...Ours is a self-blinded condition, a willing cooperation with the very thing that is killing us—a slow and complex process that involves many pleasures of bodily and emotional appetite and the more dangerous pleasures of intellectual and spiritual pride. Our eyes do not penetrate beneath the surface appearance of the process, do not see the elaborate unfolding of sinful dynamics in which horror and pleasure are combined, as if in a diabolic ritual. We can only sense its presence from time to time. Then, to placate our self doubts, we make our minor protests, we state our positions in the apparently neutral public agora, and are suitably ignored—or worse, are absorbed into the liturgy of hell that depends for its success on all kinds of human instruments, good and ill.
Which brings to mind something C. S. Lewis wrote in his preface to The Screwtape Letters:
"The greatest evil is not now done in those sordid “dens of crime” that Dickens loved to paint. It is not done even in concentration camps and labour camps. In those we see the final result. But it is conceived and ordered (moved, seconded, carried, and minuted) in clear, carpeted, warmed, and well-lighted offices, by quiet men with white collars and cut fingernails and smooth-shaven cheeks who do not need to raise their voice."
Who are these people? Did we elect them? In all probability we did, and we did so because they understood human nature sufficiently to offer us many apparent “goods” in a package-deal containing the great evils that are an essential part of their agenda. The very quality of our cooperation with the terms of the deal should tell us something about ourselves: we have come to accept as normal a complicity, albeit reluctant, with the most hideous crimes and endless self-justifications fostered by our governments, which have become aggressively materialistic in political philosophy (where there is any conscious philosophy at all). Our compliance is not enforced by starvation or the threat of torture chambers, but is rooted deep in the psyche, neo-Pavlovian and passive, for there are few things that condition human judgment as powerfully as security and dread, pleasure and the fear of pain, real or imagined...
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Michael O'Brien is an artist, essayist and novelist living in Barrie's Bay, Ontario. You can find his work at studiObrien
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