?  You worry too much—have faith.  If we do go extinct it’s ok because that’s the way it was meant to be—so enjoy life while you’re here and don’t worry too much. 
         Drug addicts think that way, my dearest one. I know (and I don’t entirely believe the word “addict).  Just get high now and everything’ll be ok.  The problem is you gotta wake up the next morning—and that reality, the reality of the morning and what that means to man, to a woman, is not always pleasant and the “addict” prefers not to see it so s/he goes out and cops a bag again.  He just wants to feel good.  That’s all he wants.  What’s wrong with that?
         If we refuse to recognize the so-called “bad,” or see it up close, we will not be able to prepare ourselves for its onslaught; we will be not be able recognize an enemy before it comes—for we will not know what it looks like.  When it/s/he comes at us we will not even know that he/she is trying to hurt us.  We were too busy being concerned with our emotional condition, our feelings—especially and most relevantly to my argument, with feeling good due to our fear of feeling fear, our fear of being unhappy.  Anything to avoid that, right?  Just see what kicks our neuro-transmitters in the right direction (inaccurate metaphor).  That’s all that matters. 
         The people who win, dear, the ones who matter in history, are the ones who know what’s at stake—not only our survival, but our dignity, our respect, our very meaning and our very truth, and the survival of our very humanity—assuming there’s any left these days (lol).  They knew—they saw the importance of things and therefore we’d better recognize what’s wrong real fast so we can kill the motherfucker before s/he kills us.  And in reality, not just figuratively, that—getting killed by “an” enemy—happens all the time.  You know that obviously.  I choose to protect the truth—and the truth is that the truth is not a fairy tale, and truth does not change if we refuse to see when it, this non-fairy tale, happens to make us unhappy.  I’d rather see it in all its horror and stare it down and kill it before it does that to me—and people get killed all the time, my dear lovely girl.  Need I say it?  Thirteen million children were killed in World War II.  Why?  Well, that’s complicated, but I believe, and so do others, that a lot of it had to do with the fact that...put perhaps overly simply, I don’t know...again, with the fact that people chose to do and see only what made them feel good—they refused to recognize the storm clouds on the horizon—and so that happened—people did not pay attention to reality until it smacked them in the face in the form of global fascism and Nazism.  This was only 65 years ago, dear.  65 years ago!  Should the Jews in the concentrations camps, as they were being murdered in the gas chambers, have chosen to see only the good at that moment—to feel better? (Is that question too condescending? Or is it appropriate to bring an issue to its logical and perhaps absolute conclusion in order to illustrate the absurdity of the position-in-question being, in this case, criticized?) Well, I think that’s not just a sarcastic and/or rhetorical question.  I think that can be considered a genuine question—and much for the reasons so far enumerated.  But if the Jews in Germany, before Hitler, had perhaps paid more attention to what was happening, and not have been as determined to only believe the good—that Germany was a good place that had embraced them entirely so that they, the Jews, were indeed “true” Germans, true, complete citizens of Germany, and therefore safe with certain guaranteed rights etc.—perhaps if they had put their finger to the wind (and I’m not saying there weren’t those who did), if they’d insisted less on sounding safe and proper and “positive” because it was “good for business” or whatever, perhaps if more of them had stuck their necks out of their little bourgeois shells and looked around them more—perhaps they wouldn’t have been “taken care of” so easily by Mr. Hitler?  Perhaps they might have seen something like him coming?  I don’t know?  Go figure—
         Some people call it denial, my dear—and I don’t mean the river.  The history of humanity is, in certain ways, the history of denial.  We’ve constructed myth upon myth upon myth to comfort ourselves—among other, perhaps more nefarious purposes.  “Realists” (quotes?) therefore are called cynical because they do not subscribe to certain myths that, apparently, are—because of their (the myths’) optimism—“obviously” “truer” and “better” because they are “nicer,” “safer,” more “positive,” etc.
         Many people believe that all is love—or that nature is a “circle” of love—and that if we just got “back” to nature, we’d be better, happier—civilization is the enemy—the natural is intrinsically good—nature will provide (people say the same thing about God—they said it about the Fuhrer also—they made the mistake of faith in a false God—and that is all they all are, false—there is no God, and if there is, well, he can go his way, and I’ll go mine thank you).  But if nature is a recycling cycle of love (New Age stuff), what of the caterpillar and the wasp?  Forgive me if you know this already, but apparently the mother (queen?) wasp (forgive the non-technical language please) lays her egg(s) (all per a specific type of wasp) in a (certain kind of?) caterpillar. (Without all the conditionals: “Forgive me if you know this already, but apparently the queen wasp lays her egg(s) in a certain caterpillar.”) Why?  The wasp embryo can thus partake of--“munch” on--the internal organs of the caterpillar as it (the wasp embryo) grows—in short therefore receiving the necessary nutrients to continue to grow, ultimately, into a full-grown wasp.  However, the embryo does not make the (foolish) mistake of eating the poor caterpillar’s heart, because if it were to do so, the caterpillar would die and its viscera would rot and therefore not offer sustenance to the wasp embryo, and it in turn would die.  So the heart is saved for last—the wasp embryo consumes all of the other organs first, and when at last the “right” time has come, when it is ready to “move on,” as it were, the wasp embryo consumes the heart of the caterpillar because, well—and obviously—the caterpillar simply doesn’t serve its original purpose for the wasp any more.  Therefore no need to save the heart (and keep the poor caterpillar alive). “What good are you to me?  Bye bye!” (Kind of like humans, at least at times?--called natural selection and evolution—it’s not our fault if we do that kind of thing—at least not as a general rule).  So there’s nature’s “love,” there’s the “circle of life,” and “harmony” and “balance,” all coming from dear, benevolent nature—honesty, natural being, and love (and there are obviously numerous other examples of nature’s utter indifference to its inhabitants’ well being)—and if you don’t believe in nature, you can believe in God instead—maybe the caterpillar didn’t pray enough when it woke up in the mornings?  Did it sin one too many times?  Was it a Jew?  If he’d just been better that might not have happened!
