Two Hundred

We’re social animals, yet we’re alone.  We’re alone because we never learned how to live with each other.

Other animals do it instinctively, as sleepwalkers do.  But we’re no longer asleep. We’re no longer guided by instinct, as other animals are.  Neither are we fully awake.  We live in daydreams, guided by illusions.   

We call ourselves homo sapiens, and decided that in order for us to live with each other the wisest of us must rule, and the rest must consent to be ruled.  But even the wisest of us find it difficult to rule themselves, much less the rest of us.  So we learned to lie.

Every society we've built has been founded on a lie we told each other and ourselves, a conspiracy to which everyone was party. Eventually it became a prison in which we’re both the prisoners and the guards.   

Every society we've built eventually collapsed.  Not because we woke to the reality that it was founded on a lie, because we always knew that.  We pretended the lie was true because we wanted it to be true, and tried to make it come true.  It collapsed because those who didn’t care whether it was true or not used the dream to rule the dreamers, which discredited the dream and persuaded the dreamers that they were fools to dream.

Now we no longer dream, or we have nightmares from which we can’t wake up.  There’s nothing else to do but die.