Taming the monster
When someone you love dies, you feel betrayed by some unknown force that took the person away from you. You are sad. You weep. But you accept your impotence towards the unknown, the force that surpasses your discerning.
When someone you love, truly love, betrays you, it is part of yourself that dies. And you have no unknown forces to blame for this betrayal. When your love is deep, that person becomes an extension of yourself. When they betray you, it is as if you betrayed yourself, and a part of you killed itself. It is one of these very rare cases where the sadism and masochism happen in the same act.
The question that takes hold of your brain is why? Why would someone who loves you and cares about you, ever hurt you? It is hard to understand. You turn it in so many ways and you fail to find a rational answer. Then all of the sudden, it dawns on you. What if the assumption you took is wrong? What if that someone doesn’t care about you, or cares less than you believed, then everything can be explained. A part of you made you believe that it cares about you when it didn’t. In reality, in truth, it cared mainly about itself.
You are stuck in an endless loop of sadness and disappointment. You are sad because part of you died and you are disappointed because a part of you, the other person, killed another part of you.
In that endless loop, the why continues to echo in your head. It is an ever-probing question to get to the bottom of the cause. Once you established what pushed a person you know so well, over the edge, then you need to know what pushed them to the edge. What conditioned that person to be able to carry this destruction and auto-suicide? Two factors, when put together, create the conditions for such an ungrateful and ungraceful act. The external factor is the “salim-stalin” chain, and its effect on people; what they missed growing up, and how their character was shaped by the circumstances they endured during their upbringing. The internal factor is engrained in most people’s nature. It grows fast, when the “salim-stalin” chain creates the right environment, it is the biggest culprit in the miserable state of human relationships. It is selfishness, I, myself, me, me, me. When this monster takes over all else is forgotten, shut down, or simply wiped out. There is no place for kindness, care, respect, or love. Not even empathy, compassion or pity. Any feeling towards the other becomes secondary to the need to feed the hungry monster.
“Give me attention, give me love, give me care, give me dreams, give me, give me, give me”. I will take everything. I will take it wherever I find it. I will ingest it, digest it, and then I will shit it back on you by telling you that you haven’t given me enough. The monster is always too busy looking for food. It doesn’t worry about anything else. It is hungry all the time. The more it eats, the bigger it grows, and the hungrier it becomes. Nothing else matters anymore. Like a herd of famished goats, unleashed in a garden, one hour later, when there is not a single flower left, they climb on the trees, eat every leaf, and when this is over, they walk to another garden, leaving behind them a trail of small black balls of excrements.
Whatever care builds slowly and painstakingly over the years, selfishness can destroy in minutes. Few people, and fewer by the day, construct their lives on authentic values, on a level of genuine truth, and naively but strongly believe that certain things can escape the bestiality of the monster. With time and sheer circumstantial luck, when things start to build up the way they imagined them, these dreamers start to think that they are succeeding. They pride themselves with the feeling of having somehow defeated the monster, at least in their own yard. They convince themselves that they might pull it off, where very few people or any have pulled it off before them. They continue to advance carefully, with a growing strength, always anchored on the fragile edifice of “truth” they brought together over the years. Then the monster wakes up, or I should say the “salim-stalin” chain wakes the sleeping monster up. Something happens, something rooted in the history and psychic of the other person, and strong enough to poke the monster and bring it back to life, hungrier, more ruthless and uncaring than ever before. In no time, what the dreamers spent years building, is shattered into pieces, fed to the monster and defecated back on the ruins of this part of their lives.
With instinct, selfishness is without a doubt the other fundamental feature we share with animals. Staying in that selfish animal state, not being able to overcome it, tame it, and replace it with a more humanistic feature, such as caring about the other, even when it is not our blood, is the plight of the so-called humanity. “Survive no matter what” our instinct tells us. “Take everything you can” our selfishness convinces us. Survive and take. To be fair with animals, they do give to their children, to all their children. Humans are not always as giving. We sometimes don’t even give to our own children. We have evolved into our humanity by mutating the animal features we inherited, into forms unique to us: a weaker instinct and a much more intrinsic and developed selfishness.
I despise selfishness and selfish people. Even if they are clearly winning in this world, my cause is to always fight against them, to annihilate them wherever I find them and whenever I can. I don’t care if this is a losing cause, I am like Sisyphus, I enjoy rolling that rock up the selfishness hill, even if it rolls back down as soon as I take my hands off of it. The battle is hard because it is fought with unequal weapons. The selfish doesn’t care about anything, or anyone, the selfless, cares about everyone, including the selfish ones, and this is why the selfless people are defeated. The only way I can foresee making progress in my struggle is to stop caring about the people who don’t care about anyone else but themselves. Their suffering, their tears, their complaints, all these subterfuges which bait selfless people into compassion and empathy, into forgiveness and acceptance, should be ignored. We might accept some of them, when we have no choice, but we will do it knowing that they cannot feed any longer from our feelings, our heart, our care, and our core. Let the selfish people feed on each other, a deadly battle of who can suck more blood and energy from the other.
Jesus failed miserably, when Mohammad succeeded beautifully. Those who say they are Christians, follow nothing of what Jesus said about giving and caring. That is a resounding failure. Those who claim to be Muslims, are far more in line with what Mohammad said, because giving and caring about the enemy and the stranger is not part of their doctrine. Convert the enemy or kill them. Give the one who is like you and take from the others. These precepts are in-tune with who we are as humans, unlike the soft illusionary teachings of giving to strangers.
With all that, if only gratitude was expressed clearly or even perceived occasionally, then the giver would be satisfied with that much. Selfish people do not even express the slightest genuine gratitude. It is quite the opposite. They expect you to be thankful to them because they accept what you give them.
Be done with these people! There is no place in our lives for the monster or its bearers. The rules are simple:
If you give you are welcome to take. If you don’t give, then go find another selfish person to take from.
The war is raging … we are probably losing but let us put every effort, let us celebrate every small win, and moreover let us enjoy every battle we fight!