Titles

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I was thinking about spiritual titles this morning and was about to write an article about them, but things got in the way.

Anyway, what’s interesting about it is that I didn’t actually pay attention to them until recently despite intuitively understanding the concept and its importance. I always focused on growth of your soul in qualitative and quantitative sense, on spiritual substances and their meaning, and first and foremost on making spiritual choices and affirming them through actions in your life.

Sure, that’s extremely important. However, there’s more to say about it.

The Christians intuitively understand spiritual titles, despite not explicitly defining the concept. For instance, Judas is a Traitor. St. Lucas is an Evangelist. St.Peter is an Apostle, a Saint, a Pope and a Keeper of the Keys of Heaven. St. Stephen is a Saint and a Martyr. Jesus is a Saviour, Messiah, Redeemer and so on. It’s obvious that they understand the idea – titles can be positive or negative, and one person can hold multiple titles.

Obviously, Titles don’t designate properties of one’s soul. They, however, designate one’s choices; they say what one did, or what position one holds in spiritual society. They are separate from one’s species; Jesus, as a species, is both a Human and a Person of God. St. Peter is a Human. Michael is an Archangel. Satan is a Demon and a fallen Seraph (Angel of the choir of Seraphim).

So, a question arises: is it possible that a person of a lower order can have a higher position in the spiritual hierarchy due to a greater title, than someone who merely has a soul of a higher quality, but who didn’t really do anything, and thus has no titles? Honestly, I can’t think of a precedent from my own experience. Usually, souls that got to grow really large also did great things. Souls that earned prestigious titles usually did that in the context of great spiritual challenges that resulted in spiritual growth as well. Also, I know Goddess is the most impressive being I ever met. I honestly can’t tell if she has some impressive title; she probably does, for instance the Eternal Wife of God, the Power of Creation and Destruction, or the Queen Consort of Heaven. and as a species she’s a Person of God. Her title, however, is not the first thing I thought of in her holy presence; it was gratitude, humility, awe and deep love, because she is such an incredibly awesome and holy person, and she always handled herself with such purity, simplicity, brilliant intelligence and absolute virtue, that I always just stood there like a dumb statue or something, in complete shock. What’s actually most shocking of all is that she actually tried not to be impressive, and that made her even more so.

Satan had a title – King of the Earth, Prince of This World and so on. His presence was the opposite of impressive. He felt like a peacock at best – a small being trying to puff himself up to seem large. At his worst, he felt like an envious, hateful, disgusting, demonic creature. Any good person is his spiritual superior, to be honest.

So, obviously, titles are a secondary thing, but they certainly tell you something important. They tell you of choices, they tell you what someone actually did, what they chose, or how God sees them. They kind of go hand in hand with spiritual advancement, that is true; however, beings of a similar level of advancement can have different titles that designate their different position in spiritual society. One may be an Artist; another, a Teacher. Also, some may be Traitors, Slanderers or Denouncers, but those might find themselves in the company of Demons, rather than the society of God. In any case, it seems that incarnation in this world seems to force one to choose, and the result of this, more often than not, isn’t just spiritual evolution or degradation, but also earning titles that give one a place in God’s world, and I think it’s super important.

Nostalgia and wind

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Today I went out to take pictures against my better judgment, because the wind is so strong, it keeps moving the vegetation around and you basically can’t get anything still or in focus, especially if you’re doing closeups, as I was. However, I wanted to test something, so here we are.

I assembled a setup that’s closest to my (almost) first camera, the Minolta X-300 with the MD 35-70mm f/3.5 lens. Instead of the X-300 and Kodak gold 200 film that I commonly used, I used my old Sony A7II with an adapter, but other than the camera being 24MP full frame digital, the setup is functionally remarkably similar, giving me most of the feeling of working with film (manual focus and all that) while avoiding the hassle of having to develop and scan actual film.

The most remarkable thing about this experiment is that I expected to feel a sense of nostalgia, going back in time, using my old lens that I learned photography with and so on. There was none of that. The lens felt awkward, foreign, unintuitive to use because of the macro setting that basically moves the optics away from the film plane like a built-in extension tube when you run out of space on the focus ring to focus closer, and not having the autofocus was actually not that much of a problem because of the wind moving things, that made accurate focus impossible, so I just had to feel it.

