a primer for thought

study. read. memorize. he's got it down. he knows the books and their theorems well enough to make new ones. others, long after he is dead, will build upon these. as will generations after them. man explores the world in which he lives in a struggle to understand it. he plays with numbers and ideas thought of long before his grandparents walked the earth. he claims, "it is my will, it is my destiny, the ultimate manifest destiny". so he spends his days. toiling and grinding at a fragment of a puzzle which only appears larger with every found piece. day in day out, he pressures his mind to its limits of conceptualization.

when he looks up from his work one evening, man notices, while many brothers and sisters are toiling at the same underlying puzzle of everything, many are not. instead he sees them engaged in games and contests, not to learn and share knowledge, but to compete and hoard. not only are they ignorantly playing and engaging in forms of lackadaisical intercourse, but they utilize luxuries of the systems they care not to understand in these matters.

man is intrigued by this lack of interest in the greater knowledge. after consideration, he realizes that his preconception of man is wrong. man is not an eager pupil tending to the questions of the universe. instead he is a simple child, needing only to be preoccupied with the glittering emptiness of a daunting task. the animal of man, with his enlarged brain, does not find himself with any greater purpose than his ancestors, but only the common need to expel its excess thought processes on empty emotional experiences and mundane tasks. a synapse fires and man is contented again, for now. the button pusher, creating an easier way to push buttons so that he may push two buttons at once, or eat, or fornicate, while pushing buttons.

man finds this restructured comprehension of himself and his place in the world unsettling. now he is entirely aware that life as he knows it is merely, keeping oneself busy. this awareness came to him crisp as the bite of an apple, displaying the void of ethics in such a world where men are slaves to thought. moreso even than his ancestors, who appear to not reflect on or consider their habit and insticts. with this knowledge a new man is born, a free man, who choses his destiny without consideration for those who may never see things as he does. the new man, who does everything with clarity of purpose, a grin slits his mouth and a blade his arm.