Never Fading

People eat each other.

It's the truth, an observation with a little spite and hyperbole thrown in for flavor.

In the absence of hope, I have found life to be an exercise in breathing and surviving the void. I wrote about that already though.

What I've come to understand through this is that ideals have never been meant to be taken literally. That is, to live purely by one ideal is to shove one's head in the sand, to stop living in a real world, and to inhabit a world of imagination, a construction in the void. Because we want to run away, and it feels good to do so.

The problem is, all you're doing with your ideals is blindfolding yourself and sprinting through a forest. Sure, you may start out walking, feeling around with your hands, being very careful, tiptoeing, but eventually you get cocky. You think that you can walk normally, and glancing off trees every once in a while is no big deal. Your eyes are protected from any branches. Faster and faster you walk, and then you start running. You have gotten a feel for the forest, you think you understand its' pattern, and then you slam into a tree. You become broken, you fall on the ground, and you may even stay there for a while.

But the truth is, you can either die or you can take the blindfold off, realize the forest is far uglier than you dreamed, and keep walking. It may be drudgery, but at least it's real.

When you stop seeing what you want in people and you start asking what they actually are, you may come to the same conclusion I have. People are selfish, dumb animals that act largely on instincts. Those that transcend that are rare because the rest of the species makes it nigh impossible to do so. To be able to love, you must risk everything your instincts tell you to protect, save the instinct to procreate.

When making love is largely a selfish act, we have truly proven what we are: animals.

Animals eat each other.

Sure, most humans aren't practicing cannibals, but given a situation where one could, without consequences, take advantage of another person and get something amazing out of it, one will usually do it. Hell, it doesn't even have to be something amazing, it could be driving a few feet ahead on the road, and the price could be endangering many lives to attain this. Why not? You don't know them, they don't know you. Why not risk killing them to get ahead? You are going to be late if you don't do this multiple times.

People sell interest in someone that is not themselves for money, compassion for fame, and their souls for getting ahead in some way.

Those that do not are the exceptions that prove the rule is largely true, but they also prove that people don't have to eat each other.

Living a different way is possible, and make no mistake: you will pay with everything you have ever held dear. Allegiance to the truth typically results in mass opposition, ostracization, and recognition only after you can not benefit from it in any way. Self-esteem typically results in being ignored because in reality, 99% of people are more concerned with their next sentence and making it profound than in anything you could possibly say or why.

So why do it?

For the sake of doing it. You will be never fading, the anomaly that laughs at power and threats, that proves that we're not just animals, and that is all the satisfaction you can possibly expect from it. No good act goes unpunished, and no allegiance goes unchallenged by someone. No ideal is accepted by all, and no morality is agreed upon. It's a complex mess of things that you can never seem to win at times.

But it's life.