Unwashed Masses.
Gods love them.
Everyone else fears and despises them, including themselves. Let’s talk about them.
Safe to say you’re not part of it, the great horde, since you read the Devil’s Blog, which requires a degree of literacy beyond the common. Assuming you understand it. I pride myself on my clarity of expression, my abuse of commas notwithstanding, I have no desire to be mysterious, linguistically. A penchant perhaps, for polysyllabic prose, a fondness for the fulsome, but these are simple enhancements, charmingly gratis.
Vocabulary, one way of separating the cream, pruning the bush, dropping the deadweight. A little obscurity goes a long way, a hint of philosophy or mythology and eyes are drooping. Extended sentences, a few choice descriptions, some truth, and suddenly you have but three left, readers with curious minds and a sense of humour. The best kind.
A few more strokes, I think, before we get back to the sheepfold and its contents. What else can I say about you, that I haven’t said? Though I suspect you wouldn’t find repetition repellant, glory is glorious.
Has it been a hard road to here? Hardly. Not for the likes of you. You know the rarity of an open mind because you have one. The ultimate tolerance. Forget what the last few centuries did to that word and find its simplest meaning. The ability to pick something new up in your hand, get a sense of it, the shape and scent, the weight and warmth, then simply put it back down. What you carry away with you is nothing of mine, but I will miss it, this touching of hands through the medium of language. Touch the untouchable, you dare to do it.
You understand that however ugly the truth is, there is beauty in its ability to change. What is the impossible but something yet undone? Above all you are brave, letting the Devil lead you by the word down paths you might otherwise shun.
Gladly would I defy the laws of physics to have you by my fireside, drinking something intoxicating, feeling my soft voice sliding down your spine, while I weave webs around your brain- give me the keeping of it for a week or two, submit to intense painless examinations and extractions not to say extortions, sign over parts of it to me, I’ll let you know which ones, but you can rest easy that I will leave your soul alone.
Consider that paragraph your sword of Damocles. You know how easily that could have become a Pandoric sentence, it should remind you that you’re never safe from the possibility of one. It’s dangerous here at the top of the heap.
What about Equality? Lovely concept, watch it dance with numbers and blind hope. See it embrace the static, the uniform, the average, get out of the way when it flees from emotions, oddities and liars.
You can’t have Individuality and Equality in the same herd. They’re so obviously mutually exclusive. As for liberty, you have never had it, you never will, as long as there are Social Norms. Let me quote my Dear Scribe, in her authority as an oddity.
“I scorn social norms because I had no part in designing them. I have no faith that they made any consideration for my needs. It’s my life, I have to live it my way, for my benefit.”
Unwritten rules for the inherently unruly. Without which we would have Anarchy, Dystopia, a world-wide regression to days of yore when armed men came riding over the hill and took your everything.
How do we know this?
History and its Associates assure us. Words assure us. The older the better, age sanctifies them, repetition immortalises them. Violence, real or imagined, blood spilled a million years ago still speaks. Media picks up scents selectively and sells them shrewdly, give them garbage because that’s what they want. Or give them garbage because it’s cheap and easy and they believe everything we sell them.
There is no evidence whatsoever that you turn into wolves if left to your own devices, you have never been in such a natural condition. Society breathes into your lungs, blood submits to reason, instincts go to ground to survive. No study could replicate such a condition, a hundred men on an island isn’t going to cut it. Overrated fiction involving boys, flies and a pig notwithstanding, brainwashing begins in utero, there is no escaping it.
All you have are theories, let me offer mine. I maintain that the laws of inertia will always win out. Until you find a way to conquer time, genetics and gravity, Anarchy and all its Glories belongs to the few, the infrequent, the insane.
What turns men into wolves? Other wolves. The immortal blade has immortal precedence. What else? God and his priests keep their dogs hungry, ruling powers control the food supply and tell you what to eat.
There you have it, the key to the unwashed masses. Like all other creatures on the planet, they want to eat.* They want shelter, they want something, anything, to amuse them. A few toys, perhaps, but otherwise this is the average human being. Of seven billion, six point eight billion are happy with just that. Longing, perhaps, for a few more years, but otherwise content. Lazy, this is your word for one with no ambition, who dislikes expending effort on principal. Nasty social constructs, productivity and efficiency, far removed from the forest, the gutter, the place where you live and feel and bleed and die while papers are shuffled. The place where you are given a number and this is more important than anything else, never forget it, never be anything else, run from words, unless we feed them to you. What is dystopia but a government run amok. What is amok? Nothing, trust me.
At the top they simply redefine the word to mean whatever you’re doing that isn’t sanctioned.
Let me leave you with something to think about.
Profanity. Assign meaning to a group of letters, agree on them, I presume, then forbid them. Pull this apart until you’re laughing.
*For an understanding of the Planet, see Robin Wall Kimmerer’s “Braiding Sweetgrass.” It’s on the Devil’s Bookshelf.