People

 People are amazing. Likewise, they are also quite peculiar. As I type, I would be referring to 'people' as a collective whole, without being particular about a certain group or type.

As writers, we are condemned to extol people even as they bring untold suffering upon us. It is people who are the protagonists of our stories, it is people who are used as a narrative anchor to bridge the gaps holes where grandiose truths about the existential human condition are supposed to be communicated. Take the case of a writer of a particularly sensitive sort who, as he trudges about his day, is forced to confront a person who mocks his disposition. Naturally, the writer does not respond, but instead comes home to craft a short horror story about a large house haunted by apparitions as a result of say, a seance gone wrong. Turns out, the perpetrator was the very owner of the mansion whose glistening portrait now hangs high above the rest as he now looks down upon us with a pronounced air of haughtiness. His physical attributes are nonetheless reminiscent of the bully our waylaid writer encountered on a certain day, accentuated and enhanced for dramatic effect in a bid to convey his own subconscious misgivings about others, by and large.

In his book 1984, George Orwell introduces his readers to the phenomenon of the 'Two-Minutes Hate' and how it seemingly drives a mob into a frenzy. Given the descriptive nature of Orwell's writing, one is forced to conclude that 'people' and the 'mob' are one and the same. Despite the existence of such written material as something of a cautionary tale, we still find political rallies, as are charged by populist rhetoric, more than sustaining the Two-Minutes Hate phenomenon as opposed to making individual participants more self-aware with regards to their collective behavior. Thus, the rules made keep getting broken and pens keep getting put to paper on an increasing rate. The pragmatic inquisitiveness of the current age is certainly of a hypocritical variety, one makes do with the world quite nicely, yet wonders why things are the way they are in it.     

People are the very balance upon which the standards of truth and reason have been premised. Like all rules, there come notable exceptions. Power bends people to its will. With absolute power comes the glitch in this matrix otherwise known as hypocrisy which disrupts balance and order. Throughout time immemorial, people have always been subject to power. At first the origins of this power were rooted in divine decree, with all of its commandments and transcendental purveyors. Then like the Promethean fire of knowledge installing the new world of reason and order, man learned to harness power and bend others to his own will. Conspiracies pertaining to some measure of ritualistic submission to the profane aside, men of power have ended up shaping the world order albeit with untold destruction. Yet, therein lies the hypocrisy of people. A messiah to one is devil to the other. Aside from a personal moral code in line with the objective foundation stone of ethics as laid out in the scriptures, there are no moral centers in the world of people where destruction, desire, and dream all frolic simultaneously in unison, having issued forth their own degree of wisdom.

Another issue is in the notion of progress. If people as a collective whole are to be taken at face value, then regress certainly qualifies as progress, given its subservience to underlying power structures. It is in regress that the promise of progress finds immeasurable sustenance and thus for people, it is regress that must stay if power is to hold sway and keep true equality ever at bay. It is yet another manifestation of the pressing proclivity for hypocrisy that corrupts will and renders one helpless yet desirous of some semblance of order from the surrounding encroachment of chaos.

To conclude, the myriad dimensions of people are manifold and confusing. Try as one might, it is impossible to do justice to all of them if not for a complete overwhelming of one's intellectual faculties. It is the artist, the writer and the philosopher who is truly far from the madding crowd to their own detriment, condemned to be a chronicler of hypocrisy, preaching the doctrine of individual experience, supplemented by the occasional epiphany, where mundane reality melts away making one feeling almost godlike, having moved beyond time and space for the most fleeting of moments.