Direction: Zero to Sixty

Scott’s Daily Prompt: Direction

Direction is from ZERO TO SIXTY!!!!!

Mid-Michigan Word Gatherer’s Prompt: Phony!

Our group facilitator said I should call the original version (lost in cyber-space) SIXTY. So I did.

Sixty

Phony. Phony-ness. A wide-spread modern art-form.

Most humans project a protective image of themselves that reflects, as closely as their sub-conscious minds can, the idealized person of the culture in which they are embedded. The real person hides from the world, hides even from its own ego.

This is a distortion of our essence.

An ancient person was smart enough to keep their given name secret, to protect from the possibility of its use by antagonistic forces. This is legitimate camouflage, not phony-ness.

Early humans even learned to deceive by using the whites of their eyes to point others away from the tree with the ripe fruits, the precursor to the outright lie. But again, there is deception and there is deception. This type of deception was a natural outgrowth of our participation in the food-chain.

Development of complex language allowed humans to flourish numerically, multiplying varieties of adaptation and culture. Words power, and magic forms, the foundation of our high level ability to deceive and confuse, when we choose not to inform. Words, and the tones we use to utter them, underpin the modern phenomenon of phony-ness.

Ancient and pre-historic people couldn’t be phony. They could hide. As already noted, they needed to use camouflage and deception like most of their fellow complex animal life forms. But they weren’t phony. It never occurred to them to try to appear as something they weren’t to their tribal fellows, even as they were trapped in their roles within their community.

What’s the bottom line here? We serve ourselves when discerning between necessary deceit of the outsider, and trying to fool our nearest neighbors and kin.

Only modern people have the opportunity to be phony in this damaging way. It’s one of the curses of the modern world, stemming from the multiple groups which claim the allegiance of any modern person.

Phony people hide their true selves under layers of mirage. Or at least they try to. Programmed, from the day we are born, to take on the values of our cultural milieu, whether it fits with our particular karmic baggage, genetic predispositions, and family history, or not, we mostly do not even know our own true selves.