I am itinerant and maudlin, moods of malaise with airs of antipathy.
Lots of my essays obsess over confining our thoughts and feelings to our gourds, so they cause less harm to others or ourselves. It’s really not giving up, as the universe doesn’t need us like that, so it frees us up to pursue what life really can be. As everything else with the Rosicrucians was symbolic, I bet their search for the Philosopher’s stone wasn’t about physically turning lead to gold, but our malleable grey matter into something lucrative. Maybe the Philosopher’s stone is no less a verb than god. Rather than facing reality, staring down the abyss of indulged fantasy warps our senses with lulling satiation, til we’re stupefied into believing ego is anything more than nothing at all. Metaphysical social engineering.
I think it’s gotten to be that way with everything, that if you want a job done right you must roll up your own sleeves, from education to patient advocacy to finding a valid place for our dreams. And everything to do with the kitchen! And yanking someone’s chain does far less harm than does pulling their string. People who care to be helpful or useful in life don’t seek out power over others regardless of the marketing. The devil not wanting to serve maybe didn’t mean he wanted to play master, but to be left alone.
You can have nonstop convictions and principles free of self-contradiction, or you can sign a ballot and hope for the best that others get managed into picking up your slack and picking up your trash. I’d never seriously propose getting the government to do what we want for ourselves, but instead living as though there is no government. When you accept that no help is ever on its way, you’ll be less prone toward creating problems, as you would come to know firsthand what it takes to resolve them. If you are permitted no other self-control in life, you can in fact choose what person, place or thing you are beholden to. Yet the strongest and most capable people any of us might ever come to know do not require cults of personality to carry them aloft.
Mandating love or cruelty either one never holds up to logic. The courts are a for profit game to deprive the masses of their own resources and opportunities. What defines first world nations is when laws don’t even pretend to apply to financial interests of those willing to sacrifice everyone else. Suicide’s a felony because we are owned. Every voter is fine with daddy issues while everyone else must compensate for governmental inadequacies if they’d like to live moments longer. I don’t think our identities rest in anything we like or dislike, but in the who, what, when, where and why for how we justify whatever suffering our opinions prove powerless to contest. In what we give or in what we take, we should regard love and cruelty both equally as the limited resources they genuinely are. Offense to that seems to say such a principle would make liberty finite, but the biggest threats to liberty are repetitiously what’s done for love and cruelty. You do have control over yours, if nothing else.