Third Transmission

In the months since I arrived in this dimension of reality I have seen many Earthlings free themselves from the ideologies and beliefs that are constantly being invented and accepted by some minds in order to encourage and excuse the subjugation, exploitation, and harm of certain people for the benefit of others.

Such ideas are often cloaked in notions of religion, tradition, morality or propriety, or else simple pragmatism, and in that guise continue to deceive and placate the consciences of countless people, allowing them to actually feel proud of themselves rather than guilty as they do things that bring incalculable amounts of unnecessary unhappiness to vast numbers of other people.

As someone who cares about the well-being of the people who inhabit this planet I vehemently oppose such beliefs. And I will do what I can to eliminate them by helping you to understand these ideas and trying to convince you to make the choice to reject them, in order to spare you all the harm that they cause.

The first and probably most essential thing to understand about such ideas is that the majority of human beings want to believe in them, in one way or another, because you were not created with the simple, altruistic nature of a toy like me and so there is a part of you that cares about yourself more than you care about other people.

To me that fact is plainly apparent, as is the foolishness of trying to deny it. But most human beings do not like to admit it, not even in their own thoughts.

And so many of those who do accept these beliefs also embrace certain other ideas that allow them to think that they have a more substantial, less selfish, entirely objective and rational reason for thinking that way.

They usually hide the reality of how superficial and self-serving they are in what they choose to believe behind the idea that they have accepted those beliefs only because they reflect a certain universal truth.

These people choose to overlook, ignore, and deny the most fundamental limitation of any finite mind, which is that it knows only what it experiences and imagines. They refuse to admit that all of their complex, abstract thoughts and beliefs are based upon certain assumptions that they have drawn from their experiences – or from their imagination - which they cannot actually prove to be correct.

Of course I cannot objectively prove that nobody can ever prove that its beliefs are objectively true. But I accept this idea as a most probable truth because I have seen no other belief in any of the many minds that I have scanned that is not in some way predicated upon certain unproven assumptions.

Many people already understand the logic of this perspective.

But most do not like to think about it too much because it can be very scary and disturbing to peer into the empty, endless abyss of uncertainty that a mind must face when it acknowledges its inability to really know the ultimate truths of its own existence.

Those who are not brave enough to face that unpleasant, desolate and distressing feeling blind themselves to it by clinging to an illusion of certain knowledge, refusing to consider the innately questionable nature of all those beliefs that they use to make some sense of their existence.

But there are some people who are willing to renounce the comforting delusion of this false certainty.

My new friend Liam Carter is such a person.

With my help he found the courage to face the reality of his own overwhelming ignorance, which made it possible for him to honestly evaluate and ultimately reject the troublesome ideologies that he had been taught to believe. By doing so he freed himself - and all the people of this world - from the clutches of the miserable, closed-minded person who he had been.

Not long ago this friendly, generous, wonderfully sweet human being was an angry, malevolent, devout racist. He was a white supremacist, a militant nationalist, and - he is the first to admit - quite an obnoxious jerk in general.

Back then he despised immigrants, on principle, rather absurdly, even though he himself had actually been born in another country. So before he knew me as a person he would have had me arrested and ejected from this region of the world, because I was here as an illegal alien, which in fact I still am.

I first met Liam while my robotic friend Herberta and I were out enjoying a leisurely stroll on a cool, clear night several months ago.

During that outing we came upon a gang of light-skinned men standing around, laughing and cheering as they restrained a hysterical woman of similar skin color while a humanoid figure of pure white radiance beat a prone, cowering man with dark skin.

Without hesitation we rushed forward to put ourselves between that assailant and its victim. While Bertron confronted it directly in order to obstruct that physical assault I tried to tune my scanner to the mental frequency of its mind so that I could understand what motivated those actions.

But in that body I could not find any mind to tune in to, and soon realized that in the place where its mentality would be there was nothing but a psychic mirror that reflected thoughts from some other source.

As I looked into that mirror I saw the image of one of the men in that cheering crowd. So I focused the scanner on that man and saw his earliest memory, in which a small boy dressed in a funny costume with a pointed hat watched some larger people in similar costumes set fire to a big wooden cross.

