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yarrowseed · 3 years ago
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wingedcat13 · 2 years ago
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Synovus: Villains Never Retire (4)
[And the end of Villains Never Retire - this one took much longer to finish, and it's a bit longer than the other segments at 11,334 words. Warnings for death, and rather more descriptions of violence than have thus far been typical. As always, catch up on what's come before from my pincushion post, and find this chapter on Ao3 here!]
How do you keep a clairvoyant from knowing that you are coming for them?
The short answer: you don’t.
The long answer is that it is, technically, possible. However, masking your movements from a clairvoyant is dependent on what type of clairvoyant they are.
Do they read actions, or intentions? If actions, work through someone else or manipulate the environment. Do not decide on a course of action until one conveniently presents itself. A spur of the moment blitz. If intentions, hire multiple actors. One of them will slip through the myriad warnings eventually. (Personally you think this method is a waste of assassins)
Do they only read the short term, or can they predict further into the future as well? If the short term only, poisons over time work best. If long term, be sure to act both kind and hostile in equal measure, until the method of their death is confused.
Is their ability only clairvoyance of the future, or can they read the past as well? If they can, you can never speak of your intentions aloud. Hide your correspondence in code, and send an assassin.
Of course, this all assumes you have time and assassins. You, personally, have neither.
But you do have something else: connections.
—-
When you recognize Athena and Menace in the broadcast, you want nothing more than to tear out of your lair and into the night like the wrath of hell let loose.
But there are several flaws in that plan, including that it is currently daylight, and that doing so would certainly get more people killed than you intend. Specifically people you care about, so that’s out.
Instead, you make a few phone calls.
“Optix.” You were still staring at your phone as the broadcast continued, promising an hour of execution. “Are you the reason I’m seeing this?”
You still weren’t sure what, exactly, Optix was - but it went by ‘it’ and had given its name, and was inherently jacked into any electronic cloud you had ever encountered. You didn’t know if it was a person, a program, or a genuine Artificial Intelligence, but you did know it could be helpful when it chose to be.
A thumbs-up emoji appeared in your messages.
“I owe you.”
A ‘no’ emoji, the red circle with its diagonal line.
“Do you have a location?”
Another ‘no’ emoji.
“Noted.”
The broadcast ended, you swept your phone back into your pocket.
“Boss,” that was Doll, looking very pale. “This is-“
“A trap? A problem? A truly blindingly idiotic move by a pack of misguided muppets I’m about to return to the scrap pile? Yes. Yes it is.”
The shadows are still writing around you, but they are drawing closer to your skin. You managed not to vaporize anything this time.
“Your eyes are glowing.” Doll notes uncertainly.
Glowing? Hm. That’s a bad sign. Normally it’s the shadows that appear there first.
Of course, the shadows come to hand when you are furious, when the anger is hot and choking. They rise when you are defensive, murky and obscuring. But this emotion - you are not certain you can call it anger, anymore, that somehow feels too weak - is cold at its core. Not the freezing, biting cold of fear, but the frost wind that steals warmth and cuts like knives.
And that emotion, whatever it is, is what calls the light.
“I am in control.” You inform Doll flatly. “Gather the others, make travel preparations. I have calls to make.”
Doll nods, bolting out of the room. You know it isn’t to get away from you so much as it is to get to work doing something, to feel as though he can help.
You replay the broadcast, short as it is.
By the time you’ve finished watching it a second time, you have a plethora of messages - other villains, sending you the clip. You don’t bother responding.
Instead, you flip to the number pad. Four digits into the number you intend to dial, it rings, from the same source.
You answer. A frustrated voice spits out a coordinate string and disconnects.
How do you keep a clairvoyant from knowing how you are going to kill them?
You use another clairvoyant, of course.
—-
When you drop from the underbelly of your plane, you do so alone.
Your minions are there, of course - Heather's piloting, with the rest on support positions or with other tasks when they actually land. But you will not take them with you into a brawl when you can help it.
You cannot fly, but you can use a different trick you learned through some very difficult trial and error - summoning sections of shadow and solidifying them, to 'run' across the sky. It's a peculiar feeling that combines vertigo with certain mental acrobatics to circumvent the laws of physics. If you fuck up, you'll fall.
So you don't fuck up.
You also don't try and stay airborne long. Instead, you let yourself drop in increments, cushioned by your shadows, until you reach the scrubland below.
You are, perhaps, a mile out from the outskirts of the town that you've been given the coordinates of. There's no question of whether it's the right one - there's a giant, gleaming metal spire in its center that doesn't belong amidst the southwestern architecture.
(The question of who endorsed these idiots is a problem you will handle later.)
There is no sign of movement in the town itself. The residents are either already casualties, imprisoned, or fled. You don't actually care which, you just want to know if you'll be stepping over more corpses than the ones you make.
There's only one way to find out - so you start walking.
---
Earlier, when you were first starting to train Alexandria, she had asked you why you never carried weapons.
"I don't really need them." You'd answered, even as you went through a practice pattern with a padded staff. "My shadows are amorphous, I can craft them however I need to. Harder mentally than fixing them into shape, but more difficult to physically counter."
Alexandria had been taking a break, perched on top of the giant tire you'd been having her lift. "You sure it's not just an image thing?" She'd asked skeptically.
You'd grinned, "Oh, it definitely adds to the image. I am unarmed, because I am always armed."
"Mom says you should do the opposite." She'd remarked. "Carry a weapon so that people think you're reliant on it, and then when they disarm you, they're surprised."
"That trick only works on someone once - though your mother does put it to good use. Also, her abilities are a little easier to disarm than mine. Shadows are everywhere - water? Not quite so easy to come by in certain circles. And the spear adds to her reach for better maneuverability. Your father too, I suppose, though he's more likely to bash someone with that shield."
Alexandria had studied you. "You really know a lot about how they fight."
In answer, you'd twirled the staff in your hands, and mimicked some of the spear patterns you'd seen both Athena and Legionnaire use.
"'Therefore I say: 'Know the enemy and know yourself; in a hundred battles you will never be in peril.'" You quote.
"Sun Tzu?" Alexandria sighs, "Please don't make me memorize the Art of War. I've already got paragraphs of the Iliad I'll never be able to get rid of."
"Memorization's pretty useless." You toss the staff instead, spinning it for fun instead of a combat pattern. "I just want you to understand what it means, not how much gold you need to allocate per li traveled."
Alexandria had eyed you suspiciously, "How many times have you read the Art of War?"
"No more questions." You'd declared. "How's the flight coming?"
---
Thunder booms by the time you've made it to the spire itself.
The sky has been steadily darkening, as you've picked your way through the empty streets. There are pock marks in the asphalt, holes in the buildings. Some of them are burned to the ground or melted - Cobalt's work, most likely.
You briefly wonder if they have a recovery factor, if you'll have to put them down again today. It doesn't change much, either way.
No bodies. Bloodstains, crumpled cars. Someone's had the wherewithal to clean, at least. Or someone who could raise the dead showed up already - hard to tell from context clues.
If you weren't wearing your helmet, you could've taken a deep breath and smelled only the heat, melting into the softer gentleness of rain. You could've felt the wind on your face, in a steady breeze.
But you were wearing your helmet, so you only noted those things distantly, and that made it all the more contrasting when you stepped into the trap that had been laid for you.
---
There are sirens wailing, somewhere. The few who have not been cut off already, cut silent as the screams of the living have been, one by one and in waves. The hush that should follow is denied by the high pitched whining of machinery and the sound of burning things. There are sparks, and pops. Something like words worn smooth in the background, run over so many times that they're part of these floorboards that are now cracking and failing, released again at the moment of unmaking.
You focus on the sounds, because you cannot see the devastation. You focus on the sounds, because you cannot smell the burning. You focus on the sounds, because if something does not force you to confront it, you do not know how fast or far away you would be running.
You shut your eyes and fight for air. Your hands close into fists, and you feel the world roll around you. An earthquake? You should be running -
Breathe. Weigh the situation, then move.
The sirens are too loud. The flames - you would've noticed them earlier, seen the smoke. The pieces of this scenario do not match.
You flip the settings on your helmet. The sounds do not change.
A mental effect, then. An illusion?
On a hunch, you blanket the area around you in shadow. From a building to your left, you hear a squeak of terror.
Slowly, not trusting your sense of direction, you turn towards it and take a single step.
"I know that you are there." You say calmly. "Your illusions are good, but they are not perfect. Come out, or my shadows will drag you out."
There's a pause, and the illusions intensify - you can feel the heat of fire on one side of your body, smell harshly chemical smoke - then the thunder cracks again, and you are abruptly returned to the near silence of reality.
A shuffling of footsteps. Then a small head pokes around a doorframe.
You run your shadows over them anyway, to make sure this is not an adult pretending to be a child. If they are, they're either much better at illusions than they're letting on, or they can also shapeshift.
You'd say the figure that steps into view is no more than eight years old.
"What is your name?" You ask, still calm, still gentle.
"Ciaran." The answer is in a near whisper.
"They did not give you a code-name?"
The child pales. "Ch-Cheshire. Like the cat."
You nod. "Very well, Cheshire. I am Synovus."
You look up and down the street, and compare the feelings of your vision to the area that surrounds you now. A few things make sense.
"I know." The child says, swallowing. "Please don't kill me."
"I will only kill you if you try to kill me." You answer, matter-of-fact. It's no use protesting that you don't kill children, no one ever believes you. "Your abilities - that wasn't an illusion, was it? It was a memory. A memory you pushed into my mind."
Cheshire nods, hesitant. "Ez - Jester said I should make you scared."
"And so you chose something that had scared you." You complete, "I felt your fear. And why did Jester want me scared?"
"I'm not supposed to answer any questions."
"You already have."
"You're going to hurt me. Hurt them."
You fold your arms. Why do you keep winding up in moral arguments with children?
"That will not change based on what you tell me, little one."
"I wasn't supposed to be here." Cheshire blurts. "I was supposed to wait - to wait until you came inside, and then -"
They fall silent, and you nod. "And then Jester would teleport behind me, hm? And why are you out here then, alone?"
"Because I don't want you to hurt them. I thought I could make you run away before you fought."
"Others have come here before me. Have you scared them away too?"
The child scuffs a foot. "Some of them. No one's ever found me though."
You crouch. "You've done a very stupid thing, coming out here to face me. But I am not here for you, and I am in a hurry. Hide, and I will not hurt you."
Cheshire steps back, but hesitates. "And Jester?"
You sigh. "They must face the consequences of their actions."
Cheshire's bottom lip wobbles. "Don't kill him! He's - he's my brother, I don't - promise you won't kill him!"
Sometimes, you really do hate yourself. Past, present, and future.
"I promise." You grit out, "That I will not kill your brother, Jester, on the condition that you hide, and not use your powers again, until a woman named Rosie comes to get you. Do we have an agreement?"
A stubbornness enters Cheshire's expression. "Pinky promise."
Again, you feel like this is a trap. Also, you're mildly offended that you would need to make a further oath than the one you've already made, but this is a child. So you hold out one hand, as far as you can, and Cheshire does the same.
When Cheshire nods solemnly, you straighten, and turn back towards the spire. The sound of scuffling marks the child's scramble through the rubble, and you hope you haven't made a terrible mistake in letting them get away.
You allow yourself another heavy sigh, and call Rosie to tell her what to expect.
---
You don't actually know for sure whether or not you have siblings. But wanting to sacrifice yourself to save a family member? You can remember feeling that way.
You know who your parents are (sometimes you wish you didn't) and you're reasonably sure your mother didn't have another child after you. Your father could have a whole bevvy of children, a miniature army, and you would never have known. An elder full-blooded sibling could've been taken away prior to your conscious memory.
Your father was known as Sunhallow. He who is Hallowed by the Sun. A god-made-flesh, who seemed to bleed gold and healed in the sun, and could incinerate enemies in beams of light.
Your mother was simply your mother to you, and if she ever did anything with her minor telekinetic gifts beyond keep up with you, you never heard about it.
When you were young, an enemy came calling. Several, perhaps. You were packed from your private tutoring into a safe room, and you did not come out for several days. It was you, your tutor, and a few others, who you knew would die to protect you on pain of a worse death at Sunhallow's hands.
When you finally came out again, you were brought to see him. He told you that your mother had had to go away, but if you worked hard enough, you could be allowed to go see her again. When you would not be a burden to her work.
Desperate to please, you had thrown yourself into your education and training. Combat, economics, athletics. Trying to find a way to call the sun the way Sunhallow could, in vain.
Several months in, your shadows had finally manifested for the first time. You'd been delighted to show him, begged to be allowed to speak to your mother - a letter, a phone call.
Sunhallow had refused.
After that day, he called you his moon-child. You became his shadow, never speaking, never moving unless called upon to do so. Your training, somehow, increased.
And when you had done that for a month, you were brought into a room where a caped hero had been restrained on a table. You knew their name from the list you were to memorize, and their strengths and weaknesses accordingly. Their name was Willowsteel.
Sunhallow put a dagger in your hands, and pointed at Willowsteel.
"There is the man who took your mother." He told you, "Go and get her back."
You had torn into them as though somewhere inside them was a key, and you could use it to open a door, and on the other side would be your mother, happy to see you after so long apart. But there was no key: only blood, and eventually that ran out too.
When you were done, Sunhallow had led you to another room, and showed you your mother's corpse.
---
The rain began to fall just as you stepped over the threshold of the spire.
It caused an interesting audio phenomenon on the inside, as it rang off the metal in a discordant harmony with the hum of the air conditioning. Thunder rumbled again.
There was no one in the entry hall that you could see. Only an empty room, wide and spacious, with a large grand staircase leading up. It feels more like a warehouse than a lair.
“Optix.” You whisper inside your helmet. “Does this place have an intercom?”
A two note trill that you take as a yes.
“Would you be so kind as to patch me into it, for a moment?”
Another two note trill, then the sound that usually heralds you should leave a message in a voicemail.
“Perhaps I was not clear enough, the last time we spoke.” You drawl, and in your voice is cold fury and disdain. There are sounds of startled movement from the stairs. “Allow me to clarify.”
Metal really is a horrible building material - the boots of anyone who is coming ring with such finality as they run to meet their deaths. A line of those you take for goons, pale-faced and unsteady and armed with automatic weaponry you know is stolen.
Your voice doesn’t waver, doesn’t change. Each word is delivered with gravitas and perfect diction. “Thou hast fucked around.”
You take several steps forwards into the room, your cape billowing behind you. The empty black blank of your helmet offers no reprieve or indication of humanity - only their own reflections.
“Thou shalt find out.”
Thunder shakes the sky - and the goons open fire.
—-
How do you keep a shadowmancer from killing you?
Well, that depends on how you define a shadow.
Must it be pure, pitch darkness? In that case, arrange for sufficient lighting, and they will be powerless.
Must it be a living thing’s shadow? Lure them into a trap, provide sufficient lighting, no living shadow to work from.
But can it be a half-shadow? If so, sufficient lighting becomes a problem. One need only cup their hand to create a negative space within the light, and draw a shadow from there. A bundle of a cape edge. The hollow of one boot.
And speaking of hollows - if a shadow is simply where the light isn’t, what, then, of a body’s hollows? The spaces in the mouth, the lungs, the small pockets inside various cavities. The slim space between brain and skull. Are those shadows?
Because if they are, a shadowmancer does not need external shadows to kill you.
And how do you keep a shadowmancer like that from coming to kill you?
Short answer: you don’t.
—-
You don't bother to count your kills. The ticker on that particular statistic is long broken, and you will not linger here. You grant them the mercy you have to give, and make things quick.
It takes you less than thirty seconds to go from staring down a wall of automatic rifle barrels to stepping over corpses, and up the stairs.
About halfway up the first level, the air shifts.
You pause, and when no immediate strike is forthcoming, you turn. "You do not have so many opportunities available to you that you can afford to waste an opening like that." You chide.
Jester is flushed, their breathing heavy. They stand where you were seconds earlier, and stare at the room, and then up at you.
"What did you do to Dymania?" They ask, and you see the edge of desperation in their eyes.
You decide that this is a lesson that can only be truly taught once. "A better question." You say thoughtfully, "Would be what I did to Ciaran."
At the mention of their brother's name, you watch Jester's face go through a variety of emotional contortions. You wouldn't bother to name all of the shades, but 'terror' features predominantly among them.
To Jester's credit, they learn quickly. The next time they teleport, there is no more pretense of talking.
---
In the rooms above you, you cannot see it for yourself, but you will learn later that Dymania is paralyzed. They lie on the floor, in the room crafted for them to get the most from their gifts. Overloaded with a thousand potential futures, each only a maddeningly small difference from the next, they occasionally shout or spasm.
In the room above them, Minerva has finally found an opening. She is trailing more goons, there is a bullet in her shoulder, and her leg is still not completely healed, but she manages to reach the rainwater, and that is all that she needs.
On the same level, down the hall, Alexandria is no longer held in check by her mother's captivity. They far underestimated her strength, and she has broken the bonds on herself and several others. When someone tries to enter the room, she takes the door off of its hinges and literally sweeps a path clear for the other hostages to flee.
Outside, Rosie is sitting on a chunk of concrete rubble, talking to a little boy who has no idea there are four others hidden in the area around him, ready to strike anyone else who approaches.
And a single figure hurtles through the sky, with no way to know that he is already too late.
---
You probably could've ended the fight with Jester much sooner, but... okay, so you were maybe having some fun with it.
Not because he was so clearly distressed, mind, just because how often did you really get to brawl with someone? No super strength, no weapons, no summoned spouts of fire, just a good old fashioned punch-out.
Yeah, sure, the kid teleported, but that just made it more interesting to fight him.
(You weren't sure what would happen if he solidified in a space he happened to share with, say, your arm, and you were disinclined to find out, so you had to lead your movements just enough and - well, it was harder than it sounded.)
And yes, you are furious still, but that fury was largely alleviated by doing something, and with the pieces you have set into motion, you will have to trust in the others in the building to play their parts. Also, you did promise not to kill this one, specifically.
So when he tries to gain enough momentum to blindside you by teleporting up and coming down, and you sidestep on the blood-slicked staircase, there is not a spike of shadow waiting to impale him if he does not teleport again quickly enough. When you see an opportunity to force him to carry through a motion and crack his skull into the railing, you stay your hand.
Mostly, though, you move in circles that broaden to leaps of your own, until Jester decides to try and pick up one of the guns of the dead goons.
You fold your arms as he aims at you. "Nice try."
Jester furrows his brow, the mask contorting to match. He glances at the barrel, does a doubletake, and swears. Frantic scurrying only turns up more of the same.
"I don't - what - how?" He cries, jumping from body to body for a gun that works.
"Solidified the shadows in the barrels." You lean against the railing and cross one leg over the other. You're only mildly winded.
“You can do that?” Jester cries in horror.
You hum. You aren’t entirely unsympathetic. “I can do many things.”
Jester looks up at you, something like determination in his eyes - and disappears.
When he does not reappear, trying to punch you again, you sigh. “Damn it.”
You click your way through to Rosie again. “Yeah, I overdid it. No, I’m fine. I am not that old. The roof? Fine. There better be an elevator.”
Grumbling, you find the elevator at the heart of the spire. They haven’t locked it yet - so you’ll take however many floors you can get out of it before they do.
—-
When you were younger, your mother told you about the things that made someone Great.
You can’t quite say they were stories, because they were more like… half-anecdotes, strung together on a line. But they were always meant to entertain and teach, and you could listen while you did other things.
For a long time, you thought they were all about your mother and father. She was every brave woman who thought to heal instead of breaking, every woman who drove a weapon’s blade through solid stone, every woman who adventured and every woman who stayed home.
Your father was every man who proved the truer than his enemies, who rallied others to his cause, who truly believed and in that faith called others to follow. Inspired them, rather than commanded.
And you? You were both of them. You had your mother’s adventuring and wisdom, your father’s effortless grace and pure heart. You did not need your own stories, when you could frolic in the mix of theirs, leaping from one tale to the next, an ephemeral sidekick.
Your mother never corrected you. But you learned, eventually.
Your father was never the protagonist in those stories at all.
And where did that leave you?
—-
The elevator stops about two stories up, by your reckoning, and had you been standing by the door like a dunce, you would've been pummeled by a torrent of water.
And had there not been mirrors at the back of the elevator, you might've pummeled Minerva with a torrent of shadow.
But there were, so you could see it was her from your vantage of tucked-into-the-corner, and she could see it was you as the center mirror cracked and shattered.
(You weren't sure if you should commend these young idiots for thinking of the corner tricks, or condemn them for putting in wall to floor mirrors. Really, those things shatter no matter what kind of treatment you give them.)
"Synov-" Her incredulity is cut off, as you sweep around the corner - and sweep her into a hug.
She must be exhausted, because you get away with it. She stands rigid for a moment, bracing, likely thinking you're tackling her or some other nonsense. Once it becomes clear - oh, a second or two later - that you're only wrapping your arms around her in reassurance that she's alive, some self-preservation instinct drops.
For a moment, she rests her head on your shoulder, and gently presses one arm against your back.
When she pulls away, you do too.
"I should've known you'd come for Al- Menace." She says, and her throat is raw. Smoke? Screaming? (You're going to burn this town a second time) "Had to show me up one more time."
"One day, Minerva." You say quietly, "I'm going to prove to you that my affection for you is not a trap, or some kind of proxy for your child. But for now -"
You spread your hands, summoning shadows between them. You spin them like thread, that thickens to wire, that thickens to cord, pulled taut and bulging on one end. That end clarifies - sharp edges, a wide base that narrows to a point. A replica of Athena's spear.
Minerva - Athena? - takes it, weighing its balance. She opens her mouth to say something, but you are already holding out a disc in the shape of her shield.
"The weight's wrong." She says, taking the shield.
"Shadows." You say apologetically. "Not the heaviest things. Shall we?"
Minerva clears her throat, "Menace is searching for more cells. They had a lot of people here."
You nod, and follow when she walks away. "Anyone other than Jester and Dymania I should worry about?"
Athena adjusts her shield. "Not while I'm around."
---
When you were Sunhallow's shadow, he called you 'Eclipse.'
You were not his enforcer - he did that well enough on his own. You were the spy, the assassin, a card near the bottom of a very stacked deck. An observer, time and time again.
And, as proves inevitable when someone is taught to find loopholes and make observations, they will begin to find chinks in their predecessor's armor. They will learn to ply their skills for their own gain, rather than only on instruction. It is what makes them good at what they do.
You were very good at what you did.
In all of your searching and spying, you put together several pieces. You conducted your own investigations, slipped additional questions into interrogations, took the time to talk to your targets before you killed them.
Their words painted a very different picture than the one you'd been given. They showed that your mother had not been abducted, but had left willingly. May have even opened the door. They showed that Sunhallow was not the first to claim godhood, only the most recent to become so prominent. And that not everyone, as he had claimed, recognized his inherent superiority.
Your father told you that one day, you would become Holy, as he was. The Sun would hallow your bones, bless you, and raise you to take over where he left off. But you knew what he looked like when he was lying, by then. You also knew he liked to tempt others by offering them the idea of his position, his glory. It was bait.
And the day the light finally responded to your call, you realized that you were going to have to take it.
---
When you and Athena find Menace, it's by finding the end of her trail of ducklings - nearly thirty people, milling about in varying levels of distress and shock.
Someone screamed when they caught sight of you, in your distinctive costume, and Athena with her spear and shield of shadows. You sighed, unsurprised, but didn't have time to even start trying to explain yourself before a head rose above the others. And kept rising.
Nearly flat to the ceiling, Menace shot over the heads of her flock, and hurtled into the pair of you to grab you both in a hug.
"Super-strength, super-strength, super-strength," you chant in warning, wanting to come out of this reunion with your trachea intact.
"You saw me ten minutes ago." Athena chides gently, but her heart isn't in it, and she hugs Menace back just as tightly.
“I’ve never been so happy to see a pile of garbage bags in my life.” Menace says, giving you a very careful squeeze. You have time to make an offended noise before she turns her attention back to her mother; “And you - you got shot? I specifically requested you not get shot.”
“The people.” Athena reminds her, nodding towards the shambling mass of mundanity.
“None of them got shot either.” Menace replies mulishly. When Athena sighs, she relents. “No major injuries so far, though some of them are pretty banged up - bruises, scrapes. I think I’ve gotten most of them out by now, unless there’s a basement to this place.”
Athena looks at you, and you shrug. “It would make sense that they did, but the elevator didn’t go down that far, and herding prisoners down stairs gets very annoying very quickly. If there is one, I’m betting it’s maintenance.”
The shambling mass of mundanity has been whispering since you arrived. You could wait for Menace or Athena to soothe them - but you’d rather not.
“Oh, shut up.” You tell them crossly. “If I were here to kill you all I would’ve blown up the place and been done with it. You all get to live and deal with the trauma for the rest of your sorry lives. Lucky you.”
There’s a collective gasp of shocked breath, and the nearest ones edge back from you a little more - but they do go silent.
Athena elbows you in the ribs. “Synovus does have a point about the stairs.” She says calmly. “And the elevator isn’t safe. Have we found an alternative exit?”
Menace sighs, “I could punch through an outer wall and carry people down?”
Athena considers the group size. “That would take some time. And we would be vulnerable during movement.”
“The ground level is secure.” You mention idly.
“Which doesn’t rule out snipers or the two remaining supervillains.” Menace points out.
“You.” Athena says suddenly. “You can make discs of shadow, and you can hold them. You can make one wide enough for them to all stand on, so they can be lowered down together.”
You could also make a slide that curves around the spire all the way down, but you don’t say that part out loud.
“I could.” You concede. “You would be putting their lives in my hands.”
“If you wanted them dead, you’d have killed them by now.” Athena counters. “So time to live up to not wanting them dead.”
You survey the crowd. You have an image to maintain - or, well , partially reconstruct.
“Fine.” You drawl, and stalk closer to the group. You shoo them all to one side, and rest your fingertips on one wall, feeling for the vibration of the rain. “This is the outer wall?”
Athena breaks off reassuring the people to call to you, “It is. Maybe four, five inches?”
You resist the urge to make inappropriate jokes. Someone in the crowd does not. Someone else smacks them on the back of the head. The first person mutters something about stress responses and apologizes.
Experimentally, you lodge a spear of shadow into the wall. It sticks until you dismiss it. You can see a faint gleam of pale light through it.
Well. Shit. Shadows are very adaptable things, but they don’t cut very well - they’re more brute force and occasionally piercing.
Which means you’re going to have to use the light.
Whatever. At least it’s not made of concrete.
You don’t bother to explain yourself to your companions, not with an audience present. Instead, you raise a wall of shadow between yourself and them, thick enough to block the glow of radiance when you summon light to your hands.
A beam would be easiest, here - but it would also be like setting off a beacon. The most subtle would be to use the light as a knife, as you normally do when you have to use it, but that would take forever. So… laser cutter?
You use three sharp, long lines to hack off either side and a new roof line, giving it a shove near the top with your shadows so it doesn’t try and fall inward. Another slash at the bottom cuts it loose. The chunk of metal falls away with a relatively soft screech (which is, still deafening) and drops with the rest of the rain, and your shadow wall.
You reveal yourself again, already turned to face the group, with the rain now drumming on the metal flooring (you may have erred on the side of excess for height) and the wind blowing your cape out dramatically. You gesture to the open air, shadows already weaving a basket to hold a large group of people.
They cannot see you smiling, but they can hear it. It is not a polite or joyful smile. “Your chariot awaits, dear friends.”
—-
No one thanks you for putting a raised edge on the platform.
Menace would’ve caught them, of course, but still. Did your efforts to save them from falling mean nothing?
Had circumstances been different, you might’ve complained about that to Athena, loudly and at length. Instead, you stayed quiet, and kept time in your head as you lowered a herd of sheeple to solid ground.
You stay up in the spire, though Athena rides with them to reassure them, and Menace drifts alongside. Once they’re down, she argues with her mother for a moment. Then she flies back up, carrying Athena.
“Refused to stay put for her injuries?” You remark, having found a chair to lounge in. That actually did take a significant amount of energy, though you’ve done everything you can to disguise that.
“Yes.” Menace grumbles.
“I told her I’d climb the spire by hand if I had to.” Athena says stubbornly. To Menace, she said firmly, “I let someone slow me from coming to you once. Never again.”
“You two are going to have the strangest rivalry.” You said admiringly, to break the tension. Both of them turn to you instead, and even if Menace’s head is covered, you’d bet their expressions are identical.
You raise your hands in mock-warding - and pause as the air shifts again.
There are two people in the hallway. One, the bruised-but-mobile Jester. The other, slumped against a wall and looking much worse for wear, is Dymania.
Menace and Athena both tense, drawing a step closer together in preparation for a fight. You cross one leg over the other at the knee.
"You know, you two are terrible hosts." You call, casually flicking a crease from your costume. "Leaving us alone for so long? Incredibly ru-"
"Shut UP Synovus!" Jester yells, near manic. You can see the whites of his eyes all the way around, even under the mask. "You weren't even supposed to be here! You're retired!"
"Someone doesn't check Twitter." You remark, amused.
"I - What?" Aw, you've genuinely thrown this one for a loop.
"Twitter." You repeat. "I tweeted 'nvm, comma, I'm back' an hour before I arrived." You enunciate each letter in 'nvm' instead of approximating a word.
Athena sighs, "Synovus."
"Yes, honored colleague?"
"Shut up."
You respond by rising, and giving an overexaggerated bow. Dymania yelps and throws themself to one side - because as you straighten, you throw lances of shadow at both of them.
---
The fight really didn't take long.
You're pretty sure the only reason they got Athena or Menace was by threatening the hostages they already had, and you could've wiped the floor with them on your own. You still didn't kill Jester, and even helped cushion a hit he took from Menace.
(The hit wouldn't have hurt him as much as the rebound against the floor. Menace would've been terribly upset to have accidentally killed him.)
(Though, if she or Athena killed him, you wouldn't be in violation of your promise.)
(But - no. You wouldn't do that to either of them. Not now.)
The end of things really came when Athena managed to pin Jester against the wall with her good arm, and you'd managed to herd Dymania away from his companion. He stumbled back again, and wound up crossing into the area where the rain was still falling.
(Lightening up, you noticed. Better finish things quickly then.)
The change was immediately noticeable. Dymania stiffened, clutching at their head with both hands, and tried to run forward out of the rain - only to find you there, walking them back to the edge.
"H- how did-" They cut themselves off, and you nodded.
"How did I know about the rain?" You asked politely, as much taking pity on them as taking the chance to grandstand. "The Silent Ones told me. You know how they feel about Clairvoyants who don't conform."
It isn't really possible for more color to drain from Dymania's face. Instead, they drop to their knees with a groan.
"What?" Menace asks, looking up from where she's trying to convince Athena to trade off with her.
You raise your voice a little, so she can hear you better. "The Silent Ones. An enclave of Clairvoyants, hidden from most of the world. When two clairvoyants cross each others paths, it's like putting two mirrors opposite each other. Endless reflections. They hate it."
You watch Dymania try to stagger back to their feet, and feel no pity. "That includes if one shows up in their own futures. It gives them headaches at best. Sometimes they wind up in comas, if they're particularly unprepared. So one of them eventually hit upon the idea - what if all of them lived together?"
You glance towards the sky, calculating how long you have left. "They live according to a very strict schedule, and interact as little as possible with each other. If everyone does exactly as ordered, there's no need to make predictions. No traps to fall into. They don't force others into it, but they certainly don't like it when someone has plans that conflict with their order either."
"You mean like, someone leaving?" Menace asks, having managed to take half-ownership of keeping Jester pinned. She sounds offended on their behalf.
"No, they can leave whenever they want. Its the ones who want to do something about their enclave - like find it, exploit it, or destroy it - that find themselves suddenly overwhelmed with bad luck. And the chaos of the rest of the world is often too much for them, once they've gotten used to the enclave."
"So its... more like a sanctuary?"
"Yes. And they know you, Dymania. They know that you cannot stand the rain."
"Make it stop." Dymania begs you. You aren't even sure they've been following the conversation - their eyes are unfocused, trying not to see or feel the falling water around them.
"Clairvoyants, as a whole, despise rain." You mention idly. You have not moved. "The randomness involved in where each drop falls - it ties them up into knots. Worse, if they predict how the droplets will feel on their skin. Some of them can filter it out, like white noise - Dymania is not one of them."
You tilt your head, and then turn back to the others. "Very well. Let's go."
Like you know they will, Dymania gives a cry of desperation. They push, once more, to try and make it to their feet. And at the point where their future diverges, they try to draw the handgun Jester had forced them to carry.
You pivot, and in one smooth motion, kick Dymania out of the spire.
"Dy!" Jester cries.
"Yes." You muse. "I suppose they will."
---
The fight goes out of Jester, after Dymania falls.
The three of you drag him up to the roof, at your direction. Once the skies clear, Heather will bring the plane back around, and all of you can reach it easily enough from the highest point. Plus, at this point, it's less stairs to go up than it would be to go back down, and you really don't want to do the disc trick again.
It turns out the roof is less a flat roof, and more of a ring near the top. You notice Menace shudder as you reach it, and tilt your head at her in question.
"They threw hostages over the railing here." She says quietly.
You nod. This explains why neither Menace or Athena protested much, at what you'd done. But you don't protest or labor the point either - instead, you clasp her arm in sympathy, and look up at where the sky is clearing.
"How did you time that so well?" Athena murmurs when you come up alongside her.
"Weatherwitch owed me a favor." You reply casually.
"Weather witch. The Silent Ones. Your council. What else is there, some kind of... Villain union?"
"Well..." You admit, "there is... something of a minion union, though I stay out of their business, mostly."
Athena sighs.
You almost take your helmet off to grin at her. You probably would've, but then you hear Menace, and the sudden tension in her voice as she says, "Mom?"
You both turn immediately - and see Legionnaire, hovering at the railing, and staring at you.
---
You didn't forget Legionnaire existed.
No, really, you didn't - but you did try really hard not to let yourself think about it for too long.
When you had named him (and Athena) as your rivals, you had made your choice based on what you thought was a genuine good in them. They did not hesitate until the cameras arrived. They did not extort or demand. They took some care for collateral when lives were involved, if not property, and they regularly showed up to help with rescue or relief efforts when they could.
And there was the fact that they had a kid.
You'd fought them enough times to know that they didn't mess around to grandstand or showboat. They maintained secret identities fairly well. They weren't like Dazzler, who would try and seduce villains in the hopes of fucking them back to civility. They weren't like White Shadow, who was always high enough when you fought them that you weren't sure they knew what was happening.
The closest, you thought, to real heroes.
So when you'd seen those bruises on Alexandria's arm, that first day, you'd been... surprised. You didn't exactly have the highest opinion of humanity in general, and you'd learned too many early lessons about pedestals and how much they hurt when they fell over on top of someone. But you had expected better of them.
From your observations, conversations with Minerva and Alexandria, and the things they didn't say, you'd pieced together a lot over the last year. That Minerva did have her flaws, but was trying to be better. That her healing factor meant that any bruises or sprains would've healed long before anyone else saw them. That Alex, though wary of Minerva sometimes, had still talked about her when she wasn't around. She almost never mentioned her father, and when she did, it was only questions about how you knew him, or in conjunction with her mother.
You had been worried, at first, that you were conflating him with Sunhallow. A man claiming holiness (the Sun made him Hallow, the Son of Mars) with strength and a following (A cult, a fanbase) and who coerced their child into working for them (Eclipse, Mercury) and who harmed them-
So you hadn't let yourself go out to find him and have it out. On better days, you admitted it wasn't your fight to have - it was Minerva and Alexandria's, if they wanted it. On worse days, you weighed the benefits and consequences of hiring someone versus doing it yourself.
And you had kept a degree of surveillance on him, just in case. Nothing in depth - you didn't know what brand of frozen pizza he bought or his Netflix account, you didn't care if he still had a job or had lost it - but just. General locations. Whether he went out in costume. You had Legionnaire watched, and not Albion.
But sometimes those lines blurred - so you knew that he had started drinking more heavily when Alexandria left. More again, after Minerva. The last two months, he'd seemed to be getting better, but he had stopped going out in costume.
And now he was here, and you had no idea what to do.
---
For what feels like an eternity, you all stand in silence. Athena had been startled into dropping Jester, automatically readying her shield and then stilling herself before she could aggravate her bullet wound any more.
(She still held the shadow set you'd given her, you hadn't found her usual weapons in the spire, though you had personally looked.)
You grabbed Jester, who was glancing back and forth with confused interest.
"Say a word, or try and teleport away." You tell him quietly, head next to theirs. "And I will make Dymania's death seem like a kindness."
Judging by the way he nods, slowly, he also remembers that you technically have Ciaran.
And Menace - oh, Menace - has lifted from the ground, hovering, with her hands curled into fists.
It's Legionnaire who breaks the silence first; "You inherited my powers."
He sounds... proud. Tired. His voice is rough. He's looking at Alexandria as though she is a prized pupil who has shown an aptitude in his favorite subject.
(He doesn't deserve that pride.)
"I have my own powers." Menace corrects him, her voice clipped and short.
Legionnaire moves his hands gently in a faint 'settle down' motion. "Of course." He says quietly. "All yours, Alex."
"Why are you here, Albion." Minerva demands. She's pulled off the Athena mask, and glares him down as he looks her over. Notes the shadow-weapons, the injury.
"I saw the broadcast." He explains, gesturing to the spire. "I thought - you needed help."
"We're fine." Minerva says flatly.
It's hard to shift uncomfortably when you're flying, but Legionnaire manages it - as his gaze slides to you.
"Oh, come off it." Minerva follows his gaze, and now sounds heated.
"Can you really blame me, Athena?" He says, and sounds beseeching. "This all started with him, when he took Alex -"
"They." Menace interrupts, nearly strangling the word. "Synovus is 'they,' not 'he.'"
Legionnaire bites his lip, flicks his eyes away, then back again. "Fine." He says, though his calm is less even now. "They took you, Alex. And then they took your mother, too."
"I left of my own free will." Alexandria has risen now, a little further up. Not quite even with her father. "And my name. Is Alexandria."
There's a certain exasperation in Legionnaire's expression that he can't hide fast enough. Changing tactics, he looks to Minerva again instead, "Athena, think about it. Synovus changed you! You know they used to say he - she, they - had manipulative powers. They've kept you isolated, and now let you get captured just so they can sweep in to save you-"
"Synovus." Minerva grits her teeth, "Did not make me move several hundred miles inland, away from my family and the source of my powers. Synovus did not discourage me from getting involved in the community, in case I accidentally gave our identities away. Synovus-" She has taken a step forward, with each line, and the tip of her spear is slowly lowering to point towards him. "-did not hurt my daughter."
Legionnaire exhales, "So did you." He points out. "It happens, it's not anything unusual - its how kids learn! I-"
"I am ashamed of that!" Minerva shouts. Alexandria has sunk an inch. "We were supposed to be better, Albion! We talked about trying to save cities, to save the world, and we couldn't even save our own daughter from ourselves!"
"No one is perfect." Legionnaire deflects.
Minerva points her spear at you. You do not flinch. "I have lived with them for over a month." She says, with a steely calm. "I have seen those who live with them. I have seen how they are with Alexandria." There's a subtle emphasis on the last half of the name, a pointed correction. "They provided me medical care without blinking, and though I have yelled and raged and attacked them, they have never raised a hand against me while I was in their house."
Legionnaire scoffs, "So Synovus learned to play nice for a while, that's not -"
"It's more than you ever managed." Minerva says with venom.
There is a silence then, deep enough that the entire spire could fall into it and further, swallowed by a negative space that never ends.
Finally, you speak again, but only when you are certain your voice is under your control. "The plane is here." You say calmly. "Someone should make sure this one-" You jostle Jester, "-is received properly."
There is a two-fold offer in the statement, and one you know both Minerva and Alexandria hear.
Tell me to leave, and I will.
Because you will, if they want. You are party to this story, but it is not yours. It will hurt you, and you will worry, but you know about closure and what it can take to find it.
Tell me to take care of him, and I will.
One more death will not be a burden on your conscious. Not when you feel responsible that he was allowed to continue - that you have protected this man for years. Logically, you know that's ridiculous. It isn't necessarily Logic that wants to kill him.
This pause is shorter, lighter. Minerva whirls on you, searching. You wait for the protest - that she can fight her own battles, and you should fuck off before she comes to her senses and fights you again, a villain at the scene of a crime.
Instead, she glances at Alexandria, who is still hovering, still staring at Legionnaire.
"Alexandria." Minerva says softly. "Our priority is still the people."
"Yes." She responds automatically. It takes her another moment to move, to shake herself out of her paralysis. "I can carry you both."
You know that does not include you.
"Athena, don't -" Legionnaire starts.
You ignore him, and look at Alexandria. "Menace." You address her by the title, helping knock her out of it a little more.
(Yes, remember - you want to tell her, - you are more than his daughter. You have stood in a room full of powerful people and held your own, and more.)
"Lady Synovus." Menace returns. You know it's specifically to spite Legionnaire's earlier assumption that you were male.
"As Legionnaire is your rival -" You ignore Legionnaire again when he starts to interrupt, raising your voice to talk over him, "- it is your jurisdiction as to what measures I can take."
The formality is a shield. You hate to ask this of her, to force her to say - but even if you weren't bound by the rules you'd created, you need to know. If she asks you not to hurt him... well, you'll try.
Alexandria pauses, watching Minerva. Minerva looks back at her, meeting her gaze through the helmet.
"It's your decision," She tells her daughter, "But I will stand by you, no matter what you decide."
"What's this about 'rivals'?" Legionnaire tries to interject.
Alexandria stiffens, as though she might yell at him, and you brace yourself to have to intervene - but instead, she just reaches up and removes her helmet.
Alexandria looks her father square in the face as she says, "Lady Synovus, I give you leave to do as you feel appropriate. No restrictions."
"You are certain?" You ask, because you want her to be sure.
"I am." Her voice doesn't waver.
Minerva takes Jester from you, frowning to remember that he's here, and he's overheard all of this. Alexandria drifts backwards, to gently gather both her mother and the defeated villain into her arms, before going up.
Legionnaire tries to follow - but can't, as you've already got a shadow wrapped around his ankles.
You slam him back down with relish.
"No." You say, your voice chilly, "You are not invited into their lives anymore, Legionnaire."
"And you get to decide that?" Legionnaire demands, trying to slice through your shadow. You tighten its grip in answer. "You get to decide I can't talk to my wife, my son-"
You are glad Alexandria is out of earshot.
"You have never had a son." You say harshly. "And Minerva is not yours in any capacity. You have had months to figure this out, Albion. Time's up."
He seizes on your word choice. "Figure it out - so you did do something! You took my family from me!"
The words, similar to the ones Minerva had yelled at you only a day earlier, make a sheltered part of you ache. But, you remind yourself, she did defend you. She trusts you.
Granted, looking at Legionnaire, still trying to find a way out of your shadows, you admit the bar is pretty fucking low.
"You did that yourself, you idiot." You hiss. "You drove Minerva away. You refused to accept your child. I am not the reason your life is terrible, Albion. You are."
He straightens, and you recognize the arrogance that returns to his posture. He still thinks you're trying to fool him. That he is correct. And he will not be swayed.
"Say whatever you want, Synovus!" He yells, "You won't keep me from the ones I -"
This time, it's a shadow that shuts him up - drawn out of his throat and coiled to serve as a gag. His eyes bulge. He did not know you could do this.
With a flick of your wrists, the shadows holding him down are gone - and replaced with chains of brilliant light. They drag him down, relentless, scorching the skin they touch, until he is pinned to the floor.
"I believe." You say, as you pick your way over to him. "That the missing word there is 'love.' But I am going to choose to believe you were going to say something else - because everything you have said today, Albion? It is not love."
You stare down at him. "You came here. You knew where they were. The lives in peril were of no consequence until it was Minerva and Alexandria. You did not come to save them. You came to try and make them listen to you again."
He may not be listening, but it doesn't matter. You do love a good monologue, and this particular serpent has been coiled in your chest for a long time.
"That isn't love, Albion." You tell him softly. "It's obsession. Possession. You don't respect them enough to consider that they have opinions and wants different than your own. And they deserve so much better."
You pick up the spear that he'd been forced to drop, and twirl it idly. He redoubles his attempts to struggle, to escape - he's always been so strong, but you have always been stronger.
You are very tempted to cast your powers aside here. You want the satisfaction of feeling his bones break beneath your hands, the visceral feeling of grabbing and tearing away. You want to make him suffer.
You want to look for a key that will give Alexandria and Minerva their happiness back.
But you know that those keys don't exist, by now. And you do not need to make yourself more of a monster to kill this one.
"They did love you, at one point." You muse. "And in another world - who knows? Maybe that would have been enough."
You plant one foot on his chest, and lean in. The tip of the spear rests on his throat, and finally, Legionnaire goes still.
"But redemption's never been my style." You hiss.
You slide the spear home.
---
A week after you return to business, you lead Alexandria and Minerva to a secluded part of the island.
The beach is shallow here, particularly at low tide. You and Minerva slosh through water up to your shins. Alexandria drifts over instead, occasionally splashing her feet in the water.
"Not much further." You assure them, though neither has shown signs of complaining. You are nervous. This place is not sacred to you, but it still has power over you.
There is a sea cave of black rock, out of the way. It does not tunnel into the rest of the island very far - a few hundred yards, that's all. A lava tunnel once, long since collapsed, and the inside filled by now with sand.
You pause at the entrance, staring at the void of perfect shadow. You love the shadows - they have always protected you, and you know this one does too - but you do not want to dive into its embrace. You want to run from it.
You clear your throat, "In here."
Carefully, you summon a small globe of light. The three of you (okay, the two of you) pick your way carefully through the cave's unsteady footing, until eventually the ground rises, becoming smooth stone instead of rocky black sand.
There isn't much ornamentation, here. Just a marker, in the form of a rock, carved with the sigil of the sun.
Minerva stiffens. "That's -"
"Sunhallow's sigil." You croak, and clear your throat again. "Yes. This is - this is his grave."
You stand in silence for a few moments - or at least, if Minerva or Alexandria speak, you don't hear them. You're staring sightlessly at the small obelisk you'd carved, so that you would always know if someone tampered with the body.