Sure, it’s not actually my old lens; that one was lost while moving, in addition to previous situations that resulted in having to rebuild my Minolta system for scratch because I actually lost all of them; long story, but I decided I actually want to have them back, if only to compare with my modern lenses or if I happen to feel nostalgic about the film days. Fortunately, I got four lenses for the average of 50 EUR each, so it wasn’t an expensive indulgence, and there’s only so much you can learn by taking pictures of empty coffee cups, so I went out to see if such a setup would be worthwhile today.

It surprised me to find out how out of shape I am with the manual focus thing, and how absolutely zero nostalgia this triggered in me. It felt mostly awkward, with camera and lens not behaving the way I’m used to these days, and the results didn’t actually look like photos from my old ISO 200 negative days either. They looked like the stuff I took reasonably recently with the same camera and the FE 90mm f/2.8 G macro lens, only less crisp, with worse bokeh and worse colours and the general look usually associated with old optics. Sure, if I wanted to make moody evocative photos on a gloomy day, that might be just what I want, but the nostalgia thing just didn’t happen with me, sorry. What’s surprising is that I ended up with over 15 winners, in that short walk, despite strong wind and the fact that I wasn’t familiar with the equipment, as strange as that sounds considering I used A7II since 2015 and the Minolta lens since 1984 to early 2000s. But that’s the truth – I haven’t actually used A7II with manual lenses for, well, ten years, and that’s a lot for muscle memory. That, however, is not really important, because it didn’t matter. What did matter is finding out that my style didn’t just magically revert into the early 2000s just because I returned to the lens I used then. In fact, nothing changed but the gear, and the gear was, well… worse. I mean, it’s not worse to the extent that I can’t make decent pictures with it, but I didn’t have any sort of epiphany about how great the old stuff was and how it can do everything the new stuff can. It’s just… meh. It’s worse, and not just worse than my best modern glass, it’s worse than my worst modern glass. I think the FE 28-70mm f/3.5-5.6 kit lens that I replaced would perform better in every way, other than probably needing macro extenders for closeups. I mean, sure, the old lens creates a look that’s hard if not impossible to replicate with modern lenses, but if I react emotionally to something, it’s the crispness, clarity and smoothness of the modern lenses, where detail is perfectly sharp, and the rolloff is smooth as butter, the colours are clear and crisp, and there’s no stupid bullshit with white balance measuring greenish when the lens is open. I like that crisp, bright and clear look so much I basically bought every single modern lens that I found useful, regardless of them being expensive as all fuck, just because I feel so good about them. They are something I once would have dreamed about, if I knew it were possible.

In the days of early digital, I once said on a photography newsgroup that I would be satisfied with a Minolta MD digital body with a 35mm sensor, that I can mount my old lenses on, and just keep making pictures the way I’m used to. Now that I can try doing exactly that – with the only difference that the digital body isn’t an SLR that I expected, and it isn’t a MD specific body, but one that can adapt almost any glass to it, I can say with conviction that I was completely wrong. Those modern lenses… they are absolutely magical in their clarity, crispness and lack of all the stupid bullshit I once tolerated simply because I didn’t know better.

That’s an interesting thing about this life, as well. We got used to it, and we see death as something scary, because it means losing what we are used to, without first seeing where we are heading, and knowing if it’s better. Before I tried modern lenses and digital sensors, I’d actually fight to keep my old Minoltas and film, because it was all I knew, and I loved what it did for me, even if it frequently made me struggle and fail. But once I got used to the modern gear, it’s actually traumatic to revisit the old stuff, and I find the experience highly educational.

Similarly, when I have an experience of the “other side”, when the memory is fresh and immediate I could just shed the flesh without a single thought. As weeks pass, the memory fades, and I no longer feel that way; the physical experience, again, becomes all I am immediately familiar with, and I would instinctively try to protect it, and fear what comes next… if I don’t immediately experience it.  If you’re in a dungeon long enough, you’ll feel afraid of getting out. It’s something we all need to keep in mind. Lack of immediate familiarity with where you’re heading creates fear, and attachment to the known.

 

Love as a power

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Everybody keeps saying how love is the most powerful force, how it conquers all, how it’s more powerful than this and that… and yet, how come I can find no good examples of love as a powerful force in literature?

