(Image is copyright Wizards of the Coast, used for fair use purposes, no infringement intended.)
Imagine for a moment that you saw a rickety scaffold, just five feet wide at the base, which goes up five feet and then has a platform ten feet wide, from which more scaffolding goes up another five feet to support a fifteen-foot-wide platform, and so forth and so on. (The picture above should give you a vague visual cue to this concept.) Obviously, this is not a very stable structure, particularly not if there are a bunch of people standing on the platforms. Let's say that you saw a large number of people under the scaffolding, all working together to hold it up, while more and more new people climbed up to the current top layer and worked to build another layer, which was only half-complete yet already people were climbing up onto it and building on top of it as well.
It should be clear enough that this is a recipie for disaster...but say that the people inside the scaffold absolutely insisted that you *had* to join them in trying to prop this insanely unstable structure up, or else they would blame you when it fell. Let's say, in fact, that everyone in your town, if not your country, was all involved in this ridiculous scaffold-building enterprise, and they'd brought all the food in the area and hid it inside the scaffold with themselves, and were saying that if you didn't join them in trying to hold up the scaffold, they would let you starve. Plus, because anyone who isn't helping them is obviously their enemy, they would throw rocks and knives and such at you, until you joined them in the scaffold. And once you were in the scaffold, you'd have to hold up the layer above you, while other people climb up on top of it and add more and more weight, until eventually, inevitably, the whole thing finally collapses and crushes everyone inside it.
This is the way I feel about our society. It's an insane house of cards where everyone just agrees to go along with obvious idiocy, and because I try to tell people that they're going to ****ing die and they should get out now before the collapse happens, I'm looked upon as an antisocial malcontent, instead of as someone who's trying to help. It drives me mad to see the way people just blithely insist on continuing to pretend nothing is wrong, rather than listen to someone who tells them truths they'd rather pretend not to be able to see for themselves.
The four pillars that I think are holding up our scaffold are Money, Law, Faith and Violence; some combination of these factors seems to be critical to pretty much everything that carries weight in our society. And I seethe with intense dislike for all four; Money is a flawed premise, Law a complete fallacy, Faith is lunacy incarnate, and Violence is as intolerable as it is efficient. A myriad of permutations emerge from these pillars: Money and Law create Bribery, Law and Faith together form Obligation, Law and Violence produce Intimidation, Money and Faith are crucial to Fraud, Faith and Violence combine into Xenophobia, and Money and Violence are both synonymous with Darwinism, and these six further combine with each other and their ancestors to give rise to an ever-widening web of extortion, mercenarism, brainwashing, contractual enslavement, financial intenture, crime, black markets, institutional corruption, mutual backscratching, pederasty, indoctrination, cycles of abuse, propaganda, oligarchy, ethnic cleansing, hypocrisy, bastardization of truth, confidence games, pyramid schemes, generational rifts, communication breakdowns...the list goes on and on. But ultimately, I think all of them boil down to one root concept, a name for the entire scaffold: Dehumanization.
Money teaches us that life has a price, which is factual but untruthful; while it may cost something to keep body and soul together, every life is nonetheless priceless, because it is unique and cannot be replaced. Law tells us that we are bound to obey our previous agreements, but this ignores the entire fact that life is nothing but the process of change; the creature who signed a contract in your name yesterday wasn't you, but something that evolved into you, and you in turn will evolve into something else, so you can't make promises today and expect your future self to honor them. Faith is nothing less than the antithesis of reason; sure there are questions we don't know how to answer, perhaps never will, but is that any reason for us to believe something that someone tells us is true, when they offer nothing resembling convincing proof? And violence, well, it gets results; kill everyone who disagrees with you, and you can damn sure get people to cooperate (either with you, or with each other against you). But it is nonetheless true that, ethically speaking, we have no right or entitlement to kill each other; again, our lives are of incalculable value, and every death is an intolerable waste, of an endlessly replenishable yet nonetheless crucially limited resource.
So we've built ourselves a very impressive scaffold society using these four bits of rebar I've described, and I can't say that I exactly want to see it come tumbling down - but I'm absolutely certain it will, and I am strongly unhappy with people's attempts to convince me to come join in the doomed effort to hold it up, when the only possible result is that I'll be crushed along with it. In fact, the more rocks the people inside throw at me, and the hungrier I get because they're hoarding all the food, the more I find myself tempted to locate a weak point in the structure and give it a good push. For now, I continue to resist that urge, and it's probable I'll die before the opportunity arises for me to act upon it. Certainly, all of you people in the scaffold are justified in hoping so. You've every right to ignore my ravings telling you to start climbing down and spreading out, every right to keep piling ever higher in your mad scramble to be one of the ones on top, who hope they'll survive when it all crashes down, as long as it doesn't fall too fast or tip too far to the side before flattening. If that's what you want to do, I can't stop you.
But I think you deserve better than that...and I'm certain that I do.
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