You still hate him, decades later.
You still sometimes wonder if you were wrong.
A touch at your shoulder startles you back to the present. Its Alexandria, who is looking at you, and not the grave. "You said that this was your father's grave."
"It is." You make yourself respond, then gesture to the front of the cave. "We should - the water gets higher, later, and I know we don't necessarily have to worry about that, but -"
"But you don't want to be here anymore." Minerva finishes. "That's okay, Synovus. We don't have to stay."
You are silent, until you are back out in the sunlight. It should be the opposite, you think - the sunlight was always his, the shadows were yours. Now he has a lair of shadows, and you seek refuge in the light? You'd accuse the universe of irony, if you hadn't brought this upon yourself.
You are not in costume, today. None of you are. It means that they can see the expressions you have lost control over, as you pace back and forth beneath a clump of palm trees, near the shoreline.
"Sunhallow was my father." You say finally, abruptly. Your shoulders drop. The tension - the weight - isn't gone, but... saying the words didn't hurt. Your throat didn't swell closed before you could force them out. You didn't deflect, equivocate, or dodge.
"Sunhallow was my father." You repeat.
"We gathered that." Minerva says, and you are grateful for her dryness.
"I-" You draw in a breath, and turn, shrugging out of the light wrap you wear. Beneath it is a backless shirt that Alexandria had insisted you buy, for one of your more feminine days. You hadn't had the heart to tell her you never exposed that much skin.
Because on your back, centered on your spine and between your shoulder blades, is a large tattoo of the same sigil. The ink is stark against your skin even before it begins to change. Touched by the sunlight, from the center out, the ink turns a glittering gold.
Hallowed, by the Sun.
You can tell from Alexandria's 'woah' that she thinks it's cool as hell. You can tell by Minerva's sharp inhalation that she knows what it means.
You pull the wrap back into place, and turn to face them.
"I killed him." You say, and you speak quickly, as though someone is going to cut you off and you will never get a chance to tell this story, the one you have never told anyone before. "I worked for him for years, as an informant and spy, but I was too good at what he taught me. I learned things he didn't want me to know - didn't want anyone to know - and I - I learned when he lied. I learned about, about the purges."
When Sunhallow was challenged, he had taken to targeting groups of people. Heroes, villains. Towns. It was purification by sunlight, in great quantities - Hallowing the place, with the Sun.
He did not leave survivors.
You swallow, "He was healed by sunlight." You explain, "So I smothered him with shadows."
You knew he would never let anyone into his rooms after nightfall, when he was most vulnerable. So you'd killed him at noon, when the sun was highest, and you'd have had to be stupid to attack him.
You did sometimes do very stupid things.
"I killed him, and then I packed his body into a trunk, and I brought it out here, and I buried it in the cave where the sun will never touch it again." You are surprised, a little, at the vitriol in your voice.
You hadn't taken any chances, moving him. You didn't know if he could come back from the dead, but you didn't want to find out.
Minerva is staring at you with something like wonder.
"It was you." She said softly. "You were the Eclipse."
You nod, exhaling. "The Heresiarch Heir." You echo glumly. "Patricide. Oathbreaker. Murderer. And coward, besides."
Minerva pushes off the tree she's been leaning on, and reaches for you. "Brave." She says firmly. "No one could stop Sunhallow - but you, you couldn't have been more than twenty when he died."
You laugh, short and hollow. "Sixteen."
Minerva blinks. "I couldn't have done such a thing." She admits. "How...?"
You blow out another breath. "He killed my mother." You say, staring into the middle distance again. "And made me kill Willowsteel."
You do not elaborate on how long it took, or how you knew it had been Sunhallow's hand that had killed your mother. Some things you were not ready to talk about, even now.
"Willowsteel...." Minerva muses, "They had a metallurgy ability, didn't they? Or was it magnetics?"
You still have perfect recall of that list. "Metallurgy, with a particular talent for shaping weaponry." You respond automatically.
And you had known that, even when they'd put a steel knife in your hands. And he had known it too, as you stood over him. But in his eyes, you had seen something like a horrified acceptance.
You had been a child. He could've easily overpowered you, or turned the blade aside. For a long time, you had told yourself that it was because he knew Sunhallow would kill him anyway, and he wanted it to be over.
The day you buried Sunhallow, sitting outside the cavern and watching the sun rise again, you'd forced yourself to admit it - that Willowsteel hadn't killed you, because he would rather have died than hurt you.
Truer than his enemies. A man with faith and belief, even if it wasn't in a god, or a man who pretended to be one.
You couldn't plant willow trees on the island - the climate didn't agree with them - but on one of the estates Sunhallow had once owned, there was a grove of them, in a perfect ring around a monument to all of those lost in the purges.
You spend the rest of the afternoon telling stories, when you could stomach it. They asked questions, sometimes. About your mother, about how you'd scraped yourself back together as a villain under your own power. How you'd drawn the others together, forced some degree of order from chaos in the cape-population explosion after the purges had ended.
You knew that both of them understood.
---
Days later, you are waiting in a room decorated in pure white.
The room is quiet, and you can hear the distant roar of an ocean that is not yours. You sit in the dark, one leg crossed over the other, pretending not to be bored.
When the light flips on, the woman in the doorway stiffens, but tries not to show any other signs of distress.
You lift your head, the black shine of your helmet giving her nothing to work with. Another dark-clad figure waits to one side, a third (though in blue rather than black) is keeping watch outside. She has not noticed them yet, you think. She will be furious about that.
"My dear Tallflawes." You drawl, leaning forward. "We need to discuss some of your more recent... investments."
[And so we come to the end (for now!) - thank you to everyone who's made it this far, whether you've been here since the beginning or are only recently catching up. My goal was to finish this during Pride Month, and I have succeeded! Sum total, VNR is just over 34k words, with Call Me Menace sitting at about 8.5k.]
[And a shoutout to 'daddythedragon' and Daphanae for correctly guessing the show Alexandria was watching last time, which was Murder, She Wrote! (Columbo and Magnum P.I. were good guesses too).]
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thefloatingstone · 5 years ago
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If you’re doing Self Quarintine (and you should be if you can help it) here’s some Youtube recommendations! Some of these I have posted about or recommended before but with almost all of us stuck indoors now’s a good time to remind you of some cool things you can watch for free!
I’m not gonna imbed the videos, I’ll just post the link because otherwise I would only able to post 5 and I want to collect a few so you can make a playlist or something. (I could make a playlist too but then I couldn’t tell you what each video is and you can’t pick and choose which one sounds interesting to you)
In no particular order:
Polybius: The video Game that doesn’t exist
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An hour long documentary in which the youtuber did extensive research to find the origin of the “Polybius” Urban Legend, which speaks of an early arcade game reportedly seen around the early 1980s which reportedly gave people migraines, insomnia, nausea, subliminal messages, and in some cases heart attacks.
The Universal S
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A shorter video in which LEMMiNO does his very best to try and track down where exactly this S that we all drew in middle school comes from? Why does literally every country on earth seem to HAVE their children draw this S?
I also recommend LEMMiNO’s video on the Dayltov Pass Incident and the perplexing UFO cases
Down the Rabbit Hole: Henry Darger
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Fredrick Knudsen has an incredible fascinating series called “Down the Rabbit Hole” which simply focuses on... anything you can discover and go digging into. From weird internet personalities, to bizarre happenings in history. This video is about the artist Henry Darger, a man who lived in the early 1900s and for all intents and purposes had a perfectly average, lonely life, until it was discovered just before his death he had spent literally decades writing and drawing a fantasy world in what is possibly the longest piece of literature ever written.
I also recommend his video on the Hurdy Gurdy
Bedtime Stories Channel
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I’m actually just gonna link the whole channel for “Bedtime Stories”. If you like weird and creepy stories, all of which at least claim to be “true” then Bedtime Stories is great. Coupled by illustrations and subtle sound effects, Bedtime Stories is literally listening to someone tell you a story about such things like hikers who mysteriously went missing, Sightings of Bog Men in Florida and giant Birds over Chernobyl, as well as weird and unsettling murders that remain unsolved. Sometimes the facts are a little dubious or have been disproved, but that’s not the point of the channel. It’s here to tell a creepy story, not give you a documentary.
A Journey Through Rule of Rose
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Rule of Rose is a Survival Horror gave for the PS2 which has rather bad gameplay... but a FASCINATING story with just as many layers and symbolism as Silent Hill 2 could boast. It tells the story of one young woman traveling back into her own childhood in an orphanage in the 1930s, and all the horrors that contains. From repressed grief, abusive relationships, child neglect, abuse, and bullying... but it ALSO contains symbolism of societal class structure, politics, eating the rich, and how power structures work. Not for the faint of heart, but HIGHLY recommended.
I also super highly recommend his video on the similarities between Silent Hill 2 and Solaris
Clemps Reviews Crisis Core
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Mr. Clemps is a great internet gamer who reviews JRPGs and other games he simply enjoys. Sprinkling in a heavy dose of comedy and very fast jokes and observations, Clemps’ videos are always upbeat, fun, and incredibly enjoyable to watch. I’m linking part 1 of his Crisis Core video in which he explains why the PSP game remains a personal favourite of his despite its flaws.
I also recommend his video on Eternal Sonata
Defunct TV: The History of Dragon Tales
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Defunctland is a channel that deals with theme parks and theme park rides that are no longer standing, or which are no longer around in their current form. Defunctland also has a sub series though, called “Defunct TV” where they look at the origin of children’s TV which are no longer airing. I recommend the video on Dragon Tales which is incredibly wholesome, and a genuinely uplifting and soft story of good people trying to make good things for children. (I also recommend the videos on Bear in the Big Blue House, Zoboomafoo, and Legends of the Hidden Temple)
Hagan’s Histories of Polar Exploration
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A Playlist for Diamanda Hagan’s videos about the doomed Franklin Expedition from the late 1800s, where England tried to find a passage through the Northern Arctic to the Pacific Ocean. This went horribly horribly wrong, with every member of the Expedition dead. Over a 100 years later we are still fuzzy on what EXACTLY happened, but apart from the arctic chill, there is also evidence of faulty canned food, a series of bad decisions, and cannibalism. Caution advised for this series.
I also recommend the rest of Diamanda Hagan’s channel. She is NOT for everyone, but if you enjoy somebody reviewing Z grade indie movies as well as just BIZARRE films, really bad Christian media bordering on Science Fiction (without making fun of religion itself) hot takes of classic (and modern) Dr. Who, an introduction to Red Dwarf, She’s an EXCELLENT channel to check out.
Good Bad or Bad Bad: Pass Thru
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A half podcast half review show where two guys watch a terrible film, decide if it’s “Good” Bad or just Bad Bad and tell you if you should watch it too.
That’s it. That’s the whole show.
I recommend diving into the untold madness that is one of the best(?) bad film makers currently still producing batshit insane movies, the immortal Niel Breen.
There is literally nothing I can say that’ll prepare you for Niel Breen.
(I also recommend their more recent video for “Dancin’ It’s on!”)
History Buffs: Apollo 13
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Do you like History? Do you like movies ABOUT History? Do you want to know if the movies about history you watch actually resemble what really happened in any way at all? History Buffs is an EXCELLENT channel, which does talk about the merit of a film itself, but is mainly focused on letting you know just how true to life that historical film you watch is. I highly recommend his longest video which covers the space race between the USA and the USSR, leading to what is known as “The most Successful Failure in NASA’s History”. The Infamous Apollo 13 and where the words “Houston, we have a problem” came from.
If you’re not interested in Apollo 13 however, I also recommend his video on the movie Casino, as well as his video on the female philosopher, Agora.
The Internet Historian: The Goodening of No Man’s Sky
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With videos with literally MILLIONS of views, you probably already know the Internet Historian. But I still want to recommend him very highly because his videos are just THAT good and entertaining. I recommend his newest video, documenting that time we were all pissed off about No Man’s Sky, the difficulties the game studio was in when the game released, and how they have been working hard to finally create what is now a truly brilliant game which is winning major awards. A really good underdog story of how a video game company actually saw what was wrong with their game, and FIXED it.
I also recommend his video on Fallour 76 as well as the Failure of Dashcon
8 Creepy Video game mysteries
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Hey. Did you know that sometimes there’s some REALLY weird shit in video games, hidden easter eggs which took literal decades to find as well as just a lot of “what the actual fuck?”. Oddheader is a channel with a dedicated discord and Reddit form solely focusing on trying to find or replicate bizarre video game finds, mysteries, and hidden glitches. Even if it means getting in his car and driving to a specific arcade just to check a rumour about Street Fighter II’s arcade version. So if you like getting spooked by weird game shit that’s not just some dumb creepypasta, this is a great place to start.
I also recommend his video on weird discoveries in DVDs and movies.
Red Letter Media: Best of the Worst
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Look you already know who Red Letter Media is.
You know... these guys:
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Here’s a video of them and Macaulay Culkin watching 3 terrible movies together.
I recommend literally any and all of their videos. Their discussion on Carpenter’s The Thing is amazing.
The Impact of Akira: The film that changed Everything
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Ok trying to pick just ONE Super Eyepatch Wolf video is literal torture. Originally I was going to suggest his recent video on Final Fantasy 7 for the PSone but I realised I recommended something FF7 related with Clemps, so instead I will recommend The Impact of Akira, a video talking in depth about Akira both as a film as well as a manga, how it completely and utterly changed the anime industry both in Japan as well as the west, and why it is still a meaningful and one of the most important anime/manga even to this day, still being unsurpassed despite so much competition.
However, ALL of Wolf’s videos are incredible, so I also recommend his videos on wrestling (despite me not caring about wrestling at all), His video on how media scares us, The bizarre reality of modern Simpsons, Why the Dragon Ball Z manga is great, and literally any other video he’s made. He hasn’t made one bad video yet.
Was Oblivion as Good as I remember?
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Exactly what it says on the tin. The Salt Factory goes back to playing The Elder Scrolls Oblivion and now with hindsight and modern sensibilities, gives feedback on his experience and whether Oblivion still holds up. This isn’t a super in depth review of the game’s mechanics or how its put together or how it was made. This is simply one guy talking about his experience replaying it with somejokes thrown in and how he felt revisiting it. It’s pretty good.
I also recommend the video he did on Morrowind (because I’m biased).
Weird Japan Only PS1 games
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Thor High Heels is SO GOOD and deserves SO MUCH MORE subs than he currently has. THH focuses a lot of obscure and lesser known games as well as big popular titles like the Yakuza series, talking about what he likes about them, what he thinks is cool, and just what kind of atmosphere and mood a certain game has, even if the game itself is kind of ass. He’s done several videos on games that were only released in Japan, as well as videos talking about the fashion in Squaresoft games and how it inspired as well as was inspired by real world street fashion, the aesthetic of PC-98 games and other topics. He also styles his videos and thumbnails after promotional art for video games from the 90s and generally just has an excellent style to his channel over all. Very chill.
Blue Reflection Review
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ValkyrieAurora is a channel run by Sophie where she talks about games she personally likes and enjoys. Her videos are really laid back and her voice is really calm and pleasant to listen to. She’s made a bit of a reputation for herself as “The channel that talks about the Atelier Games” and general is just a really enjoyable channel worth checking out if you just want something soothing to listen to.
Ancient Chinese Historians Describe Japan
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Voices from the Past is a channel were historical text is read out loud in english. These can be anything like the above video where Chinese historians describe the people of Japan around 297 AD, Accounts of “Dog-Men”, or the worlds oldest letter of complaint from 1750 BC. If you’d like something interesting historically to listen to but don’t want a full blown history lesson, this is a really good way to hear contemporary people talk about their experiences and what they thought about each other in their own words, without opinions or input given by the narrator.
The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet
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Whang! is a channel that covers weird internet stories, some horrifying, some curious and interesting, and some just plain weird. His video on The Most Mysterious Song on the Internet and its update, are about a song which was recorded off the radio in Germany around the 1980s, and after one person online asked if anyone knew who the artist was as they couldn’t find any information, led to the realization that NOBODY online knows where this song came from or who sang it. It’s a fun mystery to look into that, unlike some others on this list, is not creepy or unsettling, although perhaps a little frustrating.
I also recommend his video on The Most Mysterious Anime theme song, and the haunted Ebay Painting.
5 Lost, Destroyed, and Locked away Broadcasts
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Yesterworld is similar to the Defunctland channel in that it talks about obsolete rides, theme parks and other forgotten pieces of entertainment. Although the majority of the channel focuses on movie rides, rollercoasters and Disneyland, I recommend the video on lost and locked away broadcasts which you can no longer see. I also recommend the video about Lost and Rediscovered movie props.
The Nightmare Artist
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I talked about this one recently as I just discovered this channel. This video is about the renowned Polish artist Zdzislaw Beksinski who painted surreal and horrifying paintings during his lifetime. There is no mystery here or anything like that, it merely talks about the impact WWII left on Beksinski and how the trauma his country and people suffered influenced his painting, and how certain images and motifs can be seen to directly reference this terrible part of Poland’s history.
Disabilities in Prehistory
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Modern media likes to portray how “savage” the ancient past is, and tell us stories of how any person born with a deformity or disability would be thrown over a cliff or dumped in a well because they would be too big a drain on a community to look after. But here’s the thing... according to archaeological evidence, it turns out our ancient ancestors actually did their best to look after its disabled members to the best of their abilities. This video talks about archaeological finds of people who had genetic disabilities and what we can learn from their remains. TREY the Explainer is a great channel for archaeology and also talking about what answers we could have for sightings of cryptids. (not ALL of which we have answers for)
I also recommend his video on Pre-Contact dogs as well as Homosexuality in Nature and the Genetic History of the Ainu.
Decoding “The Secret: A treasure Hunt”
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“The Secret” was an art book released in the 80s full of beautiful paintings, but it is also more than that. The book has a fantasy story talking about 12 fantastical races who left wonderful treasures for humans to find,and the book’s paintings and riddles will tell you where you can find each of these treasures which are yours to keep if you can solve the puzzle... and the treasures are 100% true and can actualy be found and claimed, if you can solve the riddles in the book. The video tells the story of the artbook, who was behind it, what the treasures are, how many have been found and various other facts and details.
I also recommend the videos on this channel “The Game: A scavenger Hunt” and “The investigation of Erratas”.
5 Ancient Inventions That Were WAY Ahead Of Their Time
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I would recommend you be careful with this channel as its main focus is existentialism and rather alarming topics such as “how close are we to the apocalypse” and other things whose titles alone are enough to upset me. However this video is nothing like that. This video is exactly what the title suggests it is. 5 ancient inventions that were so incredibly ahead of their time you’d think they were made up. From the computer used by ancient Greeks to steel swords we don’t know how to replicate, this video is a great mix of mystery and history.
Although I caution you with this channel, I recommend Joe’s other videos about mysterious books, as well as his video on the most inbred people in history.
However, I know I keep repeating this, I highly recommend caution with this channel. Perhaps its just me and the topics of life and existent are just triggering for me, but I’d recommend maybe just doing a search for the titles I mentioned and not to go searching through the video library unless you’re not bothered by this kind of thing.
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Anyway I could keep going, but I think that’s a LARGE amount of videos to keep you occupied for the time being as well as some suggestions for further viewing.
Please enjoy, let me know if you found something interesting, and look after yourself!
If you enjoyed this list at all, please consider tipping me for a coffee
☕️ Ko-fi ☕️
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ardenttheories · 5 years ago
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Could you please do a ramble post about a Maid of Mind? Thank you!
Maids are the active Healer class, and tend to fix all of the large-scale things that hold significance in their session. They define what it is, they maintain its relevance, they ensure that it functions at its best, most incredible potential as seen in their own eyes. They also tend to have a benefactor of sorts - usually a Lord - who initially teaches them about their Classpect, and who negatively affects them until they break free on their own. 
Mind is Logic, Decisions, Unbiased Thoughts, Options, the Outer Self. 
So a Maid of Mind is actually pretty interesting. They could ultimately define what is Logical, what consists of the Outer Self, what is the most Beneficial and Unbiased route to take. 
They are incredible at making disguises and personas for any given situation, and are capable of creating such things for other people as well, obscuring the Inner Self from sight. They will always do so for a reason; disguises obviously tend to become part of any plan that might involve stealth, but the personas they use, and that they encourage others to use, would likely benefit the team for a variety of reasons (either to more closely connect with people in order to gain trust/learn the truth, or to boost their confidence and make them more easily led towards a specific path). 
They would be master tacticians, and capable of fixing any pre-existing plans in order to come to the best outcome, even if they seem like they’d fail initially. A plan that could lead to nothing but disappointment would, with the Maid’s interference, actually end up being the Only Possible Option they could have chosen, and give them a significant success in their session. 
That, or it could become part of the Maid’s ever growing web of plans and routes and options, something they take into account and then run with as much as possible while leading everyone towards success. They could formulate other plans around the failed plan to ensure that everything happens in just the right order to make everything work out in the end, even if it all becomes a little convoluted. 
They would decide what is Logical and what is Emotional, and thus try to steer people away from the Bias of Emotions wherever possible - but whatever this means is entirely up to the Maid. Maybe Logic to them is hard fact, statistics, and an almost robotic-like nature - or maybe it’s much more human, accepting of rationality and morality to create a Logic that works hand-in-hand with human emotion. Two Maids of Mind could see Logic in a completely different light, and that’s always something to take into account (especially considering Mind is incredibly thought-based; this goes ENTIRELY with how your Maid of Mind thinks). 
Maids of Mind would be capable of creating decisions within seconds. And I don’t mean just coming up with an idea - I mean physically creating a decision, a route/path to take, just because that’s how they decided to fix things. 
So, imagine this:
A Seer of Mind is looking through the options before them. They know that a teammate of theirs is going to have to decide whether or not they want to eat one of two cereals. 
There are no other options. It’s either cereal A, or cereal B. Both options are bad; in both instances, the teammate in question suffers an adverse affect and is put out of commission but with different consequences further down the timeline, and thus the Seer has to choose which cereal to encourage the player to eat that will result in the least awful outcome.
Then, when it comes to that decision being made… a third option pops up. Out of nowhere, this impossible decision is made, and the player eats an apple instead. The Seer of Mind now sees an entirely new branch of the timeline spread out before them, with a much better outcome for their session.
That is what a Maid of Mind is capable of. 
As a whole, they can also fix logic. That could be something as simple as them correcting misinformation, ensuring that an emotionally charged situation is simmered down to allow reason its chance to shine, or just pointing out the flaws in someone’s logic so that they can provide better logic in its place. It’s pretty simple stuff, but imagine how easily a Maid of Mind could fix a confrontational situation by removing the emotion and enforcing logic on the people involved - or by suddenly yelling out facts to make both participants realise they were blindsided by emotion and mistrust. 
They’d also be good at pointing out when a better option is present, especially if their teammates just aren’t thinking logically enough to even consider it. 
As a whole, Maids of Mind can be pretty… varied in their personalities. It all depends on how the Maid defines Logic, Reason, and Thought. They could be completely Unbaised, Disconnected, maybe a little cold and calculating - or they could be as cheerful and chipper as a Heart player, capable of being both Logical and Emotional based on their own view of Bias (and whether their Emotions affect their ability to Think and Decide without Bias). 
Think how Time players tend to be a little more sombre and depressive whereas Aradia (as a Maid of Time) is as peppy as a Space player (due to her seeing the End as something that can be positive, rather than something inherently negative). It’s that sort of contrast that you can find within Maids. 
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thejokersenigma · 7 years ago
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Christmas Fanfiction Advent Calendar 2017 - Day 4 - Strictly Business Part 6
Ok, so I know quite a few people have been asking for the next part of this series, so I decided to the next part of it for the advent calendar - its hardly ‘Chrtistmasy’ but, oh well! haha
Hope you Enjoy!
MASTERLIST
The cold air whipped past my window, I could hear it hollowing against the panes of glass, and I thought - though it was hard to tell through the murky glass and the dark streets - that a snow flurry had begun. I hugged myself tightly. It wasn’t cold in the room, but just the sound of the weather outside made me shiver.
I had been left in the room now for probably at least 6 hours – though I had no way to tell. My stomach was empty and pulling at me sharp and painfully, and I was bored out of my mind. I had explored my room a bit, but found very little of interest – the contents of the wardrobes and dressers only entertaining me for the short time it took to empty them.
I had managed to fall asleep for a few hours, but something unknown had awoken me, and now I sat on the edge of the bed, staring at the grimy window, unable to sleep thanks to my protesting stomach.
I had even tried knocking at the door in the hope of getting an answer, but received nothing back. I don’t think the joker had even bothered to post guards on the other side of the door – there wasn’t like there was anyway I get out of this room.
It was definitely snowing, I thought to myself as I watched something white float past the window, then another, and another, the white smudges dancing and twirling around each other, catching the light just enough to let me see them before they dashed back into the darkness. First snow of the year. That was nice. And where was I? Trapped in a dressed-up warehouse cell, I thought bitterly to myself. The view would have been much nicer from the top floor of the office block, at my desk with a cup of coffee and a bagel or pastry.
The idea of food made my stomach pang again and I tried to block the idea from my mind. “So much for being a bloody guest,” I grumbled to myself, “doesn’t even bother to offer any food service.” Maybe I was going to go loopy in this room. Maybe that was his plan.
And so, I continued to watch the window, focusing on the gradual layer of white that built up on the ledge outside, wishing I could open the window somehow and touch it. I settled instead on placing my hand against the cold glass, imaging what it would feel like and leaning my forehead against the window pane as I tried to think about anything other than being stuck in this room, or how hungry I was.
I sighed loudly, my breath hitting the cold glass and spreading outwards, obscuring a large circle with fog. I moved my hand, now placing in directly in the centre of the fog, then removing it, smiling childishly at the hand print left behind.
I exhaled another large rush of air and began to doodle randomly. Some were just simple swirls or shapes, but soon joking with myself by writing help backwards even though I knew no one could see it. I felt like an idiot, taking such fun from such a trivial thing, but at least it was taking my mind off everything else.
 I don’t know how long I had banged around in that room when I eventually heard someone. I practically jumped out of my skin when I finally heard the sound of footsteps - not having heard anything for over 8 hours. I had been lying on my bed, praying that I could take a nap to let the time pass quicker and must have dozed off because I now shot bolt upright, slightly disorientated and gripping the covers and sheets under me tightly. It flooded back quickly enough though, but my heart remained in my throat, pounding wildly as listened with strained ears to the footsteps in the corridor outside.
The sound was at my door now. Then the noise of metal on metal. The lock clicking. Then the door opened.
The man in the doorway was unknown to me, and he barely acknowledged my presence, simply stepping one foot into the room, saying, “This is yours.” And then throwing a small, but heavy satchel at me that thunked on the floor by my feet ominously.
Then, in the short time it took me to glance down at the bag and back up to the guy to ask him what it was and what he meant  – having never seen the bag in my life – he was gone. The door snapping sharply shut behind him and there was the distinct sound of the door mechanism locking behind him once more.
Alone. Again. Great.
I peered into the bag only to find it full of wads of money, each held together tightly with an elastic band. I threw the bag to the foot of my bed in disgust. Fat lot that would do me, I thought bitterly. Not that I would keep it - I could guess where that money came from – the heist I had ‘helped with’ – but even if it wasn’t, this was the Joker we were talking about. All his money way stolen.
It didn’t matter anyway. I had no need for it whilst I was locked in here.
He could give me all the money in the world – right now all I wanted was something to eat.
 Eventually food was delivered to me, though it wasn’t until after a long painful night of hunger. Now it was a regular thing. Though I remained locked in my room, I had access to water from my ensuite bathroom and food delivered morning, midday and evening by large burly men that unlocked the door, handed me and tray and disappear, the door being locked after them.
I never tried to sneak out or attempt to get pas them, there was no point – they alone could probably deal with me judging by the amount of muscle on them. I soon began instead to offer them the previous trays in return as otherwise they never bothered to collect them and I would have ended up with a large pile of crumbs slowly decaying away.
 So, I was fine. I was surviving. And I wasn’t tortured. But I was trapped and felt like a prisoner, despite the luxurious accommodation. What I couldn’t comprehend was why the Joker hadn’t spoken to me in over a week now, and I was confused why he bothered to keep me alive at all, let alone keep me here like this.
After wondering this every day, I was then very surprised when the door sounded out of the usual hours of my meal deliveries. I had been lounging on the bed, staring up at the ceiling, entertaining myself with daydreams, when the knock sounded, and my gaze now immediately snapped to the door. I didn’t move, watching the door warily, but the knocking only became louder and more persistent.
Eventually I opened the door, revealing the Joker stood looking rather unimpressed at the delay, in the doorway. I raised an eyebrow, in question, equally unimpressed with his sudden appearance after all this time. “What?” I asked shortly. I was getting use to treating this room like my own, with no one else around, and took my recent apparent safety for granted.
“Is that a way to greet your host, doll?” Ask J in mock outrage, though I could hear the warning in his words. I rolled my eyes at him nonetheless.
“Do come in.” I said, overly politely, opening the door wider to him and flourishing my hand in a mocking gesture.
“As witty as ever, doll.” He observed dryly, striding past me into the room. For a brief moment I looked out the door and into the empty concrete hallway beyond. He hadn’t ensured the door was closed after him, and now I had a view of my freedom before me. But was I fast enough to outpace the Joker? And what were the chances of getting out of this warehouse, or managing to hide, before I was intercepted by one of the henchmen that I knew must patrol around.
“I wouldn’t, doll.” Came the Joker’s voice behind me, easily reading my thoughts. I knew he was right and I begrudgingly let the door fall shut, turning, instead, to face my captor instead.
“In that case, I’ll ask again.  what do you want?” I demanded, annoyed that once again I was still stuck here against my will. Not that It was a bad room, no. Now I was being fed I was even slightly content, but I hated the idea I was stuck here – plus I was bored out of my mind.
“So hostile.” Tutted J, looking offended. “I’m just here to give you some entertainment.” He grinned with a knowing smile, holding out his hands to either side, palms towards me in a welcoming gesture.
I eyed him suspiciously. “No thanks.” I muttered.
“Aw, come on, doll.” J persisted. “You don’t even know what it is yet.”
“If it’s you, then no thank you.”
“Whilst that is tempting, kitten.” The Joker teased with a sinful grin and glint in his eye, “I’m afraid not.” Stuck in his hand into his smart jacket – the action making me flinch, immediately jumping to the idea of him drawing a gun and finishing me – grinned at my reaction, and instead pulled out a folded piece of paper. He seemed to consider the document for a moment, before passing it over to me.
I hesitated slightly before taking it from him. “What is this?” I asked without opening it, only looking at the blank folded side.
“A present.” J said simply.
“Why?”
“Because its Christmas, doll. That’s what people do.” He said slowly like he thought I was slow in the mind. I raised an eyebrow at him and he let out one of his haunting laughs. “Well, close enough!” He amended. “Come on, doll, just accept it and get on with it.” He told me impatiently, waving his hand at the paper in my grip. “A thank you wouldn’t go amiss either.”
I wasn’t about to go thanking him until I knew what I was holding, so I opened up the piece of paper to find several sheets, all full of details and plans for another heist. I frowned at the documents in confusion.
“I’m still waiting, kitten….” J whined.
“I don’t understand…” I said, confused.
“Has all this time away from the office numbed you’re mind?” He demanded, irritated by my slow uptake. “They’re the documents for the next heist” He explained, jabbing his hand at them “ – seeing as you seem to enjoy the last one so much.”
I continued to frown down at the documents, yes, I had enjoyed the planning of the last heist – problem solving all the little kinks and flaws - but I couldn’t do another one. I had aided in a robbery – and a pretty lucrative one at that judging by the amount of money that had been in that bag delivered to me!
That bag now sat at the bottom of my wardrobe. I had tried to return it, attempting numerous times to give it over to the men that brought me food, but they just completely ignored it. So, in the end, I had moved it out of sight to the wardrobe. I didn’t want anything to do with it and keeping it out of sight helped to keep it off my mind.
“I can’t.” I said finally, handing it back to him. But the Joker didn’t reach for it.
“Sorry, doll, no returns.” He sneered and made towards the door. “Keep it. Maybe you’ll change your mind whilst your stuck in here with nothing else to do.” He teased with an evil grin. I scowled at him.
He was halfway out the door now, “Oh, by the way doll, if you don’t help, you’ll probably just be contributing to a whole lot more death.” He pointed out with a manipulating smile, before slamming the door closed and I heard the lock go.
I let out a cry of frustration, throwing the paper, though it hardly got far before it fluttered limply to the floor.
I was trapped again.
And he was right. If I helped I was aiding a crime, but I would also be able to edit it enough to minimise the amount of damage was done – property and people wise.
I sighed heavily as I looked over at the papers now sprawled on the floor, tossing back and form on what to do till my mind ran itself round in circle and I threw myself face down on the bed, screaming my frustrations into the pillows.
 I did.
I gave in.
I was felt quite ashamed by my choice, but in the end, I couldn’t help it. Or maybe I could. But either way, I didn’t. I had sat on my bed for ages, the boredom - and knowledge that I didn’t have to be bored - was like torture. The lure of the papers and my curiosity for the plans eventually overpowered me however, and soon my brain was listing excuses as to why it was ok to help.
And so I did it.
I sat at the armoire, rubbing out and pencilling in my edits as the snow flurried past my window. The plan this time was for the hijacking and stealing of a lorry of chemicals. I wondered what the Joker was up to, but soon decided that I’d rather not know – it made helping easier.
When I had done all I could do – and reread it at least 5 times – I knew I now needed to get the plans back to the Joker. So I waited, until my meal arrived that evening, and – as the large henchman handed over the food I in turn handed over the papers.
The man looked at it, but refused to take it, instead he gave a single nod and then closed the door in my face. I scowled in annoyance at the door. Why couldn’t he just take it from me?
I spent the rest of the evening alone until I thought about finally trying to get some sleep, when I heard a familiar loud and persistent knock at the door. This time I didn’t hesitate and opened the door to the Joker on the other side, the papers already in my hand. I handed it out to him, but he ignored it as well, pushing his way into the room.
“Evening, doll, I see you’ve been busy.” He grinned triumphantly as he turned back to face me, his eyes on the paper. I hadn’t even bothered to consider making a bid for freedom this time, automatically shutting the door behind him.
“Yes.” I answered. “Now just take it and leave me alone – or better yet – let me go.” I said, thrusting the paper at him. He didn’t grab, instead he grabbed me, his large pale hands easily wrapping all the way around my wrist and stopping me in my tracks.
“Why thank you, doll.” He said, plucking the paper from my fingers, but not releasing his grip on me. He tugged at my wrist and I was forced to step closer to him to keep my balance. “As for letting you go, doll, no can do – you’re quite a lucrative investment.”
I scowled darkly at him. “I am a person. Not a money-making scheme.” I snarled.
“Oh, I know, doll…” He sneered, “Which is why I have a little proposal for you…” I watched him suspiciously, I hadn’t been this close to him since the kiss and I could feel his breath on my face, the distinct smell of whisky and man. I could feel my body becoming aware of his and my temperature rose a few degrees.
“I am not sleeping with you.” I said firmly, though my voice didn’t sound as strong as I wanted it to.
The Joker grinned wickedly, “Ah, princess, that wasn’t what I had in mind, though I wouldn’t say it hadn’t crossed it…” He said, his eyes roaming my body sinfully. I should have felt disgusted, but I just felt every inch of her body burn under his gaze and I desperately tried to resist the urge to squirm under his scrutiny.
“What then?” I snarled.
He ‘Oooo’ed silently at me snapping at him before his face went neutral. “I want you to work for me, doll.” He stated simply.
I felt my eyes widen in shock. I hadn’t been expecting that. “I-I can’t.” I stuttered in surprise.
“And why not?” He enquired politely, his invisible eyebrows raised in question.
“Well…” I sought for my reasoning, but found my brain wasn’t quite working, “Because you’re a criminal! And I’m – I’m not…” I finished lamely.
He laughed at my pathetic attempt of justification. “Doll, you don’t have to be a criminal to work for me – besides you’re practically doing good.” He said slyly – “think of all the people you’re saving by helping me – and you’re not even losing me any money, so I don’t care.” He shrugged nonchalantly.
I desperately searched my mind. I couldn’t have this job, I knew that, but he was speaking sense - I was kind of helping people by working for the criminal, in a mixed up twisted way. There had to be a comeback to that, but my mind was mush.
“I – I already have a job!” I pointed out.
“I’ll pay you more.” J said, simply.
I sighed, “It’s not for the money – that is my own company, it’s worth more than any amount of money.”
“Last time I checked, doll, it was your husband’s business – at least that’s what everyone been saying.” He said slyly, knowing that would make me react, but I’m not sure he realised how much of a stab in my chest that was. Something snapped in me at that and, taking J completely by surprise, I violently wrenched my hand free from his grip and stormed out of the room to the only other place I had access to - The bathroom.
I slammed the door behind me and sat with my back against the door – as it had no lock – and felt the boiling rage quickly subside into a hot flood of tears and I was soon sobbing into my hands.
It had been a fear of mine that when the merger between my company and Mathew’s had taken place I would lose my company to the man, but the contract had seemed so clear - that though the companies had merged, there was still two distinct sides – his and mine. The two companies still existed separately but we took the same losses and gains together – a close knit team like I thought our marriage was supposed to be. But I also thought our marriage would mean that much to Mathew, that he would value me more as a person than a business partner – and that he would notice – and care – about my feelings towards my company, the struggles to build it and make it thrive, and exactly the reason why I hadn’t wanted a complete merger of the two businesses.
Clearly not if he was now actively encouraging people to believe it was all his company. Especially people who still seemed to be believe that women were no more than pretty trinkets on a man’s sleeve.
Eventually the tears subsided, though I still felt raw and my temper didn’t feel far from the surface. I wasn’t just mad at Mathew now – though he was the person I was most fuming at – but I was mad at the whole of society for thinking they could do this to me and get away with it. They had known me before I was Mathews wife, they knew me to be the powerful business woman I had been before the rings and ‘I dos’, they knew, as well as Mathew did, what that company meant to me, yet they’d happily call it his the minute we were an item. Like I was suddenly inconsequential.
I clenched my hands into fists, gritting my teeth together. I wished they were in this room with me right now, I would like to punch their smug, painted faces. I growled at myself, trying to find another outlet for the rage.
I hadn’t heard J move on the other side of the door for a while and I wondered if he’d left - yet I wasn’t sure I had heard the bedroom door go either – but I might have drowned it out under all of my sobbing.
I got to my feet, catching a glimpse of myself in the bathroom mirror, grimacing in disgust and splashing water on my face in a poor attempt to make myself slightly more presentable before I went back out.
When I stepped out of the bathroom, I found J staring out my window at the snow that seemed to constantly fall at the moment.
“Not much of a view, is it doll?” He observed, his eyes not leaving the grimy glass. I didn’t say anything in return, stood awkwardly and still sniffling slightly, whilst J was on the other side of the large bed to me. We stood silently together for a moment, me watching him, whilst he kept his eyes on the window.
“I’ll pay you double.” J said eventually, repeating the offer from earlier.
“No.” I said, walking over to the wardrobe and pulling out the bag of money. I moved back to my original position and threw it on the bed between us. “You’ll that that back” I negotiated, “and I’ll take the money you’re making off those people from my ‘kidnapping’.”
His eyes snapped to money when it landed on the bed, but they moved to my face. His face was deadly serious and seemed to be surveying my face, running through my demands. He moved slowly and deliberately around the bed until he stood in front of me. “Deal.” He said with a wide grin, holding out a hand for me to shake.
I eyed his pale, muscular hand warily, my eyes lingering on the ink painting his skin. My eyes flicked up to his icy blue ones. “Strictly Business?” I asked firmly, think back to the kiss and his teasing, let alone the eyes that were now piercing mine.
“Strictly business.” Agreed the Joker with a sinister grin. But I trusted him. And I gripped his hand.
tags: @carouselcurls @aqswdefrgthzjukilop @toxic-ink @viraldragonrider @6fish6 @arkhamsurviour @theartistdetective @white-chocolate-mocha-fan @blondieinthecity
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hviral · 5 years ago
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Trump dominates the media through Twitter: We knew this, but now there’s science
“Bush Lied/People Died.” It was simple and to the point: There were no weapons of mass destruction in Iraq and no reason to invade. People paid for it with their lives. Iraq Body Count kept track of how many. Trump lies too (bigly!), but in a fundamentally different way that journalists can’t seem to get a handle on — well into his third year in office — leaving themselves (and too many of us) floating around in an ever-fluctuating state of befuddlement.
No one can imagine what Trump’s equivalent of Iraq Body Count might be. As Trump ramps up his racist attacks with the 2020 election cycle starting in earnest — while obfuscating his own far-flung misconduct — it’s long past time for journalists to do something serious to curtail the power of his lies and deceptions. The answers are there, if they’d start asking experts, because there are social scientists who understand a great deal about what’s going on — not just with Trump himself, but with the larger environment in which he thrives. There’s still a great deal more to be learned, but they know enough to provide a vaccine against the needless spread of Trump’s venomous disinformation.
One such scientist is Stephan Lewandowsky, whose work I’ve written about before (here and here). He has a new paper in progress — with co-authors Michael Jetter and Ullrich Ecker — covering the first two years of Trump’s time in office, dealing directly with his strategy of distraction and diversion, a key weapon in his arsenal of disinformation, and one of four main types of tweets identified by cognitive linguist George Lakoff just before Trump took office. (More on that below.)
“We were interested in establishing whether there is any evidence in support of the view voiced by numerous observers that President Trump systematically uses Twitter to distract us from issues that he finds threatening,” Lewandowsky told Salon.
“Up till now, this was supported only anecdotally, for example by noting that Trump tweeted extensively about a Broadway play, haranguing the performers, at the same time that he settled the lawsuit against Trump University. Our study provided quantitative evidence not only for the distraction but, even more strikingly, that the media respond to the distraction by reducing their coverage of the threatening theme that triggered the distraction in the first place.”
That last bit speaks directly to journalists’ culpability: Not only are they distracted by Trump’s shiny-object trick—along with Trump’s millions of followers — they lose focus on what’s threatening Trump, thus amplifying Trump’s distraction with their own. Given how complicated and damaging Robert Mueller’s investigation was, this distraction helped prevent casual news consumers from developing a sense of urgency commensurate with what was being revealed. It’s as if the press was running interference for Trump and shielding him from public scrutiny, rather than exposing him, as it is supposed to do when politicians violate the public trust.
Making sense of the misinformation landscape
To really appreciate what the paper found, we need to place it in wider context, as Lewandowsky did in a recent keynote conference presentation entitled “’Post-Truth’: What, Why, and How Do We Respond?” He began by addressing the differences between the Bush and the Trump style of lying, drawing on a 2017 paper, “Combatting Misinformation” for short, by Aaron McCright and Riley Dunlap. It lays out a typology of four distinct types of misinformation, but warns that “combinations of these types of misinformation synergize to have even more complex and recalcitrant impacts.”
Their typology employs two axes — one based on style (formal vs. informal) and target audience the other on ontology (using the terms “realism” vs. “constructivism”) Lewandowsky focused on “the distinction between curated lies and shock and chaos,” both of which are stylistically formal, targeting institutions and systems. These were also the focus of a paper he presented to the Stuengmann forum on deliberate ignorance in Frankfurt, Germany, last March, which will appear in a forthcoming volume from MIT Press.
The term “curated lies” describes the Iraq WMD narrative, carefully supported by U.S. and British intelligence agencies, Lewandowsky explains in “Two Ontologies,” also pointing to global warming denial and the decades-long denial of tobacco health risks as similar examples of the deliberate, carefully curated creation of ignorance in others. Although they are monstrous lies, causing widespread suffering and death, they are built on realist foundations — they acknowledge realty, even as they selectively seek try to obscure it.
“[P]urveyors of this type of misinformation target organizations, movements, and institutions they perceive as threatening their interests,” McCright and Dunlap wrote. “Systemic lies align closely with what we have termed ‘anti-reflexivity,’ or the defense of the industrial capitalist system from the claims of scientists and social movements.”
Perhaps most notably, “The success of the climate change denial countermovement owes much to the Right’s superior effectiveness in framing and re-directing public discourse toward advancing their ideological interests,” they write. “Indeed, the Right seems especially adept at using Orwellian language to promote their ideological and material interests via what we would argue are systemic lies,” going on to cite a list of examples, including:
–“Right-to-work” laws that further weaken labor unions and the very mechanisms (e.g., collective bargaining) that earned workers hard-fought rights in the first place;
–“Religious liberty” bills designed to legalize discrimination against the LGBTQ community, based on a narrow, fundamentalist interpretation of the Christian Bible;
–Focus-group generated terms that conservative activists have infiltrated into public discourse: e.g., “family values,” “junk science,” “partial birth abortion,” “death panels,” “death tax,” “job creator” and, most recently, “fake news.”
Curated systemic lies like these have been the bread and butter of movement conservatism since at least the 1980s, with roots going back even further. But Trump represents something completely different: a liar so prolific the media can’t possibly keep up. Even so, he racked up an eight-point lead over Hillary Clinton in perceived honesty at the end of the 2016 campaign. (More on this below.) Since taking office, his rate of recorded falsehoods has risen dramatically, with no discernible impact on his political support, which remains within a relatively narrow range.
“This type of misinformation is not carefully curated but is showered onto the public as a blizzard of confusing and often contradictory statements,” Lewandowsky’s “Two Ontologies” paper says. “Indeed, some of the claims, for example that people went out in their boats to watch Hurricane Harvey, have an almost operatic quality and are not readily explainable by political expediency.”
In fact, belief is not the point, nor is persuasion: the aim is to bludgeon, not persuade, and — as Hannah Arendt warned — to get you to believe in nothing, leaving you open to accepting almost anything.
McCright and Dunlap describe this as “misinformation intended to destabilize social relations and societal institutions so that its proponents may consolidate power and force unpopular decisions on a confused and/or distracted public. As such, it is a mix of the ‘shock doctrine’ strongly critiqued by Naomi Klein (2008) and postmodern authoritarianism championed by Vladimir Putin’s key advisors, Vladislav Surkov and Aleksandr Dugin.” They observe that this is most common in nations like Russia, North Korea and Iran, and “involves weaponizing misinformation to secure the allegiance of followers and to root out and suppress potential dissidents.”
