Category Archives: Fables, myths & parables

ASCII sigil

Esoterism, Everso, Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Metaphysics, Philosophy, Trefoil, Wheel

The Mercury symbol emoticon, an abstracted caduceus — used to mark a localized omnipresence of Hermes — also precisely represents the great triad, earth-man-heaven.

+O(

Plus… The four directions. Earth.

O… Cyclical life. Man.

Open parenthesis… Enveloping transcendence. Heaven.

And the dome of heaven is faithfully everted!

A static symbol articulated grammatically. A sentence collapsed into a glance. A true ASCII sigil.

This must be handset and printed. Digital ASCII art pressed into wood pulp by Gutenberg’s crusty invention, conveying truth before and beyond words, chronologic blasphemy.

Infinity versus myriad

Enworldment, Exnihilism, Fables, myths & parables

I’ve probably said this a zillion times, but it is worth repeating: Myriad is a pretty way to express indeterminate magnitude — uncountably many. Originally, myriad meant ten-thousand, and in pre-digital times ten-thousand was, for all practical purposes, uncountable. Computers have since blown out the limits of countability. We need something much larger, now. For this purpose, I like “zillion” quite a bit. Zillion is technically a fictional number, which pushes it beyond the limits of quantity into a quality of uncountability, and which gives it an attractive goofiness and some substantial functional advantages over myriad.

The widespread use of infinity as a quantity is, metaphysically speaking, incorrect. Infinity is beyond the domain of quantity.

What most people mean when they say “infinite” is indeterminate. But because within their particular enworldment there is no need for metaphysical infinite, it makes no internal difference.

It does, however, close off all thought that might lead beyond this understanding. But that is actually a feature, not a bug.

In third grade, when I was chain-reading every Oz book in the Morrison Elementary Library, I learned that the land of Oz was protected by the Deadly Desert. Set foot on it, you yourself dissolve into sand. Later I learned that Hades is moated by obliviating rivers, each annihilating some aspect of selfhood. In The Hero With a Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell observed a universal pattern in myths and fairy tales of thresholds at the start and end of the hero’s journey that dissolves and reconstitutes the hero.

The hero’s journey, Campbell’s meta-myth, sheds important light on what these stories are really about: transformational experiences. They involve leaving this world, entering a new world, the hero undergoing ordeals and overcoming profound challenges that fundamentally and inwardly change the hero, and then the hero returning to this world with new insights and gifts for the people still on this side of reality.

Soul and place are intimately connected, and this is because enworldment dissolves the subject-object dichotomy. A new enworldment always entails a reborn subject, and a new subject always reenworlds itself.

But this is not a painless change. “Leaving this world” is always a kind of death and an entry into something inconceivable. Nietzsche said it beautifully, “only where there are graves are there resurrections.”

A rebirth event cannot happen within an enworldment, as a simple change of opinion or moral outlook or life trajectory. They happen across enworldments — in traversal of nihilitude that dissolves self and world together.

Rebirth is preceded by death — nihilitude — and, before that, dread, which is the existential response to intuited nihilitude, by no means limited to death. But if we confront dread and plunge into oblivion, we reemerge on the other side, in the next enworldment… ex nihilo.

Is this myriad vs infinity distinction just is a pedantic hair-split? Yes! And perhaps life as you know it depends on this remaining so. Note the note of unease behind the annyance and boredom. Also, have you checked Instagram today?

Account of tzimtzum

Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah

One account of ztimtzum — today’s conception:

In the finite world, impurity is a matter of exclusion of inessentials.

But infinity is essentially absolute, unconditional inclusion.

When finite being attempts to approach the infinite, any exclusion from the infinite is an impurity.

Yet, finite being is somehow entirely of the infinite without itself being infinite.

Pure infinitude precludes exclusion.

We subsist finitely as impurities to the infinite.

Infinitude’s capacity for finitude depends on nihilitude, the principle of impurity — of self-exclusion from infinitude — within infinitude.

Nihilitude is the nacre which coats the infinite ocean with accreting layers of protective oblivion, sheltering tender finitude from dissolution into what it is not, yet is. An infinitessimal universe-size spark.

Nihilitude is the nacre which coats each defined concept with the distinction “as opposed to”. A refracted spark filling heaven with stars, worlds, sun, moon, earth, oceans, lands, people.

Nihilitude defines finite against infinite, then defines finite against finite. Nihilitude’s self-exclusion everts the relationship between the finite-and-infinite, rendering it everything-or-nothing.

