LITMIR.BIZ

      Conflict is not only elemental; it is essential to life. Evolution of the species is driven by conflict and sustained by adaptation to the stresses it creates and the torments it inflicts. The clash of egos, the spark that ignites passions and deepens the ideological divide between men, leads to a more sinister form of conflict because the irreconcilable beliefs, opinions and value systems that trigger hostility are imparted, not inborn. It was Sigmund Freud who postulated the now widely accepted theory that we are the product of our subconscious. Freud was careful to add that the subconscious is neither amorphous nor indelible, but rather the aggregate of myriad post-natal influences and coercions. The psyche is fashioned, transformed and often fouled by early childhood experiences and warped by brainwashing -- the planting of preset ideas -- a technique parents, teachers, clergy and other public custodians whose authority we are taught never to question or defy apply with ferocious conviction.

      As children we eagerly swallow the “truths” these figureheads concoct to beguile or entrap us, from Santa Claus to the boogey man and the tooth fairy, from the supernatural übermensch who can part oceans, rain fire and spread pestilence and famine, to the “immaculate” birth of a virgin who, visited by “angels” bears a man-God whose recondite pronouncements -- if his biographers are to be trusted -- are conflated into a cult some 300 years after his preordained death, miraculous “resurrection” and subsequent ascension to “heaven.”

      Then one day, by word of mouth or the emergence of nascent intelligence, we learn that the pixies and the elves that kindled our imagination and the ogres that populated our nightmares are myth and fraud, as are their principal agents -- our parents. With careful programming, which includes crafty counsel not to wander beyond the limits of time-honored “realities,” we enter adulthood conditioned to accept and encouraged to disseminate other absurdities that owe their being and their irritating persistence to the constant drumbeat of political and religious indoctrination.

      No one is “born” a believer or an atheist. No one spurts out of the womb a Jew, Baptist or Muslim, a Liberal or Conservative, a chauvinist or a freethinker. We all come into this world with a blank slate. Parental propaganda, our social climate and assorted constraints mold us into cookie-cutter replicas of our devoted retrofitters. We are all endowed with a brain capable of discerning the truth but we are by now so emotionally mangled by encoding and spellbound by the rote repetition of sanctioned doctrine that we submit to mindless, synchronized rituals alleged to benefit “society.” To survive, the conjurer, the master of doublespeak -- religion -- must cling to fictions that do not exist in the pristine vacuum of an untainted mind but are planted there so they may sprout, tentacle-like, the better to strangle reason.

      Held in check, redirected away from prefabricated truths, conflict can bring down the curtains of ignorance and shed light where there is none. It can help change minds, alter perceptions. I think, therefore I doubt, replaces the credo of inflexible dogma. Skepticism in the absence of provable fact has not only propelled science to its phenomenal heights, it has also freed minds trapped in ideological warrens from which knowledge, logic and enlightenment are kept out.

      Where does fiction end and fact begin? Do the two ever intersect at a point where reality, improbability and inevitability coexist? Can conflict engender a hyper-reality in which are found the truths that craven men fear to know and cautious men fear to tell? In the perfect geometry of coincidence, will these truths assume an aura of frightening plausibility?

      Knowing others is wisdom.

      Knowing oneself is enlightenment.

      Lao Tzu (circa 500 BCE)