Underlying all this is an extreme “constructivist” view: There is no truth, just competing stories supported by “alternative facts.” And in part, that’s why our media has such a hard time dealing with it: In a way, they believe the same thing. It’s central to their faith in both-sides-ism, and why they have been easy marks for climate denialism: Everyone’s views are equally valid, and let the market decide whose views win out. Reality? What’s that?
Lying as a feature, not a bug
As I noted above, Trump had an eight-point lead in perceived honesty at the end of the 2016 campaign. There’s an obvious quandary here: How does someone whose own supporters know that he’s lying manage to be trusted? Indeed, a post-election survey found that most Trump supporters recognized one of his most notorious lies as false, but nonetheless saw him as highly authentic, while Clinton supporters did not see her as authentic, but emphasized other positive attributes instead, such as competence.
The answer was provided in “The Authentic Appeal of the Lying Demagogue: Proclaiming the Deeper Truth about Political Illegitimacy,” by Oliver Hahl and colleagues. As explained in the abstract: “for the lying demagogue to have authentic appeal, it is sufficient that one side of a social divide regards the political system as flawed or illegitimate.” A key part of the their explanation is that “public compliance with norms often masks the suppression of widespread private dissent,” and the gap between the two “creates an opening for a demagogue to claim she is conveying a deeper truth and is the authentic champion of those whose voices have been muzzled by the established leadership.”
Thus, they not only explain how a lying demagogue may be seen as authentic, but also illuminate why Trump repeatedly attacked “political correctness”: as his way of describing that muzzling. This was also an act of deflection. Trump’s political persona as a Republican was entirely founded on his birtherism, which he further embellished by questioning Obama’s educational record and demanding to see his papers. All this was far more blatantly racist than national politics would allow, thus creating the need for deflection, for blame-shifting. Trump’s charge of “political correctness” was a racist cri de coeur: “You’re not the victim! I am! You’re oppressing me by telling me what I can and can’t say!”
The topic of deflection brings us back to Lakoff’s taxonomy of Trump’s tweets, as described on WNYC’s “On the Media” just before Trump’s inauguration. Tweets fall into one of four categories, Lakoff said — pre-emptive framing, diversion, deflection and trial-balloon — though he suggested another category too: the “salient exemplar,” which means presenting a single, isolated event as typical in general, such as the Trump handles crimes committed by immigrants.
It has also been suggested that projection should be added to the typology — but projection is more a pervasive feature of Trump’s thinking that shows up in multiple different contexts: pre-emptively blaming others for his own faults, trial balloons testing how well such framing might work, or accusing the mainstream media of spreading “fake news” (a prime example of deflection). The four-fold typology is neatly summarized in this graphic Lakoff tweeted out a month later:
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Deflection and diversion sound similar, so it’s worth pausing for clarification. “Deflection means blaming others when Trump is being blamed,” Lewandowsky said. “The classic recent case was his accusation of racism against the congresswomen whom he initially insulted by telling them to ‘go back to where you come from,’” which in turn is grounded in the deflection mentioned above — the narrative of political correctness used to portray white men as the real victims of oppression in today’s America.
On the other hand, Lewandowsky said, Diversion is better described as “a shift of topic to a shiny new object. So Trump tweets about the ‘Hamilton’ play on the day that he settles a multimillion dollar lawsuit against Trump University. This drowned out the bad news for him and is classic diversion.”
Media helps spread Trump’s lies, even as he attacks them
While Lakoff’s taxonomy has circulated through social media, drawn critical attention and inspired research projects, it’s been largely ignored by the media practitioners it was primarily intended to inform, who still function primarily as amplifiers of Trump’s messages. Lakoff has provided a vaccine, but too many journalists are, in effect, anti-vaxxers: They refuse to take it. So the media Trump regularly attacks must share some of the blame: They’ve been warned, and have chosen to ignore it.
This willful ignorance is particularly striking given how much Trump attacks the press on Twitter. In fact, the first study of Trump’s use of deflection focused precisely on that: “Discursive Deflection: Accusation of ‘Fake News’ and the Spread of Mis- and Disinformation in the Tweets of President Trump,” by Andrew Ross and Damian Rivers. The paper discusses Lakoff’s taxonomy, with examples and sample tweets for each category. They collected all of Trump’s tweets from Nov. 9, 2016 through Aug. 7, 2017 — 1,416 original tweets containing 30,928 words, and did a comparative keyword analysis, using a collection of tweets from all serving state governors and members of Congress. The words “fake,” “media” and “Russia” were the top three words in the resulting keyword list. They found “a high frequency of words used in relation to Lakoff’s strategy of deflection”:
[W]hen expanded into clusters and the entire tweet, words such as “fake,” “media,” “news,” “phony,” and “dishonest,” which all featured in the top 20 words of the keyword list, were almost completely used in reference to the media and his claim that the mainstream media were disseminators of fake news.
Strikingly, Trump used the word “fake” 103 times during this period, followed by “news” 86 times and by “media” 11 times.
They did find “some instances” of keywords linked to the other three of Lakoff’s strategies, though this occurred at a “much lower frequency,” which makes sense from a strategic point of view. Recall that shock and chaos is “intended to destabilize social relations and societal institutions so that its proponents may consolidate power.” Delegitimizing all other sources of information is central to this mission.
Other strategies — and even other examples of deflection — are nowhere near as central to the long-term goal. They apply to situations as they arise, rather than to the authoritarian project as a whole. (There’s one notable exception we’ll take up in a moment, where the lines are blurred: the need to divert attention from the Mueller investigation into Russia’s role in bringing Trump to power in the first place.)
In fact, “fake news” deflection was used so frequently that they were able to discern three distinct sub-categories: “direct accusation, accusation as signal of allegiance, and intratweet accusation of fake news and dissemination of mis- and disinformation.” The first, direct accusations are straightforward but the second is a little less so: typically attacking a specific target (CNN, the New York Times) while praising an ally (Fox News). “Intratweet” accusations are more variable in form, but generally use the accusation as a sort of booster shot, to heighten the emotional intensity behind the mis- and disinformation being spread.
Trump/Russia: The grand distraction
As mentioned above, there’s one exceptional case where the distinction between Trump’s authoritarian project and specific situations breaks down: the Mueller investigation, which went on for two years and called into question Trump’s legitimacy, both directly and indirectly. It was both an ongoing threat to his authoritarian project and the source of specific news stories to which Trump needed to respond. It makes sense that this would be the most prominent example of diversionary tweeting on Trump’s part, which is where Lewandowsky’s forthcoming paper with Jetter and Ecker comes in.
As already noted, deflection and diversion and differ in a significant way: the first shifts blame, the second shifts attention to an entirely different topic. This difference explains why a different approach is needed than simply examining tweet texts alone. We need a way to see the whole picture: What’s happening that gives rise to the distraction effort, the effort itself, and what happens as a result. This is what Lewandowsky’s new study does — looking at coverage in the New York Times and ABC World News Tonight in tandem with Trump’s tweeting to record the diversionary effects.
Of course a diversionary tweet need not have any impact on the world in order to qualify as such. Lakoff’s initial focus was on understanding the tweets themselves, and what Trump was trying to do. What this new study looks at, then, is not whether Trump engages in such tweeting, but rather how effective it is in terms of agenda setting, and causing the media to focus on anything other than the Mueller investigation and Trump’s cooperation with Russia’s attack on our democracy.
“The literature on agenda-setting basically invokes multiple actors, with a primary focus on the media. They are seen to be the principal agenda-setters,” Lewandowsky said. He provided two papers on the subject. “It’s a nuanced literature and evolving rapidly now, but it’s pretty clear that in the past the media were agenda-setters whereas now it’s been handed over to social media and fake news.” In short, Trump’s use of social media to shape coverage of him needs to be seen as part of a larger long-term shift.
What Lewandowsky’s team found was a distinct, statistically significant impact. They looked for, and found, words that Trump used more frequently after news of Mueller’s investigation appeared, and which were followed by reduced Mueller coverage afterwards. They did this first with a targeted analysis using combinations of keywords for diversionary topics taken to play to Trump’s agenda. They found a diversionary effect for “jobs,” “China” and “North Korea,” but not for “wall” or “immigration.”
Second, they conducted an expanded analysis using word pairs drawn from Trump’s entire Twitter vocabulary of words used 150 times or more. This allowed them to see if other words (and associated topics) might also have a diversionary effect. They did find some, but relatively few. Mostly, they found additional confirmation of the targeted analysis: The word “job” or “jobs” was present in 56 out of 73 diversionary word pairs found for the New York Times, and all 48 of them for ABC News.
“The diversion works,” Lewandowsky said in his presentation. Both the Times and ABC reduced their inconvenient coverage, and thus the public was “less likely to be interested in an inconvenient issue.” Thus, he went on to say, “the president sets the agenda — contrary to decades of conventional wisdom on agenda-setting.”
What the press could do to fight back is hardly a mystery. “Cover the real issues no matter what the president says,” Lewandowsky told Salon. “If he talks about ‘Hamilton’ on Broadway, publish an article about the real story — the Trump University settlement — and point out how Trump tried to divert. Reveal his techniques.” The same applies to deflection as well. Show what he’s up to, and don’t hand him the microphone to self-describe, blame-shift and gaslight. When he lies, report it using Lakoff’s “truth sandwich” approach. It’s not that complicated.
Trump’s ability to distract from such a consequential investigation led me to ask about the media’s obsessive focus on Clinton’s pseudo-scandals in the 2016 election, and its relative neglect of Trump’s real ones. “Well, that’s a bit of a mystery,” Lewandowsky conceded. “The media ended up normalizing Trump while pathologizing Clinton — the reverse of reality.
“And this happened despite media coverage of Trump actually being quite critical,” he continued. “However, even the critical coverage of his outrageous behavior ultimately just turned into free publicity for him. The reason this works is because his base considered him authentic because of those transgressions,” as described in Hahl’s “Lying Demagogue” study above. “In those circumstances, critical coverage doesn’t necessarily harm a candidate.”
The deeper question here is why Trump’s base feels this way. Why does one large segment of a polarized public feel that the whole system is illegitimate, to the extent that they embrace a pathological liar because of his lies, not in spite of them? Part of the answer may come from a 2016 study by Manuel Funke and colleagues in the European Economic Review, to which Lewandowsky drew my attention.
After constructing a database of more than 800 elections covering 20 advanced economies over 140+ years, the authors’ analysis found that, “After a crisis, voters seem to be particularly attracted to the political rhetoric of the extreme right, which often attributes blame to minorities or foreigners. On average, far-right parties increase their vote share by 30% after a financial crisis,” an effect not seen after normal recessions or non-financial shocks.
Perhaps the rise of the Tea Party, Trump’s 2011 embrace of birtherism and his 2016 election need to be considered as typical examples of this same broad phenomenon. People who feel the system has betrayed them are looking for someone to blame. They want someone profane to fight for them. They want it so badly they’ll embrace a charlatan who’ll happily pick their pockets all over again. There is likely not much we can do about them, in the short run, at least.
But we can stop making things even worse. We can stop contributing to the ongoing destruction of our democracy. Trump’s base is not a majority — not even close. To the contrary, once safe red states like Texas, Arizona and Georgia are now becoming electoral battlegrounds. We can reclaim our democracy — but not if the media persists in letting Trump set their agenda for them. And make no mistake, Lewandowsky’s study shows that’s exactly what much the media has done. The vaccine is out there, but our supposedly free press refuses to take it.
The post Trump dominates the media through Twitter: We knew this, but now there’s science appeared first on HviRAL.
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edgystuff · 6 years ago
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The Old World Diet
Want to stop your constant fatigue, brain fog, feeling of being bloated? Want to start waking up early, jumping out of bed? Want to have more energy than you remember ever having? This diet can do that for you.
Growing up in France, food on the table used to always come well prepared - peeled, cooked until very soft, prepared at home. Many dishes were following traditional recipes that had been perfected over centuries. Since globalization had not quite happened yet, fruits and veggies were locally grown and only appeared when in season - and even then I wasn’t that big on them, I was nuts about nuts. Grass-fed red meat was consumed no more than once a week, and chicken was a delicacy, reserved for special occasions, freshly killed from the local farm. A pet peeve I developed was snack packages being left open - see, they would go stale within a couple days. No human ate corn really, it was known to be animals food. I can’t remember any exposure to soy, except in my teenage years when I started enjoying Asian food. And above all fresh baguette, pasta and other white wheat derivatives were the basis of our energy.
Since I was quite the rebel and had a tendency to question absolutely everything, especially when it came from my parents, I was very suspicious of the French countryside food traditions. For me a lot of that food selection and meticulous preparing was akin to old wives’ tales. Moving to the US in 2003, then in my early twenties, was a pivotal moment for my diet. I started following all these pseudo-health advices, eating a lot more varied fruits, vegetables and legumes. For the first time they came to me with skin on, partly cooked, sometimes raw, because see otherwise “you lose all the vitamins.” Any fruit could be obtained all year round, though it seemed quite tasteless. Meats were on the menu every day, especially chicken which was the cheap every day option.
Fast forward about 15 years and I had developed many debilitating health issues: massive fatigue and brain fog, blank memory, blurry vision, constant constipation. My brain felt just like a piece of plastic. I would find myself just sitting in my car in a daze. I would sometimes go a full week without going number two (it’s quite a terrible feeling). Most of the time I couldn’t gather any energy to exercise, feeling just knocked out. This made me doubt everything, even my mind - maybe I was just utterly depressed and it created all my health issues? But I realized over time that certain food didn’t make me feel good, although it was so hard to pinpoint which ones. I was supposed to be eating healthy food, following the nutrition advices of many well crafted science-backed blog posts. I had tried gluten free and other arbitrary subtraction diets for months at a time but nothing seemed to feel good past the first couple weeks of positive placebo effect.
Then one day I decided to try something: to forget about what is said to be healthy, and instead to go back to my childhood diet. Exit many fruits and all the obscure grains, legumes and veggies I never heard of before age 20. Shoot for high quality meats, and less often. Satisfy that craving for bread and pastries. Well almost immediately I regained energy. Within a few weeks I was feeling my normal self again, with most symptoms gone. Within a few months, my sharpness and energy reached unprecedented levels - my brain was like overclocked, I could visualize decades-gone events sharply by memory, and my high levels of energy felt almost scary.
This was not the happy ending quite yet. Since I did not really understand what was truly bad for me yet, I then went through many relapses for another 2-3 years. Often times I was pressured by others to eat “healthy”, or I would convince myself that maybe I wasn’t sensitive to some food anymore. Maybe I was just dealing with a lot of stress of early parenthood and could not quite make the food choices I wanted. But finally it came together in 2019 when I put together my experiences with the teachings from the Plan Paradox book. Although the book has its flaws and shoots in too many directions, the main teaching is that plants don’t just give food away to us for free - they absolutely defend themselves with the largest chemical arsenal known to mankind! It makes so much sense, and is why animals need to have a very specialized diet to be able to handle a narrow set of food - and why it can take them hours or days to properly digest things. But somehow humans are now believing that they can eat anything, any time, and keep on with our crazy active lifestyles. Coming up with my new diet, I thought a good description would be “Old World Diet” for bringing me back to what Europeans refined over centuries.
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Whole grain food, or how to kill you GI
Principles and rules
What are some principles of a good diet?
Your body and mind should feel good at most times. You should start feeling better right away, there is no “die off” period during which “some dying bugs release chemicals” (the die off period is the most common excuse for bad diets).
Your weight should stay same or reduce, even though you are eating until full satisfaction.
Your GI should not hurt, feel bloated or constipated in any way. Regular daily bowel movements, typically in the morning.
The ideas of the diet can fit in a blog post, not a 700 page book.
Here are the main rules of the diet:
Stick to refined foods as much as possible. Refined doesn’t mean that you should go for chemicals - it means that the food was prepared in the “most evolved way” to make it the easiest to digest - shelled, peeled, deseeded, cooked until soft, etc.
Stay away from anything too sweet, especially fructose, which tricks your body into eating a lot of it. Many fruits are evolved to make you fat.
Stay away from anything known to be poisonous, or which may not be ripe for consumption. This seems obvious, but apparently not, look at all the potatoes.
What (bad stuff) you don’t eat is more important than what (good stuff) you eat. Stop harming yourself.
Supplements and vitamins are great. They are the way to bring back what was lost in processing - without the poisons.
You eat what the things you eat, ate.
The food list
With this in mind, the Old World Diet:
Main grains like wheat and rice are fine, but only in most refined form like white flour and white rice. Baguettes and other breading, white pasta is all good. Prefer bakery items that have risen by yeast (break up gluten) and are vitamin enriched. But stay away from whole grains! This includes most of corn based products, like corn flakes and most breakfast cereals. Also no to oats and other whole cereals found in most energy bars.
No legumes: anything soybean / soy based is off. Same for most bean and pea families. They are some surprise entries in this category, like peanuts and cashews (not nuts) which must be avoided.
Real nuts (shelled and peeled) are your friend. Best are pistachios, hazelnuts, and pecans. Almonds are fine but prefer peeled or as a flour.
Reduce meat consumption and shoot for highest quality like grass-fed beef and pasture raised chicken.
Fish and seafood should be your main protein, as long as wild caught to avoid corn feeding.
Milk should be A2 casein (coming from southern european cows). There are brands that promote A2 (like the A2 brand). But really, truly, just stay away from milk altogether if you can. It’s got enough calcium to build a cow, along with an overdose of vitamin D that increases its absorption. Hypercalcemia is a very debilitating condition. On the other hand, butter has little casein so is fine, but prefer yellow-colored European style butter.
Limit fruit consumption to only local, organic and very ripe fruit. Rule of thumb: it should smell very good. Still many fruit have high doses of fructose and are the surest way to become fat. Avocados are fruit, and although they don’t have the usual sugar, they personally make me feel really bad.
No nightshades! Potatoes, tomatoes, eggplant are off the menu. Maybe once in a while if peeled, deseeded, ripe and well cooked. Tomato paste may be ok.
Having a bit of regular sugar or maple syrup is fine, since they both have 50% or less fructose ratio. In general just avoid sugar and ban any fructose rich food (like honey).
For alcohol, the best is some clean white wine with lower sugars, like Sauvignon Blanc. Some red wine feels ok too, but it varies quite a bit based on skin content and amount of aging. Many beers seem to too much of the original lectins (the bad proteins attacking your gut) and are not aged long enough, so in doubt go for very clear Belgium-style ones. Overall the harder alcohols like whisky seem to be much easier to digest.
Overall it is close to the Plant Paradox diet, but with notable differences:
White wheat flour (with gluten) and white rice are fine really. Enjoy these delicious breads and pasta. That’s where you can draw most of your energy, and digesting them seem really easy once all of the gut-attacking substances are removed. Take the ones enriched with iron / thiamine / etc.
Avocados are not fine. Overall double check that the food is not banned in the FODMAP list.
White wine or champagne seems to go better than red wine, even with the need for sulfites.
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A2 milk, so easy to digest. But really just ditch the milk.
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Great: traditional white bread, enriched with vitamins
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Easy dinner: sardines on a brioche bun, with white wine
Trusting our history rather than pseudo-science
Fairly simple diet isn’t it? Personally I have been feeling amazing and lost quite a bit of weight after just a few weeks on it. GI is working like clockwork. This diet just brings you back to the most evolved food humanity was using before the health craze shifted us off track. What we are seeing really with all these bad “healthy” diets, is that modern science and medicine have become self-fulfilling. They are somehow telling us what healthy foods are (which they are not, besides for animals with specialized digestion that have plenty of time to digest them), which in turn make us sick in ways that are impossible for your body to fix (mostly auto-immune diseases, so your body IS the attacker) and finally we are given medications to fix ourselves (but they are just about reducing the inflammation and pain really). It’s time to stop this vicious pseudo-scientific cycle. Think about it - humanity mostly evolved by preparing their food better than animals, starting with the discovery of fire for cooking, which gave them their huge advantage over animals. It is time to enjoy the benefits of humanity’s experience and live a pain-free, energy-filled life.
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oumakokichi · 8 years ago
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This little detail in chapter 5 has been on my mind and was wondering what your thoughts on it were. Before laying down ontop of Momota's jacket on the press, Ouma takes his shirt and scarf off, but was that truely necessary? His top wasn't the most baggy of clothes (if anything those things on his pants or hair would more likely hang out from underneath the press). Could the reason he took off the shirt and had Momota flush it be so someone would find that clue? Or was this a simple error?
Thank you so much for asking this! There’s still a lot Iwant to talk about with Chapter 5, and answering this question kind of requiresgoing into detail once again about how incredibly smart Ouma is.
The short answer is that absolutely, 100%, yes, I believe heleft those clues on purpose. There’s very little with Ouma that’s seldom leftup to chance or accident. If Komaeda is a character who throws caution to thewind and allows chance into his plans every single time because he knows luckis on his side, Ouma is a character with almost no luck whatsoever wholiterally has to create his own luck in any scenario, and doesn’t take almostany risks at all unless there’s a 99.9% chance he’s going to win, or unless hedoesn’t have any choice but to take arisk.
Having gone through Chapters 5 and 6 very carefully, I wantto go back to a statement I said in one of my first meta posts, about how Ithink Ouma is the smartest character in the entirety of ndrv3. Not only do Istill believe this to be true, but having picked through the clues and hintsthat Ouma leaves for the group in the final chapter, I think this is truer thanever. The answer to “how smart is Ouma?” is “way, way too smart.”
Heavy, heavy spoilers will be under the read more, so please only read if you’re comfortable with that!
I’m not saying this as a justification of the things he’sdone or just because I like him as a character. I’m not saying anyone has tolike him, because he’s still a flawed character who does horrible things inorder to accomplish a well-intentioned objective, and it’s still perfectly okayto dislike him for those flaws and the things he does. What I want to conveywith this is simply that Ouma is not a character motivated by either malice orchaos, but that he is a master strategist, and that his every move is extremelyplanned and calculated.
There’s really no denying the fact when looking at the laterchapters that Ouma was a genius in the most literal sense of the word, and thatfrom a strategic standpoint, he was miles ahead of the other characters.
The reason I can’t think of Ouma’s hints and clues inChapter 5 as anything accidental is precisely because Momota seems to reach theconclusion by the end of the trial that even if they do go into the voting timewith the Exisal still unopened (leaving the catbox closed, in other words),Monokuma is already relatively sure of Saihara’s original (and correct) theory:that Ouma is dead, that Momota himself is the culprit and the one sitting inthe Exisal, and that the camcorder video was “edited” by stopping both thecamcorder and the press at the exact same time and pulling a culprit-victimswitch when the press was obscuring the body.
With Monokuma willing to take a bet on the “reasoning of aSHSL Detective,” as he himself puts it, there inevitably rose the risk of asituation in which all the rest of the group votes on the wrong answer (Ouma asthe culprit, Momota as the victim) like Saihara asked them to at the end, butMonokuma himself still votes on the right answer. And in that case it becomesimpossible to prove that Monokuma “didn’t know” the truth about the case, and there’sno longer any way to discredit the basis for the killing game itself.
By the end, with Saihara having already reached the truthdue to his detective’s intuition and deductive reasoning, there was a very,very real possibility that the whole group would’ve been flat-out executed, andMomota himself could realize that, which is ultimately why he came forward andopened the Exisal himself.
The thing is, this is a conclusion Momota reached afterfollowing a script specifically written out for him by Ouma, and following a plan designed by Ouma. The entire plan wassomething Ouma had to improvise in the span of less than two hours after Makicompletely ruined his attempt at dragging the killing game to a halt, but stillin that short amount of time he wrote an entire script that was almost the sizeof a telephone book and planned every single detail within his capacity toforesee, right down to how his fellow classmates would respond or react tothings within the trial.
He knew them. Hecould predict things about them. Like Kamukura and Junko before him, who arethe single two other characters we see talking about “boredom” and “analysis”the same way that Ouma does, it’s very clear to see that Ouma was incredibly smart. If he could write outan entire script for Momota that covered almost every single possible thingthat any of his classmates would think to argue or say, then it follows thatthere’s literally no way he wouldn’t also have predicted that Saihara wouldsolve his “unsolvable catbox murderer.”
After all, he himself spent most of the game challengingSaihara to find the truth, to believe in his own reasoning, and to improvehimself as a detective. He clearly saw Saihara’s potential, because thatpotential itself is what interested him about Saihara so much.
There’s no way a character as careful and cunning as Oumawould’ve made such huge slip-ups like leaving Momota’s jacket sleeve (the wrong sleeve, by the way, which wasitself a clue) sticking out of the press or telling Momota to flush Ouma’sshirt down the toilet knowing that it would be incredibly easy for it toresurface because it would clog the whole thing, unless those thing were veryintentional and meant to be clues.
Because ultimately, as much as Ouma wanted to take down themastermind and end the killing game once and for all, he was certainly notwilling to actually risk everyone else’s lives on it. No matter how much peopledo or don’t believe Ouma’s words, his motive video itself in Chapter 6 confirmsthat his motto, his single guiding code as the leader of DICE, was “We don’tkill people.” When Ouma says he hates the killing game, that he hates murdersand deaths, there’s no way to take that as anything but the truth, because thegame itself and all objective proof points to this same conclusion. Takinghuman lives was the single biggesttaboo for him, and that’s precisely why he became so desperate and tired afterthe stunts he had to resort to in Chapter 4.
He would’ve known far, far earlier than Momota that therewas always a chance that Monokuma would reach the right answer himself or bewilling to take a bet on it, using Saihara’s previous track record of beingcorrect as leverage. He would’ve known that in that case, all the group wouldstill get executed regardless, particularly if the mastermind was willing tocheat and not follow their own rules, as we know Tsumugi is inclined to do. And ultimately, he would’ve decided that hissacrifice was better spent not getting the whole group killed, but insteadsending a single, huge subversive message to the mastermind, and leaving cluesto the rest of the group that would become vital to them ending the killing game in the next chapter—which is exactlywhat happens, actually.
If Ouma had actually wanted to make a completely unsolvablecatbox murder, it would’ve been all too easy for him to leave nothing stickingout of the press at all. If he’d wanted his own clothes disposed of so that hisshirt didn’t stick out, he could’ve just told Momota to hold onto it in theExisal with him, rather than flushing it. And most notably, he wouldn’t havegiven them the camcorder video at all.
That video itself was the single most damning piece ofevidence that wound up proving that Ouma was actually dead and Momota was theculprit, and it was handed to the group quite literally on a silver platter.The act of “tricking” the group into thinking it was Momota at first onlyresulted in them realizing the truth later, realizing the angle and purpose ofthe press to cover up the victim. There was absolutely no reason for Ouma torecord that video and then hand it to the whole group as a present unless itwas absolutely designed to help them solve the case, rather than leaving itunsolvable forever. Again: you don’t give hints and clues out for free if youdon’t want people to solve them.
Following Chapter 5, there are so many things about Oumathat Saihara and the others uncover. Literally most of the investigation forChapter 6 is spent realizing “hey Ouma left all these secret messages and alsogave us literally ALL the tools we need to uncover the mastermind and get outof this school, and also wow he kind of was super scarily smart about all thisshit.”
I want to write in-depth about some of these Chapter 6 cluesat a later time, including most notably the fact that Ouma had accessed Amami’slab and left clues necessary to the whole group’s survival all around theschool as early as the beginning ofChapter 4. And he did it all while obfuscating stupidity, making himselflook as if he was simultaneously just an asshole with a big mouth and alsocompletely on the mastermind’s side, and didn’t even begin to show his trueintentions until Chapter 5. But that’s for a later time, and I’ll probably haveto take my time writing it, because there’s way too much to start with.
In the meantime, I hope this ask helped! Ouma absolutelywanted to take down the mastermind and end the killing game in Chapter 5—just notby taking everyone else down with him. He was absolutely not willing to put other people’s lives at risk, moreso after whathe chose to do to Miu and Gonta in Chapter 4 and how that completely wentagainst what he stood for. And knowing that Monokuma might well ignore his ownrules and execute everyone anyway, that was a risk he wasn’t willing to take,so he staked his life on trying to send a message instead, and getting everyoneto start thinking and solving things for themselves in Chapter 6, rather thanending things in the Chapter 5 trial.
I hope by reading this people can at least appreciate thatOuma is well-written, even if they certainly aren’t obligated to like him as aperson. He absolutely can be a little horrible gremlin who does morallyquestionable things, and he knows how to target people emotionally and presshis advantages. But he’s also unarguably, undeniably smart, very smart, and all of his calculationsand strategic planning was for the sake of ending not only the current killinggame they were in but trying to end the concept of the killing game as a whole,and that is fascinating as amotivation. Thank you for any of you who’ve read this far; this was very fun towrite!
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wenttworth · 8 years ago
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this one happens between ep 4 and 5. also is it obvious i have no clue how instagram works?
Viktor’s presence in his room was something he could never really get used to, no matter how much it happened. Even in the three months he’d been in Hasetsu and the month or so that their relationship had begun perceptibly shifting, one’s childhood idol lazing about casually on one’s bed was not something that should be normal.
He’d asked Yuuri to join him on the bed, but the way he spread himself out left little room for him, so instead he was sitting, cross-legged, on his desk chair reading. Or pretending to read, because Viktor’s eyes hadn’t strayed from his face in almost ten minutes.
Having one’s idol sprawled on one’s bed, head hanging over the side to look at one from an upside-down vantage point, probably barely able to breathe from the large poodle curled up on his chest, was not something that should be normal. And yet it was Yuuri’s norm.
Yuuri gave up pretending to read--he hadn’t even turned the page in the past ten minutes when he’d realised Viktor was watching him--and shut the book with a snap. He finally met Viktor’s eyes and was greeted with a slow smile.
“What?”
He tilted his head to one side, hair falling back from his forehead in a way that revealed that his hairline probably was receding, if Yuuri was to compare it to one of the many posters still hidden in the bottom of his underwear drawer. It was ridiculously endearing, partly from the gesture, and partly from the trust Viktor had in him to show him his (what he saw as) faults. “What?” he echoed, and Yuuri sighed, unable to stop the smile from reaching his face.
“You’re staring.”
“I know I am. Can’t help it.”
Ah, there it was. He was slightly out of breath from Makkachin’s weight on his chest.
A couple of months ago, it would have sent Yuuri into fits of anxiety that Viktor was playing and toying with him only to break his heart in the end, but he wasn’t entirely blind to his surroundings. Even if Viktor teased, Yuuri knew it was no less a game to Viktor than it was to him. It was like a dance between them, slowly getting closer before pulling apart, and even if it heightened the tension, it also increased the familiarity and trust between them.
So rather than pull away, he slid off the chair to kneel in front of him. “You only need to look so intently when I’m on the ice, Viktor,” he teased, though he was fully aware his actions said something completely different. Viktor’s eyes flickered to his lips for the shortest second before he tapped Makkachin to get him off his chest. He rolled to his front once he was freed. Yuuri stopped breathing once his eyes fixed deliberately on his lips.
“I like looking at you,” he said. It was an obvious invitation, but he didn’t move any closer. Yuuri swallowed, unable to close the distance. It would be too much too soon, as tempting as it was. Even Viktor’s eyes felt like fire on his skin; his heart would either stop or beat right out of his chest if he actually touched him. Especially in this room, where he’d spent most of his formative years thinking about him in some way or other.
He leant away and gave a short laugh. “You’ll make me self-conscious.”
Viktor smiled serenely. “Can I put some makeup on you?”
Yuuri blinked, caught off-guard by the sudden subject change. “Uh… if you want? I guess?” He and Phichit had spent a few free afternoons experimenting with clothes and makeup in Detroit, but apart from for competitions Yuuri hadn’t worn much makeup in the past couple of years. “I don’t really have much, though.”
“That’s fine. We can use mine,” Viktor said, hopping off the bed. Yuuri petted Makkachin until he returned, laying out various pallets on the duvet with a furrowed brow. “Sit,” he said, gesturing to the space between him and the headboard. Yuuri obeyed, watching him drift his fingers over the different (and probably ridiculously expensive) products. “Do you have your own foundation?” he asked, and Yuuri went to his desk to collect the small bottle, leaving his glasses on the desktop. Viktor got to work straight away, only pausing to tell Yuuri to hold his fringe back. He let his eyes close as the foundation was brushed into his skin. Viktor was humming something under his breath--Stammi Vicino, Yuuri realised with a jolt--and Yuuri felt like he could stay here, in this self-contained universe between them, for the rest of his life and be perfectly content.
“What colours are you going for?” he asked in a whisper, unwilling to break the calm between them.
“Gold,” Viktor answered. Yuuri opened his eyes to level him a mildly unimpressed look. “Stop; it suits you.”
“Don’t tell me you have gold lipstick.”
One corner of his mouth quirked up. “Not with me, no. Close your eyes.”
“But you do own some?”
“When I was younger I experimented a lot with makeup. I had most colours.” Yuuri didn’t tell him that he already knew that, He could still remember going through the pictures of whatever social media it was that he used, hardly understanding how he felt at the low-quality pictures of Viktor with whatever hairstyle and makeup he’d decided to try for that day, but knowing that it was a part of him, as much as his love for skating and Vicchan and his affection for his family and few friends.
It hit him, as it did sometimes, that Viktor was here. As a companion, a coach, and he reached forwards to touch his shin with the tips of his fingers, just to prove that he was there, nothing like he’d imagined when he’d stared at the posters years ago, but so much more flawed and better. Not untouchable, not unreachable.
Viktor edged forwards, tangling their legs together so Yuuri could reach him easier. He curved a hand over his knee, tracing patterns with his thumb as Viktor let out a shuddering breath. He’d injured that knee almost ten years ago when he was eighteen at the Grand Prix final, as Yuuri, fourteen and utterly enamoured, had forced back his tears at the obvious pain in Viktor’s face. It had been as if he could feel the pain himself. That had been the first time Viktor had attempted a quad flip in competition, and the next year when he was finally recovered enough to compete again Yuuri’s heart had been in his throat as he attempted it again, to land it successfully with a wide, breathtaking smile. That year had been his first gold in the senior division.
He scrunched up his nose at the tickle of the brush over his eyelids, and stayed as still as he could when Viktor said, “Liquid eyeliner now.” He kept his eyes closed when the cold liquid passed just above his eyelashes and as Viktor brushed something over his cheeks, only opened them once he’d started applying the lipstick.
It was probably a mistake. Viktor’s eyes were fixed on his lips but Yuuri could see how his pupils were blown wide, the blush over his cheeks. He ducked his head down a little when he noticed Yuuri staring, letting his fringe obscure his face a little more. Yuuri smiled at the bashfulness of the action, the knowledge that Viktor was just as affected enough to let him reach up to hold his fringe away from his face.
Viktor’s hands were shaking as he rummaged through the various tubes of lipgloss. “Why did you cut it?”
“My hair?”
Yuuri nodded.
Viktor smirked as he finally chose a lipgloss, a shade or two lighter than the deep red lipstick he’d just applied. “I used to straighten and curl it a lot, and the heat damage became too much to deal with. I was trying to brush it before a competition and got annoyed with it. Happened to see a pair of scissors so I cut it off. Yakov wasn’t pleased.” He reached up to tug on a few strands. “Still feels strange sometimes. Before then I always had long hair.”
He finished with the lipgloss, capping it as Yuuri let his hand drop to his leg again. “You should wear this for Eros,” he said, brushing over Yuuri’s bottom lip with his thumb.
“Would it seduce you?” he asked.
It was the first time he outright said that it was Viktor he tried to seduce when dancing, though he was fairly sure Viktor knew anyway. His breath hitched in his throat and he leant forwards to press his face against Yuuri’s shoulder. “Yes,” he mumbled into Yuuri’s shirt.
Yuuri was sure that Viktor could hear his heart pounding furiously, but still pretended not to be affected. “We need to get to the rink,” he said cheerily, his voice only wavering once. “I’m gonna go take this off.”
“Sure you don’t want to stay here?” Viktor asked, pitching his voice low, and close enough that his lips brushed Yuuri’s neck.
He was tempted, but with how much he’d adopted his seductress persona it would be a waste to not practice it on the ice. He turned to Viktor, pressing a kiss to his cheek. “You’re being a terrible coach right now, Viktor.”
Viktor looked at him dumbly for a moment, looking like he was about to protest as Yuuri untangled their legs to leave. “Wait! Selfie before you take it off.”
“What?” Yuuri grumbled, but he let Viktor put an arm around his waist as he unlocked his phone, turning his head to kiss Yuuri’s cheek as he took the picture. He leapt back, grinning at the phone in a self-satisfied way.
“You can go now,” he said cheerily.
Yuuri eyed him. “Don’t post that anywhere.”
Viktor just smirked, letting himself drop back onto Yuuri’s bed and carding his fingers through Makkachin’s fur.
--
v-nikiforov
[ image ]
5687 likes
v-nikiforov <3 <3 <3
phichit+chu @v-nikiforov @katsukiyuuri yuuri is that your lipstick on viktor’s cheek???!!!
katsukiyuuri @v-nikiforov @phichit+chu Σ(°△°|||) i told him not to post it!!
v-nikiforov @phichit+chu @katsukiyuuri I had to show off my masterpiece!
katsukiyuuri @v-nikiforov i’m stealing makkachin tonight
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orange-in-the-overcast · 7 years ago
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obscure asks meme for knife boy d:
1. What convenience store food would be their go-to at a 7-11 (Fantasy or otherwise?)
You know that boy’s all about those space Doritos. He’d get an entire family-sized bag just for himself and survive on that for three days. Pringles and Cheetos are also favorites.
2. Who is their drinking buddy? If they don’t drink, which drink friend would they watch over?
Luna and Val have been Castor’s most consistent drinking buddies. They’re good to have around when emotions start running too high. Don’t trust Castor to watch over drunk people, though. He can’t even watch over himself.
3. Who would be their go-to character in clue?
Ms. Peacock. Why? She wears blue. That’s all it takes.
4. If they ever had to go to college, what major would they pick?
Aerospace engineering. He’s always been better at math than any other school subject, and this boy just wants to be in space.
5. Do they have a signature color(s)?
Blue and black make up his entire wardrobe. It gives Icio and Venus heart attacks.
6. What would be their favorite vine?
“Let me see what you have!”
“A KNIFE!”
“NO!”
7. If they had a social media account, what would it be about?
He’d probably have a tumblr just full of Edgy posts and song lyrics and aesthetics, sprinkled in with some memey Star Wars posts. He’d also have an Instagram with nothing on it but pictures of Noodle, and ooccasionally pictures of him and Percy and the rest of their family.
8. Who would they invite to be their best man/maid of honor at their wedding?
Castor would have three maids of honor and you can fight him on this. There’s no way he could pick between all three of his favorite sisters.
9. Alternatively, whose best man/maid of honor would they be?
He honestly doesn’t think anyone would want him to be their best man, considering what a pain in the ass he’s always been for everyone. But he would absolutely be Leda’s, Polly’s, or Val’s if they asked him. And he would cry at the weddings.
10. What would be the title of their sex/mixtape?
He already has a mixtape, which he just called “Earth Jams” because he’s uncreative. His sex tape would be “Is That a Knife in Your Pocket, or are You Just– oh. That’s a Knife.”
11. If there was no prejudice, what time period/place would they love to visit?
This boy would be right at home in the grunge era of the 90s.
12. What three words would they use to describe themself?
Selfish, reckless, coward.
13. What three words would their friends/family use to describe them?
Brave, loyal, reckless, and dense are the general consensus from his friends.
14. What nicknames do they have? Any particular stories behind them?
“Idiot” is one that gets thrown around for him quite a lot, with good reason. His family used to call him Cas when they didn’t feel like saying his full name. His fathers also affectionately called him “Whirlwind” when he was being a handful.
15. Do they consider themself a good person? Why or why not?
He tries his damn hardest to be a good person, and at heart he knows he is. He also knows he’s made some very terrible choices.
16. If they were a cryptid, what would they be?
I looked up a list of cryptids for this question and found “Devil Bird,” which is just a bird that’s constantly screaming in the jungle and supposedly brings death, and honestly big mood.
17. What is the one thing they wish they could’ve said to a loved one, but never did?
He wishes he could’ve told his dads he loved them one last time.
18. What would they tell their ten year old self?
“Enjoy being a kid while you can, cause you’re gonna grow up way too fast. And when that happens, don’t think you have to deal with it alone. Don’t push away the people you love, because they love you just as much, and you need them. Also, be nice to Luna. It’s not her fault.”
19. Who would be on their team in an all out prank war? Who would they be against?
He would absolutely be on a team with Val and Leda, and he would totally rope Percy into it, too. I imagine they’d be up against Icio and whoever they decided to have on their team, as well as Flor and Luna.
20. Can they drive a car? Are they good at it? (If cars don’t exist, would they be able to drive if they existed?)
He can’t drive, but even if he could, do not let this boy behind the wheel of a car. He would have two speeds– parked or 100 mph.
21. Tell the story behind their most stupid injury/scar.
When he was a small child– about four or so– he was running around the house with Polly, and he tripped on his shoelace and bashed his head into the wall. He still has a very faint scar on his temple from it.
22. What word(s) would they freeze up at if someone said it to them?
Coward. Worthless. Selfish. Orphan. Betrayer. Alone. Or any variation of “your fathers are dead.”
23. Who is someone they don’t talk to much, but would probably get along with?
He’d get along with Juniper well, I think, though he hasn’t had much chance to talk to her apart from their one little heart to heart. I think he’d also get along with Tam and Nivviah, he’s just never really chatted with them for more than a few minutes.
24. Have they ever done something they think is unforgivable?
Abandoning his adopted sister in their empty childhood home. Almost getting his best friend killed. Breaking his boyfriend’s heart over and over and over again. The list could go on for days.
25. What type of soda would be their favorite?
He’s a root beer kind of boy.
26. What do they want more than anything?
To have all of his family safe and together again.
27. What is their fatal flaw?
His brashness and stubborn attitude.
28. What Greek God would they be most like?
Probably Ares. The god of war would suit him.
29. Who do they look the most up to?
His dads and Luna.
30 .If they had to pick between their best friend or significant other, who would they pick?
He has three best friends now, and he couldn’t pick between any of them and Percy. He’d rather die himself than lose them.
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latinforsix · 7 years ago
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A Father’s Protest
The following is the text of a protest that I recorded and then posted on YouTube, and because that video is surely destined for lasting obscurity, I thought it only fair to consign its text to the same fate, and so I now offer it here for anyone who may be interested in supporting this outcome…
 Before I begin the protest which follows - one that was written before the events of November 8th, 2016 - I want to admit that it took me three days to name the desolate mood which descended upon me that day and which still serves as a kind of unyielding sentry, blocking the paths worn clear by my long-standing faith in humanity, a faith which had, until then, unchallenged access to my thoughts - three days to recognize that I had been feeling, and will continue to feel, a sense of profound personal loss, a loss worthy of mourning, of a grief normally reserved for death alone, and were anyone foolish enough to say to me now that “everything will be OK”, I would ask “but for whom?” and then insist upon awaiting their stammering and tragically flawed reply.  
 I concede, however, that a stunning victory has been won - a victory over decency, good will, intelligence, honor, dignity, compassion, and civility, a victory over conscience, over progress, over truth, over humanity, a victory over love, because unless you are one of the victors, you already know too well that as of January 20th, 2017, we will be led by the most dangerously radical coalition of fools, scoundrels, narcissists, sociopaths, and rapacious ideologues in our history - heartless, mindless men who, were they to listen to what follows, might decide that it is not an act of protest at all, but rather an act of disobedience, even of sedition – and maybe, this one time, they will be right, and in this rare case, I must hope that they are.  
 Yet I need only for some to listen, and none to comfort me, for there are countless others who will soon enough need our comfort, and even, perhaps, our sanctuary.
 Of late, as I watch the faces of those around me when I go out in public, I have noticed that many have a look which seems to suggest that are they in a state of despair, and perhaps of mourning, but also that they are not, in some fundamental sense, ready – not only for the unfolding of the next four years, but not ready for life itself, not ready at least for the life we now have.  This look may have been there for a long time and I am only noticing its prevalence now because this darkening moment has made less shy my wish to gaze into a stranger’s face, and I may be reading into my observation more than the evidence would allow, yet I also wonder whether many of us are simply unprepared for the uncertainties and complexities of a world that we still call modern, as if somehow our time is inherently superior to all times past.  
 But what if the dark turn of current events, our empty amusements (which more often weary than distract), the difficulty of finding the truth amidst an endless cycle of news, the greater rarity of clear moral and political victories, the gladiatorial quality of our inoperative politics, the exhausting demands, often of survival itself, made upon us each day, and nights made sleepless by the day to follow, expensive devices that isolate as much as unite, the loss of restorative silence and solitude to a chatter so unrelenting that its effects linger even when a quiet moment can be wrenched from our schedules, what if all of these, our obligations and our diversions, imposed upon minds readied for a meaningful and defining interplay between constructive action and creative stillness by the hope for continuing human progress, have left us merely stunned and afraid instead, and not yet ready for what is now to come?
 Times of crisis seep into the part of the mind which dreams, and if that part is free to draw upon unassailable moral truths in its reply to a troubled reality, then can a leader be born, but if that part is overwhelmed with turbulent shadow, then will a monster be made.
 But onward…
 Hi.  This is the first of an 11 part protest that I hope some of you will watch to its end in the urgent hope that this dissent from the present, however modest its contribution, has the chance to play its small part in helping to lead us towards lasting and universal reform, and thus the far, far better future which our fears alone have earned, and at a time when we desperately need a renewed faith in both ourselves and that future if we are to create the truly human civilization of which every one of us must, at least once, have dreamt, and which we all should want for all.  
 We begin…
 I have made and now post this video because I feel strongly that my responsibilities as a father, as a citizen, and as a human being require that I offer the following cautionary tale, and by doing so, encourage you to take protective action against the storm that now approaches, a storm whose leading winds have already begun to howl.  I may not succeed, but because my intentions are honorable and born of fears which are, in turn, born of love, the consequences of failure would tragically not be mine alone to bear.
