Idea Killer
You know it’s love when they help you murder something.
I say “something”, because it’s not always about killing a corporeal thing, a thing that might leave a body behind. Bodies are messy; bodies are evidence. Bodies can get you in a lot of trouble if you’re not careful. And really, corporeal killing is so final: a big black period at the end of a living sentence that lives no more beyond that ultimate point. Sure, we could go back and forth for hours about how death has the potential to be a transformative experience, both for the killer and the killed, but that’s digressing too far into speculation, and our purpose here is a focus on the real.
I’m talking about the forced death of ideas. It’s a far greater challenge to eradicate a thought, for thought is more virulent than any known biological agent. Thought doesn’t give one rusty shit about locked doors, hermetically sealed environments, vaccinations, hazmat suits, or immune systems. It circumvents all our physical barriers with the ease of a charging bull through a wall of wet toilet paper, penetrates to our very cores, our essences, and festers there, informing and modifying our foundations so that we might become pliable agents for the continued spread of the contagion. In this way, an idea becomes a living thing, a transmissible virulent agent. And, as it has life, so too can it be killed.
As a rational person listening to this, you may be thinking to yourself: how? How could an idea ever be forcibly removed from our frames of reference? For surely, if even but one scrap of the thing remains, scribbled hastily on the wall of a truck stop bathroom, passed through a series of desperate DMs, or codified in a globally published leatherbound tome, then there lies the kindling that might burst into a raging bonfire, explode in a blaze of ideology. Yes, there is that potential, which makes the desire to eliminate such things even more tempting, and more rewarding when achieved.
Sometimes these endeavors take centuries, other times overnight. It all depends on how embedded the thought has become in the culture, and how tight the grip of those who hold on to it is. Successful murders involve influencing what people believe is the truth. This technique of “re-information” can serve higher strategic purposes as well, a sort of ideological judo. But in all cases the desired outcome is nothing less than the extinction of a particular way of thinking, and in this realm, there were few more talented people than the immortal Elienne du Chambres.
First draft: 150312
Published: 231005