It’s always weakness and heartbreak and a thing that creates its own problems, and things that are powerful are basically all other emotions; persistence, courage, focus and so on. You can say that what makes them powerful is the love they are based on, but honestly, the way it is all described is incredibly unconvincing. With one exception. No, it’s not the Lord of the Rings, where the good guys win more by accident than by power, it’s not Star Wars where the light side of the Force looks more like the hysterical side of a bipolar disorder, nor it is the Amber Chronicles where Order and Chaos look more like two selfish beasts fighting for supremacy than anything else. The exception I’m talking about is the Salvos series, whose author unfortunately doesn’t seem to be up to the task of actually finishing it, so I can only guess what he had in mind as the eventual ending, but from what I felt reading it, Salvos as a character is the only one in literature that is a convincing description of love as a tangible, powerful force. What’s most interesting is that Salvos the character is a Demon of Pride, at least nominally. She’s supposed to be motivated by vanity and narcissism, and to a degree that certainly seems to be true in the beginning, where her first motive is to survive and be stronger and greater, the second motive soon asserts itself – she cares for her companions, because they are the ones she can feel most alive and present with. At first, it looks as if this is merely an expression of her vanity, because what’s greatness without an audience, but that’s actually not the case at all. What she feels for her companions is the best description of love, despite the fact that she doesn’t seem to understand what the word actually means, especially since it seems to mean different things to different people, and I can very much identify with that. But what she does for her companions is, consistently, selfless courage and sacrifice where she puts her life on the line, repeatedly, against more powerful foes she has no hope of defeating, but saving a companion is such a powerful urge that she fights like a literal Demon, with complete disregard for her own safety, despite the fact that she always claims her life comes first.

The first such instance is her fight against Lucerna, the demon who captured her companion Haec. Lucerna is twice her level, and easily defeated both herself and Haec in their first encounter, where she had to escape and let him capture the unconscious and bleeding Haec and take him into his lair. She then followed their trail, freed Haec behind Lucerna’s back, and when Lucerna figured her out, fought him to allow Haec the chance to escape, and she and Lucerna fell together through a portal to the Mortal Realm, whereby she was separated from her companion and got stuck in a world completely alien to her. Yeah, a supposedly selfish Demon, fighting a battle she can’t possibly win to save her brother. If love in its purest form is to give your life for your friends, that was it, and she survived by pure chance.

The next similar instance is several books later, when she and her two human companions roam the Plaguelands, and the invincible Lich who is the core of the calamity captures Edithe, her female companion, after soundly defeating herself and Daniel, her male companion, who was left frozen by a curse and clinically dead. She first revived Daniel by every combination of magical fire and potions she had, and then she basically forced him to follow the Lich with her, despite his reasonable objection that they are just going to get killed since they already fought the Lich and they got their asses handed to them; they are just going to their deaths. She looked him in the eyes with a look of focused ferocity and said “he’s got Edithe”. It’s not a choice. The message was obvious – we don’t leave her. We either free her or die trying. There are no other options. She basically dragged Daniel on the power of her insane will to track the enemy, and then they fought him. She fought with an absolutely insane savegery, half her body frozen or torn away, tearing away her own arm to use as a weapon to strike at her foe. Eventually, Edithe figured out how to destroy the phylactery that preserved the Lich’s life force and they won. Again, a supposed Demon of Pride who supposedly doesn’t know what love is supposed to be, puts her own body, power and life as a shield between her companion and death, not just by accident, but in a very calculated way, tracking the superior enemy and fighting him with incredible ferocity and motivation, wounded to an inch of her life.

What’s interesting is that at first, when they just met, Edithe was very hostile and skeptical of Salvos, because she’s a Demon. She assumed all the worst things about her, and didn’t trust her as far as she could throw her, which meant not at all. But later, when they were in the Plaguelands, the worst place in the world filled with nothing but stench and death, when Edithe and Daniel went to sleep, Salvos would stand guard, and the implicit undertone is that this then became the safest place in the world, because Salvos will stand in the way of all Gods, Demons and monsters in the world to guard them and keep them safe. On her watch, the worst thing that can happen to them is that they get woken up from the sounds of accidental explosions as Salvos in her boredom experiments with creating weapons from magical fire. Salvos is the most powerful of the three of them, and she loves them, and this love is the most powerful shield they can sleep under. To her, love isn’t just a word, or some romantic idea that makes you feel good about yourself. She doesn’t even get what people mean by it. It’s just that her basic instinct when a powerful magical attack is directed at her, and her friends are behind her, she chooses to take the full impact of the strike instead of evading it and allowing it to reach her friends. It’s nothing sugary or syrupy, mind you; she is ferocious, focused, skilled and sometimes powered by incredible amounts of anger to the point of hatred that would melt steel beams. She’s not fucking around or treating love as an emotion. No, love is when you threaten her friends and then you die, or she dies trying to kill you with every Joule of energy she can throw at you. She will cut you to pieces, incinerate you and then nuke you. And when she’s done, she’ll smile at her friends and be very pleased with herself and check her stats. Sure, she’s motivated by pride, but that looks increasingly like an excuse, rather than the actual motive, because the worst fights she got in were never to show off, they were always to protect the loved ones. Also, despite her claim that she loves herself the most and her life always came first, that’s not what actually happens when push comes to shove. She is very strategic about avoiding fights she knows she can’t win when evasion is a possibility, when she can escape, grow stronger and revisit the problem with improved odds. However, when her companions and friends are threatened and being strategic is no longer an option, she always fought against all odds and chose to stand her ground and save her friends without any regard for her life, and survived mostly by pure chance or fate, rather than calculation and greater power. That’s how love works; you don’t know it’s going to end well for you, but you know you have to do it, because “he’s got Edithe”. It’s no longer a calculation at that point, it’s not a situation where odds matter. Surviving when you didn’t save your sister is not a worthy outcome.

