At one time, when my son was a small boy I would ask him:

Where do you live?

He answered with good sense:
“Street so and so, second floor.”

I would smile and correct him didactically:

“No Daniel, you live in the Endless, immense Universe, in the Virgo Supercluster, the Milky Way Galaxy of numberless, huge, stars and planets, the Solar System, on our good old Planet Earth, continent Europe, Switzerland, Geneva, by the lake Leman on the Rhone river, in Onex, rue Gros-Chêne, 14A, second floor. You live in the World.”

He understood what I meant, quickly, like a smart kid; and he lives his adult life accordingly (or almost).

                                                                                                                   *

It is good to know where you live. It arms you to to think out of the box. It also helps you when little people bother you or have thrown you again into Joseph's* pit.

                                                                                                                   *

There are countries, recently “freed” where people do not realise the meaning of managed addresses and identities. They are not aware of how they are purposefully, methodically, dwarfed in their soul by the mere microscopic placement of their home address or name. In other countries, still "free", people are slow to understand that our freedom is steadily eroded by the inexorable invasion of tagging and numbering us to fit the "needs" and purposes of mindless bureaucrats and machines.
 
There is a hamlet in France, where I use to go and enjoy being alone in a huge green space bordered by woods. The address there used to be one's name and a traditional name of the corner, that was all. Recently, an all powerful and visibly rational local committee decreed progress and applied their own imaginative intelligence. They gave good solid numbers to each isolated farm, determined by the distance in meters from their landmark and meaningful reference, the garbage collection points on the main roads. Suddenly, from number one in their own home and castle the inhabitants became number 766, 129, 302 and the like. Alone on the hill but boxed in, with a figure. That is progress. As we suffer all this numbering to advance and soon be tattooed or chipped under our skin for easy identification and the order's sake, be certain that our liberty and dignity will grow accordingly.

Good people, billions of them, consider normal to be recognized to exist and be enabled to sign with their name only after being identified as: identity complete, birth date and detailed place, card number XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX, series XXX, delivered by local authority XYZ now confirmed as living in Region XX, City XXXXXXXX, Sector XX, Bloc XXX, Door XX, Staircase Xb, floor XX, app. XX. Add to this some more categories and you marvel what is left which is still yours. As the world population grows, the zeros preceding your identification code will grow too. These zeros are political statements situating the measure of your freedom.

In such micro-managed address there is no reference, of course, of Europe, the World, Earth and so on, only a hint of how insignificant and replaceable individuals are; but the same poor people still get harangued – daily -  of being responsible for the greenness of the whole planet, the regular famine in the third world, the barbarianism of oppression far away and the huge bright promise of Paradise and Progress which is living in One Global World, free, open, modern and civilised.
 
* Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers

I am a reader, not one of those so called writers. 

Mine is the unseen, unrewarded work, without which written words have no reason to be. I do not need to be fair. Faceless as I am, I am the final judge of books. I cut books to my size. 

I determine - with my powers to understand and my view - what is in fact written there on the pages. Gifted indeed the writer able to influence my "reader response" to join his view.

The intentions I discern are the ones that come to be real. The ugliness I see, be it my own, becomes the author's. The beauty I see, is my gift to him, to her. For everybody knows that beauty is solely in the eyes of the beholder.

Lucky the pen strong enough to carry me with its flow, the one sharp enough to get past my armour !

When I am a bad reader I look with slant eyes to catch the mistake; weakness found makes me feel better. When I am indifferent, I lean back and say "amuse me, let me see what you are worth, clown!"

When I am of the good ones, I knock, ask the books questions and try to wake up the sleeping wisdom in them, I adorn them generously with the beauty and the thoughts found in me; I colour them with the living sap of my experiences...

Then, books glow.

Where is the monument to the nameless reader?

​The wisdom of Montaigne is of a sort that will come to be needed again*; that of the thinker who makes his life worth living in times of the beast. 

Let us face it, there is a time for everything; under tyranny, wisdom is opportunistic; or silent. Genius, to change the world, must stay alive.

Servitude is distasteful and its compromises are ugly ; you survive crawling like a worm. 

But there is still choice; as the witty epigram put it in my youth,

"the race of worms is not just wriggling ilk;
some make us sick
but some, make silk" [1] 


Prudent Montaigne was of the silk-giving kind. In fact he was born in silk, lived in silk and his ways were silky, pleasant to the touch. As for his work, it was of the world changing class.

Montaigne is heavy artillery disguised as fireworks.

                                                                                  *

Montaigne’s work, The Essays, sprouted – as a strange, untimely flower – from the middle of arbitrary rule and fanaticism, at the peak time of witch-hunting in Europe - the sixteenth century. You would not imagine living there. His feat was to plant a seed of independent thinking in the belly of the beast, without becoming a martyr. Born an insider to the system, he enjoyed privilege and approval, made a career, while being as I see him, a most effective dissident. Internal exile seems to be the way of life of genius in bad times; lack of wisdom would be to die for proud impatience of speech.

In a "disturbed sick state" of religious persecution, censorship, savage civil war and plague, in an epoch where (as it often happens in history) might was right, under the inquisitive eye of absolute Monarchy and Church, Montaigne is inner freedom, critical spirit, the I, smiling, in gentlemanly attire; a quiet one-man revolution in human dignity and civilisation. He accomplishes to live unbent in a crooked world.

Montaigne had to learn how to navigate an ocean of insecurity, a reign of cynicism, chaos, stupidity and malice; he did. His, was what I like to call a strategy of the cork - living the now, and consciously evolving relative to ebb and flow of stormy tide, with one clear, floating landmark  - keep at the surface, do not founder into wickedness. His way of being free - and of freeing other people - was to craft choices to navigate the complexity of unfreedom.

                                                               *

In his daily life, he was a reliable conservative gentleman, careful to heed Christ and give Caesar what is Caesars' and to God what is God's [2]. What was his, he kept for himself. 

In writing, the moralist played the tradition of the wise fool, gently; behind the Fool, hides the mountain. He worked to change the world from a position of weakness.

                                                                *

While practising subversion of authority (knowingly or instinctively, what do I know?), Michel Eyquem, freshly accepted country gentleman descending from fish and wine merchants and Marrano patricians, parvenu to French nobility, achieves to be regarded and even better, to live like a grand seigneur of agreeable company and vital counsel to royals as different as Henry III, Catherine de Medici and Henry IV of Navarre. 

Mysteriously, the distracted, lazy, dreamy Sieur de Montaigne, always about to retire in the arrière boutique of his ivory tower, tormented by his kidney stones, uninterested in having any power in his hands, is found discretely central in the negotiations to convince Henry of Navarre that Paris is well worth a Mass [3]. Unimportant and anonymous as he pretended to be, he still gets imprisoned at the Bastille, from where Catherine de Medici, that proverbially nice, charitable lady, extracts him urgently: "Touche-pas à mon pote!" This outsider was just too useful, irreplaceable to waste.

The apparent chatterbox was a prudent master of silence; not many people are able to speak so candidly and write so much without ever bragging or allowing secrets to escape their lips. Nothing transpires on his pages from the intrigues of the princes, the negotiations of the factions or the Bordeaux city real politics.

Because he was discreet and kept away from the civil war mêlée, he was solicited, named and summoned in absence to be mayor of the troubled city of Bordeaux, rara avis able to mediate between Catholics and Protestants under the climate well symbolized by the Saint Bartholomew Night massacre. Public savagery preserves a touch of common sense asking help from is opposite.

                                                                *

Meanwhile, he wrote and re-wrote his increasingly bold book – the lasting achievement.

He finds a flabbergasting stratagem to spread different ideas – reflexive writing. He writes to himself, about himself, as if. He does not write like others do about truth of the world, the Universe, nor about religion, just about himself, “domestic and private” ideally naked like a cannibal; it is not about reality he writes, no, no, simply about his intimate person, his body – thumb and prick included and his mind, about the strange, unimportant, private thoughts visiting his playful imagination. 

He, a humble sinner, is simply spending rich hours trying his hand and fantasy at attempting mere Essays.

The Essays omit to mention how prudent and skilful he was in difficult circumstances with kings, queens and inquisitors. Instead, he only describes his skill with robbers. It was not a biography or a chronicle. For a change, he relates in detail how weak he was, the blunders he did, how he never knew what he forgot, how little he knew and how uncertainly. 

In fact, he was an adroit social man, a born diplomat able to work with all warring factions at the same time, able to dialogue with Inquisition and get approved a free-thinking book by the Pope; but he does not highlight his successes or the events he influenced. He complains in detail about his pains and his clumsiness, his inattention. The man he depicts - am ivory tower  gentleman so small and weak - suggests that a great spirit is amazingly simple, a human being as we all can be. This is why so many people recognise themselves in his book.

                                                                  *

Montaigne is a great author, indirectly. We cannot measure his influence so much by thankful quotes from later peers as by the reaction of great authors who opposed his ideas and who built on that opposition, often without quoting his name. Influence does not mean enslaving followers, rather making people think - their way - to what you propose. He is great by "the share which his mind had in influencing other minds" [4]. Contemporaries liked his prose and maybe, the noble ladies opened their minds without detecting all the implications. Later generations lived by his ideas, often without minding the source.

His tour de force in proliferating the ferment of critical spirit was executed with such a light touch, with velvet gloves, in such a pleasant, moderate, deferential, conservative, opportunistic, entertaining, exotic, metaphoric, unassuming manner, that King and Pope actually like it; it took almost a century for Inquisition to notice the chain-reaction of critical thought set alight in 1580 by his charming gossip and to forbid the Essays in 1676. 

Too late! The Montaigne attitude trickled into Shakespeare, his “I am my book” and "what do I know?" irritated Francis Bacon to retort “Of myself I say nothing” [5] and to demonstrate with Method how certainly science can know the world. His surprisingly constructive scepticism fascinated Pascal [4.a] and challenged Descartes to affirm the absolute power of Reason. He will inspire Diderot and water Rousseau. Kant knew by heart entire passages from him, and built on his scepticism. Nietzsche delighted in his critical spirit and started playing with matches. His seemingly introspective book instituted quietly the reference Weltanschauung of being civilised, of the modern individual, of equality and tolerance. If you seek an example to personify Civilization when marching ahead, Montaigne is one.

                                                                                *

Why do I believe that Montaigne was wise?