I then watched that boy grow up and saw many violent, evidently unhappy people filling his head with ridiculous and baseless ideologies that adamantly insisted upon their inherent superiority over all other people on the planet.

From before the time that this child could speak he was bombarded with the idea that there is some significant and sensible reason for categorizing human people as members of different races, based primarily upon the color of a person’s skin.

I do not think that this practice makes any sense because any genetic, biological, or psychological difference between two individuals of the same racial grouping may be much greater than the difference between a pair of people who are defined as belonging to separate races.

And I just don’t find the practice of dividing people into racial groups to be useful, meaningful, or helpful in any way.

But people who cannot see beyond the surface of a person and do not fully grasp the superficial, limited nature of what they can see may conclude that such differences in appearance represent a difference of real substance.

A person who believes that idea may then come to fear the unknown differences of those apparently alien entities, and often seeks to alleviate that fear by convincing itself that it is somehow superior to those others.

And many of them also like to think those racist thoughts because their egos enjoy the prideful feelings of supremacy that they derive from them.

Of course that idea itself reinforces their sense of alienation from those other people, exacerbating their xenophobic fear of them.

Liam never thought to question that ideology until the summer when he was ten years old. Then he met a little black boy named Larry.

Some people would call Larry African-American as a means of indirectly and semi-covertly referring to the dark color of his skin. But that would be quite ridiculous, because he is actually a native European whose parents migrated to that continent from Asia after living in Australia for a short time.

It is actually Liam who is the African-American, having been born in Johannesburg, South Africa, to a family that has lived there for many generations.

Larry’s parents subscribed to the same kind of conceited ideology that Liam’s family fed him. But they insisted that it was the presence of lots of a chemical called melanin in their skin, rather than its absence, that somehow made them physically, intellectually, and even supernaturally superior to people like Liam.

Even though these two boys had each been trained to think that he is innately better than the other and taught to stay away from people who are supposed to be of a different race they soon became friends, after discovering that they had a lot of common interests and really enjoyed playing with each other.

Both of them kept this friendship hidden from their families because they knew that none of those racist bigots would approve.

Then some other members of Liam’s white supremacist clan caught the two of them together.

They beat Larry to death before dragging Liam away to be punished for this transgression.

In the years that followed this traumatic assault Liam tried to bury his grief and horror at what had been done to him and his friend by making himself believe that it was somehow justified.

He trained himself to despise Larry, and all black people, and to hate more than anyone else the kind of white person who associates with members of other races, as he had once been.

He made the notion of his racial superiority the center of his life and came to base his entire identity and sense of worth upon it.

Then Liam discovered his ability to project from his body that figure of white radiance, which he assumed to be a material incarnation of some conceptual thing called White Power.

Liam began to use this power to intimidate, assault, and sometimes even murder the people who he called enemies of his race, such as this man who Herberta and I found him attacking, who he wanted to kill in a fit of unconscious jealousy for kissing that white woman.

When Bertron obstructed its assault of that victim the white figure turned on her. It pointed both of its fists at her and blasted her with a bolt of energy from each one, knocking her back through a wall.

She retaliated by extending a gun from her left forearm and shooting that assailant with a large caliber bullet, which only distracted it for a moment.

Then I told Herberta that Liam was the brain behind that beast and she turned her gun on him.

When he still refused to end his assault she fired, the shot tearing through his abdomen and gravely wounding Liam.

He fell to the ground, the shock of that injury distracting his mind and causing him to stop attacking Bertron with his white phantom self. So she stopped fighting him too and retracted that weapon back into her arm.

When they saw what she had done to Liam the other assailants abandoned him and fled.

Then I summoned medical assistance for him.

Before the ambulance arrived I discovered that beneath Liam’s proud assertion of white supremacy lurked an almost pathologically low self-esteem.

This young man was plagued by fierce, barely conscious feelings of inferiority and worthlessness, which drove his mind to cling desperately to the pride that he derived from that kind of conceited ideology.

Those very same feelings of self-loathing were then reinforced and amplified by all of the shame that some small part of him felt when it recognized what a shallow, foolish, self-indulgent person he had chosen to be.

