Everything is deep. Everything.
The simplest thing you can imagine – a grain of sand, or the fact that you have five toes on each foot – is filled with unimaginable complexities.
Even something as simple as sunlight, taken for granted for thousands of years by humans, turned out, once someone invented the prism, to be a mix of colored light. Strange to think that when you look into a bright white light, you’re also looking into a bright blue light. And a bright red light. A bright yellow light, and so on. But you are.
Light is deep, and so is everything else.
You look at a wall in your house and you almost never see anything but a wall. But if you look INTO the wall, what you “see” is a coat of paint over drywall, which is itself simple-but-complex, attached over a network of studs and braces, which enclose a space filled with some sort of insulation, the other side of which is another coating of flat material, probably some kind of moisture barrier, with siding of some type – boards or bricks or aluminum siding — outside it, which in turn may also be coated with some kind of coloring or paint. Walls are complex.
Human relationships are the same way. Whoo-boy, that’s an understatement, huh? And yet we forget it so often. Anybody who’s ever heard someone described dismissively as “the little wifey” (or whatever), should immediately think “Wait a minute. Nobody’s ‘the little wifey.’ This is a deep, complex human being, with depths probably even she doesn’t know about.”
When you’re a child, everything is explained to you in simple terms, so you can start to understand it. But nobody ever really follows up with “But this is just the kid’s explanation, of course. Nothing is really like what we’re telling you. You’ll learn eventually that it’s all a lot more complex than this thumbnail description you’re getting right now.”
And I think because of that, most of us get used to seeing things in childlike ways. We walk through a deep world, but we LOOK at it shallow.
We want to see “wall,” and not ((((–>WALL!!!<–)))).
It’s no surprise that most of us accept the superficial, and look no deeper. It’s just easier. It’s easy, for instance, to see things as one thing or the other, a simple two-value dichotomy, rather than a seven-value, or 20-value, complexity. (“People are either gay or straight. We either have the right to own guns with no restrictions, or else we’re all slaves. You either agree with the president, or you hate America.” —Yeah, right.)
Even though I don’t have masses of formal education, I seem to have known about the depth of things from my earliest years, and I’ve spent most of my life, child and adult, trying to develop a sort of x-ray vision, so I could see into everything around me.
It’s both difficult and tiring. The sort of x-ray vision I’m talking about, you can’t leave it turned on too long. Pretty soon after you start using it, you have to switch it off and go back to seeing just the shallow surface of things while you digest what you’ve seen — or maybe just get some rest.
But it seems to me that you have to turn it on sometime. You have to.
You have to question, you have to wonder, you have to LOOK. If for no other reason, just from simple self-defense.
What are things REALLY like? What’s BEHIND what the salesman is saying? What’s the magician REALLY doing? And not just “what’s that politician – or columnist, or radio commentator, or corporate flack — really saying?” but “Why is he saying it?”
So, about 7 years ago, when I started hearing a certain statement here in the U.S., born out of the new era of terrorism, the very first thing I wondered was “What’s this thing REALLY mean?”
The statement, accompanying legislation that shepherded a variety of intrusive new surveillance into our lives, was “If you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to be afraid of?”
It does seem simple, doesn’t it? If an officer, charged with safeguarding the safety of a city or the border, or just one airplane, asks you to step aside to be scanned, or searched, or questioned, you really should comply immediately and with good will, don’t you think? Because any particular passenger really might be a danger to the others.
And it shouldn’t bother you. Because after all, the other passengers are thinking as they watch you pulled aside and searched, “If he’s not doing anything wrong, what does he have to be afraid of?”
But behind the question? Complexity. There’s at least this one other dimension to it, an idea I like to state as: “If you’re not doing anything wrong, why should you be treated like the shitbags who are?”
And “If a million people are not doing anything wrong, why should they be treated like the one who is?”
Behind the simple question, “If you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to be afraid of?” lies the Surveillance Society. The nation of Big Brother, of armed thugs with shaved heads, stormtrooper brown uniforms, and the conviction that everyone deserves equal treatment … as suspects.
If you’re not doing anything wrong, what do you have to be afraid of?
Just this: Cops who think you ARE doing something wrong, and are willing to treat you – and everybody else – in the exact same way they treat the thieves and muggers and rapists and terrorists. Like dangerous criminals who deserve no courtesy, no respect, no rights that the boys in blue aren’t legally coerced into allowing you.
That’s what we all have to be afraid of.