Cat Show 9/25/2020
VG: Dostoevsky – at the age of nineteen --wrote to his brother: “Man is a mystery. It must be unraveled, and if you give your life to the task, do not think that you wasted it; I devote myself to this mystery, because I wish to be a man.” This word, "mystery," is very important. A lot of Dostoevsky’s best characters are forever puzzled by mysteries, enigmas, paradoxes. As opposed to the fools who embrace certainties and feel very smug about it. It does not matter what kind, conservative or liberal. Dostoevsky’s characters are divided between those who turn every western theorem into an axiom, and the “philosophers” who, like Dmitry Karamazov, are forever puzzled by such things as beauty, kindness, emotions, or even a human being.
HOBBS: Don’t tell it to Alice. She’ll get very much upset. She is already at her wit’s ends, worried about endless amount of certainties. First there were Russians stealing, hacking, and confusing anything related to Democratic Party, then a tsunami of Covid fears, and now it is the Sexist right-winger replacing the latest liberal saint, Judge Ginsburg, or Trump stealing mail ballots, or Trump refusing to leave the White House. There are so many scary certainties that torture Alice nightly. No wonder she wanders around the house all night long scared of her own shadow.
ALICE: Of course, these are certainties. Anyone who doubts them is correctly banned from social media. If NYT says it is so, it is certainty. If security agencies or doctors and scientists establish something, it is certainty. Only confused and confusing fools, like Hobbs, who does not even know that Trump is the leader of fascists, and Biden – the leader of anti-fascists, can embrace uncertainty and think it is a normal state of affairs. Cats (and humans as the the inferior subspecies of the felines, obey the same laws) are antithetical to uncertainty. We need to know beyond a reasonable doubt, as the US liberal courts demand. Of course, now Trump is replacing our enlightened judges with pathetic obscurantists, who – similar to Hobbs, can’t wait for another uncertainty, known also as conspiracy theory, to endorse.
VG: I understand your concerns, Alice, but I was thinking about some more abstract concepts. Why do you always have to embrace the latest paranoid certainty that mass media peddles. Who, outside the deranged mind of Hillary Clinton would ever come up with the idea that Trump won’t leave the office if he loses? How? Why? Why would he want to provoke a civil war? And who’ll support him in this illegal seizure of power? Not military, not CIA. A bunch of hicks with their shot-guns? How would it happen? This theory is even more crazy than Russians deciding the results of US elections. Yet, it continues to be a certainty for so many people.
HOBBS: Oh, Vladimir. You expect too much of Alice. It is a sign of respect to view everything: creatures, creation, Creator – as a mystery. Tell me who is your man, and I’ll tell you who is your god, in the words of one of the ancient sages. And ask Alice who is her man? It will be a sexist, racist dog, who is out there to get little pussies. And the same applies to Alice’s spiritual pantheon. It is either saintly RBG, or satanic Trump. You can’t imagine how much Alice puzzles me. If everything is so clear to her, why is she always afraid? One is usually afraid of unknown, but not Alice and her ilk. They imagine and project upon others all sort of evils, and then began to believe with certainty and be scared of their own projections.
ALICE: I know where you are going. Of course, theoretically and philosophically, we know that uncertainty lies at the very foundations of philosophy and science. I’ve heard of uncertainty principle, since Vladimir keeps on screaming about it during his Zoom lectures. But that’s stuff is good for university classes. Reality is much more simple, and Hobbs is not off the mark, when he talks about racist sexist canines, which constitute the bulk of people in power. Each individual might contain a mystery – I’ll grant it to your favorite Dostoevsky. But when they are put together into a crowd, their behavior is highly predictable. Americans did an amazing job studying exactly that. They don’t have a clue about what a human being is, but they know damn well, how 999 would behave if you show to a thousand of them the pictures of beer, blonds, and cars. Information and brainwashing are the powerful weapons. That’s why we need censorship in this country. To brainwash people into a proper, politically correct direction.
HOBBS: That’s what I meant by Alice being such a puzzle. Now she is an uber-liberal, now she is embracing censorship and government control.
VG: Indeed. As I keep on hearing the same contradictions on NPR and even among my friends. We don’t like Biden, he is an utterly damaged goods, but we are behind him all the way. It is certain that he’ll save us from the certainly evil Trump. Well, we also know that all the certainties end up in the trash bin of history. At least about that we can be certain.