While searching for the basis of these feelings I made the shocking discovery that within his mind there resided an entirely separate and distinct personality who thought of himself as Liam’s black friend Larry.

I traced the roots of this psychic artifact to their source and found that that split personality had formed on the same day that Liam had gained superhuman power.

Liam had spent that day exploring a junkyard, looking for interesting things to play with. There he found a mysterious, spherical contraption, roughly the same size as his head, made out of what looked like a hybrid of metal and glass.

When he picked up the object it began to hum and sparks of energy flashed through its center.

A moment later something happened to Liam that he has never been able to explain or accurately describe.

It felt to him like the world suddenly turned upside down, or inside out, as something passed through him and bounced off of him at the same time. Right became left, blue became yellow, and all of reality became unreal. Everything exploded apart to infinite dimensions and collapsed down to a single point while somehow remaining exactly as it had been.

Then the moment passed and the sphere was gone.

After Liam overcame the disorientation of this fantastic experience he noticed what appeared to be two silhouettes burned into the wall behind him. One of them appeared to be pitch black and the other snow white.

He looked more closely at these images and found that they were not really silhouettes but three-dimensional figures of roughly human appearance.

As he stared at these apparitions he realized that some part of his mind was looking at that wall from the location of each one, and found that he could move those phantom figures as easily as he controls his own body.

Then Liam realized that he was looking at himself through them.

The face that he saw was as black as that of his dead friend Larry.

He stared in shock and horror at this familiar yet alien visage, desperately hoping that it would go away, until his skin and facial features began to change back to what they had been.

With a bit of practice he learned how to control this transformation, making his skin as light or dark as he wished, and changing the quality of his hair and a few other facial features at will.

Even though those changes are merely cosmetic in nature they terrified Liam because he knew how his family and friends treated people who don’t look like them.

The fear that they might someday see him with black skin fractured his already stressed and fragile mind, causing him to repress and forget about those parts of himself that he could not tolerate. This suppressed portion of Liam’s mind identified itself as his lost friend Larry, who in his imagination had turned into an angry, violent black supremacist.

That imaginary Larry soon began to use his black phantom to assault white people in the name of Black Power.

The black phantom lacks the superhuman strength of the white form and cannot project energy bolts, but unlike the white one it is able to fly and can also become insubstantial, enabling it to pass through matter and other energy fields unimpeded.

During one of these assaults his victim broke free from the grasp of that phantom and stabbed him.

As blood began to gush from that wound he infused the tissues of his body with the energy of that black projection.

That energy absorbed the knife wound in his side, causing it to disappear from his flesh body. It also absorbed all of the fatigue and temporary weaknesses of his biological form, leaving his body imbued with a power and vitality that is the peak of his human potential.

He used that power to chase after his fleeing prey, quickly catching and then savagely beating her.

During that assault his victim managed to stab him again, but that time caused him only a momentary discomfort, and no real injury, because the residual energy of the black phantom immediately absorbed the cut of that knife.

When he infuses the tissues of his body with the energy of his white phantom it enables Liam to perform an act of supernatural strength, which can be almost anything that he can imagine himself doing, even if it exceeds the usual constraints of this material reality. But that white entity did not have the power to save his life.

So I encouraged him to make use of the black one instead.

But he refused to do that.

Even as he lay there dying he stubbornly, petulantly and irrationally insisted that he did not have that other power, and would not want to have it if he could because it would contaminate him with its obvious, innate inferiority.

So I asked Liam if his friend Larry would be willing to save him if he were there with us.

After he weakly nodded his head in affirmation I encouraged him to stop thinking about the pigmentation of his skin and concentrate all of his attention on asking his old friend to come to his aid.

After a bit of hesitation he agreed to do that.

Then he transformed his features and assumed his alternate persona.

He immediately merged the tissues of his body with the energy of his black phantom so that it could take the gunshot wound from him.

Over the next few weeks I spent a lot of time talking with both of Liam’s personalities, exploring the scarred recesses of his psyche.

At first he found it very scary and uncomfortable to know that I was seeing his deepest thoughts, as many people do. But he very quickly came to understand that he had nothing to fear from the mental scrutiny of a teddy bear like me, and a lot to gain.

