Let’s all re-read the myth of Pandora’s Box to understand the age we’re living in. Pandora was warned that once the box is open, there are things that once escaped can never be returned. The current occupant of the White House, a person afflicted with one of the worst social diseases of all, sociopathy, is our modern day Pandora and has allowed the dark forces that have been crawling around for over 200 years under the fabric of this country to escape into the zeitgeist. Hate, ignorance and envy are the bane of mankind, the cause of our falling from grace, the triple threat to our mortality. Systems of laws have developed over the course of our histories to mitigate these failures. When those laws over-reach, they reflect the Hobbesian dystopia that requires the Leviathan to press its overarching rule on our daily lives, resulting in authoritarianism. Ironically, when these laws are ignored or distrusted, we rush past Rousseau’s freedom of nature and descend into anarchy and chaos, thereby justifying the Leviathan’s existence and methods. Each extreme now seems to be meeting up in the current zeitgeist. The multiple evils from the corners of the dark box are now in the air and we take them in with every breath; once in our lungs, they emerge with every out-breath.
The results are catastrophic: we are up to our necks in a poisoned stew of distrust and lies, anxiety over what is real and what is not. And because our cortexes are still under development, because as a species we are still afflicted with the curse of atavistic barbarism, because anxiety overload can fell the tallest tree and shake the mightiest mountain, we escape into smaller and smaller bubbles, descending into tribalism as a means of defense. The further you are from my tribe, the less I can trust you, the more of a threat you pose to me. In the modern, post-Freudian world, its less of a threat to my physical self as it is to my psychological persona, my spiritual life, my individual identity. The bubble shrink wraps itself to include only me and through the miraculous curse of social media, I can curate a reality that feeds my tiny self interest precisely in the format I desire while fooling myself that others, trapped in their own, have my back. They…we, don’t. We’re too frightened for our own selves.
And when we get to that point, the Leviathan wins, because our self-Balkanization forbids the loose interaction and flexibility necessary to lubricate the natural friction of allies to the same cause. We view those who might align with us as not worthy of our trust, as a threat to our psychic being: if not now, then potentially. As we turn away possible allies to a cause, as we dis-allow ourselves the possibility of new partnerships for new challenges, we unwittingly ratchet up our anxieties, tightening up our bubbles, causing them to cut off all air.
And then we’re vulnerable because we’re alone. And that’s just how the Box wants it: Leviathan awaits to take advantage of our post-existential crisis.
Bile 