but not in modern society.

i remember using fear of the dark as an argument against racism: there's no reason to be afraid of the dark, you shouldn't be afraid of the unknown.

now, i want the unknown back.

our society is far too safe; we can say too confidently, "honey, it's nothing, go back to bed." there's no adventure in not checking under the bed for monsters.

a world where there are no unknowns is by definition futile. you can make change in the ways allowed, but none of the basics will change. there will never be monsters; it will always be safe. the mechanism of society will be intact. thus the only way you can create "change" is through the mechanism of society. society will never collapse. this is not rome. there's no way to make change outside of the lines in the coloring book.

i support fear of the unknown, and a world to match. it keeps stagnation and complacency at bay. i'll find other arguments against political preference, including the fact that we simply all prefer what we do and not every place has to be the same. what's dark to you may be light to me.

our society is like the dualistic plane on which heaven and hell exist: it isn't connected to the world at large, it defines its own rules and forces them on the world. while that's the right way to do things, it's like taking drugs or having sex or eating food or reading books: if you do it too much, it's all you see, and then you've lost sight of reality.

in college, it was a great rebellion to place the word reality in quotes, like this: "reality." the implication, although it couldn't necessarily be academically defended, was that reality wasn't a single, well-defined thing.

years of thinking, summary: reality is a single objective thing, but we each experience it through the mapping of reality in our own minds, thus we experience many different appearances from a single source of data.

i've come to fear that which is trivial, and that which is known, more than the unknown. the worst the unknown can do is to violently destroy me; the known and the trivial can corrupt me. but that may not be part of your^{(tm)(s)(r)(c)} reality.