The Library of Alexandria: A Bastion of Knowledge Lost

The Library of Alexandria: A Bastion of Knowledge Lost

by

Kyle Benjamin

November 30, 2015

Figure 1: A map of ancient Alexandria from 50 BCE to 50 CE.1

Ptolemy I Soter, c. 376 BCE—c. 283 BCE, The Library of Alexandria (Comprised of a Museum and its main library and the Serapeum—added later), 4th Century BCE.

Marble, Gold, and Bronze.

Dimensions Unknown.

Location: Alexandria, Egypt (some ruins).

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1 MacLeod et al., The Library of Alexandria, Centre of Learning in the Ancient World (New York: I.B. Taurus & Co Ltd, 2000), x.

     The Internet is quite possibly humankind’s greatest achievement. In a single day, we can read practically any book ever written (and, in fact, any book that ever could be written)2, dive to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, climb to the top of Mount Everest, break the sound barrier, talk to virtually anyone on the planet in real-time, and even take a look around Mars—all from the unparalleled comfort of our beds. The Internet represents the culmination of our species’ desire to catalogue our interaction with and understanding of the universe. And the technology we have developed in our quest for more knowledge never ceases to astound. There are computer chips now, perhaps no larger than a fingernail, that will hold over 100,000 books in digital format (1s and 0s)! That many books would have taken generations to accumulate 2400 years ago. But, as I learn more about our history, it appears we are uniquely adapted on this planet to be broadly creative; to document the world around us through that creativity; to have a sort of analytic impulse. And, since that time so many centuries ago, we have developed increasingly creative ways to document this experience of life. However, we’re also uniquely gullible—a veritable albatross—and will believe almost anything. So, in discussing the Library of Alexandria, I will argue that, as a whole, the institution represented a center of analysis, learning, and information sharing—the mainspring of knowledge in the ancient world at the time. But, there is a particular element of the institution, the Serapeum, that was devoted to the reverence of the Ptolemy-created god Serapis.3 And, while the idea of the Greek Mouseion was focused at the outset on adoration of the Muses, incorporating an Egyptian tradition of using religious temples as libraries into Greek intellectualism manifested in what can be described as one of the first research institutes focused predominately on knowledge expansion.4 Therefore, this work falls mostly under the analytic impulse with only a sprinkling of the believing impulse.*

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2 https://libraryofbabel.info
* The Art History class this was written for categorized the artwork studied into seven impulses. Figure 3 shows an explanation of each impulse.

     Much of what we now know about the Library of Alexandria has been developed piecemeal from various ancient writings. One of the most prominent, called The Letter of Aristeas (c180-145 BC), indicates a high probability of The Ptolemeic Mouseion Academy (Mouseion hereafter) and its Library having been built under Ptolemy II Philadelphius but commissioned by his father, Ptolemy I Soter.5 Demitrius of Phaleron, a student of Aristotle, was chosen by Soter as the first librarian; having been noted for utilizing both an Aristotelian and a Platonic model before when designing a school for Theophrastus.6 The idea behind the entire institution was heavily influenced by both Greek and Egyptian tradition—a sort of synergy of religious and intellectual pursuits. The Mouseion and its Library, thought to have been a rameseseum consisting of a palace, museum, and shrine, essentially functioned as an academic research center where scholars were encouraged to live and work by the Ptolemies who offered a number of enticing amenities.7

     The first three Ptolemies went through what can be described as a kind of bibliomania; i.e. an almost insatiable desire to own every book ever written. It is said that anyone entering Alexandria would have their books seized and copied and then have the copies returned to them; the originals, of course, being kept by the Library and translated to Greek, if necessary.8 The Library is estimated to have had between 400,000 and 700,000 texts and roughly 40,000 of those

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3 MacLeod et al., The Library of Alexandria, Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, 5.
4 Heather Phillips, “The Great Library of Alexandria?,” Library Philosophy and Practice, August, 2010: 2.
5 Heather Phillips, “The Great Library of Alexandria?,” Library Philosophy and Practice, August, 2010: 2.
6 MacLeod et al., The Library of Alexandria, Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, 3.
7 Heather Phillips, “The Great Library of Alexandria?,” Library Philosophy and Practice, August, 2010: 3.
8 Heather Phillips, “The Great Library of Alexandria?,” Library Philosophy and Practice, August, 2010: 4.

scrolls were held in a “daughter” library inside the Serapeum.9 Saying that these people were interested in mapping and documenting the physical and social worlds is an understatement.