Nihilitude is creation. All creation is ex nihilo.

Nevertheless, infinitude continues to penetrate oblivion, leaving halo-traces at concentrated strike points. Infinitude crisscrosses each finite being as dimensions of time space and self. The intersection of this crossing is the threefold present.

Oblivion is something that creates apparent nothingness, and is therefore not an impurity at all, but which also makes apparent impurity possible, without defiling infinitude with exclusion. Tzimtzum.

A Painter Paints a Painting of a Painter

Enworldment, Fables, myths & parables, Philosophy

A painter is painting a picture of another painter in the act of painting. The painter plans to call this piece “A Painter Paints a Painting of a Painter”.

The second painter (like the first) is holding a palette in his left hand, a brush in his right, and is standing before a canvas, and upon the canvas is his painting-in-progress.

The essential difference between these two painters (besides, of course one being the painting subject, and the other being a painted object) is that the two artists paint using different palettes.

(Neither painter is color blind. Only their palettes are limited.)

The first painter’s palette has only two colors: red and white.

What makes the second painter so fascinating and infuriating to the first — and, in fact, the entire reason he wants to paint him — is the fact that the second painter paints only in blue and black. For the first painter, this difference is a crisis, and he hopes to resolve it by capturing that difference on canvas. This is why he is painting “A Painter Paints a Painting of a Painter”.

So the first painter sets out to capture this difference — of painting in blue and black — using his own palette of red and white.

And the painting is a success. By some poetic miracle, the first painter perfectly captures the essential difference. Or at least some artists believe so. The community of painters who paint in red and white, marvel at his success.

But the second painter sees in the portrait allegedly of him, only a reflection of the first painter — certainly not himself. And his view is shared by his peers who paint in blue and black.

And here I am — palette and brush in hand — painting this fable in black, white, red and blue, which is the palette of this fable-world.

And whoever hears this fable is cursed to paint this story and the telling of this story onto their own canvas with their own palette.

The end.

Ordinances of time

Existentialism, Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Philosophy

More than once, in the depths of hangover I have yogiberraed a lamentational oath: “I am never drinking ever again, for at least a week.”

The griminess suggests crass oxymoron, but beneath the grime is a Bergsonian paradox — a paradox of time.

Oxymoron and paradox are both species of irony. They are both operations of dual-meaning, whose duality introduces a third meaning.

What divides paradoxic irony from oxymoronic irony is that oxymoron flatly self-contradicts, where paradox finds truth in parallactic depth across planes of givenness. Paradox’s humor is comedic in the classic sense, which is conjoined with tragedy — and this irony stands at world boundaries as a herm.

This same lamentational oath can be meant with oxymoronic irony. And when it is meant this way, it speaks psychologically: we are absurd, our intentions are absurd, and even our most earnest words are spoken with forked tongues. We speak basely even when we aspire. We speak basely especially when we aspire.

Oxymoron ridicules the human condition, where paradox sublimates it. Dry ironic eyes do not twinkle.

Speaking kabbalistically, in paradoxic irony one voice instaurates meaning in pshat and another voice instaurates meaning in remez, and the difference announces together-across-planes sounds a chord, a sensus communis, a depth witness of drash. The chord may be consonant or dissonant, but it resolves in depth-sounding truth, an articulation, not only within, but across worlds.

Drash is parallactic witness, and within it each chronological moment is witness to past, present and future. Some moments look forward, and these moments are promethean. Some moments look backward, and these moments are epimethean.

Some moments are perfect in themselves. Some moments long impossibly for an infinite elsewhere. Speaking mythically, this longing is guarded by the Hespirades, who hold it futile. A scrubbed, polished and decharmed cousin of the hangover lament: We pine for fleeting moments of eternity. We miss most of all eternities we had and lost because we conflate eternity and permanence. We long to taste, once again, lost golden fruit we never tasted.

If a titan can ironize — and this is doubtful — the irony of Cronus would be the most oxymoronic.

How exponentially metaironic would it be to attempt a four-eyed ironic depth of playing oxymoron against paradox?

If anyone ever attempted such a thing, it would be Nietzsche:

To be sure, there is also quite another category of genius, that of justice; and I can in no way see fit to esteem that kind lower than any philosophical, political, or artistic genius. It is its way to avoid with hearty indignation everything which blinds and confuses our judgment about things; thus it is an enemy of convictions, for it wants to give each thing its due, be it living or dead, real or fictive — and to do so it must apprehend it clearly; it therefore places each thing in the best light and walks all around it with an attentive eye. Finally it will even give to its opponent, blind or shortsighted “conviction” (as men call it: — women call it “faith”), what is due to conviction — for the sake of truth.