         The point I’m trying to make is that just because we choose to see love—most popularly in either Nature with a capital “N,” or, obviously, in “God”—doesn’t mean that it is all love, partly love, or even any love at all!  That caterpillar’s (I’d say unfortunate) experience will happen no matter how we “see” nature (or how it chooses to see nature. Ha-ha--).  Isn’t it the truth that, no matter how we may see it, that (caterpillar) event is not a good thing from the caterpillar’s point of view? Could we go even further and say that, regardless of how we may “see it,” what happened was, in fact and generally speaking, not the happiest of experiences, not the most charming of events period, and not just from the caterpillar’s “point of view?”  Howbout further and just say plain darn old cruel?  At least in our human eyes?  And if so, what does that say about Nature, or God, or the Cosmos, or Faith etc?  What use are they for the caterpillar?  We are the caterpillar—or we can be if we are not careful (and in many ways we already, entirely obviously, in fact are the caterpillar (metaphorically speaking)—we share its fate—and we are exploited for our, metaphorically speaking again, viscera as well. (How far can the analogy be taken? Well, read Metamorphosis (Kafka’s version)—if you haven’t already of course).  Wasps eat out people’s organs every day (figuratively speaking) and worse—There are wasps among us, and there are caterpillars among us who choose not to see that because it makes them unhappy, down, disconsolate, and they’d rather see the good and believe and have, ultimately, absolute faith.  Those who don’t “believe” are called ungodly, cynical, morally corrupt and so on—lacking faith and therefore lacking hope and therefore being, well, negative, a downer.  (Like Noah!  Or Cassandra! Who else?)  No—I’m a caterpillar-candidate who chooses to exercise his ability and his will in the direction of recognizing his all-too-possible fate at the hands of the “wasp,” and therefore hopefully, ideally, sparing himself that fate.  And then if I, a now-deviant caterpillar, behave thus contrary to normal caterpillar behavior, won’t I, in effect, have therefore changed so much in terms of my mind and my behavior that I would no longer in fact “be” a “caterpillar”?  I guess that would be change, or “evolution,” as it were.  (And the other caterpillars who had faith because they wanted to, needed to feel good about life, they don’t like me anymore because I’m no longer one of them.  I’m not of their stripe (ha-ha) anymore—actually I’ve betrayed them now, it seems, because I’ve chosen not to be a caterpillar (and have thus chosen, very conveniently I might add, to avoid having a wasp embryo nibble out my guts from the inside out over a period of months (and then my heart of course))—and that’s dangerous to them, isn’t it? I mean as a species or community or whatever.  If they all were to do what “I” did, they’d all change so much that there would be no caterpillars left.  The caterpillar species would perish—and we can’t allow that to happen, can we?  Who would we (i.e., the ones in power—taking their point of view now—sorry for the jump) rule over then?  So this caterpillar’s (my) decision to see the truth, no matter how emotionally upsetting and/or disturbing, not only saved his own skin (actually his guts) from the wasp egg—but, quite subversively, destabilizingly, and politically dangerously, this caterpillar offered a role model to the other caterpillars who now saw clearly that their caterpillar faith, which told them everything would work out fine and would be “alright,” was what was killing them!  Their faith had narcotized them into not facing the fact of the wasp mother.  However, our dear caterpillar friend had blazoned the way (with no intention of doing such for them) for them to see, truly see; And so the caterpillar community changed into something freer (I don’t mean a butterfly), and therefore the old caterpillar community was destroyed—the de-facto rebels’ (caterpillars’’) individual and general improvement had destroyed the false caterpillar community, false because it and its rulers had promised life, and, of course, comfort and pleasure and joy, but hadn’t mentioned at what price, which was the intellectual  avoidance of their true, coming ending—this cognitive avoidance being, therefore, the ultimate price, that is, the price of ultimate ignorance (like they say, ignorance is bliss...(?)).

(—their improvement was a threat to the system, a radical challenge to the well-being of the caterpillar community, to the well-being and survival of the caterpillar order-of -things, the caterpillar social structure and social behavior and, yes, social beliefs—primarily the belief of caterpillar faith.  Their loss of faith freed them from the ravages of having their viscera eaten out alive until the very end, until the mawing and extracting of their hearts.  One final bite.  (“Caterpillars of the world: Unite!”).)

         Your beliefs, perceptions, ideas about yourself and society are part of a vast web of political power and/or the lack thereof.  It is well known that people who believe and say certain things are more likely to be “accepted” into the “community.”  The boss, the pastor, the policeman, the small business owner, the corporation, the church, your friends and neighbors—think a certain way—“be like The Secret”—and everything’ll be OK.  Don’t rock the boat.  We’ll all be ok.  Doesn’t it sound nice to hear that?  It even makes me feel good—and even if it’s actually true that ultimately, in the end, upon some kind of “cosmic finality,” we will indeed “all be OK,” I’m not sure it defeats my argument because, as I think I’ve made clear, that admittedly self-comforting sentiment is used to—in this life, here, now, regardless of the so-called “ultimate” future—to narcotize us into quietude and passive acceptance—better to resign to the world now as it is because, after all, it’ll all be ok, right?  All of it.  (They say that more now instead of the once-prevalent statement that suffering here is unimportant because heaven is the true reward that really matters—not this vale this tears, this valley of woe, this wicked world, this Vanity Fair.  Instead they just say—it’ll all be ok.  And what “it” are they referring to?  Sounds like God by a different name to me (a rose by any other name…).)