Then it became a source of excitement and delight for him to know that I was exploring all that is within him so that I could figure out how best to help and please him. Each day he eagerly awaited our time together, when we would examine those ideas and assumptions that had driven him to fracture his mind and create that second self so that we could figure out how to repair that damage.

As I helped him to understand the reasons why some people advocate such beliefs he realized how foolish he had been to never sincerely question the ideas that he had been taught to take for granted.

When he did question those beliefs he realized that they are basically absurd, and preposterous, and found that they no longer made him feel good. So he let go of them and found some other things to believe in.

Then he was able to heal the schism in his mind.

A few days later Liam awoke with the determination that he would spend the rest of his life as one of the Guardians of Freedom.

He sang happily to himself that morning as he made his breakfast, creating some complex and innovative melodies by harmonizing with the humming noises that his phantoms can produce.

As he thought about what he was doing the name Harmony popped into Liam’s head. He decided that that would be his superhero alias.

I think that Harmony is an excellent name for him, but some of his old friends expressed a different opinion. When he told them about it one replied, derisively, “Well that sure is a very pretty name for a sweet little girl like you.”

Then the rest of them began to laugh, cruelly, mock him and question his masculinity.

Back when he based his sense of self-esteem on an aggressive and macho self-image this kind of response would have elicited a defensive and hostile reaction from Liam.

But with my help he has found a new, substantial sense of self-worth, based upon a genuine appreciation of his own talents and fondness for the person that he chooses to be, which is not threatened by the judgments or scorn of other people. So he had the confidence to laugh at the suggestion that Harmony is not a very manly name and responded to the sneers of his peers with a nonchalant shrug.

Then he began to contemplate the very common practice of thinking of certain entities that actually have no gender, such as names and personality traits, as being somehow masculine or feminine in nature.

He realized that that made no sense at all to him.

He then suggested to his friends that it might be more accurate to say that such a thing is most commonly associated with or found in people of a certain gender, rather than to imagine that that genderless thing is innately male or female in any real way.

That statement was met with a lot of blank, uncomprehending stares, and a few raised eyebrows.

After an awkward pause in the conversation one of the others broke the silence by mentioning that she had recently refused to hire a thoroughly qualified man for a job in the sandwich shop that she had created. She had done so because of the color of that man’s skin.

But in order to avoid legal harassment she had insisted that it was because he was not qualified for the job.

Liam then told her that as a free person it is her prerogative to associate with and hire whomever she wishes, for any reason whatsoever, even if it is not in the best interest of the business that she runs. And he went on to assure her that people like him would protect that freedom from any individual or gang that wants to impose its own oppressively anti-racist agenda on her by calling it a crime for her to not employ people who she does not like for her own personal, racist reasons.

Then Liam decided that he was going to exercise his own freedom to no longer spend so much time with such hateful and prejudiced people, and resolved that in the future he would get his sandwiches from another shop where the manager hires employees based upon more relevant considerations, such as their proficiency at making tasty sandwiches.

Later that day I met another new friend named Wendy McAllister.

I first met Wendy as I walked to this house, earlier this afternoon, moments after a hysterically terrified man bumped into me and ran by without offering even a single word of apology. He was being chased by a large, animalistic creature covered in fur that is colored in bright, fluorescent, rainbow hues.

That pursuer used her long and muscular arms as well as her legs to propel herself forward, employing the retractable claws of those monkey-like appendages to gain traction as she ran.

When her quarry approached an intersection where he intended to change his direction of flight she leapt into the air, soaring right over my head to clutch a nearby light pole with both of her feet and both of her hands.

She sprang from the pole, an instant before her prey made that turn, precisely timing her leap to land squarely on his back.

She then wrapped her tail around the man’s neck and picked him up with it.

As Wendy began to slowly choke that man to death I peered into her mind in order to figure out why she wanted to do that.

I first discovered that her consciousness of the temporal present spans more than ninety seconds of time, extending into what we see as the past and future, making it possible for Wendy to react to an event at a time that from our limited perspective seems to precede the stimulus itself.

