pathology: there are no ends there are only means

Where does it begin? Does it begin with the unwholesome realization that capitalism represents nothing more than the latest chapter in the timeless battle between the many and the few? Does it begin with the contemplation of television, a device designed to encourage normal people to exchange the way their time was spent (and in this day and age of synthetic value, increasingly the way their time will be spent) for pieces of a dream that was spent and useless a hundred years ago, all for the sake of the five percent of humanity who have the audacity to insist that it all belongs to them? Does it begin with the painful apprehension that there is a mighty schism in this world between ends and means, and ten thousand starving children and ten thousand smoke and pollution and toxic chemical choked cancer victims and ten thousand ignorant peasants who know nothing of the high powered politics that mean fire must rain from the sky and ten thousand wise fools like me who know something about the politics but are nonetheless powerless to do anything against them, and ten thousand and ten thousand more fall into that chasm on a nightly basis never to be heard from again? Does it begin with me writing or you reading or with all the reading and writing in the world? Perhaps it begins with just another grim late night (or very early morning) when the distractions I blame it all on must inevitably slip away one by one into the quiet into the dark and I am left alone with these thoughts that circle endlessly in this powerful impotent mind the Lord has cursed my path with.

There are no beginnings in this world, no places where you can place your hand and say "this is where it began." There is only the procession of the event that never ends, which is sometimes the dim doppelganger of an event that it seemed once was, which is sometimes the dim recollection of an event it seems might be. There is always a history, always a precedent, always a reason that never fully explains what's happening now. In short, and to quote my friend Most, "Everything has a pathology."

klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.