Another Choice

Where is the spring?

When something unfortunate has happened, one can torment oneself indefinitely recalling the instants that preceded it: and if one had acted differently, rather than the way one did?

For, if one accords it any attention, one must admit that one’s will – this “local” force that allows, initiates or forbids one’s actions – is neither trustworthy nor gifted with any real knowledge, let alone with sufficient lore.

And the primary reason for this insufficiency is evident: it is that one’s will is separate from the others as from the whole and preoccupied mainly with its own personal priorities.

Its knowledge of the world is in fact only an opportunistic amalgamation of guesses and prejudices; information received or gleaned, thoughtless preferences and vague engagements.

***

Our traditional cultures had as one of their objectives to limit the damages that ignorant, selfish or rebellious individual initiative is liable to cause: to this end and with the intimidating help of a dominant religion, they codified the daily existence of everyone to the extent that there was hardly any occasion left for the individual to consider, if not a choice, at least options or alternatives.

It is thus that for very long the majority of human beings have abdicated all individual responsibility – beyond the designated terms and milieu of domestic existence.

And today these are all these millions and millions of individual aggregates that are laid prone and helpless and, like displaced cattle alienated from the right environment, are sullying the entire earth.

This governance through fear has functioned for ages, under one variant or another, each person dreading the consequences of any breach, indiscipline or offense of these many rules that used to furrow human existence – and, then, who would have dared to be so hardy or foolishly intrepid to question established order or even to secretly cherish a more likable faith?

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