"Can you imagine the cynicism that is coming to light here?" I said to Sylvia. "Ten bucks is what those fifty people had considered civilization to be worth, including their own life. Any beggar collects more than that. In other words, humanity doesn't give a damn whether it lives or dies. Many of those fifty people who had stopped at the table had probably countless thousands stashed away, if not millions, in their bank accounts and investment portfolios that promised windfall profits. But for life itself, they couldn't spare more than a buck. Many not even that. That's the image of an animal-animated, inward focused self-corrupted society, Sylvia, with a thinking cap so small and centered of fascist greed that love is nothing more than just a word, a word without substance, a phrase used in self-denial and the denial of everything else."

      "And what is the system that corrupted them?" Sylvia asked.

      "Public opinion seems to have corrupted them," I said. "It's a highly corrupting imperial force, carefully created for that purpose. Almost the whole society has become a slave to it, without knowing it. Each morning society reaches for its newspaper, it's daily diet of prescribed opinions, and as the system demands, society devotes it energies to pursuits under this system that are in most cases disadvantageous to its existence and survival. In the world of the modern 'Enlightenment' in which truth has no place, public opinion becomes the truth, carefully, artificially orchestrated. It tells us what our perceptions ought to be, what our emotions ought to be, and by what measures our living becomes politically correct. We have been 'taught' for centuries to make our love small and confined, and to find satisfaction in this small world compensated by wild-eyed consumerism. "We have been taught not to open our eyes, not to look at another woman, not to experience the continuing unfolding of love, but to keep ourselves isolated, to keep life confined, to keep it small, to keep it animated with animal-like impulses that don't empower one to think in terms of civilization, in terms of building a renaissance, or as we now must, in terms of surviving the recurring Ice Age in an Ice Age Renaissance. We have been told: Don't look! Don't touch! Don't rock the boat! Just keep your head stuck in the sand and dream contented that the evermore unfolding hell that is engulfing us, is heaven. Of course, Sylvia, if this is the way society had reacted in the early 1600s, the Second Renaissance would have never been launched, the Treaty of Westphalia would have never been attempted, the Thirty Years War might have continued for another hundred years until civilization would have ended and the USA would have never been formed. Now we face the same process all over again, except in a much worse context."

      Sylvia made a gesture of protesting, but said nothing. She shook her head instead and began studying the menu.



      As I had on the day when I had lunch with Raymond at the place, I ordered the soup of the house again and their prawns-special, Vietnamese style. After all, we had come to a Vietnamese restaurant. I remembered the prawns to have been well prepared with a tasty, spicy, buttery sauce. Sylvia followed my suggestion.

      "What did you and Raymond talk about here?" Sylvia asked.

      I laughed. "We talked about my womanizing. He regarded me as one of those countless sinners who couldn't help themselves. He told me that I shouldn't worry, because the whole world was like that. He said that most civilizations that his professional researchers studied were openly polygamous. I told him that this didn't apply. So he told me that his researchers also found that almost half of all men surveyed have had affairs of some form outside their marriages and that rest probably envied those. He suggested that under those terms, being a sinner is quite all right. Actually, he never used the term, womanizing. He is too polite for that. He talked around it. It appears that womanizing is an imperial term that has been constructed to corrupt society into being ashamed of the slightest notion of responding to the Principle of Universal Love. Obviously, his researchers didn't make this recognition, and neither did he. Instead he represented the corrupting effect of the term. He said in essence that I should bow to the system and be ashamed as one is supposed to, but in the same breath he came to my defense by suggesting that my 'failing' was excusable since human beings are inherently small-minded, pitiful, weak, and impotent."

Next Page

|| - page index - || - chapter index - || - Exit - ||

Stories about  Healing from novels by Rolf A. F. Witzsche