Large Fierce Mammal

I believe in the spirit of Man as well as the matter. I have seen great courage in men, and women, too;seen them do great things for each other, for their nations, for the world, with a kind of selfless vision that cannot be accounted for by the base, brute self-interest of the body. But why that greatness must spring from some supernatural source. some origin beyond our most subtle sense and understanding, is more than I can see. I respect and revere the spirit of Man all the more because it is of earthly origin. We have a purely natural potential for good that owes nothing to the Archbishop of Canterbury, and a thousand thousand parish raconteurs belabouring poor half-awake souls of a Sunday morning with the potential wages of their ranked and catalogued sins. If you would make a planet of saints and angels, begin by seeing that no person need struggle against his fellow, nor steal from him, nor even kill him, for his food and his shelter. Give him the means to communicate with others, and to read and hear what they would communicate to him. Let him seek the work that suits him best, work that he can see in a moment is of benefit to himself and his fellows. Let him combine with others in his community and his nation to shape and revise the laws he will then live under, so that he knows they serve him, and he them. And give him, at last, leisure to rest, to love his spouse and children, to make, if he chooses, something of beauty only for its own sake. Then you will see Paradise … then you will see the New Jerusalem, and you will never need to call upon a god to ratify it. ~ Freedom & Necessity, Steven Brust & Emma Bull

I’ve written and spoken aloud many times that the true measure of one’s stated and demonstrated belief lies in sincerity, for only sincerity will hold you to your faith when put to ultimate test. This is because sincerity is the key to faith in the self, which in the end, is faith’s ultimate expression, freeing the self to no longer wonder what one would do or consider right in a given set of circumstances, but instead, to know.

In Book 2 of his Republic, Plato puts forth a set of arguments based around a mythical magickal object called the Ring of Gyges (pronounced “GY´-jeez”). The possessor of the Ring can render himself invisible at will:

For all men believe in their hearts that injustice is far more profitable to the individual than justice, and he who argues as I have been supposing, will say that they are right. If you could imagine any one obtaining this power of becoming invisible, and never doing any wrong or touching what was another’s, he would be thought by the lookers-on to be a most wretched idiot, although they would praise him to one another’s faces, and keep up appearances with one another from a fear that they too might suffer injustice.

The back story goes that a shepherd in the employ of the King of Lydia enters a cave that he finds to have been exposed by an earthquake. Entering therein, he finds it to be a grand tomb containing a variety of exciting grave goods including – you guessed it – the Ring of Gyges. Learning what it can do, the shepherd seduces the Queen of the realm, murders the King, and takes his place. Why is the road to power always paved with corruptible pussy? But I digress.

The counter argument is, “… that justice does not derive from this social construct: the man who abused the power of the Ring of Gyges has in fact enslaved himself to his appetites, while the man who chose not to use it remains rationally in control of himself and is therefore happy.”

This set of circumstances has been explored, albeit using a different mechanism, more recently by H. G. Wells in his tale of The Invisible Man, and though there is no actual evidence of any direct causal link by way of inspiration, and the parallels are certainly not exact, the concept of a ring of power that grants its wearer invisibility while every wearing of it corrupts has seen more than ample treatment by J. R. R. Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings.

Today we know the Ring of Gyges as “plausible deniability”, and “the Internet”, but these are only the most recent names for something that has existed as far back as the first unwitnessed malicious act of one man against another. Whether its outcome is simply annoying as with insults hurled at strangers from the presumed anonymity of a speeding car or a paper bag full of Dog shit left burning on someone’s doorstep, more insidious as represented by the wonderful 21st century phenomenon of cyberbullying, all the way to individually perpetrated random assaults or thrill killings and government covert actions launched to facilitate agendas that may not fit any definition of being good, just, or even truly in the national interest, the Ring of Gyges is far from being a mythical thing. It adorns many a finger as we speak.