Ants

Ants

            Charlie picked up the pencil and stabbed the paper again.  If he couldn’t pass basic robotics, he’d never make it as an engineer.  His parents would disown him, and he’d have to sweep floors for a living.  He’d seen the others.

            Why did school have to be so difficult? Charlie asked.  He’d rather spend his days outside and inside with delicious coffee and well-written books.  One day, he hoped to publish his own short work since he had little talent writing novels.     

            While Charlie felt sorry for himself, a little creepy ran across his desk.  Looking down, he saw a busy ant scurry off of the surface and back to the half opened window.  It had six legs of annoyance and ten seconds to live. 

            Charlie shut the door as fast as he could.  He figured the thing was a minor disruptor, and he went back to his endless drills.  His curly, brown hair grabbed him as he attempted to straighten it out.  The words got lost in a translation of sorrow. 

            Suddenly, Charlie noticed another being run across his page with quick legs and a dark body that helped him hide in the warm dirt. 

            I wonder what it would be like to be an ant, Charlie mused.  He pushed the back of his office chair until the thick plastic mated with the floor.  Blood gushed like a waterfall down his face. The hard, wooden floor refused him mercy.  Not only, but the thin pages had mixed in with the mess.

            “DAMMIT!” Charlie yelled.  The neighbor beneath his apartment banged on the wall.  He salvaged his assignment as much as possible.  The pages laughed at him from their crypt.  He’d never finish.

            Getting up, he gathered the pages and laid them next to his desk.

            Why me? He asked the cosmos.  What great offense could he have possibly inflicted upon the universe?  Outside, the wind breathed, and the small Aloe Vera plant swayed its juicy arms.   Lightning came down and cursed a tree.  The tree shifted east and west then a great branch fell down like a dead baby.

            Charlie made his way back to his desk.  The bleeding had stopped.  Now there was the chore of cleaning the flood up.  He picked up the disordered papers.  Suddenly, three ants appeared and ran across his desk like little commandos. 

            “Why have you been employed to destroy my future?!” He asked of the small creatures.  They paid him no mind in their quest for food.  The leader of them disappeared first. The others left Charlie’s sight. He decided to let it go. 

            I need a drink, he told himself.  He’d go for some whiskey.  Recently, he’d passed the twenty one year mark, and this surprised him somehow.  Life had roared into his ears a few times.  He’d die without a future, a tiny voice within said, teasing him with his own thoughts. 

            Whiskey left the bottle and went into the glass of ginger ale.  He used the last can.  This also caused him to feel annoyance despite the sweet flow of heaven dripping down his throat.  He’d always loved whiskey, enjoyed the way it made him feel.  As a small boy, his grandfather allowed him a small drink of the delicious liquid.  He’d smiled and hugged the old man. 

            Thinking of his grandfather made him sad. The great man had passed away with his old bones demanding an eternal break, his leather skin hardened like a saddle and his teeth running off with youth’s shine.  Still, he had that emotion, a fire about him.  Even in his last days, he hadn’t gone without a fight, but he’d gone.

            Life is cruel, Charlie informed himself, trying to feel more like an adult who accepted the world for what it was and had secured a place for themselves where they belonged. 

            Another ant ran across the desk, his dark body highlighted like an equation of life.  Charlie couldn’t take it anymore, and he slammed his hand to the desk and killed the small fiend.  It thrashed between life and death eventually giving up and fading into the unknown.

            A power rose up inside of him. 

            “That’s what I thought,” Charlie said.  His voice bled with triumph.  “Let another one come,” he teased.  And one came.  Quickly, Charlie smashed it against the red blood on his paper.  The ant died.  His companion, at first unseen, rose up and sprinted towards the edge of the desk.  Charlie got him, too.

            “You are too slow for me!” Charlie laughed, vibrating his chubby stomach.  He put his hands on it and giggled like a girl.  For once in his life, he had power, able to bring life to its end.  He had become a demigod.  These were his thoughts. 

            A knocking came at the door pulling Charlie away from his internal monologue.  The abrupt disturbance in his thoughts caused him to lose track.  He got up from his desk and went to the hard, wooden door. 

            When Charlie opened the door, he gasped.  Fear took over his eyes, and they bulged out, trying to take the view into his mind.  His tongue rattled, but no words came out from Charlie’s lips. 

            It can’t be!  It can’t.

            Charlie tried to shut the door, but a long leg grabbed back with hideous strength. In front of him was a giant, live ant.  This information wouldn’t process in Charlie’s shocked brain.

            “Go away!  I don’t need any bug spray.  How much did they pay you?”

            “Sir, I believe you misunderstood.  I am an officer.”

            Charlie took a step back, and the body came in. 

            “You sure keep your place messy.  Did you ever think you were guilty of a crime instead of blaming the vulnerable?”

            Charlie couldn’t get the words to roll out of his mouth.  He backed up. 