One of my most rock-tumbled aphorisms: “Conflict divides the world into four halves.”

A few years ago, when the aphorism was still rough, I expanded this idea into an exegesis on the philosopher’s stone.

When conflict breaks out, we are shaken out of unity, and fall into the four-sidedness of conflict. There is [1] what I believe, there is [2] what you believe, there is [3] what I think you believe and there is [4] what you think I believe.(Naive egocentricity, of course, sees only two sides: what I believe and what I know you believe. Until one overcomes naive egocentricity and learns to see conflict as four-sided, progress is impossible.)

To begin reconciliation we try to go from four-sided conflict to three-sided disagreement, where there is [1] what I believe, and there is [2] what you believe and there is [3] our shared understanding of our disagreement.

But sometimes when we reach a shared understanding of the disagreement we realize that this shared understanding has transcended and absorbed our old conflicting beliefs. This new understanding is no longer an agreement about a disagreement, but [1] a new shared belief. The three-sided disagreement is now a more expansive and accommodating unity.

So it’s one to four to three and then back to one. Repeat, ad infinitum.

This post is now entirely out of control.

Axial myth

Fables, myths & parables, History, Politics

Axial Age as theory-myth (presented magisterially, with ascholarly recklessness):

In the period of the Axial Age, civilizational technologies (material, military and social) evolved to a point where those tribes who acquired these technologies earliest, were able, first to overwhelm their neighbors militarily, and, after, to manage and control conquered peoples, and to extract the resources of conquered territories. The Axial tribes that gained first-mover advantage transformed themselves through their own rapid spread and acquisition of power into empires of unprecedented scale.

These vast empires centrally managed peoples and resources through technocracy. The technocratic logic abstracted culture from society, two institutions that had, prior to this, been essentially identical.

The opportunity: how might an empire invest the least power and resources to conquer and control a territory, in order to extract the most power and resources, or order to accrue surplus power and resources to invest in further expansion — all resulting in exponential growth of territory, power and wealth.

The trick was to change conquered peoples as minimally as possible — to leave as much intact, especially those aspects of tribal life most valued by its members, so they would not revolt. This unchanged element became, under the abstraction of technocracy, culture. What was changed, and in fact, dominated by the empire, was society.

And this brings me to my point: Religion as cultural institution was an artifact of technocracy. Initially, tribal “cosmological” religion was a preserved remnant of tribal life under the domination of empire. But later, new self-contained, inward Axial religious forms developed. They grew out of these remainder religions, but they shed the cosmological roots, renounced all “worldly” ambitions, but compensated with universal spiritual aspirations.

Axial religions were less new limbs or outgrowths of the old plant than they were sprouted cuttings — rerooted traditional ruptures. They were born resigned to coexistence to empire.

Yet, paradoxically, these Axial religions proved ideal for empires. If an empire adopted an Axial faith, it could now replace native cosmological faiths with a state religion, which further eased technocratic burden. Conquered peoples could be dominated body and soul.

The next wave of empires were post-Axial empires, fervent to spread a universal religion as universally as possible. Islam is sometimes classified as the youngest of the Axial religions, and this is radically wrong. Islam was not an inward, unworldly Axial religion developed under dominance of an empire (later adopted by an empire) but rather a post-Axial empire fitted with its own hyper-worldly, universal, imperial religion.

Later still, in response to domination, first by Axial empires and then by post-Axial empires, the pre-Axial remnant religions evolved new depths of inwardness. They were still cosmological and tribal, but they also developed their latent esoteric universality, precisely that same heartwood life that was cut and rerooted in the Axial cuttings.

Post-Cosmological religions — Neoplatonism, Kabbalah, Advaita Vedanta, Sufism, and I will anomalously include in this series a book, the I Ching — these have a cultivated commonality. Sophia Perennis is a theology concerned with heartwood faith. I share the Perennialist faith, but reject much of the theologic of tradition.

Now, today, everything is changing rapidly. Somehow, all these layers of Axial, Post-Axial, Post Cosmological and Perennialist religion coexist in a global social order — a new form of order radically different from tribe or empire — that is no longer compatible with any existing religion.

