Eighteen wheeler — II. Confabulation

A malleability of numbers
seems to be a shared expectation between humans,
    wet lumps of sinew and imagination that we are.
We seem to be in equal measure fascinated and appalled
by the persistence of patterns that numbers promise to us.
Even those trained in the mathematical arts are
not immune to this simultaneous confusion and allure.
And we take it rather personally when we disagree on such ambiguities
    as could be attested by anyone who was casually condemned
    to an imagined hell for disputing the number of gods running it.
Yet, those that can peddle the most persistent of such imaginations
wield actual deity-like powers over the rest of us,
including banishment of those that neglect their worship to literal hells:

Money is the ultimate shared confabulation.
The one reigning religion more powerful than any other.
Its disrespect the one universally unforgiven crime.
Mammon’s clergy are held in higher esteem than all others.

Was it money or was it god that you were first trained to respect unquestioningly?
I honestly cannot remember which it was for me.
(Though the ineptness of my parents with the first
and their unending refrain of the second does suggest a sequence.)
Regardless of which comes first, both provide
an obedience to the power of a shared delusion
that housebreaks us for every other obedience thereafter.

Money is the small atrocity that trains us daily for every other atrocity.
If you can be made to believe that numbers stored somewhere shall determine
whether or not someone shall eat today or freeze to death tonight,
then you can be made to believe
the normalcy of obedience to any imagined convention,
the justness of any war, the righteousness of any tyrant.
Then,
Oceania will have always been at war with Eastasia
for you
    —just as how the antihero’s parents (or uncle or dog)
    will have been murdered by whoever is the villain of the current reboot—
to ensure that you seek justice where expedient
instead of where due.

Obey ’til your mind bleeds,
and then obey the scabs of your own
    submission
as if their patterns spell some unchangeable holy writ,
then ask your children to obey the same.
In the face of Reason, obey harder.
In the face of the awkward, stay silent.
Like my dad who always believed every person who ever talked to him softly,
considering it too impolite to demand legal agreements,
writing off what little came to his incompetent hands,
and when—inevitably, unfailingly—he was swindled,
he believed that his god would personally descend to sort his burdens
—if not in this world, then in some other.
The desperate need to find patterns, especially where there are none.

If we can reject one religion
—though it takes courage—
why not also another?
Money is no more infallible than any of the other gods
we are told to obey unquestioningly.
If we can learn to see circumcision as mutilation,
perhaps we can learn to see poverty as oppression
and worldbreaking income inequality as violence.
Though it may yet take generations,
a kinship awaits those of us that dare to see that
    religion is a heritage of scabs
—be it financial or ecumenical.
Why have faith in anything else but one another?
(Atheists are not faithless; we just prefer to expend our faith upon the shared hope of fellow humans rather than confabulations.)
Why should I etch the same scabs to my mind
as had been etched onto those before mine?

The line of my fathers ends with me.

Melih Sener

“Eighteen Wheeler” consists of five parts:
1. Eighteen wheeler — I. Innumeracy
2. Eighteen wheeler — II. Confabulation
3. Eighteen wheeler — III. Induction
4. Eighteen wheeler — IV. Dice
5. Eighteen wheeler — V. Oath
(… well, fine, and also something about carrots.)