What if, through no fault of your own, the way you live makes you stupid — and stupider by the day?

What if the things you have to do, which fill the most productive hours of your day and consume your best energy, also constrict and stiffen your intellect? What if increasing your efficiency means limiting the realities you can consider and stunting your sense of what life is? What if that thing that we want to protect against the infinite demands of other people is our intellect itself? And the more of it we lose, the less able we are to preserve it, because we lose simultaneously both the desire and the capacity to hold onto it?

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Intelligence is as subject to infinite deferral as our dreams.

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Not to be hyperbolic, but let’s talk about torture for a minute.

Despite what you might think, the point of torture is not to extract facts from the prisoner. Most people seem to think that the physical and emotional is preparation for the fact-gathering interrogation (but this is just a popular prejudice derived from the outworn 300-some-year-old philosophy we don’t even know we have), and most popular debates on the subject center around the tradeoffs of getting the facts and being cruel. Most of the time, the whole debate is disingenuous and takes advantage of the fact that nobody really knows how to talk about what torture is in simplistic enough terms to make sense to torture advocates.

The point is to destroy the prisoner’s capacity and desire to be the person they’ve been. Why? Because the torturer wishes to annihilate that spiritual possibility and make the torturer’s own worldview the only existent one. They are destroying an incomprehensible otherness and replacing it with a ditto of their own, or with nothing. They want to make their convictions and world one and the same without a trace of telltale mirage ripple that indicates opinion. And what makes a conviction ripple? The dissent of others with differing worldviews.

The torturer wants the prisoner’s entire body, soul, and mind . The three work together as a holistic system. To get control of any one of the elements, you need to break down all three in order to reconstitute a new system, or if you prefer “re-educate”.

Physical abuse breaks down the body; emotional abuse breaks down the soul. And finally, interrogation breaks down the mind. The alien angle of questioning, imposed on an exhausted, anxious and dispirited subject, displace the prisoner from his own standpoint and shatters his perspective into fragmentary data points. This horrible forgetting (which, neutron-bomb-like, leaves facts standing while killing all life) further weakens the body and undermines all hope and desire.

Most peoples’ lives act on them like torture. They’re worn out from the timetable and from doing things they’d prefer not to do all day long. They’re emotionally spent from innumerable petty conflicts and one huge fundamental suspicion that they have forsaken their purpose. Finally, they’re forced to pattern their understanding of things on the standard business schema of plans and reports and business-speak, which somehow seems to explain everything without ever making sense of anything.

Gradually, we forget ourselves, and hand over our entire heart, soul and mind, not because we really choose to, but because we don’t choose not to. Our highest commandment is to do the infinite things most needful at any moment, and to fulfill the expectations of those who assign us our tasks.