 I want to talk about the state of our nation and of our world, not, I hope, as one discordant voice among so many others, but as an individual who has quietly assembled those truths which are both self-evident to those guided by love and its attendant concerns, yet tragically obscured by the glossy distractions of modernity and carefully ignored or subverted by those who want only for themselves. This is my intention, while my motivation is my son and the passionate – perhaps desperate - wish that the world he has begun to enter will at last choose to be guided by love and by the gentle, generous thoughts which love will bring, rather than by rank self-interest alone.
 Before beginning work on this, I asked myself whether the sense of urgency that lead to it is rational, whether the judgment upon which it is based is sound and not rather overstated or illusory.   Did my judgment, my troubled assessment of our world, reflect the legitimate recognition of a danger that is new to a world already skilled in the design of new forms of misery (where even the microbes seem to reveal by their adaptive mastery the delight a creator feels), or was that judgment simply a reflection of the greater intensity of thought and feeling which naturally follows upon the ever-deepening love of one’s child, as well as the arrival of that child’s father at a more thoughtful middle age?  
 But though my natural vigilance against the darkest impulses of our race may have shaken my stubborn and long-standing faith in the gradual perfection of our shared destiny, I do not believe that my thoughts have been clouded by my love and its worries, but rather that they are now made clearer by them.  Therefore, I must continue, and hope that, if nothing else, you will listen and then decide for yourself.  
 I will keep myself disguised, not to lend drama to an ordinary tale, but because I am not the subject of what follows and must never be, and because if I succeed at all in what I want to accomplish, there are some who might want to use the mistakes that I have made during the natural course of my life to discredit whatever value my words might have for those who otherwise would be prepared not just to consider them, but then perhaps to act upon them as well.  
 This is neither a desire for celebrity (after all, what would be the worth of anonymous fame) nor a form of paranoia (which is the illusion of a tragic celebrity) -  it is instead a fear based upon a knowledge gained from long and careful observation whose only bias is the passionate wish for a future worthy of what is best in us all. Yet I assure you that I am an average man whose life will deservedly never earn the attention of history for reasons of either heroism or villainy, and that the only part of my biography worthy of note is my son, in whose name, unspoken here, I have made this video.
 I claim no visionary status, for there is, I believe, not a single thought I offer here that is new, no opinion that is original nor any suggestion novel, but this cannot diminish the value of what I will argue, and for those who may think my views extreme, the fact that I am simply recounting established truths should instead increase the meaning of what will follow, and if either my style or my tone threatens to obscure its value, look past me and towards the ideas that I present, for I am no more than a messenger, though one armed with truths worthy of our renewed devotion, and aware that we must live a truth in order to survive its loss, and then to restore its sovereignty.
 I feel that I should tell you now, before I continue, that I have faith, that I have always had an abiding faith in the destiny of Mankind, for I am convinced that someday we will break free of all that now haunts us, and leave the sorrows of history behind…someday. For now, however, the more immediate future is not bright, and the story I will tell is not a happy one, though you will soon understand this, because it is our story.  
 But if you would ask what I want to accomplish that requires anonymity, which to some of you may seem needlessly theatrical, strategically foolish, or even suggestive of a cowardly and thus more narrow and self-serving purpose, I would answer that I want something much larger and more important than your reviews of this video, something that would be to the benefit of everyone, something that I do not have the power to begin nor the necessary gifts to lead, but which I have grown certain is both essential and for the common good.  
 I want revolution.  
 I gratefully acknowledge that resistance to the current regime is already closely gathering, and that it is a vital first act if democracy is to be restored, yet I feel it is important to add that the message of resistance is stop, while of revolution, it is begin, and so we keep in mind that although it will be the resistance which stops the tyranny blocking our return to democracy, it would be the revolution that it kindles which will, at last, begin our progress towards our true and rightful destiny.
 It must be non-violent and respectful of the human rights of everyone at every moment, even if the men we confront are not as noble nor as brave, yet it must be so sweeping in its scope, so universal in its appeal, and so constructive in its results that history will have no choice but to judge it a victory for everyone, perhaps even for those who will have lost the struggle.  For now, however, judge the value, the meaning, the truth of what I will say by those who oppose it, and by the words they will choose to express their disapproval.
 Those same words may be one of the most reliable ways by which to gauge the number, the perverse intensity, the tragically misplaced focus, and the willful refusal to learn, of those who will stand in opposition to my opposition to their agenda, and you would probably only need to review the comments written below this video to understand that.  If my experience with video commentary holds true, most of the words which will follow my own will not be kind to what I have said, even though most of those who would post a heckling comment here are those whose freedom and enlightenment I would want to assure.  Speak a truth to someone who fears that truth and their fear will respond with an anger which seeks to dismiss that truth and to discredit the ones who have offered it. But I would say to them: don’t be afraid – the truth will not hurt you, if you offer it unguarded entrance, and where there is love, fear can never claim dominion…
 Without this revolution, our children may ask us why we did not act when, in early 21st century America, all of the following breaches in democracy were made, or made to widen, while noting that each one represents a loss of, and for, what is most deeply human within us all: the Supreme Court promotes abstract entities to a human status thus demoting ours to theirs and replacing the rule of law with the monarchy of wealth; and a few dozen men, hidden from our view by laws which serve them alone, succeed in purchasing the most destructively ignorant legislators in our history; and congressional districts are redrawn by ideological extremists assuring the anointment of the unelectable; and morally indefensible laws are passed whose sole purpose is to reduce or prevent the voting of targeted racial and ethnic minorities, of those who have already given and lost too much; and corporations are redefined as financial entities whose sole purpose is the maximization of profits, while few note that if this is their sole purpose, they therefore cannot be moral entities as well; and a large, entrenched, fanatical group of representatives conspire to force their delusional reconstruction of social, economic, and cultural reality upon the majority; and under the empty claim of virtuous action, a major political party conspires to return women to a position of legally enforced subservience, neither their bodies nor their destinies any longer their own; and our press becomes too often owned by men indifferent not only to the ethical demands of professional journalism, but to anything other than profit and propaganda; and many millions of our citizens now feel so entitled to their furious resentment and are so diseased with the craving for dictatorial power that they would wound their country rather than brave the noble terrors of self-awareness; and with a membership representing little more than one percent of the population, a single organization, using a demonstrable lie and allying itself with the most thoughtlessly extreme partisans among the smallest political party, is able to prevent the passage of an almost universally supported law written in response to the slaughter of 20 young school children; and a federal government increasingly effective at serving its citizens comes under relentless and well-financed attacks from men educated by talk show hosts and driven by the darkest forms of greed and bigotry; and despite the irrefutable sum and scope of data and overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change, the greatest threat we have ever known other than ourselves (though we ourselves have caused it), is declared a hoax by wealthy men and their elected valets, men incapable of even the elementary conclusion that without science, their wealth would consist of little more than a few extra goats; and a system of corporate and political governance is ordained which both recruits and rewards those least restrained by conscience and to whom compassion would seem an obstacle; and off-shore accounts are found to hold more than enough money to build housing, clinics, and schools for every person in the world who does not now have access to any one or all of these; and millions passively, almost gratefully, accept the transcendent ignorance of affluent religious leaders who would risk the world on the bet that they alone are right; and one man of great wealth and great power, calling himself a journalist, establishes an empire of newspapers and television stations whose profitable but dishonorable objective is to speak to the fear, anger, prejudice, and intolerance of an audience now so demonstrably misinformed that they have become a threat to their own country; and our youth, encased in sound and electronic imagery, remain still too silent in the gaunt face of a tyranny which grows in proportion to that silence; and on heartlessly ideological grounds alone, nearly half of our governors refuse to make medical care available to their poorest and most vulnerable citizens, assuring the unnecessary deaths of thousands and the needless suffering of far more; and the field of psychology – the study of the mind - fails to confront ascendant pathologies that would command every aspect of every life according to a form of thought that should only be found in the darker dreams of troubled children; and language, the foundation of human identity, is bled of meaning by our advertisers, disfigured by the willful incompetence of our politicians, impoverished by the costs imposed for words beyond the monosyllabic, and drained of its authority by schools deaf or indifferent to its transformative power.  
 But now please note that this list of our self-defeating actions and inactions could easily have been far, far longer than just these, as, for your sake alone, you should already know.
 Any one of these defeats – and this word is not too strong - represents a danger to democracy, but together they foretell the rise of a “sociopathocracy”, of a rule by men without the capacity for empathic response, men who cannot feel with or for another, men without regret or doubt or second thought who will have wrenched from a once-free people the machinery of government and corporate power which they will use not to silence, but to mislead, and this far worse than silence because the people will then practice their right to free speech by quoting from textbooks written by the ignorant and approved by the illiterate, and from the poisoned feast of “official pronouncements” which they would neither ever dare nor even think to question because they fear their thoughts would be known to their masters, the mind-readers only of the dead.  
 In that world, spinning towards us now, only an uprising in the literal sense of this word could hope to win back the freedom and dignity that will have been lost to this brand of modernity and to those whose brand it is: the men who would sell it to an exhausted audience by selling themselves as thoughtful men guided by a humane philosophy.  The brute fact is that it is far, far easier to pretend quite convincingly to care than it is to endure the unending sorrows of this world by caring.  
 To such men I would say, no, you are not acting from devotion to principle, to philosophy, to moral imperative, to ethical constraint, nor even to pragmatic necessity – you are acting from an indefensible sense of entitlement, and from the unrighteous anger and resentment from which your sense of entitlement has grown, and among all of your failures, the most ruinous was your refusal to imagine, because once you had made this morally catastrophic choice, you were doomed to feel nothing more than a bitter, virulent contempt for anyone who does not belong to your dreamless tribe - for you, the feeling of a shared humanity with all must seem, like melody to the deaf, an inexplicable thing, a notion meant for greeting cards, not for sober realists like you.
 But we have divided our efforts against what opposes us.  At different times we have blamed criminality, carnality, destiny, human nature, conspirators, advertising, extra-terrestrials, priests, naked ambition, politics, parents, fanatics, zealots, egos, ids, hatred, greed, fear, rage, and each of our ideologies, philosophies, and religions. Among others, these are the ones which, according to our mood, we would accuse of standing in our way, of willfully slowing our progress towards the millennial dream of an earthly paradise, of the world made a garden where all of our children are at play while we, their parents, dance to the sound of their laughter and weep for those who had worked to make that garden grow but had not lived to dance there, too.  
 Yet there is, I believe, only one group that has stood in the way of universal social progress, a single group for which we do not yet have a fitting name, a group whose members suffer, if to differing degree, from a single grotesque deformity of character – they do not know what it truly means to be human, they do not know that we possess the humane passions to which they are emotionally blind, they do not know that we are burdened and blessed with a human conscience, and for them, all the rest, including all the rest of their kind, are nothing more than an audience that has yet to applaud as loudly as they should.  
 This revolution would not set one faith against another, nor one generation against another, nor one class against another, nor one race against another, nor one ideology against another, nor one gender against the other – none of the old lines of division would hold because this revolution will summon those who possess a conscience, the heart-readers of our kind, to take an unyielding stand against those for whom conscience must seem an unaccountable weakness, a useful defect in their prey, and though the forces arrayed would be strangers to history, the roots of this revolution have grown from primordial ground, and the first time a human being refused to kill a beaten enemy despite the prodding shrieks of his tribe, this revolution became inevitable.
 And this revolution must be more than a re-ordering of political power, more than the ascendance of one ideology over another, more than the banishing of arrogance or the triumph of reason, more than a deliverance from the repetitions of history, more than a final end to needless loss, more than renovations, however thoughtful, made to the institutions that have underwritten human civilization - it must be a revolution of human awareness great enough to transform a world, a revolution in the capacity of consciousness not just to think differently, but to dream differently, and by doing so, to become different, to become new beings – still human, though more so.  
 We are being led by soul-less men whose number will soon be legion.  They do not care about those beyond their gated worlds, for to them, we are little more than a resource to be spent to their advantage, customers for things made by children and beaten men, weary participants in our own devaluation, yet I counsel faith with a poet’s words: “come, my friends, ‘tis not too late to seek a newer world”, to which I add: no, it is not too late - not yet...not yet.
 What may be most troubling about the current increase in the number and in the power of those who act from self-interest alone, other than the misery they cause (or do not end when they could), is the fact that we have seen this insurgency against love and reason too often before.  Now, however, the insurgents are armed with the instrumentalities of modern communication, which can be as wounding to the mind as weaponry to the body.  Yet upon reflection, it now seems foolish to think of them as the insurgents and surely more accurate to say that they have always been the ones in power, and so it must instead be love and reason, and those who are their faithful, who are the true insurgents - so be it, and far better.
 With all this in mind, I ask you to understand before I continue that for the sake of this revolution, everyone’s humanity must be acknowledged as equal – their actions, however, must not. Because of this, I am convinced that the conflicts which are now playing out around us, and among us, nearly everywhere, conflicts that are spread across almost every domain of human action and interaction, arise from the struggle between the darkest form of ignorance, whose measure of awareness is narrow, grasping, venal, unyielding, and merciless, and minds broadened by a compassionate heart and deepened by a passionate curiosity, imagination’s outward gaze.  
 Though such conflicts have left no century –virtually no decade - in human history unscarred, they feel different now, and more threatening.  In their diversity of cause (as both origin and objective), their near universality of place and constancy of hour, their obscene devotion to the purchase of unbridled power and control, their contempt for the individual (a word whose root meaning signifies that which cannot be divided against itself), their perverse delight in remaining indifferent to the truth, and their disguise of rapacious self-interest in philosophies once meant to liberate, they are pushing us towards a wider and more dangerous conflict than we have ever known.  
 Yet this, I believe, was almost preordained.  
 Imagine a room without exit in which you have placed a sociopath and a malignant narcissist in one corner and a human rights activist and a single mother in the other, with a table in the middle of the room on which sits a fully functional computer with active internet access, and it would not be long before the latter couple would quite rationally decide that if they want to survive, they will need to use that computer to knock the other couple senseless.  
 Forgive the violence – it is as metaphorical as the rest of this story, though metaphors may have incited more violence than has fear and anger – but while violence is one of love’s many tragic opposites and thus the opposite of my intent, I am here because of the many forms of violence, some of them unknown before our time, which haunt the conscience of the best of us, a violence that seems to grow unrelentingly, even in this 21st century, whose arrival may have been greeted with more hope than any other moment in remembered time.  
 It is a well-practiced and nearly perfected violence that is set against mind and body and heart and soul, against women, children, and the best of men, against principle, against tradition, against freedom, against both new knowledge and ancient wisdom, against the poor, the sick, the young, the old, against faith, against hope, against love.
 So, I ask: is the dream of meaningful human progress now so troubled towards unscripted ending - a waking into nightmare - that the primary alternatives to answering the sedative call of the fanatic have become either the acquisition of a fortune or, failing that, a phone?  Although I have never thought in recognizably religious categories, there have been moments when I fear that there are energies, once human but no longer, which first have darkened and congealed, and then moved to align themselves for a battle that would be nearly Biblical in its proportions.  
 I offer this because implicit in this question is the suggestion that something now approaches which could bring a holocaust not solely upon the believers of a single great faith alone, but upon an entire world, and this ashen thought may well exceed our capacity for its bearing, and make a lethal comfort out of vigilance, and from warning, silence.  
 I ask in sum: is there a singular new threat striding across our world, or at least rising to do so, one differing from its predecessors not in its scale alone, but in the grotesque and yet unquestionable precision of its opposing logic, and allowed to take form not by a fatal scarcity of love, but instead by a system, built by the corrupt, enforced by the cruel, and spread by the ignorant, which will have kept us too busy, too tired, and too worried about the coming day to notice the coming storm.
 But here is the script for the horror movie that has already begun now that the theatre has been cleared of the audience from the drama just ended: gather the angry, the frightened, the exhausted, the patriots of their half of a divided country, then keep the facts away from them, offer them their very own villains, let them have their guns everywhere, give them the illusion of influence, enlist an old testament god, demonize the opposition, diminish the authority and integrity of the free press, raid our schools to pay for mansions and citadels, reduce all complexities to the binary, neglect the lessons of history, ignore misery, reward ignorance, create an earlier golden age now lost to degeneracy, blame the vulnerable for all victories delayed by mercy, and allow – unaware - the inner toddler, and if necessary, the inner savage the power to conjure and to defend the inhuman, all so that one day our fates are no more than the destiny of an invulnerable few, and we are no longer governed, but monitored.
 There is, however, much ground to cover before the point is made, and a few vital subjects to discuss along the way, the most important of which are love, language, conscience, imagination, astonishment, science, and politics, though because I must rely upon words to make my point, it is with language that I must begin.  As a great British writer suggested, language is the main instrument of man's refusal to accept the world as it is, and as I would say in reply, it is just such a refusal that it is now my mixed pleasure to offer you, though first know that ours is precisely the kind of staggering moment in history for which our words were made.  
 Yet the words I would use to make my case have been taken from our reach.  The best of them, the ones with ancient roots, with a poetry to their sound, and with a royal lineage of kindred yet often rival meanings, have been altered with strategic indifference to effect, and now serve a differing purpose.
 Words should be transparent, permitting us a glimpse of whatever bright fragment of the world a word is fashioned to reveal in the light of its shared meaning, though when a word suddenly takes on unfamiliar new meanings, not after trial by public use and private assessment, but because our ad men and their commercial masters have so decided, then transparency fades to translucency, and the latter to mere obscurity, though there lies a fragile hope in the thought that when there is no word left to describe a thing, the best description of that thing is then the thing itself, if it has not been driven from existence.
 Thus, the words I would speak to praise, to defend, to honor have been wasted upon merchandise, while the words I would use to warn, to accuse, to condemn have been spent upon making what is thoughtful appear threatening instead. Or to use a metaphor that has some hope of catching your divided attention, these words have been made into zombies, seeming at first no different from when last we had met them, and yet upon our reunion, the change they have suffered is tragically clear, and now, ruled by new masters, they shuffle vacantly past us, unaware of what they once had meant to their grateful couriers.
 Consider this statement as an example: where there is love, there is hope, where there is hope, there is progress, and where there is progress, there is a future.  Every word of this is meaningful, the words together clear and bright, and yet while the sound - and the only meaning they once had offered - is still hopeful and deeply felt, there is now another sound, one that comes from our uncertainty about what these words still mean, a sound that seems to ask: “what was just said?”, while at this troubling moment in our history, the reply just could be: what I just said is, “what do you think about that for a campaign slogan?”  Marketing, and thus politics, its fraternal twin, has become our new dictionary.
 Some words have this second sound to them, a kind of echo, not so much heard as understood.  There is, for instance, something about the sound of the word “must” that I often find troubling.  I am not referring to its use as an urgent call to required action, as when a parent tells a child that they must obey certain rules for their protection.  I am instead referring to its use as a public reminder of a moral responsibility, as when someone tells us that we must find a way to make the world a better place, as I myself have done and will again. The first sound is simply its common meaning as a moral, legal, or ethical necessity, and for most words the established definition is the only sound we hear.  
 But for the word “must”, as for others now, that second sound, often not fully conscious, is the recognition that against the backdrop of current circumstance, it has another meaning, one belonging to a different word. For “must”, this second sound I sometimes hear could be translated as futility, or better, the fear of futility, or better yet, the weariness that comes of the fear of futility.  It is as if, in reply to this word, we whisper to ourselves: yes, of course we must; there is no sane alternative, and yet…and yet this has been asked of us so many times before by so many people of conscience without once succeeding in awakening those who are still sleeping past the sounding alarms, and this audible shadow, this second sound will then assure that “must” is weakened and made to seem instead a lesser word like “should”, while mere wish, rather than conviction, turns commandment into demure appeal.  So, when I use the word “must” in what follows, allow no second sound, and know that something vital is being asked of you.
 Also, I have noted recently that some of our best and most thoughtful political writers, women and men devoted to the truth and thus aware of both the power of words and the approach of the inhuman, will often string several compelling adjectives before a noun, like a brood of young following their mother, where tradition and modesty of style might otherwise recommend just one.  I have done this myself when I feel that a noun needs a strong supporting cast of adjectives if the point is to be clearly made - after all, a noun without an adjective can be a lifeless thing, powerless to evoke an image and the feelings which that imagery naturally invites.  
 Yet I worry that ultimately this is an almost useless strategy because these adjectives, and the power they should have to reveal the crucial details - lights shone upon a darkened form - will either be discounted by those who do not want this enlightenment, or, by their number, diluted in their effect for those who do.  Nevertheless, strong, precise, accurate, and expressive adjectives are urgently needed, and I would ask that you not let their number lessen their value, and that you welcome each one of them as allies to the cause.
 Some things, perhaps most things, perhaps even all things which are most human need to be expressed in words, no matter how few, just as other things are best expressed by music, or sculpture, or dance as well, but what if the words we need to construct our worlds and tell our stories have lost their power – if their meanings have been so foreshortened and diminished, so transformed by alien reference, or so sickened by their time spent with nonsense that they carry no meaning to which we will attend anymore?  Then, as in certain raucous movies where the image is equal to the word, we roam among enemies, the image made real by what remains of imagining.
 I find it difficult to trust a word that has been asked to hold too much or to keep concealed within it meanings that are its opposites.  Confronted by essential words whose traditional definitions have been riddled by their waste upon trivia, many of us now try to restore their power by placing before them a word starting with the alphabet’s sixth letter and ending with “-ing”.   I don’t object to this tactic – I have used it myself to make a point – I object to the need to use it and to a loss of meaning so great that to express an urgent thought, I must add the emotions conveyed by our most effective forbidden adjective in order to shore up a word’s fading power.  
 Emotion should not need to be added to a word, it should be contained within it and kept safe from those who would plunder it for their own narrow purpose, and if any think that we, who are made of words, could bear a world in which the millions of remaining words in the thousands of surviving languages had been bleached not only of their meanings but of the traditions that had once provided those meanings with a shared utility and poetic resonance, then you are, quite literally, at a loss for words, a loss that is your own, though because you are one of us, thus ours as well.
 I confess (and again, the word is not too strong) words often fail me now, and I am not used to that kind of silence, to a stuttering to give form to a nameless truth.  Yet although this can be disquieting, it also offers a chance, however small, to search for a way to express what lies beyond the words that I can command (or that have command of me), and if nothing more, I know that what lies past the far boundaries of language is either the wondrous or the monstrous – with the first, I feel at home and need no words, but with the second, I find myself wandering among ominous, lumbering shapes I cannot name, and without a fitting name, I cannot know whether to battle them unarmed, or to find wisdom in ignorance, and retreat to warn others of their approach with whatever words may sound the needed alarm.
 So, is there anything that I, or anyone, could say that would, by itself and as a consequence of its statement, change the world?  Are there words, in any number, any order, any language, any perfecting revision that could persuade you?  Although the thought of impossibility offends me, I think the answer must be no.  Who can I reach with words alone, and who must I reach, no matter the instrumentality of my labor?  Many, even now, contribute to a better world, but these are the ones who have written their own call to action, and do not need my own.  
 Of the rest, many are silenced by circumstance, though they would speak if they were free, and so it is for those who will not act for all that I would want to make conscience from malice or dreary comfort, yet this would require a living assemblage of words which would descend upon us like a celestial decree written in blood or flame, and I do not have this power, nor, I fear, does anyone.  
 So, in the absence of the infallible articulation, to what call to gentle arms would we all willingly attend?   There are two ideas, differing starkly from each other and yet secretly allied, which might have the power to guide us, though they must first be made into words before they can begin the pursuit of their destiny and thus our own. The first of these, the one in which there lies great hope, is carried by these four words “what still could be”, while the second, the one in which there lies only sorrow, is born by these four others “what might have been”, the muted scream of possibilities forever lost, and the most haunting words I know.  
 These ideas serve as the boundaries of the possible - one cradling our noblest dreams, the other signifying the agonized recognition of irretrievable loss, and between them lies everything that is human.  I may not mention these two ideas again so that they may shed the words that gave them substance here and deepen into truth, but they will be our worthy escorts as we proceed.
 So, the challenge is to discuss matters with you that many deeply caring people have already publicly examined with both intelligence and passion yet without having awakened us to collective action.  How then do we cast a new and more revealing light upon these same matters in a way that will make very clear the greed, arrogance, and cruelty (the qualities I most passionately oppose) of most of those who have ever taken power, whether by birth, wealth, or brute force, and of those who even now would rule us in an age which should demand instead that we rid ourselves at last of those who cannot see and cannot love and cannot change, and of a form of thought so dark, so resistant to the light which others cast that it would seem grotesque even (perhaps especially) to the insane, and of men who guard against any truth or any progress that does not serve their heartless purpose.  
 I have neither the wisdom nor the authority to tend to even a fraction of the better words which have been wounded by modernity and which we will need returned to health (and perhaps to battle) if our language is to do more than trouble silence and to advertise. And please note that the primary language of the ad is not of words – in the typical ad there are sounds that sound like words, though their purpose is not to offer meaning, but rather to serve as a kind of auditory hypnotic, and accompanied by the upbeat notes of the jingle, they work to assure the primacy of the image whose own purpose is to create a longing for what the ad men want so desperately to sell us, though because a longing is the desire for something you fear that you can never have, is that typical ad a source of any substance at all, or, for most, little more than a loud and glossy taunt, one that uses words the same way a pusher hawks his pills?
 Ultimately, the difference between being able to convey our thoughts effectively, and forever struggling to express ourselves, is the difference between a life of meaning and one that is spent in frustration and despair.  This has little to do with one’s vocabulary, it is rather the ability – one which can be taught to every child – to be aware of how we feel and to work to give our feelings an even greater substance by guiding them to the words that will serve their will, and speaking those to those who then will listen.  
 Or, as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein said, the limits of our language mean the limits of our world, and I believe this means, among other things, that if we continue to segregate ourselves from others, from our communities, even from those members of our families whom we view as political renegades, there is the risk that as we isolate ourselves from the world, our language would turn inward as well, threatening to devolve into jargon, while the meaning of our most vital words would begin to slither towards their antonyms, and language fracture into tribal dialects that would divide us even further.
 But though my own powers here are limited, there are three words I will try to nurse back to a semblance of health in the hope that, while sitting up from their sick-beds, they can help guide me as I continue here, a guidance which may, for instance, include the suggestion that I end this medical metaphor before it wounds the patient it seeks to heal.  
 Those words are love, astonishment, and imagination – love because the meaning of this sacred word has been diluted by the likes of mere liking and desire (though love itself remains immortal); astonishment because too few seem to understand its great power, and because it just might be a strangely secret synonym for love; and imagination because without it, neither love nor astonishment could make and keep the magic they must always have the power to offer us.
 So, what is it we know about love?  Well, we know that it is what makes one make of car that car, that it can be inspired by certain foods and cleaning products, that its most potent contemporary symbol is money, that it is what young ladies dream of finding and young men pretend for them to find, that it is ultimately nothing more than the lunar high tide of human neurochemistry, and that it commonly fades away over time and is even more commonly then replaced by one of its many less romantic opposites, like hostility, contempt, rage, vengeance, bitterness, resentment, and of course, eternal hatred.
 This was satire, or so I hope you noticed, though even if it was no more than childish sarcasm, it was meant to portray our tragically muddled views on the subject of love, arguably the most important subject of them all.  Yet what is love and how do we know what true love truly is?  
 What if, for instance, love is not an emotion at all, but rather an ecstatically unguarded welcoming, if it is an act of imagination in which a sacred place within our hearts is cleared, a silent invitation sent, and all that is best within us comes forward and gathers in that place – joy, compassion, hope, courage, understanding, empathy, trust, desire, faith, tranquility, gratitude, awe, pride, admiration, humility, curiosity, patience, delight, playfulness, warmth, and kindness, and whomever is then called to join this gathering will be granted a kind of immortality, and forever after be our beloved.  Then would true love be the exultant union of our humanity with a worshiped other whose inward presence leads us towards the divine, making us more human still.
 But if lurching from humorless satire to this undisciplined metaphysics was uncomfortable, then I am pleased, because I do not want you to be comfortable.  I want only one of two things from you – either a willingness to bear agonizing witness to the unbearable, and to have unyielding faith that our world need not be this way, or, if all you can see is a world which brute necessity and natural law have made a simple inevitability, then I want very much to teach you that you are the reason this revolution is now as much a moral obligation as would be caring for an unloved child, as you yourself must once have been.  
 We have lost our faith in love. We have been lead away from its light, away from the vital knowledge that love is the most powerful, the most curative, the most transformative force in all the world, and the consequence of this loss can only be still greater loss.  Modernity has made it easy, and in certain ways even soothing, to believe that love, the sacred passion which for millennia has born all that is best in us, is finally no more than the vaudevillian theatrics of human physiology as scripted by our genetic inheritance and its dispassionate commandment of survival and reproduction.
 It is almost as if we have been taught that love is no more than the greatest feeling for another that we could ever know, so when the day comes at last that we feel the greatest feeling for another that we have ever known, we will believe that it is love, and when it fades, we will believe that love fades, too, and so we move on, discouraged, but still in hopeful pursuit of another sweet dose of our own endorphins (the better angels of our chemistry), even though this would mean that love is a relationship with ourselves, with no more than our own bodies, while the other, the once beloved other becomes little more than a convenient source of the external stimuli needed to provoke the desired process to transient life.  
 So, what is love, you ask (and do you need to ask?).  To answer, we first accept that although there are some places where only words can bring us, there are still others where even words cannot go, or can but cannot lead the way, and love is the latter case, leaving words to wonder at a thing which even our poets struggle to portray.  And disregard what our dictionaries tell us, because although I feel strongly that dictionaries are one of the foundation stones upon which human civilization rests, I have yet to find one whose definition of love doesn’t sound as if written by someone who has never known love at all.  
 But I offer you the following and hope that it awakens the memory of what you wanted most when, like all of us, you were wrenched from the contented inanimate and forced into a thunderous place, half too bright, half too dark, and visited by hands as big as you and faces that filled the sky, and where the only thing that clothed you, that kept the world from trembling apart, that soothed the flawless vulnerability of your infancy, was love.  But if that love is missing, and we are left to tremble alone, then can a savage be born.
 For a time, any sentence beginning with the declaration that there are “two kinds of people in the world” lead me to assume that whatever observation then followed would be a useless simplification of the truth it was meant to reveal, that it was no more than a clichéd preface to a statement that I would inevitably find of little worth.  It was love that taught me better.  First, with love as later guide, I realized that my assumption kept me from more closely examining what another was offering, and that by doing so, I was offering nothing more than an assumption, one which was, upon reflection, too often wrong.  
 Yet more importantly, I one day came upon a truth that is well served by that useful simplification, and it is this: of the many among us who have been gravely wounded by early circumstance, there are indeed two kinds of people in this world: those who would never do to another what was done to them, and those who will insist upon doing to others what was done to them. It is, of course, the first kind (for whom the word kind provides another meaning) who know what it means to love, while the second know love only as a frailty to be used against the first.  Some whose hearts were broken will always want to heal another’s if they can, or at least never then to break one, while others are, towards others, too broken not to break.
 Love is the truest magic whose most commanding spell can transform a predatory animal into a human being on his inexorable way towards the divine.  There is simply no power in all the world as great as genuine love, which is the source of all hope and will always triumph over sorrow and loss, and which, when genuine, does not ever fade away.  Love will overrule instinct and self-interest, and loosen the rigid boundaries of personal identity which then reach outward to embrace those who will become the part of us we cannot then live without.  
 But in truth, I do not know the words, nor the lyric order in which to place them, that would speak of love as love would want, though conceding this, I have read through the list of quotes that I have kept for many years where I found a few which say of love what far too many still need to hear:
 Whoso loves, believes the impossible - Elizabeth Barrett Browning
 Love is the only truly rational act – Stephen Levine
 Love is our truest destiny and we will not find the meaning of life on our own, for we can only find it with someone we love – Thomas Merton
 There is in man's nature, a secret inclination and motion towards love of others, which if it be not spent upon someone or a few, doth naturally spread itself towards many, and maketh men become humane and charitable – Francis Bacon
 They do not love that do not show their love – William Shakespeare
It is love’s power that those on divergent paths can travel together, and learn before journey’s end that to search for their differing grails is to find the same destiny, and to know that it is sacred - Unknown
 The definition of insane is the inability to relate to another human being – it is the inability to love - Richard Yates
 And lastly (for the moment):
 In love, the purest joy and a profound vulnerability must co-exist, and yet no refuge is more enduring than love, nor mortal guardian as shielding, and where there is no love, neither is there sanctuary – Unknown
 From the moment of our birth until whatever age we are when we allow ourselves to be convinced that the world is more rational than it has yet become, we all want above all to love and to be loved in turn, and yet nearly every one of us, under the relentless pressure of mature opinion, comes to believe the world is sane, or at least a place where surely there is shelter somewhere if the darkness comes for us, but because this strangely tranquil view is refuted every day by the news, it can only be preserved despite these facts by a narrowing of awareness and a devaluing of intelligence, and thus are we converted into that tragic form of realist who will not notice his own heart sink when he finally concedes that magic is for children alone, and love is only a kind of dream – vivid, deeply felt, and worthy of remembrance, yet destined to fade at daylight.
 But there is a love story of a kind that I want you to hear, a true story that would remind us of the irrefutable power of genuine love even when, perhaps especially when, confronted by death, though before I borrow from history to make my point, you should keep in mind that the following extraordinary moment took place during the Victorian era when the public expression of love, by either word or gesture, was considered impolite and thus discouraged.  
 Yet on the night of April 15th, 1912, an officer of the RMS Titanic, then in command of a lifeboat already lowered into the water and moving away from the foundering ship, heard something that he would never forget, and here I must quote Second Officer Lightholler himself: "what I remember about that night - what I will remember as long as I live - is the people crying out to each other as the stern began to plunge down. I heard people crying out, 'I love you'".  
 In my opinion, among all the countless number of gathered details about that night, the personal stories, historical documents, official testimony, articles, books, and movies about the Titanic, this one fact, stated with such quiet simplicity (and you can almost hear in his imagined voice an astonishment so great that he would have struggled all his life to accept its larger meaning) is by far the single most important fact of all.  
 Yet, if you have ever truly loved another, then you still do, and need no more from me or anyone…but if you have not, and if this most human of longings still has claim upon your heart, then travel off towards the brightest light you see, and never wander from the path that it will carve out from the darkness, and never forget love’s gentle commandment: another than you.
 As a single, prevalent theme, not only for this video, but for our common future and its progress, why not love?  Every sublime human quality is an inseparable part of love, which then makes love the bright and welcoming home of all that is best in us, while every desolate or ruinous trait is, to love, the unnatural enemy of us all.  Forgive – or better, understand -  my certainty, but there is no rational doubt that love is both source and affirmation of compassion, imagination, devotion, patience, tolerance, and the capacity for joy and creative achievement, yet also that love, by its selfless nature, stands forever against greed, arrogance, and cruelty, which together form the dark sub-theme of all that I will say and all that I oppose.  
 Argue against this, if you wish, but defend your position clearly, if you can, and then await with a semblance of courage the passionate expression of incredulous disapproval which that position would so deservedly inspire, and then, perhaps, learn at last what you do not know, though must if you want to know happiness as well.
 Though I will say no more for now on the subject of love, a subject for which there is no conclusion except to love, I have saved for you a final quote, one that possesses an intricacy as exquisite as love’s, and a wisdom which required much well-rewarded thought before I could begin to see past its seeming darkness to more fully understand its singular brilliance:
 To him who is completely empty of love, existence can become a burden, but never a hell - Ludwig Binswanger
 But now that Dr. Binswanger has astonished you (whether you know it yet or not), onward to astonishment…
 Where “love” is a word threatened by the rabble of distracted meanings that we have forced upon it, “astonishment” is instead threatened by an obscurity as unwarranted as love’s perverse commercial fame.  Part of this obscurity is to the unearned credit of our advertisers who have left this word alone because it has three more syllables than they can manage (which is why an advertisement is called an ad), but it is also because this word points to a state of mind and heart which, like magic, is not something with which a modern adult is supposed to be concerned – ours is, after all, an age that seems to want us scheduled for both perpetual motion (which too often is only action without accomplishment) and constant dialog (which too often is no more than two synchronized monologues).  But astonishment asks something very different of us.
 When it is genuine and not instead mere bewilderment or surprise, astonishment, born from an openness to both immensity and novelty, is always transformative, and yet it is more than just a momentary disbelief on a scale to make adventure from monotony, it is instead our encounter with something which is so out of place with all that had ever come before, or so at glaring odds with rational expectation that identity itself, our most deeply rooted sense of personal worth and awareness, is altered by its entry into our world and by our subsequent memory of that experience.  Upon astonishment, words withdraw until they are needed again, and those that return first are the ones whose meaning is best suited for that moment, the ones least weakened, we hope, by our arrogant abuse of language.  
 With the thought that the more meaningful something is, the more within us rises up to greet it, astonishment is then our reaction to whatever possesses so much meaning, whether it is beautiful or grotesque (and there is no third, except when astonishment grows into lasting wonder), that the mind cannot assess this meaning at once, but must first create for it an inward dwelling place and clear a path before we give it access to awareness and offer it to memory.  
 How many of us, however, still allow ourselves to be thus thunderstruck (and it is from the Latin word for thunder that “astonishment” was formed)?  An event will astonish us not as much because of its deviation from experience, but because of its disparity with expectation, and it is far more disorienting when a moment is at odds with an enlightened innocence than with the comfortably familiar.
 Yet you once lived in a constant state of astonishment. There is a time in every life, from its first minutes until our daily routines refuse entrance to the miraculous, when each moment is without precedent and everything possesses life, when objects which, to a jaded adult, are unworthy of notice are seen to be kindred and rimmed with an animate fire.  For most, however, this ecstatic vulnerability to enormity does not survive maturity (the latter another word to rescue, at another time).  But this loss of an openness to the extraordinary is, though common, not inevitable, and if lost, can be restored.  
 I know that I may risk the loss of your interest in astonishment were I to indulge in a repetitious emphasis of its covenant with what is vast (and Sophocles warned that nothing which is vast enters the lives of mortals without a curse, though I disagree), and so I will tell you why I have roused it from its troubled sleep to work towards revolution, and why it will, like love, serve this cause so well – because astonishment renders us mute, because like birds fleeing in advance of the first charged edge of a nearing storm, words take silent shelter before astonishment, knowing they have nothing to offer until thought, the parent and child of language, resumes its tenuous control and deepens the meaning which the heart was first to understand.  
 Astonishment is the translation of whatever has brought us astonishment into feeling, into thought, and, it could be said, into being - it is the measure of the enormity of that source, like knowing the size of a meteorite by the hole it has gouged from the world, an analogy of destruction, I grant, but astonishment is always destructive, though only to ignorance, conformity, and thoughtless contentment - it is truth’s forced-entry into our hearts.
 The thought of welcoming astonishment back into your world may trouble those of you whose worlds have been carefully designed to get by without it, worlds that have been constructed with exquisite care for the demands of the modern adult.  You are, after all, disciplined and organized, your countless appointments are delicately balanced against the need to work and to sleep (though you suffer from too much of the first and not enough of the second), and you may already feel astonished enough by the ad-infested sampling of the news you glimpse, news which, depending upon the channel, will leave you both frightened and misinformed, feeling like a soldier ordered to attack the enemy by launching your rations at its armored columns.  
 Under such conditions, any greater sense of astonishment must seem a senseless luxury, like watching a magic act meant for young children and trying to find the trick which gives the illusion of magic while forgetting that the magic is real and in the keeping of the children.  
 Astonishment, however, is not a rabbit pulled from the magician’s hat, it is a magician pulled from the rabbit’s, and this may be what keeps you from welcoming astonishment back into your life – you fear that astonishment will exhaust you, pushing you from a merely unrelenting weariness into a fatigue so crippling that it could ruin the fragile machinery by which you manage your breathless schedule.
 But no.  You are not tired, you are asleep, and true astonishment will awaken you, and from thinnest air it will pull from the hat not the rabbit, nor even the magician, but you.
 Of astonishment it can also be said that while some are astonished sometimes, and some, having surrendered the magic of childhood to an impenetrable maturity, may never again be astonished, there are a few who are astonished at every moment, and it is these few, the ones for whom astonishment is a way of being, who should be the teachers of our children and, because no adult is more than half so, the other half the child they used to be, it is these few who should teach us all because they possess one of the greatest human gifts: an awareness of the enduring presence of the magical so unwavering that they can greet what they have seen many times before as if it were the first time. And it is this magic which helps reveal the bond between astonishment and love, because to love is to be forever astonished by those we love.  
 It also seems that as a moment of astonishment begins to fade into its hushed after-glow, imagination assumes command of the long passage towards thought’s return – at first, it is a vague sense of motion without imagery, but then an animate swirl of faint outlines, strange forms beginning to emerge from a back-lit but dark gray mist, and finally there is light and our theatre’s curtains are drawn, and all this because there was some great truth that had been swaddled within astonishment, a truth that was both astonishment’s cause and effect, though at first too vast and intense to appear as truth, so the mind is cleared away of all judgment and sensation until imagination can reveal it as a truth worth adding to the others which we hold most dear.  
 I offer this because I now often find some new story so astonishing that when this inner drama plays out, I am left with an awareness which, while agonized, is nevertheless in bright contrast to those duller moments when we are witness to the inhuman yet feel nothing, or no more than a brief annoyance at being disturbed from our waking sleep, and please note that it is possible for something which is not surprising at all to be nevertheless astonishing.
 But an example: I recently read a statement made by an official associated with the incoming administration which, though only one among a multitude, was as grotesque, as thoughtless, and as emotionally vacant and intellectually primitive as many of those others, and though I could be forgiven for having already grown too tired by the day’s events to protest - even if only inwardly - I was still left astonished by its unaccountable stupidity (which is not an absence of intelligence, but rather intelligence badly used), and I was glad that I was, because it was then as if that statement was the first genuinely monstrous thing I had ever heard and thus was its depravity made clear, rather than lessened by inclusion in a long list of moments of equivalent indecency, and so once again did an undiminished capacity for astonishment save me from discounting news that was indefensible, and I believe that no beast, however fierce, if gifted with the capacity for speech, would ever have made such a statement – savagery is Man’s alone, and the unfailing capacity for astonishment, love, and as I will soon remind you, imagining, is our only steadfast defense against its final rule.
 Love and astonishment are each a kind of benevolent apocalypse.  Both sweep away the parts of us that we have worked since childhood to fashion, the parts that allow us to manage a world which requires us to pretend that we were never children at all, or at least that childhood is an extravagance at odds with a productive maturity, a strange demand since pretending is the better part of children’s play.  
 We are born with the expectation that the world will be beautiful, magical, and safe, that people will be creative, playful, and honest, and that life will be filled with love, joy, and adventure, and even for those children whose experience does not refute this, growing up too often means forgetting how the world enchanted us when first we entered here, and how its simplest moments would fascinate.  
 But find something that will astonish you, or better still, find someone to love and ride the shockwaves of that joyful undoing to self-mastery and then you will be astonished over and over again every day, whether by the beauty of love, or by the sorrow of its rarity.
 Both strangely and not, there are only a few quotes about astonishment, far fewer certainly than love and imagination, though I offer three with the hope that one day, some of you may add your own, and by doing so, make less likely that this word and the vaster world it has to offer will ever again be forgotten.
 Astonishment is the root of philosophy - Paul Tillich
Explanation separates us from astonishment, which is the only gateway to the incomprehensible - Eugene Ionesco
 Astonishment is a kind of birth, a return not just to an earlier time of life, but to the earliest time of all, a replaying of how the world must have seemed that first instant the light appeared and we, an inescapable openness, began - no precedents, no memories, no attendants, no words, no thoughts, no guides – then, no surprise at all that all we could do was cry; yet later, if an openness to the world is permitted to endure, the tears become wonder, the provocateur of astonishment – Unknown
 With this in mind, I ask: is it not astonishing that a fanatical obedience to a thoughtless ideology has replaced a shared commitment to serving others; that a faith built upon on a philosophy of love, acceptance, and forgiveness has given way to a sacred devotion to wealth, power, and unholy vengeance; that the health and welfare of women and children – our greatest source of magic – has not been made our first priority; that the universal truths and empirical facts which underwrite our world are now questioned by our leaders; that the governing mechanism of civilization itself is money rather than love; that a person’s color – and this grotesque absurdity must be emphasized – their color, rather than seen as another element of human beauty, is used instead to identify an opponent; that science, the patron of knowledge, meaning, progress, and security is disputed or casually discounted; that journalism, one of the guardians of democracy, has been wounded by corporate self-interest and alternative versions of current events; that poverty is judged a moral failing while ignorance and prejudice are quietly encouraged; that it would take half of the world’s population to equal the financial worth of just five men; that our leaders are knowingly drafted from the ranks of the arrogant and self-absorbed; that the most admired form of power is autocratic rather than altruistic; that the early symptoms of a lethal planetary fever are proudly dismissed as mere fiction; and that a man who not only lacks the emotional maturity and intellectual curiosity of a young child, but is unrestrained by conscience and the capacity for benevolent action, has now taken command of the world’s greatest financial and military power, and seems fully prepared to ignore all other sources of legitimate authority -  is it not astonishing?
 Though it is surely a defining human quality, astonishment too often does not survive into adulthood as a guiding passion.  For many, exposed long enough to the corrosives of the modern world (whose modernity is growing old and fragile), all that may be left of astonishment is a restlessness both troubling in its reach and urgent in its call to act, though I fear that the actions then taken would return us to a darker time, rather than redeem us.  
 Yet I believe that if the average adult’s diminished capacity for astonishment could be increased by just half – back to the purity and intensity of an older child – then all the world, its mirror wiped clean, would at last begin its call for sanity, bringing chaos only to chaos itself, and making the possibility, real for the first time in our history, of a love offered to all by all.  Our capacity for astonishment is an abiding source of hope, and for now, that is enough, and more than enough.