     Historian P.M. Fraser proposes that according to Strabo, a Greek geographer, philosopher, and historian: “The Mouseion is part of the royal quarter and it has a cloister and an arcade and a large house in which is provided the common meal of the men of learning who share the Mouseion.”10 Statements made by both Rufinas of Aquileia and Aphthonius suggest a grammatical argument that can be made about their descriptions of the Serapeum being past tense, meaning they both had likely been to the site before 391 AD but wrote the descriptions after its destruction that year—part of Rufinus’ cursory description of the Serapeum being:

                    On the upper level there extended habitations in which temple staff and those whom they called hagneuontes, meaning those who are pure, normally resided.... In the middle of the entire area, there was the sanctuary distinguished by its precious columns, in it was a statue of Serapis, so large that its right hand touched one wall and its left, the other. That monster was said to have been made of all kinds of metal and wood. The interior walls of the sanctuary were believed to have been covered first with gold plate, overlaid with silver and finally with bronze, the last as a protection for the more precious metals.11

          Other than the scarce statements mentioned, very little is known about the physical structure of the Mouseion itself since none of it survived into the 21st century. The only ruins

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9 Heather Phillips, “The Great Library of Alexandria?,” Library Philosophy and Practice, August, 2010: 4.
10 El-Abbadi et al., What Happened to the Ancient Library of Alexandria? (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2008), 53.
11 El-Abbadi et al., What Happened to the Ancient Library of Alexandria?, 90-91.

existing today are those of the Serapeum (see Figure 2). As with practically any ancient situation, centuries since have heard many stories of the unfortunate destruction of this most wondrous place. There was even an elaborate story popularized in the West by a professor at Oxford named Edward Pococke in 1663 about how an Arab general once ordered the destruction of all of the books.12 This story has been, among a few others, debunked as a myth with no clear intention. Nevertheless, while no number is absolutely certain, anywhere from 40,000 to 400,000 books are thought to have been burned in 48 BC in a last-ditch military effort by Julius Caesar that caused fires to rapidly spread through Alexandria.13 And there are so many varied, unconfirmed stories of how the Mouseion and its Library were destroyed that offering the details of all of them here would be time-consuming and ultimately futile. I will say that the Serapeum is generally thought to have been destroyed in 391 AD by Theophilus.14 In any case, it can surely be remarked that an unbelievable amount of information and history was lost.

     Humans are unparalleled in our ability to create—at least on this planet. But if there is one thing that we are even better at, it would have to be destroying all of the things that we’ve created and even some of the things that we didn’t. The Great Library of Ancient Alexandria stands (no pun intended) as a testament to our tentative veneration of knowledge. Even after centuries of experimentation, cataloguing, and advancing our understanding of the world through some of the greatest thinkers in history, our penchant for unbridled arrogance and hostility eventually reduced another marvel of the ages to dirt: a bastion of knowledge lost. One might ask, to what end? Did we learn from it? We’ve reached, what I consider, the most pivotal point in humankind’s history. Access to information is not only light-speed, but quite literally at the tips of our fingers now, we

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12 El-Abbadi et al., What Happened to the Ancient Library of Alexandria?, 213.
13 MacLeod et al., The Library of Alexandria, Centre of Learning in the Ancient World, 70. 
14 El-Abbadi et al., What Happened to the Ancient Library of Alexandria?, 89.

produce enough to provide food, clothing, and housing to every human on the planet, we’ve walked on the moon, and we have learned more about ourselves and the universe in the past 60 years than in all of humankind’s history combined. Yet, tens of thousands die every day due to hunger and other poverty-related issues while we throw millions of tons of good food away annually, some people’s closets could clothe entire communities, we have enough vacant homes in the United States for every homeless person here to get more than one, we don’t even look up at the moon anymore because we’re too glued to our cell phones to be bothered with the likes of “outside”, and we still have people arguing from debunked positions with misrepresented or blatantly false information despite the ability to settle such arguments with a five-second Google search. So, what did we learn from it? Apparently nothing—we’re even more destructive than ever before. And, with all of its hopes and glorious possibilities of being the ultimate bastion of knowledge in the 21st century, we have successfully turned the Internet into the only thing we seem to be capable of producing with our greatest achievements: dirt.

