Heraclitus

Why don’t you join a corporation?

I don’t have any of the things corporations want, Charlie, and I have many of the things they hate.

But you have to make a living.

You sound like my father.

Maybe he’s right. You can’t always be what you want.

My father has no notion of being. In his thinking, one can only behave – never be.

“What’s the difference?” Charlie asked, turning away from the campaign ad in disgust. “What is a ‘documented untruth? That’s an oxymoron.”

C2 mused, “Actually, documented untruths are more common that you’d imagine. When someone wants to turn a deception into an institution – a fixture of history – he creates the necessary evidence. He documents untruth.”

Then what can we believe?

We can believe that humans have a propensity for evil – to deceiving and being deceived. Only after that presupposition can we ask “What is believable?”

But after all, the deceived are only victims. Is being deceived evil in the same sense as deceiving?

More so, Charlie. Deceiving may leave one’s knowledge of the truth intact. Being deceived lobotomizes that knowledge. It weakens and can eventually destroy one’s capacity for truth – one’s capacity to truly be anything – even a deceiver.

There you go about “being” again.

We cannot be except in truth, Charlie. You are a personal truth, which means that while I might be able to behave like Charlie, I cannot be Charlie. It also means that if Charlie behaves in a way contrary to the being who is Charlie, he denies himself – eventually he destroys his own being – until nothing is left but behavior, without a source.

That sounds so terrible. I cannot believe that God would let it happen.

Yes, Charlie. As a machine, I cannot believe in God. But if I did, I would have to believe that God would not ever allow that process to run its full course – not until the final judgement. I would know that God would never lose anything of a man.

May 1997