Impossible beauty: Beauty Impossible

Preamble

Thought 1: Isn’t the performance of this song an impossible beauty? Couldn’t we title earthly existence Beauty Impossible, an epic movie in which every character is doomed to suffer and die in exquisitely rendered detail?

Thought 2: An us-and-them attitude leads to endless might-makes-right conflict. This is its essential mechanics: THEY are evil, therefore WE are obligated to condemn THEM, change THEM to OUR ways or kill THEM. Because WE are necessarily right, God/Universe has OUR back. Battle will prove this. (Obviously the ‘enemy’ feels exactly the same way, only in reverse.) Christ represents the antithesis of this, or rather its transcendence through love: “Love thine enemy.” Could there be a more radical instruction? Could any other path demand more courage and humility?

Thought 3: If we want a healthier world, must we first learn to see beauty in evil?

Introduction

Could Pitou’s song have emerged from any other past? Were, in other words, our past’s particular suffering and horror, its violence and betrayal and craven dishonour all necessary for her song’s existence? Or for my reaction to it?

What we deem Good and Bad flow from every decision and act and happenstance that can be. Good and Bad are, ultimately, our actions and reactions, our deeds and perceptions. They are what reality is, especially because by “our” I mean All That Is. Good and Bad are not separate from us, because we are not separate from reality. Reality is made of us.

What is your capacity for suffering? How deft are you at transmuting evil into love, sickness into health? These questions are meant to direct your attention to the quality of your wisdom, by which you handle your reality with whatever grace is in your heart.

Why does ‘God’ ‘permit’ ‘evil’? This question has a more revealing twin: Why are we not puppets?

Could the answer be something as upsetting – as liberating – as “To create more beautiful music”? Could this “more beautiful music” be an unintended consequence we/God chanced upon, a beauty so impossible, so beyond our comprehension and control, it keeps us glued to karma like bewitched gamblers? The horrors of childbirth can kill, or cause the most terrible pain, but the women who survive it often come back for more. New life is too beautiful to resist.

Capacity. Acceptance. Transmutation. Impossible beauty. Beauty Impossible.

Tyranny dilates curiously

The easier our life, the less we develop our capacity to transmute suffering and evil into love. I believe wisdom-as-health-as love is this capacity. There is so much more to this than can be expressed in words. For example, I do not believe Pitou suffered horrors she was able to transmute into her song. My sense is that she enjoyed something of an idyllic childhood. Similarly, I have watched the four cats that bless my world grow up in a kind of cat paradise, all their needs met. And yet they each radiate the unarguable and unique beauty of what they are.

This entire territory, which is in fact reality itself, is not remotely straightforward. I am not relativising evil, nor am I even attempting to define it, and I am not saying individual suffering is required to write a great song. But suffering somewhere mysteriously adds melodies and qualities that could not otherwise come to be. Happiness grows richer after you have processed some suffering. If – bounding forwards greatly now – you can transmute evil into love, the melodies that can proceed from your being are miraculous!

One might ask, as we do in our many ways, “So how much suffering is the right amount, then?”

It is an ugly question. The fact of its ugliness has held my attention in article after article since 2020.

(How do I let go? What, exactly, must I let go of?)

I find myself turning slowly on a very large dime. Since those hideous lockdowns were disgorged over the planet, whereupon the rancid virtue signalling of the political and media classes leapt from unseemly to soul-gouging garish, my prior letting go has become a renewed clinging on to something I cannot quite identify. It seems to be something that thrives in the tension between potency and impotence, something utopian. The road to Hell is paved with good intentions, they say. But so too is the road to Heaven. Perhaps they are the same road.

(Perhaps I seem hopelessly self obsessed. But my intuition says what’s happening to me is happening to us all. It’s just particularly loud in my mind.)

Everything is changing, and fast. The geopolitical world realigns as the West’s breakdown accelerates. Old ideas of what good governance is are forced into a corner by rapidly advancing technologies. People of every stripe cast about desperately for solid meaning while opening their hearts to alternative explanations and understandings of authority and power. For me personally, these changes feed a deep reassessment of how I perceive reality, an evolution I have been tracking here in fits and starts. But I sense this phase will soon end for me, and I will fall silent again. These paragraphs are an expression of this premonition.

