The Heretic

Heresy - a challenge to established dogma.  
Heretic - someone who commits heresy.

I am the mad heretic.  When I stop to think about it, I realize that's really a redundant phrase.  After all, sanity is defined in terms of normal behaviour.  And heresy is the challenging of norms.  So madness and heresy, if not the same thing, are close relatives at least.  Whatever.

The key thing isn't the madness part.  The world is full of mad people.  I could make a case to have almost everyone I've ever met certified.  People think of themselves as conventional, logical, rational, staid.  But the vast majority have behaviors that are erratic, irrational or just plain bizarre.  Let's face it, most of us are stark raving bonkers, at least a good bit of the time.

No, the key thing is the heresy bit.  And the most important part of the heresy bit is what I'm heretical about.  I'm not challenging the  existence of an omniscient, omnipotent creator or the elevation of personal attractiveness to the point where we're willing to cover ourselves with toxic chemicals to achieve it or even the supremacy of crunchy peanut butter over smooth.  Don't get me wrong - I could easily challenge those deeply cherished cultural icons and many more.

My heresy strikes to the roots of all other heresies.  I challenge (insert drum roll here) money and the role it plays in the world.  Contrary to claims made in an ancient book translated from an obsolete dialect of a foreign language, the love of money is not the root of all evil.  But it is handily beating out whatever is in second place.  The whole money-jobs-economy-banking system-jobs-fianancial security-wealth schtick is one giant fraud perpetrated to keep the wealthy elite elite and wealthy while the rest of us waste our youth, vitality and creativity in the pointless drudgery of the workplace.  Yet with remarkably little variance, politicians of all stripes promote and follow mostly identical policies that result in us choosing between conformance (and a lifetime of indentured slavery and indebtedness) or irrelevance.

There are better ways to spend our lives - more on that next blog.