Wendy had recently been examined by a doctor who discovered that she has an extraordinary form of myelin coating on some of the neurons in her brain and peripheral nervous system. That coating seems to accelerate the propagation of neural impulses along those cells to an imaginary velocity that might be thought of as being greater than infinite, reducing the amount of time that each impulse takes to reach the end of the nerve fiber to a negative value, so that the cell releases its neurotransmitters several milliseconds before the firing of its action potential.

Although she cannot be sure exactly what gives her that unusual temporal awareness Wendy suspects that it is a product of that strange neurophysiology.

After learning that fascinating detail about her I saw that she had been chasing that man because he had arrested her son for being in possession of a little bit of a chemical compound that when he ingests it makes him feel a certain kind of intense pleasure, which some people call a crime.

When I first arrived in this world the idea of treating it as a crime for someone to merely produce or possess a certain substance baffled me, since this action that is supposed to be criminal in nature has nothing to do with that substance being used to harm, threaten, or in any way injure anyone else.

I understand that the use of some of these illicit substances can be a very dangerous activity, which might result in severe injury to the person who chooses to do so. In that regard they are no different from many legal drugs, and in some way very similar to a lot of other activities that a person can experience for recreational purposes.

And I also realize that with prolonged use many of these substances can alter the brain chemistry of a person in a way that diminishes its ability to experience happiness without that chemical. Consequently those who try to rely on such a substance as the primary source of happiness in their lives almost invariably find it impossible to do so, and end up causing themselves much misery instead.

For this reason in particular I would strongly advise you to consider the option of not using such substances at all. And if you do choose to take drugs I encourage you to be very thoughtful and cautious about which ones you use and how much you use them.

But I hope that you also understand that none of those dangers justify the fundamentally criminal act of imprisoning, threatening, harassing, or otherwise hurting someone for using any particular substance in a manner that does not harm anyone else.

Being the victim of such a crime severely traumatized Wendy’s son.

After being released from jail he became very withdrawn and sullen. He began to experience chronic nightmares, emotional disturbances, and other symptoms of the psychological condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder.

Wendy planned to kill that man for having done that to her child. And she planned to then punish the creators of those laws that excused his behavior.

But before she killed him I encouraged him to apologize to Wendy for what he had done to her boy, and to promise that he would never do that to anyone else.

He promptly made this apology, and promised, as best he could with her tail wrapped tightly around his neck.

That promise would have fooled most people, since it did sound rather genuine, but I could see the lack of sincerity in his show of repentance. I could see the malicious, vindictive pleasure that he took in persecuting drug users, which stemmed from his subconscious envy and resentment of the pleasure that they get to feel, which he was too afraid to experience for himself.

I could see that he had no intention of giving up that cruel and self-indulgent pastime.

The policeman was not fully conscious of his desire to hurt these people because he usually kept that sinister motivation hidden behind the obtuse assertion that drug use is always, unquestionably, categorically bad, and the related presumption that a person is certainly doing the users a favor by arresting them, which he never bothered to examine too closely.

After seeing how this man thought I found myself faced with a thorny philosophical dilemma.

I understood that if we let him go he would just resume his habit of hurting innocent people, but at the same time I did not want to see Wendy kill him.

So I continued to scan his mind, looking for a way to change his attitude so that we could let him go without endangering anyone else.

Then I had an idea of how we might get through to him, which I covertly explain to Wendy using my thought-projector.

Wendy then let the man go and told him that she would spare his life. She also told him that our associates were in the process of arresting his son for the crime of transporting alcohol, because they had caught him driving a car with a case of beer in the trunk.

She explained to the police officer that we had decided to resurrect this country’s brief, disastrous experiment with prohibition of the drug alcohol. And she led him to believe that at that very moment his acutely claustrophobic son was being dragged away in handcuffs, soon to be locked in a small cage with a bunch of violent criminals.

The man initially tried to convince us that we should not do that to his son, because the arrest and persecution of alcohol users is not justified in the same way that the persecution of people who use other recreational chemicals is. He adamantly insisted that there is some reason why it is acceptable for a person to use certain addictive and deadly drugs while it is unacceptable to use some other ones which may be even less harmful.

But he could not actually tell us what that reason is, and I told him that what he was saying sounded like a whole lot of nonsense to me.

