There is what we call evil. Sociopaths, psychopaths, that ilk. I like to say that we’ve diagnosed evil and made it merely vile.
I often also sense a more general pall of evil, of negativity, which is the Imp of the Perverse Poe noticed, or the Horla that de Maupassant wrote about. Felt it darken the world on 9/11 and that darkness has only spread. It feels to me like the same dark pall that tried to cover the world at other times in history, too. Nazi Germany, for instance, or Stalin’s purges, or Pol Pot, or oh so many other times and places when sociopaths held sway in sadistic cruelty.
I’m not sure what that is, but it feels like more than just human nature, itself encompassing the best and worst of us.
I’m an atheistic agnostic. I don’t buy into sky fathers or any of that shit. But it does seem to me there is much more to our world than we can parse, and thus no one can know for certain whether we’re being influenced, (feels like it at times), or even programmed and controlled. Also, there are occasional instants that seem like a glitch in the matrix, y’know?
So a Satan? Nah. That’s within us. Same as all the gods. They’re conceptual, not factual. But maybe there are forces of negativity and entropy vying against those of positive light and life. I don’t know, just going by how it feels.
Am I making any sense?
Probably not, it being late after me being up early. Likely this is little more than a purging of words before attempting sleep, when the images take over.
Perhaps the world is in code. Semioticians would nod sagely, then confuse us with abstruse chatter and a diagram resembling a Spirograph design. Maybe what I take for a pall of evil is merely code for entropy. Encoded entropy is no less chilling, I suppose, but it sounds more rational.
Sounds.
Seeming Digression: Letter and book codes and other basic ciphers are going to come into new use, if they’re not already booming. How could we tell? With the elimination of privacy comes a renewed craving for it. Secrets are currency, always were, knowledge being power.
Only when used, though.
Say we all go to encoded lives and sly signals for communication. If the professionals look, they will crack our codes effortlessly. They have the quantum computers. With any electronic exchange, it’s a given that it’s in the clear, and public.
Will they bother to look? Again, if it’s electronic, they already sift and scan everything. So yes, they see it all. You cannot hide in electron patterns nor talk past the information packets.
Handwritten letters will be somewhat safer, due to volume of mail, which provides inadvertent noise for one’s signal, but one might be singled out to be watched. Surveillance permeates our society.
As with all ciphers, how long the code stays unbroken is key. Each encoded message need resist decryption only so long. Go signals are more reasonable for us low-level users of the steganized lives. Passing a lot of information is simply too ungainly.
We will be forced into cells with cut-outs, dead drops, and blind signals rigged by innocents or dupes. Our spies and investigators will need to find ways to pass secure items via package couriers of some sort. A chain of dead drops serviced by cells isolated except for a single signal, perhaps.
Democracy’s fatal flaw: It required an informed electorate. Ben Franklin suspected we could not keep a democracy going and he and Jefferson and so many others were right. It fell from within. The Liberty Bell’s crack is a potent symbol.
Digression Revealed As Shadowing: “Equality may well be a right, but no power on earth can make it a fact,” wrote Honoré Balzac.
Ever stop to think that those who care passionately about our freedom and liberty have always been a minority? And the majority has not much cared at all about such things, as long as there was food and diversion. The bread and circus dodge works because human nature does not change.
So really, what does the minority who mitigate for freedom, liberty, and equal recourse to law and prosperity want? Would they be satisfied with their own separate placr, or world? Or do they really want everyone to join in and play their game?
If the majority of us care so little about being abused slaves, why does this minority care? What were the Enlightenment brains jabbering about? What did Marat die for, or Tom Paine write pamphlets about?
If a degraded slavery suits most just fine, then democracy is a cruel burden to lay upon the masses. Democracy, it seems, to judge by the majority’s attitude, will vote itself out.
Look around.
It’s happening.
Helped along by sociopathic criminals using money, scum for short, the corporate fascists are systematically looting revenues and buying instrumentalities.
In 50 B.C.E. Lucretius described REM sleep but it was not until the 1950s in a Chicago sleep lab that it was named and thus became “real” to our culture.
So much ancient knowledge was not lost, but destroyed in a calculated attempt to expunge it from human memory. The Vatican waged this vile war against knowledge and culture, and had it not been for a few defiant Irish monks who liked their Classicism, we would have virtually none of what is now vaunted as the Western Tradition. We would instead have a biblical dark ages.
Those scum I mentioned are trying to bring back the dark ages, only worse.
Light kills infection. We need an Enlightenment II. Shine bright light on religionists, (the Dominionist evangelical “christians” are currently the America’s Taliban, seeking theocracy through destruction, fear, and hate), and keep shining the light. Give these cockroaches and mold spores no break, no covering shadow.
Shadow war, meaning deniable assassination, black operations, and clandestine subversion on behalf of corporate interests is the new watchword in foreign policy as practiced by the US government and military. A cult of secrecy runs things. Invisible, unknown people no one elected and no one oversees keep the war for gain going, in more forms than we can define from our blinkered, propagandized box.
There is what we call evil. It is sadistic, sociopathic, and ubiquitous. It passes as human but is a mere humanoid shape. It is empty, hollow, and cruel. It is devoid of compassion, empathy, or sympathy. Kindness is viewed as a weakness, compromise a failure, and cooperation the ploy of sycophantic losers. Dicks Like Cheney lower values and render public discourse crass. The banality of evil is C-level Yale flunkies convinced they know better than everyone else how things should be and being willing to say and do anything for the power to carry out their sick plans.
There is what we call evil.
There is also a majority who find it vile.
Stirring that majority to action is the only way of lessening evil in our midst, and diminishing its negative influence over our lives.
Shine brighter. Support the 99% movement and the Occupiers who protest the worst people in the world.
Stones resonate to energy. Hence megaliths. There is a reason they were stood upright. And cathedrals and churches built over such sites contain and diffuse that resonant energy. Talking about hiding one’s light. How vile this is.
Stand tall. Resonate. Do not let the boxes they seek to put over us baffle our energy. Focus will on pushing back at the pall, and take action to light the darkness.
Choose your preferred metaphor, but by all means fight against the anti-human, the unkind, and destructive. Fight fear, hate, and greed. Fight callousness. Fight coldness and indifference.
Fight.
Flight is not possible. There is nowhere left to go.
Stand and fight.
/// /// ///