 But if you fear that you have lost your capacity for astonishment – which is no less than the will to remain open to experience even when it sweeps through you like a storm-wind -  keep in mind that there are forms of astonishment with which, I must hope, you are already familiar - like laughter, whose grating sound and seeming grimace are signs that something has penetrated and overthrown ordinary awareness and, having done so, left you more open to accepting – even when it requires courage – the other forms of astonishment as well, like joy, grief, and wonder.
 Yet if not, fear not – the child in you remembers.
 That which astonishes us may always seem to come from outside of us, as the news of the day can suggest, yet the role our imagination plays is vital, not only as accomplice to astonishment’s creative destruction of careless tranquility, but as the source of astonishment whenever the news so clearly fails a larger truth that imagination must then complete a story left untold, and from this we can learn that if we imagine bravely, and if, by doing so, we open ourselves to our world and to ourselves, we may find that we are astonished as much by what is within us as by what is not, and will then need the news only to arm us for peaceful action, rather than for horror’s brief reminder that we are still human, after all.  
 Or better yet, imagine what our world would be like were love to govern, and astonishment will inevitably follow and never be far behind because one of the great virtues of astonishment is that although we can be exhausted by fear, sorrow, doubt, anger, and discouragement (which may be another form of exhaustion), astonishment, like love itself, can only serve to awaken us, as if upon the end of a perfect sleep, and this suggests that astonishment and love may not be not emotions, after all, but rather states of mind, perhaps even of being, that prepare our inner world for our emotional reply.  
 Without astonishment, we are just organic machinery with a flair for the dramatic, and if I were to choose the quality which is, with love, the most important for our humanity and thus our progress, it would be our capacity for astonishment because it asks of us a willing vulnerability to the drama of life and an openness to each experience without which we would come to feel little more than a secret impatience for our final, unapplauded bow.
 I also fear that without the capacity for genuine astonishment, without this readiness to find the extraordinary in the monotonous, or the monstrous in the ordinary, we are defenseless against those who do not care, we are defenseless against the most dangerously heartless people in the world, and I don’t know how to say this any more clearly than that.  Yet in this world, to live with astonishment is to be a rebel, and whether you want this role or not, you are very much needed, and for any who are frightened by this thought, I would add that in this world, to live without astonishment is to be either a collaborator or a casualty.
 Please note that the bright astonishment at whatever brings us truth, justice, and love will here be called joy, while the dark astonishment at what betrays our expectation of truth, justice, and love will here be called horror, and if you feel that either word is too strong, then your ability to be astonished has been worn down, and instead of horror at what is monstrous, you feel the same resigned exhaustion as would an animal being lulled to sleep by the clattering of the train that is shipping it to slaughter, and instead of joy at what is magnificent, you feel mere relief, a small, brief pleasure that something has broken the monotony of your waking hours, and if so, this revolution should begin within you, and with the realization of how much has been taken from you, a realization which, if honest, will be accompanied by a sense of horror that will begin your journey to freedom.
 With joy and horror now as guides (though this may feel like having as our escort to the prom both a poet and a thug), I will soon turn at last to the subject of the opposing sides in this revolution, and that there are opposing sides at all on the subject of what we are and who we must become, and that those sides are now locked in a ruinous stalemate is one of the better reasons for astonishment and for the revolution it would chaperon.  First, however, I want to bring imagination into the light (or bring us into its) because no subject, even love, is more important here or, as I hope to show, anywhere else if the better world we can imagine is finally to be born.
 Imagination – unlike love, this word (or more precisely, the private theatre which this word should light) does not need to be won back from our advertisers, and unlike astonishment, this word does not need to be brought out of the obscurity of disuse.  Its meaning is well known, if only to the ones who possess it and give it sovereignty, but although none can give it to the dreamless, perhaps I can help it to re-emerge for those whose imagination has been self-censored, or, by others, made to sleep.  
 In the first case, for those with an especially free and vivid imagination in a world so immersed in the daily news and dramatic re-enactment of suffering, imagination may become so haunting that just to get through a life already over-spent by obligation, to imagine at all may be assessed a luxury which, like a home we cannot afford, is more a liability than endurance would allow or bravery achieve.  In the second case, there are some who let others imagine for them, and although they could imagine for themselves, they instead permit our media to fill the role their own imaginations would far better play, and quite possibly for the same reasons as those who, to secure serenity, keep imagination from its destined role.  
 If I go to a movie that arouses the passions which are most hopeful for their expression, has imagination been given substance, or replaced? For some, of course, a movie of great artistic power can incite imagination to continue the story after the movie has ended, thus providing the cast and props for inwardly producing our own sequel.  Yet others seem satisfied to have been given by others what imagination, in the absence of the external, would otherwise have worked to offer, leaving the capacity to dream weakened and less able to guide us through those moments when it is best not first to act, but rather to imagine.  
 Know – or remember – that when a beloved dream comes true, the dream does not become reality –  instead, reality becomes the dream, and this, too, is a vital form of magic.
 Imagination is the sacred place where we can have conversations with the dead and in this way not only still speak with them, but for them as well, and thus is conscience imagination’s other name. It is also where our memories are brought to life, because a memory is not the same as a remembrance – the latter is a living thing, with literally a life of its own, where a memory is only an image recalled.  And as feelings will rummage among words for their proper names and thus the power to journey beyond their natural realm, imagination is the place where feelings go to put on bright costumes and perform their play, and by doing so, tell the story of their quest – imagination is the heart’s dressing room.
 Yet beyond all, imagination has its honored place herein because without it, compassion, which is the ability to envision yourself in another’s world and to feel as the other feels, would be impossible, and without compassion, love itself would fade from the anthology of vital human qualities, for how could we love someone if we cannot imagine our way into their hearts to see all that is there to adore, and to bring back from that magical journey the grateful astonishment from which our love is then born into its rightful immortality.  
 But with the thought that my own imagination may not be up to the task of conveying to you its vital and enduring importance, I again quote a few who would, I imagine, know more than I:
 Imagination will often carry us to worlds that never were, and without it, we go nowhere - Carl Sagan
 Imagination rules the world - Napoleon Bonaparte
 Imagination is more important than knowledge. Knowledge is limited. Imagination encircles the world - Albert Einstein
 Our imagination flies, and we are its shadow upon the earth - Vladimir Nabokov
 Those who possess a free and vibrant imagination can build entire worlds from nothing more than wish, worlds different from our own and worthy of our travel, and if they have an artist’s gift, they can share those worlds with those who cannot build their own yet who will be made more human by their visit there – Unknown
 To these five, I would add only that imagination’s finest role is not in merely envisioning what could be, but in straining to envision what cannot be, and by doing so, make it so.  I have even come to believe that there will come a time when human progress will have brought us to a realm where imagining and reality will be, if not identical, then at least so intimately interwoven that each will be made of the same enduring substance and only their differing names will mark the unguarded border between them.
 It also seems that at times, when very tired or very calm and still, we can find ourselves at the outer reaches of imagining, in a place past the realms where words must drop away, and in that place there are, I believe, realities so far beyond our own, not in their distance but in their nature, that we could hope to grasp them at all only by first fashioning the language that would allow our entrance there, a language as rich and varied as music or mathematics or the ones we speak, though so new to us and differing that there could be no analogy found among our stock of metaphors (a stock which forms another form of language), and yet more than this, still further out beyond our present sensibilities, there may be something even more astonishing – wordless languages we could only begin to master were we first to discover the distant realities which they are waiting to portray for us, realities that are beyond the ones that are beyond our own.
 But more to the point, I believe that if you try bravely enough to imagine at least certain kinds of misery (while accepting that some will be too much for you to bear), you can sometimes come quite close to what it must be like to feel it, even if you have never known that kind of misery yourself - close enough to know what those who live with it day after day must endure because of those who cannot imagine anything at all, and once you have, it is impossible to forget, and impossible not to act, whether by helping those who suffer, or by fighting those who act to make their suffering a cruel inevitability.
 Without imagination, we cannot dream, and ours is a time when dreams are desperately needed, though a brave new dream is struggling to be born, a dream that seems made of the secret longings of us all, or perhaps it is an ancient dream which has waited through a troubled sleep for the light that would begin its waking, yet either way, it is the conflict between that dream and the dreamless world it would transform that has led us to this time, a time threatened not as much by ravenous herds of ragged men finding satisfaction in butchery, but by those who have power and a gift for strategy unguided by compassion, and where there is no compassion, there is no imagination (for they are kindred), and a fantasy life, however filled with dramatic detail, which excludes those in need or does not lead to the wish to serve many, is no more than a grim store of visualizations meant to serve just one, and I would say to you without fear of rational opposition that whatever has power in this troubled world and is not also a moral force must be judged by conscience to be immoral.
 These truths are immutable, and no experience or its discounting, no history or its forgetting, no dream or its abandoning, no loss or its stifled mourning, and neither any one nor any god could ever take them from us or diminish their true worth. Yet all our lives their creative light has been obscured and their ability to bring us joy undone, and we have been kept from their brilliance by men driven by fear and anger and sullen resentment, and prodded towards anarchy by those whose tragic estrangement from love requires a chaos that will distract them from the howling emptiness and eternal night within.  
 But these truths not only light our path, they light the rubble placed to block our way, and thus for the best, they will inspire, while for the worst, they will incite, so watch closely and listen carefully whenever a cause makes claim of these truths as if theirs alone because they belong instead to everyone.
 Before leaving the subject of these three sacred words, I warn you against using them without the reverence which they deserve, and which we require for our progress, so know, or remember, that you do not love your car, the score of a game cannot bring you astonishment, and picturing savagery is never an act of imagination.
 Now that I have enlisted love, astonishment, and imagination as our steadfast companions here, I turn to the forces who even now stand in opposition to each other, but who must soon meet on the bloodless battlefield of passionate and unyielding debate if we are finally to be rid of the one and lead by the other towards the universal freedom to fashion our lives made joyous by love, made thoughtful by astonishment, and made generous by imagination, and of that generosity please know that it not only reveals a love of others, but a faith in the future as well, because to give to others, especially to those you do not know, requires the belief that your actions will echo into a time beyond your own and that others will hear it and be made better as a consequence - as long as the words which carry this news still have the power to inform.  
 And of both the power and fragility of words, a final few words as warning: is there a word so unspoiled by modernity, or so rarely used, or so obscure, or so new that it could be brought into this struggle and serve as one of our champions?  Or is there any word, no matter how damaged by commercial exploitation, or how emptied by new meanings forced upon it, or how deformed by careless overuse, or how weary from dishonored age that it could be made new and work again on our behalf?  I would, for crucial instance, want to use the word monstrous to describe the most inhuman of our actions – and I have - but though it still has power, and a sound that offers added effect, what can it still portray of those same actions?  
 Not what I would intend, yet I know of none that can, and without them I fear the monsters may go unnoticed, or seem instead mere scoundrels, and so I ask that new words be made by those who can, new words for all that astonishes, or should, and that we start to make them soon.
 Yet we are not running out of words – we are running out of meaning. There are many adjectives weakened by our careless habit of proclaiming extraordinary what is not, or of seeking to make irrelevant what is instead imperative, and many verbs obliged to portray differing realities for which they were not made, while many nouns are then rendered uncertain in their meaning by their forced marriage to those adjectives and verbs, and as a consequence, we have arrived at a time when it seems that almost any thoughtful statement, almost any warning or appeal, almost anything to be said about anything, begins to sound like a cliché, the easiest of all statements to ignore – and what then of the power of language to light our way?
 After decades of the commercial exploitation of language and our own careless personal use, at this “terrible” moment of our history when we need words to speak with authority, what does “terrible” mean anymore, what does “horrible” mean, or “shocking” or “deplorable” – what does even “true” mean anymore?  We have cried wolf with language, and every time we have used a critical word (where “critical” means both essential and dissenting) to describe nothing more troubling than a rainy day or a stained shirt, we have eased the path for greed, arrogance, and cruelty, and given tyranny reprieve from our judgement - and now the wolves are gathering, their eyes wide upon us.
 As I continue, not only do I need take into careful account the words I use and whether their current meaning is able to convey what I believe to be true, I must also stay aware of the fact that news of hideous conspiracies are now a form of recreation, a game of vacant words and desolate fantasy, competing with honest journalism for the attention of those who prefer the shiver of excitement felt when hearing rumors of scandal and of plots to subvert the “natural order” of things, of those who value gossip over truth because they feel a little more alive when they secretly celebrate reports of designs against that order while publicly expressing their frightened indignation, of those who would rather whisper prophecies of moral outrage than mourn the tragedies which unfold every hour of every day in every part of this troubled world.  
 But what I want to tell you is not a conspiracy carefully disguised with a few known facts and supportive quotes, it is simply my report to you of what I have learned from our remaining truth-tellers about the ruthless men who stand with such coldly stubborn indifference between us and the destiny that would be ours were love, rather than self-interest, to lead us, a world resolved, not to administer, but rather to minister – and to everyone, at long, long last.  
 So, my munitions low (and perhaps my stragglers gone home), I at last turn to the forces arrayed, and I first introduce The Opposition, a force led by men driven by the most destructive human traits: greed, arrogance, and cruelty (and note how each is kin to each), and when found combined within a single personality, these traits are the guarantors of suffering – not their own, of course, because such men will always ensure their own welfare, while the suffering of others is just part of the natural order, as if that order were not designed by these same men, and not instead the most vicious form of tyranny.  
 Though fiercely opposed to universal human progress because this would compel them to give rather than to take, these men are too few in their number to rule the world, and so they must have an army of followers whose loyalty to the cause is assured by their ignorance of that cause.  Therefore, will they enlist the proudly uninformed and from this muddled stock it is not difficult, with the right words (and where “right” offers two meanings), to create the resentment needed to rouse them to defend their masters against any effort to build a world in which every child, every woman, and every man would be treated with equal worth, respect, and dignity.  
 Resentment is key.  I am convinced that the primary motive behind the actions of the man who now would lead us (though towards what shared fate is not yet clear) is not so much an unrelenting hunger for both power and praise, though this is surely true as well, but deeper still, a profound resentment (which is sorrow soothed by anger), and as with all feelings, dark or bright, the source of his resentment must be equal in its scale to the feeling which sustains it.  
 A resentment as deep, as prodding, and as threatening as his will emerge from an early disappointment so crushing that its gravity will pull everything else into its orbit, while the resentment which then forms is its sentient shadow, and I believe that this resentment grew from the humbling truth that he does not possess an absolute and universal power in compensation for his loss, a power over events, over others, over nations, over truth – a resentment, perhaps, that he is not God, after all, because he believes that, in fairness, he should be, and that if he were, his worship would be assured, his knowledge complete, his power supreme – omniscient and omnipotent forever, and satisfied at last.
 But the Opposition represents nothing more than the most cunning among the heartless leading the most frightened and embittered among the ignorant, and how tragically ironic that the latter may never know that the ones they have been incited to oppose include themselves.  Yet the ones who would oppose our common destiny must be included in our pursuit of that destiny because those who resist that better world will learn in time that, even for them, that world is better, too.  For now, however, the unfeeling are herding the unthinking toward their lot, eager for the coming stampede.
 It seems that those who stand against our progress have given us an ironic gift by revealing their number - and they are legion, though we are more.  Yet our comfort in this majority ends with the awareness that our opponents represent a profound ignorance, not just of mind, but of heart as well.  The question of how to purge this darkness is an ancient one, though other than our faith that love and truth are the lights that are needed, we are left for now with resolute opposition as the only course with hope of final victory.  
 The record of unfolding history suggests that those who have no heart have convinced those who have been denied the truth to follow them, and together they are enough in both number and intensity to bleed governance of its charity, though it is those without a heart, those who would lead us towards desolation, who are my focus, because knowledge can be acquired, but a heart cannot, while many of those who choose to follow are innocent of malice.
 These leaders of The Opposition are blind and they are deaf, yet act as if they alone can see and hear the suffering that is within their power to relieve, suffering which to them is no more than childish whimpering.  They are determined to ignore the facts upon which our world has been built and to author dark fictions as ramparts in defense of their merciless intent, their smiles are vain simulations of sincerity, their words corrupted with unfamiliar purpose, their ambitions forever circling back to their own desires – in sum, they are proudly resolved, in the words of a children’s book, to “pull up the flowers and water the weeds”, and if their ravenous craving to remake the world in their own disfigured image were to succeed, our world would become the broken home to exhausted and illiterate men shunted towards premature senescence by a depraved yet unassailable brotherhood who see them as little more than customers.    
 But perhaps I have worried too much about finding a word whose meaning remains unsoiled – the immaculate exception – and so I did not understand that a few common words placed into the care of a brief, declarative sentence could succeed in conveying what I am convinced is vital, and so I offer this: they do not care.  
 Those among our elected and appointed leaders who would place power, money, influence, privilege, and personal benefit over those who neither possess these advantages nor hope of gaining them have been so bled of humanity that it is almost as if they belong to a different breed, a mutant, depraved sub-species, Homo Akardos – Heartless Man, and anyone who possesses an authentic conscience, anyone who loves genuinely, anyone who is devoted to the truth, anyone who is guided by a living imagination, will – not must, but will – reject and oppose the authority of those who cannot rightfully claim these qualities as their own.  
 I do not often use the word “evil” – it has a dramatic effect that tempts its use, yet does not have the explanatory power that is my preference, but in this case, I say to you that those “leaders” who demonstrate beyond all rational doubt that their goal is the unyielding defense of wealth and power even when this will assure the suffering of others, are evil by any definition and according to the ethical teachings of any religion or moral philosophy, and whether you call this evil or not, it is a monstrous, grotesque perversion of everything we hold dear and of everything we must protect no matter the cost in our time, in our comfort, and in our sacrifice.  
 Most of those who now would lead us are, at best, asleep, dreaming of their treasure as heroes of a savage quest, yet the future is already leaning close in, whispering “they do not care”, and awaiting our resolution.
 And of the most powerful of these leaders, I also suggest this: he is forever trapped in a present so consumed with fear and desperate personal need that the past cannot give evidence to imagination, and so he cannot foresee the future which his actions will then spawn – it isn’t that he does not know what he must, it’s that what he knows cannot find its way to him; it isn’t that he has no will, it’s that his will is, by dread, willed obedient to that dread; and it isn’t that he does not remember, it’s that he knows that he must not.  
 Beyond him, however, it is important to keep in mind that those who are led by the Opposition are not of one kind.  
 There are some who follow because the leaders they have chosen out of a weary innocence seem passionate, intelligent, knowledgeable, and sincere, and these followers are too busy or too tired to carefully research the positions to which they have passively pledged allegiance, or they remain personally unaffected by what is happening to their more distant neighbors, and so they transform their disquiet about the rumors of nightfall into the gratitude that they need not worry for themselves, and then abandon any further thought with the hope that their leaders will offer help where it later may be needed.  
 These are citizens devoted to the ideals of family, thriving communities, a strong country, and a safe world, and they do not mean to betray those ideals. They have learned the social algorithms which permit them to live and to work without bringing trouble upon themselves; they are good citizens in most ways who can be expected not to bring trouble upon others; they are parents good enough to make their children good citizens and parents good enough as well; they are good neighbors who tend to their lawns and light their homes on holidays; they make good employees by working hard and without complaint; and they make good friends for those good citizens who share their views, yet there is something missing from their lives.  
 It is as if, as children, upon the first rumors that there were monsters, after all, they decided that they would always stay in the light and do what was expected of them, and ignore the moments when their submission to the social order signaled that the most human parts of them would need to go untended and fade away, and only appear again in dreams they will never recall.  But somewhere within, they know that something vital has been taken from them.
 For a time, their anger at this theft of their destiny, and their fear of the powers that took it from them, are little more than a vague foreboding which the remnants of youth and a busy schedule are able to keep away.  In time, however, the gathering sense of an embattled life arouses that fear to an intensity impossible to ignore, while the bed-time stories told by The Opposition stoke that anger to the point of lethal rage.  
 Fear and anger - the armor and sword of our reply to threat, the great motivators, rousing to action those who would otherwise sleep, and less powerful only than love.  As long as these good citizens refuse to become more broadly and deeply informed, the ideals to which they once pledged their allegiance will remain under increasing threat by the leaders of the Opposition in whom they so dangerously place their stubborn trust.
 Beyond these recruits, there are the enlisted men.  Sullen, bitter, resentful, contemptuous of facts and whomever would dare to offer them, driven by an unexamined sense of entitlement born of misdirected anger and conceived in misguided fear, willfully uninformed, deferential to wealth, resistant to change, suspicious of legitimate authority, indifferent to want despite their own, confusing opinion with knowledge, mistaking what is loud for what is true, taking comfort in darkness and troubled by the light, and convinced beyond appeal that they have been chosen for both worldly retribution and celestial reward.
 And yet I believe that they, too, could be reached, if the truth could first reach them, and made ready to join the many who are, even now, prepared to challenge the mighty, heartless men who stand against our common destiny, men who possess no capacity for human thought, so none for mercy.  
 All these are, in effect, the soldiers of The Opposition army, and to the extent that they obey what is not true, they could be won over from the Opposition were they at last to give free access to the truth, though standing between this army and the truth that would free them is an officer corps (and the military metaphor is fitting) composed of zealots who believe in a vision of America and the world which radically deviates from both the lessons of history and the spirit of democracy, and my first objection to their thinking is that it is not thinking at all.  
 Instead, it is a self-serving patchwork of unexamined beliefs drawn from ignorance and prejudice (which are two different words for the same form of depravity) and I oppose them as passionately as the well-groomed leaders of their retrograde movement because of their celebration of violence, their bizarre fascination with Armageddon, their reverence for the instrumentalities of death, their confusion of ignorance with freedom, their rejection of science despite their selective use of its knowledge, their mistrust of communities beyond their squabbling tribes, their thoughtless misreading of the philosophies of love, their need for those whom they can judge of lower rank, their astonishing failure to see the enduring magic that women offer, their reflexive hatred of authority other than their own, their violent contempt for what is foreign even when it is benevolent, their pillaging of moral philosophies for the words that can then be crudely stitched into the appearance of irrefutable truth, and the perverse skill with which they mistake obsession for commitment, extremism for devotion, and mere affiliation for genuine love.
 But of our elected and appointed leaders, it would be a dangerous, perhaps fatal strategic blunder not to concede that these men who lead the Opposition can be quite impressive - depending, of course, upon what impresses you. They have power or wealth or both, they can speak to thousands without a script, they are well dressed, often well educated, in a narrow but suitably credentialed way, and endowed with the instinctive ability to quote whichever moral principles will catch and keep the attention of the audience whose members they wish to bring to their cause.
 Their greatest talent, however, is the ability to know which audience includes the men who will follow them, the ones who long for a return to the time when men were men and women were their grateful servants, and the fact that the time for which they long was a long journey through hell for all but the empty men who created that hell and then defended it against those who can dream is, for such men, a fact without either substance or merit.  These are not men who know what it means to love.  
 They do not know that the infinity which is love cannot be diminished, and that whenever we find another to love, a new infinity is added, and never will one take from another or seek to keep away the new, and when the heart is made free by these harmoniously conjoined infinities, we are made more human.  Love is, of course, about relationships, those self-chosen bonds between two or more people which endure upon trust, respect, empathy, mutuality, and a shared imagining of how the world might rather be – this is the bond which makes a celebration of our charity, and which is invulnerable to time’s passing, even though we are not.  
 What modest wisdom I possess, though mostly borrowed from the wise, suggests that there is no wisdom unless it is for everyone. If so, the one truth I know that belongs to us all, even to those who would proclaim it an illusion, is the power of genuine love to heal, to transform, and to humanize. We are born into a profound longing to be loved – it is our first hunger, and if we are given that love, we will also then share it both freely and joyously, but if we are not, life becomes a solitary labor to find that love, a labor that does not always earn our heart’s fair keep.  
 Love, in truth (its kin), is a way of being, yet so are the radically differing passions which drive much of The Opposition: contempt, bitterness, resentment, and a groundless sense of entitlement that should be far more worthy of our concerned debate than those entitlements which, like boys celebrating the agonized death of a slug beneath a mound of kitchen salt, they attack with such an unaccountably proud and self-congratulatory intensity, while the form of cackling ignorance which haunts progress most is not the one which reflects a deficiency of knowledge, but the one which reflects a deficiency of love, because once love is taken from a child, and never found or felt again, the latter form quickly becomes the former, and thus is built another eager member of The Opposition.  
 If nothing else, remember always that love is not the word “love” – it is our birthright and our salvation.
 I do not want to hurt in any way those who form The Opposition – someone already has.  I want instead to teach them that the anger they feel is misplaced and would exactly measure out the tears which that anger obscures, because except for the Sociopath, no one who supports the actions and inactions I have listed here could do so unless they once had been so wounded that anger seemed the better resolution because while tears are private, anger is public and thus will receive the validation of shared expression.  
 Teach this to the army of The Opposition and in time they would, I believe, take a better and differing path, leaving their commanders unarmed, though if the latter would be willing, we would welcome them as well.
 Of the forces arrayed, the other is The Alliance: I briefly considered calling this group something like the League Of Vulnerable Egalitarians because this spells “love”, the guiding spirit of my quest, though it would also spell trouble because not only is it artificial (and so the opposite of what I seek) but like so much else that is artificial, it would rightly be seen as an advertisement of a kind, and though it might seem impossible to most of us moderns, there are other ways of communicating a purpose without cutting away at its substance so that it will fit into an ad which, in turn, would fit – if just barely – into a mind that has been narrowed and dimmed by forms of diversion offered as narcotic compensation for the silencing of its moral and aesthetic sensibilities by men who care for nothing except power while they live and then, if they prove mortal after all, history’s bribed remembrance.  
 Besides, all egalitarians are vulnerable.
 But I wander from light to darkness, and so I return to the better name for this second group, this peaceful army still to be assembled, and I call it The Alliance because that is what it must be - an alliance formed of women, the young, and those men who attend carefully to the news of the world around them and who, upon each report of greed, arrogance, and cruelty are astonished anew and made more ready still to take action towards a better world.  
 And a fine group of individuals the Alliance will be – passionate, intelligent, well-informed, imaginative (and therefore compassionate), honest, brave, and merciful, though not yet bound together by love and the fears that love must bear, and by a shared astonishment at the horrors that still rival our achievements in their number and devotion to cause, and so they are not now an Alliance at all, and are therefore not ready to oppose the smaller but more dangerously fanatical group of men who have been opposing even the idea of universal human progress for millennia, the men who are, without knowing it, the reason for our revolution.    
 Yet we have another ally, perhaps the most powerful if unexpected ally of all: those who have come and gone before us, especially those who died too young to fulfill their destinies, and those who, because of a fatal injustice, never had the chance to decide upon their destinies at all, and those who died before they could say good-bye and speak their love to those they cherished above all else, and those who died in agony or in anguish, and those who died without ever having known love, and those who died their names unknown and their graves unmarked, and those who died alone, and those who died when asked to defend what they felt was right or who died when forced to defend what they knew was wrong, or anyone who died needlessly because of war, disease, poverty, hunger, slavery, unbearable loss, or lethal despair.  
 These legions of the dead should weigh heavily upon conscience because unless we establish a world that is forever meant for all, their lives and their deaths will not receive the gratitude and justice of our final triumph on behalf of the living, the unborn, and our awaiting dead.
 Now, to both The Opposition and The Alliance I say: it is time – it is time for the positions you represent to make of their vast and irreconcilable differences a just cause worthy of creative battle, to gather your greatest champions in all the salient fields – history, economics, philosophy, science, law, psychology, journalism, and religion, and at battle’s end, with faith in love’s triumph, begin a world meant for all, even for those whom we once had called The Opposition.  Though I would also say to The Opposition and to any who would oppose this Alliance, beware not only love, but love’s anger, for it is invulnerable to discouragement, far readier for battle, and relentless until victory can restore its mercy.
 But at what cost, you ask again? What will be the true human cost of this revolution of which I so gladly dream?  If it is devoutly non-violent yet unrelenting in its determination to remove from power those who would rule rather than serve, the cost will be only for the heartless to pay and yet, unless they are beyond all redemption, they, too, would learn in time to celebrate with gratitude all that was won for their loss.  
 After a hundred centuries of festering ignorance and pervasive suffering, some of us have begun to despair of the ancient dream of a world made world for all, and instead begun to hope only for intercession – whether divine, magical, natural, or supernatural – as if humanity were a hopelessly scattered tribe lost among its own debris and praying for their deliverance.  Yet the fact is that right now we know enough, we have enough, we are enough to transform this world into a terrestrial paradise, and within a single generation, we could have a world in which even the momentary suffering of a single child would be felt by all, and met with our shared astonishment.
 There is, of course, more to be said.  I have spoken of current events, of certain essential words, of love, astonishment, and imagination, and of the opposing forces that would compose the revolution which history requires of us all if love and justice are to be shared by us all, yet these are only preface to the argument.  With this in mind, I now join together a few of the current events that I have already shared and, by doing so, reveal a bleak but essential truth with the hope that if you have genuine love in your heart, you will be afraid for those you love, that if you are still capable of true astonishment, a vital inner silence will fall as the enormity of this truth settles uncomfortably within you, and that if you have a living imagination, you will be able to see the darkening future which even now is being assembled with an inhuman efficiency and cannot be far from its completion.  
 Then, made ready by your love, your righteous fear, your astonishment, and your empathic foretelling, you will use your voice, your vote, and your unrelenting will to learn and to act so that the tightening hold of an emerging sociopathocracy is broken by those whom it wants instead to misinform, exhaust, frighten, coerce, or bribe into a hushed and fatal consent.  I begin by repeating my earlier statement that “on heartlessly ideological grounds alone, nearly half of our governors refuse to make medical care available to their poorest and most vulnerable citizens, thus assuring the unnecessary deaths of thousands”.  
 It should be merely self-evident that of the millions who have been denied this care, thousands will die of diseases that could either have been prevented or cured, and though well-established statistics bear this out as well, I would rather quote sense than science, though of my struggle to find the words that would fairly portray the reality with which too many live, I would ask of myself: how can I find other words, better words, stronger words than thousands will die?  The answer is: I cannot not, and I need not.
 Any position, no matter how noble in its purpose and rational in its statement, can be attacked, and any position, no matter how cruel and irrational in its intent, can be defended, and thus every action can be defended on moral grounds, and every action, no matter how destructive, can be argued as both rational and beneficial on the basis of a principled philosophy, and the fact that a more thoughtful majority may passionately disagree does not, and cannot change this.  But if you have love in your heart, your response to this willful indifference to needless human suffering and loss must be horror, astonishment’s desolate nightfall.  
 Defenses of this action have been offered, of course, but whether they are based upon economic, political, or even philosophical or moral arguments, the reasons for providing that care are, for those with a heart, forever and indisputably self-evident, and the crucial difference between those who oppose that care and those who are its champions is that the latter possess a living conscience and the others do not, and there is no middle ground nor exception to this truth.  
 My point would simply be this: as soon as the facts about the effect on those in need are understood, the debate should end without further argument, and in the better world that all but the merciless want, this would be invariably true.  For the ones who decided to deny medical care to those in need, there was no love to guide them towards sanity, there was no astonishment at the thought of those who would suffer and of those who would die, and there was no imagination to offer the images of the tragically inevitable consequences.  
 There was nothing good or fair or admirable about this decision, and those who made it are among the leaders of The Opposition whom I very much want to consign to those darker moments of history whose only value would be as a lesson towards the light, because with this law we had come to moral closure, which is the moment – always within our grasp - when a morally ideal threshold is reached beyond which no further principled debate is needed in order to assure the most humane result, and so we can and should ask these leaders of The Opposition: what is it that you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?
 I quote another earlier statement that “with a membership representing little more than one percent of the population, a single organization, using a demonstrable lie and allying itself with the most thoughtlessly extreme partisans among the smallest political party, is able to prevent the passage of an almost universally supported law written in response to the slaughter of 20 young children”.  
 I should not need to say more, of course, though I must, of course.  Could anyone reasonably deny that it is virtually a logical impossibility that one could have a heart and not be horrified that a small group of cold-blooded men could defy the will of a nation at a moment when another horror was pleading for the justice of love?
 So, I ask, what principle, what reason, what argument, what moral law, what religious teaching could argue against that act of love without seeming grotesquely empty and utterly cruel in comparison?  Or to ask a simpler yet more central question: where was love that the reply to this staggering loss was instead sociopathic in its indifference, not only to the children, but to a nation awaiting resolution.  I demand your answer - not for me, but for yourself.  
 And of those who stood in the way of humane action, we ask again: what is it you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?
 With these two issues as first illustration, I say to you, without fear of rational dissent, that I know – not believe, not suppose, not claim, not suggest – I know that love would ask that any debate come to an end as soon as the facts, the human facts are clear.  What sane counter-argument could there be to accepting an established system of medical care that would prevent the unnecessary suffering and deaths of thousands, or to a thoughtfully crafted proposal of legislative action that would keep guns from madmen?  
 None - and yet in both cases, love lost out to the self-interest of men who care far more about their political careers than about the lives of those they were sworn to protect, and so once more did the fanatic find a way to disguise ignorance as principle and make wisdom, which is love when love is made thought, seem treachery instead. But the fanatic will always value his moral principles more than the people for whom those principles had once been fashioned as refuge, though it is only for their power to provide him cover that he will mention them at all.
 We ask: where was love and astonishment and imagination in these two cases?  Why did not love prevail, silencing the opposition, as soon as a solution was offered, and why did not our horror at this loss rally us to further action, and why did not imagination foretell the future thus darkened by these atrocities of inaction and refuse to give way?  Because as I also stated earlier, “a system of corporate and political governance has been established which both recruits and rewards those least restrained by conscience and to whom compassion would seem an obstacle”.  
 Both corporate and government leadership represent political office (the corporate by virtue of its purchase of government) and so it is to politics that I will now turn, though with the same discomfort I would feel if I were discussing poverty, disease, or any of the horrors that in a better world politics could solve, but in this world does not.  
 Before I continue, however, I offer some comfort by reminding you that when The Opposition recruits, it also reveals, so watch closely who is chosen to lead, and who will follow, and towards what objective – power, profit, or people, and then support when you can, and oppose when you must.  
 Fairness requires that I first state very clearly that there are politicians who are devoted to that better world, that there are women and men whose dream is not their own, but ours instead, women and men who are worthy of our admiration and gratitude for what they have done to bring us closer to a world in which love is the primary light by which we make our way towards a universally shared freedom, as well as the watchfulness against inhumanity which that freedom requires of us all.  
 This truth must never be forgotten or ignored.  Yet although this is the truth, it is sadly not the only truth.  By an outrageous manipulation of the news, of laws, of precedent and tradition, and of the emotions of those they have deliberately misled, a fanatical minority has gained ascendancy, subverting the will of a more thoughtful, if strangely passive majority, and it is about this extremist group (and cult may be the better word) that I want to make the following points.  
 First, as far as I can tell, for the first time in our history, most of those who lead, or conspire to lead, are less enlightened, less knowledgeable - not only of the facts but of what it means to be human - than those whom they would lead. Knowledge is power, of course, and in its reach, perhaps only love extends further, though political office is also power, which may be why those who lack the former are so often drawn to the latter.
 Second, most of our politicians act precisely as we teach our children not to act – they boast of accomplishing what is not theirs to claim or what is instead more deserving of disgrace, and they will blame their opponents for actions which their opponents never took.  Compare the statements of any of our more fanatical politicians to a child’s defense against the accusation of not sharing with another child and the differences would not only be small, but would favor the child.
 Third, and even more troubling is this - to the extent that politicians are lead to their decisions by their ravenous hunger for re-election and the consequent need to win over the disturbingly large number of voters who, out of fear, rage, greed, or hate, can only be awakened to brief public service by words designed to provoke the ignorant to vote, then it is also true that our politicians are led by the ignorant, and thus the rest of us by both, and the fact that the majority is composed of people of intelligence and compassion does not and cannot change this, though it should reveal to this majority that intelligence and compassion are not enough by themselves – you must also have the knowledge and the devotion (which is another kind of knowledge) that will be needed to elect politicians who possess the intelligence, and the compassion, and the knowledge, and the devotion to lead us where we already know we want to go.  
 If not, then we will continue to be led not only by ignorance, but by the money which contributes so generously to conserving that ignorance, and thus will we be led by the most tenuous of all that is real and by the most tenacious of all that is abstract.  But we would ask of our politicians: what is it like to hold a position of public trust and yet feel the need to betray the truth, to obscure, to ignore, to forbid the truth in order to succeed, and what, to such men, can success mean if a devotion to the truth, the guarantor of freedom, is not a living part of it?  
 Their ignorance is staggering. It is a nightfall, not only of the mind, but of the heart, driven by the most primitive and unyielding of human emotions and, like a black cloud of insects carrying a fatal disease, it is delivered through a blanketing swarm of thoughtless words.  
 It is an ignorance nearly as intricate as the knowledge it willfully rejects, layer upon sedimentary layer of differing causes, differing alibis, differing resentments, differing targets, all flowing from a single commanding fear – that to learn is to threaten what they need to believe and to expose themselves as villains, rather than as the heroes they would dream of being, if they could dream at all.  It is a well-practiced, even an articulate ignorance, able to speak in sentences at length in public, and forever unaware that some who listen know exactly what they are and will devote themselves to their opposition.
 As one specific example of my many objections (as polite a word as I could find), I would point out to the more self-serving of our politicians that removing the regulations which prevent industry from polluting our air would simply amount to a new regulation, one which prevents us from preventing industry from polluting our air – either one would be the result of government action, so do not expect us to believe that you represent a righteous opposition to an authoritarian government and do not permit yourself the illusion that you are liberating anyone, and if you cannot act out of love for the people of whom, by whom, and for whom our government was established, do not be surprised at the ferocity of our opposition and of our intention to liberate ourselves from you - in pursuit of your own destiny, you cannot have ours.
 As another example, the following now seems the extremist politician’s standard formula for answering a difficult question on a publicly sensitive subject during an interview with a credentialed broadcast journalist: immediately mention the subject of the question so that, by answer’s end, the question will be remembered as having been answered, then “pivot” by accusing their opposition of ruinous mistakes made on this same (or strategically similar) subject, and “pivot” once again by citing the great victories won by their noble cause - then just keep talking about their mistakes and your victories for as long as possible in order to prevent another question, offer a constant smile to suggest a confidence so supreme that all doubt has fled in terror, while keeping their voice calm unless a slight raising (to convey explicit contempt) or lowering (to convey implicit warning) will serve as emphasis to their point, all the time adopting an air of imperial indifference, thus marking the question as foolish, the questioner a fool, and the politician as a righteous defender of all that is sacred.  
 But the formula is easy to master, and once you commit to memory the lists of all your victories and all their mistakes (which, to their eyes, are victories), anyone could learn to answer difficult questions in a way that leaves the majority of viewers in a state of vaguely satisfied confusion – a triumph only if the defeat of Reason is reason enough to deceive.  It seems that we need politicians, as opposed to elected leaders, only because the system in which they work enlists them in order to work at all, however poorly.  
 Yet what if we had a system of government that instead enlisted women and men of authentic conscience, whose sole ambition was to assure the well-being of all, who would ask for the honor of serving others without the need to ask for money from others, not because they would be wealthy, but because their dreams for us would be known to us, women and men who would delight in telling the truth at every moment and whose wish was not to gain power for themselves, but to give power to those without?  
 If we oppose the shameless obedience to wealth, the ravenous hunger for celebrity, the grotesque self-interest, the unreflective longing for unassailable power, the need to reshape fact into fairy tale and truth into advertisement, and the thoughtless allegiance to ideology rather than to those they should serve, we would then be half way to the ancient dream of a world that is meant for all.  Yet fail to oppose that obedience, that grotesque subservience, and we learn, as many already have, that past a certain far point of political thought and action, in the dark corners where the fanatic paces back and forth in search of chaos, what we would find there is no longer a philosophy, but a pathology.  
 And of politics and advertising (its Rasputin), I ask, could it be that the taunting theatrics of the modern ad, the gleaming machines promising our ecstasy, the communion we are offered with useless things and toxic food, the engineered beauty and contrived good cheer, the tawdry song and dance of our tireless consumerism, the thoughtless manipulation of opinion and desire, and the demand that hope should hope instead for pretty objects above all else, could it be that this parody of lived experience has led to a politics that now prefers marketing to governing?  If so, the model is based upon the corporation, not the constitution, and nothing good could ever come of this.
 Perhaps I am naïve, yet it seems clear to me that both the original and the enduring purpose of government, of the law, of principles, of ethics, of rules of any kind is nothing less than to protect us, and because these standards of human conduct often include other species as well, they are ultimately meant to protect life itself, to prevent harm whenever possible, and by doing so, to promote the safety and welfare of all that lives.  With this in mind, I find it profoundly troubling to listen to our current political leaders debate the value of proposed legislation because, in almost every case, the two sides will defend their positions based upon either one of only two considerations: the economic costs or the human costs.  
 Though the defenders of the latter must, of present necessity, also give thought to the economic costs of any given proposal, the defenders of the economic costs rarely discuss the associated human costs unless a passing reference offers some strategic political value, and if the mention of money is thought insufficient to win the argument, the Champions of Wealth will then deploy other sanctified words like “freedom” or “faith” or “family” (and to each we should reply: “which” and “for whom”), though these words are used only as cover for an action that will inexorably lead to their own gain, and our next loss, and so it also seems clear that these standards of human conduct are, in effect, now being rewritten to permit a profitable cruelty by the same heartless fanatics (a redundancy in the service of emphasis) who have already purchased the political authority to proceed without regard to the human consequences of their actions.  
 If nothing else, please note that based upon the public record of each – a record to which we all have access - the primary mission of one political party can reasonably be portrayed as defending the rights of people, while the primary mission of the other can reasonably be portrayed as defending the rights of money, and I would remind the supporters of the latter that these two missions are neither morally equivalent, nor could ever be.
 We are being led, though “corralled” may be the better word, by men whose kind I have gratefully never known, unless some have somehow kept their utter lack of empathy well hidden.  We have empowered thugs, and the word is not too strong.  They are thugs who have swaggered their way to power by pretending to uphold values whose human meaning they will never know, their faces lit with a cruel, sneering delight at the thought of denying to others the rights which they themselves enjoy, their voices shrill with the pleasure felt at the thought of converting into law their contempt for anyone of lower rank, a standing based upon whether we possesses the money, social status, and political power to raise us high enough to be noticed by those who do.  They will not notice us, but we will watch them, and if they discount us, as is their intent, we will raise ourselves until it is they who must look up.  
 For now, watch for those leaders who will answer the questions asked of them, not those they wish had been asked, and whose answers will withstand honest scrutiny and will not, by their length, prevent all further questions, whose voices will not grow strident nor their eyes narrow with contempt when challenged, who will inspire, rather than provoke, who will know when events require their solemnity, and whose smiles are sincere and reserved for issues worthy of our own, for these are the leaders worth our attention, if not yet our full devotion.
 And at the intersection of politics and language (a dangerously busy intersection since politics is language at its most public yet least patrolled) there is, among others, the ailing word “hypocrisy”.  
 It is a word originally meant to convey a morally indefensible divide between one’s stated principles and one’s actions, but it has been used so often for so many issues by so many politicians that it has been hollowed out and now seems to refer only to a political strategy designed to assure individual career longevity and internal party solidarity, so that the act of accusing the other side of hypocrisy is simply part of the dues a politician pays to remain in good standing with their party, and this means that even when the charge of hypocrisy is demonstrably true, this word no longer has the power to reveal the morality tale for which it was created, while the act of making such a charge is itself now often just another act of hypocrisy, and thus has another vital word been rendered nearly impotent.
 But for the typical American citizen who is at best only marginally informed and at worst either demonstrably uninformed or disturbingly misinformed (which is to know less than those who know nothing), distinguishing between the two political philosophies which compete for that citizen’s brief attention and continuing loyalty can be a complex challenge.  After all, the public representatives of both philosophies seem rational, sincere, and passionate, they are familiar with the issues and articulate in their policies, they draw large crowds when speaking in public, maintain a coven of veteran advisors, and have the backing of corporations that fund their quests, and of news organizations that support their policies.
 Because they will often use the same words spoken in the same style and in the same tradition, it is not always easy to distinguish between the elected representatives of The Opposition and of The Alliance.  They will all speak of freedom and hope and devotion and of a brighter future for everyone, and if you listen without knowing the speaker, it can be difficult to know whether they are guided by compassion or egomaniacal self-interest.  Start half-way through many contemporary political speeches, and you may struggle to learn whether they are for you or against you, though this may be the point.  
 The words they use are not an advertiser’s words, which are shorter, more universally understood, and thus less prone to differing interpretation, yet the typical politician is an ad-man through and through.  If he comes to you from a position of vain indifference, his actions will not reflect the true meaning of his words, while if she is one of the honest and genuinely caring few, her efforts will be honorable and on our behalf.  But understand that it is only possible to believe that “both sides do it” if you are listening to just one side.  
 So how does the well-intentioned but unsophisticated voter decide which philosophy would best serve the best interests of their families, their country, and their world?  
 First, I am not concerned here with the fanatics, for they are beyond the appeal of other possibilities, nor to those whose anger, fear, or hatred would lead them to vote for whichever candidate offered the subtle pledge of either public vengeance or private vindication. But for the rest, for those who carry no prejudice into the discussion of national and international issues but who do not yet know how to distinguish those with a dream from those with a strategy, how do they learn which politicians and news organizations they can trust, follow, and support?  Other than using multiple sources of information to learn all we must about the issues and those who would lead us, and learning all we must about ourselves so that any secret bias is kept from dominance, there are other points to be made.
 First, it is true that politicians sometimes use the word love in their speeches, though using this word and leading on the basis of what this word signifies are not, of course, the same thing. When needed for strategic emphasis, the typical politician may talk of his love for our country or his love of the freedom which our country’s original governing philosophy represents, but I am not usually persuaded to believe that he is referring to love as I and others so gratefully know it.  
 Second, the idea of our country is, by itself, no more than an abstract concept if its mention does not explicitly include every one of our citizens and residents, and every one of the living ideals upon which our democracy was founded, while the word freedom, like many other sacred words, has been asked to carry new meanings within its spacious realm, some of which point away from freedom itself and instead towards tyranny, and though there has been much talk of freedom recently, if I understand what is being said, it almost seems as if nothing more than freedom itself is needed to assure our happiness, though I would ask: freedom from what or from whom, and freedom to do what and to whom?  