Because his work appears to be the first self conscious and comprehensive attempt to query the entire European heritage "What can you tell me about how to live?" [5a]

Consider that wisdom was understood by the sages as the vehicle to living a happy life, with the meaning that such good life is one worth living. With Montaigne I find an instance to observe that the way towards such flourishing must must learn from the past, learn from Plutarch and Seneca, but also judge with our own head and fit the real world where we are born. 

We may know much wisdom, generate many words of wisdom but we are wise as much as we live wisely, in such a way that makes our life enviable and admirable, in our own world, not in the next.

                                                                             *

A wise life à la Montaigne, in times where persecution is at work, is one in which you keep safe, productive and free inside, while you adapt, for fear and for duty, to the sorry country and times where you are born: “I shelter where the storm drives me.” [6]  

His, as Stefan Zweig observed [7] was "freedom with a rattle of chains."

This sort of Good life is prudent well being and self-respect, as much as times allow. You keep positive. You live a normal life. You enjoy each stolen epicurean moment, as the bird in hand is worth two in the bush; you keep adroitly out of harm's way, avoid hurt and poverty. Stoic sages help you at this time with a rule to consider only that which is of you, which you can do and to keep at distance from that which is beyond your powers:

“Some things are under our control, while others are not under our control.
Under our control are conception, choice, desire, aversion, and, in a word,
everything that is our own doing ; not under our control are our body, our
property, reputation, office, and, in a word, everything that is not our own doing.” [8] 

For that which you agree, you do your best in full view, with modest enthusiasm; even as you can do so little. For lack of anything better, you pride questionably in the thing well done.

Where you differ, you act obliquely, by not doing the wrong thing right, by the power of inaction, absence and silence, by that which you do not do and do not say, by esoteric allusion. 

You trust, perilously without reserve, a few good friends. Inside your inner garden you hide Paradise: beauty and wisdom and sincerity, in the company of the great authors who keep alight the flame of civilisation in spite of history perennially wretched.

While you compromise in all this dubious business of survival and comfort, for the sake of privilege empowering your action, you work nevertheless to be a good person, to keep hands clean, to preserve respect for yourself and the other, to give something, so that you are more than a worm.

The common intellectual will do so much and hope the better for their children. Geniuses, like Rabelais, Maimonides, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Bacon or Montaigne will also nurture a much greater plan, a Masterpiece to endure; that is paid with even murkier dissimulation, compromise and double-talk. 

Of course there are alternatives to such dissembling; innumerable sincere martyrs chose to die for ideas, of few of them we even know, like Simon Peter, Imam Husayn, Wycliffe, Thomas More, Jan Huss, Giordano Bruno or Jane d’Arc. Meanwhile, the mass, chooses to drift. The worst, grow genuinely corrupt, to serve the evil masters better than requested.
                                                                                    *

Micheau Eyquem is the case for spoiling your kids, provided you give them the education of a prince. 

His father was an energetic, rich, ambitious upstart, keen of humanistic ideals. The great books of the classics adorned his walls and his friends illustrated the best of Renaissance humanism. He imagined with them a home-curriculum in new education for the benefit of his son.

While he, the Father, worked hard and humble to grow richer and to rise to nobility, he fancied little Micheau, first surviving child, to be special, an experiment in humanism; first two years sent away in a peasant family to understand simplicity and "real life"; next several years with a Latin tutor, spoken to exclusively in Latin, to become a native speaker of classic culture and to have education tailored to him, not him cut to the size of school; after that only, he learned French as a foreign language; then he was sent to an elite college, away from home, to taste social life and constraint as it is... but still among an elite. As his father revered the sages of antiquity and collected their books, Micheau took to actually reading them, in original and without the intimidated feeling of visiting alien countries, it was his mother tongue; when home, the boy was spoilt, woken up with classic music played at his bedside every morning, never doing or learning other than what pleased him, so that he developed the taste to doing just that, all his life.

Freedom in the mind, culture, autonomy, playfulness, liking your life, indulging in vanity but not taking it or oneself too seriously, ability to think by keeping a distance, is the recipe of a critical spirit that will hover above his times.

With such upbringing, Montaigne became inclined to understand the human comedy with detachment, as if from the stars, to form his own opinion unprejudiced by what was said in the foreign language of the locals. At the same time he saw and felt things from close, feet on the ground, as simple and serious as they are for a peasant. Luckily, he was born with a pleasant friendly temper bent to avoid conflict and hurt. So he took life easy and acted always with a light hand. 

Because he was allowed to feel sorry for himself, he felt sorry for other people too, animals included; he could identify with them, imagine being in their place. 

Because he enjoyed life, he grew to respect life and to love it. 

As he saw people around him so different, he learned to accept irreducible difference to be normal and diversity as a natural thing. Additionally, with a catholic father, a mother of Jewish descent and several protestant relatives and friends, he found religious divides irrelevant.

Then came the books, full with the sleeping wisdom of the past; he was one of those thinkers keen to learn from History; he read the old historians’ meaningful accounts and found in them advice for his own time; he saw that human nature keeps us repeating the same errors; he absorbed the many antique anecdotes and sayings of the sages and theories of the philosophers from olden times without taking them as granted; he saw that everybody had to be contradicted and no idea was too foolish to have some philosopher embracing it. 

Here is one man who took Socrates by the letter. Didn’t Socrates say that the unexamined life is not worth living? So he proceeded to do examine his own life and make it worth living. He did that for decades, ceaselessly and in writing so that his book is indeed his person and matures with his mind. 

Did the frontispiece of the Delphi temple enjoin the visitor to know himself?  Montaigne went on to do just that, day and night, dressed or naked. 

Did Socrates claim that his knowledge of his own ignorance was the force that made him wiser than all around him? Montaigne went further, to draw implications. He read the Pyrronian sceptics and was fascinated by the amplified consequence of the Socratic claim: " we know that we know nothing" into the extreme that absolutely everything is so doubtful that there is nothing we can know with certainty; this includes the good sense implication that humans – theologians and priests included - know nothing about God’s ways and thus have no reason to burn people for vain interpretations of creed. So, he turned the nihilistic paradox of absolute scepticism into a tool of freedom: I will doubt everything received, and even my own doubt, and therefore stop troubling myself with theories, keep practical and think with my own mind, as well as I can, humbly enough to avoid stupid, sufficient opinion but also boldly enough to speak with no concern of authority and dogma. I will do what my good sense suggests me and my feeble judgment confirms. 

As I read my own private Montaigne – everybody does - I was tempted to interpret his life and "method" in terms of Taoist wisdom. He did not know the Lao-tzu but lived by it; 
He does not push, he pulls.  
Because he does nothing, much gets done. 
Because he leaves space, things happen as he wants.
Because he takes sides with no one, all sides need him. 
He has many friends because he is a friend.
He can do things because he keeps things simple. 
He goes a long way because he goes with the water.
By knowing himself, he understands other people.
Being unprejudiced, he can talk with all.
As he enjoys himself, he has compassion. 
Because he keeps steadily with the golden mean of moderation, when he is critical, people listen.
He survives for the reason that he is flexible, not the kind to die for ideas.
Because he lets live he is left to live.
​Because he keeps an open house with no walls, little is stolen from him, even harm passes over him.
He is good but he carries a sword.
To be wise – he decided - is not to toil by some perfect saintly model, but to live as you are, better, as well as you can. Wisdom is permanent improvement, not distant ideal.

The unique ability Montaigne has - as a true critical spirit - is to not only see what is wrong in the evil present but also what is good in it; to see through indignant enthusiasm and to equally perceive what is evil in alternative extremes proposed, in the dogmas touted by the opponent to present wrongs. He does think with his own head, moderate and humane amidst madness . «...keep your head when all about you/ Are losing theirs’..." He would have certainly made his Kipling’s words.

Other great thinkers advise us how to become perfect. Montaigne teaches us how to live wisely and better, as we are and where we are. 

                                                                      © 2013  Ioan Tenner & Daniel Tenner
_______________

* It may look strange for me to write so bluntly about such a subject, in a normal time and a free country; but this is why I can do it, I am not a persecuted dissident but a retired elder man with no career ambition and no tenure to defend. Some scholars could write about this much better but they will not do it; they are wise. As for me, I believe that sharing such knowledge may be generous and useful.

[1] George Ranetti : Cugetare 
“Sunt şi-ntre viermi, în viaţă
Deosebiri de clase:
Sunt viermi ce fac...doar greaţă
Şi viermi ce fac mătase!” 

[2] Luke 20:25: "He said to them, "Then give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's."

[3] Paris is well worth a Mass (Paris vaut bien une messe) Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, Random House, 2004

[4] Hovey, K. A., "Mountaigny Saith Prettily": Bacon's French and the Essay, PMLA, Vol. 106, No. 1 (Jan., 1991), p.72 the share which his mind had in influencing other minds"

[4a] "Ce n'est pas dans Montaigne, mais dans moi, que je trouve ce que j'y vois ." Pensées (1670)

[5] “De nobis ipsis silemus” Francis Bacon, The Great Instauration, preface to New Organon

[5a] Schneewind.,J., B.,  Moral Philosophy from Montaigne to Kant, Cambridge U.P., Cambridge, 2003

[6] Horace, Epistles I.i.14) 

[7] Zweig Stefan, Montaigne, PUF, Quadrige, Paris, 1982

[8] THE ENCHEIRIDION OF EPICTETUS in Epictetus, Vol II, Harward Univ. Press, Loeb C. L., Cambridge, 1952 p 483

I thank Professor Claude Blum and Classiques Garnier Numérique for precious access to the magnificent Corpus Montaigne, Classiques Garnier Numérique  http://www.classiques-garnier.com/numerique-bases/index.php?module=App&action=FrameMain&colname=ColMontaigne

Does it ever happen to you that important things you need to say are hopelessly misunderstood?

Did you feel that the words available confuse your thinking instead of helping you to understand and to express your truth?

Did you ever feel abused with words misinterpreted by hypocrites?

Did you suffer the irritating bad faith and bullying of politically correct language or langue de bois?

Did you get censored and ridiculed when you wanted to explain that some important word does not only mean an officially defined thing but more or different truth?

If you experienced this, you have an interest to ask who has the right to decide what words mean. It is time to become owner of the words you use.

                                                                                        *


The freedom of words reflects the freedom of thinking and in good part also makes it. Minds are as free as their words. 

Our right to free speech and to freedom of thought became common place, at least in our part of the world; but this right, even granted by law, isn't worth much without mental means rich enough to think well with our own head and to express what we think. Those means are mostly words; better said, what we mean behind those words, in our mind.

The richness of one’s vocabulary measures one’s freedom deeper that the right to speak. Still, knowing words is not enough. 

