You are on a path, moving toward truth. You see it peaking over the mountain, and begin to move swiftly toward it.
~BUT WAIT!~
A peal of thunder deafens you, as a blinding strike of lightning hits ground not 20 feet from your face. You open your eyes, stunned. As attention retunes and vision returns, you now face a wall too high to see beyond, and as wide as the horizon. Your path stops here, flanked by two identical doors.
You hear the rattling of doorknobs and the creaking of hinges. Each door cracks open, and while the interiors are obscured you note what you can see.
The floor of each is tiled in checkerboard, and in each room, the silhouette of a figure tilts toward you. You hear two throats clearing, and then..
“This way! I’ll show you the way to a perfect future, all these corruptions undone. We welcome everyone, and soon everyone will be part of our unified system where all are the sa—I mean, equal! Just a bit of flexibility on your part, a few rights sacrificed, for the cause.”
“No, no, ignore that utopian fool and come this way! The old ways are best, and I can take you back to a time before all this corrosive progress. We can make this land great again. The way it was, before that one’s kind spoiled it for us. God’s on our side, kid. Right this way.”
You have to choose, and yet you hesitate. Something seems amiss. Can you remember what it was? What do you do? Are you bound to choose between the only two apparent options, or is there more beyond the facade?
Human minds are addicted to the assignment of all things to polarity. Order and chaos are no exception. People want security above all, and so they box the world up to try and own and run it, or shrug their shoulders and give up on personal responsibility in favor of moral relativism. Is it all chaos, or is it an intricate web of conspiracies and bureaucracy?
It seems to be both. Order is imposed on the perceived chaos of nature by man, who deems it wrong because it is uncomfortable. Nature perfected order before man, but it's too subtle for most of us to notice. So it goes also with autonomous societies existing in parallel with the Death Grid. Manmade order tends toward the pathological, and begets the hellscapes occasionally discussed here. The option (the Web or Life, in this case) waits, for aeons if necessary, for us to come around. And we will, in good time.
The frantic ones who say it's all planned down to the atom shrink life to the size of a panopticon prison cell, and in their fear offer no candle against the shadows. Trouble abounds, to be sure, but speak of solutions or get off the stage. The smug nihilist hipster tadpoles preaching no future and no agency of individual control leave the gate open for malevolence to operate with elbow room, and tend to help it along unconsciously or otherwise. Surprise, y’all. Complaint without contribution means you’re working for The Man.
The options as advertised are dead ends, and we do ourselves little favor when we take the shapes of someone else’s jars. If you haven’t figured it out yet, that Death Grid that chokes the earth is powered by the savage fight-or-flight emotions at the bottom of the brain (Hell) rather than the top shelf imagination and problem solving of the higher levels (Heaven). So be contrary to yourself now and then. Make a third way when there seems to be one. Ever wonder why so many religions, philosophies, artists, musicians, and architects are hung up on triples? Take a hint, and travel well.