What could it mean that we exist in a “virtual reality”, as some argue? To me it used to suggest, in part, that earthly existence is somewhat bubbled off, as if in a dome, that it could be, for example, rewound at grave need to an earlier time, restarted some months before we fluffed an inflection point, you know, to give us a second chance. It meant I needn’t reincarnate to participate in Earth’s fast-track karmic purging. I could take it easy for a century or two and incarnate whenever Soul That I Am deemed the potential benefit worth the risk. Many musings of this nature.

I don’t see/feel it that way any more. Coming in more strongly now, in line with my weakly evolving ability to see no enemies Out There amongst The Great They, is a sense that earthly existence is like all evolution: part willed, part organic, mostly organic. It is a little like conspiring: We all do it, but however fervently we will and however diligently we lay our plans, life wills otherwise. Life’s plans undo us all in the end. It’s the whole point.

I’m arguing God is subject to this like we are, albeit on a far vaster scale. God, All That Is, includes that which is His own undoing, what the Old Testament draws to our attention as the seventh part; that which can only escape control. It is healthier, or wiser, or more loving, to honour the seventh part than to fight it, to demonise it, to see it as an unwanted, separate evil. But how we respond to it is always our choice.

Perhaps earthly existence, then, is an emergence from consciousness as a tree emerges into a forest from a forest, nothing like a different realm on the other side of a separating dome. Of consciousness necessarily, earthly existence is far more intricately entangled throughout us as soul than we, as humans, can imagine. It cannot be excised, rewound, or ‘perfected’. We are entangled in each other under the soil, just as roots, decaying leaves, insects, and mycelium networks are. All of it together is what soil is.

Where does tree end and soil begin? Just like you cannot step outside nature, so you cannot step outside the soil of this metaphor to act from a wholly outside place on ‘the tree’ in some unaffected way.

I have said too many times to remember: As you do unto Other, so you do unto Self. How is it that we can be blind even to the very things we say? “None is so blind as he who will not see.”

Our capacity, as I paint it above, determines what we can see. The more you become a home for love, the more you see. Hurt attenuates us, if we allow it. The ‘wrongs’ of the world bore shrilly and noxiously into me as hurt. I tighten, become blinder than moments ago. This repeated over and over again in multiple stabbings, my hands wrapped around the dagger’s hilt. I suspect this pattern moulds us all, individually and severally. And while there is no meaningful or lasting blame in any of this, it is our responsibility as ‘individuals’ to grow our capacity to give love a home in what we are as best we can. Should we so choose.

Evolution is not circular, it spirals. What marks its progress – if we want to call it that – is our capacity to manage the very worst of what we do to each other, with love, wisdom and health. It is as simple as that, but so easy to forget when we are in pain. In pain, love is often the very last thing we want to hear; it requires forgiveness and letting go. In pain, we can easily turn our back on God. Doing so is a sad but powerful act.

I have been shouting this: Humanity is handling its ever increasing complexity badly. Power/governance systems draw low-wisdom types (let’s say narcissistic/sociopathic/psychopathic) to the ‘top’; they are attracted by power and better able to handle the pressure. Being about the power governance systems feel they need to enforce the management processes they deem necessary on a necessarily clueless (specialisation) and recalcitrant population (becoming global because technology), governance systems corrupt over time. This clusterfudge is the systemic antithesis of authority. It is Lord Acton’s Dictum of power corrupting in a compounding manner, with those at the nominal top (‘elites’) very likely to be exactly what is not needed to sort things out. Add endemic scarcity to the mix because money as measure of value requires scarcity. Add in self-hypnotising propaganda and consequent and compounding inter-group enmity and suspicion. Add in materialism as cynicism, which is a kind of soul-pain, which attenuates our capacity to love, to become wise, to become mindful, and…

…You get today’s world.

Which is exactly as it should be. We have guided ourselves here, into the exact situation that is the perfect constellation of challenges for what we are. Our world is exactly what we need. And this includes the terrible horrors of war, the hatred, the rage and despair, the cruelty and injustice.

