I once prided myself on being exceeding gullible, swallowing the most improbable of tales easily and without any real desire to question the validity of the circumstances described. In my heartfelt opinion, this meant I had a deep capacity to accept as true the considerations of others, without need to diagnose, dissect, validate, or unnecessarily ponder. Such innocence is in many ways the easier road, for being untrusting, suspicious of words and motives is not a pleasant or rewarding stat. Having a lack of trust in ones fellow human beings makes for a sure route to sadness and rolling disappointment.
My eventual recovery to a balanced equilibrium came about simply through the need for self-preservation, a realization that mine own wellbeing and mental health was suffering through the constant dispiritedness, my serial disillusionment at the capacity of others to adapt, nay manipulate events, situation, occurrences, to their own benefit and best advantage.
I was perhaps fifty years of age before I realized that the foremost motive in human interaction is sadly that of selfishness, egocentrism, a truth that is in no way a critique, for indeed ‘tis that very trait that has empowered human kind to the very pinnacle of success and existence they have so satisfactorily accomplished. That so much time and effort is spent by our species in the moral and ethical determination to empower and enhancing charity in the hope of arousing parity, is simply but the opposing weight upon the so delicate scale of homo sapiens desperate need to facilitate some notion of egalitarianism.
Use and usury are the basic building block of civilization, whether we like the idea of not such mechanisms have detailed society from the outset. That the shadow of such oppression haunts to this day but proves the degree by which the logic is painstakingly engraved into our skeleton. Each deceit for gain, every exploitation echoes the same despotism, the exchange of anguish and wretchedness for affluence and fortune, the acquisition of milk and honey through the consumption of another’s vitality.
Daily Abstract Thoughts 