            “You are a criminal for killing those small ants,” the officer said.  He pointed to the badge on his head.  “For this, I’m afraid death is the only option.”  The officer pulled out a knife from his backpack.  He teased it back and forth until he stabbed Charlie.  Blood sprayed everywhere, but Charlie couldn’t clean up this mess. 

Should a Search For Truth Ever Be Subordinate: What is the position of the scientists as a member of society?

Should a search for truth ever be subordinate?

By Albert Einstein

            We are living in a period of such great external and internal insecurity and with such a lack of firm objectives that the mere confession of our convictions may be of significance even if these convictions may be of significance even if these convictions, as all value judgments, cannot be proven through logical deductions.

            There arises at once the question: Should we consider the search for truth—or, more modestly expressed, our efforts to understand the knowable universe through the constructive  logical thought—as an autonomous objective of our work? Or should our search for truth be subordinated to some other objective, for example to a “practical” one? This question cannot be decided on a logical basis.

            The decision, however, will have considerable influence upon our thinking and moral judgment, provided that it si born out of deep and unshakable conviction. Let me then make a confession: For myself, the struggle to gain more insight and understanding is one of those independent objectives without which a thinking individual would find it impossible to have a conscious, positive attitude towards life.

            It is the very essence of our striving for understanding that on the one hand, it attempts to encompass the great and complex variety of man’s experience, and that on the other, it looks for simplicity and economy in the basic assumptions.  The belief that that these that these two objectives can exist side by side is, in view of the primitive state of our scientific knowledge, a matter of faith.  Without such faith I could not have a strong and unshakeable conviction about the independent value of knowledge.

            This, in a sense religious attitude of a man engaged in scientific work has some influence upon his whole personality.  For apart from the knowledge which is offered by accumulated experience and from the rules of logical thinking, there exists in principle for the man of science no authority whose decisions and statements could have in themselves claim  to “Truth.”  This leads to the paradoxical situation that a person who devotes all his strength to objective matters will develop, from a social point of view, into an extreme individualist who, at least in principle, has faith in nothing but his own judgment.  It is quite possible to assert that intellectual individualism and the thirst for scientific knowledge emerged simultaneously in history and remained in separate ever since.

            Someone may suggest that the man of science as sketched in these sentences is no more than an abstraction which actually does not exist in this world, not unlike the homo oeconomicus of classical economics. However, it seems to me that science as we know it today could not have emerged and could not have remained alive if many individual, during many centuries, had not come very close to the ideal. 

            Of course, not everybody who has learned to use tools and methods which, directly or indirectly, appear to be “scientific” is to me a man of science.  I refer only to those individuals in whom the scientific mentality as truly alive.

            What, then, is the position of today’s man of science as a member of society?  He obviously is rather proud of the fact the work of scientists has helped to change the radically the economic life of men by almost completely eliminating the muscular work. He is distressed by the fact that results of his scientific work have created a threat to mankind since they have fallen into the hands of morally blind exponents of political power. He is conscious of the fact that technological methods, made possible by his work, have led to a concentration of economic and also of political power in the hands of small minorities which have come to dominate completely the lives of masses of people, who appear more and more amorphous.

            But even worse: The concentration of economic and political power in the ands of a few has not only made the man of science dependent economically, it also threatens his independence from within; the shredwed methods of intellectual and psychic influences which it brings to bear will prevent the development of independent personalities.

            Thus the man of science, as we can observe with our own eyes, suffers a truly tragic fate.  Striving in great sincerity for clarity and inner independence, he himself, through superhuman efforts, has fashioned the tools which are being used to make him a slave and to destroy him falso from within. He cannot escape being muzzled by those who have political power in their hands.  As a soldier he is forced to sacrifice his own life and to destroy the lives of others even when he is convinced of the absurdity of such sacrifices. He is fully aware of the fact that universal destruction is unavoidable since historical development has led to the concentration of all economic, political, and military power in the hands of national states.  He also realizes that mankind can only be saved if a supernatural system, based on law, would be created to eliminate for all time the methods of brute force.  However the man of science has slipped so much that he accepts the slavery inflicted upon him by the national states as his inevitable fate.

            Is there really no escape for the man of science?  Must he really tolerate and suffer all these indignities?

            Is the time gone forever when, aroused by his inner freedom and the independence of his thinking and his work, he had a chance of enlightening and enriching the lives of his fellow human beings? In placing his work too much on an intellectual basis, has he not forgotten about his responsibility to dignity? My answer is: while it is true that an inherently free and scrupulous person may be destroyed, such an individual can never be enslaved or used as a blind tool.

            If the man of science of our day could find the time and the courage to honestly and critically over his situation and the tasks before him and if he would act accordingly, the possibilities for  a sensible and satisfactory solution of the present dangerous international situation would be considerably improved