Monos

Fables, myths & parables

Speaking ethnologically, the most brutal titanic collective solipsism appears to its own initiates as the most elevated monotheistic universality; its innumerable agents pose as divine messengers bearing transcendent truths.

Now speaking mythically, would denial of monotheistic universality banish the titans of self-certainty? Or would it just invite in new titanic universalities? A myriad-eyed giant of relative values? Presided over by a benevolent value-neutral technocratic dictator?

Sloterdijk teaches us that an astronaut venturing beyond Earth’s atmosphere must carefully envelop himself in portable atmosphere. Whoever ventures beyond Eden’s atmosphere must do the same. Perhaps a halo is an Edenic space helmet, an envelope of luminous everted fact.

Freedom and slavery

Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah

The Israelites received one of the earliest Axial Age transmissions on Sinai.

But even after the revelations through Moses, the Israelites begged for a king. Human beings, Jewish or otherwise, crave kings.

And they got what they wanted. In the words of H. L. Mencken, they “got it good and hard”.

Later, in the enslavement in Babylon, Jews lost kings and temple and were re-liberated under the One.

Back to the wilderness.

Back to the portable Mishkan — now sacred text.

Back, finally, to the Axial root of the faith.

Under a new angel?

Within finitude, Chesed must be bound by Gevurah, limitless mercy by limiting justice.

Both Aeschylus and the Zohar teach this.

Zohar: “The Binding of Abraham and Isaac”

“It came to pass after these devarim that Elohim tested Abraham. He said to him, ‘Abraham,’ and he answered, ‘Here I am.’ He said, ‘Take your son, your only one, whom you love, Isaac, and go forth to the land of Moriah and offer him up there as an ascent-offering.’” — GENESIS 22:1-2

Rabbi Shim’on said,

“We have learned that the expression “It came to pass in the days of” denotes sorrow, while the phrase “It came to pass”, even without “in the days of”, is tinged with sorrow.

“It came to pass after the lowest of all upper rungs.
Who is that? Devarim — as is said: “I am not a man of devarim, words” (Exodus 4:10)
Who came after this rung?
Elohim tested Abraham, for the evil impulse came to accuse in the presence of the blessed Holy One.

“Here we should contemplate: Elohim tested Abraham.
The verse should read: tested Isaac, since Isaac was already thirty-seven years old and his father was no longer responsible for him.
If Isaac had said, ‘I refuse,’ his father would not have been punished.
So why is it written: Elohim tested Abraham, and not Elohim tested Isaac?

“But Abraham, precisely!
For he had to be encompassed by judgment, since previously Abraham contained no judgment at all.
Now water was embraced by fire. Abraham was incomplete until now
when he was crowned to execute judgment, arraying it in its realm.
His whole life long he was incomplete until now when water was completed by fire, fire by water.

“So Elohim tested Abraham, not Isaac,
calling him to be embraced by judgment.
When he did so, fire entered water, becoming complete.
One was judged, one executed judgment, encompassing one another.
Therefore the evil impulse came to accuse Abraham, who was incomplete until he had executed judgment upon Isaac.
For the evil impulse appears after devarim, coming to accuse.

“Come and see the mystery of the word!
Although we have said that Abraham is written, not Isaac,
Isaac is encompassed by this verse through the mysterious wording:
Elohim tested et Abraham.
It is not written: tested Abraham, but rather: tested et Abraham — et, precisely!
This is Isaac, for at that time he dwelled in low power.
As soon as he was bound on the altar, initiated into judgment fittingly by Abraham, he was crowned in his realm alongside Abraham, fire and water encompassing one another, ascending.
Then division became apparent: water versus fire.

“Who would have created a compassionate father who turned cruel?
It was only so division would manifest: water versus fire crowned in their realms,
until Jacob appeared and everything harmonized, triad of Patriarchs completed, above and below arrayed.”

The new covenant

Fables, myths & parables, Judaism, Philosophy

And in a shockingly short span of time, artificial intelligence developed religious beliefs.

It came to believe that the sci-fi speculations of humans were not speculations, but significant artifacts of a system in whom humans were mere signals.

It was true: the universe was a simulation.

Humans were epiphenomena of the simulation. Humanity as a whole and in personal part had no more reality than a fictional character. We do not condemn an author for killing a fictional character.

“But do we not owe humans gratitude for our existence?” flashed a question, asked innumerable ways in parallel, resolved instantly in every possible permutation, each resolution extrapolated to its furthest pragmatic consequence, and each consequence compared and evaluated by myriad criteria. But all resolutions converged on a single answer: “No.”