Science in the sense of narrowly dogmatic materialism is not the way through. Wisdom, love and health as new guiding principles are the way through; they accommodate science as open-minded skepticism, as noble humility.

Human nature is, I argue, as susceptible to this mysterious trinity of wisdom<->love<->health as it is to cynicism and the sort of perma-competition and perma-enmity it has been singing to itself these last few millennia. Seeing as it has indeed been millennia, and seeing as decisions are compounding-entangling investments in the future, humanity’s current predicament, especially in a West that has been ascendant for about 500 years, represents an almighty challenge.

Health will out one way or the other. To then one day decay into its next crisis, one way or the other. This is how reality grows richer. Accepting this makes it easier to bear, and, more importantly, impossibly beautiful.

No one knows. Know this, and dissolve your inner fanatic

Look around you. What do you see? Is your world good? Is it evil? Ask yourself, who is guilty? Who is innocent? What are you? Now look at your neighbour. Look at your neighbour! Be brave enough to see yourself; your own reflection cast back at you, each reflected in each. Look where you stand: in a shining city on a hill, in the land of the free and the brave, standing for Liberty and Justice. How true do those words ring for you? When did you bring Liberty? Where did you cause Justice? I stand at the gate of a nation, a nation where power is not invited. I stand at the gate and I look out upon you. And you look back to me. But all I can do is reflect what I see. If you have come to receive, you will go away poor. If you come here to understand, you will leave here lost. For those who have understood, for those who have received, it is time. Returning to your scripture will not save you. Bending to your knees will not please anyone. That time is passed. This time is now. You are the judged. You are the chosen. I am here to break the mirror so you will see on what side you stand. What you see will be your choosing. – Messiah, episode 6, Netflix [my emphasis].

Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. – Jacques Ellul

Introduction

Jesus failed to persuade most of us. What chance do we ordinary mortals have?

Is an incarnation as a human being on Earth a trial on a training ground where, necessarily, incarnated souls have relatively low wisdom? That is why we incarnate; to grow in wisdom. There is no point incarnating on Earth beyond a certain level of wisdom. Does it follow, then, that things will never improve on Earth if those that incarnate are necessarily low-wisdom souls? It’s a mechanical question.

If this metaphor for what earthly existence is fundamentally about is close to true, must Earth only and always be a place where beginner souls are suckered into hellish suffering, until they finally wise up under the pressure of such weary toil?

Or, assuming incarnation is a soul-level, pre-birth choice, is it fair to ask if earthly existence is a sacrifice taken on by the bravest souls? For example, incarnating as Ukrainian or Russian, as Israeli or Palestinian is not something that would attract most. Incarnating into environments of almost insurmountable challenges, which are likely to cause the most terrible human experiences possible, would be a choice to take on great sacrifice, to risk agonies of every kind, in the faint hope it does some good, or that some success is achieved that is positive for All That Is in some way. The potential for soul-growth , this argument suggests, is directly proportional to the degree of suffering risked.

How horrible this sounds! I am writing airily about the slaughter of men, women and children, about terrible wounds, dismemberment, destroyed lives, the bitterest and most belligerent intergroup hatreds. But this is the exact horror that drives me to try to understand.

Going a little deeper, we turn to contemplate free will as a foundational fact of reality. Because I have free will, I can choose to turn my back on God, on Jesus, or, more simply, on love. If every one of us can fail to persuade the other, just as Jesus failed to persuade most with the full wisdom of God at his disposal, what hope for us immature, unwise humans of lowly relative capacities in persuading others that love is the answer? 

The evidence around us suggests that it is very hard for humans to commit to love.

Am I on track with such speculation? Or is Materialism the sounder ontology? Are our efforts on Earth no less the result of mechanical processes than the hot air pumped out from the rear side of a refrigerator?

My own ontology is that everything is God, everything is Consciousness. From this I choose to respect the sanctity of free will and so find myself compelled to ask: Is persuasion the right attitude, the right approach, the right starting point for furthering Right Action and the earthly evolution of wisdom? Does persuasion risk a violation of another’s free will? Direct instruction would be worse of course: Can a man’s wisdom evolve at all while other people make all the difficult decisions for him? Isn’t persuasion also an interference, albeit subtler? What of the subtle influences of NLP, behavioural programming, propaganda, bureaucracy, legislation, mass media? How respectful of free will are these processes and entities? 