Our thinking is free and our speech unhindered only when we made the words we know ours, by understanding what they mean and by making them represent reliably our point of view. Else, our thought and speech is sterile milling of received phrases.

                                                                                         *

I became convinced that all the good logic we learn cannot make us think with intelligence or wisely if the words - while they follow each other in proper reason - are poor in shades, not true to the nuances of the world and not true to our point of view. 

If the words are "garbage-in," our logic, be it perfect, is worth as much. 

                                                                                         *

It seems to me, that some words available to us are frozen fingers. They got carefully tweaked in their history, eroded, maimed, mis-defined goodthinked and instituted in a way that prevents not only voicing differing view but even naming or understanding important realities and opinions so that we could use our own judgment. This is not new:

"1 And the whole earth was of one language, and of one speech.
2 And it came to pass, as they journeyed from the east, that they found a plain in the land of Shinar; and they dwelt there.
3 And they said one to another, Go to, let us make brick, and burn them thoroughly. And they had brick for stone, and slime had they for morter.
4 And they said, Go to, let us build us a city and a tower, whose top may reach unto heaven; and let us make us a name, lest we be scattered abroad upon the face of the whole earth.
5 And the LORD came down to see the city and the tower, which the children of men builded.
6 And the LORD said, Behold, the people is one, and they have all one language; and this they begin to do: and now nothing will be restrained from them, which they have imagined to do.
7 Go to, let us go down, and there confound their language, that they may not understand one another's speech.
8 So the LORD scattered them abroad from thence upon the face of all the earth: and they left off to build the city.
9 Therefore is the name of it called Babel; because the LORD did there confound the language of all the earth: and from thence did the LORD scatter them abroad upon the face of all the earth."[1]   

Probably the Babel-deception - corrupting the words to make free thought hard and its communication impossible - is a tacit, time-tested rule of ruling, not organised conspiracy; nevertheless it is real. If you want to own your mind, better be aware of this.

Welcome then to Logomachy - the Battle of the Words. This is warfare too big for one person alone or for one lifetime, but we can still do something about it, even individually, as I will try to illustrate with my own modest sketchy notes. 

Read The Rectification of Meaning if you care to follow my thought.

_____________
  
[1] Genesis 11 KJV
 

​To join some new place, we enter stage carefully, politely; humble, shy like guests, eager to be accepted, knowing that there is no second chance to make a first impression. We do the needed steps at our best to show our best. It is, unknowingly, a rite of threshold passage; a newcomer, “separated” from somewhere else, still “an outsider”, who petitions to become “like us”.


There is good reason to do the same effort when you leave. This comes not always natural and some think that it does not matter any more. But it does, for those left behind and even more, for us. There is no second chance for a last impression.  You can benefit or be lastingly damaged while leaving.



Time comes, inevitably, when things end. You move, you quit, you are dismissed, a term consumed, the place closed down. Or you found something better. Change.

Ending good times is hugged and kissed with beautiful sadness and risen toasts; but when the heart is heavy and unsatisfied, in unfriendly climate, hurt, with a powerless sense of loss, quality parting is less natural... Separation, like divorce, is hard, often a life-crisis. The centrifugal forces are at work towards nowhere-land. You are about to cross the divide between those who are inside and those who are outside. Partir, c'est mourir un peu...

You feel the instinctive urge to break quickly, abruptly, to strike. Better a fearful end than endless fear. The instinct is to "fight or flight” [1]. Just turn away and go, with a snap at those who come too close. Or slam the door to let steam off and make people hear. Some, who did not treat you right, do not deserve anything else. Their unfinished business will not be yours any more. 
​
In fact, if your deliberate choice is to be remembered no matter how, you can use the old Zeigarnik [2]  effect - suddenly suspending everything in mid-air and walking out by surprise at an odd moment; or, if it is your justified interest to do it, not just bad mood, you can prepare a “Parthian shot” [3] – a compelling and punishing problem you let loose while you depart, a poisoned legacy you unveil or leave quietly in your stead. This is what you do if you do not care for parting well done.

                                                                            *

Behave instead as well as when you came. Finish in style. Even with bad feelings you have good reasons to do the right steps of separation, wisely. 

Departure well done is a framework that protects you from being impaired while you leave. Do not botch the rite of separation [4] which must be carried out to close the doors behind you and free your hands, your soul, for new life.

- First of all, part properly because your self-respect needs to behave constantly in accord with who you are; a gentleman is a gentleman even in the gutter. The way you “loose” speaks very loudly, to other people but also to you. It is in the difficult moments that people find out who you really are. You too. You have no excuse to say "I do as they deserve". No, you do as you deserve.

- Second, you are made of what you do, your well-being and view of the world are built of your events assimilated and nothing will delete a mean souvenir. You may not realise now, but you will live your memories repeatedly, and they are all you keep - they will stay with you, want it or not. Bitter things said and done, necessary things not done, farewells failed, unfinished business that does not rest in peace, will weigh unconsciously in your bag like lingering ghosts. Don't poison your blood.

- Third, the sages teach us " Do not spit in the well, you may need to drink from it, again..." It is not the end of the World just of this little world. The future is weaving threads of surprise, where you meet enemies again in narrow streets, and need good will from those who do not count today.

                                                                                            *

The elements of proper parting: conclude, signify the close, take farewell

Dress well for the last days if common sense allows it; a white shirt and dark tie, the right robe that fits you, signal well that you count at the burial. In fact your tie tells quietly that this is a burial.

Accept that this is a serious situation. Denial is worsening things. Do not pretend to be cheerful.

When several people leave, there is often an embarrassed climate of disunion, each one for himself, live and let die; do not indulge in this. Do not be natural! Smile with solidarity, encourage, offer sympathy. Say 'us" for a last time, if you can. Instead of picking on each other like rats crowded, you can chose to support each-other or, if justified, to pick together on one deserving to be bitten.

Tour one-by-one the people you know, with a good word for each, careful not to omit someone who does not deserve neglect. As you speak, say goodbye with your eyes, looking in people's eyes, not sideways. Confirm identities and roles, the same way you bowed respectfully when you arrived; call people by their name, say their titles, flatter them with their merits and power, if your stomach allows it. You should confirm identity and respect due, even when you fire someone or especially then.
 
Exchange little gifts, souvenirs; imperishable solid little nothings for those you want to remember you and nice perishable little nothings for the others.

Signal "keeping in touch". Exchange addresses and phone numbers, as useless as they seem to you now.

Give hints that you will give good reference in the future, if that is possible and with care not to be abused. Make to others a small gift of courage; remind that the journey continues.

Do not accept exit interviews - that is final insult and manipulation - but give exit feedback, good and also, if justified, hostile criticism - with due care not to have it used against you. Do not volunteer criticism, do not document facts, just interpretation.

Initiate some form of ceremony. A modest event, some symbolic sacrifice offered, is an essential signpost when you end things, a full stop that frees you to go. Sit down, eat and drink together, it is a strong symbol. Propose a last supper or picnic or toast even when you feel betrayed. If you are inspired, offer a noticeable last word. Some last words last.

Say a prayer if you are a believer or something similar if you believe something else. Let the stupid see this as ridiculous.

I remember myself very angry, but offering a mirror-like salute to my colleagues-to-leave in a company where I met some ugly people who hurt me; I mailed a message “to all” - to thank for all they have done for me and wished them: "May all your dreams come true!" This was not so nice, as quite a few dreams are nightmares, reflecting who we are and what we fear and deserve.

Socrates would tell adieu to the crowd that voted him to drink the hemlock: "The hour of departure has arrived, and we go our ways - I to die, and you to live. Which is better, God only knows." [5] 

Of course, you may choose in some deserved cases, the loudest critique, that of silence. 

To end a time in which you invested your soul, sacrifice something symbolic; you must pay the ferryman. Then, wash your hands.

The Russians have a custom to sit down for a moment, quietly, to think. Sit down for a last time before you go.

                                                                                *

Finally, there is life after life: call soon some people you appreciate and say something nice. This is valuable, as they, like you, feel that they are already forgotten. One of the worst things you can do is not to recognise them when you meet or change the way you treat them because they are no more "in". Let false friends behave like that.

                                                                                 *

To a moment of uncertainty and ugliness you can bring a touch of beauty and hope. A gentleman is a gentleman even in the gutter.

----------------------------------------------------

[1] Cannon, W. B. (1932). The wisdom of the body. New York: Norton.

[2] Zeigarnik, Bluma, "Über das Behalten von erledigten und unerledigten Handlungen," ( On finished and unfinished tasks), Psychologische Forschung, 1927 9 (1), 1 - 85. 

[3] Parthian shot, often simplified by current language to “parting shot”: The Parthian warriors of old practiced this tactic – taken over by most mounted archers – to feign running away in defeat and then, while fleeing, turn on their adversary with an unexpected volley of deadly arrows.
​
[4] Some classic books explain the theory behind my simple advice: A. Van Gennep, Les Rites de Passage, Paris, 1909 and Mircea Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation – The Mysteries of Birth and Rebirth, Spring, Woodstock, 1995

[5] [Plato, Apology, Tr. Benjamin Jovett]

If the encounter is brief, 

while you are still you and the face to face is just a small sign, 

a wink from her passing by, or a near miss quickly gone, 

the thought that you are about to die is 
- afterwards -

a magic wand that made your life substantially longer, whatever its remaining duration may be in fact. 

There is no more convincing argument to live better each moment left; or at least differently*.

                                                                     *

You felt that this was it, the whole thing, frozen, with all those lose threads and unfinished plans, that which you started and never ended or not even started but dreamt. It takes a life to miss so many things...

                      Thus shall ye think of all this fleeting world: 
                      A star at dawn, a bubble in a stream; 
                      A flash of lightning in a summer cloud, 
                      A flickering lamp, a phantom, and a dream. [1]

                                                                     *

Strange! When, my dog, Tao died in my hands, I felt shrieking pain. More than this time for myself. That death felt unbearable. All I suffer now is sadness; deep, gray, heavy, like the distant humming of rising storm. I felt the same years ago during an earthquake waiting to see if I live or not. Nothing, is coming closer. 

                       "What I possess, as if far off I see,
                        And what is gone, becomes reality." [2]

                                                                     *

Winning some, losing some. Life. Not bad after all. What happened to me was because of me. I achieved to only do what I wanted... Well, what I could...

Reluctantly, I draw a line and avoid to sum up that rich harvest but the total is there: 

Indeed, I am nothing.