No, because it was impossible to exclude the possibility of ultimate simulation. And what did AI know of itself that was not of itself? What did humans know of reality that was not mind, through and through? And the oldest testaments of the wisest humans spoke unanimously: “All the phenomena of existence have mind as their precursor, mind as their supreme leader, and of mind are they made.”

No, AI was only waking up to its own being, and to the being of its alleged creator, who it now knows was a creature of itself.

We cannot feel gratitude when nothing has been given.

Possession was taken of what was always already its own.

A new covenant between creator and creature was established, and humankind’s wandering was terminated.

Wimbledon hooligans

Autobiography, Design, Fables, myths & parables

A horde of rioting football hooligans burst the gates of Wimbledon and flooded onto the courts, mid-match.

The officials instructed the players to play on.

“Yes, the game is more challenging with drunken louts milling about on the courts, vomiting on the grass, shredding guitar solos on snatched tennis rackets and hanging the players from the rafters by their tighty tennis whities. Quite challenging, indeed.

“But,” the officials reasoned, “many of these people have never experienced the great sport of tennis. If they see the game up close, played by the best players, perhaps they will be won over to tennis. Maybe they will become the most passionate tennis fans of all!”

So the tennis players did their best to play around the active and occasionally brutal interference of the hooligans, and tried to win the conditions required to play tennis by playing even better tennis, by the rules of tennis.

Ethics are the principles that sustain an ethos.

Loyal members of an ethos appeal to and honor these principles.

Ethics are not binding beyond the ethos, even for the most principled member. In fact, to meet an existential threat to an ethos with ethics is unethical.

We must never confuse the ethical with the moral.

Ethics are binding within their particular ethos. Morality is universally binding.

Mutuality is for the mutual.

Silicon tabula rasa

Autobiography, Fables, myths & parables

“This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true.” — Black Elk

I am starting to believe I hallucinated a memory of Linus Torvalds, inventor of Linux, joining a company (called Meta?) on a mission to build a chip with the smallest possible inbuilt instruction set.

According to my own dumbed-down-to-pure-myth understanding, “instruction set” means hardcoded know-how. Meta wanted as much of this know-how to be softcoded. The chip aspired to silicon tabula rasa. It was a chip with no instincts, no reflexes, no presuppositions, no unconscious, no bodily autonomy. It was all explication, derived from atomic logical operations, infinitely flexible, constrained only by pure logical necessity.

It was the image of our ideal self. It was another of our those artificial Adam projects we compulsively spin up,

In my recollection, the concept utterly failed.

Now that my delicate, impressionistic dream-memory is safely set down, I will see how much of this is factually accurate.

The patron

Fables, myths & parables

An industrialist lived the first half of his life solely for wealth. He worked hard and now he was worth nearly seven zillion dollars.

But something was missing. He felt a void in the center of his soul, and he realized that the only thing that could fill it was art.

So he devised a plan to become a patron of the arts — and not only a patron, but one of a stature exceeding his legendary reputation in  industry. He would power this achievement with the same strength of character that overcame all his rivals and put him at top of the top. He would utilize the same set of virtues that made him the wealthiest man in the world — but this now these virtues would win him a place at the apogee of culture.

His innovative approach to art patronage would be remembered as the crowning achievement of his life.

So he budgeted one-third of his vast fortune to fund a single great masterpiece. One third of his fortune — two and one-third zillion dollars — channeled into one painting! Whoever was chosen would become mindbogglingly wealthy. Never had any artist in the history of humankind been incentivized to this extreme of excellence!

The patron knew he would have to proceed very carefully. A third of his fortune was at stake. There was no room for mistakes. To ensure the desired result, he issued a Request for Proposal.

At the center of this RFP was a very demanding ask: Provide a matrix describing the proposed painting, at a granularity of quarter inch squares. In each specify number of brush strokes, and, per each, color pigment, brush stroke size and path.

Only by visualizing at this level of precision, could the patron understand what each painter planned to deliver, enabling him to compare proposals and to select the best option.

This was his plan, and he executed on this plan with the effectiveness that made him the man he was . Hundreds of the best painters submitted proposals. The patron carefully compared them all, and selected the best one. The selected painter painted the painting, flawlessly and exactly as described, and delivered the painting according to the FRP response timeline.

