Any maxim that can be destroyed by insight must be. And that is every maxim. In our time, pithy quotes and phrases that sound wise vie for our disseminations — and the result is stupidity dressed up as beauty, intelligence, understanding, and fellowship.

Copying phrases as nothing to do with our enlightenment, or even our education. Replication leads to more aggressive replication. In replication, we pretend to dispense insight like candy; but it is slavery we communicate, enforce, and recommend.

And we love nothing more than our slavery.

Those who wrote what we so admire would ask us not to copy — but to discover and surpass the insight they achieved. Their whole purpose was to rescue and nourish the impossible gifts we carry and inhibit through our habits.

They gave us a ladder; and instead of climbing, we started making copies of ladders. Thus was our possible ascent stifled at the first rung. Their ladders, intended to lift us, had the opposite effect — and imprisoned us in a flatness we can no longer even detect, let alone amend.

Now we are dying in tangles of copies of ladders we cannot understand the function of. We have even forgotten what they were for, what climbing actually is and means.

And so we make more ladders, and are puzzled at the piles of bodies that spring up everywhere in their wake.