I Only Lie For Selfish Reasons

Nil Sine Magnos Labore

On the first Tuesday in March I slipped 35 cents into my pocket and headed to the bus station on Madison Ave. There was no real reason to have those coins rubbing a steady hole in my jeans other than the fact that I had them. They were mine.

In life there are few things that people truly get aggravated or impassioned about but by far one of the most common things people will fight to the death for is what they feel is rightly theirs. Possession, or possessions, has a hold on the mental psyche of humanity that few things ever have or will. Unless the Matrix or time travel becomes a real and viable thing. Until then let’s face it, how many wars would be fought if it weren’t for the idea of my freedom or my rights or my needs or my beliefs. In essence, it is selfish innate desire that causes the world to go round.

As horrible as that may be or how offensive that may sound it’s rather comforting in a strange, although admittedly twisted, way. For you see if all the world is selfish then people, as a whole, are easy to manipulate. All a person needs to do is find which strings, which threat to a possession, needs to be issued in order to gain control over another person. It’s like blackmail except it’s not illegal. Politicians do it all the time when they use “hot-button issues” or attend political rallies or just open their mouths in general. They say things like “And those Lefty-Liberals are going to come for your guns” or “Those Right Wing-Fascists are going to ruin your earth.” Note the use of the word your and the strong desire to defend what is yours that rises up in people. Possession is the soul root of selfish action and, ironically, mass action.

It’s this type of understanding that got me thinking that I should tap into this type of fear inspired manipulation. But then I remembered that I didn’t want to be a politician and/or evil. Not that being evil is bad, well I suppose it is, it’s just not a career I would choose for myself. If being evil could be considered a career which, thanks to Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot and many others, I am forced to think it must be one. Although now pondering on that I can’t help but think that perhaps you do not choose evil but evil chooses you. Or is it the other way around? Alas philosophy is both my strong suit and my weak point. By that I mean that I can walk in circles while making it appear like I’m doing complex calculus related geometry. Another relatively useless thing for everyday life as explained by my sophomore geometry teacher who blithely informed me that 90% of everything learned in his class would not be useful and/or applicable to the real world.

Sophomore math teacher aside the whole idea of the real world and what can be applied in and to it, as well as what we are being taught in preparation of the real world, got me to wondering. Many things do that if you haven’t noticed by now. What is the real world? What had I learned, if anything, that could be applied to it? These questions and many more like them swirled in my brain like a whirling vortex of doubt. Something every teenager in the existence of the world is wildly familiar with and, in reality, never truly gets rid of. Never fear though, the tactics at ignoring and or avoiding the Vortex of Doubt (and sometimes Despair) become more refined throughout the years. One of the more popular tactics is Repression, something almost all private school students can attest that they have a phenomenal amount of experience with. If repression doesn’t work or you still find yourself being drawn into the gravitational force field of the Vortex of Doubt there is always this magical thing called therapy.