Pillow

I know a man who, when he wakes up in the morning, doesn’t need to do much beyond breathing. I don’t know his name, because he knows mine. Ever since I discovered that acquaintance can be experienced one-sidedly, I stay silent when people tell me their names. I don’t think I am strong enough to bear the responsibility of existing in someone’s life, of being included in it. Constantly preventing someone from doing something bad and continually trying to persuade them to be a good person—at least good for themselves—seems to me like a god-level sense of duty. I’m not that good of a person either; once, I refused to give a piece of chicken I was holding to a kitten. I can understand why the man who needs nothing beyond breathing behaves the way he does. Precisely because of this, when he becomes involved in life, he would have to regulate his actions so that bad things don’t happen and would constantly crush himself under the responsibility of making good things happen. This is not a kind of responsibility he can take on. I don’t know what kind of world he imagined as a child, but I’m certain he didn’t want a world that contained concepts like hunger, genocide, income inequality, the slaughter of animals and humans, child labor, and abuse. Because someone who avoids taking action this much cannot be evil-hearted. All the evil that has befallen the world is actually the product of an unstoppable force—that is, of an unceasing, irresistible matter that cannot find any wall to crash into. So I think we’ve found the motivation beneath the inaction of the man who needs nothing beyond breathing when he wakes up in the morning. By remaining motionless and doing nothing on his own, he tries to be that wall. In this way, he doesn’t place himself under the label of the responsibility of “I must do something good,” and by not doing anything bad, he neutralizes himself on the ethical plane and thinks he is a good person. But is this true? Does standing still as a silent wall against this unstoppable evil mean being an extremely strong wall against this devilry? Can millions—no, even billions—of people, under the argument “I’m not a bad person because I’m not doing anything bad,” stop this unstoppable force without any ethical concern? No matter how motionless it is, wouldn’t this malicious, pure dictatorship that has set out at full speed to crash into and destroy it be able to pierce that wall simply because of its numbers? It does. In history, that wall has been pierced thousands of times. Because placing a substance that has no meaningful mass in front of an unstoppable force merely becomes another object for unstoppable energy to pierce through. So what happens if we place a body at least as strong and resilient as it is in order to stop this cruelty? We cannot do that, neither philosophically nor scientifically. Because the concepts of “unstoppable” and “indestructible” mutually negate each other as absolutes in physical terms. Such a collision can never be defined under any conditions, because if one exists, the existence of the other is always invalidated. The existence of one of them must be clear and observable. Evil stands on its feet through the existence of good; every moral barrier we build against it is, in fact, a stubborn performance by two opposites that cannot bring each other into being, struggling to remain on stage. Thus, building a wall of equal force—or an even harder one—is today the most “motionless” form of action available to us. In a world where we cannot go beyond absorbing the movements of the demons we stand against like pillows—that is, beyond accepting and submitting—the most virtuous and good action possible is to crash harder into this force that is moving at full speed toward us.