Physical world has inertia.
Living realm has survival instinct.
People have consciousness.
Souls, not soles.
You walk through life on your soles. Calloused soles mean having walked for a meaningful distance. Calloused soles used to be an evolutionary feature of the biological organism.
You walk through your social life using your soul.
Your body, a.k.a. your individual organism, lives in the physical world. It breathes, eats, drinks and does whatever other things inside what you consider to be ‘the physical world’.
You, the ‘conscious human being’, becomes inside what you call ‘a social environment’. Family, society, social network bubble…
You relate with the physical world through your soles, your lungs and your digestive system.
You relate with your social environment through your soul. Using your reason from time to time… whenever passion allows reason to roam freely!
To walk further, people have invented shoes. Artificial callouses attached to their feet, enabling them to walk/run on hard surfaces.
To work harder, people have invented tools. Elaborate callouses attached to their hands, enabling them to do far more things than bare-handed.
To fare better, people have started to communicate. To speak.
Speaking among themselves, they honed their budding consciousness. Developed it further and further. Making their minds more and more sensitive.
Shoes and tools isolated the people from the immediate reality. Making it possible for them to survive/thrive in more and more challenging environments.
Sharper conscious minds deepened people’s understanding of what was going on. In the environment they inhabited and, eventually, further and further away. Even more consequentially, their conscience started to learn about itself.
Conscience discovered soul. Invented it? The jury is still out on this matter.
Anyway, their soul seems to be the only thing which prevents people from pushing tool use to its ‘ultimate use’.
Some people still consider it’s their reason which prevents them from behaving unreasonably. Even after David Hume, an XVIII century Scottish philosopher, noticed that ‘reason is the slave of passion’. Actually, Hume not only noticed this but also considered it to be appropriate. “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions“
What we mean is that war used to divide people in two categories. Fighters and victims. Forget about the fact that each of the fighters and victims are further divided by the front-line. Each war used to be fought by the fighters and endured by the victims. By those whose lives were directly impacted by the fighting. Almost never in a good way!
Lately, since communication tools transmit almost instantly everything almost everywhere, a third war related category has appeared. The bystanders.
The people who have to shield their souls.
Those constantly witnessing sufferance being inflicted upon other people.
Those whose consciousness is the target of relentless propaganda. Propaganda trying to convince them that that sufferance is deserved. That they, the bystanders, should ignore the sufferance. Should allow the aggressor to use their ultimate tools, their weapons, against the victims.
The bystanders are asked, by the aggressors, to agree. Or, at least, to ignore what’s going on.
The bystanders are told, by the aggressors, to look the other way.
To callous their souls.
nicichiarasa 