What I find most impressive in those descriptions is that Salvos doesn’t use love-based energies or some light side of the Force bullshit to fight for her friends and family. No, she uses absolutely everything at her disposal – curses, magic, physical weapons, tricks, space magic, or tearing off her own arm and beating her enemy with the bloody end. She uses her brains, focus, courage, anger and skill. She doesn’t use the power of love to influence the enemies with white light, she tears them to shreds, and then burns the shreds to ash. And yet, often she will show incredible kindness to apparent enemies, and convert them to allies, once they are no longer in a position to hurt her friends and she has the luxury of kindness. One of her most powerful skills is called Truth Divination, and it basically removes all barriers and deception between souls, allowing the other person full access to her own feelings, and allowing her full access to the other person’s feelings. When the other person feels her true nature, the kindness, protectiveness and purity of her soul, it is invariably transformative, because you can’t hate her if you know what she truly is and how she truly feels. This allows her to heal broken and hurt souls and mend broken hearts, and it’s implicit that this happens because her own soul is so pure, honest and whole.

So, this character, nominally the Demon of Pride, who feels more like a Goddess of Loving-Kindness, is the best literary description of metta I ever had the opportunity to read. It’s not a description of a loving being as someone who fights with a “power of friendship” or some other bullshit; it’s someone who will spend a whole day watching butterflies and caterpillars and talking to wolves and birds like Snow White, but if you threaten her friends, you are dead. She worked all her life to become strong, and she probably broke the all time record in speed of advancement, just to be able to protect herself and her companions from dangerous foes, and is an equivalent of a super-soldier who is an expert in all possible forms of martial and magical arts, and is perfectly happy to smell the flowers and admire the clouds all day with her friends, but if you’re a threat, you get to find out why she spent all that time practicing the various ways to dismember and murder.

I love that. I’m sick of all the wimpy “positive” characters and this is very refreshing, to see a supremely loving and kind person who basically turns into a nightmarish killing machine on a dime, and then back again when the threat is dealt with. Light side of the Force isn’t the gay side of the force. It’s the “oh you’re so fucked now” side of the Force.

I don’t know if the author actually meant it this way, but I decide to read it this way and since I’m smarter than anybody and I’m always right, that makes it final. 🙂

Choice

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How do you determine someone’s choice?

The obvious answer is to ask them. However, this implies that they know what they are being asked. Ask an atheist whether he wants God, and he’ll say “hell no”. On the other hand, ask that same person what they want and they’ll start to talk about happiness, love, fulfilment, knowledge and so on, basically lesser manifestations of God. Basically, such a person suffers from avidya, which is a very useful term from Vedanta, which poorly translates as “ignorance”, or “lack of knowledge”. In fact, a better translation would be “anti-knowledge”, things you think you know and you hold on to them as if they are important and you would be diminished by their absence, and they are merely nonsense that would have to be removed in order to make place for real knowledge. Basically, there’s too much shit occupying space in your head for reality to compete. So, how do you know what a person suffering from avidya actually wants and chooses?

Ask a woman what kind of a man she wants and she will start about all kinds of nonsense – he needs to be tall, good looking, fit, wealthy and powerful and so on. Then you make an online dating service that allows women to choose men that fit that profile, and they will all compete for the same 1% of arrogant whoremongers who will fuck and dump them, after which those women will complain that there are no good men left and all men are trash. No; you just created a superficial criterion that selects for good looking trash.