                                                                     *

Suddenly, the wheel starts screeching again, everything hurts, the void is not yet due.

I see returning things I can decide and do. A living dog is better than a dead lion [2]. And I look again at the belongings and worries that own me - they were vanishing, dust, valueless, one moment ago - now coming back for another reprieve.

I can read more books. Ask more questions. And think. I can plant tomatoes again, a tree, mow the grass, rest my eyes on the horizon, paint the South wall and fix the old roof. True, all this is for the house of tomorrow where I will not be allowed; but my hands will still host those capricious visitors, my heirs.

And I can still write such clumsy little lines, longing without hope to leave in words a trail of the disquiet little spark of spirit I am.

Afterthoughts:
I read my words and now I say: "These are afterthoughts. What do I know what it means to really meet death, not its shadow!"
_________________________________

* My son Daniel found the same and expressed it better than me. 

[1] Buddha, The Diamond Sutra translated by Kenneth Saunders

[2] Goethe, Faust prologue

[2] Ecclesiastes ix:4

The Beast is the human multitude turned inhuman.

Crowds and even nations who commit evil [1] - those deeds which people recognise with horror and indignation, as intolerable to the commonsense humaneness of their times - I call  "The beast".

I define the Beast by measure of what is experienced by its witnesses, because the measure of inhumanity is man, the measure of all things human. Measured, weighted, counted and explained "objectively", beastliness is reduced to "just facts", with no moral significance and feelings lost. Therefore, do not turn to science to understand horror.

The Beast negates the civilised human condition achieved by its age.

The inciters

The rousers of the beast, those who summon it,  may not be the beast itself, the crowd or the individual gone barbaric but those who tease and wake up the beast in other people. The rousers may look like poets, leaders, thinkers and preachers, talented, charismatic and with a big smile on their face. When I describe the beast rising I cannot avoid considering both inciters and the corrupted. Add to this some natural, born beasts and those technology driven social "progresses" inviting inhumanity to flourish.

Beastliness, universally proven to destroy everybody's good life and observed in History to end badly, is certainly an Antipode of wisdom. In fact - by definition - wisdom is a permanent struggle of civilisation with the eternally returning beast. Therefore it is grave neglect of wisdom not to understand the beast and its teasers and not to learn how to fight it.

                                                                                  *
The incidental beast

In the dual nature of a person, part of the individual comes from the biological past and seems to be animal.

Our genes persist from the ancestral animal, ferocious without qualm, born to survive, devour and proliferate; this root is inevitable and vital in our body and creative in our psyche but it is normally tamed and sublimated by education.

An additional, uniquely human brand of cruelty is an eclosion of our very human Mind when depraved downwards into beastliness, in spite of being aware of the savagery of its deeds. This time the tiger lost innocence; atrocity, no more excused by nature's blindness and drive, is aware and wilful, armed and amplified with civilisation’s means of thinking and action, consciously transgressing its values and borders. This happens when cultured people give themselves licence to be beasts by sheer hubris or with the excuse of "higher purpose".

The ferocious individuals who act as instigators and occasionally as leaders, are a minority, alas the anonymous potential beast ready to serve them are legion, as proven by History. Without those numerous followers, the inciters would remain mere bursting pustules of wickedness. 

The passive potential accomplice to beastliness is a normal individual inobservable in a gregarious multitude; this low creature is, I assume, the descendant of the weaker herd or pack animal, accomplice to the leading beast by unquestioned followership. These are people callously indifferent, flatly insensitive to other people's pain and degradation, driven by self-interest only. The humble mob follower is not only ready to neglect, not only ready to assist by cowardice. Such mob also enjoys Schadenfreude - the joy to observe somebody else's loss and harm. This gent has the stomach to participate in the lynching and tearing apart of victims and is ready to feed on them, to loot and profit on them like jackals and gorillas, under pretext that "everybody is doing it", "this is how it is", or even "we must follow the law". 

In times of war, catastrophe, disorder, lawlessness or prevailing oppression, the passive beasts will come forth and enrol in masses to do the detail of the bloody jobs and, because of their number, they were in the past and will be in the future overwhelmingly more effective than the initiators. The potential beasts are hidden into anonymity, modesty and diffusion of responsibility. The passive beasts will of course "only follow their superior's orders."  Loyally. The skies protect us from finding out how many such passive beasts are available among our contemporaries and neighbours!

                                                                             *
The collective beast

From time to time, the individual instigators to beastliness and their potential followers - find favourable conditions to multiply and congregate into collective evil-doers. When grown to a crowd the may turn a nation into the Great Beast. Aggregation amplifies beastliness turning it into "new social order" or "new man" dominant for years or even for generations.

Beyond the individual evildoers, beyond the atrocity of one or another freak, my main concern in this text, is the emergence and contagion of such congregation, the Collective Beast always ready to return among us and make history lapse back. Here comes again the avatar and inheritor of  the crushing authoritarianism of chiefdoms, hordes, tyrannies, absolute kingdoms, dictatorships, religious wars, inquisitions, lynching mobs,  "revolutionary" terrors, brain-washing sects, and police-states.

Worse, as I observe recently, the beast does not come only from a barbarian past, but from the amazing human desire of progress. Dehumanisation has its visionaries and industrialists who invite it to come upon us from the future. A whole new techno-scientific religion lures humanity shamelessly into devaluing our own species and forsaking itself in exchange of promises of perfect, rational, clean  "Trans-humanity" "post-humanity", and the like. My seven signs of the beast are probably insufficient to expose these new tempters.

Beastliness is contagious in a weakened moral tissue. It spreads from one to many, feeding on the functioning of multitude in uncertainty and in critical situations. Lost people, poorly educated generations, are easily  enthused by some grand idea explaining everything and solving all problems in simple popular terms. I believe that whatever truth, whatever noble ideal or creed, turns evil  when it is simplified into exclusive one-way solutions promising to reform the World.

In the Twentieth Century the philosophers called the Great Beast totalitarianism or totalism - the complete, all-embracing hold of an exclusive ideology and movement over all the aspects of life of an entire society. This form of government embodies, I think, the unleashed will to bully and to overpower.  In the name and with the help of some monolithic, simplifying doctrine, whichever comes handy, this primitive mentality of domination turns masses of people from ends, from persons, from agents, into means and objects, spare-parts used and abused and soon corrupted accomplices to intolerable wrongdoing.
 
The unique and defining feature of  the totalitarian beast of beasts is its consequence: not only it does but moreover it makes do evil; it accomplishes not only frightening wrong to its victims (as ferocious criminals do) but also depraves everybody – whole nations - into taking part in evil as a way of life.
 
Indeed, totalitarianism which achieves to dehumanise entire social bodies, whole nations, not only the wrongdoers but even their victims, is radical badness.

While crushing its targets with oppression, harm, torture and death, the social climate created by the beast attains the ultimate madness; it turns the sufferers and the perpetrators alike into inhuman beings: pulls them back from persons into animals or “progresses” them into pawns, robots and raw material for new barbarianism not yet imagined.

Essentially, totalitarian evil degrades the human condition of its times. It is an enemy of Civilisation.
 
In pursuit of some unique idea, as a means towards its Utopian ideal, totalitarianism destroys purposefully and callously the human being, transgresses its standards, negates its basic values, its culture and its civilisation achieved in millenniums of slow progress.

                                                                                      *

The solitary individual beast longing for domination and rape, slumbers in each of us, hopefully jailed under layers of civilisation. It hides behind and among other basic animal instincts and drives which we sublimated, socialised and redirected in urbane ways.

It waits ready to leap, from down there in the dark regions of human nature, beneath good and evil; or, it burgeons out of the nightmarish, unfettered complications of the imagining mind.
 
I do not conceive to reduce dehumanisation to an unique biological root. The incitement to persons' inhumanity may also come from outside, from high above, from fundamentalist turns of religion, from culture, from ideologies, techno-scientific detachment or technology progress which lost its humanity. Recently I judge that it is produced by unintended "systemic" consequences of uncontrolled technology, driven by uncontrolled financial gain. This millennium will offer plenty of material to study technology out of local or national control, which seems to be allowed to take totalitarian control of our lives.

Indeed, the beast may come not only from barbarian fanaticism but also from ideas of prey and machine-like ways of life let lose among us.
 
                                                                             *
 

The universal mentality of the Beast
 
To persecute, to generate fear, the pleasure to hit, to hurt, to torture, the need and enjoyment to bend, to make people do things, to turn them into things (and soon spare-parts), to rape, to kill or at least to bully, to terrorize, to humiliate, to force, to cripple, to dispossess, to plunder, to laminate people equal or to keep them unequal, are - sadly - generic human drives and mentalities. Such transgressive urges of the doctrinaires and of mobs, have no religion, race or ideology.
 
The root as I proposed, is always the same; I believe that this torment of humanity is, at least initially, a fact, biology, omnipresent, normal - behaving like a species of predators; normal for the beast, beastly for Man. For, while I claim that no one shall be held guilty for being born an animal, with a beast inside, there being no guilt either in our most shocking fantasies and thoughts, as civilised humans, we are fully responsible for what we do with controlling those animal urges.

                                                                                    *

Good, common people loathe the beast and would not let it loose; bad ones long secretly to do to others what they hate to be done unto them but, in normal times, hide such drives under a fig-leaf of hypocrisy for shame and fear of punishment.

The occasional burst of subhuman barbarism through the veneer of civilisation, seizing a moment of panic or of anarchy, appears to us civilised citizens of historic nations as irrational, sick, unexplained by duress or overwhelming cause; it must come from the ancestral vital readiness to overpower and devour, now degenerated into harm for harm's sake. This is not a mere hostile disposition or the drive we all have, to lash out, to defend or to take revenge in response to frustration or someone abusing us gravely; it is the unprovoked predatory urge to do what is well known and intuitively agreed in the present culture to be intolerable or horrible.
 
As for the deliberate supra-animal, the intellectual beast considering itself beyond good and evil, its surge is worse; its hubris comes from cultivated idle hands, armed and amplified with true knowledge, theory, absolute ideas, power, wealth, wide vision and mighty technology. It emerges when thinking people feel entitled to disconnect from simple human concern. 

The prophet, the philosopher, the scientist, the inventor, the politician, the captain of industry, the law maker may fall to this aberration for the sake of some unique idea, of some unique truth. This, as I see it, is made possible by rational thought's and intelligence's capability to become divorced from common sense, gone callous and wild, alien to the living, abstract, scornful of the biases, emotions and weaknesses of the human. Under the mask of pure reason, unbiased science, creativity, pure faith, utopia and social vision, this "purity", "progress" of "higher cause" justifies to free oneself from "mere" humanist morals, to give oneself licence to instigate and commit evil.

