For whom does one write? Gertrude Stein said: “I write for myself and strangers.” In our age among those strangers are the various espionage networks—the CIA, the NSA, Mossad, etc.—who are looking for keywords that might show some terrorist act in development. Writing’s a dangerous occupation. Alekzander Soltzhenitsen was sent to the Gulag for eight years for referring to Josef Stalin in a letter to a friend as “the man with the moustache.” His example is just one of thousands that took place under the Soviet regime. The lesson was learned: if your letters risk being read, it’s better to use code words. In this light, consider the emails connected with Jeffrey Epstein that repeatedly use the words beef jerky, ice cream, pizza, dentist, Snow White, Disney princesses.
But even in normal life, writing has its perils. One never knows how the recipient will read what’s in front of them. I had this feeling when I first began to write long-hand letters, before the home computer age. I’d wonder about how what I wrote was taken by the reader. Even an innocuous line such as “I hope you are doing well” could lead the recipient to ask “Why is he asking? Why wouldn’t I be doing well?”
And if writing letters is dangerous, expressing the truth can be fatal. The prophets Zechariah, Jeremiah, Ezekiel and Isaiah all found this out as did John the Baptist, Saint Paul, the Apostles and Jesus, all of whom were killed for telling the truth. Standing between people and their desires—for worshipping idols, immoral behavior or expressing their pride is deadly. Why is it that so many people—as Feuerbach and Guy Debord pointed out, prefer the lie to the truth? The answer? It allows them to do what they want and feel good about themselves unburdened by their conscience.
We move between conscious and unconscious motivations in our acts. With friends and family, one has the right to expect good will, to assume that the mere act of writing shows an honest interest in their welfare. The interpretive meaning of a letter, its deconstruction, its possible double-meanings, though present in any text, shouldn’t stand in the way of writing freely.
But writing for strangers changes the game. There’s no reason why a stranger should give you the benefit of the doubt. Imagine a passage whose content wavers on the fine line of the politically correct/incorrect. This is a constant concern, being understood exactly as one means to be understood.
If there’s any modern subject worthy of consideration, it’s the violent emotions associated with the Covid period. The only time I ever had any open hateful comments about anything I posted on Facebook was then. Because of it, I saw many friendships dissolve, relationships break up, including marriages. Why was it that so many people who normally question government and business suddenly started to be staunch supporters of masks, fast-track vaccinations, social distancing, lockdowns, and the other non-democratic dictatorial measures put forth in the “public interest”? Why did any doubt transform one into a “conspiracy theorist”? Why was the usual healthy skepticism of authority abandoned and replaced by, for example, “trust the science” as if science is always independent of those financing it? Why was it that a headline would appear on Google news and then one saw it everywhere, as if each new post was an individual discovery rather than indoctrination and propaganda? Was this outpouring of support really a statement of fraternal care or was it something else?
It’s safe to assume that these same basic human inclinations towards belief and doubt existed before Covid and that they’re still around. What that period revealed was the ease with which people can become thoroughly unreasonable. Alan Dershowitz, the supposedly liberal and Democratic human rights-oriented lawyer called for people to be forcibly injected. Noam Chomsky suggested internment camps for the non-vaccinated. Pope Francis called vaccinations “an act of love” and had a special Vatican coin smelted.
A two-sided picture emerged of the times we live in. On one was the mega-death threat of Covid, Wokeism, Globalism, Modernism, all to be accepted by Right-Thinking Well-Meaning People. On the other side was a collection of backwards, mistrustful Dark Age troglodytes with no real unified platform other than the tendency towards paranoid fantasy-oriented individual thought mixed with an innate distrust of science, rationality, progress and of all mainline narratives. I believe the first position is correct.