The problem those women have is that they are checking their instincts and they seemingly tell them what will trigger the feeling of safety and fulfilment. The problem is, they don’t know themselves and their true nature enough to predict. For instance, they can’t predict what will happen when they sit at a table across a person who is of average height, casually dressed, doesn’t have much money, but her soul clicks to him because he’s her actual partner. What she thought would be triggered by a tall, muscular guy driving a Lamborghini is literally nothing compared to what would happen when she meets her matching Lego brick. Also, when she would imagine a romantic evening with her partner, she would imagine nonsense such as a dinner in a fancy restaurant, or a bubble bath with candles and roses, and if she had all of that with a wrong person she would feel the wrongness, as if she were a caged animal. With the right person, she’d be doing absolutely anything, and she would have the feeling she expected from a romantic bubble bath with candles and hundreds of roses. The thing is, people have stupid, superficial, materialistic ideas about how happiness is caused; they think it comes when all the physical stuff is set up just the right way, as if the matter will cause them to be happy. In fact, that’s the exact opposite of how things actually work, which is why people predictably fail in their search for happiness. No, happiness doesn’t happen when you meet a tall, muscular, rich guy who buys you flowers and takes you out for dinner. It’s the opposite – when you meet the right person, you are so happy you don’t even perceive the physical matter, it can be whatever and it doesn’t matter in the slighest.

Biljana recently asked me how I felt about the new lens that I bought, the FE 135mm f/1.8 GM. I told her that I start caring about lenses once I make great images with them, the ones that make me feel great about the equipment that allowed me to take them. Until then, a lens is merely glass, plastic and metal, a piece of gear that means nothing to me regardless of how expensive and optically perfect it might be. Then I take a few nice pictures and start feeling good about the lens, or I take great pictures with it and have a feeling that it set me free and allowed me to create exactly what I meant to, and I start really loving it. I used to have lenses that were absolutely inferior to my modern gear, but I loved them because they allowed me to take pictures that were exactly what I wanted to create. On the other hand, the modern GM lenses are absolute optical jewels, but I hardly even started using them. I did create some nice pictures with them, but nowhere near what I made with Minolta MC 50mm f/1.4, MD 35-70mm f/3.5, or Canon EF 35-70mm f/3.5-4.5.

Emotional and spiritual significance has nothing to do with nominal material metrics, it’s like comparing the person you love to a better looking person you don’t care for. The better looking person is just a nice looking piece of furniture to you, a bag of meat with no significance. Sure, if you ask someone what they want, those objective material metrics will for the most part be what they are talking about, or they will talk about intangibles without knowing what they are talking about or how realistic those expectations are.

So, how does God know what you actually want, when you yourself can’t tell? Well, first of all you need to have options to choose from. If you choose God and heaven because they are all you know, is it a real, informed choice? If you choose hell because it’s all you know, is it an informed choice? If you choose men or women based on how certain physical attributes trigger your sexual instincts, are you making an informed choice, or are you merely manifesting ignorance of what you actually need? You can look at pictures of women all day and pick parts from each that look best thinking you could merge them all into one person and get the ideal woman, or as a woman you can look at pictures of men and think how tall and muscular your ideal man should be, but in reality, what will actually make you click is a soul connection, and you can’t get that by putting all the superficial stuff into one person and magically expect to get something ideal.

Also, people who have no knowledge of God will talk about how God needs to be this or that – omnipotent, omniscient, the only one etc., and they never understand and expect the most important thing that makes everything else irrelevant – how God makes you feel. They expect to see something great or magnificent, but they don’t expect their sense of self and reality to change in his presence. They don’t expect that God makes you realize your true self when you’re in his presence, they don’t expect to not care at all whether he’s omniscient and omnipotent once they see him, because the what happens to them is something they never expected, something they never knew to expect, and something completely different from anything they would describe beforehand. You expect to be awed from the outside, and instead the cage for your soul shatters, and you are no longer small, limited, afraid, ignorant and alone. The presence of God isn’t about how you perceive God, it’s what presence of God does to your sense of self. It’s like living your life like a black and white photo and then not only growing colours, but photo shatters completely and you are the reality of the captured moment, not only visual but emotional, perceptual, everything.

