Prologue (Cont.)
"Now why is that? Is it entirely related to that, being comfortable or miserable? A worker on a tight budget or a firm one, goes on to carry out his livelihood, he does as he is told and many times he is content with that. This process: earn the livelihood, deplete the expertise, gather sustenance, replete the life and the expertise, new month begins. Bah! Rinse and repeat. It becomes a loop and not a process because process is when a series of actions leads to a meaningful end. There's no meaning to be had here. The worker gets to experience life's simple pleasures and he gets to experience unusualities from time to time. And for many, that's enough. What about the employer? He has ambitions. He carefully studies the system, and sees that there are people who have not enough ideas or willpower or capital to become one like him. And thus, he exploits the system, can we even call it exploitation since it's been so common since dawn of time, to construct a microsystem where people are obliged to be the cogs of his ambition in exchange for their livelihood: something so grossly pathetic as money. And even if his ambition branches from being employer to becoming entrepreneur, very little changes. The baseline operative notion previously being "milk a system to earn money" goes on to "bring new ideas to make a system to earn money". Some are either tactical or delusional when they believe their ideas are changing the world and beneficial to mankind. Sometimes earnestness is involved and that's where the delusional kind of beneficial entrepreneurship arises from. A lot of businessmen and entrepreneurs are content with being as they are, obviously the ambitions still being in them, despite the innate anxiety of those positions. Maybe some would, from time to time, when they sleep, head heavy with dreams, the oneiric exaltations manifesting in spasming limbs, violently mumble out: CHANGE THE WORLD!!. The Devil can touch both the worker and the employer, and it's not always in the form where the worker takes deviant measures to reach the goal instead of doing as told, or when the employer, in his ambition, takes deviant measures regarding the supersystem: " Last Shot at Heaven". For these are albeit little things in the grand schemes of things. The Devil is not manipulation of earthly affairs, but rebellion on cosmic scale. The Devil touches the worker when he realises that all of those small pleasures, unusual excursions, financial safety hardly matter. Thus he becomes Raskolnikov? What's the meaning? It's futile anyway. The Devil touches the employer when he realises that only thing of worth in the world is intelligence; his exploitation, that are so rocketed by his privilege and capital, is not a sign of intelligence. He orchestrates schemes, he balances the tension between his own system and the broader ones which create the biome his system is in, he takes calculated yet relentless risks in finance to both further propagate his ambitions in practical context and to sate the narcissistic vanity to come out as the winner. But he realises, it is only situational smartness, materialistic instinct. Not wisdom, not the kind of intelligence which is exclusive to a select few, in any given time in history. These men, either from the events in their lives or on their own volition, escaped the ugly bounds of being the exploiter or the exploited. The vile capitalist cannot assume this, he cannot shed his facade of pride and malignant ego. Unless the Devil touches him. The vile worker maggot cannot assume this, he cannot shed the motionary inertia of being a cog, unless the Devil touches him. Only then both realise that, none of their occupations mean anything, in the grand scheme of things. So when does the Devil touch? Only at the peaks of joys or at the sustained packets of it? Or the opposite: at the steephole of despair or gravel-crawling breadths of anguish? The Devil is not an entity but an idea, it's the antithesis of God, which too is an idea. A notion. We don't get them anymore, but prophets, since time immemorial, said: "Oh! My followers! The salvation is within yourself. God helps those who helps themselves". Being touched by God can be the fruit of many spiritual strides, or it can be something as little as an epiphany. But unlike what that wise man once said, nobody knows when the Devil will touch you...."
Funtitled #3
For Deftones XV / Entombed II (Shades of colour are all I see...)