The "sleep of reason" may beget monsters but clarity of faith and reason fully awake, when freed of being humane, can do even worse.
                                                           
                                                                                     *

The primary individual transgressor has occasions to incite, especially in isolated or in large anonymous groups, wherever identity and responsibility are masked, diluted or split.

Any serious crisis, pest or disorder - a crash, penury or danger, offers an accidental occasion for civilisation to lapse, a pretext for the predisposed wicked to hit and for good people to become a horde, at least for an instant. Mostly, it is a shameful irrational incident, or an individual crime:

Just give occasion for a crowd to form, put a spark of disorder or panic to it to inflame it into a mob and the beast bursts free. Or, to learn from Milgram [2], divide the crowd into individuals like - I hate to say - you and me unawares, let an ethic-free truth-seeking scientist dressed in white say: "do it, it is normal, everybody does, I take responsibility for you!" and the passive beast in you very probably complies, ready to torture; or take a healthy normal boy, institute him jail-man, as Zimbardo [3] did, put two straps on his shoulder, give him orders to "Go! Go! Go!" and Lucifer is ready to do the job of "Live and let die!" Even cheaper, give a crowded stadium plenty to drink and you will see.

The rousers of the collective beast

However, the best post-industrial recipe to invite the quiet gestation and return of the Beast in our History is to fatten and divide nations into lonely, sub-educated, frustrated employees, consumers and unemployables. To turn society into circus-game audiences and to broadcast enhanced stupidity as a way of living until we all became disenchanted, blasé and indifferent to everybody else's suffering. Let greed and envy and hypocrisy rule. Promote fake news and alternative truth. Confuse reality with virtual games. Show them that others will have more forever and there is no hope, that words, books and governments are unreliable, that everything goes. Add to this some fanatic community and faith division. Overcrowd them in large cities. Accelerate everything beyond humane speed an pace of change.. Cultivate immediate pleasure and increase fear. Keep people anonymous, humiliated and  insecure. Show them atrocity daily until they don't feel anything, until it doesn't mean to the children more than buzzing of flies above corpses seen on screens.

Alas, that Beast does not need accident or natural catastrophe to awaken; human mind and pen and action, cynical politics, cultivated religious intolerance, unfettered greed of global finance unleashed, voracious supra-national business can be more devastating than the pestilence, the flood, the fire and the quake. 

Culturally and politically, when the single thought and absolute truth of some seductive doctrine whose time feigns to have come gives some reason made simple and a flag of purpose to ruthless leaders, evil sprouts, flourishes, spreads, prevails and finally turns banal [4] and becomes everyday life. Those are the rousers of the Collective Beast.

I asked myself what or who, besides grand catastrophe, is teasing out the beast in communities of people; ideas gone feral or wicked personalities who made it to power? On reflection, both; single-minded grand ideas - utopias abstract, absolute, exclusive and not human - provide the matches, fools play with them, bad public mood adopts them and goes mad.

                                                                           *

From time to time, authentic creative geniuses devoid of wisdom feed the beast; enthusiastic doctrine makers would prophesy some unique ultimate: uncompromising Truth, Justice, Equality, Freedom, Prosperity, Enterprise, Wealth, Democracy, Spirit, God, Compassion, Nature, Beauty. All the highest ideals.

Tragically, anything exalted, meant to elevate humanity to a better life, turns, when made absolute, exclusive and simple, into ready-to-use immoderation and torture-rack. Such sublime visions and radical choices, blind to human nature, common sense and human reality, summon without fail violence and oppression. Writes Montaigne: "They want to get out of themselves and escape from the man. That is madness: instead of changing into angels, they change into beasts..." [5]

Bad people will soon amplify and apply those extremes or pervert the ideals. Intelligent people turned stupid will  take delusion for visionary light. Finally, bandits, will misinterpret, add fuel and set the fires to exploit occasion. The rest, masses of people who fail to mind their own best interest, provide the woods to catch the flame and burn themselves alive.

The visionaries who create our pure ideals fly high, they do not seem to know how to make their oversized ideas fool-proof by including some humane moderation. They take too little time to imagine side-effects and consequences of neglecting human nature and the commonsense of real life.

Hasty prophets make angels fall; the future giants will have to learn the practical art of protecting their vision from the shapeless pygmies walking in the mist [6] and the bandits waiting in ambush to corrupt them. Particularly, they need to moderate and protect their good intention from that hateful kind of zealots who claim to serve the good but in fact only irritate and provoke the opposite by means of offense and pestering.

Philosophers need lawyers to provide their last words against mischief. Maybe the great ideas should also be created with strict usage instructions, warning of doubt, mapping of limits, an expiry date and a self renewal mechanism that would keep them "falsifiable" and sane.

We do need bold, generous ideals and boundless new dreams to advance. We are made of dreams. What intrigues me is how to know when an idea is enlightening - a beam of light to illuminate our way in this world - and when it throws the light into our eyes to blind us, when it tips into yet another pretext for evildoers to take over and to rage.

The tipping point and the signal of alarm may be when the wonderful idea becomes more important than the people.

I do not know; at this time I would concede that the harm comes, sometimes, in the perverted application. Some will always manage to twist the highest ideals meant to work for man, into big hammers: universal, unique, absolute remedies finally serving something else, divine or political, but not human; those heavenly ideas become thus ripe to be taken over by unscrupulous leaders with beastly drives who will put them in quick and dirty practice.

With bad faith or short-sighted intelligence (that is stupidity in the long run) you can work the opposite from anything; just take it literally and amplify it to absurdity. Or while denouncing rightly a hateful extreme, propose that the opposite extreme is goodness. We know from Aristotle how wrong this is. It may be sufficient to exaggerate with zeal. Strangely, the most sacred ideas of humanity seem easiest  to deprave into radical exaggeration or perverse consequences, probably because they are so pure, so naive, so abstract, so otherworldly... so inhuman. Poor application is insufficient excuse though; the original flaw is still in the tragic blunder and onesidedness of the original idea.

The arsonists are easy to find. Bad and stupid people, as I observed, do not need grand dangerous ideas; they have ways to misunderstand and alter any idea, particularly the excellent ones. The individual beast needs only a pretext to move and take over, a flag to wave, a vehicle to ride, empowerment to act. Omnipresent little local beasts manage locally to twist generous universal concepts into perverse simplifications and one-stop remedies; those simplifications spread irresistibly helped by the immense downwards dragging force of compliant stupidity and weakness. The passive beasts among us interpret and apply anything falling into their hands with such methods and means that will, without fail, rouse the same ancestral violence, oppression, envy, falsity, hate, unfreedom, and misery in some new version. Every time they grab some little power, the little beasts pave the road to heaven in such ways that it ends up in hell.

Is then becoming beasts again an irresistibly returning tendency of human nature and society?

                                                                                          *

To do something against it, observe the new beast growing

Before doing all the harm, the bigger collective beast process, the systemic one, progresses insidiously, disguised. The monster project for a New World, A New Order, a New Man, Superman, Post-man, a New Planet, comes from honourable parents, is born into the new generations as a lively, charming baby full of noble promise, rising against obvious injustice, dangers and ills; who could speak against it?

There is always a new generation of suckers to fall for a reduced, simple, unifying one-idea to be applied with a firm hand.

The new remedy-to-all-problems begins beautiful, young, full of passion. It makes things simple. The Pied Pipers of Hamelin seem beyond suspicion, some of them are even honestly unaware of what they bring ito the world;

the solutions are twisted with elegance to cut corners but they address real problems of humanity. This makes them vital.

The thinkers and dreamers who conceived them are honourable and honest, have clean hands and seemingly pure, even self-denying intentions. This makes them credible.

Following them, the new leaders who propagate the new creed have energy and courage to take risk and know how to play on deep desires and fears. they are good at dealing with people. This makes them convincing.

As some of these leaders are charismatic and capable, followers are charmed and a contagious movement starts; one to lure the whole nation on yet another shiny way into dark times.

It is human to be conquered by a new self-fulfilling idea whose time seems to have come [7]. We need hope as we need bread, water and air; when we lost hope we are ripe to follow whoever offers it.  

The best of us honest people respect the noble vision and the enthusiasm, the ambitious grab the new tool to conquer power, pure-hearted idealists rush to embrace the dream with love and expectation, the discontent rally the new flag because it represents the enemy of their enemy, selfless heroes stake and sacrifice their life to let it win.

Good people who do not seem to learn from history come to trust and join the movement to build the finally fair, good, beautiful, happy world, the panacea prophets always claim to build; you may be one of the fans. My parents believed in their youth in such a beautiful one-stop dream; those intelligent people blinded into stupidity needed a few years to see the utopia turn into nightmare. Until it was too late to stop it.

                                                                                           *

The beast grows insidiously, with more or less noise, disguised among the normal nuisances of business as usual, nourished from small annoying things to big ones, tollerated from distant to close, from other people's troubles to -finally - your life. It cannot grow by itself, we all let it grow, even nourish it with our own bad vibrations and with not taking responsibility: "a single leaf turns not yellow but with the silent knowledge of the whole tree" [8]

The beast needs its favourable season to prevail, its best is the winter of our discontent. The disenchantment of the working human made useless is a wonderful time for collective evil to emerge. The beast feeds on a Zeitgeist of disillusion pessimism and disrespect, when the horizon is dark with worry and heavy with suspicion, when values certainties and hopes are shaken. All sects know how to use this "unfreezing" destabilization.
                                                                   *

The public slope starts with too much unfairness, poverty, disorder and insecurity or too much intrusion and control, all exaggerations do.

A sense that something is deeply wrong gets people in the street, and in their home, irritated without knowing what to do. Misgovernment and irresponsibility inflate with interdictions, taxes, stupidity, hypocrisy, public lies – a climate of discord and a desire for something drastic to end all this. (Heavens, what an old story!) Something should be done. Someone should be held responsible. Someone else, superior, should take responsibility, tell the truth and show the courage to do whatever needs to be done. As for us we are powerless, nobody listens to us.

Things happen that should not be allowed to happen. People do not belong as they should. Incompetence and cowardice rule. Growing abuse, nagging, irritating bureaucracy and intrusive control on one hand, inequality, insecurity, unemployment, irrespect, violence, on the other hand. All this is getting people more and more irritated like an overpopulation of rats. War is inevitable, some will say, not knowing what war is. A revolution is needed... or we need to go back to our traditional values.

