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“Society,” said Spock, “is a collection of rules. A mish-mash of Laws, spoken and unspoken, official and unofficial, democratic and despotic, that we all must follow at all times, or suffer dire consequences. Without the rules, there is no society. Without society, there are no rules. They’re tied together inseparably, invisibly, and inconceivably. Nobody has any hope of ever knowing all the rules, because there are simply too many of them. And, assuming one could possibly figure out the rules, the instant our hypothetical master of society chooses to travel to the next town, his knowledge is useless. The old rules are invalid in subtle and surprising ways, and he may find this out in the most unpleasant of ways. And, even worse, even if he doesn’t travel, even if he manages to gain complete knowledge of all the rules and laws of his society, eventually, sooner or later, he’ll wake up one day and find that his sense of things has become outdated. The rules have changed and he’s no longer with it. And again, he’s in trouble, because the changes are subtle.”
“So what’s the answer?”
“Answer?” asked Spock. “Answer? What’s the answer? What answer? What’s the question?”
“Well, you know,” said Samson, “The answer. How is one suppose to keep up?”
“Keep up!” laughed Spock. “Just forget it, man, you can’t keep up. There’s no need to even try, it just won’t happen.”
“That sounds like an answer,” said Samson. “You have some idea in mind, some way to deal with the difficulties of modern life, so what is it?”
“Forget it!” said Spock, “you haven’t even heard the problem yet!” The other patrons of the restaurant glanced their way. Spock was becoming quite excited, gesticulating emphatically and enunciating with gusto. Spock waggled his eyebrows at their evening compatriots and went back to his speechifying.
“The rules,” said Spock, “are mostly bogus. They aren’t there for anyone’s benefit, at least, not any one majority. There’s really only one or two rules that we need, you know?”
“Don’t murder,” said Samson.
“Yeah, that’s one of them. Don’t steal, that’s another one.”
“Don’t lie,” said Samson, “don’t covet your neighbor’s wife.”
“What what!” shouted Spock. More looks from the neighbors. Spock grinned wildly at them and theatrically quaffed from his pint glass. Foam engulfed his upper lip, and he smacked loudly with his lower lip to recover it, finishing his performance with a loud and very convincing, “Ahhhh!”
“You’re out of your mind,” said Spock, “society, culture, and all of civilization is constructed on two rules: always lie and always covet your neighbor’s wife. The outcome of these two is usually stealing and murdering, but if we could encourage the two and discourage the other two, then we’d have all the driving force of society, all the urge to build, construct, and embetter the world without any of the disasters caused by embiggening imperialistically.”
“Can’t you go five minutes without making up words?” asked Samson.
“Inflectually, my friend. Inflectually.”
“Right. So you’re saying if we kept on lieing and coveting our neighbor’s wives, but stopped murdering and stealing, the world would be a better place?”
“I’m not saying any such thing, or if I am, it’s unimportant. What I’m talking about is the real world, the one we live in, not some fantasy world where things make sense and the rules are set up to make everyone happy. I’m talking about right here, right now. Why are we wearing clothes?”
“What?” asked Samson.
“Why are we wearing clothes?” repeated Spock. “It’s hot in here, I want to get naked. I’d be more comfortable.”
“I wouldn’t,” said Samson, “keep your damned clothes on.”
“See,” said Spock, “that’s what I’m talking about. We have too many rules and laws. Forget about whether there’s some legislation that says I can’t take my clothes off in this fine dining establishement. Forget about whether there’s some unspoken rule about keeping my clothes on being the glue that binds together all of society. Forget all that, now, because of what you just said, I’m obligated not to get naked because of the Laws of Politeness. It would be rude of me to be inconsiderate enough to ignore your desire not to see my hairy arse, so I’m constrained to keep my pants on.”
“Thank goodness.”
“We’re getting to the point,” said Spock, which is really quite and achievement considering the route we’ve taken so far.” Spock noticed that Samson’s glass was nearly empty. He closed his mouth dramatically and held his breath.
Samson finished his pint and motioned to the waitress to bring him another. He was on his third pint for the evening, but when Spock got started on one of his speeches, it could go on all night. And experience had shown that the best way to enjoy Spock’s speeches, or at least, survive them, was to continue consuming alcohol until he’d run out of breath. A fresh pint of IPA arrived, and Spock exhaled and gulped in a huge quantity of air.
“Now”, he said, “Where was I? Oh yes, I was demonstrating adherence to the unspoken rules of social interaction by holding my thoughts until you’d had your supply of beer replenished to the point where you could continue to tolerate the greatness of my thoughts.”
“Yes,” said Samson, “that’s precisely where we were.”
“Right. As I was saying,” said Spock, “there are rules, unspoken rules, countless unspoken rules, that concern the way we react to our environment. Little ones, the ones you don’t even think about, the ones that have been indoctrinated into you, drilled into your mind, since birth, by the very act of growing up and living here in this society. Culturation, I think the sociologists call it, or something like that. Acculturation. That’s what it is. The process of soaking up all the bullcrap from the world around you so that you can go through the same motions as everyone else and fit in without drawing attention to yourself. Do you know what happens if you draw attention to yourself?” asked Spock.
“Success!” said Samson, raising his pint in a mock-toast.
“No,” said Spock, “not that kind of attention. If you drop out of society, if you stop doing all the little unspoken things that you know you’re supposed to do but don’t want to, if you stop showering, stop shaving, stop brushing your teeth, stop dressing appropriately, they toss you in the nut house. Well, they used to, that is, until society became cheap and uncaring. Now they just toss you out on the streets, but you see my point.”
“No,” said Samson, “I don’t think I do.” Of course, he did. He always did. Samson would play dumb for people, he found it made them more comfortable, got them to let their guard down. With Spock, it was easy. Spock liked to think he was more intelligent than everyone else, smarter and more incisive. Spock thought his big brain gave him better insight into everything than anyone that either of them knew. He was right, mostly. But he also was lacking, and Spock would be the first to acknowledge it. Spock was intelligent, and knew it, but seemed to have no delusions about where he stood in the rankings of humanity.
Samson found it made their relationship easier to play the straight man, the benighted fool in the wilderness, led around by Spock’s brilliance. Putting his friend at ease this way smoothed out their relationship and made entertaining conversations like this one possible, or more precisely, likely.
“My point,” said Spock, “is that the rules, the laws, the little tiny stupid things that comprise our sanity, the collections of behavior that determine whether we belong in the boardroom or on the streets, are entirely artificial. Entirely false. Entirely constructed and just as entirely replaceable. Drop a man in the jungle with no clothes or tools. Now what difference does it make whether he says ‘Bless You’ when someone sneezes? What difference does it make if he knows how to tie a tie or play the violin? What good is it for him to know the difference between a red and a green traffic light? What good is his vast knowledge of how to make a bed or butter a bagel?”
“Not much good”, said Samson.
“That’s right,” said Spock. “You see, we can do without all that stuff. In fact, in the natural state, we must do without all that stuff. But in reality, in ‘reality’”, said Spock, making scare quotes in the air with his fingers, “we are forced to deal with so much bullcrap each and every moment, so much extra, extraneous processing, that we don’t have time to deal with actual reality. We are so preoccupied with false reality, the programming we get from society, that we never get around to perceiving what’s actually going on.”
“What’s actually going on?” asked Samson.
“Actually, really, what’s going on in the actual, real world, is a terrible, awful tragedy. It’s only because we’re so preoccupied with unnecessary, arificial details of a constructed reality that we have failed to notice the dire facts of reality.”
“And they are?”
Spock held up his empty glass, and shouted: “I’m out of beer!”
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