Bibliography

El-Abbadi, Mostafa, William J. Cherf, Dimitar Y. Dimitrov, Maria Dzielska, Jean-Yves
          Empereur, Fayza M. Haikal, Georges Leroux, et al., What Happened to the Ancient
          Library of Alexandria? (Leiden: Koninklijke Brill NV, 2008).


MacLeod, Roy, Robert Barnes, Wendy Brazil, J.R. Green, Patricia Cannon Johnson, Samuel
          N.C. Lieu, D.T. Potts, R.G. Tanner, John Vallance, and J.O. Ward. The Library of Alexandria,               
          Centre of Learning in the Ancient World. New York: I.B. Taurus & Co Ltd, 2000.

Phillips, Heather. “The Great Library of Alexandria?,” Library Philosophy and Practice, August, 2010: 2-4.

Figure 2: The remains of the Serapeum in Alexandria, Egypt. Taken from https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Alexandria_-_Pompey%27s_Pillar_- _view_of_ruins.JPG

Figure 3: Artwork explored in the Art History course I took was done so in relation to at least one of these impulses.

Generation Dumb: An Open Letter to My Fellow Americans

My whole life I’ve been taught that being American is something that people around the world aspire to. There was always this quaint little story being repeated about a dream and how “if you work really hard, that dream will be realized;” how “if you’re ever downtrodden, there is plenty of opportunity to pull yourself up by the bootstraps;” how “America is the greatest country on the entire planet!” You remember hearing that, right? I know you do! We ALL were taught how star-spangled awesome we are. (In fact, some of you might still hear this or even say it yourselves.) The idea that America represents freedom, honor, justice, and a level of compassion that extends always-open arms to the needy, sick, and desperate is something that we kind of just accepted growing up—as if we are the only country on the planet that venerates these ideas—as if it is something we actually do. You see, I now know that it was just an emotional appeal. And, it worked pretty damn well! It works even to this day! Of course we all want to believe that we are a part of the best damn thing that ever happened to this planet! Right? I mean, isn’t that what we are? Isn’t the United States of America the best fucking thing on the entire planet—past, present, and future?

Sadly, and arguably embarrassingly, the answer to that question is a resounding NO! ‘Sadly’ because we undoubtedly have the potential to be yet squander it unashamedly—although I do feel that segregation through imaginary national boundaries is frivolous and unnecessary—and ‘embarrassingly’ because we self-congratulate as though we indeed are the best. Sure, it may be etched into the Statue of Liberty, “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”, but somewhere along the way we slid unquestioningly into our 40+ hour workweek routines and slowly our unprecedented compassion eroded; our respect for human life waned; our desire to uphold the principles upon which this country was founded all but disappeared. (For example, the principle of reviewing policies in the framework of the Constitution and changing them if necessary. Slavery was explicitly condoned in the Constitution but later changed through an amendment when people realized that it’s a fucking shitty policy.) It now seems we have no direction; only passive obedience to mindless materialism and artificiality with absolute irreverence toward the tired, the poor, and the huddled masses yearning to breathe free. And, the homeless—Oh, the homeless! Where do I even begin?

NONE OF YOU gave a flying fuck about the homeless in this country, many of which are VETERANS—that many of you step over and ignore on your way to get $6 coffees—until they were convenient for you to incorporate into your bigoted worldview. (You’ve probably even posted on social media about that time you gave a homeless guy “a five spot”.)  In fact, you cared more about the fucking CUP that the shitty, overpriced coffee came in that YOU STILL WENT AND PAID FOR than you ever did about the homeless. What you probably didn’t hear about is the Denver PD arresting a group of people for building tiny houses for the homeless (on property that was originally used for community gardening but recently sold to a private developer) and then tearing the houses down. Essentially, the message there was “fuck the homeless!” So, where was the public outcry? (Crickets.) And that’s the problem! People tend to only give a shit when whatever they’re giving a fleeting shit about benefits them (or their social media accounts) directly. The moment anyone actually gets downtrodden, or even simply gets accused of doing something considered “offensive” or inappropriate, or really anything that goes against the trendy “norm” of the hour, LOOKOUT—The Social Justice Warrior Brigade (SJWB) will be Johnny-on-the-Spot to tell you what a despicable human being they are. And if presented with evidence that refutes or even destroys whatever bandwagon the SJWB has jumped on, the general response is something akin to, “Facts? Never mind facts! Facts don’t matter!” (Again, crickets.)