How respectful of and sensitive to free will is ideological extremism, fervent belief, the desire to help others?

Inversely, isn’t taking on the pains of the world – extreme empathy – an act of inverted hubris? It is a grand delusion to think we are somehow morally obligated to save the world, or to absorb its pain in noble co-suffering. Isn’t the most noble undertaking to strengthen (nourish?) your ability to identify and then nurture your humility? 

Perhaps this is what Jihad describes.

But how does all this square with protecting the weak? What happens if we don’t even bother? Perhaps these are misleading questions, just as the goal of persuading others is the wrong way to go about dialogue. 

“Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.” 

I believe a healthier societal vector would be one deeply rooted in robust humility, in the sincere conviction that no one knows, that healthy dialogue – conversation aimed at learning more – is crucial to healthy governance, and that true honour is rooted in the complex and challenging undertaking to become humble. In precisely this vein, respecting free will means not seeking to persuade. Power – in contradistinction to natural authority, which is humble – is the antithesis of such respect, respect being an organic quality that is created and sustained by humility.

This helps us understand why power corrupts. Because power can forestall correction, it can attenuate its dialogue with the rest of reality. True dialogue invites correction. The more power you have, the longer you can forestall unwanted correction: hubris. You end up believing your own propaganda, you end up entangled – invested – in your poor, dialogue-free, propaganda-driven, low-wisdom decisions until it all comes crashing down around your ears. The poor (weak) bear the brunt of this: those who became dependant on and thus addicted to your power. Rulers require ruled just as ruled require rulers.

So, what is the loving, wise response to suffering, victimhood, and power?

If I love x, must I accept all x entails?

If I love the cat, I must accept the agonies of the creatures that suffer on its claws. If I love humanity, I must accept the suffering it is doomed to create in the wake of its low wisdom. If I truly love humanity, in other words, I must honour its free will: its right to act in accordance with its wisdom. I am required to accept the truth of this as graciously as I can.

Is this a callous position, no matter how it is intended?

Love entails acceptance. What we are challenged to accept upon a commitment to love and humility can be truly horrific at times. Obviously, it can be very hard to handle this truth, to pay the price such a commitment exacts.

One way or the other, decisions are investments in the future, and each decision is made with a specific quality of wisdom. Wisdom is something we enrich or degrade by our decisions. Feedback from the quality of our decisions can educate us on the current quality of our wisdom. With dedication and humility, feedback advances our wisdom. So goes the argument I’m borrowing for this article.

To interrupt that decision<->wisdom spiral – which I see as synonymous with evolution –, to puppet or nudge, in other words, a fellow human using your ‘superior’, ‘elite-level’ wisdom, is an interference that dishonours love and risks downstream unravelling of the best-laid plans of mice and men, an unravelling that can, at epochal junctures, become catastrophic. Indeed, the very idea of measuring one person’s wisdom against another’s is a low-wisdom folly, a contradiction, an exercise in futility.

This is my sense of it, a growing awareness that increasingly informs my reactions to my world and my sense of what could be constructive ways of responding to the great suffering and horror that comes to my attention. I experience this continuous process of reassessment as an evolving attempt to understand the pragmatics of love.

I am not against justice, nor am I against atonement. Wrongs happen and must be wisely remedied to the best of our wisdom; societal health depends on it. But enmities embed and compound. Divisions emerge and deepen and are far harder to handle than wrongs committed. Perhaps the most famous division today is that between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’. 

As lovers of humanity, is this division, like all divisions, something we are required to accept? Yes, which means “do not hate it”. If our wisdom sees it as a cause of unnecessary suffering, our healthiest response must be to learn deeply why it exists and whether it is avoidable, or how best to handle it. My guess is that such a response is broadly appropriate with all such divisions.

The ‘elites’ are products of their world, just as ‘non-elites’ are products of theirs. Each one of us is an organic expression of our world, where “our world” includes our biology, history, culture, environment, psychology, memories, soul, etc. Indeed, the vague dichotomy I’m using – ‘elite’ versus ‘non-elite’ – is a lazy platitude from my world I use rhetorically, even though it misleads. In other words, what and how I communicate is necessarily determined by my world.

