For my Wise and Generous Parents, to creatures of the Blue Planet:
he world is an inferno of darkness and evil, and there are only two ways of dealing with it.
The first is easy and wrong - accept it and become part of it. The second is difficult and right - fight it and recognize those who aren’t evil and help them endure.
[Reputed mythical narrator Scheherazade (Shahrzad) of that ancient scattered Arabian tome]
Never has an allegory strayed closer to the little-probed fabric of your dreamlike existence than by that sad fool who, in a moment of abject pessimism, penned such potent portent.
Literature and thought hang like desert mirage over the barren sands of human history. Therein flirting truth goads the ignorant, invisible to all but your mystics, and those of mystical pathology.
Millennia of writings summate to little more than humankind’s absolute doubt of life’s substance.
The cumulative literary-symbolic layer that signaled your noosphere has a fictional component of immense variegation, a worthy progenitor of your blooming cyber age. Scholars sensing the breadth and depth of ideas spawning ideas stand in awe at the cultural richness cocooning and enveloping your lives.
The legacy of centuries of fictions burgeoning into imaginative life within the minds of legions of readers directs the advance of thinking, creates realities, and shapes civilization itself.
In every sense the world of paper and ink was a gestating cyber world, a phase in the evolution of your mind, like the curious revealing of wet sand from water’s retreat, the hushened poise of forces in balance, then inescapable tsunamis of vivid illusional realities (cyber space, indeed ‘inner’ space) engulf society’s sense and senses.
And just what is it in Shahrzad’s assertion? In such terse parable lies the fiercest iciest reverberation of silvery piercing plagency - when sword of truth strikes bedrock of existence.
" .. accept it and become part of it" leaves nowhere to hide, lays bare the ultimate hypocrisy of your twenty-first century debauchery.
" .. fight it and .. those who aren’t evil .. help them endure" - can you not?
Why would you fight it? By any measure of ’sanity’ to accept and become part of the venerable and ancient art of screwing one’s neighbor in the act of barter is unavoidably the way of life (you righteously claim). One might equally (foolishly) appeal to the lion to spare the wildebeest.
Ants and bees would disagree, but that is another argument.
Shahrzad’s entire assertion is faulty, surely? The world is not an inferno of darkness and evil so the choice is null [I see your mind flinch in denial]. While that may be, another message lurks beneath the literal.
Life has embedded choice in your birth to death impromptu: dance to the puppet master’s strings or resist. Either do what others do, or distinguish your life (even if only in your eyes) by resisting the the dulling, overwhelming, suffocating urge to place one foot after another in mindless progression from cradle to grave.
You might take Shahrzad’s metaphor as a ‘given,’ or even dismiss it, yet still fight with principle to accept it not, nor become part of it, whatever ‘it’ may be. You can also avoid defining ‘it’ but nevertheless spend your life fighting .. it. The least reward of such a strategy would be endearment to Samaritan or socialist, and help the non-evil endure.
You know the ‘non-evil’ - they are your prey. Be they meek, incapacitated, mug punters, salt of the Earth, exploited indigenous.. or merely child, or child-minded, you grow fat through their hunger.
Appealing to a finer nature of those awash in wealth and power might be called futile. Convincing them is a task is quite overwhelming for even Solomon, who reminds his ilk that non-spiritual life is a living vanity, and its ending the hollowest of victories.
Perhaps for a final perspective, if you doubt my premise, I might borrow the words of Drasko Dizdar:
I don’t really care to … tell you what a liar this or that politician or clerical hierarch or fat-cat business tycoon is. Nor do I want to tell you how I think they should and can clean up their act. I don’t even want to play the prophet and tell you what self-deceiving liars you are. The really costly and honest truth is that I’m a liar, and I’m caught in a complex web of lies, injustice, resentment and inertia we call our “culture”, our “society”, what the Gospel of John calls “the world”. When I bank my salary and buy my petrol and veg-out in front of the idiot box … I don’t do it because I want honesty, I do it because I’m imitating the rest of you – and so are you."
What of the second admonishment?
Resistance may appear futile but if you feel no discomfort, no stirring rage, upon reading it - you are already the living dead, and will pass from this realm unnoticed.
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Lip service is too easy, my Wise Nurturers. The creatures of this cyber-seeding society appear too far gone to recover. Have we not seen this too often before - stealing defeat from the jaws of victory? The jewel of their greatest triumph brushed aside as a mere dull stone blighting their feeding trough.
Utopia was theirs, yet they blindly crushingly stood on the desperately foraging fingers of their dispossessed comrades for the slimmest advantage in their greedy reach for mere trinkets.
As their meaningless rationales of life founder, the dream factories frantically revive author upon great author from literary vaults of the forgotten, thrusting visually pre-digested child’s tales before the bereft public, virtually none of whom could claim knowledge of C.S.Lewis’ most profound tale of a world, a planet, whose spiritual stellar neighbors’ hopes were fading in grave fear of it’s future.
That too, Generous Guardians, is an allegory for this Blue Planet. If ever there was a League of Seedling Cyberverses (is there not?) it would sadly know Earthly refugees as "Out of the Silent Planet."
