It is absolutely astonishing how difficult it is to clearly understand even the simplest of statements. In many cases, it could take years. Yet, driven by some poorly cobbled together nonsense, inflated by a badly myopic description, it will take but a moment to pull the trigger — to commit violence — perhaps, even with a feeling of great justification or release.

Yet this turns out to be the release not of our pain, but our intelligence. What we are releasing is our humanity into the chaos of armed fictions that seem to ‘demand’ we act in their behalf. But they never had any behalf. They are malformed ghosts of language and analysis; yet the bullets they command, through us, land in actual children and living places. And thus our minds, lives, families and world are torn apart by them, be they the bullets of war or profit.

There are limits to the active survivable stupidity quotient of any highly technological species, and they shrink in proportion to the speed and ignorance with which those species pursue goals in direct opposition to those of living beings in general, and their possible or ostensible intelligence in particular.