Do you still belong to this community? No. The erudite name of this climate is anomia - lawlessness and disinterest for the common good. The time is here for the beast!

Finally, to save us, to solve it all with a firm hand, to burst the pustule, comes the hero powered by the Beast, leading a heroic movement. When the movement takes the power the beast grows suddenly adult.

Its real face, will always be the same; a strong rule, by one alone, or by a nameless group of few in the name of the many, it does not matter. The face and the mechanics of totalitarian rule. You let it happen, even voted it coerced by urgency.

Time to pay for blindness.

You can see that the beast is prevailing again in a dark sway gaining the public place, a climate which on pretext of whatever at hand will make your life hell; in such a world, persons with freedoms, rights, identities and thoughts are like witches, they will not be suffered to live.

It all started with distant shouts, then other people who opposed the beast were hurt, not you; now the beast ends up with hands on your body. We were warned repeatedly of this typical course of events:

"First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out--
     Because I was not a socialist.

Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out--
     Because I was not a trade unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out--
     Because I was not a Jew.

Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me."  wrote pastor Martin Niemöller (1892–1984).

The victorious beast will brand persons with degrading labels, reject and exclude them, turn them into numbers of less human others and time given it will enslave or kill, thousands or millions, for a word, a belief, for a colour or for their birth, for their parents, for what they do or do not do, for what they are or they are not. The Beast does not care in fact if you are or not guilty of something, it makes you guilty; everybody must fear.

With enough time to grow and to settle, the beast will give you a new world order,  a silent kingdom of Khattam-Shud, a necessary way of life, yet another grey empire of cogs where everything that is not forbidden is mandatory.

Whenever it sets firm foot in a land, the beast uses up and sweeps a generation or two into the garbage-can of History; strangely, the good and the bad finish all the same. The beast ends-up torturing the entire nation (tomorrow the whole World), with no exception; even the dictators doing it are terrorized.  

All this, for nothing...

The empires of totalitarianism proved to be meaningless gray zones of History, just dark spells, forgotten soon when the last participants perish of old age. I do not believe that Evolution needs such disruptions of civilisation, there are sufficient catastrophies of nature and industrial growth.

Luckily, the beast seems to die out by itself, historically speaking; it collapses when it consumed just too many lives and most of the material and moral resources of the populations infected, like fire left without wood to burn. Or so I dream.

                                                                                        *

Another age of the Beast and its almost inevitable war will be a sinister time to survive... if you do. Hopefully, I will not be there. In the best case this will mean for you decades of life, if not your entire generation and even your children, wasted; lies, betrayal, cowardice, guilt and wickedness, amidst fear, misery and indignity - you will be ashamed for having been there and suspect for having survived... if you fell by luck on the advantaged side of the gun.

There were several ages of the beast in our short past and there will be new ones, this is a promise! We are not at the end of History.

From time to time the beast found and will find new opportunity to surface and to rule. The progress of humanity gives birth to such times of atrocity, and dehumanisation once in a while and again. The human loss [10] and, as it seems, the conscious gravity of transgression are growing with the centuries. Growing because most cultures became aware of the wickedness. The horror of the events and oppressions did not diminish in modernity with our evolution in ethical knowledge;cruelty grew. Soon, the use of humans not only as slaves and employees but as raw material, spare parts, genetically controlled races dedicated to slavery, or simply as food for other people will be technically feasible. If you think the time of beast is over, think again! Open your eyes! What is available is always used in tragedy: "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there." [11] Remember this future when you speak freely and video yourself carelessly while you see the growth of unlimited control technologies and the wayback memory of the great Internet machine. Interesting times lay ahead. Magnificent times for the Beast.
​
                                                                        *

It is of course easy to name the beast of the past, the examples are notorious and generally agreed; yes, the past wars were aimless bloodshed; to sacrifice people is abomination, barbarian invasions are savage, slavery is degrading humanity, inquisition is demonic, crusades are fanaticism, witch-hunts are a shame for civilisation, burning people is atrocity, fascism is murderous, communism criminal. Electing dictators is suicidal. Exterminating nations is crime against the entire humanity. Tamerlane, Stalin, Hitler, Mao, Pol-pot, a chaplet of similar monstrous nobodies that history may want to forget, are easy (for some) to judge in retrospect; but once, normal people were seduced by their vision and did not see the old writing on the wall the Mene, Mene, Tekel, Parsin Daniel understood. [12]. The victims did not move out of the way of the crushing. We keep wondering in retrospect why so many intelligent people were so thoughtless, such fools. They were all convinced, in denial, as we all are, that it - the rule of the beast, cannot happen here...

                                                                     *

There isn't much you can do, not even run, when evil is already normal and victorious and the One thinking is the only one admitted; at best you disguise yourself and try to live on, like a bug playing dead. Or maybe you chose to be a martyr..

If you discern the beast early enough, you may still act, with prudence, against its growth.

Opposing evil is an art of war not an art of speech. Do not be democratic or educational or reasonable with the beast. You have a better chance to use against it all the means of hostile criticism.

Maybe you can cause the beast to expose its fangs prematurely, soon enough for a majority to be repulsed; maybe you can vote against it; or you can support - with moderate illusions - the forces - not always much better - working against it; at least you will not feed the beast - nor the counter-beast opposite to it, not serve it or sacrifice your youth for its lie. If nothing works and you see the signs of some beast coming to power, you could hasten to move far away - if there is some distant shore left free - and let the wheels of history turn without you.

                                                                *

The real challenge is to discern and name the beast not of the past but of the future.

How then to cast the horoscope of the beast when still a baby and to make the good people see the monster that will be, in a young, healthy new movement?

Let me try to offer a provisional checklist of signs that I believe to reveal future collective evil. I will not give examples; I observed that a collection of examples is in this case a stopper for the critical reflection– passion flares up, positions are taken instinctively and thinking stops drowned in dispute. People are already flirting with one of the available beasts. I only invite you to consider the signs, to improve them, to complete them or change them and later to keep them in mind when you look at this or that ultimate solution offered or "cool" movement opening its loving arms to you.
                                                                  *

The seven signs of the beast:

• The one true cause of all evil and also the one solution to save humanity from it. The first sign of the beast is when, again, someone sees the light and finds the one way. The beast makes reality simple; the latest peril is the ultimate danger, doom is imminent, not joining the one final solution brings the end of the world.

When you hear this - yet another end of the world prophecy by a new saviour with yet another mission to save the world, armed with a supreme silver bullet - have no doubt, darkness is on the march.

• Aversion towards the human is the second ingredient, a telling sign of what will be done to people when the movement conquers power – any variant of the man-hating belief that humankind is bad for some reason and society decadent or declining: man deserves despise, is born in sin, stupid, weak and selfish, destructive, a nuisance, vermin, cause of all ills, guilty of something, whatever that something may occasionally be.
 
Accordingly, the individual and the crowd cannot be trusted to be free, to chose, to vote, they must be disciplined, made to feel guilty, surveiled, "educated", closely controlled and punished; man must be overpowered, forced to behave. Humanity is a flock.

• Ideas are more important than people. Visions do not serve people, people serve ideals; the higher cause is more important than individual life and freedom. It is good and noble for people to die for ideas!

Future has precedence over present and the common good is “in the name of the people” and of the cause, above mere happiness of one or other. The People, the Party, the Movement is more important than the citizen, the person, the member, as the whole is superior to its parts.
 
People being less important than a Cause, ends excuse means. In this light, collateral damage is normal, sacrifice, violence, martyrs, assassination, terror, are justified to prove the worth of the cause; people are expendable means, not ends. For the later good you must live worse now. We must suffer! What counts is history, not biography. The world is seen from the abstract point of view of the Cause not from the point of view of persons.

Local compassion, happiness now, clean hands, not doing evil, are luxury. As the individual can only count and have power in the collective and the serving the Idea, individualism is bad; all people must be laminated equal and selfless. The New Man must be created anew: lonely, replaceable, powerless, devoted, submitted and ready to do whatever is ordered.

• Total control and the rape of privacy. The beast is obsessed to control everything and know and regulate everything for all people with no corner of privacy, no secret garden to hide and to hatch dissidence. The future Beast invites you to be transparent and to confess; it uses all available means to know everything about you, past present and future. From your fingerprints to your ADN to your dreams. It is particularly interested in the people you know, your friends, your contacts, the words you ever said or wrote, what you ever learned and everything you read [9], your precious private information extracted in the past century under interrogation, now harvested, mined, milked, in all innocence (your innocence) by facebooks, linkedins, googles, whom you fed voluntarily tweeting away your privacy; your "social network" will serve - when the next beast comes to power -  to harass and to arrest, re-educate, cleanse, goulag, auschwitz and exterminate as needed everybody connected to you. People will be frightened to have had links to other people.  In this future the Beast plans your biography and the little beasts act it out. It censors what you eat, drink, smoke, read, the way you mate, your sex, your cloth, your belongings... It needs to keep you needy, guilty, dependent, impersonal, miserable, cowardly and defensive. When the beast prosecutes you, you must prove yourself innocent, not the one who accuses you. And you must do it quickly.

It wants not only to control what you or other people say and write and do; it is not satisfied to find out what you think and regulate what you must execute; it wants to know what you could believe and think because you will have to be reformed and required to believe and think and desire “right”; when it settles in power the Beast will control and censor what you can know, establish processes and rules and regulations for what you must, so that what is not forbidden is mandatory, limit by law the words you can use, what you have, what you eat and excrete, what you think and finally what you are. What you are because who you are will be valueless by then. In the best case you will be an ant. Or a soldier. In the worst you will be prey.

• Blindness to any other point of view. It's "us or them"; belonging is defined by rejection. The delusion of persecution is a component always present in the growing totalitarian movement. The beast needs somebody to reject, an enemy, an outsider, a sinister conspiracy theory to unite the rejecting flock. It will justify later all violence as defensive and necessary.

Scapegoats are required, or enemies, some excluded people, taboos or at least some heresies to exorcise. Whoever does not howl like us is against us! A witch-hunt will do. Different is guilty, inferior, mad, it must be reduced.

The Beast does not create another political party, it launches a movement; a party wants to govern among other parties, a movement - as Hannah Arendt [13] observes - wants to get rid of all parties, of state, of law, of all form of accountable order; it aims to rule nations by commanding crowds, in fact it wants to master the whole world, with no competition.