How do you know whether you want that beforehand? You couldn’t know enough to say anything meaningful about it. However, once you have such an experience, how do you know whether you chose it? Let’s say you can’t just repeat it at will. But you can choose it by choosing to make it precious to you, by choosing to make other people feel like that, making them feel that the chains around their soul shattered, that they are no longer in a small dark room but in a wide, endless space within. You can choose to give light, love, happiness and knowledge to others. That’s how you choose God – by being to others what God’s presence is to you. You don’t become happy by wanting to be happy and collecting all the things you associate with happiness. You become happy by removing limitations from others the way God would remove limitations from you, were you in his holy presence. You truly choose things by doing them to others.

Stories

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I would continue the last article with several stories, of the kind that never happened and yet keeps happening daily.

Story one. “Friends” hanging out, slightly drunk, telling embarrassing stories about each other in front of third parties. “Remember how he was simping over that slut like a damn idiot, it was terrible, he was buying her flowers and writing her love letters like a total beta NPC. She was stringing him along for months while sucking off Chad and Tyrone, and we all knew it but we didn’t tell him because it was funny to see him make a fool of himself in front of everybody”.

Story two. Heroic warriors hanging out, slightly drunk, telling stories about each other’s adventures. “Remember how we barged into a jungle where a gang of armed robbers were camping, while we were just hanging out aimlessly. They jumped us, and he just instantly snapped into warrior mode, took out his weapon and started weeding them out like they’re nothing, and they were seriously hardened bastards and murderers. It was so awesome to look at, I’m getting chills now remembering how much he kicked their ass.” “He’s not telling it right”, the other hero answered. “It’s true that I came at them hard as they jumped us, but I had tunnel vision and didn’t survey the environment properly, and missed three bastards hiding in the foliage, and he saw them aiming at me behind my back and took their heads off before I figured out what’s going on. I owe him big time, he was so much tactically smarter than me that day, that it wouldn’t have been a victory if not for him. I’d have kicked ass until I got killed, but thanks to my buddy, it all looked easy instead of it being my funeral”.

Story three. “Guys, I have to tell you something embarrassing about Joe.” (everybody giggles, Joe thinks “here goes…”). “When we were camped out near Kandahar, the dumbass commander had the camp placed in the valley between two hills and stationed guards at the entrances of the cauldron. Of course, the Taliban crawled down the hills quietly during the night, ended up right in the middle of our encampment and started shooting at the tents and throwing hand grenades. We were all running around like headless chickens trying to figure out what the fuck is going on, and Joe was in his underwear, balls hanging out, grabbing a heavy machine gun and starting to spray the motherfuckers with heavy metal. He got five of them good, to the point where the rest started losing their shit and the rest of us sleepy bastards managed to wake up enough to join him in kicking their ass. He looked like a fucking god of war or something, nuts out, peppering the hostiles with vengeance; I wouldn’t be too surprised if he zapped them with lightning from his eyes or some shit, that’s how awesome he was. He saved our butts, and the idiot commander later reprimanded him for facing the enemy in improper uniform. Can you believe this shit?”

Story four. Women hanging out and complaining about their husbands, trying to make themselves important by criticising and belittling them. The last one feels uncomfortable by the whole atmosphere where women try to impress others with how cool they are and how stupid, weak and boring their husbands are. Eventually, she decides to speak: “I am very sorry that all of you seem to feel the need to belittle your marriages and yourselves in this manner, and I wish to have no part in this. My husband is smart, focused, good and I keep thanking God every day for letting me find him. Everything is so much better when he’s around and if I had to complain about something, it would be that people outside the family don’t know enough of what a wonderful person he is”. Then the rest of them start making faces and snorting with contempt, and she takes a good look at them, excuses herself and leaves, making a mental note to avoid bad company in the future. She comes home, the husband asks how it went, and she shivers and says “may dear God save me from ‘friends’”. She tells the husband the details and he makes her popcorn and cocoa before bed, while the crazy harpies proceed to plan how to cheat on their husbands and destroy their families.

So, you see, there are multiple ways of hanging out with friends over a beer and sharing stories. There’s a whole art of narrating something in a funny way so that you extol someone’s virtue, or pretend to make slight fun of them while in fact praising them for being awesome, elevating them in front of others. Or, you can tear someone down and create resentment, discord, pain and humiliation, while pretending it’s humour. Also, it takes some virtue to see that something is developing in a nasty direction and either counter the bad narrative or just remove yourself from the situation completely. Basically, weak people seldom have the courage to counter a popular but evil narrative from their “friends”, and to rather leave the company altogether than to continue participating in it and destroy their lives.