April 2025 – Northcoast Antiquarian

When Cruelty Becomes Virtue: The Erosion of Soul and Society

The Destruction of Leviathan by Gustave Doré (1865) — *The Destruction of Leviathan* by Gustave Doré (1865)

Author’s Note

This essay, The Void at the Heart, is presented as a contemplative meditation on the moral and spiritual collapse visible in aspects of contemporary governance and public life. It is a deliberately focused reflection, tracing the descent from cruelty in action to the corruption of thought, to the inversion of traditional values, and finally to the eclipse of the soul itself.

This essay may, in future, be expanded into a fuller monograph-length work. Such a work would likely incorporate historical and contemporary examples, address counterarguments, consider cultural issues, and distinguish more sharply between causes and symptoms of decay. For now, however, I offer this essay as a completed meditation in its own right—a starting point for further reflection.

The Void at the Heart

On Cruelty, the Collapse of Reason, and the Eclipse of the Soul

There is a void at the heart of the soul, a place where the ordinary bounds of morality and ethical consideration seem to collapse into nothingness. It is not merely that questionable policies are advanced—that has ever been the case in human governance—but rather that their implementation is accompanied by a conspicuous and grotesque relish for cruelty. Even if one were to suspend judgment upon the legitimacy of the policies themselves, the manner of their enforcement betrays a deeper and more troubling decay: a delight in the infliction of pain.

Deportation of unauthorized aliens, for instance, is not approached as an unfortunate necessity carried out with solemnity and regret. It is heralded as a triumph, an occasion for rejoicing, even as it often rips apart families, sunders years of labor and stability, and leaves children disoriented and/or abandoned. Similarly, the mass termination of public servants and contractors—individuals who dedicated themselves to fields such as public health, education, consumer protection, and law enforcement—is not seen as a sorrowful consequence of political/policy change or fiscal concerns, but is rather celebrated with an air of gleeful vindictiveness. Grants and subsidies intended for the most vulnerable, from students to farmers, are not merely ended; they are rescinded with evident gleeful satisfaction, as though deprivation itself were a moral good.

Even those nearing completion of their educational journeys, standing on the threshold of careers that might benefit society, are not spared. Educational visas are canceled without warning or cause, months or even weeks before graduation. Opportunities are crushed underfoot. Dreams are shattered not as a side effect of some broader administrative goal, but seemingly as an end in themselves, an assertion that the suffering of others is righteous and overdue.

This spirit of cruelty is defended and magnified through a rhetoric that frames suffering as deserved, earned, or insufficiently severe. The pain of others is no longer a regrettable cost, but an instrument of moral theater: those who suffer are cast as villains, their misfortunes paraded as proof of divine or civic justice. In such a worldview, mercy is weakness, empathy is betrayal, and the infliction of pain is a form of virtue.

There is a profound difference between enacting necessary policies with reluctant firmness and celebrating the devastation they cause. A just society may impose burdens, but it ought never to rejoice in doing so. When joy is found in the destruction of livelihoods, when cheers rise at the deportation of neighbors, when applause greets the impoverishment of fellow citizens, something foundational has been lost. The wound is not merely political; it is spiritual.

The embrace of cruelty as a public virtue hollows out the soul of a nation. It numbs the collective conscience, distorts the notion of justice, and substitutes vindictiveness for principle. Over time, the society that delights in the suffering of others does not merely lose its victims; it loses itself. It becomes a cold and pitiless machine, capable of great power but incapable of true greatness, capable of order but incapable of meaning.

If the celebration of cruelty corrupts action and spirit, it inevitably corrupts thought as well. The human mind, which depends upon honesty and openness to discern the world aright, cannot remain untouched by the moral decay of the soul.

The Eclipse of Reason

The celebration of cruelty does not remain confined to the sphere of action; it metastasizes into the realm of thought itself. When a society exalts the suffering of the vulnerable and frames mercy as weakness, it necessarily distorts its ability to process information honestly. Truth ceases to be measured by coherence, evidence, or fidelity to reality. Instead, it is judged by its conformity to the prevailing narratives of contempt, fear, hatred, or greed.

Thus, expertise—whether scientific, legal, historical, or journalistic—is no longer respected as a necessary guide to sound judgment. It becomes suspect by its very nature if it fails to mirror the animosities of the moment. Scientists who warn of ecological degradation, public health crises, or technological risks are dismissed as conspirators or ideologues. Legal scholars who point to constitutional violations or abuses of authority are castigated as partisan agitators. Historians who trace the patterns of injustice, violence, or repression are branded as enemies of national pride. Journalists who seek to uncover uncomfortable truths are denounced as purveyors of “fake news,” their integrity impugned simply because they refuse to tailor their findings to the dominant ideological climate.

The citizenry themselves, infected by the ethos of cruelty, become willing participants in this willful blindness. They refuse to hear, to consider, to weigh, or to deliberate. Instead, they declare all sources outside their ideological fortress to be corrupt, unreliable, or part of some imagined conspiracy. Knowledge itself becomes an object of scorn, and expertise is equated with betrayal. The very faculties that distinguish the informed citizen—the ability to discern evidence, to listen with patience, to reason without rancor—atrophy and are replaced by reflexive suspicion and tribal affirmation.

Orwell, ever the grim prophet, would recognize the phenomenon with bitter familiarity. In his imagined dystopias, the manipulation of language, the corruption of thought, and the triumph of ideology over reality are not the consequences of brute force alone, but of a populace that chooses to believe falsehoods because those falsehoods are more comforting—or more satisfying—than the difficult demands of truth. Ignorance is strength, he wrote, capturing the dark alchemy by which the renunciation of reason is transmuted into a perverse kind of certainty.

