(Or Tolerance, in the common tongue)

No one can be commended any longer for instilling values in others – least of all the young and impressionable. We used to think it was right to guide others or to advise them in times of confusion or growth, but we now realize that this was intolerant. No one can really speak to another’s uniqueness. Both individually and culturally we must let everyone decide what matters to them on their own, or they will not genuinely learn to be themselves. Interference, even to save lives or heal (as we once thought “good”), is actually stealing the decisions and experiences that others have a right to make and have. Therefore all attempts at this must stop. We’re too enlightened to limit each other that way.

Teaching our beliefs is in actuality the ultimate tyranny, because freedom requires that there be no willful outer influence from elders. Curbing freedom, especially in delicate years, is never an option. Everyone has a right to develop unhindered, choosing their highest good and pursuing their own desires without input from external, pre-developed systems. We will sanction anything to preserve the freedom of each single human being to do and be what they like. We will discourage speaking out in public about religion, faith, right, or wrong. We will curtail police action and authority in order to respect every person’s right in this respect. We will censor all schoolbooks and materials to prove our dedication in this concern, and to preserve each child’s original personhood, unmolested by non-neutral pressures and cultural assumptions. We will teach everyone that the validity of anyone’s traditional values, opinions, and desires (even ones we’ve never met) is merely personal (and therefore intrinsically void) in order to secure an open, equal footing for all knowledge. We will deaden the meeting of every passion that leads to friction, and even marriage and international relations will have the proper bumpers in place to still their heretofore inevitable conflict.

Agony must be stilled, conflict nullified, and peace made. No one may ‘win’ public ground, as this will encourage confrontation. The devaluation of everything in the public sphere is the answer here. In the case of difference and confrontation, we will no longer allow there to be stands made for the things thought to be ‘right’. A stand-off is the perpetual goal on all sides. In fact, if two differing parties can no longer see one another, our job is done; the pressure never appears, and peace is achieved. Each can go their way without molestation.

The more we instill these things into our children, the less identity- and belief-caused pain will exist in the world; people oughtn’t to experience such abominable friction. A successful world will have no wars because everyone on the planet will know that they have no right to demand anything of another and that every idea and belief ought to be left to flourish. The quelling of violence will not be necessary, simply because the highest ideal of all will be the undiscoverable and inconsequential nature of one’s neighbor, left untrammelled and pure. Our world and our neighbor’s are equally valid in every respect.

We will stop relating.
We will stop sharing.
We will stop loving.
We will live for our own self, each.
We will stop learning from other intelligences.
We will not be reasoned with.
We will grow stale and rigid.
We will stop creating.
We will stop expressing.
We will stop proliferating.
We will stop believing.
We will stop caring.
We will die.

*~*

I don’t know where necessity will come into play. Somewhere along about where one person believes that all children should be killed, maybe. . . Or before that? When having children and ‘caring’ for them becomes simply a matter of large-scale production and economics because lonely love has been imprisoned and suppressed? Perhaps when there is no intervention while someone in a deep and legitimate depression decides that blowing up the earth is the only way out of their pain? Is one person’s world really always so equally valid as to be unchallengable?

I hate to be cliché, but look at Hitler, at conflict resolution patterns, arguments between husband and wife, feuds, and general communication between two separate parties on something new anywhere. We would be nowhere without confrontation, conflict, passion, and the guts to stick to our guns! Those are (scale aside) what provide the opportunity for an understanding to be reached (not the weapons, duh, the other things). Burying each side forever is simply authorizing mass madness on a scale we’ve only had glimpses of before. Passionlessness is not wisdom, though it can lack it. When a husband and/or wife stops trying to make themselves understood, the possibility of love is diminished for each. Collaboration may breed stupidity and pain, but it also provides opportunity for exponential newness, creativity and positive learning. We’ve pruned the tree back at the trunk in order to address agony, and while I agree that agony and conflict should be addressed, permanent public silence is not the answer. It’s social suicide. It is an negating influence. It is NOT TOLERANCE.

Perhaps everyone dies alone. I wouldn’t know as I’m still alive.

I’ll tell you one thing I do know though. The more this ‘devaluing’ principle, in each and every aspect, pervades our living, the less free we are.

Is steam more free as steam when the boundaries and conditions of its existence are withdrawn? No. It is no longer steam. The same goes for us, our boundaries and conditions.

We are communal, social creatures, and generations of similar foundations have an awful lot right about the humane gears of society. We cannot live more and more cut off from each other this way. This is not genuine. This is not human.

Perhaps everyone dies alone, but now… ?

Now everyone must live alone.

c. Mary Kathryn Gough, 03/02/12, wales 10.01 pm