So, don’t sit there and try to sell me this bleeding heart bullshit! I’m not buying it! THIS CUP IDIOCY WAS JUST TWO FUCKING WEEKS AGO! Now, you’re all suddenly experts in foreign affairs?! Seriously?! Most of you still can’t differentiate the word ‘your’ from the word ‘you’re’; ‘there’ and ‘their’ from ‘they’re’; and ‘were’ from ‘we’re’. (Apparently, the claim is that it just isn’t important. That’s right, grammar isn’t important.) And, I’m supposed to believe that you’re magically qualified to talk about Syrian refugees? ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME?! GO AHEAD AND FUCKING POINT OUT SYRIA ON THE MAP! In fact, go ahead and name all 50 states in the United States and point those out! I’m willing to bet that (sadly and laughably) a vast majority of you can do neither of those right now without Google. But, sure—your opinion is so VERY fucking special. (-__-)

Sometimes I wonder why I want to do so much for humankind when most of you are, quite frankly, so stupid. (Don’t take too much offense to that. You’re not special. I’m not special. And neither one of us is particularly intelligent. I’m at least smart enough to realize it, though. Plus, being offended is a useless thing to be.) But then I realize that I can’t even imagine living in any other period in our species’ existence. In my humble opinion, we are indeed living in the most pivotal point in Humankind’s history. That’s a bold statement, I realize, but we must consider the ever-expanding knowledge-base we have amassed—especially over the past 60 years or so. In that time, we have learned more about ourselves and the universe we are a part of than in all of our history combined. At least, some of us have. Most others seem to be stumbling around, drooling on themselves, aimlessly shifting from one manufactured hype to the next, acting as if just because they have an opinion it should be considered. Well, guess what, folks: Most of your opinions DO NOT matter. Someone needed to say it because people everywhere have become giant fucking pussies seemingly afraid of their own shadows.

That’s right: MOST OF YOUR OPINIONS DO NOT MATTER! Get that through your fucking heads, people. I know how this all started, though. I get it; we were all told that “everyone is entitled to their own opinion.” But, at some point, people forgot to pass along the caveat that, while we may be entitled to our own opinions (which is something that can easily be proven false with the line of questioning that follows the question, “Entitled by whom?”), whether or not those opinions hold any shred of veracity or relevance is a different story. As a result, the idea that opinion entitlement equals opinion relevance manifested. Thus, American exceptionalism is thriving today. But, when you start pointing out to people the blatant flaws in our socio-economic system, the response tends to be “Well if you don’t like it, you can just git outta here!” Just to be clear, this baseless opinion is supposed to be just as relevant as, say, the fact that the United States doesn’t even crack the top ten countries in the world in education; or that we really only lead the world in debt, military spending (which trumps at least the next ten countries combined), deaths by police, and healthcare costs. But, it just isn’t relevant. Saying, "if you don't like it, then leave" is a fucking stupid opinion. And those of you reading this that often hear these fucking stupid opinions by these next-level morons we all know should stop shying away from calling out this festival of unfettered fatuity. It's time to stop being afraid to say that most opinions are fucking stupid and just do not matter. It's time to stand up an...oh who the fuck am I kidding? I’m a part of one of the most privileged, yet proudly inept, generations to have ever walked the Earth: Generation Dumb. Our motto is simple: "Mommy, they're being mean to me!"

It’s so exhausting trying to explain things to people now that everyone has been deluded into this opinion-aggrandizing scam. I would consider myself someone that is well-educated. After all, I am currently pursuing an undergraduate degree in physics and, considering the reaction I get practically every single time I tell people, I would say that people would generally agree with that statement. Thus far, I have taken over 100 credits of college courses across a vast range of disciplines. I’m very much interested in socio-economic and political issues. It’s just that learning about the way the universe actually operates has always piqued my interest. The joy of finding things out about our interaction with this thing we call “life” is simply unparalleled. But, I’ll be the first to admit that the more that I learn, the more I realize that I don’t know a goddamn thing. Do I find that scary? Do I find that diminishing to this wonderful experience? Of course not! I find it overwhelmingly beautiful and humbling; yet, almost inexplicably exhilarating. Point-blank: Believing without evidence, or faith as many claim, is quite possibly the biggest waste of human existence there is; it’s pure idiocy. And, I’m tired of everyone tip-toeing around the fact that many in society pride themselves on this concept of “faith” (or “dumbassery”, as I like to call it). I’ll give the faithful credit for one thing: You are the ultimate rationalizationists. But, that’s more of an albatross than anything else; the albatross that I’ve given up on trying to help you leave behind. Again, it’s exhausting and I’ll explain why.