It is not merely that ideology colors perception; it replaces perception altogether. Information is no longer evaluated according to standards of credibility or methodology, but according to its utility in reinforcing contempt for the foreigner, the minority, the poor, or the vulnerable. If facts threaten to humanize the other, they are rejected. If scholarship suggests the necessity of compassion or restraint, it is denounced as corruption. Only that which fuels resentment is permitted to be heard; only that which magnifies grievance is deemed “true.”

In such a climate, dialogue becomes impossible. The very idea of dialogue presupposes a willingness to listen, to admit complexity, to concede error. But where cruelty reigns, these are forbidden virtues. In their place stand slogans, shouted endlessly into a void that no longer seeks understanding but only echoes its own bitter triumphs.

In such a climate, governance itself grows chaotic and erratic, not by accident but by design. Policies are proclaimed and abandoned with little coherence; programs are implemented or canceled with open disregard for planning, expertise, or consequence. The instability is treated not as a failure, but as a virtue: a sign of disruption, toughness, authenticity. Yet beneath the slogans, the disorder corrodes trust, hollows out institutions, and leaves citizens adrift in a landscape where no promise endures and no framework holds. It is a cruelty not merely of action, but of confusion—a destabilization that magnifies alienation and feeds the collapse of both thought and community.

Yet even this collapse of thought is but a precursor to a deeper betrayal: the corruption of the very values that once defined and ennobled a people.

The Inversion of Values

As cruelty becomes a public virtue and ideology supplants reason, the final and most insidious transformation takes place: the subversion and inversion of traditional values themselves. The outward forms and labels of religion, civic duty, and ethical conduct may be preserved, but their substantive meanings are hollowed out and replaced by their very opposites. Language itself is corrupted; words once signifying aspiration, mercy, and justice now serve as empty vessels, bearing meanings recognizable only as antonyms of their epistemological truths.

Faith, once the call to humility before the divine and charity toward one’s fellow man, is distorted into a weapon of exclusion and punishment. Love of neighbor becomes conditional, subject to ideological conformity; compassion is reserved for the in-group alone, while hatred of the stranger is sanctified as a form of righteousness. The prophets and founders who once preached repentance, mercy, and love are invoked by those who trample upon their teachings, their sacred words reinterpreted to bless cruelty as strength and vindictiveness as virtue.

Civic values fare no better. Patriotism, once the measured love of one’s country expressed through service, sacrifice, and the protection of rights, degenerates into a shrill and defensive chauvinism. The rule of law, once understood as a shield for the weak and a restraint upon the strong, is twisted into a blunt instrument to punish enemies and protect the powerful. Freedom, once the delicate balance between personal liberty and communal responsibility, is redefined as the license to oppress, to dominate, to revel without shame in the suffering of others.

Even the ethical precepts that ground common life—the golden rule, the dignity of work, the sanctity of truth—are inverted. Do unto others becomes do unto others first, lest they do unto you; the dignity of labor is reserved for some and withheld from others based on arbitrary categories of race, origin, or ideology; truth itself becomes malleable, no longer a standard to which men must conform, but a tool to be wielded, bent, or abandoned as expediency demands.

In this bleak mirror-world, tradition becomes little more than pageantry—a hollow ritual masking a profound spiritual betrayal. The ancient words are mouthed, the venerable ceremonies performed, but their meaning is lost. Their light has been inverted into darkness, their call to transcendence replaced by a shout of tribal triumph. What was once sacred has become profane, and the keepers of the tradition are blind to their own apostasy.

Yet the descent does not end even there. It reaches further downward, to the degradation of the individual soul itself.

The Final Descent

Ultimately, the mind infected by cruelty and blinded by ideology forgets how to think, how to reason, how to love. The soul, once the wellspring of compassion, imagination, and truth-seeking, is lost. What remains is a hollow creature, a being still outwardly human but inwardly diminished, descending toward an animalistic existence governed only by base and grotesque instincts.

No longer illuminated by the light of reason, no longer stirred by the love of others or the awe of the divine, such a being reverts to the raw appetites of dominance, fear, rage, and self-preservation. The faculties that once elevated humanity—the search for truth, the capacity for self-sacrifice, the impulse toward mercy—atrophy and rot. What once distinguished man as a creature formed in the image of the divine is obscured beneath layers of suspicion, resentment, and brutality.

In such a state, crassness replaces dignity, and rudeness masquerades as strength. The subtleties of manners, the graces of dialogue, and the silent obligations owed to neighbor and stranger alike are discarded as burdensome relics of a now-despised civilization. Material success becomes the sole remaining measure of worth, and individual gratification the only recognized good. The broader community—once the nurturing ground of the self—becomes either invisible or hostile, perceived only as an impediment to personal appetite or ambition.

Alienation takes root, first unnoticed, then unchallenged, feeding upon itself. Having severed the ties that bind individuals to each other through mutual respect, shared memory, and common purpose, society decays into a landscape of lonely, embittered selves, suspicious of all and merciful to none. This alienation colors every interaction with a thin, toxic miasma: a pervasive bitterness, a readiness to assume the worst, a ceaseless litany of grievance against an imagined host of enemies.

The community, too, begins to crumble. No society can endure when its members are ruled by suspicion rather than trust, hatred rather than fraternity, cruelty rather than justice. Institutions falter, not because they are attacked from without, but because the very spirit that once animated them has fled.

Yet the gravest tragedy is not merely societal collapse, but the debasement of the individual soul. Each man or woman who abandons thought for slogan, love for contempt, truth for expedience, does more than wound the body politic; they desecrate the image of the divine that resides within.

Thus, the moral and ethical void at the heart of the soul becomes complete. And from that void, no nation, no civilization, no human heart emerges unscathed.

