Inquiry -- Part One

If you were involved in an inquiry, together with many others, into something that did not exist, but you had all accepted as a premise that it did, universal accord over what this thing was would be next to impossible. More than likely, varied insight would take you down various paths. You would form associations and leagues of agreement and begin to contest one group against another. Politeness would give way to insult and ultimately to physical violence. Each member of each group would see himself as the champion of his group’s solution to the question, and the solution itself would take on an essence and being of its own. For those who believed in it, it would become materially real and would subordinate all other reality. Perhaps at times one association would be more powerful than the rest and would dictate to a large extent the course of events. But then it would lose its grip and another would take its place, or there would be a precarious balancing of authority among a number of them, with the inevitable threat of widespread war. Unless one group were to eliminate the others completely, malice, animosity, malignity, and spite would go on for a very long time, even indefinitely.

(To be continued.)