When someone that has never stepped foot in a college classroom, never cracked a scholarly journal, doesn’t regularly read anything longer than their friends’ grammatically incorrect, meaningless diatribes on social media, never does any research of any kind, and never tries to advance their understanding by listening to people that have—when that person tries to argue with me about, say, gravity, I have to ask the question, “Where could I possibly begin?” It took me YEARS of math, reading, problem-solving, and several experiments before I could factually utter the words “I sort of understand gravity.” Of course, that was in Newtonian mechanics; Einstein churned out a much more refined explanation requiring more math, more problem-solving, and several more experiments. And even with all of our experimentally-confirmed understandings of gravity, we have yet to arrive at an elusive yet infamous Theory of Everything—the idea that all of the laws of the known universe can be consolidated and condensed into an equation perhaps no longer than a few centimeters. But, you expect me to explain ALL OF THAT—the math, the concepts, the experiments, the EVIDENCE—to you in just a few minutes? Why? So that it destroys your haphazard, completely untenable claims only to have your arrogant, dumb face obliviously say to me “We’ll just agree to disagree” or “I just know in my heart of hearts and you can’t prove I’m wrong and…”? NO! It doesn’t work like that! The burden of proof falls upo…oh, fuck it! NEVER MIND!

Unfortunately, this quest for elegance through brevity, a worthwhile endeavor in the world of equation-making, has made its way into the information-sharing sector of our society morphing it instead into a sort of quid pro quo/“Get it first” instead of “Get it right” monstrosity absent elegance altogether. We now somehow think that talking points are a way to convey large chunks of relevant information. It just doesn’t happen that way; it can’t. Whereas 35 years ago we could sit and watch an interviewer ask a question and get a 5-minute, uninterrupted answer from a single guest at their own pace, now we can’t even hear more than 15-second, sound byte-style responses from sometimes 3 or more guests in an 8-minute-total “interview” about pressing issues that affect us all without endless interruptions, jabs, snide pseudo-intellectualism, and more advertisements than information that can rightly be labeled news. Then, we move on to “Miley Cyrus is at it again…” It begs the question: What the actual fuck?!

We want so badly to feel important; to feel powerful; to feel recognized. Again, we're taught to want all of that. And it appears we’ll ironically stoop to the bottom of the dirt to achieve those feelings. Meanwhile, we don’t stop and take the time to think about the fact that we’re all important in our own nuanced ways; to different people for different reasons. And, not everyone is always going to agree with those ways and reasons. But, if you call yourself any of the several tens of thousands of variations of “Christian”, you should recognize that the power is with love. That’s right, your very own doctrine tells you essentially to love powerfully—not say “FUCK ‘EM! Send ‘em back where they came from! We have millions of homeless here…” Great! I’m glad you’ve finally acknowledged it and you should again read what I said about the homeless above. But, you also need to realize that the money to cover the costs of the refugees was and is going to be created and there’s not a fucking thing you can say or do at this point to change that. You’ve given up that say by pretending to give a shit by sharing a quaint meme with grammatical errors that is supposed to be “enlightening” or by changing your fucking profile picture or by putting #LatestTrendyBullshit with a link to some minimally-educated clown giving what is portrayed as “truth” and then doing, quite literally, nothing else. Yeah? Here’s some fucking TRUTH for you: The fact of the matter is that the money to cover the costs of eradicating poverty worldwide could be created RIGHT NOW—this very moment. It’s a rather simple process that has been made to seem esoteric by those conversations that always shove economic and monetary jargon to the wayside in lieu of infotainment—pushing it into the “it’s complex” category. (In fact, it’s so simple that it can be summed up in about 50 pages. And that’s exactly what the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago did in 1963 with a booklet called Modern Money Mechanics--summed it up in 50 pages. In other words, it’s all a fiction. But, don’t take my word for it! DO THE RESEARCH YOURSELF!) It’s so easy that we create and distribute enough money for war every 8 days to easily end global hunger or provide education to every child on the planet or any number of other socially beneficial programs across the globe. More importantly, we have the resources and technology to feed, clothe, and house every human on the planet. Instead, here we are beating the fucking war drum YET AGAIN! What the fuck is wrong with you people?!