Epilogue: The Faint Memory of Light

Yet even amidst the ruin, a faint memory endures.

The divine image, though battered and obscured, is never wholly extinguished. Buried beneath the ash of cruelty and the rubble of falsehood, there remains a spark—a silent witness to the soul’s higher calling. It is not easily rekindled. It demands humility where pride has reigned, mercy where vengeance has triumphed, courage where fear has prevailed.

The path back is arduous and uncertain, for it requires the infected soul to remember that it has forgotten; it requires a people to repent not merely of actions, but of the passions that animated them. It requires that tradition be not merely repeated but restored, that truth be not merely spoken but once again loved, that reason be not merely used but honored.

If such a reawakening is to come, it will come quietly at first, as all true renewals do—not in thunderous proclamations, but in the whispered refusal to hate, the silent act of mercy, the solitary pursuit of truth in a world grown hostile to it. From these small and stubborn acts, unseen and unsung, a civilization might yet be reborn.

But if not, then the void will deepen, and the ruins will spread, and future generations will wonder at how lightly men once abandoned what was most precious: not wealth, nor power, nor comfort, but the light of mind and soul that marks the human being as more than a beast among beasts.

The choice remains, as it always has, hidden in the quiet precincts of each heart.

Pondering the Night: A Meditation with Morpheus

“Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky” arose from a meditation on the nature of dreams, consciousness, and the silent mysteries that lie beyond both. Rather than seeking to instruct, this poetic work offers a dialogue — between mortal longing and divine wonder, between question and silence. In addressing Morpheus, the god of dreams, the poem invites not sleep, but contemplation: a shared pondering of the night sky, where the known fades into the unknown, and where even gods may pause in awe before the infinite. It is my hope that this work may serve as a quiet companion for those who have found themselves, at least once, standing beneath the stars, asking questions for which no easy answers are given — and finding, in the asking, a kind of sacred beginning.

Sleep (c. 1771). Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 96.5 cm (38 x 51 in). Cleveland Museum of Art. Depicting Morpheus — *Sleep* by Jean Bernard Restout (c. 1771). Oil on canvas, 129.5 x 96.5 cm (38 x 51 in). Cleveland Museum of Art. Depicting Morpheus

Ponder, O Morpheus, the Night Sky

“Beyond dreams lies a silence where even gods wonder.”

Prelude: The Summoning of Morpheus

Morpheus, Keeper of the Silent Looms,
hear now the summons not of those who seek forgetfulness,
nor of those who plead for soft illusions to cradle their weary minds—
but of one who, standing alone beneath the immeasurable firmament,
dares to bid thee ponder.

Ponder, thou Weaver of Shadows, the night sky:
the endless, ink-deep vault where Orion’s belt cinches the waist of darkness,
where scattered fires—blue, white, and ancient red—
whisper of secrets too vast for mortal tongues.

Not for dreams of idle comfort do I call thee forth,
but for contemplation;
to set aside for a moment thy ceaseless crafting of mortal visions
and lift thine ancient gaze upward,
where the silent percussion of dying stars
beats out the hidden music of creation.

For if thou, master of phantoms and bringer of luminous memories,
shouldst pause to wonder at that boundless mystery,
then perhaps the soul of man, frail and flickering though it be,
might dare likewise to ask:

Who dreams the dreamers, O Morpheus?
Whence come the visions thou bestowest?
And what lies beyond the last dream, beyond the last star, beyond the last breath of sleep?

Thus the greater query is born, trembling on the tongue of the sleepless,
yearning toward the silence that gathers all speech.

The Greater Query: A Dialogue with Morpheus

Soul:
If thou, O Shaper of Phantoms, canst be stilled by wonder,
then hear the questions borne upon my waking breath,
fragile as they are, yet earnest as the stars are ancient:

Who first whispered the dream into being, before ever thou didst fashion it?
From what unseen wellspring do the rivers of vision flow?
Are the dreams of men but fractured echoes of a deeper song,
or do they weave even now the hidden fabric of worlds yet unborn?

Morpheus (in thought):
Dreams are the trembling of the soul against the veil of the infinite.
They are not born of my will alone, Seeker,
but arise from the deep soil where memory, longing, and the first light entwine.
I but give them form; I do not summon them from the abyss.
Some dreams, frail though they seem, stitch the very edges of what is to be.
Mortals, in dreaming, unknowingly shape the unborn dawn.

Soul:
Is it given to us—dust briefly animated,
clay granted momentary breath—
to pierce that veil?
Or must we first unmake ourselves,
falling through forgetting, to be remembered by the nameless light?

Morpheus:
Beyond all dreams there is a silence
older than stars and deeper than death.
A silence not of absence, but of fullness,
where neither waking nor sleeping holds dominion,
and the soul, naked and unafraid,
beholds itself as it was before all weaving began.

There the true Dreamer dwells—
not I, but He whom none can name,
the source of all dreams, the end of all seeking,
the unspoken, the unseen.

Soul:
And if we seek it,
do we not risk all—memory, longing, even self itself?

Morpheus:
It is the risk of being lost to be found,
the surrender of knowledge to come to knowing.
To seek the Silent One is to set sail upon a sea without stars,
to abandon the safe shores of image and name,
to become at last what thou hast always been:
a breath upon the waters of infinity.

Ponder well, O Seeker,
for in the seeking, thou thyself becomest the dream,
the dreamer,
and the silence beyond.

The Blessing of Morpheus: The Sending Forth

Morpheus:
Go forth, Child of Earth and Stars,
go forth lightly, as one who walks upon waters not yet created.
Carry no burden save the yearning that kindled thy question;
bind no certainty to thy brow, nor shelter fear within thy breast.