 The great psychologist Victor Frankel made the point that because America has the Statue of Liberty on its east coast, it should, in order to do justice to liberty, have a Statue of Responsibility on the west coast as well.  In this way, this nation would be bordered not just by two oceans, but by two principles neither of which can exist without the other, lest freedom become mere anarchy and responsibility become mere obligation.  Daring to define it, I would offer that freedom is the ability to travel your own path without either fear or opposition, as long as you do not diminish the freedom of another, and as long as the other is following this same sacred rule.
 But a freedom that is unconstrained by any law, ethics, tradition, or moral consideration would be little more than another word for chaos, and the politician who would claim that it was a love of freedom which lead him to keep his own countrymen from having affordable health care, from voting without obstacle, from having equal influence upon legislation, from equal pay or living wage, from having the protection of sane gun laws, from clean air and water, from a climate that will not kill our children, and from knowing the truth, is a heartless, thoughtless, dangerous fool who should have power over no one – after all, the greatest tyranny is the use of freedom by some to reduce the freedom of others.  
 These leaders do not see the desperate need, and if they do, they don’t believe it, and if they do, they don’t accept it, and if they do, they do not care.  When we are confronted by a tyranny of any kind, and thus by a loss of hope, of freedom, of fellowship, of sanctuary, we must remember that love is our deliverance – just remember as well that sometimes love will decide that it has come time to fight for that deliverance.
 And if a politician were to protest that he was acting from love, that it was his love of freedom which inspired him to take these actions, then I would reply that freedom without responsibility is always a tyranny of the self because responsibility is always about others than yourself, as is the love which is, to the eloquent sheep who have such power, no more than an old, if useful technique for keeping that power safe from those whom they claim to represent, because power of almost any kind, but especially power based upon wealth, fame, or political office, will always become an extension of the ego of those who possess that power, and too often, if the ego thus enlarged is wounded, its power will be used to wound.
 I do not worry that I am wrong about this, but I do worry that were we ever to demand that those who lead us love us, the typical politician would simply defend himself by using the word love until its meaning had flickered towards extinction, though what better reason for revolution than to prevent this alone. If our leaders, instead of leading, continue to follow those among us who, because of their grudging and unexamined resentment, feel entitled to act against the common good, revolution will become a moral obligation, and as long as it is non-violent and has that common good as its only goal, then it is a revolution which must be considered rational, desirable, and, may it be, inevitable.
 But I have not yet made the larger point, and because of its central importance here, I want again to borrow the words of better minds and wiser hearts than mine.
 Every man has in politics a right to think and speak and act for himself.  I must judge for myself, but how can I judge, how can any man judge, unless his mind has been opened and enlarged by reading?  A man who can read will find rules and observations that will enlarge his range of thought and enable him the better to judge who has and who has not that integrity of heart and that compass of knowledge and understanding which form the statesman – John Adams
 Whenever the people are well-informed, they can be trusted with their own government, and whenever things get so far wrong as to attract their notice, they may be relied on to set them to rights, and if a civilized nation expects to be both ignorant and free, it expects what never was and never will be – Thomas Jefferson
 A nation, like a person, has a mind – a mind that must be kept informed and alert, that must know itself, that understands the hopes and needs of its neighbors – Franklin Roosevelt
 Wisdom and knowledge, as well as virtue, diffused generally among the body of the people, are necessary for the preservation of their rights and liberties - Massachusetts Constitution of 1780
 We believe that an informed citizenry will act for life, and not for death – Albert Einstein
 Of all the points that I would want to make on this subject, these quotes describe what I consider to be one of the most important arguments that I will offer: we cannot, as a nation, enter this vaunted 21st century and make our way towards the universally celebrated future which this nation was so thoughtfully designed to assure if we are dragging behind us the many dangerously uninformed and misinformed citizens who, along with their rapacious political masters, now keep us from the destiny which is our destiny to fulfill.  
 Because I feel certain that we cannot enter the future which our scientific and social progress now allows us to imagine while also burdened by the proud ignorance of so many, I wonder whether this bizarre and threatening era represents the barricade which that future has erected in order to prevent this ignorance from interfering with its arrival, because the future will always insist upon its time, and yet a future that is no more than the continuation of our brutal past is simply the past made immortal by a present rendered impotent.  But do not let the past discourage you, do not let it color your present, and do not let it predict your future - let stand what is, and move on from there.
 I offer an imagined example: there will almost certainly come a time when the technology of virtual reality will offer the experience of a world to match our own in all its vital details, and the synthetic yet lucid and deeply felt reality of that artificial world will allow us to build a kind of second life there, and if that life is better, happier, more hopeful than the one that we have built for ourselves, it could lead, for some, to a life spent in that second world to the fatal exclusion of the original, to a kind of death by vivid dream.  
 However unlikely this scenario may seem, to entrust a future whose technology has the power to engineer a perfected illusion, whether by device or prescription or hypnotic broadcast, to a population hobbled by incomplete or inaccurate knowledge and by prejudice and entrenched myths, is to trade destiny for fate – history will require that we become more human, or it will assure that we become less, and the latter is the path to our ruin – not, I believe, in any future so distant that we must leave its description to the imagination of our writers, but in this, our 21st century.
 Many had spoken about the 21st century as if it was a new land full of bright promise and invulnerable to the nightmares of the preceding ten millennia, as if we only needed to cross over its border with history to arrive home at last.  Not so, of course, and yet our wish to make the 21st century an enduring refuge from horror has made the new millennium a many-faceted symbol.  It is the doorway through which we hope to escape the twenty medieval centuries that came before, it is the bloodless battlefield on which we strike the fatal blow against the empire of greed, arrogance, and cruelty that ruled the world ‘til then, it is the place where the raw materials of technology and hope will be used to build a human paradise for all, and it is the time when we learn at last what it means to be human and to acknowledge our debt to the past that we can now pay to the future.  
 But we are being held back.  Tens of millions of Americans believe that our world was made on Sunday, October 23rd, 4004 BCE, and tens of millions of Americans believe that our climate is not changing because of human activity, and tens of millions of Americans believe that the theory of evolution is demonstrably false, and tens of millions of Americans believe that tens of millions of other Americans, no matter how desperate, should be denied help from a government that they do not believe works for the common good, thus hoping to prove what is false with what is cruel.
 So, what came with us when we entered the 21st century?  What followed us through the door as the speeches, the fireworks, and the eager crowds celebrated the passage of the most lethal millennium in our history, as well as the hope that hope itself would now be granted substance enough to become instead a faith?  
 What entered with us, celebrating, too, though for differing reasons, were those who soon enough would make this new century seem no different from the last: sociopaths, fanatics, violent psychotics, malignant narcissists, zealots, and “true believers” (an odd title since what they believe is rarely true).  They are a sentient form of darkness that has been with us from the beginning, and their remorseless cunning has traveled with us, unchanged, from a brutish past to the fragile civility of this moment, shadowing us as would a predator.
 But I say again that what opposes us, what opposes life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness (and I would add, of love, too, though love is the truest happiness) is not the other political party, the other gender, the other class, the other generations, the other religions, the other philosophies, but those whose conscience was either never bred, or never born.  Still, we need to know more about those who would have us know less, and so I choose one group from among our list of villains, one who may have been born with the seed of conscience, though because that seed was then planted in poisoned ground, conscience grew instead into a barbed and twisted vanity.  
 With this, the fanatic will now have another moment upon another stage, though its light will not be flattering here, nor should it ever be, because the fanatic is someone who has anointed himself, though never to a position that he deserves, or that we ever could afford or ever should allow, and so I begin with three quotes written for his own useless review.
 A fanatic is someone who can't change his mind and won't change the subject – Winston Churchill
 It is a poised and confident ignorance that both marks the fanatic and renders that mark invisible to the rest of us, for we assume that ignorance will always appear in disagreeable form, yet I have seen a pleasant face whose eyes were lit as if by a benevolent passion, only then to learn that behind those lustrous eyes there was little more than a howling wasteland of resolute hostility – Unknown
 A fanatic is someone who is convinced that their personal identity - the deepest and most elemental foundation upon which one’s entire sense of individual existence depends - is under imminent and unrelenting threat of annihilation, and because the fate of the universe itself appears to rest upon the preemptive destruction of that threat (which is calling into aberrant being a world where it is the darkness that is radiant, and where the gods can only watch with a sullen impotence), the fanatic journeys with bizarre elation towards the imagined lights of oblivion, for here and now, few exist but he, and all foretold reunion awaits him in a place where he has never been, and none can ever go – Unknown
 To the fanatic, he is the most passionate of men, committed to a noble cause, guided by a light that no one else can see, and though he stands alone, he valiantly struggles against an enemy that is without honor, without mercy, and assured of victory unless the fanatic can persuade enough true patriots to take up the fight, and so he assumes the role of savior, a role for which his talents serve him well, though they are talents which, while real, are tragically misspent.  
 He is often a gifted speaker, unafraid of presenting his views to large, unruly groups (though they are carefully chosen in advance for their capacity for riotous applause), he is well dressed according to the fashion of his audience, and he will moderate his obsession with making the world over in his own image by appearing as a humble man who is simply determined to make life better for those who feel left alone in the dark - as long as they follow him towards the utopia just over the horizon, which is, despite his claims, always a greater darkness, though to the blind, there is darkness everywhere.  
 In the end, the fanatic is just an infant made dangerous by a man’s knowledge of how to avenge himself against whomever is not inhumanly perfect in their response to that infant’s constant and conflicting need for our slavish attention.  
 Yet I have been fooled by the fanatic.  I have heard speeches whose words seem right, speeches given by men whose voices resound with a righteous certainty, voices whose melodic authority will fling each word as if it was meant to penetrate the skin.  My youth and my wish to contribute to a noble cause lead me to see these fanatics instead as Generals preparing an army to war for the end of war, and to see us, his citizen soldiers, as patriots against tyranny.  
 However, the truer metaphor would be theatrical and would portray me as more foolishly hopeful and trusting, and so I took too long to walk out on their braying monologues, and yet a fair review would quote the blood-price of my admission and my far too charitable applause as the still finer act because what had for a time seemed worthy of ovation was merely an amateur’s failed audition upon an empty stage, while the show’s truer stars sat in the velvet rows before them.  
 Though my devotion to these men was brief, it was troubling, but though troubling, it taught me much, if differently from their intent.  In part, my devotion reflected a faith in them that I had kept past reason, since for them faith was a worthless passion valued only for its power to blind us to the truth of their indifference to the truth, and from that moment on, I forever reserved that faith for those who earn it with their wish to return our own with theirs.  
 The rest was my longing to be free and to free others in turn, a worthy passion and one so strong that when I thought I had found someone who made an answer to this longing seem possible at last, I then lowered the sword and shield of my caution - as the young will do when hope is made their sentinel – and did not raise them again until it was almost too late to protect myself against their predatory vanity.  
 The fanatic is arguably the most dangerous among the leaders of The Opposition for he combines the narcissist’s egocentricity (where others exist only for the admiration they offer) with the sociopath’s lack of conscience (where others exist only for the advantages they offer) and then to this adds a story, one that is often well told, seemingly coherent, and provides just the right enemy for those uninformed listeners who will always want to make external what is too painful to keep inside.  This can work because the fanatic knows how to create an enemy in order to shift the darkness within them onto others in the urgent, if unacknowledged, hope that fighting this enemy will finally purge them of their darkness, though in the end, it will only serve to make this darkness more powerful and more pervasive, and by doing so, they will instead welcome what they had wanted to expel, and make of themselves the truer enemy.
 Ultimately, this is a matter of the experience of personal emptiness (of which I will say more later), and there are two forms from which we can suffer: one is the hole in our hearts if we were not loved and do not then learn to love despite this loss, and the other is the hole in our minds if we are not broadly educated, whether by our schools, our families, or ourselves.  The fanatic suffers from the first and enlists the second, but neither have that broader awareness, that sense of inner companionship needed to see the world without the prejudice of fear, and like hope, fear is a prophetic emotion, foretelling what will be, and it is always learned so perfectly that once fear takes hold, it can feel too commanding to overcome, and even too needed for its counsel to want to overcome, and each fear will then bear a host of lesser premonitions, the dreads and worries which will faithfully obey the fear that bore them, like slavering dogs pacing around their master, ready for the hunt.
 But it is our job, our duty, our commitment, our responsibility as citizens of this country and of this world to be informed.  If you call yourself a patriot but are unfamiliar with the available facts and differing positions regarding the most critically important issues confronting us, then you are betraying the country you have claimed to love, and have promised to defend (and of such a promise was the first hope born), though to our patriots I offer a suggestion: patriotism not for our country, nor for any, but for all, a patriotism which humanity asks that we pledge instead to humanity because our most formidable opponent is not in another land alone, it is here and kept strong by what we do not know though could choose to learn, and having learned, then act upon, while noting that to choose not to act is to risk losing the right to choose.
But here I want to cite two other passages from earlier in my talk: first, “our press is now too often owned by men indifferent not only to the ethical demands of professional journalism, but to anything other than profit and propaganda”, and second, “a single man of great wealth and great power, calling himself a journalist, establishes an empire of newspapers and television stations whose scandalous but profitable objective is to speak to the fear, anger, prejudice, and intolerance of an audience now so demonstrably misinformed that they have become a threat to their own country”.  
 First, of the latter, a question: treachery is one of the most serious accusations one could make, and so I wonder aloud whether it would rightfully apply in the following case: if a large “news” corporation, for reasons of profit and ideology alone, had the conscious goal of providing incomplete, misleading, or brazenly dishonest stories to viewers who had been lead to believe that these stories were “fair and balanced” news, and if this corporation used this strategy so effectively for so long that its viewers were found to be the most thoroughly misinformed of all, and if, as a consequence, those viewers, by virtue of both their number and their artificially provoked anger, put democracy at risk with their votes for ignorant, heartless scoundrels, then could this corporation’s actions justifiably be described as treachery?  
 As one gives this the thought which it deserves, remember that corporations do not govern, they rule, and that more than one scholar has shown that our country is, by well-established definitions, no longer a democracy at all, but also that treachery is defined as a “violation of allegiance, or of faith and confidence”, at best, and at worst as, “an act of perfidy or treason”.  “Some are saying” that I would vote “yes” on both – and they would be right because this corporation has, without rational doubt, greatly damaged trust in journalism, in government, in truth, in facts, in ourselves and in each other, and whatever the opposite of patriotism may be, it is precisely the charge of which I now proudly and passionately accuse them.  
 With all this in mind, perhaps the first action that would make ours a more well informed and thus more humane society is to make these points as clearly, as loudly, as factually as possible, though to accomplish this, we would need to rely upon a press already diminished by the grotesque self-interest of those who, with no shame felt or shown, would freely call themselves the guardians of the fourth estate, though the only estate they would ever faithfully guard is their own.  
 It is astonishment in the form of horror we should feel at the realization that ethical reporting is being carefully replaced by allegation, conjecture, and paranoid speculation, and that our country, built of and by and for the truth, is in danger of being swept away by an unrelenting storm of lies and strategic exaggeration (which, since it is not the truth, is another form of lie).  Journalists of great courage and devotion still struggle to find the truth and to tell its story honestly and without bias because of their love for the truth and for those who suffer from its want (and I would not be here if they did not), but they must now compete with media celebrities whose salaries and stardom are valued more than the work, often dangerous, that is required to separate fact from rumor and truth from accusation.
 What worries me as much as the decline of principled journalism is the keenly felt possibility that we could reach the point at which we drown in the lies that now only lap at our feet.  Where facts are for the mind, the truth is for the heart, though when the heart has been hollowed and blackened by a life without love and by the desperate torment which then can fill this emptiness, the truths to which that heart is drawn may seem the ones that once had sheltered us, but are now in the keeping of words meant only to deceive rather than to liberate.
 There is a special kind of fear, an existential fear, the kind that moves towards madness, in just the thought of fake news, for it is not difficult to imagine finding ourselves talking with someone who would not only quote fake news in defense of their position, but who would claim that the facts which we had carefully gathered as refuge against uncertainty were instead the “real” fake news (and fear becomes terror at the pairing of “real” with “fake”).  How could we then hope to share what we know to be true, to have the kind of conversation that would allow for the possibility of a changed mind, even if it was our own?  
 Yet even more disquieting, unless we devote far more time than most of us are granted to the task of getting our news from multiple differing sources in order to assure that we uncover the truth at last, how could we keep ourselves informed and thus safe from news that is not news at all, but instead a grotesque and dangerous fiction meant to distract from the truth the way a magician distracts his audience from the secrets behind his tricks with words and wand and pretty assistants, a black magic meant to make the truth itself disappear in a silent, gagging billow of smoke – and do not doubt that an “anti-factual” world would be a dying world, exchanging our destiny for dust.
 It seems to me that there is ultimately only one reason that could account for a man’s support of our current flirtation with tyranny - what he does not know.  If a man takes his news from sources which fail to honor the well-established rules of journalistic ethics, whether from a rank indifference to those ethics or from a fanatical devotion to ideological fantasies (though these may be the same), or if that man is unfamiliar with history, our governing philosophy and its founding documents, as well as the verifiable details of current events, then his support is based either upon the acceptance of deliberately and maliciously produced myths (with my apology to mythology) or upon simple ignorance.  In the latter case, he may be guilty of nothing more than having not yet learned where the truth can be found – a failure of curiosity, perhaps - though he still could be assigned some responsibility for adding to the destructive conflicts which now so clearly threaten us all.  
 If a vital part of patriotism is the possession and defense of authentic knowledge, then those who author and publish willful and inflammatory fictions, and those who accept them, are conspirators against democracy, and precisely what kind of man, pray tell, would want to claim this as his contribution to history?
 We near a time when the glib pretension, the baseless charges, the formulaic responses, the malicious assumptions, the perfected insincerities, and the strategic underplay and overplay whose balance is delusion will be broadcast from so many points to so many people that the truth will seem an oddity, a breach of peace without defenders, an uncomfortable sound requiring the white noise of well-rooted fabrications and perhaps a few ads if tranquility is to be restored.  
 So, now a moment of political science fiction for you, a poli-sci-fi story meant to provoke imagination to foresee the merciless future which many of our present leaders, stuck in a gloried past that never was, would have us build for them, and I offer this because I recently watched the host of a program devoted to politics interview a guest who represented a position at extreme odds with his own, and it was their brief though deeply troubling exchange (a better word than conversation in this case) which leads me to wonder just how fatally poisoned the air could become and how ruinous to hope it would be were that guest’s confrontational strategy to become pandemic, because that strategy was not guided by a thoughtful devotion to a belovéd cause, but by the determination to give the well-informed and gracious host no chance to reply, or if he did, to accuse him, falsely, stridently, contemptuously, unrelentingly of putting words in her mouth, no matter what reply he offered.
 If such malicious arrogance were spread across all the instrumentalities of modern communication and into our homes and communities, the following portrait of our future would pass quickly from fiction to foretelling.
 Imagine a world in which it has been so long since you last heard an established fact quoted without its immediate denunciation as a conspiracy against reason or religion, or so long since you last heard an intelligent opinion openly discussed without contemptuous response, that your measure of truth, and thus of guidance through a darkening world, could be nothing more than the least fraudulent among all the news you had to hear, and unable to voice an opinion that differs to any degree from official doctrine without forced exile from the company of others, courage turns inward and makes a fortress of thought as the last barricade against catastrophic unanimity.
 Try to feel what it would be like to need to create a refuge within you and to call for the retreat to its sanctuary of all that you held dear, of all the truths which had once secured your sense of identity and hope (one a thing of the past, the other of the future, but both entwined), and of all the inward strongholds you had built against the loss of freedom, and by this retreat, hold the last ramparts against the loud, ceaseless rush of lies that pour from every program, every ad, every leader, every acquaintance, all the time keeping secret, even from yourself, the proud though desperate refusal to conform to a world without honor, while the well-rehearsed but vacant smiles of the Ministers of Deceit (where minister may have two meanings) are broadcast from every device at every numbing moment.  
 But imagine, if you dare, were we to reach the moment when we no longer know where the truth is kept, when fragmentary information, authorized deception, sanctioned uncertainty, exaggeration, embellishment, and the deliberate suppression of the truth renders the discovery of the truth impossible.  Imagination grows reluctant to complete this story, though grant me that it would be the purest form of insanity, and if a madman is someone who has detached himself from our shared reality, what would it mean were that reality instead detached from us?  It just could be that this story’s end would then foretell our own, because without the truth, we are just primitives scouring the brush for scraps while listening for predators.
 I concede that mine is ultimately not much of a story, and it is far from the strangely entertaining horrors of cinematic apocalypse, but let your own imagination continue the story to places where it will require courage to go on, or to cite a better tale than mine, it now seems that 1984 just could be more a part of our future than of our past.  
 But of apocalypse (a word that once meant to reveal), I offer a guess about why it is that conversations about politics and religion, far more than any other subjects, can so often arouse aggressive passions – it is, I believe, because politics is the set of rules by which we are governed while we live, and religion is the set of rules which, we are told, decide our eternal fate upon our death.  Thus, are these two subjects literally a matter of life and death, and the discussion of their offerings so often an assurance of confrontation, and if the apocalyptic was ever to descend upon us, it would be the fusing of these two that would summon it.
 This is why the two should never be allowed to be joined.  Because politics is by its nature a public matter and religion private (though a privacy claiming public obligations), they should be kept forever apart in the public realm which is my interest here, and this makes politics both the provocation and the necessary process for any revolution that would establish a functioning democracy for everyone - and those last three words, democracy for everyone, should be a childish redundancy rather than a form of emphasis, though the very reason to stress this truth (already under stress of another kind) is also the reason to make some contribution towards remaking our world on behalf of all who live upon it rather than of those upon it who would tell us how to live.
 It is ultimately rather simple. Our lives are governed by a system (a word which, like bureaucracy, is strategically vague in its assignment of responsibility) which defines success as the acquisition of wealth and power, or more precisely, wealth and therefore power, and this system is designed to attract those whose ambition is too rarely guided by moral and ethical considerations. That most of us would define success by the love we have for others and the actions, often valiant, that we take to protect and enrich the lives of those we love, is a truth that is too often obscured by our almost hypnotic fascination with the glamour of wealth and by our understandable fear of a power that is not ours to wield.  
 But this is, and always has been, a world in which the ruled dare not question the system in any fashion that would catch the attention of those who rule, and to imagine a world where it is the diseased who reign over the healthy would not only serve as a fitting metaphor, but as an act of private rebellion which is, in many places, still best kept from wider public view.  
 Here you might object that in this country, it is we the people who rule, and though the rutted track of our history seems to suggest that this has often been at least partly true, most of today’s most powerful, encouraged by the worshipful legions of our misinformed, and armed with information provided by the science they publicly disavow, are now methodically eroding our democracy, which one recent academic study has found to be an oligarchy, a country governed by a wealthy, powerful, and, I would add, merciless few, and any nation which travels from democracy to oligarchy within a single generation is one whose downward momentum plunges towards sociopathocracy, a nation ruled by those for whom conscience would be the only extravagance they could not afford, a nation therefore clearly in need of revolution.
 It needs to be said again that this revolution must be non-violent at every moment of its determined course, and the only thing that I would want fired at its opponents is the truth, or the unyielding demand for the truth because we are being put to sleep, a restless, dreamless sleep with a lullaby of outrageous lies, told as if they are instead self-evident truths, spoken with a solemn authority by politicians and broadcast personalities who look us in the eye and without a blush tell us what they are well paid in both salary and celebrity to tell us, mixing grimaces of outrage with radiant smiles in well-practiced imitation of authenticity, their voices as smooth and deep as a prophet’s, and growing strident only when challenged with the truth, and yet if we listen carefully enough, we will learn that they lie in such a way that the truth is somehow told.  Still, too often too many of us will permit ourselves to believe them anyway.  
 We believe because it is comforting to have our fears given external focus, thus obscuring their truer source, and we believe because surely no one who addresses millions every day would lie to millions every day, and we believe because to doubt them would be to doubt that hard-won sense of ourselves we have worked a lifetime to fortify against uncertainty, and we believe because to question such prominence would be to question our own secret dreams that one day we will do something to make our names last at least a little longer than the marble upon which they will soon enough be carved.  
 But success is love, both joyously given and as joyously received, and if, as one great philosopher claimed, hell is other people, then I would make the counter-claim that other people are the only heaven I have ever known or would ever ask to enter. This is success, this is truth, this is triumph, this is joy, and this is our mortal share of immortality.  Yet, though deeply felt, what I have just sought to portray is not really quite so simple, after all, and in trying to make it so, I have made errors of the kind we must never allow, lest we become those whom we would oppose.  
 First, by “the system” I was referring to institutions which protect those who value money and the political power it can purchase more than the health and happiness of those who treasure something more than treasure alone.  For some, however, “the system” gives a name to the nameless forces that keep them from their dreams, while for others, it refers to the set of laws, mostly rational, by which the world is organized, and so the meaning of “the system”, if left unclarified, ranges from invisible bureaucracies beyond appeal, to the flawed yet perfectible rules of human governance.  
 Second, by the “wealthy and powerful” I meant to specify those who care about little more than building immortal monuments to themselves by purchasing and ruthlessly keeping political power and influence, if there is any longer any difference between them, though I made no further distinction and spoke of them as if each one was the same as all the rest.  
 But they are not.  There are some who have power yet little wealth, and this power is vast when it derives from moral intelligence rather than from wealth alone, and there are others who possess great wealth but use it to lessen misery or to oppose the use of wealth to gain an influence which The Opposition could never secure in a better world than ours.  
 Third, by “politicians and broadcast personalities” I was referring to the worst of each, though there are politicians and journalists of unquestionable integrity, and this must never be forgotten, in part because it just might be these precious few who will lead us towards a freedom we have known only when, in our purest and most perfect moments, we watch our children at play and to the music of their laughter, compose our dreams for them.  
 So, for those already held captive by their prejudice (the most ruinous and entrenched of our illusions), my carelessness  might have added other groups to all the others that have found their enemies, and any complete list of such groups would ultimately include every one of us, a fact we might one day use to our shared advantage, and so, it is these three errors especially, but any others I may have made whose amending I must leave to those who see more clearly, though when they have, I would say to them: take the lead and tell us what you see, and by doing so, astonish us.  
 But of all the horrific facts I quoted as introduction, one of the most staggering is this: “off-shore accounts are found to hold more than enough money to build housing, clinics, and schools for every person in the world who does not now have access to any one or all of these”.  The estimated amount held in these secret accounts ranges from 21 Trillion to 32 Trillion dollars, and even the lesser of the two would be enough to assure that everyone on the planet would have the essential basics needed for a secure life, and I ask you to imagine with me a world where all of our children are in school, all of our sick receive care, and no one must huddle against a stranger for shelter against the night.  
 But numbers, like words, are now so often used without the reverence they deserve that our understanding of both their meaning and their power have been diminished, and so I offer the following brief tutorial: if you were to count without stopping at the rate of one every second, it would take more than eleven and a half days to count to one million, an ordeal, no doubt, and yet to count to one billion would take more than 31 and a half years (nearly half a lifetime), while counting to one trillion would take nearly 32 thousand years (meaning that you would have had to have been born into a Cro-Magnon family in the middle of an ice age to be nearing the end of this labor), and counting to 32 Trillion would take more than one million years.  
 I don’t expect that this tutorial will, by itself, awaken you to the enormity of this story, but it is a lesson that should at least provoke imagination to envision the sharp-clawed little demons that would begin cheerfully tunneling against sanity when counting just to one million, and by this lesson, bring the heart into our assessment of this story, one which, by the way, was given far less coverage by the press than justice and reason would have asked.  
 These accounts are held by large corporations as well as by wealthy individuals whose estimated number represents just one percent of one percent of the world’s population, and it is at precisely this moment that many of you may predict that I am about to call for the confiscation of these Trillions and their redistribution to every place on Earth where the poor suffer for the want of what this money could provide them.  But I am not.  This is partly because it could not happen, partly because it would not happen, and the rest is my conviction that there is a better, a more rational, a more practical resolution to the ten millennia of our rule by those whose power, whether derived from wealth or enforced by weaponry, is used only to secure more power, and with little regard for those who have none.  
 That resolution is revolution.  
 I have tried to find a way, I have tried to find the words, I have even tried to find the numbers that would not only catch and hold your attention, but would inspire your devotion as well, and yet the one idea that may have a chance of keeping you from your next distraction and of awakening you from the dream that was formed in another heart than yours is revolution.  
 This is not, however, why I chose it as the theme for this talk, this protest, this dissent.  I hope for revolution because I see no other way to remove from our path the one obstacle that prevents our collective progress, and the one conspiracy for which the gathered evidence is overwhelming: the collaboration between political power held by those without imagination, and wealth possessed by those without compassion, a dominion whose scale and significance should horrify you as well.
 Sometimes, however, fewer words have more power than many, at least when the subject speaks on behalf of the words unspoken, and so we can ask again of those who horde their treasure: what is it you love more than the people you could protect, but do not? In this case, at least, we know the answer: money, but now ask yourself: what does it say of a man who loves money more than those who are dying for its want?  
 In only partial answer, I would say this: I am neither anthropologist nor historian, though it seems to me that we could reasonably divide the Time of Man into historical eras defined by either the strategies of group survival or the established system of commerce that was dominant at its time: thus first, the Age of Hunting, followed by the Age of Farming, after which the Age of Trade, and finally the time in which we now live, the Age of Money, while noting that each Age past the first includes the ones that had come before.  According to this, we could ask: is there a rationally compelling reason that our current age could not be replaced, as the others were, by something both new and better?
 Each of the first three Ages had its tragic flaws, though each allowed us to keep ourselves alive long enough to arrive at the next.  But the Age of Money is different.  Other than acquisition by theft or conquest, it was difficult in the Ages of Hunting, Farming, and Trading to acquire so great a surplus of meat, grain, or commodities that immense power was then conferred upon the holder – these were the Ages when most power was held by those who possessed both a merciless ambition and the most soldiers.  
 In the Age of Money, however, power is held by those who possess a merciless ambition and the most cash.  Where the difference between the two is weapons and money, the one a threatening reality and the other a regulated abstraction, the Age of Money seems the far better world, but for whom and how many?  As you would answer, remember that at this moment, the five richest people in the world now own more wealth than the poorest 3,600,000,000 of us, while the poverty of the latter is largely a consequence of the wealth of the former.  
 Keep in mind that in each of these four Ages, women and men of conscience could do little more than hold out against threat and deprivation until the next Age could overtake the last.  Yet I have faith that free women and men of conscience are the ones who will build the next Age and design it so that no one would ever again be left behind by the forward motion of human progress.  And perhaps if we give this next Age a fitting name, its greater human value would become apparent, and so I would offer:  the Age of Transcendence, the time when history was divided into the darkness that came before and the light that will come after, a light that would shine upon all, and would only grow brighter, and would never go out.  
 This is just another wish of mine, though please note that the word transcendence comes from two Latin words meaning to climb beyond, and is this not precisely what the vast majorities of our race throughout all of human history have spent their lives working valiantly to accomplish, if too rarely with success?  May their labor, which is ours as well, not have been in vain.
 Of money, a final thought to ease the tug of conscience telling me I have not quite said enough, and so I say to you that money should not be the principle foundation upon which our daily interactions with each other and our relationship with our world should be based, for although there are luminous bastions where love is ascendant, the shadow cast by money hangs over us all, while for many, its worship by others can be lethal, while life and death, it seems, are now just another form of currency.  As my son, whose moral intelligence is beyond question, has said to me more than once: “if I was rich, I would not be rich”, and if you do not understand his point, then neither will you understand my own.  
 But if you do, allow imagination to wander freely and without fear among the more human possibilities.
 Now, while soon onto a subject that is to love as the light to dawn, I must first begin with another of my opening points, and thus begin in darkness: “under the empty claim of virtuous action, a major political party conspires to return women to a position of legally enforced subservience, neither their bodies nor their destinies any longer their own”.  
 I feel that women are, in certain crucial ways, superior (though without also believing that I am, as a man, inferior as a consequence – illogical perhaps, and yet utterly rational), and my admiration for their strengths of heart and mind and body and soul borders upon a reverence – in truth, there are moments when I feel that to have pleased a woman is like having done something to have caused a god to stop, take notice, and smile, and I have long been convinced that the world would be a far better place if the ladies were to lead us until the men had gained – as they can and must - the emotional intelligence and respect for life which is native to a woman.  
 That there is nothing in the universe more powerful than genuine love is a truth that she has known for millennia and kept against ruin, and so I, for one, would willingly go wherever she might lead.  
 The men have had their chance, their time to rule, and so I have often spoken to others of a world where women have won the leadership of every government and every corporation, and when this is greeted by the grotesquely cynical response that then the world would go mad one week each month (a response I have heard more than once), I reply with a knowing smile “better one than four”, a mildly clever reply perhaps, yet useless in the face of such impenetrable ignorance.  
 So, I ask you now to imagine a world without women.  
 Left only with this nightmarish thought, however, the story would quickly end when we grasped the simple biological fact that the planet would then begin to heal as the last of our kind nodded off and dissolved into its widening pastures, so let’s complicate this dark tale by adding that the men, despite the absence of their better halves, have found a way to produce sons without needing the heroic gallantry of women.  
 Left alone with only other men for company, without beauty, without love, without a standard set for kindness, gratitude, patience, and humility, or any passion grander than a brute allegiance to their tribe, imagination – not accustomed to failure – grows blank when trying to conjure a guide as magical as a woman who could lead them towards a world that would be worthy of her lost example.  Women know many things we men have yet to learn as well, and perhaps one of the most deeply human is that there is, after all, a resolution to the inescapable solitude of human individuality, and that it is found in the divine refuge of intimacy.  
 Love, romance, laughter, dance, both sleep and silence when they are shared, the adoration of beauty as well as the reverence for mystery which is its kin, the private idioms of glance and touch, and the reverie of inward monologue (an intimacy with oneself without which all outward forms are incomplete) – these are the gifts for which she lives in thankfulness, even as much as for life itself.  And what man, proud of his battle scars, would not rather jump from the battlements onto the back of a boney steed and ride off into the fatal delirium of war than face the dangers and agonies of childbirth?
 I believe as well that women have, for want of a better word, a profound sense of interiority, perhaps because of the vital fact that they can conceive, carry, and bear a child, whether they ever do so or not, and I feel that it is important for the men to note that this is something they can never know, and I wonder whether this sense of interiority becomes the model upon which a woman’s typically greater sensitivity to emotional truth – whose roots are always deep - is then based, or the example from which it is learned, though whether this is true or not, it is surely true that emotion, whether outwardly expressed or not, is a language of its own.
 A case in point: I have known women to express their deepest feelings in a code that women have used for centuries, if not millennia, a code meant to convey emotional complexities while speaking of subjects having little interest to most men, a code based upon ordinary words whose subtle new meanings derive more from glance and tone than established reference, a code used when a woman wants another woman to understand a truth while in the company of a man who never would, a code no man I know has ever mastered.  
 But I do not want to master that code on behalf of men – rather, I want the men to master themselves so that women never again need to use a code at all, because, as you know, a code is only necessary when in the presence of those who might otherwise stand against you.
 Men often seem to live on the surface of thought, tragically separated from the broad realms that lie below and unaware of what lives in their hearts, which are, after all, just as human as a woman’s, and this inward separation could be one of the reasons for the greater sense of unacknowledged emptiness with which men too often live, yet if their will and their awareness permit, men are just as capable as women of the profound experience of self that gives constructive meaning to one’s world and allows room for the possibility of love, the guarantor and guardian of this sense of interiority, an experience which is ultimately the sensation of life itself and the consciousness of the humanity of both others and ourselves, and this is something that men can always learn, if they so choose.  
 I also feel that, where history is cause, there may be more women who are proud to be a woman than there are men proud to be a man, and this may be one reason why a woman’s pride is seen by many men as an indefensible sense of entitlement which threatens their own, though these are the men whose pride has been, by too much pride, too wounded to permit their reverence for a woman.  But there have been many great men these past ten millennia, if not enough, and yet it is, I believe, far easier for a woman to rise to the occasion of the need for greatness – a man requires history and genius, a woman only requires a good man, though sometimes just his opposite is enough.  
 It is her time now.
 Yet of men and their struggle to discover their true depths – of their struggle to be men - I would add this: just below the surface of thought - in other words, just below the language of the word, lies the language of the image, and though, while awake, we rarely give to the image the time we give to the word, the language of the image is its equal because intimately bound to the language of feeling (for images are to feeling as words to thought) and what our feelings speak, the images will speak as well, and when we learn them as a single language, then will thought transcend the word, until the word can find or form the name to grant its return to brief dominion, though of the name and its elusive magic, remember this: a name is not an attribute of the language of the word alone, for an image is a name for that of which it is an image.  
 And there is power in a name, for when you give something a name, you give it life, and then you can call upon it again and again, or command it to go away and await your summons, though having a life of its own, that which has a name will not always obey. Yet something without a name can have a kind of life as well, and like a ghost, it will often hover nearby, waiting for us to see it and hoping we are not too startled when at last we notice to then grant it substance by giving it a name.  
 But whether by name or image, we men could profit by more time spent in the realms below and beyond the word – or better, more time spent in both and in equal share – until they are made whole, and, like a woman, each man is made whole as well.  For now, however, it seems that men want their opposite in a woman, something softer than themselves, perhaps as a kind of redemption, while women hope for someone just as gentle as they – may the ladies find their gentlemen, and in doing so, find the fair destiny which they would out-wait history to embrace.
 Yet despite her majesty and her greater mastery of what it means to be human, there are men who, on behalf of their masters, are willing to diminish her freedom and thus her power to make this a better world even for those whose desperate need for the approval of either their god or their public blinds them to the gifts she has been waiting millennia to offer us.  
 I would ask these men whether they are afraid of learning that the way of life they have defended at such high cost for so long would be revealed as a moral obscenity compared to the world which she would still gladly help us build, and so afraid that they would rather regulate a woman’s freedom than risk proving that their own lives have been spent upon nothing nobler than keeping those who might oppose them too frightened, too misinformed, and too busy guarding their lives against ruin to take a stand against them.
 In sum, I would ask these men: precisely what, brave gentlemen, frightens you when you think of a woman who is free to act as she wishes and to pursue the destiny of her own choosing, and why have you worked with such depraved tenacity to transform that fear into law and to spread it to whomever still may suffer to listen and to obey?  And I would say to them that it is their refusal to accept the benevolent authority of The Feminine, their unconfessed envy of a woman’s power, and their insistence upon unchallenged dominion that has given shelter to the enemies of progress and made the name of Man another for inhumanity.  
 I would also say to the men that if you long for the sunlit refuge of magic, or if you want to know whether there is any magic left anywhere at all, you need not search, because the great guardians of our magic – and the finest magicians in all the world - are everywhere around us, though surely you already know this - surely you know that women, and the children they bravely and gratefully bear for us, are the ones in whose gentle hands all the brightest magic ever known or needed is forever safely held.
 And of women and men, I remind the latter that almost every one of us is larger than almost every one of them – and this is a simple fact known to everyone past their childhood, yet for most women, this simple fact can be deeply troubling, precisely because for most men, it is not, and part of this revolution, which must be more a revolution in consciousness than in governance (since the latter follows from the former), requires every man to learn that their greater physical strength must be only for the protection of women and our children until the day comes when our sanctuary is at last no longer needed and we then can soothe ourselves in theirs instead.  
 If I were asked to offer just one moral prescription in the hope of progressing towards a cure for all the world’s many agonizing disorders, it would be “women and children first”, and though this seems, at best, almost absurdly simplistic, and even foolishly antiquarian, as would any single prescription, imagination suggests that were this to be faithfully and universally applied, the world would quickly begin to recover, not only because all women and children would then be safe and free and cherished, as sanity itself would demand, but because this could only come to pass if each man devoted himself to its fulfillment, and by doing so, become the man that all men are surely meant to be.
 It often seems that men cannot manage their world unless it is their assigned task to compel other men to do so, and it is clear that most men could learn much of much value from most women if only they were to allow women to teach them what it truly means to be more deeply human, and it is to this latter subject that I now turn at last, though not before I stress that if men did not secretly believe that women possess a greater magic than they themselves have yet to master, why have so many men in so many places sought to lord over her, and why they still do not know that the restraints they have placed upon her, whether by law, tradition, or religious text, keep her not only from her own bright destiny, but from ours as well.  
 Understand that we will have secured the world for our mortal paradise only when we have made a world in which every woman is honored by every man, though until this comes to pass, accept the possibility that men are simply not yet as evolved as women are, while here, too, we can ask: what is it, gentlemen, that you love more than the women you could protect, but do not - and before you answer, remember this: she will love, even when she is not.
 There are more than one million associations, foundations, and institutes in the world and yet as far as I can tell, there is not one whose specific mission is to study the question of what it means to be human, arguably the most important question we could ever ask, and the vital importance of an answer to this question, however incomplete and provisional that answer would be, is made more urgent now because of the emerging conflict between an imperial ignorance provoked by wealth and armed with a fanatical intensity, and a world longing to be free of all that keeps us from a destiny whose extraordinary brilliance we still cannot fully imagine, though at times we may sense this as it strains towards our admission, like a memory that loiters near the threshold of awareness, not yet ready for its recall.  
 But what does it mean to be human? The long but ultimately useless answer would include everything that everyone who has ever lived has ever done, thought, felt, and imagined.  Beyond being unknowable, this would mean that every act of cruelty is equally as defining of our shared humanity as every act of kindness, thus turning the answer, whose supporting evidence is far too inclusive to gather, let alone to comprehend, into little more than a slogan, something like “if you do it, it is human to do”, and by this trick, make the question itself seem unimportant, or too discouraging in its scope and implications to pursue.  
 But the greater flaw with this answer is its focus upon our past, from the beginning of human time until now, and though the past should always serve as one of our guardian lights, however dim or flickering, it is upon the future and who we are capable of becoming that our answer should properly be based. To the question of what it means to be human, no answer we might offer now - perhaps ever - could remain true for long, and certainly not for all time, for we are the ones for whom no single truth is true, except that we are human.
 So, we shrink the answer by expanding the question to ask: what could it mean to be human?  What are the human qualities that we would want to keep, and which to leave behind, and what are the qualities we do not now possess but can nevertheless imagine and, in time, attain?  One clue to an answer is the fact that there have always been people of such extraordinary moral courage and intelligence that we can, by using their examples, have a sense now of what our destiny could be, as if these women and men were emissaries who have traveled back to us from the most joyously astonishing future we could hope to achieve.  
 Of those living now, I would first nominate Aung San Su Kyi, Desmond Tutu, Malala Yousafzai, and Thich Nhat Hanh, while noting that there are many, many others whose names have not yet risen above the horrors that they are so bravely struggling to end, and many whose names will never reach us but who have given their own destinies, and often their lives, in the effort to make that future present.  
 I also feel that it is important to note that the four I have named represent Christianity, Islam, and Buddhism, and how profoundly meaningful it would be if this simple fact could bring the same lasting peace between two of these great religions that these four people, and many others, have worked so bravely to offer to us all.  
 Please also note that two of them are women and that, as I believe the two men would agree, there are none anywhere who are braver than they, though many who are as brave.
 But to return to the necessary work of fashioning a preliminary answer to the question of what it means to be human, I would begin, of course, with love, though I admit that I am also tempted to end with it as well.  It has a power that makes wealth and celebrity seem trivial by comparison, it has a royal entourage of  kindred passions including compassion, devotion, conscience, benevolence, and courage, it cannot be made to waver or to fade, and only imagination, when unbound by fear, is as powerful as love, though I have sometimes wondered whether they are, in greater truth, twin siblings born of something even more fundamental: life itself and the deeply felt awareness that without others and our commitment to them, life is only a lingering brevity, a diversion taken between the indistinguishable gasps of our first breath and our last, a packing of our bags for the longer journey.  
 For now at least, the pursuit of an answer to the question of what it means to be human may require nothing less nor more than imagination’s resolve to set off on a well-stocked expedition into the future, for we are, both as individuals and as a civilization, a vast and deeply hopeful potentiality only now beginning to rouse from its millennial sleep – as a race, who we could be, and who, I have faith, we will be one day at last, is immeasurably nobler and more human than who we are today – onward towards that inward trek shared outwardly with all.
 As I hinted before in a moment of playful solemnity, love may be a radically advanced form of consciousness more than just one emotion among the rest, a form so undistorted by prejudice of any kind, so willingly vulnerable to an unguarded experience of the world, so alert to beauty and truth, and to all the joyous compensations for mortality, that those who truly love must represent a level of human development which would, were everyone to love, then assure the ecstatic destiny which the millennia of our agonized labor against inhumanity has so unquestionably earned.
 If nothing else, know this: love is not blind – love will see our imperfections with the greatest clarity, though also with understanding, and the knowledge that our imperfections are just strengths that have not yet been brought to light and made ready to act on our behalf.
 There is, of course, more to being fully human than love alone (though love, by its nature, is never alone, nor, because of it, are we).  But aside from hoping that the question of what it means to be human will soon be given a focused, organized, and public forum, I will mention here only one other issue related to this question which I feel is essential, and though it has the unhappy status of being one of love’s many opposites, it is not commonly recognized as being one at all, though it is, I believe, central to a more comprehensive answer.  
 The attention given to the human brain by our biological sciences, especially by our genetic, neurological, and cognitive sciences, has already yielded discoveries of great value and meaning, and one day its findings will surely be considered one of the great intellectual triumphs in the history of science.  But though I want the associated research to continue without interruption, its revelations to increase, and its knowledge to spread, I offer two warnings.
 First, I fear that many of the scientists engaged in this research are guided mostly by the working assumption that everything about us, even our most intimately personal experiences, including love itself, are no more than the ultimately predictable result of the underlying mechanics of our biochemistry.  
