I saw the conversation going that way. I could have stopped. A little voice in my head said, “stop talking, you have nothing to gain.” After I had said “masculine and feminine are universals. Think is Yin & Yang. Think of hidden and visible. These categories are so much larger than gender.” I knew that this conversation was heading to some dead end. I saw the look in his/her eye. I felt that impotent rage looking for a kill.
“What, next are you going to say you do not believe in evolution?” OK. I did not see that one coming. I knew it was going to be something. I suggested we could have a one hour discussion on this topic. Of course he/she said this was silly.
I tried. I said that in the 1970’s Stephen Jay Gould organized an evolutionary biology conference at Harvard University. SJG was the foremost proponent of Darwinian evolution. But he saw that the model did not fit the data. Life on Earth does not change smoothly, through small random variations, which is the fundamental basis of classical Darwinian evolution. The data says very much otherwise. What came out of the Harvard conference was “punctuated equilibrium” which states that:
ecosystems remain mostly constant for long periods of time; then, for reasons that we do not yet understand, many species change all at once, and new ecosystems are established, which persist until the next big change.
My interlocutor threw up his hands, exclaimed I was a conspiracy theorist, and threatened to try and get me fired.
I read another book by Jay Gould years ago, and it stopped my mind. It might have started me on the path to thinking apart from the indoctrination of school. I love your journey of saying the forbidden thing after that little voice said "stop talking." I usually obey the little voice and stop talking, but I want another way. Not to pick a fight or see the other as enemy, but to stand my ground and bring more truth. There is a way I need to process out my own shadows of fear to be able to do this cleanly, and reading your experience helps with that process. Thanks!
Whom the gods would destroy, they first drive to madness.
We are informed, you and I by our shared faith that the gods of both the ancient world and of our day are in fact all demons.
The Ancient Greeks taught that to drift away from reality - the logos and mythos of our world - is to go insane and then die.
I have experienced similar conversations with peers, relatives, colleagues. I have avoided them as much as I could, especially with those that have displayed only a very feeble grasp on reality.
Chiefly it’s because the best way to help them is to avoid empowering them to drift away from reality any further — mental health first aid, to be precise.
Part of it is to protect my own heart.
Part of it - charity.
The “inner generosity” of which you wrote about in the previous letter - what little I have to give is limited by the ability of the recipient, the capability of their reception and the restrictions on effective application. (Matter, Form and Intention).
To bestow an “inner generosity” upon another, one must follow the rubrics taught by the Church. And those rubrics closely parallel the rubrics for bestowing blessings.
One cannot bless sin. Especially not unrepentant sin.
So for the morally and mentally unwell, the only thing that you can offer is a lifeline back to sanity and reality. Even then, you can only offer it when it is being asked for.
The ones who don’t give a damn about the Truth anymore and no longer pursue it are being left behind, and the rest of us have to keep going on without them.
Our mythos and logos, which Tolkien once described as the only one that was ever true — follows Truth, like a lodestone to a magnet, or a magnetic field to an electric current.