Trafika Europe 12 - French Bon-Bons

THE COMBINATIONS (novel excerpt) By Louis Armand

23 There’s an old Gnostic theory which says that the world was created by an imbecile who got it all wrong. Ac- cording to the same theory, man’s purpose on earth is to clean up the mess. This task was supposed to be achieved by means of an unfortunately inexact sci- ence—namely, the understanding of the secret dualism of good and evil, through the revelation of eternal sym- metries . Problem was, the world as it was created was lopsided, incomplete—it was the idea of the Gnostics that knowledge alone could provide the missing part, and through it man would become the great engineer of the world’s correction—its harmonisation . Harmon- isation would lead to symmetry, which would lead to the understanding of the secret dualism, which would lead to the knowledge necessary to bring about… har- monisation—like a dog chasing its tail. This roundabout doctrine, so the story goes, later informed the genesis of alchemy , from which evolved by increments the so- called Age of Reason—but also its irrational outgrowths: fascism, eugenics and the Übermensch. Perhaps that was why the earth still tilted on its axis, because hu- manity, too, had failed to set things straight.

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