A next step

One becomes suspect.

And on the other side, perhaps a greater peril broods: that of losing all discernment, of letting oneself be reduced to an obedient and compliant shadow, hollowed out, dispossessed and divested of all independent resource, of all autonomous capacity of reflection – and of all right to rule one’s own conduct.

***

The pitiless logic of the first step into the gearing is set in motion.

To tie up for the first time this mask on one’s face, to recoil for the first time from the nearness of another – and distrust settles in, infiltrates and spreads like an opaque smoke in all the spaces of daily life.

One no longer knows and, worse, one is no longer capable of knowing: it is the “authorities” that know and can know: and yet, bombarded and strafed from every side at every moment by debilitating, contradictory and inconclusive information, it is the very status of these authorities that is somehow unseated and altered: is there something else behind them all, another agent, power or formation that evaluates, judges and decides?

Doubt proliferates, infecting all our actions, in the exact image of this parasitic spectre released upon earth.

In whom, where are we to rest our trust?

What has happened?

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