Let dreams fall from thee like withered leaves;
let even the constellations become but distant embers,
for thou seekest now what neither dream nor waking thought can compass.

Take not with thee the names men have carved into the bones of the world,
for names shatter against the face of the nameless.
Take not the proud trophies of reason, nor the soft nets of hope,
for these will tear upon the thorns of the infinite.

Instead, take this only:
a heart made naked in wonder,
a mind made silent in awe,
and feet made light as wind upon waters unseen.

And know this, O Soul:
thou art neither lost nor found in this seeking,
for to seek the Silent One is to be gathered even now into His dreaming.

Thus do I, Morpheus, who weaves the veils of sleep,
send thee forth beyond all veils, beyond all sleep,
beyond the last trembling breath of mortal wonder.
Go, and become the question thou hast dared to ask.

Epilogue: The Pondering of Morpheus

And Morpheus stood long in the hush of the night,
his ancient hands unclasped, his brow unburdened of dreams.

He lifted his gaze once more to the immeasurable vault,
where scattered fires—blue, white, and red—
burned against the black breast of infinity.

He pondered—
not as god to mortal, nor as master to servant,
but as wonder to wonder,
breathless before a mystery he too could not wholly grasp.

In the stillness beyond weaving and shaping,
he glimpsed, as in the faintest shimmer of distant nebulae,
a vastness where even gods must bow their heads,
where even dreams dissolve like mist before the morning sun.

And in that silence, older than all his songs,
Morpheus smiled—
not because he understood,
but because he wondered still.

He felt a pang—brief and piercing—
a mortal ache for the fleeting fierceness of human wonder,
so bright and brief.

And so he pondered, and the night pondered with him,
until speech was stilled,
and he was lost—and found—within the endless deep.

Thin Books Are Dangerous

**“Every door leads deeper. Every step farther from certainty.”**
(Samuel van Hoogstraten, Perspective View of a Corridor, 1662, oil on canvas)

Prefatory Note

In my youth — now roughly four decades past — while studying the slender yet profound Itinerarium Mentis in Deum of St. Bonaventure, there arose in my mind a simple observation: “Thin books are dangerous.” By their brevity, they conceal depths which the unwary may mistake for shallows. By their compactness, they pierce more swiftly, and leave marks more enduring than tomes of a thousand pages.

The small variations presented below draw their form, though not their genius, from the fictions of Jorge Luis Borges — that master of mirrors, labyrinths, and forgotten libraries. If there is any virtue herein, it is owed to his example; if there is error, it is mine alone.

May the reader proceed with care, for the thinnest books, and perhaps the thinnest tales, are those most difficult to escape.

“The shortest books require the longest penance.”
— Anonymous marginal note, Biblioteca Laurenziana

I. The Library of Thin Books

In the city of Aram, whose streets no cartographer has ever agreed upon, there was once a secret library known only to a few scholars and fewer fools. It was said to contain the sum of human knowledge, but organized strangely: the thick books were shelved in dusty catacombs, seldom touched, while the thin books were kept in a bright chamber at the center, on shelves of polished cedar.

The Keeper of the Library explained this arrangement to all who entered: “The thick books are for forgetting. The thin books are for believing.”

Each thin book contained a single idea, expressed so perfectly that it resisted all argument. Sovereignty Belongs to the Strong was one book. The World is a Dream of the Gods was another. Still another was simply titled Obey.

Visitors who read the thick books emerged thoughtful and burdened, full of hesitations, counterexamples, and second thoughts. Visitors who read the thin books emerged transformed: resolute, fervent, certain.

Over time, it was not the heavy tomes that shaped Aram’s kings, priests, and scholars, but the thin volumes, read once and carried forever.

It is said that the city of Aram fell, not through invasion, nor famine, nor pestilence, but because, in the end, its citizens each lived by the idea of a different thin book, and could no longer understand one another.

The Library still stands, or so the story goes, though its doors are sealed and the books grow thinner by the century.

There is a final book, the thinnest of all, placed at the highest shelf where none but the Keeper can reach. It contains no words at all.

Its title is: Certainty.

⁂

II. The Shadows of the Books

There is a city — it does not matter which — where it is rumored that a second library exists beneath the great Library of Learned Tomes.

The surface library, the Library of Learned Tomes, is a noble place: its corridors are vast, its tomes heavy with ink and argument, and its readers slow, uncertain, weighed down by the burden of complexity. No truth is simple there; every assertion is marked and belied by a hundred footnotes, every conclusion bruised by rebuttal.

But below, beneath stone and time, there is another library. It is said to be vast but weightless. There, one finds only thin books — so thin they seem at times to flicker in the light, as if they might vanish.

Scholars, sensing the rumors, sometimes descend. They find books titled with dangerous simplicity: Justice is the Right of the Victorious, History is the Story We Tell Ourselves, The Future is Written.

Each thin book feels familiar. And well it should. For these thin books are the shadows of the thick books above¹: each vast, tangled treatise, compressed into a single, unassailable maxim.

The discovery at first seems marvelous. Why wrestle with a thousand pages when the essence can be grasped in a sentence? Why debate, when the answer can be carried in one’s pocket, ready for all occasions?

But the thin books are not summaries; they are distortions. They are what remains when doubt, nuance, and contradiction are stripped away. They are the husks of thought — seductive because they seem lighter, easier, final.

In time, those who read only the thin books come to mistrust the thick ones. They grow impatient with questions, contemptuous of ambiguity, zealous for a clarity that admits no appeal.

Some say that it was not neglect but the rise of the thin books that doomed the upper Library. That the heavy volumes grew dusty because the city’s rulers and citizens alike began to prefer the glimmer of certainty to the slow, earned labor of understanding.

