Olive nodded and smiled. "Indeed, Plato would say to all that religious stuff, like the Adam Smith stuff, 'Wake up people, the fun is just beginning. Listen to yourself to what you are saying, and then question our honesty and your answers that you may derive. Plato would tell you that when you begin to argue with yourself, you begin to discover things, and as a consequence of that, new questions emerge. He says, 'Don't ever think you have reached the final limit. There is no final limit in the realm of advancing perceptions. But you've got to start with the highest concept that you know to be true. It's like Socrates had said to his friend Menon, there is no need for teaching. The truth lies before us all to be discovered, and that we can all do.'"

      "Adam Smith tells us the opposite," I added. "Adam Smith tells us to stick with the lowest concept, saying: The dirt of the Earth is your gold. Dig it up and hide it. And as for sex, just get, get, get, as much as you can get, and rape or kill for it if you must, but get, get, get. It's Greed Based Economics in a different form."

      "Isn't that what I said earlier," said Olive. "Didn't I say that we have a huge challenge ahead of us, since society has been going backwards at full speed? We are almost at the point again where society says that love has no place anywhere, not even in the smallest possible domain. Just listen to the pop songs. They are all about getting, and more getting,"

      "But we say that this narrow perception that society wraps itself up in, is crazy," said Indira. "Naturally, we are being ridiculed if we don't conform. And believe me, I am ridiculed a lot in India. All the narrow-minded people in the world demand that everyone conforms to their narrow way of thinking. Tatsuhiko and I refuse to do that, and so does everyone of our family. Still by our refusal, we did get a few people to question themselves about the validity of their narrow standpoints. That's progress, I suppose," said Indira.

      "I think we have to look at this thing more closely than that," Sylvia interrupted her. "It has always been the case that love is confined to the smallest possible denominator. This goes back as far as you want to take it. The marriage institution was as small and confining in ancient times, as it is today, and sex has always been tied into this confinement. Maybe the people who have challenged this were killed for their daring. We may be a bit more advanced today, but not by much."

      "That's not true," Tatsuhiko interrupted her. He began to laugh. "Love is much more confined today than it has ever been, even while we sell songs about love by the millions. In the early day, mankind didn't have Adam Smith's system of greed based economics bearing down on them, as we have it today, which has no room for love. Adam Smith has invaded our very soul and kept out the faintest notion of the Principle of Universal Love, even in the private domain. Mary is the only pioneer I know who stood up in the world and said that if love isn't unfolding in the universal domain, don't bother, because you're missing the point."

      "I know that," Sylvia replied. "We can't even keep the hospitals open anymore that we had once built for one-another, and why should we, since millions of people can't afford the insurance premiums anymore to use the hospitals that are still remaining. We let people die while we sing about love. And even while people are dying for lack of care, society scoffs at whoever as much as talks about the General Welfare Principle on which the USA had originally been founded, which is but a small step towards the Principle of Universal Love. Isn't that what Mary is getting at by keeping the door of her institution closed to the small-scale marriage model? Of course, whoever dares to step outside this small model is being ridiculed and slandered in every imaginable way. Yes, I have seen this, Tatsuhiko."

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