Care to Place Bets, Anyone?

By Timothy Spearman

The short story by Anton Chekov called ‘The Bet’ is based on a wager made between a banker and a young idealistic lawyer. The banker bets the young upstart student of jurisprudence that he could not tolerate 5 years of solitary confinement in a prison environment. The young idealist takes him up on his challenge, even raising the stakes to 15 years, in an endeavour to prove his point. The banker excepts the challenge under the proviso that he must cough up $2 million if his prisoner is able to do the time.

The prisoner serves his time, spending his years in study, devouring the classics, the New Testament, treatises on philosophy and theology, finishing his period of confinement with the eclectic archival tastes of a pretentious dilettante. In the end, having grown weary of the inane struggle called existence, he decides that he no longer needs or even wants the money. There is no longer any point in honouring the terms of the wager, as he has an appetite for nothing this world has to offer.

He leaves a note for his jailer, who at one point he upbraids for the decadent lifestyle he has fallen into…

“You are mad, and gone the wrong way. You take falsehood for truth, and ugliness for beauty. You would marvel if suddenly apple and orange trees should bear frogs and lizards instead of fruit, and if roses should begin to breathe the odour of a sweating horse. So do I marvel at you, who have bartered heaven for earth. I do not want to understand you.”

Sagely words iterated by a man who has lived the life of an ascetic, renounced the world, foregone all worldly attachments, freed himself from desire, and gained complete liberation from the cares of this world.

Now apply his words to today’s bankers who control the world and their lackeys in government, the media, academia, science and industry. Name a single minion of the unholy alliance who has not ‘bartered heaven for earth’ and sold his soul to the devil, and who does not ‘take falsehood for truth’ in his prostituted existence. Even the arts have failed to uphold their once high standards, seeding the field with a crop that substitutes ‘ugliness for beauty’ and doling out honours to the sick, the cynical and depraved products of the dark imagination, the works of Steven King, Roman Polanski, Christopher Nolan and other bastions of the so-called entertainment industry.

But we are as much to blame for buying into this fraud and participating, bartering heaven for hell in the process, and making Lucifer our king. There is even a TV series now called Lucifer, which those living under his spell find fit entertainment for their children. But then it is not as if we weren’t warned in Ephesians 2:2 that he is ‘the prince of the power of the air,’ not to speak of the airwaves.

Care to place bets that the vast majority of us will soon barter away our freedom to live in the global security state offered up to us by the New World Order of the Beast?

And so the chaff is separated from the wheat, which blows as so much dust in the wind.

 

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