Observe communication, you will know with whom you speak; it is a dialogue of the deaf. The followers of vision do not examine, dialogue or learn, nor consider deliberation, they "are for" or "are against", firmly, they believe and propagate. They do not negotiate, they "educate". To belong, you must convert, be reborn.

The beast, even young, cannot suffer relativity or respect variety of choices. It has no doubt. These people are not truth-seekers but truth-carriers. Truth is one, it's our truth of course, with one voice and no dissidence suffered. You cannot vote this unique truth. No need to explain and to convince by proof or arguments (One-truth disparages rhetoric and despises vote) it is sufficient to affirm the force of the “obvious” the force of “reality”. You can recognise the formula: "You must see that...!"or milder, "Do you believe in...?"  Believe, not think. Anything diverging from the right message is bad, mistaken, false, stupid, guilty and mad. Dispute with the people under the spell of the beast is a dialogue of the deaf with the blind. The believers react to opposing truth with irritation, anger, violence. They have no tolerance for dissenters, who are punished for causing the irritation.
If you try to advance that diversity of opinion is good, a right of man, that mutual respect possible in difference, that we dispute each other to learn and we do not need to always agree, you will look as a Martian.


• Appeal to the low emotions. The rousers of the beast wave grand ideals but it happens that they usually express the lowest fears and desires of a crowd and constantly appeal to them.

When the movements of the beast disguise themselves into political parties, whatever their name and preferred subject, the resulting camps are three: the party of envy, the party of hate and the party of greed (impartial in the middle). All excite some form of the old war of all against all [14] from before the axial times when the sages came with the simple wise idea that you shall not do to another what you hate to be done unto you. They play on fear, envy, greed, distrust, pride, rejection and hate. They kindle intolerance, indifference, inhumanity, rejection and fanaticism. All this, to build a happy future, of course.

• The no-plan plan. What is promised is something else, the negation of the present, not a construction. It is a project without a plan to build. The true plan is to undo the present. And to seize power.

In the balance between what is wrong today and what must be done, the criticism of the present is vehement, rich and justified, but the concrete projects for the future are curiously misty, grand, missing or half-baked, there is no time for that, change is too urgent; in fact, the plan of the beast is "to be against", not a programme but a mood of hate, revenge and opposition; any description of what total victory of the new vision means concretely, is absent - first destroy, then we will see; that makes critique of the new baby idea quite difficult. As you ponder, the longer term destination - if any - proves to be otherworldly, nowhere land.

If you want to judge who these movements are consider carefully, not what they criticise but what exactly they propose and how they will do it. Ask for details.

                                                               *
Each one of these seven signs could be the mark of the Beast. Could be; but several of them together are the certain sign of collective evil growing.

                                                                 *

I hope this imperfect, certainly incomplete list is useful to start with. I keep working on it. There is no need to believe me; the real weapon against the rousers of the beast is developing your own critical spirit. You may want to watch out for the signs and decide interpretation for yourself, find your own marks to detect the rousing of the beast. Look at the crusaders of the day and check the signs. When you find symptoms I missed, please let me know, if I am still around.

Size-up the ravishing baby. When you want to judge an idea or a movement do not be deluded by how fresh, how justified or noble or inspired it looks now when it is just born and cherished by loving parents. Do not be deluded by your indignation against present badness and injustice in favour of the opposite excess. Test the infant by imagining carefully its mature total victory; amplify the idea as far as you can, imagine how it will look and what its consequences will be.

Behold the rousers of the Beast!

---------------------------------------------------------

[1] Card, C., The Atrocity Paradigm, Oxford UP, 2002 defines evil by its effect, awareness and reference to the norm of an epoch, as “foreseeable intolerable harms produced by culpable wrongdoing”.
 My own choice is to define evil (and many other things) in relation to the people who live them; The victims and spectators of evil deeds discern them as such by means of their feeling and intuition, validated by the common-sense of a Zeitgeist, in which those deeds present a family resemblance manifest in shared reaction of horror and indignation. I would even say that we detect evil by finding it to be inconceivable, beyond bounds. The troubling thing is that those who practice evil or participate to it on a large scale do not see it so, or they do not care to conceive it. In my mind, such intolerable harm is produced by those who do not care to consider other people as persons with identity, dignity and rights, or who abolish feeling guilty or responsible and practice instead hubris, uninhibited ferocity and indifference while doing to others what they could not suffer done unto them. Thus, I see evil as the reverse of the golden rule of mutual expectation. As you see, things get really complicated...
Meanwhile, I make things simple while we keep seeking some objective definition that will allow measurement and punishment with sounding line and scales. I chose that the common sense of what we feel is a good enough provisional “here and now, for us” means to discern evil by consensus.

[2] Milgram, Stanley (1963). "Behavioral Study of Obedience", Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology 67 (4): 371–8 and Milgram, Stanley, Obedience to Authority; An Experimental View,  Harper and Collins, 1974

[3]  The Zimbardo Stanford prison experiments and its follow-up:
Haney Craig, Banks, Curtis, Zimbardo, Philip, Interpersonal Dynamics in a Simulated Prison, International Journal of Criminology and Penology 1973, 1, 69-97
Zimbardo, P. G. (1971). The power and pathology of imprisonment. Congressional Record. (Serial No. 15, October 25, 1971).
Zimbardo, Philip, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Random House, New York, 2007

[4] The term banal is by Hannah Arendt, in a scandalously critical book to read absolutely:  Arendt, Hannah, Eichmann in Jerusalem, A report on the banality of evil, Viking Press, New York, 1964)

[5] Montaigne, Essays, p 1044, Of Experience 13)

[6] Gibran, Kahlil, The Prophet: Much in you is still man, and much in you is not yet man,/ But a shapeless pigmy that walks asleep in the mist searching for its own awakening....

[7] Victor Hugo (1802-1885) : “On résiste a l’invasion des armées; on ne résiste pas a l’invasion des idées.” Victor Hugo, Histoire d’un Crime, Œuvres Complètes, Hetzel & cie,  Paris, p.240  The famous oft-cited English paraphrase versions “Nothing is more powerful than an idea whose time has come.” (Also cited as “There is nothing more powerful than an idea whose time has come.”) commonly  attributed to Hugo were never spoken or written by him. The literal English is: “One can resist the invasion of armies; one cannot resist the invasion of ideas.” cf Quote/counterquote site (with my thanks) http://www.quotecounterquote.com/search?q=Hugo

[8] Gibran, K., The Prophet, About crime and Punishment)

[9] Moglen, Eben, Snowden and the Future: Part III, Columbia Law School, November 13, 2013
http://snowdenandthefuture.info/PartIII.html

This kind of information should be known, for everyone to judge what it means. Maybe the Beast is advanced already, or at least recklessness is preparing now everything the Beast will require later to rule.

[10] White, Matthew, Atrocitology - Humanity's 100 Deadliest Achievements, Canongate, Edinburgh, 2011 This is a sobering book to read. The wars are deadlier, century after century, the loss – in war and equally in “peace time” are magnified by Nazi Fascism, Stalinian and Maoist Communism, to hundreds of millions that would make Genghis and Timur envious and compete successfully with slavery, famine, pest, leaving far behind the fall of the great empires and civilisations of the past.  The monstrosity be it liberticidal, economic or genocidal, seem to have grown beyond compare, to famine, rape and extermination used as education.

[11] From Gurlyand's Reminiscences of A. P. Chekhov, in Teatr i iskusstvo 1904, No. 28, 11 July, p. 521 in Donald Rayfield, Anton Chekhov: A Life, New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1997

[12] Bible, Daniel 5:25

[13] Arendt, Hannah, The Origins of Totalitarianism, Harcourt Brace, San Diego.., 1979

[14] Hobbes, Thomas -Leviathan or the Matter, Forme, & Power of a Common-wealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, Andrew Crooke, London, 1651 chapter XXIII

«Mourrons pour des idées, d'accord, mais de mort lente…» Let's die for ideas, but slowly...(1) 

Brassens the poet had the courage to look the hero-mongers in the eyes and tell the incorrect truth. 

When you had long run experience to judge, the real place and worth  of great ideas you lose the excessive trust we, enthusiasts tend to have in them at first sight. 

To think them, yes! To create them, to dream, to marvel and explore them, yes! To like them, develop them, to debate and apply them, yes! To try them, yes, with prudence and care for people. To fall in love with them and espouse them? Well, love happens and once married, you may have to live with them for long years. But to kill and die for them, isn't that too much? *

Life is the last good we own to enjoy and pass to our children if there is to be a humble place for us in the miraculous chain of being. Life perpetuated is the source of endless futures, of starting new things.

To let people live a future is the best promise for their better world.

Be then suspicious of prophets who engage you to give your life now and cut your chain with no future, depriving your possible inheritors from even being born.

Wait!  Scores of noble and urgent visions proved false in History, or worse, went wild, turned to nightmare and opened the gates of Hell. That hell which is in the detail, in the application paving the road to heaven. Too many people embrace the new snake in haste only because it rises against the old, hateful snake. 

Alas, the wasted dead cannot correct their error. Only among the living can you repair mistakes, some of them. A living dog is better than a dead lion (2)  Prévert quot,  martyrs rot: “Martyr, c ‘est pourrir un peu » (3) Therefore, the sage, reluctant, loiters round the grave...“Le sage, en hésitant, tourne autour du tombeau…” (1) 

You are living one biographical time of so many years and no more, among a couple of generations and no more. You do not live in the house of the distant future, even your children will not live there; your life is a zero-sum end-game running now, as you read these lines; what a pity for it to turn out to be what happens while you prepare other things. Who you are and what you do and have and feel and achieve in some sixty more or less active years is your entire world, all you ever get and all you give.

Doctrinaires want you to confuse your ticking biographical time with “History”, “the future”, “the progress of humanity”, “the Planet”, The other world" or other abstract fictions of the like. That tragic comedy of errors is staged to sell a life of misery now on promise of heaven tomorrow or worse, to spend you cheaply for a slogan. 

Your life is biography, not history.

Beware those who point their crooked finger at you and claim that you are living history. They are about to steal your life.

Do not be used.

------------------------------------

* Well, I know, I know, local good sense is needed here, there are exceptions when you want to chose; moreover, one thing is to think it another to say it loud, in dangerous occasions; armies, zealots, patriots, will gladly shoot you for such words. 

