The End of Security
And the Pyramid of Hope
Vikid felt lost, each day felt like a trek through nebulous clouds of doubt, with no orientation and no semblance of a final destination.
He wondered aimlessly, tending to the most basic requirements, his children, his family and business interests within arms reach.
He tried to read but his attention was waning, he tried to talk to people but communication was inconsequential. When people can't hear what you are saying, either directly or through metaphor, it is because you are at a non-resonant frequency. Your speech is like the ghostly rain of neutrinos, unapprehensible to the whole Earth.
He questioned his own intellect and a close cousin, wisdom. Wisdom had never equalled intelligence but he found the latter to be a prerequisite.
Sometime back in his teens, he had been taught about Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. He believed that most young adults were taught about that pyramid some time in their life. It was a prominent staple of any business or psychology course, an academic given.
He had internalized it years ago, he thought he was at its peak, but it wasn't until two weeks ago that he finally understood, he was just a step above ground zero.
Intellect disolving to Wisdom.
It's when the rockets were flying towards him late one evening. He ascended the roof of the house, the skies black, looking for them, when a deep dread grew from his tummy, enveloping his heart and his entire body. It was inescapable fear.
The end of security.
The pyramid finally made sense. His actualization was an illusion.
Then he thought about those not currently in the line of fire, or those who have never had to experience it. While he wished to never have to face such uncertainty again, it had an invaluable lesson.
You are nothing without proper security.
And the corollary,
any regime that can successfully threaten that security has all the leverage.
Take the peoples in North Korea, Iraq, Iran, Palestine, half of Africa etc… in these places you have no security, thus you are a nothing. It is hard to understand this, not intellectually, but in the real.
Look at the pyramid again, sitting right above security is love, friendship and family.
This is exactly what Vikid experienced, to the extent that our security was threatened, to that extent that layer is degraded. Love becomes obsolete, friendships are dead weight accessories. Family too gets challenged. Our security didn't drop enough to really threaten family. But he could now imagine how it did. How children outed their parents in the USSR, how brothers condemned each other to death by secret police. How parents sell their daughters to sex slavery in 2026.
It happens today, in the real.
The educated “know” about this. We have seen it in films like Dr. Zhivago and Casablana. We had read about it in great books like Warchild by Emanuel Jal. We see it in the News.
If you haven’t read it. Make it your next book.
But there is knowing something intellectually and there is experiencing it, in the real.
Vikid took it for granted that what he now felt, was only level one in a multilevel game. But it had taken him his whole life just to see the first level, and for a fact, most people in the First World had never seen it all…
It also informed him about poverty. What must it be like to have nothing, not even an education, when you haven't seen films, haven’t travelled and face daily insecurity. All the different gradations of it. It makes for a society rife with problems searching for the wrong solutions.
This is again what we see.
We see it with whole communities of people indoctrinated with vile beliefs, searching for utopian solutions to the misunderstood problems.
The problem is not poverty. The problem is security. Physical security, laws unenforced (or enforced only for the few) and lack of security of private property. Poverty is the result insecurity. Why bother to own anything, why build anything, if it can be stolen or taxed to death the next day?
One of the great conundrums is that when Security is effective, it is invisible. That's why you never see it. Efficient machines are noiseless. The only time you see security is when it is least effective, when it has to be enforced. You only see it when the environment in general is insecure.
If you are old enough, you will remember a time when going through the airport was a breeze. All that beefed up security now, the overt visible security, the removing of belts, shoes, water etc… is because the general security is weak.
Effective security is invisible and the invisible invariably gets ignored. The ignored goes into disrepair. The disrepaired eventually fails, sometimes catastrophically, by revolution / war or in general, by slow decay.
So wisdom dictates, take care of that which is invisible.
But first you must find it!
Heed the Wisdom in the Pyramid of Hope.
And that's,