That what a person says is not measured by what it means to them, but what it means to the person they are trying to get it to.
- '' Amir Centurion''

All cities, all geography, even all art and music and writings and inventions are fastidiously subdivided into parcels of proprietary claims:  all the world, under the virtually theological rule of modern egology (“ego” taken as a ruling principle), is meticulously defined as “mine” versus “thine,” “ours” versus “theirs.”  We use our homes as we use our bodies, as we use our faces and our words as well:  as a mask and a shield, a barrier to exclude others.  Kafka captured the nightmarish dementia of man self-considered as an obscure and obsessive sort of reclusive mole (“The Burrow”), paranoiacally banking up involuted underground labyrinths against the anxiety of being invaded.  Kierkegaard, whom Kafka esteemed, had already written intricate expressions and symptomatologies of an “esthetic” type of personality hellbent on retreating from the public, natural or social domain, living a pathologically secretive life of perverse games and exploitative self-interestedness.  And Marx as well saw the capitalist or bourgeois class in toto as a constitutionally self-concealing and mendacious character-type, doomed always to relate to language and action only as a way of systematically misrepresenting their true purposes and qualities of personality.  The bourgeois world-construct is functionally complete when its underclass has been systematically and intimately hemmed-in by its ideological virtualities, the contrived and projected “false consciousness” in which it has been axiomatically catechized.

From moderns’ manic phobias about socialism and communism it is patent that this is a civilization of paralytic egologism, of psychotic proprietarism:  the American aborigines who were genocidally extinguished by waves of whites saw most sharply the truth about modernity’s manias—“The love of possessions is a disease with them.”  In moderns’ culture of abstracted ego and intensified but destitute “consciousness,” the aristic ethos not just of sharing and generosity but also of open communication, forthrightness, honesty, and candor has demonstrably perished.  There are utterly not enough aristic personalities surviving to make a commonality of culture feasible any longer:  “politics” has become a dark euphemism for organized deception, hi-tech manipulation, and Olympian Machiavellian intrigues, and “democracy” in that world-order is so moribund it can be little more than a pious verbalism, a rhetorical fraud.

One step is the beginning of a journey.

The Buddha asked them, "What do you think? Which is better for you? To search after a woman, or to search after yourselves?"