The Power of Lies
It’s impossible to know the truth about who you are, if you lie about yourself. Tax collectors demand money from fellow folks, thus accountants send out invoices. And exactly as soldiers on the battlefield, if nothing else, they claim that they just follow orders. They insist that they have no choice.
People like to blame society as if it was an abstract system that has nothing to do with them. But body social is people — a web of interacting nodes creating an interwoven net. So, while you ask for payments and remunerations, you feed that grid with insistence to comply with your demands. While you shoot at others, you feed society with fear and hate.
I know of no one who likes such arrangement. Even the most wealthy and powerful complain and feel threatened by it. Quite logically, because what is fed into the network is what eventually comes around. And the higher you are in the hierarchy, the stronger the backlash, the more amplified the accumulated destructive energy of those too weak to resist the pressure of collective delusion, all those who inevitably come after you.
Unless there is enough human nodes who break the chain reaction and refuse to participate in perpetuating the depravity, there is no way to stop the madness.
But vast majority of people, no matter their affiliations and creeds, instead of stopping and reevaluating their contributions, simply doubles down. “I must build the walls to protect myself. I have to play along even if I don’t agree, lest they devour me,” goes the excuse. However, it’s a lie.
Sure, the danger is real and annihilation at the hand of your fellow zombies can come at any time. But it’s a lie that you have to play along and become a zombie yourself just to survive. No to mention that such survival is far from actual living.
So, there you are lying to yourself, if not actively, then, at least passively preying on other people, perhaps even taking pride that you can withstand the anxiety stemming from unpredictable horrors of the social battlefield. But lions don’t go around constantly looking for a kill. Makes it rather clear why most people are obese nowadays.
Anyway — while you lie about and to yourself in any way, you obviously cannot know the truth about yourself. If you don’t know the truth about yourself, you cannot know the truth about other people and the world at large. And if you don’t know the truth about the world, you cannot hope to act in a way that leads out of the rat race toward a satisfying living that religious folks dubbed Paradise.
Perhaps you will claim that you don’t want it. You may claim that you could not care less about satisfaction and believe that you thrive while hustling, and that hunting others is the best way of living there ever was. Well, if that’s the case, you don’t even know that you don’t know. However, I’m sure that one day even you will be fed up with it.
As I said above, at that point everyone, and you will be no exception, starts to blame others for their misery. All because of lies you tell yourself about your motivations, feelings, thoughts, and, in the end, basically everything as every lie has the peculiar property that it needs further lies to survive. Thus, to keep the lie alive, you shift the blame outside and find faults in a scapegoat of your choice, only to not have to take responsibility. And the lies snowball and branch out.
In the end you are either a proud ignorant or a poor victim. Well, let’s just say that when you stop bullshitting yourself you will be neither. What’s more, you will have clear conscience because you will stop feeding the society with the perversion of transactional connections since you will be able to see at last that that choice even exists.
That would be a truly valuable contribution. After all, who would wage wars, if there were no soldiers, and who would exploit people, if there were no tax collectors, accountants, and the like? Not to mention that you will be free to dedicate your time and energy to more creative endeavors.
Of course, there’s also another possibility. You will stick to the lies, the society devours itself and eventually collapses, and the lies die out with you. The choice is yours.
Well, but obviously only if you abandon the lies you tell yourself first :D