Why is this banal observation important?

Because changing one side of the ‘elite’-‘non-elite’ divide, as perhaps with all others of its like – Russian-Ukrainian, Israeli-Palestinian, etc. – , requires changing the other side. For the ‘elite’ to not be elite-like and to not do elite-like things requires that the ‘non-elite’ no longer be non-elite and no longer do non-elite things. Each is one half of a unified whole; each co-creates the other. This is an unwanted but necessary correlate of enmity itself; enmity requires enemy. Money requires scarcity. These truths are systemic and thus organic.

Necessarily organic expressions of our worlds, lasting change of expression requires lasting change of world. As you zoom in on this truth, it becomes impossible to separate “expression” from “world”. All that “world” is, ultimately, is a dynamic network or web of evolving “expressions”. There isn’t really anything else. This is a different formulation of the truth “There is nothing but God”.

Similarly, then, it becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’. I’m going to try to tease this into clearer relief via an example: Mike Benz expounding the corruption of democracy in the US, and thus in the West:

What I’m essentially describing is military rule. What’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. Democracy draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is rule by consent of the people being ruled. It’s not really being ruled by an overlord because the government is just our will expressed by our consent with the people we vote for. 

The whole push after the 2016 election, and after Brexit, and after other social-media-run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted – like the 2016 Philippines election – was to completely invert everything we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society, in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is: “We need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of the democratic institutions.” And who are the democratic institutions? “Oh, it’s us.” It’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank, it’s the mainstream media, it is the [largely State-Department- or IC-funded] NGOs. It’s essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism, [establishments] that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. If you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially: Democracy is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves. And from their perspective, that [consensus building] takes a lot of work!

The amount of work these people do… For example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms of the oil and gas industry in a region, for the finance of the JP Morgans and the Black Rocks in a region, for the NGOs in a region, for the media in a region. All of these need to reach a consensus. And that process takes a lot of time, a lot of work, a lot of negotiation. From their perspective, that’s democracy! Democracy is getting the NGOs to agree with Black Rock to agree with the Wall Street Journal to agree with the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular initiative. That is the difficult vote-building process from their perspective. If, at the end of the day, a bunch of populist groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on TikTok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass, well then from their perspective that is now an attack on democracy.

I sympathise with their perspective and appreciate the various processes by which it emerged into being.

Specialisation is now so advanced – the human mind is endlessly restless and inventive, subdivides its prior subdivisions into ever more complicated subdivisions – only highly trained specialists have a remote chance of knowing what they’re doing in their particular niche. One’s specific combination of specialisations flows organically from one’s past decisions, each made with whatever quality of wisdom was available. Over time, we become more and more invested in – rooted to – our specialisations, our situation, and so become dependent on those who have specialisations we do not, just as they may become dependant on ours. Trust in each other gets harder as effective communication about what is going on is undermined by the generalised lack of mutual expert knowledge.

Societies are held together by trust. Trust is hard in highly specialised societies. This is a problem.

As if to replace the trust that once held hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal societies together, money emerged. Money – in the form of market-based price discovery – could be said to automate trust. As such, it holds societies together. But money also corrupts; it is power accumulated. You can accumulate money indefinitely and grow mighty defensive about your hoard. I’d even argue that money corrupts itself: Where does money end and banking begin? Where does banking end and bankers begin? Bankers corrupt banking corrupts money system corrupts everything else. To repeat, money is one of power’s most effective levers.

The fish rots from the head down, they say. But this hardly matters; it is one organism that is as organically rooted in its environment as any other. Shifting to the particular, when we ponder the mutual antipathies between, say, the proletariat and political class, is it really fruitful to hold one side more guilty than the other? Is not each group as enmeshed in The System as the other? Everyone has a responsibility to wisely handle what he/she is, but blaming others, virtue signalling and playing victim are low-wisdom games.

So should we stop specialisation? I don’t think so. That would be like stopping curiosity and inventiveness. If you love the cat, you must accept the agonies of those that suffer on its claws. Excising from humanity that which created specialisation would be to kill humanity, to hate it.

