Politics is more than pointing out the lies of others, Prudence indicates.  So too is how people and societies organize themselves and their governing structures and technology.  Even more, so too is religion and ideologies of various kinds: much, much more than pointing out the lies of others.  There are larger pictures to take in and analyze and critique.  After all, do artists lie?  Are they, then, no longer artists?

Life is art… or at least the creation of an artist – an artist who tries to teach his/her subjects how to expand and beautify the painting in which they reside, on ever better canvas and frame, and in brighter, truer colors.  Life is the basis of the greatest artist’s greatest work.  Eventually life takes us to the edge of the canvas and what we call death results, but death is not the basis or the subject or the purpose of the painting.  Death dealt for selfish, craven reasons before the edge of the canvas is reached, destroys not only a bit of life but the integrity of the painting.  It’s source and perpetrator must be expunged, cleansed from the art that is life, for it/he/she has no place here.

Details of the art of life can be studied and understood a little better, and a little better, and a little better, still.  Important to the beauty of the multi-billion points of life that comprise the fulgent artwork of life on Earth, is freedom to act in concert with the artist’s intent.  Were there no options, no imagination, no whimsy, no beautiful choices, then the painting would be dull in color and harmony, smaller and devoid of love, the one color that is always the hardest to mix or apply, and the most vivid.

Holding the whole creation together is the love of life.  Here and there, created in love but, somehow, twisted to love death, itself, bits of life, humans, develop the love of death and the “art” of dealing death.  They claim to abhor terrible, brutal, violent death, yet do nothing within public policy to put a stop to it.  On the other hand, the same people use public policy to accelerate hidden, “life-saving” death, like abortion and vaccination.  That’s where the art of death exists, first from euphemism and then, only in unseen places, by terrible, brutal violent death.  In either case, the very presence of death-lovers amidst the beautiful artwork of life causes the artist’s paint to bead up, unable to blend or enrich the near-perfect painting alluded to; it leaves blank, colorless blemishes.

Freedom, or the absence of freedom, is like that: devoid of color, particularly vibrant colors of creativity, joy and charity.  Humans are designed for and have evolved to flourish in an environment of freedom – we’re “tuned” to what we consider to be beautiful and harmonious – and there are “rules” for being free.  Without the rules, which are not limitations, in application, but better described as guidance, humans can easily slip into license and corruption, both mental and physical.  Where this tendency has begun to concentrate we can see that the inherent beauty of human evolution has been dulled, and created still more areas where the artist’s paint has beaded up, failing to mix and blend and enrich the entire picture.  We have names for these “rule-breakings.”

The first name describes corruption of the heart; we call it hatred.  It has many manifestations, but all of them must be taught, it turns out.  Every cultural tradition seems to include an identification of the “first hater,” which is the same as saying the “first liar.”  Lying to other humans is an act of hatred: hatred of the inherent beauty of another human.  It declares that the hater who is doing the lying has no respect for the value and integrity of another person… or even of a country full of other persons.  Hatred is very easy to spread around when haters don’t even realize they are hating others, and when they may not even realize they’re telling lies!

So, the simplest form of heart-corruption is lying, but it’s not always a matter of lying to others: humans can be led to lie to themselves.  That’s an environment wherein there is neither much debate nor alternatives based in pure truth.  A small initial lie, like “this drug will make you happier,” can lead an inherently beautiful human to tell him- or her-self that he or she is not worthy of the beauty that others still enjoy.  Nothing good flows from that belief.  Even worse, rather than trying to convince such “lost” people of their inherent beauty, political forces try to make reinforcement of the new self-lie much easier.  It’s called respecting “civil rights” but it is an ugly perversion of the beauty of human life.  It also seems to be contagious, tending to infect younger and younger, beautiful humans.

At some point, societies develop a means of “enforcing” the rules of freedom so that the greater “good:” the maximum number of humans being able to survive, grow, create and have successful families and children, is assured.  Except for those whose freedom is stripped from them for varying degrees of failing to follow the rules of freedom, the enforcement paradigm works fairly well until a fresh lie is introduced: enforcement “hurts” too many people.  The political/police enforcers are quickly led to still another form of hatred-lie: “hurting so many of our fellow humans is not who we are as a people” and that ending a lot of enforcements is the “right” thing to do.

Now the artist’s beautiful painting becomes even more dull and hard to look at by humans who are still mostly beautiful… and hard to understand, as well.

Soon, because political power and re-election trumps everything, confused humans are led to hate those who refer to rules of freedom as being anti-freedom: the worst of all sins.  The defense of “freedom” for those who are already in the business of lying, readily morphs into the defense of licentiousness, at which point every person or institution who defends adherence to the “rules” for freedom, is identified as an enemy of “freedom” or of “democracy,” neither of which is defined.  The evil intent of anyone opposed to them, however, must be virulently opposed.

We can Prudently see, now, that hatred is more than the first name of rule-breaking: it’s the only name of rule-breaking.  It manifests as lying, and therein lies the complexity of hatred: the myriad kinds and styles of lies that are told to us and by us.  The struggles between truth and lies describe most of human history.  Prudence thinks humans have become LESS truthful over the centuries that have led us to today.  Certainly this is true for the United States.  Can we keep excusing lies from various groups, agencies and institutions simply because the liars believe what they are saying?

The great painting called “Life” is still beautiful, but becoming less so at a frightening rate.  The single metric of suicides teaches us that increasing numbers of humans no longer perceive any beauty in living.  The great lie of abortion has blazed the trail… no – blazed the 8-lane expressway toward death as a “solution” to the problems of life.  Great, ugly swaths of the painting have beaded-up, unblended colors that look muddy rather than vivid, because of abortion.  Will truth ever overwhelm the hopelessness of abortion?

Nearly as much of a blemish on the painting called “Life” are the compound lies of transgenderism.  Here, the merchants of Death convince very young people to commit “suicide of the self,” even as they convince their parents that those same merchants are “educators,” preparing their children to be successful citizens of the United States of America.  Each child was born to be a certain person, a certain soul, and to conquer the challenges for that person, male or female.  Instead they are coached to either become sex objects at grade-school ages, or to “kill” their selves by undoing their sexual being with a grand pretense that it is possible to believe two diametric ideas simultaneously.  It is a means to living a lie, also destroying reproductive viability.  As it has spread through education in many states and countries, the painting has become duller, with sharp edges between vibrancy and death and dullness.

The elements of vibrant, vivid paint, including the color of love and not of death or hatred, still exist, and there are yet a few million of the artist’s apprentices still active and available.  We who are given the opportunity to co-create our painting – which represents a lot of faith on the part of the artist – often lose sight of the harmony and natural beauty that we have taken for granted.  For a hundred reasons we insist on trying to blend ugly, dull colors, believing that our odd intentions will render a better beauty than that created for us by the artist.  Yet our ugly paints keep beading up and leaving growing patches of ugly dullness amidst the original beauty.

Still, we push on, insisting that we know better than the artist of our life painting.  As the blemishes expand, those stuck in the ugliness try to blame the co-creators of beauty for the contrast, as though reducing the overall quantity of beauty and harmony would make everyone feel accepted and grant equity to all.  To their dismay, however, the rules of freedom don’t allow for it and, to the purveyors-of-ugliness’ horror, those are the rules of beauty, as well.