The Perfect Humanoid Symbol, 2

When we shape matter to express our non−material self, such as with art, everybody wins; when the world shapes our non−material self into thinking, feeling and behaving like matter, such as when we betray our honesty for thirty glittering dinar, everybody loses. When we win, we become more and more free; when we lose, we become more and more slaves; and what makes us win or lose is whether we are cause or effect: we aim at being cause over the world, the world aims at making us effect, that’s the bottom line. From this stems all that part of culture and thought about defining and fostering ethical values and principles, such as honour, which is instrumental in teaching one to be proud of one’s attitude and ability to produce survival. Basically, all those values and principles are telling you is: as things are, you are here to survive and make everything and everyone survive; to make it, you have to be cause, not effect and that’s it, period. In the beginning was the Word, and the Word is… be cause. And what is addiction but hopeless effect?

Second, addiction to what: food or poison? You may say that living beings in this world are addicted to breathing, drinking and eating, but if you wanted to change that you’d have to reach and modify the heart of the laws of physics and nature. Otherwise, since nourishment brings survival to living beings, does it deserve being called addiction? There’s a clear−cut distinction here, and it is that between help and betrayal: not only air, water and food bring life and poison brings death, but in order to bring death poison disguises it as life. Suppression as usual: exploiting one’s drive to live and perverting it into a drive to die. The mechanisms of poison addiction is quite exact, and it’s, as I previously described: artificially creating and exploiting a degrading need that did not exist in the first place. It’s the swindle perpetrated with criminal protection and nicotine addiction: you damage people and force them in a lower degraded state, then you exploit their drive to regain the original state, selling them the cause of the disease as if it was its cure, selling them dearly a tiny bit of that which was their own in its entirety in the first place, while you ensure they never realize the truth but on the contrary remain sided with their torturers and fighting their rescuers.