“The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was to convince the world he didn’t exist” – Usual Suspects
The history-assisted proof may be less elegant
Than the closed-form expression of basic envy,
This theorem holds just the same.
There isn’t any limit to how many of us
Can be murdered before a sick society
Drops one peg further down its folly.
And such folly, for the reason I’ll explain below,
Is being mistaken for sanity.
I am not going to tell here why terminal victims
Playing the open society’s game are, by definition,
The innocents. And one can turn values upside down
All he wants : dead men don’t get to participate
In further conversations unlike their murderers.
Yet the very process of opening one’s eyes – this epiphany –
Is welcomed as redemption enough.
It soothes our deeply seated craving for the logical
Impossibility of evil. Henchmen restore their petty
Humanity with fair trials and grand ideas
And the very usage of reason,
We feel there is some kind of victory and there is,
– There is – there is only that. Here is the victory :
It is when madness plays its best trick
By fooling the tormentor into a clean slate.
This is how we snatch what’s left and wolf it down
As if hiding repulsive food in the most repulsive way,
Believing perhaps we should digest our way into kindness.
Image credit : the New Yorker – Bruce Eric Kaplan
Frédéric Benqué 