Looks are deceiving

The mirror is a very powerful image. I didn't want to just let it drop with the glancing remark made last time. Two of the reasons it is so powerful is that (a) it is simply accurate, and (b) it has been around for a rather long time. A one time popular image to depict this is one know as "The Ancient of Days" (but not to be confused with Blake's watercolor) and as "The Great Symbol of Solomon". It really doesn't matter what you call it, as pictures are worth a thousand words, as you can see. And I wouldn't let all the Latin bother me either. One phrase says that the Macrocosm is like the Microcosm, the other says "As above, so below."

For me, the important features of this meaningful image (German: Sinnbild) is the clarity of the image above the waterline and the murky, unclear, unfocused form of the image below it. We don't have to be Platonic idealists, nor do we have to believe in a particular metaphysics to recognize that things around us are not a clear-cut, as clearly defined nor as sharply in focus as we often like to think. All that the image tells us is that there could be more, there could be more clarity, more sharpness, and that we can imagine, if we chose, to picture what this might be if we simply acknowledged that the murky image exists. Recognition is the first step to resolution, and the metaphor of backwardness, of the unclear mirror image is a helpful one.

There are too few rich and too many poor people. Some folks simply have way too much, most of which they don't need at all, and too few people have the bare necessities. We have crazy notions like more force will make people more obedient, that draconian penalties are a sign of compassion, that taking things away from people who don't have enough will make them try harder, that bailing out crooks (see the banking crisis) will make them more generous. None of that is true, none of that works, and none of it can work, because it's simply doing backwards things.

Don't get me wrong, I don't think many who need to are going to grasp this all too soon, but one can hope. And that's one of the reasons I really don't get tired of reminding whomever I can: for the most part, we've simply got it backwards.