Distrust

The skeptic and the compulsive contrarian are personalities marked by profoundly different attitudes.

The first is a virtuoso who cultivates doubt, tries to understand, and knows how to suspend judgment. They're ready to question everything, but they go about it methodically: they look for evidence and use reason.
The second is a collector of obtuse certainties, often a victim of ridiculous polarizations. They reject every official claim out of hand, sometimes just for the sake of it. Driven by an itch to look "cleverer" than everyone else, they end up a compulsive denier.

The skeptic is inspired by curiosity and a critical mind. Their tools are facts, data, and logic. They pursue their goal with rigor and patience.
The contrarian is driven by phobia and vanity. Speculation and distrust are the tools in their toolbox. They have no time for analysis; they jump to conclusions.

The skeptic studies the system, identifies its constraints, and carefully maneuvers within its degrees of freedom.
The contrarian yanks, thrashes, kicks, and ends up tangled in a snarl of junk alternative yarn.
The skeptic swims upstream, alone, toward the source. The contrarian, instead, gets sucked into a murky whirlpool, at the bottom of which they'll find nothing.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Amen - part three: superstition

Those who don't accuse me of blasphemy or stupidity over what I've said about heaven and hell might still, if only out of superstition, call me reckless: if the afterlife existed, and hell weren't the revelry inn you're so keen on, don't you think they could make you burn there for exactly what you wrote?

The answer is simple, even if it's not intuitive. I've actually read the New Testament, the letters of Paul of Tarsus to the early Christian communities in particular. When Big Paul the persecutor converted and got appointed head of the apostolic delegation for the Gentile territory, he changed sides, but not his stickler habit: the requirements he set for getting into heaven are as bizarre as they are strict. I take great care not to meet them, so if that parallel reality really existed, I'd end up roasting straight away at "Churrascaria chez Satan."

That would be the fate of someone with my lifestyle, my values, and my convictions. It would still be, even if from here to my last day I took to writing hypocritical ass-kisses to the whole ecclesiastical establishment.
Precisely for that reason, since hell would be waiting for me anyway, it would pay to make friends with the owners of the joint. Maybe they'd reserve me a less scorching corner, where I'd keep singing the praises of the host.

Who knows? I might even become the official court propagandist. Not bad for someone who, to avoid the heavenly drag, is ready to risk ending up skewered on a rotisserie spit for all eternity. Right?

You can read the whole "Amen" saga by following this link.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

To serve and be served

Not all jobs are the same. There's working, and then there's working and serving.
Careful, though: when I say "serving," I don't mean "serving customers" in the general sense. I mean briefly and willingly acting as their servant, doing things for them that they could otherwise do themselves: bringing the coffee, wiping the table, polishing shoes, washing hair, trimming nails, delivering a pizza.

It's not something to take for granted. It's an enormous kindness from the person serving you, something that goes well beyond the ordinary duties of any other job with an equivalent wage. It takes human qualities and dedication to do it well, with kindness and dignity.

I forget this sometimes, but I've committed to keeping it in mind. When the gesture is carried out with grace and the person receiving it becomes aware of it — briefly interrupting their stream of thoughts, the conversation with friends, or the message they were typing — a specific exchange of signals takes place, and both sides pick up on it. The intensity of the interaction deepens, and even the coffee tastes richer.

If you've never tried it, do it. You won't regret it.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Amen - part two: the closing argument

Some of you may have thought my reflections on heaven and hell (you can find them by following this link) were blasphemous, or maybe just nonsense: completely baseless foolishness.
Objection, Your Honor. To clear up any misunderstanding, I call to the stand none other than the Bible itself, in paper and ink.

The Book of Genesis opens, like all great literature, "in medias res", with God, all alone for who knows how long, suffocating from boredom and falling prey to a compulsive creationism, which kicks off the history of the world. 
But even the world, so lifeless, doesn't save him from the tedium. So, using recycled materials, the way every clever kid does to get around that annoying state of mind, he builds himself a little toy: man. Then he plants the Garden of Eden and plops him right in the middle of it.
Man, though, is a lot like me: he wanted to be born in hell, where he surely would have had a blast. Instead he finds himself in this gorgeous place that looks a bit like Switzerland or Singapore. He stands around dazed for a few moments, admiring the splendor, but once the "wow" effect wears off, he starts getting bored shitless.

