The cloaking agent of darkness

Sunday 4/13/25

If you say publicly and express it clearly what a person who is ultimately reliant on the ignorance and apathy of others is trying to get away with, or how they are bad at their job despite acting as if they could be no better and are spoken and treated about like this were a given, that person will look ridiculous, every time, and those who pump them up--if there are such relevant parties--will come off like liars.

Much of the case is made merely by putting forth the example and saying, "Have a peak at this," because rarely does anyone actually look at anything. They're just going along. It's not that the thing doesn't exist or isn't true; it's that no one is looking at it.

Very few people have what they have--whatever it may be--because they are good at that thing or deserve to or are the purported thing.

They are, whether or not they know it, reliant on the cloaking agent of darkness, which most often takes the form of the ignorance and apathy of others, who have similarly low professional and moral standards for themselves, and that we are less and less able to discern anything for what that thing is, in part because we don't care and we don't look, see, think. We are so out of practice that these things are turning vestigial.

People bank on the absence of light. If they knew that light was a possibility, that they could easily be revealed as what they are, shown for all that they can't do, the minimum standards they can't meet, they would behave--and work--differently.

If and when you publicly say that thing clearly and well, those about whom one is speaking cannot do anything but know that the truth has been revealed, and hate the person who is responsible.

They are taken aback by this very simple and true thing about themselves, which ought to have been obvious, like it's a great shock to them, and yet, there it is.

For them, it's as though the saying of this thing had paradoxically birthed what had been in place all along and long predated the remark.

I can, for instance, take a single email from an editor that shows that they have no idea what they're doing, or how basic English works, with their complete incompetence on display, and easily reveal why.

That editor banks on no one ever doing this. They don't think that someone will or won't. But it's an expectation nonetheless, because they are not honest with themselves. They don't scrutinize themselves, hold themselves accountable. Nor does anyone else, as they go about their version of the same thing.

Once the paste is out of the tube, there it is. It's paste. It isn't something else. It can recognized and known as paste. And it's not going back in.

This will feel like an ambush to them, as in, "How dare you know this thing that, yes, okay, now that I see it, is plainly true...gosh that's really me...I hate you!"

Very easy to do. It's like putting your finger to four wobbly stacked blocks from out of a child's toy set and knocking them over. No harder.

I'll come back to this--and link back to it--with a couple of examples from the other day.