 Yet if we believe that each human action is derivative of processes beyond the reach of reflective self-consciousness, and each feeling, thought, and dream a result of the binding rules of cause and effect, then we begin to lose faith in the ideas which are both the foundation of any free society and the source of our belief that we are capable of fashioning our own destiny even in ultimate defiance of the natural laws that gave us life.  If we are machinery, however fragile, poorly operated, and doomed to malfunction, then we will offer our reverence to the machine.
 But we are not, and though the scientists who study us may not yet have the conceptual framework that would allow them to account for the exquisite complexity of human experience and our capacity for transcendence, the forces that threaten the classical view of humanity which portrays us as animals in laborious motion towards a kind of mortal divinity, may not come as much from science, but instead from careless reporting and our careless reading of it.  
 And this is my second warning. For every article I have read which narrates the triumphant discovery of the genetic cause of a human behavior (discoveries which are often later shown to be premature, if less publicized), I have heard many declare with a strangely causal assurance, as if quoting the merely obvious, “it’s all chemical, you know” when told a story of some singular act, even if it was not brutish, but rather sublimely human.  
 “Well, I don’t know that it’s all chemical, and neither do you”, not that I offer this as a part of the conversation, though I usually ask, with a practiced innocence born of both courtesy and curiosity, for the factual basis of their claim.  But to watch a person making such a claim on behalf of our chemistry, you will often notice that after the assurance, which is dignity’s disguise, their eyes will look down a moment in reflection, and this is the moment when they begin to understand the implications of their claim.  
 If we are to be relieved of responsibility for our errors by assigning them to the mindless workings of a brain held captive by its neurophysiological processes and neuroanatomical structures, then we must also surrender all credit for the actions which correct our errors and bring joy to others.  Too often have I heard even love discussed as if it were an illusion, or a passing squall of hormones set loose by the instinctual need to mate, a lust adorned with ritual.
 As the classical view of humanity begins to warp under the pressures of an unfinished science and its incomplete or inaccurate coverage, it is interesting to note where we turn to be reminded of that more honoring view.  Some keep refuge in religion where at least the freedom of the human will is preserved, though most of their followers would claim that the mistakes we make are ours alone, while our triumphs are to the glory of a distant master, and this, too, would take from us our true humanity.  
 Yet there are still places where the language, the symbols, and the images which speak of that humanity are maintained against the current habit of assuming that we are a catalog of poorly interlocking parts, a noisy mechanism set to self-destruct.  The most enduring of these places are the arts in general, but film and literature especially, our dreams and inner dialog, and most ironically, our politics.
 Film should be the most obvious case. I have never met, nor, I confess, could I even imagine, someone who is not enthralled by movies, and there are, I believe, two primary reasons for this.  First, a movie is an act of imagination outwardly displayed and shared with others, and though it represents the imaginings of another, it is nevertheless a dream set upon a screen, one which, if the movie is a work of art, will feel as though it is somehow our dream as well.  Even more than this, a movie, if it is the product of a creative and humane intelligence, will find its sequel in our daydreams while we continue its story as it becomes – literally – a living part of us, as all great art will do.  
 Watching a movie with others may now serve the same purpose that once was true for books read alone before a fire.  They are the most recent chapter (itself a literary metaphor) in a verbal history that began with story-telling, a tradition that gave us the myths to which films often return for inspiration.  Once stories could be printed (no mere transfer since the form itself gave new canvas to imagining) they became the dominant verbal form, and once stories could be filmed, movies became widely ascendant.  
 To this history of verbal forms, film adds a shared visual component that may serve to rouse a further wonder as did those earlier fires around which the very first stories were told. At its best, we learn from film what it means to be human, perhaps more effectively than from any other modern form, especially in an age in which the arts are too often without either their audience or their artists.
 Second, unless a movie is so poorly written, acted, directed, and filmed that we cannot in any meaningful way relate to the story it tells, it will represent both the validation and the enshrinement of the classical view of humanity – the theatre is where we go to hear the language and to watch the images that underwrite human freedom and dignity, where we go to find ourselves and to be reminded of who we might have been and who we could still be, and the story we are then told will serve as one of the answers to the question of what it means to be human.  
 Please also note that every movie ever made, perhaps every story ever told, tells the tale of a struggle against some form of inhumanity, and even if that story is set in comedy (which is tragedy performed for the innocent), that struggle is, as is ours, one that will not end until the end of inhumanity itself.  And please note, too, that everything human is a story – all that we tell others, all that others tell us, all that we know, all that we learn, all that is, and all that we are, is a story – everything, and thus, for us, are stories everything, too.
 The less obvious case is politics, perhaps because it can be as discouraging as the belief that our destiny lies in our chemistry.  Yet if you can bear to listen to what the typical politician says as he pleads for your vote, you will hear him deploy the words that have always been used to portray and to defend the classical view of humanity, words like hope, family, loyalty, courage, freedom, and even love.  That he uses the vocabulary of human exceptionalism for strategic purposes alone makes two points: first, that we hunger for a reason to believe again that we are beings midway on an epic journey from a brutal past to a glorious future, from beast to deity, and second, that most contemporary politicians, especially on the national stage, may serve our most cherished images, if not those whose images they are.  
 But we are human, after all, and what is finally most important is not the partiality (in both meanings of this word) of science and its reporting, but the effects that our thoughtless acceptance of its presumed implications has meant to our self-image as human beings, and part of what I would want our revolution to offer is the shared effort to answer the question of what it means to be human, of what it would mean if everyone was free to imagine without constraint, and what it could mean if we were to assure that love, rather than power, is the bond that links us all.  If this were to come to pass, then please grant that such a moment would be astonishing in the most joyous sense of this essential word.
 But I offer this of Man (where this word refers, with deferential emphasis, to Woman as well), a brief tale of the kind we might tell to someone new to Man and to our history:  in some, there lives a full humanity; in some, there is a humanity that has never learned to know itself, though, unaware, it still awaits its teacher; in some, there is a humanity buried beneath the rubble of a painful life, rubble that love and time could clear away; and in some, there is no humanity at all, only the pretense of an outward semblance of humanity.  These four groups are, in their order, The Awake, The Sleeping, The Unborn, and The Undead.  
 Of the latter, the name suggests that we are, to recast drama as horror, in a kind of zombie apocalypse, though it should be argued that we always have been, while hope lies in the truth that there are now more who are fully awake than ever before, and like a prince waking with a kiss his princess from her dreams, The Awake will one day help bring both The Sleeping and The Unborn to full life again, while leading The Undead away – or so I still believe and will forever hope.  If nothing else, know that The Awake want only to love and teach, The Sleeping need only to learn of themselves, The Unborn need only others to love them, and The Undead need no one, and want only money, power, and freedom without moral constraint.  
 This is, of course, too short a tale, and yet it contains praise and warning enough to begin one day the longer story.
 Before I move on, I would strongly recommend that if an institute for the study of what it means to be human is ever to be established, it must not be with money offered by those among the wealthy who have already proven to our lasting dissatisfaction that their devotion to humanity does not extend beyond their own, and I would also ask that its founders consider calling it the World Institute for the Study of Humanity, whose acronym is WISH, a word utterly appropriate to its mission.  
 To end, for the moment, my discussion of our humanity, I feel that I must add this: when you look at a man as if he is not human, you will, at that very moment, appear to him as no longer human, too, because, at that same moment, you are not.  When you can at last recognize your own humanity, you will then have become fully human and will never fail to find that same humanity in everyone you meet.
 But now, having previously mentioned science and journalism only in passing, and in the latter case, with some discontent, I want to round out my view of both before beginning to move towards the end.
 Earlier, I said this: “despite the irrefutable sum and scope of data and overwhelming scientific consensus, climate change, the greatest threat we have ever known (other than ourselves, for we ourselves have caused it), is declared a hoax by wealthy men and their elected valets, men incapable of even the elementary conclusion that without science, their wealth would consist of little more than a few extra goats”.  
 If ignorance is the confident possession of information that is at odds with the established facts, then, as I have said before, we are being led by the ignorant, and although this should be so well established that it seems almost another act of ignorance to think it needs restatement, the point here is not that the ignorant are leading us (with our bizarre approval), but where they are leading us, which, in this case, is to our doom, at least if they were to remain in power much longer, and this, by itself of course, is reason enough for revolution.  
 But I have already spoken of power and ignorance and politics (and note again how nearly synonymous each of these is to the others), and so I can instead now talk about science, one of the antidotes to each.  
 The findings of science are often controversial, even among scientists themselves, and the theories constructed to explain those findings are sometimes later disproven or shown to be incomplete, yet the further work which then leads to the abandonment or to the improvement of a theory is also a victory for science, and thus for us all. It is, I believe, the scientific method, and the women and men devoted to the truths which science has the power to reveal, that will one day build the foundation upon which a worldly paradise will then be built.  
 There are now, however, far too many who look upon science with suspicion, and even contempt, and though this, too, is based upon ignorance, I may be able to bring some light to a few of those who are now huddled in a dusk which they mistake for dawn, and so I offer the following brief tutorial on science, and as you listen, please keep in mind that science itself is a revolution, one which has won many victories for everyone, but which needs to remain free to win more.
 What science is not.  First, although the two are often in a forced marriage of convenience, science is not a bureaucracy.  Science requires freedom – to think, to imagine, to experiment, and to pursue the truth based upon empirical evidence, and please note that empiricism is simply the perception of that which is shared, unlike, for instance, delusion or hallucination.  Bureaucracy, however, reduces freedom on the premise that rigid control through policies designed to account for all possible human error is the only way to protect the public it serves – a noble cause, yet often counter-productive and very expensive in its neurotic vigilance against that error.  
 Second, science is not a religion, and I believe that whoever believes that it is, or thinks that science is the enemy of religion, does not understand that they are both a reflection of the passionate longing to understand, as well as a devotion to mystery (and we are fed by mystery as much as by the substance of its resolution), and the divine capacity for wonder, one of the greatest gifts we possess but whose name has now become, for many, no more than another word for a kind of skepticism, while wonder itself, deprived of its name, drifts into mere potentiality and waits to be born again. Perhaps most importantly, no religion can prove that its god exists, and no science can disprove that any god exists, though please note that in each case, the definition of proof belongs to science.  
 Lastly, science is not a conspiracy. The highly trained women and men who devote their lives to scientific research are not plotting to take over the world, and though they have, in many cases, developed new languages in order to better describe the new truths they find, the symbols they use and the old words to which they give new meanings are not meant to keep us out, but rather to draw us closer to what they have learned, hoping that a renewed sense of wonder will overcome our fear.  
 And to those who think that climate change is a conspiracy, I would point out that there are, by one estimate, as many as 200,000 scientists associated with climate research – climatologists, paleo-climatologists, geophysicists, glaciologists, mineralogists, oceanologists, and geologists, among others -  and that at least 97% of them are now convinced, based upon an immense collection of carefully gathered data, that man-made climate change has begun and will continue until we act both decisively and globally.  
 If you believe that this is a hoax, that some dark power has persuaded 194,000 scientists to abandon their methods, their ethics, and their sanity, then I ask you, in fact I dare you to offer us the data which would support that claim, one which would be amusing if it were satire, but which is instead a lethal form of ignorance.  There are many, though not enough, who trust science to provide the truths upon which we can rely for our progress and for the wonder and astonishment which those truths so often provide as well.  
 But those who do not should not remain unchallenged, and when they openly ignore or reject scientific discovery and in doing so, threaten our progress, they should be asked this one question: do you have any evidence for your position?  This may seem a childish tactic, yet you can only credibly deny the findings of science with evidence that is drawn from science – anything else would be like claiming that a rifle and a kiss must be the same because they are both not trees.
 What science is.  First, science is philosophy with a method, a system of empirical inquiry which assures that its discoveries will provide truths worthy not only of our trust, but of our wonder, and I ask you look to around - at home, at work, at school, as you drive, as you walk, as you dream, as you suffer the diverting taunt of watching television or the imperative torment of listening to the news, and as you do, ask yourself what the world you know would be like without science.  
 The honest answer would be indistinguishable from an expression of profound gratitude because without science, life would be, as one philosopher imagined, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
 Yet this grim portrait is the life that many hundreds of millions of us must still endure, and though science alone cannot change this until we have changed ourselves, it is one of the most powerful allies we have in the struggle to rid ourselves of ignorance, disease, superstition, and all the many forms of misery which the name of misery cannot hope to name, of lives so intimate with suffering that to survive, they must ally themselves with their own want and struggle towards that place within them where pain becomes almost just a subtlety, a small detail, one star among the rest in a sky that is ignored for the broken ground.
     But I believe I know where science seems to offer its illiterate opponents the chance to attack the reliability of its findings, and it is in the matter of proof.   There are two and, it has been argued, three different forms of proof.  The first could be called absolute proof and belongs to the realms of mathematics and symbolic logic where such proof, once verified, lies beyond rational challenge. The second is experimental proof and belongs to the applied sciences like physics, chemistry, and biology, and though it can provide compelling demonstration of a theory’s validity, it is not absolute and could, theoretically, be shown incomplete or even false.  
 The most successful theories in the history of science, quantum mechanics, relativity, and evolution, are examples of experimental proof because each of many thousands of experiments and applications performed over time by many thousands of scientists in differing fields have achieved the same results, though such proof does not usually ascend to the same level of irrefutable certainty as mathematics and symbolic logic provide.  
 The third could be called consensual proof and applies to those cases in which there is a near unanimity of scientific opinion based upon multiple independent analyzes of large volumes of data studiously collected from all available sources.  In these cases, conclusive experimentation is usually not possible either because of ethical constraints or because the scale of the phenomenon studied renders experimentation impossible, as is true with climate science, although experiments using small-scale reproductions of larger systems and rigorous mathematical calculations are both employed in the associated research.  
 However, if you think that mere consensus based upon mere data is unimpressive, no matter how great the consensus and how vast the data, please note that it cannot be proven in any absolute sense that smoking causes lung cancer or that fatty diets and lack of exercise cause heart disease, and if you still insist that human-caused climate change is a hoax, then please, to all the world present your data, the sources of that data, your analysis of it and the statistical and mathematical basis of that analysis, and keep in mind that scientific theories are predictive, and though human-caused climate change is a theory that cannot be proven beyond all doubt, proof enough just may lie in the fact that climate science has already begun to make predictions that are starting to come true, predictions which foretell a ravaged world.
 But we are haunted by proof.  More to the point, we are haunted by our ravenous hunger for proof, and by its seeming rarity.  Other than the irrefutable conclusions not only of mathematics and symbolic logic, but of Relativity, Quantum Mechanics, and Evolution, the comfort we secure from proof seems too seldom felt.  It is, of course, human to want certainty and each of us, I believe (though I am not certain), is in a constant, if mostly unconscious, search for the refuge that proof will offer.  
 This searching can be so relentless that in the absence of proof, we will often decide – again, unaware – that belief alone is adequate, and if the fear aroused by the failure to extract proof from doubt is strong enough, it will raise belief to the status of either faith or conviction (the latter having banished the doubt that faith allows), yet because belief is a form of hope, there is risk in deciding that what we hope to be true is true after all, for we may then act as if we are on higher ground while mired in swamplands.
 The anxieties of being human - and of being human at this time - prod us to seek out those truths which are beyond refutation and which will shield us from the vulnerabilities of disquieting uncertainty, though it is only authentic knowledge, whether gleaned from science or gained through experience, that can raise mere opinion to the status of truth, and by doing so, give us our footing and a better form of hope.  Unequivocal proof may not be as common as we would want, but an enlightened and justifiably confident certainty – of both intellectual and moral truths - is a human possibility available to us all, and for now, this is enough.
 Nevertheless, The Opposition will continue to fight to protect its power, using the truth against itself and disguising their deceit with a few innocent facts while convincing those who would be the innocent victims of the approaching storms and droughts and plagues that it is the scientists and not the Oligarchs who are the conspirators, though perhaps nowhere else does rebelling against The Opposition seem more just and more urgent because in this case, the revolution has already begun, though it is nature herself who is the rebel, and humanity the authoritarian power to be removed.  
 If nothing else (though more is required), know and never forget that science is one of the shepherds of astonishment.  Science has given generously to our world - it has brought us knowledge, comfort, meaning, wonder, and more than one form of freedom, and one day soon, I believe, it will also bring us extraordinary new forms of beauty as well.
 I am not referring to the kinds of beauty that science has already offered, the discoveries that bring joy (which is beauty felt), or theories whose elegance becomes a form of art, or the images from deep space whose beauty has long awaited our astonishment.  I am referring instead to the better world that science will help us build, the one we will rightly call a paradise, and though it will take more than science alone to accomplish this, it will be science that builds the infrastructure of paradise, and then, upon that lasting ground, we will, like children at play, follow beauty towards transcendence.  
 I am convinced that our future will bring not only scientific progress (which, if we survive, is assured), and not only moral progress (which we must first assure in order to survive), but also our aesthetic progress, and also that a world in which we are at peace with ourselves and in harmony with our technology will be beautiful beyond current imagining, beautiful beyond current meaning and sensibility, and even to an older adult it would be experienced with the same benevolent intensity of creative wonder as an infant must look upon her first dawn or twilight, magic everywhere, and the boundaries between self and world intangible, and though my finest effort just to stumble my way towards the dimmest sense of this future is doomed to failure, it has lead me to believe in a form of beauty that has the power to transform a world, as the beauty of a woman or child can transform, at last, an aging boy into a man.
 I am also convinced that the experience of beauty is both a fundamental human need and therefore a fundamental human right, that the simple phrase “a love of beauty” is an irreplaceably enlightening redundancy, and that beauty is the way the universe has welcomed life to its lifeless shores, as if to say “behold beauty…now live!” Imagine a sterile universe (though you cannot), a universe empty of life, and then wonder: what worth, what purpose, what meaning could the universe have if it did not welcome life?
 It would be worse than nothingness, it would be the most hideous of possibilities and the most grotesque of absurdities, a silent desolation without anyone there ever to weep for it, or, at its end, to record that end with tragic gratitude.  
 But if I am right about this, or even just partly so, then this is one more reason to encourage science to pursue the truths we will need if we are not just to survive, but to progress.  Onwards towards paradise - though first, towards a revolution whose most fundamental principle may be the urgent calling to believe in – and to build - a heaven for the living, not the dead.
 Of science, I would say in sum that for anyone who wonders why, when I spoke of what science is not, I did not mention art (the other great defining human enterprise), I would first point out that art is the expression through a symbolic medium of one’s unique vision of the world, and because we all have such a vision, we can all express ourselves in one creative practice or another.  
 Yet few of us are artists - if I produce a work of art, at best I will reveal only myself to the world, though when an artist creates, she reveals the world to itself, and so art deserves our most thoughtful attention and our deepest gratitude because it is not an occupational category, it is, in greater truth, a moral one. This said, it could still be argued that the arts teach us about ourselves, while the sciences teach us about the universe, and yet the more we learn, the more we understand that the two are nearly one, and the distinction, simultaneously both trivial and essential, is like the difference between our most vivid dreams and their fulfillment - though only once they are fulfilled.
 And of technology, which is the public face of science, I believe that the internet is well on its way to becoming the most liberating technology in our history, and because I believe that its ascendance is matched – not coincidentally – by the re-emergence of a moral tyranny which desperately wants unregulated control over anyone whose final enlightenment could lead to that tyranny’s lasting exile into the past, I also believe that these two cannot co-exist for long, and any increasingly successful effort by the latter to reverse our moral progress would, by itself, assure revolution, though I fear that the longer we wait to take our stand against this tyranny, the more likely that it would not be an uprising made of peaceful protest alone, and this cannot be allowed lest we become those we must overcome.
 I remember as a very young boy seeing a cartoon in which a ghost tried to walk through a wall while carrying something he had taken from the room he had entered, only to be stopped dead, because though ghosts may pass through walls, objects cannot, and this has become for me a visual metaphor to help illustrate the intention of our fanatics (men who may be metaphor-immune) to return us to a darkness which would extinguish what little light we have already brought into this world, and the far brighter light they know we would bring once we are free of them at last.  
 Ultimately, they cannot succeed, they cannot carry us back to a time that never was, or into a future that would make a cruel reality of their cold-blooded dreams, but if we are not soon rid of these ghosts of horrors past, they may well learn to do more than just come unhindered through our walls.
 My larger point is this: despite its complex social, economic, cultural, and of course technical challenges, modern technology has advanced to a point where we can now imagine that once those challenges are responsibly met, technology will not only help liberate us from the ancient curses upon us – disease, madness, inequality, prejudice, ignorance, and war – it will also, as it has even now to visible extent, bring us meaning and wonder and beauty as well, and help create a world where love is unopposed.  
 But technology’s power to enslave is still as great as its power to liberate, and a powerful few have already demonstrated this power with a propaganda campaign meant to deliberately misinform its viewers by disguising itself as news, and by doing this so successfully that its viewers are now more poorly informed than even those of us who do not watch, read, or listen to any news at all.  Technology is already its own revolution, though we will need another of another kind to assure that a more advanced technology will be free to offer everything that it will one day have the power to provide.  
 The most beautiful of our imaginable futures, the one which almost every one of us would want, is a melodious clamor of creative transformation, filled with light and laughter and love, and so inseparable from our most exquisite dreams that it will be an irreversible triumph over every ghost that haunts us now, which is still every ghost that has ever haunted us, and it is because of the contrast, disorienting in its scale, between that future and our own time, which is merely the least horrific chapter in our history, a contrast for which I can find no analogy, that I proceed here, and I know that to get to that future, we need to squeeze through the narrow passageway of present time at the same moment that those who would oppose us are trying to push past the rabble and get there first.  
 But only one can break through, and which shall it be - those who would free everyone and everyone they would free, or those who would free no one but themselves.  May love, imagination, and astonishment guide your answer.
 Earlier, I also said this: “the field of psychology fails to confront ascendant pathologies that would command every aspect of every life according to a form of thought that should only be found in the darker dreams of troubled children”.  Quite a dramatic statement, I concede, and not entirely fair, I confess, though I did not change it because this statement contains enough truth to begin my argument, and enough error to complete it.
 I have spoken here of greed, arrogance, and cruelty, of sociopaths, narcissists, and fanatics, and of those to whom love is as alien as thought to stone, and what all of these share, aside from a magisterial depravity, is their membership among those human conditions that are studied by psychologists - studied by, though not often enough treated by, and for two reasons.  
 First, those who suffer from any of these pathologies do not suffer.  They are typically quite content with themselves (and I did not say “happy” because the truest happiness can only be found by those who love), and so rarely, if ever, will they seek therapy, and second, more rarely still would any known therapy succeed, and so it is instead we who suffer from their pathologies.  But though we have not yet learned how to treat them effectively, we have learned how to test for them effectively, to learn in any given case whether a person has a character flaw which makes more likely their willingness to act from self-interest alone.    
 From this, there are three points to be made.
 First, a century ago, the new field of modern depth psychology emerged from one of history’s most remarkable gatherings of creative genius.  They were not alone.  The first half of the twentieth century, despite the slaughter that has come to define it, also brought us extraordinary advances in science, philosophy, art, and literature, and these were all, by any definition, revolutions in creative thought and human possibility, and yet, with the exception of science where the revolution continues, the forward thrust of intellectual and artistic brilliance has slowed and we now wait for the return of the lightning-crossed air that will breathe new life into history’s advance towards wisdom.  
 The world’s current population is three times what it was at the mid-point of the twentieth century, and yet authentic genius, revolutionary by definition, is far more rare than it was a century ago, and this troubling scarcity may cost us most in the case of psychology because it is the field of study that studies us.  Meaningful progress has still been made in this field, and many have been helped because of it, though its advance has slowed, and there seems no sign of a new revolution in the study of the mind, and although the cognitive sciences, which dream of replacing psychology, have revealed much of much value, the first meaningful answer to the question of what it means to be human remains to be written, and may not be authored by someone who calls themselves a psychologist at all.  
 Second, as I said a moment ago, psychology has developed diagnostic tests which are, when properly administered and professionally analyzed, remarkably accurate in revealing emotional pathologies, and more than one government agency in more than one country uses these tests to screen applicants for highly sensitive positions. The best of them, which has been amended and revised several times since its creation nearly three-quarters of a century ago, is the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, or MMPI, and because of this effective tool, I now offer you my first concrete suggestion for improving the world (aside from trying to incite you to love genuinely and to imagine freely): let us publicly urge anyone running for elected office to take the MMPI, to have it professionally analyzed, and to reveal the results to those whom they would represent.  
 By “urge”, I would include inspire, encourage, invite, advise, propose, and even dare.  We should not, however, require this by law because this could end either with a tyranny of testing or with corporations administering this test whose financial or political self-interest might work against the goal of revealing who among us should never hold elected office.  Besides, how fascinating it would be to listen to the reasons a politician would give for not taking the test or for not revealing its results.  But the larger point should be this: wouldn’t you want to know if the person seeking your vote is a sociopath or narcissist?  If not, I would ask instead: would you take this test, and if not, why not?
 Even the most elementary lessons psychology already offers can be redemptive, and I give them summary, though imperfectly, with this thought: much that is deliberate is not conscious, and much that is not conscious can be revealed to deliberation, and though with this I have reduced a century of courageous work and humane revelation to a bumper sticker, it is, I believe, still capable of casting light.  
 For instance, if you hate our government, perhaps it is because there was once, or still is, someone of authority in your life who hurt you and you are unable to get free of either the person or the pain, government can be made a symbol of that hated authority and the object of your anger, thus absolving the villain and making a scoundrel of a still mostly responsive and democratic authority.  
 Were such surrogate hatred of our government to spread far and deep enough among us and the government to be weakened too much for too long by a paralyzing struggle between unassailably entrenched ideologies, precisely who, or better, precisely what do you imagine will step in to fill the hole where democracy once had taken hopeful root. Sociopathocracy may be, as a word, utterly new, but those who would build the sweat-shop planet this word describes obey a form of thought older than any word.  It is unquestionably past time for that form of thought first to have its power over anyone taken from it forever, and then to be bred from our stock by evolution’s greatest, if perhaps unintended, gift – genuine love.  So, if you want a better world than ours, know yourself better than could another.
 But now I have a suggestion for psychology itself, and this is the third point I want to make: explore the mystery of our sense of personal identity whose true nature eludes us but which is surely a crucial part of learning what it means to be human.  
 It is a vital mystery, and if you would ask me what it is, I could say only that it is the core of our sense of self, part shadow, part light, the rest a crystalized astonishment; born before words could build their wall, it is the primordial entity who secures our bond with ourselves and thus all others, the boundary stone which marks the place where the world must end and we begin, the first contract between awareness and of those things we accept to be aware, the other within us who speaks only the cryptic imagery of dreams and who shepherds us past the animate dark, an inner mirror into which, like an aging beauty, we will glance for reassurance, a vigilant mood which does not think but to which thought attends, and that does not feel but for the heart is its own, made of the tougher substance of wounds dealt though healed, and of childhood’s magic, dark and bright, and no matter how well-lit and exquisitely fashioned the personal world we build upon it, our sense of identity is that world’s enduring foundation, forever set into the dark earth of early childhood, and once established, lies undisturbed by what we do above, unchanging, immune to loss, and keeping us whole, and of the great assembly who have a living presence within us – our nobility, our commoners, our scoundrels – this sense of our personal identity, that great abiding presence, is the first to come to life, and the very last to die.  
 It is both us and it is not.
 In other words, I have no idea what identity is, and neither do you, though every one of us is at one with our own and yet would stutter to describe it. But I feel certain of this – our sense of identity is able to endure sorrows that would break our hearts, sicken our minds, and wound our bodies, and not even rage or hate or fear can do more than lead it to settle more deeply into the ground that was our inward nursery, and it is, I believe, our sense of identity which allows us to survive and to move beyond our sorrows.  
 Yet there is one circumstance which threatens identity, something other than the far extremes of madness or disease or of losses too great for any to bear, and that threat is humiliation.  I am not even certain whether this word is meant to portray the feelings that accompany the experience of humiliation or its effect upon our sense of identity, though it is the latter which interests me here, and I would ask psychology to study this subject with a greater intent and intensity than it ever has before because experience suggests that it is the underlying motivation for violent acts committed not only by individuals, but by groups, by countries, and even by entire cultures.
 The nature of our sense of personal identity is visible in the light of the people, groups, institutions, and ideas with which we identify, and these then become so central to our existence that we will forever remain alert for the symbols by which to grant them external life and thereby make them tangible and worth defending at almost any cost.  
 Of myself, I identify with my son (for whom there can be no symbol, though he himself is one) as well as with others, with certain philosophies and institutions, with my country (for which there are many symbols), and with humanity as a gifted, restless, brave, playful, anxious tribe of individuals none of whom chose to be born, all of whom will die, and each of whom lives, almost constantly, with a longing for something that has never yet arrived – add to this that some will learn to love and some will learn to kill, and we have sketch enough to begin a later portrait.
 But that portrait would remain incomplete if humiliation – its experience, its meaning, its consequences, and its resolution – is not made a part of it because humiliation is, I believe, the single greatest cause of violence in all its human forms, except the one we too often need for protection from the others.
 Identity is, without rational – or even irrational – doubt, immensely powerful, and for any who are endowed with reflective self-consciousness, as many humans are, identity is the mirror which thus reflects, and it is so entwined with the awareness of our individuality that identity could serve as its own definition – I am that I am.  
 Yet though powerful, identity is not always strong, and if I’m right, the following just might be how a violent extremist is made: inflict humiliation upon him while he is still too young to have finished crafting his sense of personal identity by infusing it with the enduring symbols of those with whom he identifies, and then inflict humiliation upon any of the people or groups whose symbols have become an intimate part of his identity.  
 Once this is done, the only way he can avoid the abyss, the only way to escape the threat of the dissolution not just of his beliefs, but of his being, is to take action against whomever is perceived to have inflicted that humiliation.  Violence which, to the sane, is but madness, could then be seen as an act of literal self-preservation which, though grotesque in its expression, might best be prevented from recurrence by humiliation’s most powerful opposite (need I tell you what that is?), though the first step is surely to gain the greater knowledge of ourselves and of each other that still eludes our mastery.
 If just one of the braces holding together a man’s sense of personal identity begins to fail, he must quickly act to find a cause if he is to shore up a self-image in danger of collapse, and this desperate effort, guided only by fear and shielded from reflection, will always focus most intently upon whichever ideology promises to secure his threatened manhood - but if, with sincere determination, we offer even such a wounded man the faith that he belongs to a greater and more human cause, he could be dissuaded from his fate, which, of course, is ours as well – his responsibility then would be to accept our offer, though first ours would be to make it.
 Yet if nothing else, I feel certain that humiliation is the agonizing reminder that we have not been loved – it is a kind of death, and though symbolic and unmourned, it is nevertheless felt as an annihilation of identity – it is death burdened by awareness.
 Yet what if the thing with which someone identifies most is death itself?
 I ask this because I sense that, for some, death will begin to take command when their sense of identity proves too weak to assure that life remains the stronger force, and once this descent into oblivion is complete, death will come alive within them and take dominion, and I wonder, too, whether this might cast a light on some of history’s most horrific acts – after all, if a man has given himself over to death, that others live may seem a taunt worthy of his vengeance, as if he is saying: I am lonely death – join me.
 But there is hope because there is, at least in some, a place within that cannot be fully portrayed by reference to any of the terms of modern psychology - it is a kind of theatre of one’s self, a playhouse where we gather with the members of our cast of characters whose totality is our own to rehearse, to reflect, to recall, to redress, to rebel.  It has a felt depth and, like a stage, conveys a greater space beyond, it is lit, often brightly and with a many-colored radiance, and offers passionate dialogue and restorative silence, and where at differing times we are either hero or villain, yet always both director and audience – it is the place where we dream awake, where love, imagination, and astonishment reset the scene and recast the story under brightened lights and a drawn curtain - it is our truest home, and I would counsel faith in this theatre within, for our destiny lies in the script and we are the playwrights.
 Before I move on, two final points. First, my apologies to psychology and to all of its many excellent students and practitioners, and my great thanks for all that they have learned and for all whom they have helped, and I would ask them to understand that my impatience is with the current pace of new learning which, if I underestimate its progress, would earn my further apology but also my suggestion that they ally themselves with the best of our remaining journalists to make that progress better known.  I should also add that social psychology has begun to shed light on a number of crucial issues that are of great relevance to our time, including some that are central to what I am trying to say here, and for this, I am very grateful as well, as we all should be.
 Although the work done by the social sciences, including social psychology, is of the first importance, psychology itself must always concentrate upon the individual, upon his experience of the world, upon his finest possibilities, and upon whatever stands in the way of his destiny, because all that is most deeply human, all that we treasure and all that we oppose, all that we would carry forward and all that we would cast away, will forever begin with the individual, and the actions of the group and the influence of others are ultimately only a reflection of this truth, and if the best work is now being done by the social sciences, it is surely because the individual is both far too complex to permit quick mastery of the labyrinth of personal identity, and also more complex than any group of which we are a part, except perhaps for family which is, or should be, the one place where the group is equal to the individuals of which the group is made, though I believe that we have already begun the journey towards an eternal age, distant yet visible, when all of humanity will work, and play, as one great family, indivisibly united by genuine love, creative intelligence, and benevolent purpose.
 But we are still far from home.  So, to make another suggestion of another kind, if I could add just one to psychology’s inventory of disorders, it would be the experience of emotional emptiness, even though it might then be given a name that misses the point, perhaps something like Affective Deficiency Syndrome - whose acronym would be “ads” – ironic since, for the careless watcher, most of our ads can empty an hour of its meaning with an almost mechanical efficiency.
 But I feel strongly that this experience of emotional emptiness is crucial to the understanding of what it means to be human because of what breeds this emptiness and what this emptiness then can breed in turn.  This experience is the awareness that there is a place inside of us which, while vacant, still tells a kind of story, and though it speaks in muted whispers in a language known to none, if we listen carefully, as if for a predator’s footstep, and come to know this storm-swept emptiness and to rebel against its occupancy within us, we then may learn the meaning of its presence and what it takes to end this void by filling it.  
 This emptiness, this deeply felt abyss forms, I believe, for one reason only – when love is denied to a child.  
 But the ways we then try to fill this emptiness as adults, whether by work or play, are many – drugs, money, violence, religion, food, hatred, cars, guns, knowledge, solitude, music, politics, sports, anger, television, and of course sex, though sex is a special case because although the intimacy would be enough and the sensuality would be enough, sex offers even more: beyond its comfort, and even its mercy, it offers an ecstatic alteration of identity so blissfully and transformatively alien that it offers a glimpse into the future of human consciousness, and though that glimpse is brief, it is a kind of perfection which, while it lasts, endures, receiving its own place and form of remembrance, and foretelling a new and far better world, so watch for this realm just beyond the zenith of your pleasure lest pleasure’s blinding arc obscure it.
 In truth, any chosen form of work or play, any dream could be put to the task of filling the abyss, though when it is, when that dream enters that abyss, it is the dream that is most often changed, and changed from dream to discontent.  For relevant example, aside from a few who may offer supportive remarks (and assuming that any will have listened), the commentary posted below this video will surely be written mostly by those whose own sense of emptiness drives them to try to fill it, however briefly, with the bitterness, anger, resentment, hostility, and contempt that many use to soothe the dull throb of their inner desolation.  
 We will sense the abyss most when alone, especially in silence, or when bored (a lesser form of emptiness far more easily filled), or in a moment of loss or indecision, but what will most arouse this emptiness from its dormancy and make of it a restless entity is a stretch of time without desire, without a plan or purpose, and if unscheduled time is the twin of unpartitioned space, then for any who live with this feeling of emptiness (which is not, please note, the same as being empty), time can feel as would open spaces for the agoraphobe, and once this feeling of emptiness is met with empty time, then can violence follow.  
 But though it is compassion, which requires a faith in time, that leads some to act on behalf of others, it is emptiness that drives some others towards action on behalf only of the dead. A symbol acquires a living status as it gathers to itself all the inward forces for which that symbol stands, and for anyone who lives with the emptiness that can arise from having been unloved, that emptiness can become a symbol for death - the ultimate emptying - and when that symbol then comes to life, death then comes to life, too, and a monster awakens from its infancy to act.
 But here are three quotes which give a better portrait of this haunting sense of emptiness, and though this word is only found in one of these quotes, and even there refers to another kind of emptiness, its message, I feel, still well applies:
 I have discovered that all human evil comes from this: man's inability to sit still in a room – Blaise Pascal
 All of you undisturbed cities, haven’t you ever longed for the enemy – Rainer Maria Rilke
 In all our searching, the only thing we’ve found to make this emptiness bearable, is each other – Carl Sagan
 There are some, perhaps many, who are so emptied of life that even depravity, the definitive thrill for the heartless bored, can, in time, grow tedious, and faced with nothing left to fill the void, they pursue a broader power over others by seeking to become our saviors, and whether in the form of a politician, a CEO, a servant of a god, a commentator, a troll, the wounds they will inflict, though seeming minor next to the headlines of the day, will then be felt by many.  Yet even such power, however great, will not appease this emptiness.
 I would only add that this emptiness cannot be wholly filled by another’s love, but only by loving that other, and I would ask that if psychology does not make love and its loss a central value in its search for human truth, what is it doing to fill its own brief share of time?  
 Fully understanding this experience of emptiness as well as the mysteries of identity is, I am convinced, crucial to meaningful human progress and to the final abolition of suffering - therefore, to the students of human psychology I would plead: we worship the wrong powers and we are not well, and so we await your genius with a patience made fragile by a sense of urgency that now swells by the quickly passing hour. After all, surely you would not want us to ask: what is it you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?
 It seems that we all begin either with love or in emptiness – one serving as midwife for all that is best in us, the other conjuring darker, older, more primitive, and less human qualities, yet though love can never be lost to emptiness, have faith that emptiness can, by love, be changed instead to love.  
 But please note that history has produced other unforeseen and nearly miraculous gatherings of genius like the one that gave us the foundation for contemporary psychology, which is to say for enlightened self-discovery, and one of these was the gathering which, more than two centuries ago now, gave birth to this country, a labor whose presiding attendant was revolution.  It is well past time for another.  
 The revolution of which I dream will not be a revolution in thought, or thought alone, but a revolution in being, and to give you a sense of how revolutionary this revolution must be, I want to draw upon another one, a revolution set too deeply in the future to set in motion now, though which just might provide a lesson in how great are the changes that we need, and thus how great are the changes which, one day, must come.  
 In doing this, however, I must offer a thought with which almost everyone will disagree, a thought so difficult to believe that your skepticism should not only be absolute, but met with the contemptuous laughter which follows upon an encounter with the ridiculous, with eyes either widened in surprise or narrowed in suspicion, and perhaps even with a dark astonishment.  
 First, we accept, though mournfully, that money is the primary operating principle by which the world is run (and badly) and of this there should be little doubt for anyone beyond a certain young age who wasn’t raised by wolves.  There are other forces and factors at work, of course, and these even include love, devotion, conscience, and imagination, though only lovingly sheltered children would believe that those are the brightest lights by which we make our way.  So, being true, what will be your reaction when I tell you that one day, perhaps not all that long from now, money will no longer be the principal currency of human interaction?  
 As you are deciding how quickly you should dismiss this thought (almost as if you feared the Oligarchs would know if you were to allow it entrance), please keep in mind that I could have made this prediction without its strategically humble preface, but I understood that if I had, your disbelief would surely have been so great that even if you desperately wanted this to be true, it would call into question the value of everything that I have said to this moment and everything that I will say from this moment on, and I concede that I waited until I was nearly done with my talk to offer this thought, hoping that for those few who may have traveled with me this far, I may have earned enough of your trust to speak of this without losing your attention as a result – I may be wrong in that hope, though as Lincoln said “to sin by silence when they should protest makes cowards of men”.
 Yet despite the risk I now take, and with Lincoln at my side, I have faith that one day, probably far beyond my time, though perhaps within my son’s, we will at least begin the struggle to find a way of accomplishing for this world what we must without consigning most of us to the hopelessness, fear, hunger, violence, sorrow, and disease which has always been the consequence of our grotesque fascination with money, and which, to anyone watching from another world, would be the most powerful and the most revealing of all our transmissions.  
 But here is a thought-experiment to help you with this: imagine that something does all of the physically dangerous and intellectually meaningless work we now must do ourselves, that it protects us from harm, grows our food, builds and maintains our homes, infrastructure, and devices, and all the brute labor needed for civilization’s advance is safely and reliably completed on our behalf, and we are then free to use our creative and moral intelligence to pursue our destiny.  
 Now, when you have traveled with this thought as far as imagining permits, ask yourself what could accomplish this for us, and why in such a world there would be any need for money at all. There might still be villains made for a time, though what power could they gain that would keep us from the paradise which then, for the first time in our history, we all would know in our hearts was ready at last to be built, because in such a world, power would no longer come from wealth as we know it now, but from the greater resources of love, imagination, and creative intelligence.  
 I have an answer to the question of what this something could be, though I will keep it to myself, partly because the overwhelming majority of you who find this entire point to be a self-evident absurdity would think of this answer as proof that my own thinking is undisciplined and self-indulgent (and perhaps, at times, it is), but mostly because I want you to carry this thought-experiment as far as your own imaginations permit and then to decide for yourself.  
 Understand before you begin that if your imagination is not guided by love, your answer will be as foolish as you believe my question to be, though I offer this as a taunt to clarity: has there ever been a needless death for which money could not be held answerable to a rationally defensible extent, whether by its dominion, its strategic withholding, its willful misappropriation, its diversion to our petty diversions, or by our tragic indifference.  
 The question is rhetorical.  Play detective and you should find that somewhere within the story of every death by unnatural cause, money or its want will make its villainous appearance, and then decide instead what world it is you want.  
 Keep also in mind that in any country whose primary goal and national priority is money (rather than, for instance, its citizens), one of the methods used by the typical elected official to protect the wealth that keeps him in power, while also assuring a bright future for his own accounts, is to embed this corrupting gluttony into laws with names which are either happy in their sound or strategically vague in their meaning, and which can successfully be described and defended as both pragmatic and humane as long as the voters are too frightened, too misled, too busy, too tired, or too angry to think for themselves and who thus hold - as if their own - the last passionately stated opinion they have heard, and so I say again: decide what world it is you want.
 For now, consider this: a system founded upon money, made of money, sustained by money, defended with money, and ordained for money is a gleaming atrocity, an exclusive hotel for a clenched handful of affluent clients, surrounded by superfluous multitudes who can only crane to squint into arched windows tinted to shield its patrons against reminder, an opulent fortress already beginning to shudder under its own dead weight.  
 Now I quote again one more of my earlier points: “morally indefensible laws are passed whose sole purpose is to reduce or prevent the voting of targeted racial and ethnic minorities, of those who have already given and lost too much”.  Silence tempts me - though only briefly.  
 There was a recent fifty-state review of all documented cases of in-person voter fraud, the kind which is, according to many of our politicians and the conspiracy theorists whom they suckle, the only kind for which preventive legislation is needed, and this review showed that the incidence of in-person voter fraud represents 0.000007% of the voting public, while another study, using more data across more time, showed a 0.000003% incidence of such fraud, or one in every 32,258,064 ballots cast.  
 So, unless you are a fanatical ideologue and thus contemptuous of any fact that does not justify your indifference to the truth, you must agree that in light of these facts, any action which makes voting more difficult, if not impossible, for our own citizens is nothing less than horrifying.  
 Yet I worry now that any who at first had armed themselves with a renewed awareness of the vitally important meaning of the words love, imagination, and astonishment may be experiencing what many of us will sometimes feel when confronted with a seemingly endless report of disturbing news – a momentary weakening of our capacity to understand the darker world in which many others must live, and if so, I ask that you dwell with care just once more upon a truth which is, I concede, profoundly troubling to accept, and that truth in this case, as with others of which I have spoken, is the erosion of our freedom to direct the course of our own destinies, and this loss is knowingly, if not consciously, the result of the bizarre longing felt by many of our elected officials to take any action, no matter how morally scandalous and rationally unfounded, which assures the fulfillment of their poisonous dream of a world in which only their own tribe will be free to prosper without the risk of either government interference or significant public dissent.
 Decreasing the number of days when we can vote, the number of places where we can vote, and the chances that all our votes will matter equally, while simultaneously increasing the requirements we must meet in order to vote at all is arguably the greatest internal threat to our democracy since the civil war, a carnage which lead to the defeat, though only for a time, of the same militant arrogance now stirring from its latency, and this threat is the work of men who neither feel nor think as we have every right to expect of our elected and appointed leaders.  
 Some of these men have defended the laws restricting our right to vote by stating, with rehearsed indignation, their great concern that our current system is vulnerable to pervasive fraud, statements often accompanied by statistics drawn from the thinnest of air.  
 Yet the only fraud is the one committed by these elected officials who guard what is not under attack, and attack what poses no threat except to their dreams of a world where only their dreams will come true, and I would suggest to each of them that if you are tempted to vote against reason and the common good because you might then be voted out of office by someone more radical than you, then is it not far better to be honored by history for your defeat than condemned by it for your victory?
 I also worry now that if you are among the great throng who are ignorant of the details needed to bring light to the most challenging problems we face, whether that ignorance is self-imposed or brought to you by the immaculate celebrities who are paid to keep the shadows safe, you might decide that rather than learning more and fighting back, you will decide instead that I am just another conspiracy theorist, a man seeking the strange glory of infamy by daring history to uncover what I seek to obscure, all the while acting as though I am the gate-keeper through which the truth must pass before it can reach its restless audience.  
 I am not, though I would understand if some of our more devoutly misinformed might think this since the thought that our democracy has already been wounded by a relentless and continuing attack from a relatively small, though highly organized and well-funded group of fanatical ideologues with a carefully developed strategy which includes impassioned denials of its ultimate purpose, could seem a paranoid fiction, but if you doubt this, then either you have been studiously ignoring the world beyond your home (for which I could not blame you, though it is a dangerous comfort), or you are one of the fanatical ideologues who wants to deny the right to vote to those who would surely vote against you.  
 In this case, as in the others, love is nowhere to be found except in our opposition to those for whom love is just the debt of obedience which they are owed.  Though of those who support this theft of so precious a right, we can ask again: what do you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?  