In the end, the Library of Learned Tomes collapsed inward like a drained well. And the shadow library, weightless and triumphant, remained.

Somewhere, perhaps, it still remains.

Somewhere, perhaps, it is growing.

⁂

III. Coda: A Reflection in the Labyrinth

Some say that even the tale you have just read — the account of the thick and the thin, the surface and the shadow — is itself no more than a thin book: a single idea, polished to gleam, shorn of its necessary doubts.

If so, it is but one more glimmer in the labyrinth.

One more reflection upon reflections, cast by a candle already guttering.

One more danger to remember, and to forget.

IV. Scholium

¹ Cf. the lost Tractatus de Umbris Librorum (“Treatise on the Shadows of Books”), attributed to the forgotten scholar Balthasar of Istria (fl. late 13th century), who wrote: “The greater the volume, the more labyrinths it contains; the thinner the shadow it casts, the more swiftly it pierces the heart.” No complete manuscript survives, though fragments are said to be embedded in certain marginal glosses of the Biblioteca Laurenziana. Some dispute the existence of Balthasar himself, suggesting he is merely the invention of later compilers seeking to dignify their own thinness with the patina of lost antiquity.

The Second Why: Authority, Suppression, and the Death of the Questioner

Prefatory Note

In The First Why, I sought to explore the sacred trembling of humanity’s earliest question—the moment when consciousness dared to disturb the hush of creation. There, I argued that the act of questioning was not a fall from grace, but the beginning of wisdom, the awakening of wonder, and the first movement toward meaning.

This essay, The Second Why, turns from the theological to the historical, the philosophical to the political. It examines the ancient and recurring pattern by which those in authority, threatened by the murmur of the question, have sought not merely to answer but to silence it—sometimes by exile, sometimes by imprisonment, sometimes by death, and sometimes by the corrosion of meaning itself.

If The First Why was the breath before the question, The Second Why is the cost of speaking it aloud.

William Blake, The Ancient of Days (1794), frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy: a vision of creation measured, and mystery confined. — **William Blake, *The Ancient of Days* (1794), frontispiece to Europe a Prophecy: a vision of creation measured, and mystery confined.**

I. The Question That Threatens

In the hush before thought, in the stillness before speech, there stirred a murmur—the first Why.

In The First Why, I sought to explore that primal trembling: the moment when consciousness first turned inward upon itself and outward upon the world, daring to ask what had not been asked. Yet if that first question marked the birth of wonder, it also, inevitably, sowed the seeds of fear. For in every age thereafter, those who have sought to guard power have found their greatest threat not in armies nor in weapons, but in the fragile, defiant utterance of the questioner.

Throughout history, the act of questioning—not the conclusions it might yield, but the mere audacity of inquiry—has been regarded by authority as a mortal transgression. Again and again, societies have answered the quiet and insistent “Why?” with the grim decree: “Thou shalt surely die.” Whether whispered in the Athenian marketplace, charted among the stars, recorded in forbidden books, or muttered in the corners of censored universities, the question has been met with exile, imprisonment, silencing, and execution.

The pattern is ancient and unrelenting. Socrates, forced to drink the hemlock; Galileo, commanded to renounce the stars; the Inquisition’s pyres; the Nazi bonfires of thought; the gulags swallowing dissenters; the purges and bans now rising anew in the name of security, patriotism, or purity. In every case, the underlying offense is the same: the refusal to leave the hush undisturbed.

In what follows, I will trace the political, historical, and theological burden borne by those who dare to ask. For the suppression of the questioner is not merely an incidental cruelty, but the essential mark of an authoritarian impulse. To disturb the hush is to call into doubt the inevitability of power, the permanence of truth, the sanctity of the given order. Thus, the first Why was not merely a beginning. It remains a perpetual provocation—an act of revolution still echoing, and still condemned, across the centuries.

II. Historical Pattern: The Death Sentence for the Questioner

The history of civilization is marked not only by the questions that advanced knowledge, but by the relentless attempts to silence those questions and destroy their askers.

Socrates, that midwife of inquiry, was sentenced to death not because he espoused a particular heresy, but because he taught the youth of Athens to question the established wisdom of the city. His crime, ultimately, was to disturb the hush.

Galileo, peering through a telescope toward the stars, disturbed a cosmic silence maintained by theological decree. It was not heliocentrism itself that threatened the authorities—it was the precedent that nature, rather than authority, might answer the question.

The Inquisition institutionalized terror against those who inquired beyond the sanctioned bounds, who sought to hear a different resonance in scripture or reason.

The Nazi regime, recognizing the existential threat posed by free inquiry, did not merely censor books—it burned them, seeking to annihilate the memory of questioning itself.

The Soviet Union consigned dissenters to gulags not because their ideas were dangerous in themselves, but because their questioning undermined the infallibility of the Party’s pronouncements.

From the gulags of the Soviet Union, the pattern unfurled still further eastward.

In Maoist China, the Cultural Revolution unleashed an orchestrated assault on memory and inquiry: libraries ransacked, teachers denounced, ancient traditions obliterated in the name of ideological purity.

Today, under the reign of Xi Jinping, that spirit persists: a resurgence of suppression masquerading as stability. Re-education camps, purges of dissenters, the silencing of Tibetan voices, the systematic erasure of Uyghur culture—all stand as testament that the death sentence for the questioner is not an artifact of the past but a method renewed in our own day.

Nor is this pattern confined to other shores.

In contemporary America, the same ancient reflex stirs. Books are banned from public libraries under the guise of protecting the young; universities face funding threats unless they conform to ideological demands; scientific research in fields such as climate change and public health is censored, altered, or silenced.

