cherokee nation

The Cherokee Nation will return.

the experts

The common man hides his impotence behind delusions of power. He says: my personal actions affect the entire globe! What is the source of such hubris? The common man has been led astray by the experts. The experts know they depend upon the common man for their existence; without an audience to venerate them, the experts are no longer experts, merely reluctant scholars. Only in the face of ignorance, then, can one become an expert. So the experts feed the ignorant on candied sweets and strong liqueur, they tell him "only you can make a difference!" and "unless you act there will come catastrophe!" But the common man is overwhelmed with this responsibility; like a bee trapped between two panes of glass he imitates St. Vitus until his expiration; floundering and struggling, pounding his skull against the invisible walls around him, when all along, the exit lay above his head. Better to ignore the experts and follow the example of the escape artist: seek calmly and methodically for the exit, for it is your very floundering in the face of imagined future threat which itself creates catastrophe.

assaults of madmen

How can society protect itself from the unprovoked assaults of madmen? There are two questions here: 1) how can such be prevented? 2) who should do the prevention? As for the latter, surely the answer is those at blame? But we are a jointly-imagined whole, jointly-responsible. Each of us contributes his part to an atmosphere which breeds behavior of an "antisocial" nature. Even fiction still has a cause; even the drunken careen of mad imagination cannot arise without external catalyst. We provoke the disturbances of the susceptible, and through our ignorance encourage them. So "society" is to blame for its internal detractors, but also "society" is a mere intangible epiphenomenon, laid upon the noise of individual behavior. How then can we address the former; how then can we act? We each must succor the potentially estranged separately, as jointly there is no we, but merely a collection of Is. We cannot trust a mere fantastickal apparition, but each separately must carry the load of all. The duty of the individual cannot be foisted upon the shoulders of an imaginary giant.

a test

"They should have acted thus _______," we say, but would we ourselves have acted thusly? Only if tested can we know ~ and to be tested, at all costs, we avoid.