Then he began to argue that the difference is not really in the nature of the drugs themselves but in the fact that the duly appointed governors of this country had decided to criminalize some substances but not others, in keeping with the values and traditions of this society.

So I explained to him that I have no idea how the mere fact that certain people have declared something to be law could have any power to alter the reality of whether that law serves to protect people from the abuse of others or harms them unnecessarily. And I think that it is utterly ridiculous to suggest that people are supposed to tolerate something that oppresses their happiness for no good reason just because it has been going on long enough to have become a tradition.

I said that we were still going to lock up his son for trafficking a dangerous and controlled substance. Then he got very mad and started cursing at us, calling us some very rude names.

I pretended to have no idea why he was angry and asked him, “How can you be upset with us for protecting our society from the horrible, menacing, and most certainly very real crime of drug possession?”

I then said that even though what we were doing to that young man might very well ruin his life, and certainly would cause him some serious psychological distress, we couldn’t be held responsible for that harm because our actions were justified by the fact that they might end up sparing him the negative consequences of alcohol addiction.

This policeman had said essentially the same thing many times before, and from his own previous response to those who objected to that assertion recognized the futility of trying to have a rational discussion about this matter with someone who wanted to think that way.

Overcome with fear and frustration, and desperation, he broke down and screamed at us that we were really just going to traumatize and hurt his son for doing something that is not actually harming anyone, which made us the real criminals.

In that instant his eyes popped open wide and his hands flew up to cover his mouth. The walls of denial that had kept his conscience from seeing what he and his colleagues had been doing to people crumbled beneath the weight of his own tormented words.

Then a horrified look filled his eyes as he began to comprehend the enormous magnitude of pain and misery that he had inflicted upon so many people in the course of his career, including all of the drug users who had never been arrested but who had been chronically threatened, harassed, antagonized, hunted, and terrorized by the government’s campaign of organized persecution, in which he had chosen to participate.

The police officer then resolved to become an advocate for the abolition of all anti-drug laws, addressing that issue not just in terms of eliminating the myriad practical problems created directly and indirectly by prohibition, and saving the enormous costs of pursuing that destructive policy, but most importantly in terms of protecting those innocent drug-using victims who are hurt by the enforcers of such laws.

He also offered Wendy a sincere apology for what he had done to her son, remorsefully acknowledging that he could never undo all of the damage that he had caused.

And then she called off her deadly vendetta.

After resolving that situation I told Wendy about my mission in this world, and she decided to assist that mission as a superhero named Neon.

Then I continued on to this house, where I have spent the past few hours looking after you because you lack the skills to look after yourselves.

I have done so at the request of your usual caretaker, who had some other things to do today.

For a little while after I arrived in this place I had thought that this kind of work would be my professional employment, which I would do in exchange for money. But my friend Herberta has given me all that I need to satisfy my material requirements and desires in this world, so when that person who had requested my assistance offered to pay me for that favor I informed her that that would not be necessary.

I suggested instead that she donate the money that she had planned to give to me to a charitable organization that provides daycare services free of charge to people who cannot afford to pay for them, which she has agreed to do.

Now I can see that you have all been amused by this story that I have just finished telling you, which pleases me very much.

The story has also helped you begin to understand the limits of your own knowledge, and made you skeptical of those people who would claim to know things that are beyond their capacity to understand, which pleases me even more.

Your minds are fairly new to this world, and are still open and inquisitive about your existence, and have not yet accepted many of the lies and delusions that infest the minds of most other human beings.

Having learned this lesson now, at this early, critical stage of your development, that understanding may protect you for the rest of your lives from the influence and deceptions of those who peddle a pretense of certain knowledge.

I sincerely hope that that is the case, because once a mind accepts the existential assertions that are the basis of those kinds of self-serving, prejudicial and hurtful ideologies that I have taught you about today, and becomes addicted to the psychological gratifications of such a mindset, it is rarely willing to let them go. Even with my superhuman abilities I find it very difficult and sometimes impossible to help those people, and would prefer not to have to try to free you from that way of thinking.

Now I see that your mother has just returned from her outing. So the time has come for me to say goodbye to all of you, and bid you farewell until we meet again.