God, who has few rivals when it comes to empathy, partly because he's the only one around, notices: as you'll remember, he'd been through the same thing himself not long before. So he makes him animals, but the trick turns out to be a washout: man plays with them for a little while and then gets sick of them.
So God tries again and creates woman. In its own way, this gimmick also has to do with a hole, but it's definitely no washout. And this time man is into it. Woman piques his curiosity and tempts him into breaking the rule against eating the fruit of the tree of knowledge. The two little scamps, using the advice of an alleged talking snake as an excuse, eat the symbolic apple, setting off down the fantastic epistemological path we've never left since. 

Mr. Touchy finds out, though, flies into a rage, and kicks them down to hell.

So, to sum up: in heaven everybody tends to be bored out of their fucking minds, the host included. The moment they try to entertain themselves a little — fucking, snooping around, raising doubts, asking uncomfortable questions — they get told to head on down to hell, evidently a better fit for that kind of activity.

Now, taking into account a source above any suspicion whatsoever, you tell me, Esteemed Members of this Illustrious Jury: when I said hell would be a more interesting place than heaven, where exactly was I wrong?

You can read the whole "Amen" saga by following this link.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Natural-born vendactors

I'm watching some woman selling flowers on the street. She spots a young couple and swoops on them, waving her bunch of roses. The smile on her face is the brightest, happiest, most piercing smile you've ever seen.

The moment she realizes the couple isn't going to buy, that smile vanishes, just like that, all at once, without leaving a trace on a face that has instantly reconfigured itself into a scowl carved in marble.

With every new pair of potential customers, the ritual of swapping "masks" repeats. A change so abrupt, from one extreme setup to the other, so sudden and clean that you couldn't say which of the two "moods" the girl actually identifies with.

How the fuck do they do it?
Natural-born vendactors.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.

Amen

Not that I count on it much, but if the afterlife really existed, between heaven and hell I would choose the latter.
It must be a place full of souls who party hard, chat, yell, drink, smoke, get high, fuck, fall in love, dance, sing, read irreverent literature, listen to tempting music, think, doubt, cry tears of emotion, laugh with delight.
Fire doesn't scare me, it's just a symbol: it represents warmth, joy, dance, love.
Heaven, though? What a gigantic pain in the ass. Those ashen faces, the snooty smiles, the pale straw-yellow skirts. The doorman's sad, persecuted-political look, good old Peter, would be enough to sink me into the most oppressive form of depression.
Honestly, I prefer the carnival style, the brazenness and the mocking grin of Satan.
P.S. I almost forgot: Amen!

You can read the whole "Amen" saga by following this link.

Sinister design - part four: the allegory

You can read part three at this link.

In the previous installments I talked about a whirlpool: the mechanism that sucks us in when we pick a side on crises we can't verify. To make this clearer, I'll use a movie allegory — and no, I'm not saying we live in a simulation: I'm only using the film as an example.

Nearly everyone has seen "The Matrix," the wonderful trilogy starring Keanu Reeves. And plenty of people came out of it feeling exhilarated: "It's a smart story, I understood it, so I must be smart too." They think.

And in fact the result looks encouraging. But then you look at them, and it becomes clear they haven't picked up on all the symbolic sides of it, the metaphorical layers that make it relevant even without the technological apocalypse. They stopped at the plot about sentient machines that drain humans of their energy while keeping them living in a simulated dream, the matrix itself. They can't put two and two together, can't connect those blessed dots.

So let's spell out the allegory. In our reality, the "machines" can be represented by politics and the media. The dreams — the film's matrix — are the polarized issues that politics and the media hand to citizens. And the energy being drained is that of the individuals who fall for the trick and devote themselves, heart and soul, to fueling the mechanism: that's the whirlpool.

Let's look at a few examples from the string of polarizing issues pushed on the masses in recent years. Did we dig in, helmet on and bayonet fixed, taking a position (any position) on the various disputes over the pandemic? We got sucked in. Did we pick a side on the Russia-Ukraine war? We're sinking toward the bottom. Did we pick a side on the Palestine-Israel question? It's already too late. Did we pick a side on the US-Iran war? Same story.

And you can be sure that when interest in the crisis of the moment fades, politics and the media will supply us with new ones. As I said before, the content isn't the point. The goal is distraction, splitting public opinion. Divide et impera.

Okay, take some time to think it over. Then, if you like, go ahead and rewatch the film. Maybe this time the parallel will be clearer.

You can find the other installments of the "Sinister design" saga by following this link.

Drafted from Italian with Blog Translator, then revised by me.