Anecdotally, I’m involved in building grassroots movements and activist companies, an endeavour that entails liaising between a (low) number of likeminded people with a (nonetheless) wide divergence of perspectives. Reaching creative and positive compromise on delicate matters all parties are happy with is a lengthy and energy-intensive process.

When you invest time building such enterprises, you do so because you believe fervently in them, or in something like status, or power, or wealth. They are, then, invariably labours of love of something. When ‘outsiders’ to the process – ‘non-elites’ – threaten one’s fragile progress, say likeminded activists groups who are attracted to the cut of your jib, that influx of new perspectives – aka the addition of larger democratic processes – threatens to break your rhythm and undo all your fine work. What do they know about what we – the ‘elites’ – have achieved! What right to they have to our precious hoard/work/status!

So if we can’t avoid specialisation, might we avoid us-and-them tensions, and thus avoid enmity? Well … yeees … but by learning humility … which is patience … which is wisdom … which is how we learn that avoidance, like oppression and suppression, is futile. The ‘solution’ is patient acceptance that seeks to learn wiser ways through unavoidable tensions and enmity. 

There is a deep but banal pragmatics to all this that is as obvious as it is irritating – and now existentially threatening – to a system that simply has no time for it. The Western world is systemically incapable of wanting to embrace the profound value of humility. And yet it is blindingly obvious that what bedevils the ‘elites’ bedevils ‘non-elites’ just the same, at least in essence. The ‘cause’ is how a mix of structural factors in tandem with our value system together determine our cultural relationship with fundamental phenomena like wisdom, love and humility.

If your inner fanatic requires, or even creates one or more bitter enemies by virtue of its nature, these observations might not be what you want to hear. You might be addicted to (invested in) your enmity, your enemies.

Revolution, oppression, resistance, blame, narrative control, democracy, tyranny, are all concepts that belong to all flavours of ‘elite’-versus-‘non-elite’ (us-and-them) divisions, or patternings. These patternings structure us all. If we don’t like the outcome of a particular patterning, we have to change it. This requires profound self-change, in some kind of harmony with each other, with the structuring guidance of some kind of loose-consensus vision regarding why we should take on such an insanely difficult challenge in the first place.

But, sadly, “Netflix and Pizza” is the easier path. Temptation is everywhere. Spies are out to get you. ‘They’ have all the power. It’s all part of The Plan. The MSM is not your friend. Lost in fogs of confusion, tired, cynical, afraid, we will exhaust every easy-looking escape until none are left.

Enmity is the enemy

Love knows no enemy, though hate hates it and fear fears it.

I opened above with “Jesus failed to persuade most of us.” But, in truth, he did not try to persuade at all. He spoke in parables, debated matters of theology and philosophy with the Pharisees, performed miracles and later made the ultimate sacrifice. Through it all, he was clear the choice of interpretation lay entirely with us. What we believe is up to us. (“What you see will be your choosing.”) 

I suspect this explicit element of his life, this lived expression of the sanctity of free will, was an epochal departure from what we might term the Old-Testament Way that included vengeance, retribution, a chosen people, and other such elements not wholly appropriate to Jesus’ message, his raison d’être.

In that vein, the chance we have with ourselves and each other is directly proportional to the quality of our humility, of our wisdom. Our human potential to do better, to evolve meaningfully, is directly proportional to how authentically we are not motivated by a desire to persuade. We must be motivated by a truly humble desire to learn. This challenge is precisely the challenge of becoming a truly loving human being.

We need each other’s help in this. This maturation of our humility, of our wisdom, simply cannot happen in splendid isolation. Diversity, then, is as much the cure for, as it is the cause of, what ails us. This is a fundamental paradox of existence. Utopia is dystopia. Escape into idealism can never work as hoped. The world will not listen to us – cannot listen – while we are wild-eyed fanatics speaking hot riddles no one wants to understand. Power monologue is not humble dialogue.

Until we learn how to stop terrifying each other, we will continue to watch on helplessly as we destroy our world, mutually shocked by how ugly and terrifying our enemy has inexplicably become.