Leviathan

Madness begets madness.

Our cruel indifference towards those genuinely in need is matched only by our presumption and our spurious outrage at our own imagined victim-hood and our fantasies of thwarted entitlement. We loudly protest when short changed by the shop keeper, then, once the error is rectified, walk past the beggar on the pavement outside, oblivious to his need as we reflect on our own petty vindication. We reward or console ourselves with a holiday, and once there, complain about tardy service at the cocktail bar on the beach where the bodies of drowned refugees were washed up the year before. The wreckage of a home destroyed by a typhoon or a tsunami one thousand miles away becomes the flotsam that spoils our paradise, and heirlooms and keepsakes and photographs of people now anonymous among the living are litter that ruins the view.

When we try to discuss these discrepancies Reason itself merely invites scorn and ridicule. Argument is treated as affront. Evidence is dismissed as provocation. Logic is taken personally. There is only shared conviction or deliberate contradiction. There is no nuance, doubt or investigation. Assertion is an end in itself. Facts become banners around which to rally. News is fake unless it makes us feel good. The lies of others are tolerated, indeed celebrated, if they permit us to continue to lie to ourselves. Hate and avarice prevail and the dog-whistle and the knee-jerk are our only clarion and litmus of validity. All our criteria of truth corrode and crumble in the acid and greasy bile with which we lubricate our discourse. We succumb to the suggestions of every opportunist and indulge every easy prejudice. The habit of forensic thought is replaced by reflex and gratification.

We must put our hands over our children's ears when our leaders speak to protect them from the filth our leaders spout as they try to exculpate themselves from their sex crimes, implicating all men to make their own guilt seem commonplace and unremarkable, or as they distract from their corruption and plunder with calumnies that misdirect our indignation towards the weak and the vulnerable and the foreign. We placate the angry at the expense of moderation. We indulge bullies who insist we listen to them despite having nothing to say, who complain they are being ignored even though no-one else is allowed to speak. We allow others who timidly bear the most urgent of messages to fall silent to appease them and let their loud, empty words fill our halls and chambers and courts and parliaments and cathedrals with their specious import.

But do not confront the world head on. If you do you will only discover it possesses inexhaustible reserves of horror that will overwhelm the best in anyone. It will outdo the most inventive imagination with the variety of its atrocities. It leaves even God dumbstruck and paralysed with trauma, unable to intervene. What chance do we then stand?

Is there is another way?

Even though we may raise a humble yard from the limbs and timbers of our greatest cities, its pillars becoming our tallest skyscrapers, its canopy our hand extended upon the sky, within which to perform our noblest ambitions over countless generations, we find the highest degree of civilisation we can accomplish is still just an exquisitely refined barbarism. We may invest the finest vessel we can construct with the noblest cargo of hope, and launch it with our age's loudest boast of progress. But Leviathan will splinter the stiffest beam in its grip, and reduce all collective endeavour to disconnected tales of individual panic and despair, and to survive we must become flotsam and seek that beach where we intrude on another's dream of paradise.

But we accept the futility of our efforts and we make them anyway. The most we can achieve is temporary repair, so defiantly we live in a world built and rebuilt from its own wreckage. And we act not out of the consequences of our actions, but because our actions are who we are. We are not defined by their futility.

And we are kind to one another. We offer the beggar the change we received from the shop keeper. We learn the histories of the places we visit, reflect on the losses they have suffered, and celebrate the human legacies they have left us. We will dismantle and fold up and pack away and dispatch paradise to distant lands so that some earthly shelter may be assembled where it is needed.  

And kindness begets kindness.

Help the world's victims one by one, for you cannot vanquish the world itself in its entirety. We may not swim to solid ground. At least we shall not sink.