Oh yeah; I forgot I’m writing for mostly uneducated people. Dare I ask, when was the last time any of you opened a textbook or visited a website with peer-reviewed academic information? I’ve noticed lately that when I talk to people about these kinds of topics (or really any topic), I mainly get three types of responses. First, people will basically say that they don’t give a fuck. Second, I get the pseudo-intellectual/Alex Jones/”conspiracy theorist”-type responses which typically have no real evidence and are exceedingly speculative. And, lastly, the rarest of them all would be the engaged, well-read citizen that understands how to distinguish between credible information and baseless propaganda. To prove my point, the vast majority of you fell immediately into one of these categories as soon as you read the second line of this paragraph. If you are not in school, never went to school, or have no plans to go to school, you read that line and said, “Fuck textbooks!” (If you also said, "Fuck school!" or some variation, enjoy being a blithering fucking moron for the rest of your miserable, drama-filled, probably short, shitty little life.) If you get all of your information from people like Alex Jones, Fox “News”, or some popular blog that has no tenable information, then you read that line and started trying to connect the dots of how the “liberal, hippy-lovin’ propagandists and their communist textbooks are trying to jam a giant surgical needle into your head and suck your brains out only to replace them with…” Yeah, you get the point. You should also enjoy being a blithering fucking moron for the rest of your miserable, drama-filled, shitty little life. Seriously, that’s what kind of shameless turd you sound like to those that read that line and either said, “Textbooks are my existence right now! Mrrrrrrr FINALS!” or “I never want to look at a textbook again but my bookshelf is filled with them and my degree in engineering, physics, chemistry, philosophy, geology, education, or some other relevant field is hanging on the wall next to that bookshelf that reaches the ceiling.” Anyone that tries to insult people by apparently using words like “liberal” or “socialist” as pejoratives is a fucking cretin that I can guarantee has no clue what those words even mean.

Alas! What do we do? Well, I have plenty of ideas and know of many others but I keep getting told how “unrealistic” they are by all of you overly-qualified scholars. Never mind the fact that everything I talk about is 100% technologically feasible RIGHT NOW (i.e. automated transportation grid, solar, wind, wave, tidal, and geothermal providing more than all of humankind’s energy needs, vertical farms all over the world, desalination plants all over the world, 3-D printed EVERYTHING, automated service sector, and so on). Never mind the fact that when it comes down to it, you actually don’t know what you’re talking about. Never mind all of that because “facts don’t matter—your opinions do.” (-__-)

I’m not naïve, though; I realize that the amount of stupid out there is daunting. Indeed, the only thing I fear is the direction we are headed as a potential-squandering, immature society. We’re in the boredom-killing, victimhood-manufacturing business. Have you noticed that? No one can take a fucking joke about anyone or anything anymore without the whole “woe is me” bullshit. No one can take any fucking responsibility for anything in America anymore. Well, at least not anything negative that happens because of their very own idiotic choices. (For example, mothers that try to pull the whole “that’s not my baby” bullshit when their sons beat or murder someone. Fuck off already. Your son’s a piece of shit and you’re a shitty parent. Most people don't know how to raise kids. That’s what caused it. Period.) But, if something positive happens, of course that was you! You deserve a medal, a trophy, an editorial, a million fucking dollars from GoFundMe, a yacht, college funds, a retiremen… Give me a fucking break! Go cry in the fucking corner already and again stop acting like just because you have an opinion about or are offended by something that it automatically is elevated to the status of “EVERYONE STOP WHAT YOU’RE DOING AND LISTEN TO ME NOW! WHAT I HAVE TO SAY IS IMPORTANT BECAUSE I’M YELLING IT OVER AND OVER AGAIN! YOU WILL BOW TO MY EVERY WISH AND WHIM BECAUSE IF YOU QUESTION ME YOU ARE [insert cliché pejorative demographic]!” Seriously, will you please fuck off? I’ve learned quite a bit about the universe in my 29 years of existence on this pale blue dot. But, perhaps most revealing would be the sadness I feel when I realize that I can sum up my interaction with other humans in just a single, pitiful little sentence: We lie, cheat, and steal (some of us even kill) with no real remorse and, in continuing to doing so unabated and ignored, deserve whatever the fuck we get. 


Sincerely,
Kyle