The Cage

Experts and authority figures are an essential component of the following, in that their knowledge and the promise of the possibilities of further knowledge to come that will encompass all aspects of existence is the binding element which gives heft and tactile strength to the cage. They are the iron in the bars.

When one is told that they are barely more than a savage whose fundamental drives - survival and procreation (hitching one's genetic material to the conveyor belt of time) - are all that account for their myriad desires and needs, one sees the cage as their comfortable and possibly even poetically apt home.

When one is told that their emotions and deeper musings are simply extrapolations of chemical and electrical impulses from an oddly (and seemingly unmotivated) expanded brain which mean nothing beyond their initial impetus, those being the base reactions of an animal to their surroundings, horizons shrink, possibilities die, and the cage has become a boundary that simply seems inherently right, all considered, for only the mad need roam beyond.

When one is told that the world is and always will be a garbage heap of doom and despair which is useless to struggle against and that only delusional fools can hold hope that something else could be raised in its place, the cage becomes not simply a confinement but a ballast against the worst that the outside might hurl against the structure, and the comfort of knowing all of the other prisoners are tucked nicely away in fellowship to such lies gives an illusion of warmth to the undying and pervasive cold.