What you Manufacture in Your Mind Matters, Yet it is Substance that Matters More (or Less - o sepi to poly
EpiPen and the Adrenergic Synapse (MAO and COMT)
Sophia: Gentlemen, you both speak of the human condition with such biting clarity. Tell me—what is progress? A biochemical surge, perhaps? A flash of adrenaline through civilization’s tired veins?
Shaw: A fitting metaphor, Sophia. Society often requires a jolt—an EpiPen to the moral heart. But alas, most people fear the injection. They’d rather stay comfortably anemic in thought.
Vidal: Quite right, George. Though I’d say the modern condition isn’t anemia—it’s vanity overdose. Everyone’s drunk on their reflection. Narcissism has become a democratic right.
Sophia: And yet, Gore, you once said a narcissist is simply someone better looking than oneself. Isn’t that confession more playful than critical?
Vidal: Oh, it’s both. I’ve always found moral outrage rather unbecoming—unless it’s well-dressed. But truly, Sophia, our age adores its own image. We’ve replaced introspection with self-promotion, and called it authenticity.
Shaw: How quaintly said! The ancients had oracles; we have influencers. Humanity, it seems, never tires of worshiping its own reflection—only the mirror changes shape.
Sophia: And progress, then? Is it nothing more than a rebranding of our conceits?
Progress is impossible without change, and those who cannot change their minds cannot change anything.
— George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Shaw: Not quite. Progress begins when a person can change their mind—to outgrow their own illusions. A civilization that refuses to do so will soon suffer intellectual cardiac arrest.
Vidal: Indeed, Shaw. Though some seem to prefer cardiac arrest—it’s less work than self-examination. Perhaps the true radicals now are those who pause before reacting, who metabolize thought like enzymes breaking down adrenaline.
Sophia: You speak of MAO and COMT, then—those silent regulators in the synapse of the soul. Without them, thought becomes frenzy; without reflection, revolution becomes theater.
Shaw: Ah, beautiful! Progress as metabolism, not explosion.
A narcissist is someone better looking than you are.
— Gore Vidal (1925-2012)
Vidal: And narcissism as unspent energy—too much adrenaline, nowhere to go but the mirror.
Sophia: Then let us be our own regulators. To think slowly, to doubt gracefully, to change often—that might be the true art of staying alive.
Shaw: Quite right. Progress, my dear, is not speed—it’s direction.
Vidal: And good lighting, of course.
(They laugh—half in irony, half in hope.)
— Another planksip Möbius.
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