The Department of Defense has scrubbed the achievements of minority service members—Tuskegee Airmen, Navajo Code Talkers, Medal of Honor recipients—from public websites, erasing memory itself in service of a homogenized narrative. Students at Pentagon-operated schools have sued for the restoration of forbidden books and histories, fighting against the burial of truth.

The administration has attacked the free press, threatened the licenses of broadcasters who report unfavorably, and sought to strip public media of its funding.

At the same time, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DEI) initiatives have been dismantled across the federal government, corporations, and law firms—silencing efforts to reflect a fuller human story.

This temptation is not confined to any one nation or ideology. Across Latin America under military juntas and authoritarian leaders, across the Middle East under rigid theocracies, across Africa under autocratic regimes, the suppression of questioning has reappeared, adorned in different garments, but always driven by the same ancient fear.

It is not a flaw of one party or one epoch. It is a perennial temptation: the temptation of all power to silence what it cannot control.

III. The Keepers of the Keys: Monopoly of Truth and the Death of the Question

Yet the suppression of questioning is only part of the authoritarian project. Its deeper ambition is the monopolization of truth itself.

Authority, when it turns tyrannical, declares not merely that certain questions must not be asked, but that the answers have already been determined, possessed, and sealed.

The rulers, the priests, the inquisitors, the commissars—each claims the sacred keys: the key to salvation, the key to justice, the key to moral righteousness. Good becomes what they pronounce; evil becomes what they forbid.

There is no longer a living search for meaning—only a mandated adherence to the truths held by the gatekeepers.

To question is not simply to err; it is to betray the natural order as they have defined it.

This monopolization is rooted not merely in political expediency but in an ancient theological distortion. In the story of Eden, as handed down by scribal hands shaped by authority, the knowledge of good and evil—the living tension of discernment—is forbidden. The human capacity to navigate complexity is recast as sin; the hunger for understanding becomes rebellion.

Thus the pattern is sanctified:

Only those who possess the keys may speak.

Only those who serve the keepers may think.

The rest must accept silence or accept exile.

Interlude: The Flattening of Knowledge—From Merism to Dualism

In the ancient myth, the Tree offered not a simple dichotomy but a totality: the knowledge of good and evil—the full sweep of moral discernment, the wholeness of moral understanding.

This fullness, this richness, could not be tolerated by those who would rule. Thus the merism was flattened into dualism: Good became what the rulers commanded; evil what they condemned.

The tree of knowledge was not destroyed; it was redefined.

The living dynamic of discernment was replaced with dead certitude.

The gift of discernment became a forbidden fruit.

The complexity of moral vision was narrowed to the dictates of authority.

Thus was the wonder of knowledge itself corrupted, stripped of its vitality, pressed into the service of domination.

IV. The Usurpation of Wonder: Authority’s Theft of Creation

In suppressing the question, in flattening knowledge, and in monopolizing truth, the authoritarian spirit commits not merely political crimes but spiritual ones. It usurps the wonder of divine creation itself.

Creation was never intended as a dead thing, frozen into rigid forms. It was meant as a living, breathing mystery—an invitation to seek, to discern, to wonder.

By claiming sole possession of truth, by forbidding inquiry, authority places itself above the living act of creation, mocking and profaning it. It substitutes its brittle edicts for the breathing Word; it erects idols of certainty in the place of the living search for truth.

Thus, the authoritarian repeats the ancient blasphemy:

Denying the image of God in the questioner,

Denying the breath of the Spirit in the seeker,

Denying the sanctity of wonder.

To defend the right to question is therefore not merely a political duty. It is an act of fidelity to the structure of creation itself.

V. Silencing the Search, Silencing the Finding

Authoritarianism, in its most persistent form, does not merely seek to silence answers it dislikes. It seeks to silence the very act of searching.

The question, the seeking, the wondering—these are intolerable because they suggest that truth is not yet fully possessed, that knowledge is not complete, that authority is not absolute.

Thus, authoritarian power strikes first at the searchers: the scientists, the philosophers, the journalists, the seekers of every kind.

Yet where seekers persist, and truth is found despite them, the authoritarian hand strikes again—this time at the truth itself. Inconvenient findings are erased from records, public data is withdrawn from view, scientific reports are rewritten to serve political ends.

The silencing extends from the human act of questioning to the very realities those questions uncover.

So it has come to pass in our own time: climate science censored, health research distorted, public knowledge reshaped not by the unfolding of discovery but by the fiat of rulers.

In this, the authoritarian spirit reveals its deeper fear: not merely that questions might arise, but that truth might emerge—and stand beyond its grasp.

VI. The Collapse of Meaning: When Words Are No Longer Words

Perhaps the most chilling expression of authoritarianism is not the silencing of speech but the disintegration of meaning itself.

When a government refuses to comply with a Supreme Court order—one plainly written, unambiguous in its demand—by claiming that it does not say what it says, we enter a realm beyond censorship. We enter a space where words no longer signify; where legal language is emptied of content and refilled with the will of power.

This is not merely a constitutional crisis. It is a metaphysical one.

The shared meanings that allow a society to function, to reason, to hold power accountable—these are dissolved.

And in their place arises a new doctrine: that truth is not what is said, but what the ruler claims was meant.

In such a world, there are no longer laws—only declarations. No longer language—only slogans. No longer truth—only the assertion of power over meaning itself.

VII. The Eternal Struggle to Disturb the Hush

The first Why was not a mistake. It was the beginning of the journey, the necessary shattering of silence, the first movement toward wonder.

Those who fear the questioner seek to stop the world from becoming, to freeze it into the shape of their own certainties. They usurp creation itself, not out of strength, but out of terror—the terror that their towers of power might crumble under the lightest whisper of a question.