 Yet by now you may long for the thrill of a conspiracy theory as reward for listening to these tales of inhumanity (though they are tales that you should already know), something to distract you from the horrific, just as you might welcome an ad for soap while watching the nightly news, some modest extravagance to restore your mood in preparation for the tales that still await you, and so I offer you this:
 Imagine it is true that funding for our schools from kindergarten to college is deliberately reduced, depriving many of our students of the resources needed for learning, or that the cost of school is so great that they cannot afford to learn at all, and that much of the news to which we listen is deliberately poisoned by an ideology that wants only an unaccountable power and uncountable wealth, and that voting is deliberately made more difficult, perhaps impossible, for millions of our fellow citizens, and that prohibitions on guns in public, even in schools and churches, are deliberately removed, and that money, the human equivalent of talons, is deliberately converted into speech, thereby granting more of the latter to those who possess more of the first, and that corporations - the primary source of that money and thus of that speech – are deliberately granted personhood, and that these mutant humanoids have been deliberately conceived to work only for the reason of greater profit, rather than for the greater profit of Reason, and that our government, designed to teach, to protect, and to assist, and increasingly capable of each, is deliberately made to seem at best, incapable of any, and at worst, an enemy of the freedom that it was designed to assure.  
 The ultimate result would be an emotionally illiterate and intellectually vacant horde without a guardian authority to stop them or to defend those who would oppose them, and the final lesson is simple: the priority of government is people, while the priority of business is money – mix the two and money will win, and the people lose.  
 So this is my conspiracy theory, one which might provide a riveting headline for some of the papers that line our supermarket check-out aisles (a gauntlet that could appeal only to a sociologist or the utterly bored, though it should astonish us all), a headline something like “Secret Society of Sociopaths Plot Government Takeover”, though I leave it to you to decide just how fictional this is, while adding that I have stressed the word “deliberately” here not only because it means to act knowingly, but because if you were to hyphenate its first two syllables, it would form the word de-liberate, meaning to take away one’s freedom.  
 But of course there is no such word, and even if there were, surely this conspiracy theory is no more than an absurd fantasy and could never come to pass here in the land of the free, though we all should note well that freedom without responsibility would be anarchy because responsibility is always born for others than ourselves.  I am convinced that our greatest uncertainty, our greatest confusion, our greatest fear arises from the belief, widely felt if rarely voiced, that there is no single fundamental source of moral authority that is invulnerable to rational counter-statement and which could, with universal equality and acceptance, unfailingly serve us all, and for all time.
 In the public realm, every harmful action has its articulate defenders who will disguise injury or injustice as morally necessary acts on behalf of a righteous cause and portray their critics as thoughtless radicals, and every benevolent proposal will be confronted by passionate opponents who quote virtuous tradition in their implacable resistance to constructive change, and the most troubling aspect of this reality is that no matter your position, your politics, your philosophy, your faith, you will judge this reality to be just as self-evident as those who would oppose you – for each side, moral clarity is too often theirs alone.
 Many, perhaps most, would claim, sometimes violently, that there is a single fundamental source of moral authority, whether it is the Bible, the Torah, the Qur’an, the Bhagavad-Gita, the laws and constitutions of the world’s democracies, the arts, the sciences, philosophy, psychology, our reason, our dreams, or even the semi-divine powers of human intelligence (which may be the extent to which we have conscious access to our mind’s full range of latent powers), and every one of these has provided us with moral truths worthy of our reverence and our observance.  
 Yet not one of them can attend to every human need, and not one of them can answer every moral question, and so I would ask: is a single fundamental source of moral authority a realistic possibility?  I have an answer, though fitting the complexity and ambiguities of the question, it is both “yes” and “no”.
 The “no” reflects the surely obvious truth that truth is not always obvious.  For many, the truth, no matter how radiant its message or comforting its lessons, will be heresy to those whose path is lit by a differing truth, and it is difficult to imagine how any one source of moral guidance could serve every one of us under all circumstances, no matter how singular or extreme - or more precisely, it is difficult to imagine this without picturing a world in which everyone has been trained from birth to wear a pleasantly vacant smile and watch an endless loop of sitcoms when not at work in their hushed and softly lighted cubicles.  We are far too complex for a stone tablet bearing The One Commandment.
 The “yes” reflects my faith in two related human gifts and their power to free us from the destructive consequences of greed, arrogance, and cruelty.  First, although not one of the sources of moral wisdom I cited above could serve every one of us as a reliably secure foundation for principled action, I believe that together they could because they represent the gathered totality of human knowledge and the incarnation of wonder, that transcendent state which descends upon us (or is it we who ascends?) when imagination has reached the far distant boundary which both marks the limit of its great powers and its unrelenting call to press onward anyway.
 Bringing them together may sound like a guarantee of global conflict if you are now imagining an international conference at which representatives of each realm of knowledge would debate all the others. But if you welcome every child and every adult into a system of education that is biased towards none, whose teachers live the subject that they teach, and which assures that every child becomes a willing student and is given full access to all the sources of knowledge, then the moral truths which are a part of that knowledge will become universally available, and each student would then be free to choose those sources which speak most clearly to them, and because all knowledge is self-knowledge, the outcome would be, in time, nothing less than global liberation.  
 Please note, however, that this idea is far from new – its roots began in ancient Greece, its first flowering took place in the late Middle ages, and only started to fade away in the 20th century, which may be one reason for that century’s deservedly legendary reputation for slaughter.
 The other gift is love.  It should not be surprising that I would offer this, but how is an education which explores all that is known, and concedes all that is not, related to love, as I suggested earlier?  Because each represents a broadening of human awareness so great that to the rut of ordinary consciousness, it would arrive as a kind of welcomed dilemma.  These are the two enchanted paths, both secured towards the same bright clearing, parallel at first and yet later chancing to cross again and again, until each, nearing their destiny, overlays the other, making one where once were two.
 So, if we ask the question: what most profoundly deepens our humanity and increases our awareness of the humanity of others (though each will assure the other), while also broadening our vigilance against inhumanity and, with ironic simultaneity, bring us the greatest joy, what better answer could we give than love and knowledge?  Yet if for some bizarre reason you don’t agree, keep this quote in mind, if mind you have, while strutting or stumbling through your day:
 History becomes more and more a race between education and catastrophe – H.G. Wells.  
 But before I end this talk, a thought about endings: once you get to a certain age, if you look back upon your life and set your gaze widely, it is like looking down from an open window upon an extravagant party where a great throng is celebrating something that is still not quite clear, most of them invited but others slipping through the gates, many behaving with impetuous abandon, some intent upon a playful revelry, a few engaged in passionate conversation, and the rest happy just to be there at all.  
 Yet the party must end, and as it begins to quiet and thin, evening turns to night, and those who remain are the watchers among the scattering crowd, the ones who had gathered there first and sobered nicely before the finish, learning much - and these are the ones who will stay and gather round their host as the last of the lights begin to blink and turn off.  
 With this metaphor as preface, I ask: what is the second greatest power in all the world, the one which seems to rival love, the one which can come to a kind of life and will fill the abyss that forms within us when love is nowhere to be found?  It is death - the great insoluble mystery, the one which makes all others visible to wonder, and so I would also ask: how many of us would need to have this word revived from disuse or ignorance, though it may be that the only way to speak its name is silence.  
 But it may not be death itself which frightens us as much as our understanding, dimly felt though constant, that when death seems close, it will tear away the illusions we have crafted against our end, and fill that hole, deeper than a grave, with the irrefutable truth of who we have been, of who we are, and of what we have done and left undone.  But if so, this means that even now, with death seeming far off, we know this truth already.
 Though death offers no facts except finality, it offers countless truths, and for those who love genuinely, the one with which we struggle most is the riddling fear that the time must come when we will never again see those we love most dearly. We have been given just this briefest life, this bright streaking across a darkness that seems to gasp in admiration before swallowing our light forever, a brevity we would not mourn for ourselves alone, but for those we love, for those whom we could not ever, ever relinquish to eternity, asking for the mercy of an unfading remembrance, if nothing more, asking that they do not pass into rude oblivion without the mercy of safekeeping by some eternal diarist.
 Yet I have faith in life enough to have faith in death as well. The universe is too beautifully and gracefully organized and welcoming of life, its scales so vast that the numbers by which we portray them seem instead a form of poetry, its symmetries so elegantly fashioned and so exquisitely balanced that it would be an atrocity against reason to conclude with a brave if fragile certainty that the universe would have given us the divine gifts of love, imagination, and astonishment, and with them make inevitable the dream of life without mortal limit and of love without final parting, only then to take all of this away after a few score years, just as we are arriving at self-mastery and ready to teach the young all that we have learned.  
 So, I counsel faith – in life and in yourself, yet I also counsel defiance towards whomever would oppose that faith, a defiance founded upon the truth that love is stronger than death, and will outlast its dominion.
 Yet just as I reached the moment when I would end this talk, and with the triumph of love over death, I heard a story on the news that has asked for its mention here, and it is this: our country has paid another to keep the recent exodus of desperate young children from reaching our borders, turning them back and forcing their return to their native country, and the coroner of one city in one of these countries reported that in just one week, he had seen the bodies of five of the young children who had tried to find their way to safety, but had been denied this fundamental human right at the cost of their lives, and though a desolate silence tempts, I instead must ask whether the $80,000,000 we paid for this monstrous service would have been enough to find refuge for these children in those of our homes where they would have instead found love.  
 But they were aliens.  
 I must wonder in bleak astonishment if our fear of aliens, whether from another country or from another world, reflects our awareness, vague but nagging, that if we were to classify humans as the animal endowed with conscience, there would then be among us, as there have always been, those who are human only in appearance, aliens not in place of origin, but in the inhumanity of their intentions, though of this news of the fate of alien children (as if any child could ever be anything less than one of all of us), I add only that if you are not astonished by it, if you are not horrified by it, if you are not driven to near madness by it, then you are not only alien, you are, in the most vital sense of the word, as dead as those young children.
 When I heard this, I cried out (though to an empty room) and then, without another to divide the horror by its sharing, I cried, though these tears, I knew, were different from all others I have spent upon horror.  These are ancient tears, shed when the first imperfection entered my world, recording the memory of the first betrayal of a child’s expectation of magic, gathered then but kept ‘til now, when I was ready to grant their wish, and by doing so, weep for our loss at long last, and I am again a child at defiant play in muddy pools. Yet I am also an adult willing to play with fire, willing on behalf of his own child, and so I came here, wanting love’s rebellion against history and the hideous sense of censorious decorum of those who would repeat it.
 Now my ending, though of a different kind, one which, if you are among the few who will have traveled this far with me, is surely a welcomed if not happy ending, and with it, I ask a final question, one that gives summation to the more troubling of my observations and their litter of thoughts (where “litter” means progeny and not debris, or so I hope), and it is this…
 Are the lulling, almost narcotic instrumentalities of modernity, the cumulative pressures of guilt and despair following upon ten millennia of unflagging barbarity, the sense that our poets, the guardians of love’s true meaning, have been rendered mute by the counter-lyrical blare of modern commerce, the bullying advertisements that have, by a differing violence, captured nearly every line of sight and frequency of sound, the distracting hungers aroused by devices too rarely put to a creative human purpose, the congenial and, for some, the oddly comforting narcissism of our leaders, the loss of an emotionally nurturing complexity in our use of language (for which the child-like writing of our emails and text messages could serve as both epilogue and eulogy), bureaucracies that have become living but unthinking entities irreconcilably separate from the people of whom they were once composed, a growing disdain for knowledge passing into a virtual celebration of ignorance (and where virtual adds an ironic second meaning), the recasting of the extremist from fool to hero in a tragic farce authored by illiterates and played before a captive audience, the willful indifference, perhaps contempt, felt for the artistic and intellectual brilliance of their cultures by a West that is now felt to offer little more than a gleaming emptiness and by an East that is now thought to produce nothing more noble than cheap commodities or a violent zealotry, and a need for immortality grown so desperate, so defining of identity that a god’s self-chosen ones, grasping a weapon that only a god should keep, would end our world to gain their heaven and impossible to stop until we learn that our own obsession with celebrity is simply the counterpart to the terrorist’s willingness to die for his cause - have all of these (and the unnamed, and perhaps unnamable) now begun to gather into a sentience that is in some fashion unlike any peril we have ever known, one more difficult to articulate and thus to recognize, more difficult to confront, and more difficult to overcome?  
 And with this, we can now ask once more of our overlords, what is it you love more than the people you could protect, but do not?
 For as long as I can remember, I have had an unshakable faith in humanity, a faith that one day we will, as a single family, round some now unforeseen and far distant corner and find that we have arrived home at last, a home in which everyone, without exception, will be free to pursue their destiny and to have enduring shelter against ruin - fires burning against the cold, lights against the dark, and love against its loss, and despite the fact that nearly everyone with whom I have shared this faith has found it to be a foolish, taunting daydream without hope or substance has not lessened this faith by even the slightest degree.  
 And yet.  
 And yet I wonder how long it will take to make real this dream, perhaps the oldest dream of all and the one dream that everyone who has ever lived must have summoned at least once while hoping that one day it will come true, a dream whose abandoning would be imagination’s most tragic defeat.
 Even after listing the world’s great horrors - poverty, prejudice, disease, cruelty, hatred, ignorance, insanity, despair, and war - there is, I sense, something beyond these now, something for which I do not have a name (though others might), and if I had to describe it – and I feel that I must try – it is a kind of collective global pathology of the human spirit which has already begun to effect those individuals who are most vulnerable even to the unspoken call, the felt incitement to commit acts of violence, acts taken without any moral justification beyond references to political or religious principles despite the clearly visible truth that there is no rational correspondence between those beliefs and the acts then committed in their name.  
 This pathology may be a kind of widely shared emotional fatigue or discouragement so pervasive that for those who find hope difficult to conjure, the future collapses into the past, the death of others becomes a reprieve, while our own is a kind of contraband there to tempt us.
 And why not, some would ask.  It is not hard to feel overwhelmed by our condition: politics without honor, power without conscience, wealth without compassion, journalism without ethics, leadership without courage, religion without love, and an adolescent nation struggling with a kind of voluntary dementia, unwilling – and perhaps soon unable - to remember all of the defining moments, horrific and heroic, in its unequal history, and stumbling towards a darkening future in which we squabble over who betrayed that glorious past which never came, and driven inwards by that one thought which, were we to linger too long upon it, could bring any of us to the borderlands of madness: what might have been.  
 Ours is still a world in which our most treasured human gifts - courage, curiosity, compassion, and all the others which these imply – will lead those who possess them to act, often innocently, against the interest of those who will then ignore, mock, harass, persecute, imprison, banish, or kill these better citizens in order to protect their self-endowed right to spread a darkness that will give cover to their own.
 In other words, ours is a world where the qualities we should admire most are the ones that most endanger those who would offer them – wander from the weary crowd and you risk confrontation with those who guard it for any signs of rebellious humanity.  After all, it is clear that we are not so much lead, as we are ruled.  
 And who is responsible for the dictatorial brutalities of our age?  It is not Muslims nor Christians nor Jews nor Hindus, but the heartless ones among them; it is not black nor brown nor red nor white, but the heartless ones among them; it is neither the young nor the old, but the heartless ones among them; it is neither the learnéd nor the illiterate, but the heartless ones among them; it is not the men, but the heartless ones among them; it is not the rich, but the heartless ones among them; and it is not humanity, but the heartless ones among us.  
 By now, it should be self-evident, that those without a heart, without love and imagination and the capacity for astonishment, will want something very different than those who are endowed with the brazen gift of  benevolence; they will want something from the world, rather than for it, they will want something for themselves, rather than for another, they will want our obedience, rather than our thoughtful attention, they will want power over others, rather than the power to relieve others of their suffering, and they will want their own facts, rather than accept the gathered knowledge that has brought us to a place still better than we once had known, if still far from what we dream of even now, so look for what our leaders want - not in what they say, but in what they offer, and what they take.
 The increasingly irrational claims of The Opposition leadership, their fabricated rumors of conspiracies against the natural order, their bizarre and groundless accusations of treachery, their smug declarations of moral superiority, their unaccountable contempt for established facts, and their wretched ignorance of the boundless reach and power of love, reflect no more than the echoing, haunted emptiness of their philosophy and their dim if keenly felt understanding that our progress would diminish their authority, and the more threatened they feel by the possibility of that loss, the crueler will they become, though even now, their hearts, or what remains, are set against the rest of us, including those whom they once had called their own, so protect yourselves with the sense of horror that is the only fitting response to what they have to offer us, and then reclaim our world in the name of what it truly means to be human.  
 What is the invariable theme of human history?  It is not yet love, though love has kept us from extinction and given courage to resistance.  It is not genius, though genius has flared with frequency enough to allow our progress, halting and uneven as it has been.  It is not hope, for had hope been unfailing, there now would be no need for its assurance.  It is madness...it is madness.  
 If I knew a stronger word than this, I would use it.  If I could create a stronger word, a word to hold a crimson lightning ready to jolt us into humane awareness, a word that would astonish us all, that would break down the wall we have built between those truths we shut away and how we would feel if that dark gave way to light, I would use it, but it is this very madness which keeps it safe from its naming and allows it to settle instead into the less disturbing realm of the merely troubling, for while a good thing without a name still has power to do good, a dangerous thing without a name has still more power to wound.  
 I ask again for a new word - just one for now - a word which, when spoken, will grant its speaker the power to express a vital truth without fear of misunderstanding, and when heard, will offer its listeners an unmistakable grasp of that truth, a word whose rhythm and cadence express a solemn though lyrical certainty, and whose meaning is so elegantly crafted, so clear and specific in its conscious intent that combined with its poetic flourish, it will be shielded against misuse, and all temptation to diminish its authority by either political revision or commercial exploitation will be kept far off, a word whose beauty, purpose, and dominion will have been set in shining armor.
 Like light through falling ash, may that word help disperse this madness.
 Those of us who are not engulfed by madness are encircled by it. Those we love may be close by, but those who do not love us, who do not love anything remain too near and too intent upon our ruin.  Make that new word soon that it will make sense of our story, give it archaic roots so that the unbroken thread of this story will ground it in the past where this madness began and by its novelty reveal its lasting hold upon us.  
 But have faith that we will win, that word or not, though if not this word, I also ask again whether could there be a single truth that would guide us towards a world that excludes no one, that abandons no one, that forgets no one?  It feels as though there must be, even though ten millennia of searching have passed and no such truth has ever been found.  There have been moments when we believed that we had found this fundamental truth and then enshrined it within a philosophy, religion, or ideology, only to learn in time that it did not work beyond its time, or did not work for everyone, or did not work at all.  I may have seemed to suggest this myself when I said before that we are the ones for whom no single truth is true, though there my intent was different.  
 Yet perhaps there is a truth that would provide for those who do not now have what each of us deserves – enlightened governance, the freedom from want, and the opportunity to decide our own destinies – a truth that would also serve those who have what they need but want others to share in their bounty as well.  I suggest for this truth: humanity, by which I mean everyone with a heart, everyone who loves or who has the capacity to love and is thus also endowed with compassion, imagination, conscience, patience, and courage (for genuine love requires our bravery), and all the benevolent qualities that are most defining of our humanity, these are the ones who must somehow replace the heartless, and lead us towards a better world than ours has ever been.  
 But just to distinguish those without a heart from the rest would be a difficult task because they have always adorned themselves with an outward show of the human qualities that will give them camouflage, though I believe that very few of them would ever understand that they are missing those strengths of heart and mind which are vital to our full claim upon humanity.  Yet even once they were known, how do we replace them without earning the violence which is theirs to unleash, and then keep them from ever again having power over others?  Remember that the vastly greater share of power (and of money, its patron and defender) is held by those whose only ambition is the use of that same power for their own self-serving purposes.  
 I have no objection to your longing for power, nor would anyone except those who have too much.  Without exception, every one of us wants power – every one of us.  But I ask: what kind of power do you want, and what is the source of the power that you want, and for what purpose will that power then be used?  
 There is a vast and irreconcilable difference between power that is wanted for the sake of others than ourselves, the power to guide, to shelter, and to free, and the power that is wanted by the heartless to glut the ravening emptiness within them and to use against whomever might dare to challenge their dominion if only by the wrong kind of silence (for to the tyrant, the rebels are the quiet ones), so I do not question your longing for power – I only question what you intend to do with that power and whether it brightens the world for others, or brightens it only for you, for if you have wealth and influence but no love in your heart, then you are impotent - yet if you love, then you are already the master of your world, however alone you may be.
 Now bear witness to this: to end a democracy, only these are needed: diminish the quality of public education; permit the ownership of the majority of news organizations to fall into the hands of a few; restrict voting rights for those who might oppose you; ensure that the major share of any increase in national income is siphoned to the wealthy; create a propaganda machine disguised as journalism and give it both undeserved power and reach; make certain that the people are entertained in return for their losses and that they do not understand what they have lost; place the interest of corporations above the interests of the people; remain in a state of constant war; offer the rapacious the clearest path to government and corporate leadership; using repetition, celebrity, and the empty promise of reward, indoctrinate the poorly educated; make the police the enemies of those who are most in need of the police; divide the people and then turn one faction of citizens against another; and give money the authority that once was held by clear and honest language.  
 Yet all of these could be reduced to no more than this: money for a few, scarcity for the rest, knowledge for a few, uncertainty for the rest, influence for a few, futility for the rest, security for a few, anxiety for the rest, or more simply still: unchallenged power for a few, vulnerability for the rest.  But note that not only are these an assurance of tyranny, they are also, in time, an assurance of revolution as well.  
 Because we do not have enough time to evolve beyond our current conditions before we would inflict upon ourselves a new and even greater chaos, I believe that only revolution on a global scale would bring lasting human progress, a revolution in our system of education, in our system of government, in our commerce, in our priorities, and in the awareness of ourselves and of each other, because those in command of us will not give up their power until an even greater power is finally brought to bear.  
 It will not be without a prolonged struggle, it will not be without moments of uncertainty, and it will not be without a response from those who will oppose us, but our unrelenting insistence upon the primacy of the rule of love is the only path before us that is traced in light.  
 We spend our lives held fast between two infinities – one spread out before us, the other an inward expanse, and these twin infinities - the Universe and the Self - are kindred not only in their scale, but in their nature, different perhaps only in the direction we need set out to travel them, one an outward quest, the other opening within, and with either we can be forgiven moments when these vaulting spaces press down upon us with their haunting intricacy, their almost oppressive beauty, their command to explore, their unsettled interplay of bright and dark, and the sense that with each we are often both intimate and estranged.  
 We are bounded by restless immensity, and we can all be granted a kind of heroism for the struggle to keep our balance as we attend to the unrelenting summons from each – forgive yourself for those moments when you are staggered by realms whose dimensions are forever beyond your final comprehension – forgive yourself for everything.
 I have faith that, with faith in ourselves and the grateful awareness of our common destiny, there will be, one day, a last needless death, a last descent into madness, a last day of hunger, a last betrayal, a last act of indifference, and the last hesitation to embrace another - every one of us then, without exception, led forward and bound to greatness by the love of all for all.  I know that some of you will scoff at this, emboldened by the vain confidence that you are right to find this prediction a self-evident absurdity, a still-born thought conceived in a narcotic dream, a dreary paradise of human perfection, a failure of heroic realism.  
 But these are the same accusers who would call someone of authentic compassion a bleeding heart – although, without knowing it, they would be doubly right, for in this world, a compassionate heart, somewhere within, is always bleeding.  
 I read recently of a news personality (which is not, of course, the same as a journalist) who refuses to accept the philosophy of those who work for constructive social change on the grounds that theirs is a position based upon “theory, feelings, and fantasy”.  
 I would first reply that theory, if it is that and not instead unfounded speculation, reflects both the possession of knowledge and the disciplined longing for more, and also that fantasy is undeniably imagination’s finest act, and so it seems that this news personality – a woman, alas - objects to basing her world-view upon knowledge and curiosity and imagination, and yet as bizarre as this is, her position is made grotesque by her opposition to feelings as a guide, to which I would say: everything that is human begins and ends with how we feel.  
 Tell me what actions, what thoughts, what intentions, what dreams are not born in feelings, and what is it that leads us towards or away from others, and towards or away from ourselves, if not our feelings, and who except the poor sociopath – if even he -  does not live out their lives guided by how they feel, for better or for worse?  I myself am here because of these three passions: love of my son, anger with many, fear for all, and without these, I would a useless thing.  
 What is devotion without feelings, what is faith, what is joy, what is thought, what is meaning, what is courage, what is hope, what is love?  I would ask her for an answer but she has already offered  it – she bases her philosophy (if that is the word, though from everything can a philosophy be woven) upon “facts, logic, and reality”, and so I would ask which facts and which logic, and what is it like this reality in which you live, what is a reality without knowledge, curiosity, imagination, and feelings, and how can it be anything other than a cold, lightless, empty place, one that I would have called haunted except for the fact, except for the logic, except for the reality that you can only be haunted if you feel the determined purpose of the ghosts  who haunt you – she has my deepest sympathy and the hope for her redemption.  
 But it seems that for many of us, our broadcast media, including (and perhaps especially) its vivid and melodic ads, has, by its tightly programmed rhythms, made ours an episodic era, and so the time we spend at home can begin to feel as though it alternates with dulling regularity between the melodrama of life spent with others and the breaks we take from our roles to attend to our clapboard castles or to indulge in the hypnotic offerings of the very media which has set the pace and pattern of our actions.  
If this seems a cynical view that ignores the glories of home and family, it is not and it does not, yet what are the stories that we now so often make of our lives, the stories that we would tell, the stories that we are, but a methodical commerce between the theatre of our human interactions and their grateful intermissions.
Yet our revolution offers hope for this as well, because there is, I believe, no greater incitement to benevolent passion than the creative abyss of unscheduled time, for if you have not allowed this world to empty you, what would await you within those unscripted hours is you, while the rulers of the world prefer you both exhausted and entertained.  And if you feel that this call for revolution is too incendiary, I would reply that because it would be no more nor less than a bloodless, though surely not quiet, revolution in human affairs and in our relations with each other, only an extremist would think this extreme.  
So, what of us, and what of our redemption, and what of the places within us that still refuse welcome to the truth?  Whether revealed in historical event, artistic expression, scientific discovery, or imagined possibilities, we are endlessly fascinated by loss, by catastrophe, by ominous prophecy, and by mysteries that would thrust either shadow or light upon the world were our most urgent questions to be answered, and I wonder whether this fascination is born of our shared intuition that there is something precious that is missing from the world, something which, were we to find it and make it ours, would transform the world forever.  
That ark, that grail, that impossible light in the sky, that foretold apocalypse, that shadow in the sea, that oddly blinking star, that sourceless hum, that haunted forest, that thing without a name, that unremembered dream, that footage found, that ocean trench, that ancient crater, that unexplored chasm – with what within us do all these seem kindred?  I will wonder, too.  
 But in truth, we are so far from the truth, that when we finally glimpse it, the truth will at first appear as something too differing to comprehend - a looking into a mirror that is broken by the image it reflects.  But the mirror is flawless, and such are the truths which, by their revelations, astonish, and which require an authentic courage for their acceptance.  And yet they are also the most generous truths, yielding wisdom and its serenity once they have re-made us – they are, in noble sum, the guardian truths – welcome the discomfort they will offer, and never forget what still could be.  
 The sacred moment when we allow ourselves to imagine the far better world which even now we could bring to immortal life, is also the moment when the obstacles that stand in our way are made clear.  It is the smug and willful narcissism and utter indifference to need shown by just a fraction of us which we have somehow come to believe are instead the signs not only of true success, but of an admirable mastery that we must both emulate and follow, and so we find ourselves stuck in the dark-ages with our devices, ancient miseries barely lit by our shiny new things.  
 Yet nothing about that far better world is so different, so mysterious, so unattainable that we cannot see how very possible it is, and I ask you to imagine it without the restraint of either envy or fear, and when you do, the brilliance of that world will then reveal the darkness which still keeps it just a dream.
 Further, I both celebrate and caution that the Age of Greed, Arrogance, and Cruelty is coming to an end – these may be no more than the first days of a long struggle – or the closing years of a far longer one - and many of the actions taken will not succeed, but those who rule the world cannot win, unless by victory you would mean the moment when they learn at last that they are human, after all, and thus no more nor less than one of us, and with this in mind, I offer three final quotes:
 To The Opposition about The Alliance: “you have not convinced a man because you have silenced him” - Albert Camus
 To The Alliance about The Opposition: “perhaps everything that frightens you is, in its deepest essence, something helpless that wants your love” - Rainer Maria Rilke
 And to them both and thus to us all: “nothing that is human is disgusting unless it is cruel or violent” - Tennessee Williams.  
 May these one day serve the human purpose for which they once were written, though as we wait, it may have value to note that while The Opposition needs legends, The Alliance wants visionaries, and because the first is focused upon the past, while the latter is looking towards the future, this is a difference with vital implications for us all.
 Although we must grant that some who govern us are endowed with conscience and compassion, and work bravely on our behalf to establish justice for everyone, the ones who rule, rather than govern, the ones who stand in the way of all progress but their own – the psychopaths, narcissists, violent psychotics, fundamentalists, partisans, zealots, and fanatics – have an unaccountable power, because while they represent a fraction of humanity (is it even 1 percent?), they make life for all the rest immeasurably more difficult.  
 Further, every reputable scholar, every accomplished scientist, every honorable journalist, every established expert, every principled leader of whom I have record has affirmed that the current administration and its ruthless and fawning congress is a significant and continuing threat, not only to this country, but to our world, and of the most powerful of them, I would say, without fear of error, that his inner world is small and dark, empty of little more than an indistinct chatter, and caught between the insatiable hungers of an unloved child and the fear of a certain kind of light, and assuming - quite safely - that he is not simply a gifted actor portraying a dangerous fool in a tragic satire skillfully written, he is instead the parody of a villain from a badly written political melodrama which borrows from every clichéd speech in the vast repertoire of formulaic scripts, a talentless actor who has forgotten his lines and stands smirking before a worshipful and well-armed audience, and anyone who has been brave or bored enough to have followed me this far should know - and should know anyway - that the power which motivates the majority of our leadership is not love, and I am convinced that only a revolution can change this, a revolution in our awareness of what it means to be fully human, because those who oppose us do not love us, and so to win, we need first to love each other.
 It is true that these tyrants who lord over us have their armies of thugs and bullies, assuring their own security, but those who simply want to live free from want and fear, and free then to devote themselves to their families and communities still far outnumber their masters, and so I say: were those without power, without hope, though with a dream of lasting peace and liberty to rise up to demand that justice, we could not, if we are both peaceful and unyielding, lose that most human of struggles, and once we had won, history would look back with astonishment upon the millennia that had proceeded our triumph and wonder why we had waited so very long.  
 For now, however, there is simply no rational alternative to massive and unrelenting global protest, with countless peaceful rallies in our streets, calls to our representatives, letters to our newspapers, petitions to our governments, strikes and boycotts against the most ruthless of our corporations, with our tears, with our appeals, and with our demands.
 Without such passionate and unwavering and universal protest, democracy will continue its procured retreat, and tyranny its imperial advance, and the speed with which our despair and self-doubt would then increase does not permit us the luxury of the reluctant progress which has, until now, kept us just a child’s faltering step ahead of a catastrophe whose first signs only the future may notice have already appeared, and though we would survive the indignity of a forced acquisition of wisdom, we would not if all we do is dig our private burrows ever deeper, and so for now, the most essential word to keep in mind and heart just might be: together, a word that needs no rescue from obscurity.  
 In the Story of Humanity (half each of novel and textbook), most of the long chapters of that heroic novel must still be read as tragedy, and this fact alone is yet another; but looking through that textbook one lesson at a time, starting with the very first, there is great hope in the unrelenting forward advance of our knowledge, and in the freedoms which that knowledge has offered us, and one day, perhaps, the novel and the textbook will be joined together to become the Song of Humanity, a ballad filled with tales of celebration and shared progress, and no notes false to love.
 But to honor imagination’s debt to astonishment, and ours to both, I remind you of our sacred responsibility to every child whom we have ever allowed to die; to every woman ever hunted, beaten, raped, mutilated, enslaved, or murdered; to every good man ever worn down by the cost of devotion imposed by a merciless world, or killed in defense of those he loves; to every leader of conscience ever silenced or imprisoned; to every nation ever ruled by another; to every truth ever obscured, to every fact ever dismissed, to every name ever lost to memory, to every act of courage ever betrayed, to every noble cause erased from history; to every loss of freedom and human potential, to every defeat of reason and good will, and to every better future willfully delayed – and for all these we say: this far and no farther, this far and not a bloody inch past and not a damned hour more; and we say as well: on behalf of the more than seven billion of us now alive, on behalf of the more than one hundred billion who came before us, on behalf of the more than nine million species of life in this world, and on behalf of the world itself, never forget that the only thing which stands between us and the shared progress towards a credible utopia which is our birthright and our destiny, is a small yet ruthless fraternity of corrupt and morally degenerate men to whom we are superior, not only in our number, but in our humanity.
 To those who have been shielding themselves from the truth too well - and at this deeply troubling moment, it is easy to understand, though impossible to champion, such strategic withdrawal from reality – I ask you to have faith that ours is a time which is teaching us anew how to be astonished, and no matter how difficult these lessons may be, we should be grateful for the return of our capacity for astonishment because it restores both the clarity of our thoughts and the greater meaning of our humanity.  
 Therefore, be astonished by the truth that many who are now in power are engaged, often consciously, in the monstrous effort to transform not just our opinions, but the way we think, and that some of them, cursed with a kind of acquired sociopathy, emotionally stunted and empty of anything more than a lust – almost sexual in its dogged tenacity - for a power that can be neither questioned nor challenged, are sealed so tightly against both reason and compassion – an empty vault closed to all - that nothing human is allowed to enter, while we, to them, are meant only to serve in servile and destitute silence…
 Some compare the present to the past, and if they find the present to be worse, they will seek to change the present by working to return us to the past, but if they find the present to be better, they will find little reason for any change.  Others compare the present to the future, and if they fear that the future will be worse, they, too, will find little reason for any change, but if they believe that the future will be better, they will seek to change the present by working towards that future.  
 Therefore, the ones who will work for change are those who find either the past or the future to be better than the present, though because history reveals that, despite the enduring obstacles and the uneven pace of our progress, we continue to advance towards a better world, it is those who believe in a better future who will be the true agents of that progress, and whose broad knowledge of our history and deep faith in our humanity will allow us, one day, to arrive at that better world at last.
 The only power that can save us from us rests with us – no god, no pantheon of gods, no alien civilization, no discovery, no revelation, no petition, no prayer (those plaintive appeals to an imagined incarnation of justice), and no bright distraction will rescue us from ourselves if we ourselves do not; yet a crisis, if it is threatening enough to awaken the sleeping among us, can then incite a revolutionary solidarity among the majority which will, once established, overwhelm the tyrannies that have kept us from our destiny – that crisis has now arrived.
 Yet if now there are, by sheer number, more brutes swaggering towards the nearest camera for their stammering audition before a spent legion of silent viewers, there are also more who are ready to oppose them, and who are raising their children to love genuinely, imagine freely, and to seek the joy that can be found in the brighter realms of astonishment.  We can win our world away from those who now would claim it as their own, though that triumph, won through revolution, will be celebrated only by our children, and perhaps only by their own, because it will not be won while we, their adoring but mortal guides, still live, though we can travel on, our happiness complete, knowing we had helped to build a road towards the only paradise worth dying for.  
 Still, I am sentimental (a will to remembrance that pleads to share), and as I share with you my hope that I am wrong in the darker share of my assessment, that a father’s love and his labors against our loss have made of worry his finest gift, and of the day’s news a false prophecy of lasting night, I sign off forever with the hope for a creative and humane revolution, and the assurance that all I want, all that you must want, is an end to our governance by greed, arrogance, and cruelty, and instead by nothing less than love…
 Or, to put all that I have said here another way: to those who have power but no heart I would say, you are hurting our world, and thus my son, too, and all whom I love, and all whom I will, and that you are not permitted to do.    
 Thank you so much - now speak up…act up…rise up - but do this for each other, and do this with love…
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symbianosgames · 8 years ago
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The following blog post, unless otherwise noted, was written by a member of Gamasutra’s community. The thoughts and opinions expressed are those of the writer and not Gamasutra or its parent company.
Harmony and the Kludge in Game Design Lewis Pulsipher
Harmony and its opposite, the kludge, are fundamental to good game design. Games that lack harmony or have in-harmonious aspects have a handicap, though some succeed. Fortunately, most of the in-harmonious games are never published, or only self published. Players don't always recognize the in-harmony but its existence still affects the game. Designers may not recognize in-harmony if they think of the game as “My Baby.” But designers need to recognize it and get it out of the game.
So what is harmony? This is hard to pin down. It's like harmony in music, something you can hear and can recognize when harmony is not present. Here is a long quote from a 1997 lecture where this concept of harmony comes from:
Brian Moriarty: http://ift.tt/2q6Z9Pk     “It’s something you feel. How do you achieve this feeling that everything works together? Where do you get this harmony stuff? Well, I’m here to tell you that it doesn’t come from design committees. It doesn’t come from focus groups or market surveys. It doesn’t come from cool technology or expensive marketing. And it never happens by accident or by luck. Games with harmony emerge from a fundamental note of clear intention.”
I think Moriarty moves into the touchy-feely as he goes on, but you can look it up and see what he has to say. I'm using a simpler definition: “everything in the game feels as though it belongs there and contributes to the purpose and feeling of the game as a whole.” That's harmony. It's important because games are not just collections of mechanics. Not just data. Not just metrics. Games make intellectual and emotional impressions on players, and lack of harmony is noticeable, sometimes clearly, sometimes in subtle ways. The effect is not good for the intellectual and emotional impression.
Harmony is not the same thing as “elegance,” in fact I hesitate to use the word elegance because it's used by fans of certain kinds of tabletop games as a bludgeon to attack fans of other kinds tabletop games, who in turn react very negatively to the word. ”Elegant” is often used in much the same sense as “clever.” It's usually used in relation to abstract games or practically abstract games, games that are not models of some reality.
Harmony isn't cleverness, it’s something that affects the game as a whole. It's about appropriate fit. Now what's appropriate fit depends on what standards people are using, and those standards have changed and very much loosened over the years. Think about movies and TV shows over the years. What makes sense? The screen has always required a heavy “suspension of disbelief”, but those entertainments have consistently become less believable. People will accept all kinds of foolishness and huge plot-holes because the program is otherwise entertaining. and we’re getting the same thing in games.
I love Star Wars for the adventure, but when I first watched the original Star Wars I came out of the theater and said “this is dumb” and “that is a big plot-hole” but I (in the long run) accepted it because “it’s a movie.”
I still have SOME standards even for movies. The Starship Troopers movie (monsters in outer space) had us travel 80,000 light years and then forget that we can use tanks or helicopters! Monsters farted unguided missiles, yet the human fleet stayed tightly packed together in space to make itself a good target! It's just ludicrous. Yet it was a popular movie that begetted a couple sequels.
The same kind of loosening of standards of disbelief has happened in game design. People often treat games more as time killers or something mildly engaging to do while they socialize, than as actual entertainment or something worth *focusing* on. So they let things go by that would not have been accepted many years ago.
All right. What's the opposite of harmony? The Kludge. I borrow this term from software (“kludgy” is the adjective that's used.) A kludge is a tacked-on solution to a particular problem, or a solution that works but isn’t consistent with the rest of the program. In software though not in games it's also hard to understand and modify.
The Kludge is hard to define in game design because one man's kludge is another man's “nothing wrong with that.” How do you notice the kludges if the game is a model of something? The kludge will usually be inconsistent with the rest of the model, and may have nothing at all to do with what's being modeled. It may be there to fix some design flaw. When I play games I sometimes ask, why am I doing this particular thing? If the only answer I can find is “because it fixes a design flaw,” or “because the designer liked it,” or “I have no clue why it's here,” then it is probably a kludge.
What about kludges in abstract games? A kludge is less obvious because the game doesn’t represent anything (other than “a game”).  Abstracts are collections of mechanics, different from a model where the context should help people play the game, and the mechanics are expected to represent something that happens in a real world.  Nonetheless, in abstracts you can have a mechanic that doesn't fit with the rest, that doesn't mix well or doesn't seem to have a useful function, or clearly should've been replaced with something else, or simply should have been removed from the game.
Where do kludges come from? Often they are added to games to solve a problem that appeared in testing. Or perhaps the designer realized it would be a problem, and added it before the testing. Most of the time it's added to fix a demonstrated flaw, but at other times, it's in the game because the designer liked it, even though it doesn't fit with what he ended up with. (Remember, games often end up some “distance” from where the designer originally intended.) He or she isn't willing to take it out, isn't willing to “shoot their baby”. It could be the original idea itself, yet the game has developed in another direction. At that point, the designer should shoot the original, get it out of there, but it's emotionally hard for a designer to do.
Now some examples. These are from well-known, successful games, so that you’ll be able to relate to what I’m explaining. Games can succeed despite kludges; but the more you have, the less likely that the game will be good.
Catan, which used to be known as Settlers of Catan: both the robber and the monopoly cards. Keep in mind there’s not a lot of interaction in Catan between the players except for the trading, and there's little you can do to actually hinder another player after the initial setup.
I think the designer saw the difficulty of hindrance, and decided to add the Robber, which has *nothing* to do with the rest of the game. It doesn't fit at all in any way, shape, or form, but was added to provide a way for a player to hinder another player or at least have the potential to hinder other players. It has nothing to do with the settling model. If it represented mere bandits, a player’s soldiers would be able to do something about it, nor do bandits affect a budding newly-settled region the way they can an old, over-populated region.
Catan is supposed to be a game about trading, but I've seen many players who don't trade much. The monopoly card takes all of a particular resource from all the other players and puts them into the hand of the player who played the monopoly card. Then others are forced to trade if they want to get that resource, or wait a long time for more of that resource to be produced. Perhaps someone can come up with an explanation (not excuse) of how this would happen in the real world, I cannot. I think the designer added that card to make people trade, thinking of the groups where there's otherwise not much trading.
Catan is very popular and is a decent design that was in the right place at the right time, although technically speaking it has these kludges.
How about Risk, the US pre-2008 version, not the newer version based on missions? Some of those earlier versions had mission cards, but they didn't work well. In 2008 Risk was revised with missions to make it quite a different game. In old Risk, the territory cards are kludges in two senses. First, they were an artificial method, and by artificial I mean there's no correspondence with reality, of encouraging players to attack. You have to a conquer a territory to get a card; it was something to try to discourage turtling, which is nonetheless quite common in Risk.
Second, you turn in the cards for armies. That's there to bring the game to a conclusion, because you have an increasing number of armies that can get very large. The game is pretty long as is, but it's very long without increasing numbers of armies, which I have played a number of times. Instead of going up to 50 armies and more I used 4-6-8-4-6-8-4-6-8, but that makes it a very long game.
Two kludges to solve (or at least mitigate) a fundamental problem in the game: the game didn't naturally come to a conclusion. The game didn't naturally encourage people to attack. So the cards were added for those purposes.
Let’s consider the online video games World of Tanks and World of Warships. In big video games like these both harmony and the kludge become obscured. We could probably say that it's easier to make a harmonious game that's relatively small and focused rather than one quite big.
In World of Tanks the entire idea of 15 versus 15 randomly assigned teams is a kludge, in the sense that it has nothing to do with real warfare, but it's necessary to make the online game practical for a very large audience. In World of Warships the overall kludge is to play in a small area, usually amongst lots of islands, places where real world battleships and aircraft carriers virtually never went. In both games we have the bizarre mix of nationalities of equipment: German and French and English and Russian tanks or ships on the same side, and possibly 15 different tanks or 12 different ships on a team. It's also a necessary kludge but has nothing to do with reality. So both games break down as models of reality, and the kludges are obvious.
But in video games there are many conventions, normal modes of design, that are ridiculous kludges but necessary to make a game of it. (Consider the ammo and medpacks sitting all over the place in shooters, or even respawning itself - awful kludges.) When is a kludge no longer a kludge? When almost everyone accepts it as necessary, I guess.
Let's take a tabletop game such as Eclipse, which is ostensibly a Euro-fied 4X space game. It's almost a wargame, almost an exploration game, almost this, almost that, but ultimately unsatisfactory (for me). The major kludge in the game is that players are awarded hidden-value victory points for fighting, and fighting early on tends to give you higher value points because you draw a number of VP pieces and throw some back into the supply. You’re encouraged to fight repeatedly as you can draw again whenever you fight. I think this was added when the rest of the game resulted in little fighting, because people didn't gain enough from fighting. What they were likely to lose in assets was more than they were willing to risk for the possible gain. So the victory points were added well.
Rewards for fighting make no sense in the 4X model, or any reasonable model. Your surviving units gain experience when you fight, yes, but you lose a lot of ships and people, and that experience in the overall context should not be worth a lot (if any) of victory points. Military forces are a means to an end, not an end in itself. In a game I watched, about half of the overall points for five of the six players came from fighting, which is ridiculous. They were roughly equal to the points for holding the solar systems that had been discovered. In the long run what do you think is more important? Wars are economic, after all.
There are other flaws in the game. For example, the results of exploration are that space is mostly impassable. I think that's deliberate, to avoid and out-and-out wargame, but it doesn't fit one's idea of space as wide-open territory. That makes the extermination part of 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) ineffective even with the fighting points.
Again, how do you recognize a kludge? I’d say it's easier to find things you think are kludges in a game you don't like than ones you do like. Also we have the limitation that some designers of puzzle-like games, whether they’re single player video games or solo tabletop games or cooperative games, tend to add things to make the puzzle solution more difficult. I come in heavily on the side of this motto: “A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.” I think that’s an alternative definition of harmony. Given that motto, I see many of those puzzle-maker additions as kludges.
This is not something you can rigidly define or easily pin down, it requires self-critical thinking.  It doesn’t matter what specific mechanics you use, whether already very popular or brand new (the latter very rare). What matters is how they work together as a whole. Designers need to recognize the in-harmonious, and excise it!
My Patreon is at:  http://ift.tt/2gShTQU My thanks for the generous support from Rossan 78.
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