This is a very specialised skill if you will, and requires a lot of conviction on the doer’s part in order to get the right message across. In today’s world of money and everything being as close as possible to materialistic, licking asses can get you a long way if you lack merit. It’s the single most efficient method that has been proven, each and every single time, to succeed. The amount of vanity that the people around us bear forth with pride is staggering, and years of evolution and civilisation have done nothing to castigate it. And the silver lining ultimately comes out to be the permission of that vanity to continue to stay and spawn from mind to mind. It is present in every individual, within me, within you, within Osama, within Obama, and speaks forth through one form of the arts or other. Money can do nothing to quell it: a poor man will have it, and it will show forth in his perseverance; a rich man will have it, and it will show forth in his philanthrophy. Wellbeing can boast of nothing it has done to defeat it: a sick man will have it, and it will show forth in his steadfastness in the belief of the value of life; a healthy man will have it, and it will show forth in his early morning jogs. And it’s not as if vanity and education are parallels – the illiterate is capable of being as vain as the educated are, and the fundamentalist will be as vain as the liberalist. It has its mark everywhere.
And that is good, nay, fabulous! What health or wealth can’t do, vanity does. It fires up the dying spirits of a man, it boosts his surging morale, and it gives an instantaneous solution to every conceivable problem. Suppose a society bereft of vanity, and everyone becomes Jesus. That is not good: we need to be human to feel human, and we have our needs and desires. These desires are what propels us forward, don’t you think? We need to feel good about being who we are, and we can get nowhere if not for vanity. It is an element that requires no faith nor belief. You don’t have to pray that you or someone else has it: it comes with the package. The highs and lows that speck our days or nothing but vanity and the castigation of that vanity, respectively. All it needs is acceptance, and once it sinks in that we are vain and can not help being so, then vanity is a boon. It is the fruit of knowledge in disguise.
There is no single governmental or private institution that is free from it. It begins with begging and ends with holy matrimony, at least the ones don’t work out that well. If you expect yourself to be sufficed by the happiness that emanates from the “admiration of nature’s beauty and her bountiful fruits”, then you and I are Aryan sages from 4,000 years past. Changes abound, and we need to keep up with them to stay around as ourselves! We, gentlemen, need to lick ass to be able to do that. We have to go to little children and tell them how cute and pink and chubby they are, and only then can we hope to sell them an ice cream even if they don’t want one, and only then can we hope for a commission on that. We have to go to young ladies and tell them how bright their skin is, and only then can we either get their phone number or sell them a skin cream. We have to go to sardonic men in coats and polished boots and tell them how we admire them and how we think they’re so inspirational in their business achievements, and only then can we hope to bag a contract to build a gate for their factories. We have to go to the local money lender, tell him how poor we are (this is a special one: others can feel good about themselves only if they feel bad for you), get some money for an exorbitant rate of interest from him, go to the police academy, fall on people’s feet (special one again), convince them that we won’t let them down, and sign up as a constable whose only job is to fetch tea for his bosses, while all the time hoping the government’s pension funds are still burgeoning. As for the man who is convinced that he is not vain and does not carry a single ounce of vanity, praise him on that and he will give you that loan you want to tint the windows of your ill-purchased car.
Vanity is everywhere. It is in the air, it is in the waters, it is in the sky. It is in the non-believers, it is in the zealous, it is in the dying, it is in the just-born. Whole governments stand on it, and the very same governments go to war if that vanity seems to have been mocked at. The law may have narrowly slipped through its cluthces, but lawyers and judges have not. I was hoping that the jury pools were still pure, but that thought went to hell if Boston Legal’s anything to go by. The only thing that is not vain is vanity itself. Moments after it has taken a firm grip over a young man’s mind, it will be disappointed. Humans don’t deserve to be vain, but since vanity is everywhere, we know not definitely of a world otherwise. And if my opinion counts for anything, I don’t want to be in a world otherwise!
Clathration Therapy 