Yet not all authority need fear the question. Rightly ordered authority—whether of parent, teacher, judge, or priest—can nurture questioning, guiding it without silencing it, guarding freedom without abandoning wisdom.

It is not authority itself that is the enemy of the question, but the corruption of authority into the idolatry of its own certainty.

Nor is the impulse to question so easily extinguished.

Though libraries burn, though words are twisted, though questioners are exiled or slain, the Why rises anew. It survives in secret conversations, in hidden manuscripts, in the defiant wonder of each generation that refuses to accept silence as its inheritance.

To ask Why is to affirm the livingness of being.

To defend the questioner is to defend creation.

To disturb the hush is to proclaim that the world is not finished, that meaning is not the possession of the powerful, that wonder still breathes.

The light shines in the darkness, and the darkness has not overcome it. (John 1:5)

The First Why: Innocence, Confusion, and the Misreading of Eden

Donald S. Yarab

When I consider thy heavens, the work of thy fingers,
the moon and the stars, which thou hast ordained;
what is man, that thou art mindful of him?
— Psalm 8:3–4 (KJV)

Original Sin, Hermitage of Vera Cruz, Maderuelo (Segovia)
Anonymous

Copyright ©Museo Nacional del Prado — Original Sin, Hermitage of Vera Cruz, Maderuelo (Segovia)
**Anonymous**
Copyright ©Museo Nacional del Prado

A child, in the earliest unfolding of consciousness, turns to the parent and asks: Why? Why is the sun hot? Why did my pet goldfish die? Why must we grow old? The loving parent does not scorn the child for such questions. Even when the answers stretch beyond what the child can yet comprehend, even when no answer can satisfy the deep, intuitive wonder stirring in the young mind, the parent listens. A gesture, a story, a silence full of tenderness—all serve as a response, for the asking itself is a sign of life, of spirit, of the soul reaching beyond itself.

How then can it be imagined that the Divine—source of all wisdom, all love—would greet humanity’s first Why not with the hush of welcome but with wrath? How could the natural longing to know, to understand the world into which humanity was born, be met not with compassion, but with a condemnation unto death?

It cannot be so. It is not the divine who pronounced guilt over the sacred question; it is man.

The doctrine of original sin, as shaped by priests and theologians, emerges not from divine decree but from human artifice. It is born of fear—fear of questions too vast to answer, fear of mysteries that human authority could neither command nor contain. It is a doctrine not of heaven but of earth, devised by those who sought to regulate the soul’s native reaching beyond the bounds of certainty.

For what is the story of Eden if not the story of the first Why? The yearning for knowledge—the desire to taste, to see, to know good and evil—was not the rebellion of prideful beings but the natural unfolding of consciousness itself. To portray this reaching as disobedience is to misread the very nature of the soul. It is the innocence of the child, multiplied and deepened, that yearns toward the silence, that dares to disturb the hush with a question.

The Genesis narrative itself frames the matter plainly:

“But of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, thou shalt not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Genesis 2:17, KJV)

Yet in the original Hebrew, “good and evil” is not a narrow moral distinction, but a merism—a pairing of extremes meant to evoke the totality of human experience. The knowledge at stake was not merely of right and wrong, but of the complexities, ambiguities, and perplexities of life and being itself. It was the awakening of discernment, the painful blessing of full consciousness—the soul’s first stretching beyond the silence into the unknown.

In the unfolding of the tale, it is the serpent who first stirs the question, bidding the woman to see beyond the command to the possibility of knowledge itself:

“For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.” (Genesis 3:5, KJV)

Yet the serpent, in the original narrative, is not named as a satanic force. That identification is a later gloss, a retrospective layering by later traditions. In Genesis itself, the serpent is simply described as subtle—”more cunning than any beast of the field.” It is not evil in the mythic sense, but a catalyst: a figure who provokes the first stirring of conscious wonder.

The temptation it offers is not toward cruelty or depravity, but toward awareness—the dangerous and sacred gift of discernment. When the woman saw that the tree was “good for food,” “pleasant to the eyes,” and “a tree to be desired to make one wise” (Genesis 3:6), it was not pride that stirred her, but wonder. It was not rebellion, but reverent reaching—the first trembling articulation of the soul’s native Why—that set humanity upon its long and necessary journey into the unfolding mystery.

Later theological traditions, particularly within Christianity, would recast this moment as the origin of inherited sin, a fall from grace so profound that it marred all generations to come. Even softer interpretations would speak of exile—a banishment from divine presence, a sundering of primordial innocence.

But this, too, misreads the deeper rhythm of the story.

There is no fall in the truest sense. There is no exile. There is only awakening.

Awakening carries consequence: the loss of effortless innocence, the onset of labor, of mortality, of sorrow. But it is not severance from the divine. It is the beginning of the soul’s true journey—the movement from unknowing participation in being into conscious, perilous freedom. It is not punishment, but transformation: the invitation to become beings capable of discernment, of wonder, of seeking the infinite even while clothed in dust.

The expulsion from Eden, if it can be called that at all, is no casting away. It is a sending forth—a sorrowful and sacred commissioning. It is humanity’s first trembling step into a world no longer given but always to be made meaningful by seeking, questioning, remembering.

Nor is this reaching confined to Eden alone. Even in the later unfolding of the sacred story, it is the struggle, not the submission, that is honored. Jacob wrestles through the long night with the divine being, refusing to release his grip until a blessing is given. And far from being punished for his audacity, he is renamed—Israel—“one who struggles with God.” (Genesis 32:28) Thus the struggle is made sacred. The refusal to let go, the daring to seek, the ache of confusion: these are not condemned but crowned. The journey was never meant to return to innocence; it was always to pass through mystery, bearing the wound and the wonder of awakening.

