The 18th Century French satirist Voltaire wrote that “Opinion has caused more trouble on this little earth than plagues or earthquakes” and that “Those who can make you believe absurdities (i.e. Donald Trump and his election conspiracies) can make you commit atrocities (i.e. the January 6 insurrection).” But my favorite bit from Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary—under “Optimism,” or if using the literal French translation, “All is Good”—is this version of the Adam and Eve story:
The Syrians pretended that man and woman having been created in the fourth heaven, they resolved to eat a cake in lieu of ambrosia, their natural food. Ambrosia exhaled by the pores; but after eating cake, they were obliged to relieve themselves in the usual manner. The man and the woman requested an angel to direct them to a water-closet (i.e. a toilet). Behold, said the angel, that petty globe which is almost of no size at all; it is situated about sixty millions of leagues from this place, and is the privy of the universe—go there as quickly as you can. The man and woman obeyed the angel and came here, where they have ever since remained; since which time the world has been what we now find it.
Yes, in this world which prides itself as being the only “confirmed” bastion of “intelligent” life, what exactly that “intelligence” has been used for is a matter of debate—although if one be honest, that would be a short, one-sided affair. This poor planet, which just wanted to take its place among the heavenly orbs to drift aimlessly about the universe without a care in the world, found itself infested with a life form that was fascinated with first creating and then tearing down, imbued with the mania of having “more,” the “need” for “bigger,” “faster” and more “powerful”—whether to “benefit” the individual or a political unit. It wasn’t enough to just live and get along with one’s neighbors; as Walt Whitman confessed about his admiration of other species of life:
They
do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of
owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of
years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.
So our poor Earth, through no fault of its own, has had to suffer being the privy of the universe, not just seeing the abuse of its gifts, but the follies of human nature: disreputability, indefensibility, irresponsibility, destructibility, cupidity and just plain stupidity. Take for example what is going in in Gaza, where Hamas militants were trained and supplied by a rogue Iran to engage in a bloody raid in Israel; they managed to accomplish that, but to what purpose? In a somewhat grandiose display of revenge, Israel’s military reprisals have only been by a factor of 20 of what it suffered, killing over 25,000 including an estimated 8-10,000 children.
When it is over, what do you expect will happen? Maybe the average person in Gaza and Israel might want a rest, but perhaps in Gaza their vengeful “representatives” and their patron will not have learned anything. Iran in particular only sees mass death as part of its “master plan” to convince the world that its peculiar brand of homicidal ideology is "justified," and will set about rearming and retraining its latest proxy in crime, if only as more cannon fodder to annoy those it finds domestically useful to call enemies.
As they say, stupid is as stupid does. The modern human race has 100,000 years of existence, and it is difficult to assess what benefit “intelligence” has bestowed upon it as a long-term thesis, just short-term grandiosity and humiliation in turns. Once the human race just killed what it needed for food like any other beast of the field and jungle. Now, it kills out of greed, vindictiveness, self-pity, mental disturbance, egotism, and sometimes just plain arbitrariness and opportunism. Rulers and generals have casually sent masses of men at each other to kill as many of each other as possible—and whichever side killed more, in went the reinforcements to finish the mess and take the battlefield, for whatever it was worth. Countries and peoples just can’t stay home and take care of their own dirty business.
Of course individuals leave their own execrable mark on the world. Take any mass-murderer, or a simple California woman high on marijuana who went into her kitchen, grabbed a steak knife and stabbed her “date” 100 times. A judge sentenced her to one day of community service per stab, justifying this by claiming she didn’t know her mind. Oh really? Sometimes a psychopath doesn’t reveal themselves until all societal inhibitions are removed.
But surely our “leaders” are supposed to steer us in the path of righteousness and humanity, right? Well, maybe self-righteousness and inhumanity, out of deliberateness or foolishness. Take for example the paper published by the McCourtney Institute for Democracy at Penn State University, asserting that today, “Americans not only are divided, but baffled by what motivates their opponents.” Not surprisingly, it suggests that Republican voters are much more consumed with blind hate than their counterparts, the latter who are at least willing—get this—to allow “moral” motivations to the opposition.
That is too “generous” by half. Corruption, paranoia, stereotyping, race hate, xenophobia, cruelty, maliciousness, cupidity, ignorance, hypocrisy—these are supposed to define “morality”? If you support such a person for office who promises to bring all that to the table to inform policy, then something of that must dwell inside of you as well. Well, some of you are “moral” about some things, I suppose. More guns to kill “those” people, and opposing abortion and gay rights. That’s it??? Hell, Trump doesn’t even give a damn about that stuff; he’s just about all that other stuff.
This video tells us all we need to know about a man who is neither stable, nor a genius, but someone who if reelected will be as Hitler was—a completely immoral and evil man out to take vengeance on the world for "crimes" he imagines were committed against himself, but too mentally lazy to form actual policy on his own, preferring to deploy henchpersons eager to prove their “loyalty” by out-doing each other in evil to please—and take advantage of—a man as dangerously stupid as this:
Not that Nikki Haley is necessarily that "better" an alternative; still being in her "mental prime" only means her MAGA madness is not as apparent if you don't listen close enough to what she says between the lines.
Trump—who claimed the stock market would collapse if Joe Biden was elected in 2020—now takes “credit” for the record-breaking Dow Jones average; he claims that this is “his” economy, you know, the one that in 2020 saw the biggest GDP and employment drops since the Great Depression? This is supposed to be in response to the “assumption” he will be elected in 2024.
Now, intelligent people might
actually say the opposite is true: that stock prices, GDP and inflation are improving
because Wall Street would prefer not
to see Trump elected, given the chaos he and his henchpersons have in their
minds (if such a thing exists to form intelligent thought). Of course since the economy is unlikely to be a winning case to vote stupid, the "border crisis" that House Republicans oppose a Senate-induced "fix" for that is barely more "humane" than their own will have to do. As the St. Louis Dispatch editorialized, migrants are being used as "culture war cannon fodder" in this election year.
In recognition that this is an election year and the privy-dumping that goes along with it (mostly being excreted from the Republican side), I’m going to compose my own “philosophical dictionary,” and instead of wasting time composing one long and exhausting “dictionary’ of terms that define the present-day privy we call the US of A as originally intended, I’m just going to post this as an “introduction” and move on from there.
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