Lohbado Dialectic

pencil on paper

Lohbado is working on a new video about book burning. In burning the book, the Chief Nomroh made evident the impossibility of making things safe and secure. Destroyed books have historically screamed out to be read. Often the act of burning them made surviving copies famous.


The attempt to censor or destroy is futile. It's impossible to turn life into a bowl of cherries. Roses have thorns. Snakes spit venom. Mosquitoes suck blood. Efforts to have the last word or to proclaim an official version of reality includes, in its attempt to eliminate difference, its opposite. Dogmatic barking about what is makes vivid that which irritates or threatens one's opinions or beliefs. Book burning is an impotent gesture at limiting truth to vested self-interest, to contain truth within walls of one's likes, dislike and indifference. One's morality is not so free as one might like to think. Authoritarian or moralistic decisions are often arbitrary, or conditioned. One ends up internalizing a set of commands which bombarded one after being born. Biological, economic and social forces determine or condition one's sense of self, or one's hopes and fears, or concepts about reality. One might get angry and wish to destroy that which calls what one was taught into question. Destruction amplifies that which one wishes to repress, deny, minimalize, ridicule and destroy.

Historically, administrations sometimes vandalized that which they didn't understand, for example, during the Copernican revolution, when authorities threatened to kill Galileo for his scientific observation that the earth is not the center of the universe. No amount of authority or violence can alter matters of fact. The propaganda machine historically manipulated the masses into participating in or consenting to crimes against humanity. Fortunately, there were always those who opposed injustice and brutality. Often they got burned, intimidated, tortured or broken. In the end, the truth comes out, hopefully. The rest is history.