Across cultures and ages, humanity has imagined a lost Golden Age—a time when the world was right, when peace and justice reigned, when innocence was unbroken. In religion, in philosophy, in politics, the pattern repeats: there was once a perfection; we have fallen from it; we must find a way back.

Why does this myth endure? Perhaps it speaks to something innate within us: a yearning for wholeness, for rootedness, for a home we can no longer name. Perhaps it soothes the terror of our confusion, offering the hope that disorder and suffering are not our native condition, but a wound that can be healed.

Yet in our fixation on a lost Eden, we risk becoming prisoners of backward-facing time. The myth orients our spiritual gaze toward the past—toward what was allegedly lost—rather than toward what might yet be discovered. We become archaeologists of an imagined innocence rather than explorers of an unfolding mystery. The soul’s natural movement—reaching forward into new understanding—becomes replaced by a desperate scrambling backward toward a manufactured memory.

This temporal disorientation fundamentally misunderstands the nature of spiritual growth. Wisdom is not the recovery of what once was, but the discovery of what has always been waiting to be known. The soul does not develop by returning to an infantile state of pre-questioning, but by maturing through its questions into deeper and more profound questions still.

When we orient ourselves toward a mythical past rather than an unfolding future, we deny the essential nature of consciousness itself, which is not static but dynamic, not preservative but creative. We mistake the spiritual journey for a return ticket when it is, and has always been, a one-way passage into greater mystery, greater wonder, greater questioning.

Moreover, what we call Eden is not a historical reality but a projection of our deepest yearnings. It is the mind casting upon the blank canvas of prehistory its own longing for belonging, for certainty, for uncomplicated being. We imagine a time before questioning not because such a time existed, but because questioning—the fundamental condition of human consciousness—carries with it the necessary burden of uncertainty.

Eden, then, is not a lost homeland but a psychological construct. It is the mind’s attempt to escape the very condition that makes it mind: the capacity to ask, to wonder, to reach beyond what is immediately given. The myth provides a name for our discomfort with confusion, allowing us to imagine that our questioning nature is not our essence but our fall.

And here lies the deeper danger: what begins as a fabricated consolation becomes, in the hands of authority, an instrument of control. The artificial memory of Eden, manufactured to soothe our existential disquiet, transforms into a weapon wielded against the very questioning that makes us human.

For when the myth of a lost Eden is seized by those who would govern—whether priest or king—it becomes a tool of manipulation. The lost paradise becomes a justification for power. If the people can be made to believe they have fallen, they can be led to believe that only through obedience—obedience to those who claim to hold the keys to return—can they be restored.

Thus Eden becomes not a symbol of hope, but a lever of command. Thus nostalgia becomes a chain.

For those who seek to honor obedience as a spiritual virtue, there remains a profound distinction between the willing surrender that flows from understanding and the blind submission that stifles questioning. The former may indeed be sacred—a conscious alignment with wisdom greater than one’s own. It is only when obedience is divorced from the soul’s natural reaching, when it demands the silencing rather than the maturing of questions, that it betrays both the human and the divine.

And the chain wounds. It wounds the individual, teaching him to distrust his own questions, to despise his own longings, to silence the sacred impulse toward wonder within himself. It wounds the collective, stifling thought, suppressing creativity, narrowing the imagination of what a human life or a human community might be. It breeds conformity where there might have been diversity of spirit; it fosters submission where there might have been genuine reverence; it exalts obedience over understanding.

Under the weight of this imagined Eden, humanity turns inward in fear rather than outward in joyful seeking. The soul bows not in awe before mystery, but in terror before judgment.

Thus the myth that was meant to console becomes a force that deforms, a memory that imprisons rather than frees.

Some might argue that certainty provides comfort, that boundaries offer safety, that answers—even if incomplete—shelter us from the storm of unknowing. There is truth in this. Structure can indeed nurture growth, just as the trellis supports the vine. Yet when structure calcifies into dogma, when the trellis becomes a cage, the soul withers rather than flourishes.

Man is neither innately good nor innately evil. Man is innately confused. Born into a world more vast than his mind can grasp, woven from mysteries too great for his language to name, humanity’s first impulse is not toward sin, but toward understanding. The soul, bewildered and reaching, gropes for knowledge not out of pride, but out of need—the need to make sense of the strange and wondrous being into which it has been thrust.

Confusion, then, is not a defect; it is the ground of wonder. It is the blessed ignorance that precedes the sacred question: Why?

It is this confusion—the condition of the in-between creature, made of dust and breath—that makes the human journey necessary. Without it, there would be no seeking, no questioning, no striving toward the silence that calls from beyond the edges of comprehension. Without it, there would be no reaching for the fruit, no ache for the infinite, no longing to pierce the hush with a voice.

The theologians, in their haste to impose clarity where mystery should have remained, mistook confusion for corruption. They mistook the stumbling search for the willful turning away. But confusion is not sin; it is the evidence of our created nature, the signature of beings fashioned for a journey, not for stasis.

To ask Why? is to live as we were made to live: poised between the known and the unknown, between the immediate and the eternal. To forbid the question, to cast the seeking as rebellion, is to deny the very condition of being human.

Thus, the first reaching toward the tree of knowledge was not a crime against the divine. It was the first true act of humanity: the confused, innocent soul daring to stretch toward the beyond.

In our questions, then, we find not our fall but our rising. Not our sin but our salvation. For to ask Why? is to begin the journey home—not to an Eden that never was, but to a wholeness that awaits us in the brave and beautiful reaching of the confused, beloved human heart.

The sacred path is forward—into uncertainty, into wonder, into the endless unfolding of mystery.

For the gates of Eden swing but one way.