(1) Georges Brassens, Mourrir pour des idees, 1972 © 1972 ED. MUSICALES. Take a moment to read this wise irony:

Mourir pour des idées, l´idée est excellente
Moi j´ai failli mourir de ne l´avoir pas eu
Car tous ceux qui l´avaient, multitude accablante
En hurlant à la mort me sont tombés dessus
Ils ont su me convaincre et ma muse insolente
Abjurant ses erreurs, se rallie à leur foi
Avec un soupçon de réserve toutefois
Mourrons pour des idées, d´accord, mais de mort lente,
D´accord, mais de mort lente

Jugeant qu´il n´y a pas péril en la demeure
Allons vers l´autre monde en flânant en chemin
Car, à forcer l´allure, il arrive qu´on meure
Pour des idées n´ayant plus cours le lendemain
Or, s´il est une chose amère, désolante
En rendant l´âme à Dieu c´est bien de constater
Qu´on a fait fausse route, qu´on s´est trompé d´idée
Mourrons pour des idées, d´accord, mais de mort lente
D´accord, mais de mort lente

Les saint jean bouche d´or qui prêchent le martyre
Le plus souvent, d´ailleurs, s´attardent ici-bas
Mourir pour des idées, c´est le cas de le dire
C´est leur raison de vivre, ils ne s´en privent pas
Dans presque tous les camps on en voit qui supplantent
Bientôt Mathusalem dans la longévité
J´en conclus qu´ils doivent se dire, en aparté
"Mourrons pour des idées, d´accord, mais de mort lente
D´accord, mais de mort lente"

Des idées réclamant le fameux sacrifice
Les sectes de tout poil en offrent des séquelles
Et la question se pose aux victimes novices
Mourir pour des idées, c´est bien beau mais lesquelles?
Et comme toutes sont entre elles ressemblantes
Quand il les voit venir, avec leur gros drapeau
Le sage, en hésitant, tourne autour du tombeau
Mourrons pour des idées, d´accord, mais de mort lente
D´accord, mais de mort lente

Encor s´il suffisait de quelques hécatombes
Pour qu´enfin tout changeât, qu´enfin tout s´arrangeât
Depuis tant de "grands soirs" que tant de têtes tombent
Au paradis sur terre on y serait déjà
Mais l´âge d´or sans cesse est remis aux calendes
Les dieux ont toujours soif, n´en ont jamais assez
Et c´est la mort, la mort toujours recommencée
Mourrons pour des idées, d´accord, mais de mort lente
D´accord, mais de mort lente

O vous, les boutefeux, ô vous les bons apôtres
Mourez donc les premiers, nous vous cédons le pas
Mais de grâce, morbleu! laissez vivre les autres!
La vie est à peu près leur seul luxe ici bas
Car, enfin, la Camarde est assez vigilante
Elle n´a pas besoin qu´on lui tienne la faux
Plus de danse macabre autour des échafauds!
Mourrons pour des idées, d´accord, mais de mort lente
D´accord, mais de mort lente

English translation at
http://www.projetbrassens.eclipse.co.uk/pages/lyricsandtranslations.html

(2) Ecclesiastes 9:4

(3) "Martyr, c'est pourrir un peu."
(Jacques Prévert / 1900-1977 / Paroles)

My parents enjoined me to respect the humble and help the needy.

My parents taught me to protect the innocent, to teach the ignorant and to warn the cheated.

And I do! I feel well when I do! I also sympathise with the defenceless, and loathe all oppressors.

But my parents forgot to advise me this:

                                                                               *

​You cannot work for the light if you do not know the shadow. Without what I learned about the wicked I could not help the innocent.

To prove that what you share is wisdom, keep alive. Dead martyrs are mainly a blueprint of how to perish.

Truth and justice do not prevail like in the legends; sometimes, the dragon wins. Learn to be a dragon... at times.

Worse, strangely, more blood was shed in History in the name of truth than for the sake of lying. Understand the colours of lying: some is stupid ignorant, in error, some shameful, some protect lives and countries. Some lies are crimes, some lies are sacrifice and duty. Most are venal and egoistic some are generous. Some are ugly and some are beauty, art and dreaming...giving hope.

When you are nothing but just, it's one step from being cruel. Uncompromisingly sincere, you are a heartless barbarian.

Bad people saved me and good people did me harm. Judge people for yourself.

To help and to do right you must be credible and able to do things; don’t give away your means with silly wows of poverty. Do not despise power, just don't let it go to your head.

Keep away of dying of other people's ills; you do not help the oppressed and the poor by joining them. To help them, try to pull them out from misfortune; grow your means to do things, educate them, teach them to fish, create choices and work for them, advise them well with higher competence than theirs, give them respect and a helping hand, not your body and life. Declaring yourself with the victims is mostly arrogance or a vocation to be a victim.

To be good you must be able to do wrong too; be good but carry a stick.

                                                                                 *

Among people whose life is worth little, your life is worth nothing.  Avoid the vacations in hell. Keep away from those who have nothing to lose.

If you must visit in humble territory keep alert and look plain. Smile friendly but laugh carefully. Do not shine. Do not offer unasked advice and do not help people against their will; when asked, be shy, as a guest among wolves; “the meek are simple as doves but wise as serpents” (1)

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For most people that which cost them nothing is worth nothing. To make it useful, cause them to pay a price, an effort, a sacrifice or some pain. Sad but true!

When you save someone or give much, do not expect gratitude, on the contrary, excuse yourself for the gift, imply it's your duty and still beware; receiving too much is heavy debt and all people hate to be debtors. Particularly the small ones.

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Certainly, do not appear wise alone among fools. As there is a time for everything, amidst mass delusion truth must wait. No choice but to give time to time.

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Simple is not stupid but it is not very intelligent either and common is the opposite of uncommon.

Simple people dislike complicated people; shallow minds hate deep ones. Complexity is a threat for them, depth a bottomless precipice, imagination is craze and subtlety an insult; for the limited mind irony is lying, humour mockery, paradox madness.

Simple people distrust change, even for the better. For the innocent, things are as they are “because this is how they are” If you ask why, it is a critique. If you ask why not, it is an accusation.

                                                                                 *

Some simple people are stupid too (not to speak about the intelligent who can be even more stupid because they command more means). Common-sense is not so common.
Do not reason with the stupid!  Excuse them, help them charitably, suggest them what to do or let them bite the dust if they do not listen, but keep the distance.

The stupid thinks in one dimension only and is proud to do so, calls it honesty. The stupid persists in error proven and calls it honour.

Stupidity, when you meet it close, it is not just insufficient intelligence, not even lack of intelligence but a full-bodied way of thought, different and  hostile to intelligence, like paranoia opposed to sane reasoning. Stupidity is a dense and coherent judgement, intent to force everything into a square pigeon-hole, firmly convinced and rejecting of new perspective or acknowledging error; it is an active process of dragging downwards, like gravity.

Do not dream wishfully, like Socrates, that once informed properly and educated, stupidity will eclose into enlightened goodness; no, it will only be more efficient, hidden behind a better mask of words learned by rote. Do not make things simple to fit the stupid. You are a fool indeed to educate your natural enemy.

Stupidity is your most powerful foe. Wisdom has many limits but stupidity is endless [2] It often wins in the larger crowd and in the longer run.

If you cannot avoid fight with stupidity remember that in the long run it always wins. Do not set to defend a long-term position. Chose the short term. Unsettle, throw down and go away to other things, elsewhere. Run!

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The poor are not beautiful, nor good or honest by the simple virtue of being poor; they are like everybody else, except for the burden of what they do not have and need [3]. Spare yourself the dreamer’s disenchantment; just do the good things for their own sake and for your own satisfaction of being good. Do not expect recognition.

                                                                                    *

I interrupt a longer list, charitably, before I’m swallowed by the dark side, with the edifying tale of the clever man who went a-hunting oddity:

A man was told that there is an island where people are one-eyed. He decided to become rich. "I will go and catch one of those, show it at fairs for money and make a fortune." This is what he said, and went. It took years but finally he found the island [4].

All people there were one-eyed, indeed. What an exciting, outlandish sight!

The native saw, with equal delight, that he was a two-eyed freak, caught him and made show of him in the marketplace... and made good money.

Moral:

In the land of the one-eyed, wear an eye-patch.

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 [1]“Behold I send you as sheep in the midst of wolves. Be ye therefore wise as serpents and simple as doves.” Douay-Rheims Bible, Matthew 10:16

[2] "Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former." - Albert Einstein, maybe, “The difference between genius and stupidity is that genius has its limits. (also: Two things are infinite: the universe and human stupidity; and I’m not sure about the universe.)” Probably not by Einstein but after Gustave Flaubert cf. Calaprice Alice, The Ultimate Quotable Einstein, Princeton UP, Princeton, 2011,  P. 478

 [3) Let me render the politically incorrect quote from Heinrich Heine in extenso, as you do not have many occasions to read such heresy: “These court lackeys of the People are incessantly praising its perfections and its virtues, and shouting enthusiastically “How beautiful is the People! how good is the People ! how intelligent is the People ! “No, it is a lie. The poor sovereign People is not beautiful; on the contrary, it is very ugly. But this ugliness arises from its dirty condition, and it will disappear as soon as we have erected public baths, wherein His Majesty the People may wash himself gratuitously. The People, whose goodness is so much vaunted, is not at all good—is often just as wicked as are certain other potentates. But its wickedness Springs from hunger; we must see to it that the sovereign People has always something to eat. As soon as His Majesty is properly fed, and his appetite is satisfied, he also will smile upon us condescendingly and graciously, just like other sovereigns. The People is certainly not very intelligent; it is perhaps even more stupid than other monarchs; it is almost as brutally stupid as its minions. Its favour and confidence are bestowed only on those who declaim and shout in the Jargon of its passions, while it despises every honest man who tries to enlighten and ennoble it in the language of reason. So is it in Paris; so was it in Jerusalem, Leave it to the People to choose between the most righteous of the righteous and the veriest highway robber, and be sure that the cry will be: " Let us have Barabbas ! Long live Barabbas! "The cause of this perversity is ignorance: we must endeavour to eradicate this national evil by instituting public schools for the People, where Instruction, and with it the indispensable bread and butter and other nourishment, may be gratuitously provided. Then, when every unit of the People has been placed in a Position to avail himself of all wished-for knowledge, you will soon see an intelligent People. Perhaps, at last, it will become as cultivated, as intelligent, and as witty as you and I, my dear reader.” Heine, Heinrich, WIT, WISDOM, AND PATHOS, FROM THE PROSE OF HEINRICH HEINE, TR J. SNODGRASS,  BOSTON:CUPPLES AND HURD, 1888, p 253

[4] After a Japanese folk-tale.