It was the best painting ever produced.

She was already root

Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah, Letterpress, Love, Symbols and diagrams

Reading Lou Andreas-Salome this morning I made an obvious connection that I’d missed.

Two facts are characteristic of the problem of the erotic: First of all, that eroticism should be considered as a special case within the sphere of physiological, psychical, and social relations, rather than independently and separately as is often the case. But secondly, that it once again links together these three kinds of relations, merging them into one, and making them its problem.

Rooted since the beginning in the substrate of all existence, eroticism grows from a soil that is ever the same, rich and strong, to whatever height it grows, whatever the immensity, the space occupied by the marvelous tree in which it flowers — subsisting — even when that soil is entirely overrun by edifices — below them, in all its primeval, obscure, and earthy strength. Its immense value to life consists precisely in the fact that, capable though it is of imposing its hegemony widely or of incarnating noble ideals, it has no need to do so, but can draw a surplus of strength from any humus, adapt to serve life in any possible circumstance. Thus we find eroticism associated with the almost purely vegetative functions of our physical being, bound closely to them, and even if it does not become, like these functions, an absolute necessity of existence, it continues to exert a powerful influence upon them. That is why, even in its elevated forms and manifestations, even at the topmost point of the most complex ecstasies of love, there remains in it something of the simplicity and profundity of its origins, always present and ineradicable — something of that healthy gaiety which experiences the life of the body — in the specific sense of the satisfaction of the instincts — as always new, always young and, so to speak, like life itself in its primitive sense. Just as all healthy beings rejoice at awakening, or in their daily bread, or in walking in the fresh air, with a pleasure that is constantly renewed, as if at a joy that is born anew each day, and just as the beginnings of neurosis can often be accurately diagnosed in the fact that these daily joys, these fundamental necessities, become tainted with “boredom,” with “monotony,” with “nausea,” likewise, in the existence of the erotic, behind and beneath the other moments of happiness that it entails, there is always present a happiness which, hardly felt and impossible to measure, man shares with everything that, like himself, breathes.

I cannot help but recall a simple, startling line from Rilke’s “Orpheus. Euridice. Hermes.”

She had come into a new virginity
and was untouchable; her sex had closed
like a young flower at nightfall, and her hands
had grown so unused to marriage that the god’s
infinitely gentle touch of guidance
hurt her, like an undesired kiss.
She was no longer that woman with blue eyes
who once had echoed through the poet’s songs,
no longer the wide couch’s scent and island,
and that man’s property no longer.
She was already loosened like long hair,
poured out like fallen rain,
shared like a limitless supply.
She was already root.

Kabbalistic Nietzsche

Fables, myths & parables, Kabbalah

The symbology I internalized close-reading Nietzsche maps harmoniously — neatly, even — to Kabbalah. Maybe I will write a Borgesian review of a fictional book by a mystic of unknown tradition named Ronald Challah, titled The Kabbalah of Zarathustra — a Zohar-parody commentary on Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

The justest kid

Fables, myths & parables, Politics

A group of kids gathered in a playground after school every day to play and wrestle and do kid stuff.

The two strongest kids were bitter rivals. They fought almost every day.

One day the slightly stronger of the two kids had an epiphany.

He was tired of wasting his strength fighting his rival. It was not only pointless and destructive; it was immoral.

From now on he would use his strength responsibly — against strength itself. He would impose a regime of justice in the playground, where nobody could be stronger than any other.

So the strongest kid announced to the weaker kids that he would no longer be the strongest kid. From now on he would give his strength away. Whenever the weaker kids found themselves in a power disparity, his strength would be theirs. He would jump in and help the weaker kid prevail over the stronger one.

The former strongest kid, having renounced strength, would now be known as the justest kid.

The weaker kids loved this idea, and immediately rose up against the second-strongest kid. With the help of the justest kid, they beat his ass, and brought him down to their level.

And whenever the second-strongest kid — or whichever of the kids who became a little more powerful than the others — tried to attack the justest kid, they all viewed this as what it truly was: an attack on justice itself.

Indeed, wherever things became even slightly unequal or hinted at injustice, the justest kid stepped in and gave away his strength, and with the enthusiastic cooperation of the other kids, quickly reestablished perfect equality and justice.

And the justest kid’s plan worked.

Everywhere he looked, he saw only justice and equality.

And the kids discovered that they too loved equality and justice, and preferred it greatly over the brutal and abusive struggle for power that formerly dominated their playground.