The Ideal in Opposition to the Real

By Greg -
There will be long term effects. His tear ducts will stop working. The lens of his left eye will develop cataracts. The hair on the top of his head will turn gray. And the cancer (which my dog, Clarence, has been diagnosed with) will likely return. This is the age of bear skins and stone knives, and medicine is a branch of the military. We preserve and protect life with shields and weapons because we observe nature as a battleground and evolution as an arms race. We see what our metaphors enable us to see, and what we see is fear. Fear made the turtle's shell and the snake's venom. Fear made fins and wings, teeth and claws, and fear made rage as well as the reactions to it: flight, submissiveness, and group identity. When we look at nature, we see ourselves, because that is how we see. We know the world only as well as we know ourselves, and today we know ourselves as selfish genes in a war which will be won by the most fit.

Some of us are asking what the victors of this war will be fit for, and that is a question that can unravel the knots of reason we've tied. The winners of this war will be fit only to wage war. If it's a war with ourselves, there will be no one left. If it's a war with nature, the outcome is the same. And don't tell me it's a war of good against evil, because evil is just a word that denies the enemy our understanding or compassion. Evil is mindlessness, and mindless is anyone or anything that doesn't share our world view, speak our language, or observe our protocols. But we know they think, and we know they know that we know that they know. And if we stopped believing in our mutual fantasies of good and evil, we could coexist in a common reality. We've known that as long we've had knowledge, and we had self-knowledge long before Eve ate the apple.

But self-knowledge was coopted by a mindless God whose only interest was power. And that mindless God created good and evil to keep us in its rapture, to organize us into a rage, and to conceive the ideal in opposition to the real.

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