The truth behind the fog

I’m staring at the fog right now. At a superficial look, fog shows itself almost as a living being able to hide reality.

Only after a while I realise I’m looking at reality, not at the fog. The fog is the reason why I can see the truth, through it.

Reality is formed by the union of everything existing: a constellation of atoms dancing in spacetime. And even if I can’t see them, they blend into each other, exchanging quantum.

Every tree I see blends into the ones near it, while streetlights blend into the orange walls of the homes they illuminate.

The reality I see now, through the fog, is more real than the reality I usually can see, where everything is defined in circles and straight lines, in depths and in highness.

Weird, isn’t it?

So, in this peace I hope, because I know that humanity gave birth to people able to understand things and better reality since the beginning of our specie’s first steps.

My hope fights against the effects of the ochlocracy I see.

Ochlocracy is, according to Polybius, the degeneration of democracy. Every form of government can degenerate: monarchy into tyranny, aristocracy into oligarchy, and democracy into ochlocracy. Polybius was a historic who lived in ancient Greece. This is something he wrote in his Histories.

As long as citizens survive who have experienced hubris and violence […], they value equality of rights and freedom of speech more than anything else; but when they take over the power of the young and democracy is passed on to the children of the children of these, they no longer take into account equality and freedom of speech because of habit, they try to prevail over the majority; it is especially the richest who incur this fault. Therefore, desirous of pre-eminence, not being able to obtain it with their own merits and virtues, they squander their substances to captivate the multitude, alluring it in every way. When they have managed, with their foolish greed for power, to make the people corrupt and greedy for gifts, democracy is abolished and turns into violent demagogy […].

It’s a bit creepy how this fits also in our societies. But if I think at myself as part of a single specie, I can find hope anyway.

Hope that there are clever minds all around the world that are doing their best to better reality. I’m sure they exist.

I hope they can see the fog and think about what I’m thinking.

Now I see the lights of the cars, avoiding to crash into each other, dancing in curves, disappearing slowly into the darkness.

I picture clever minds exchanging energy and ideas as raindrops when they fall into a lake, creating waves that collide into each other, all the time, randomly.

I hope we’ll stop before Chandrasekhar limit: hope we won’t collapse, as a specie, into a black hole. Hope that, now that we can see all the climate crisis effects already happening, we will stop in time.

After all, they say hope is the last thing to die.