The other day I remembered something my maternal grandmother used to say. Although she was born in Italy, she spoke English not with an Italian accent but rather with a western Pennsylvanian American-English dialect. I recall her using the term “kaka” to signify something one shouldn’t touch—or put in one’s mouth. I think she might even have used the expression to refer to poop. I was little, so the memories are vague at best, and she’s gone now, so I can’t ask her about the term. I can guess, however, that it derives from Greek kakós which passed through Latin to Italian to her English colloquialisms. And that surmise made me look at today’s bitter exchanges in chat and comment rooms on the Web and ask, “What makes people desire to harm others verbally, spreading kaka far and wide?” You, of course, might ask why I tie desire to kaka.


It isn’t a matter of what some put in their mouths as much as it is a matter of what intentionally comes out of their mouths that reveals an insidious malady of character and a connection to desire, in this case the desire to destroy the lives of others over differences of opinion and lifestyle, differences that might be at times be just a matter of degree and not of kind. Although I have characterized our milieu in many ways in other essays, I prefer here, therefore, to designate the twenty-first century as the Age of Cacoëthes.   


I suppose that the modern meaning of cacoëthes as “insatiable desire” could be applied to humans of previous ages, maybe as far back as 200,000 to 300,000 years ago with the rise of our species. Certainly, desire has been the focus of discussion on morals and ethics since the Buddha called it the root of evil. But in some contexts “insatiable desire” seems to be a positive motivator, as it is when one has the desire to learn, to succeed for the sake of supporting family and friends, or to improve the lives of others or oneself. When insatiable desire turns on others or inward in self-destructive addictions or obsessions, it becomes, as the Buddha warns, the source of human ills.


And possibly a deep-seated understanding of desire’s inimical side is tied to the etymology of cacoëthes. The prefix caco does seem to derive from the Proto-Indo-European root language for “defecate.” So, the prefix is seemingly as old as language itself, and it might be an onomatopoeic and guttural utterance associated with defecating. Added to ëthes, the cognate of ethics, cacoëthes suggests the antithesis of what is noble, good, or moral. It is “bad ethics,” so to speak, which we commonly call “evil.” In its Greek form kakoēthēs means "ill-habit," "wickedness." In its Latin derivation, it came to mean “disease of character.” Could my amazingly articulate grandmother who had no formal education have been aware of the word’s philology? She definitely seemed to have commonsense about what was or was not good for me.


The sinister side to the word seems particularly applicable to those on social media, certain pundits on TV, some comedians, vociferous politicians, and activists who rail in ad hominems against the opposition regardless of the matter at hand. The “insatiable desire” that seems to dominate much of the electronically interconnected populace seems to be a desire for degradation and destruction of the character of others with whom they disagree.


You might have one or more insatiable desires. If you do have one, ask yourself whether or not it is a manifestation of ëthes or cacoëthes. If it is the latter, you need to hear my late grandmother’s warning and seek help because you have a “disease of character.” It might be as preventable as avoiding what you pick up. But like an addict living in a drug house surrounded by filth and other addicts and pushers, anyone who stays in such company finds no easy path to quashing the desire to harm or self-harm. The house of social media can be such a house; so much of it is covered in kaka that the dirt is difficult to avoid.


I suppose the best advice for rehab is to get out of the house of maliciousness and turn desire for evil into a desire for good. Or, if you insist on remaining in the house of cacoëthes, simply think “kaka” the next time you read a comment by a diseased character motivated by an insatiable desire to soil the reputation of another over a disagreement. Both my grandmother and the Buddha would be happy to know they prevented someone from touching kaka.

Thought and Emotion have a conversation:


Thought: “Well, I think we crossed the point of no return with respect to driving under the influence. We seem to be living in a Dune-like universe of drug users.”


Emotion: “LET ME GUESS. YOU ARE JUST GOING TO SAY THAT ALCOHOL AND DRUGS SHOULD BE BANNED.”


Thought: “You don’t have to shout. I said what I said because I see the results of a simulated driving study by Thomas D. Marcotte and others. * The researchers had people smoke pot and then attempt to drive when they felt they were doing so without impairment. The results were not good news for travelers. They revealed that THC makes its way into the brain and that blood levels of the drug and feeling “okay” to drive cannot be used as impairment indicators. Even after ninety minutes, pot smokers drove unsafely.”


Emotion: “SO, WHAT ARE YOU SAYING, THAT STATES SHOULD RETHINK AND RESCIND THEIR LAWS PERMITTING POT USE?”


Thought: “Not completely, but they might consider tweaking their laws a bit and initiating an education component. They might also look at laws regarding auto insurance.”


Emotion: “SURE, FINE THE HECK OUT OF US JUST BECAUSE WE WANT A LITTLE RECREATIONAL POT. I SMOKE, BUT I’VE NEVER DRIVEN UNDER THE INFLUENCE OF THC.”


Thought: “Really? I suppose that if you fall into the average group of driving pot smokers, that means you never drove within four and a half hours of smoking pot. I say that because for many of the test subjects, THC caused impaired driving well beyond the time the smokers believed they were affected. THC impairs even when the pot smoker believes she is no longer under its influence.”


EMOTION: “SO, I’LL JUST SMOKE WEAKER POT IN SHORTER CIGARETTES.”


Thought: “Good luck with that. The study revealed that the subjects’ composite driving scores did not differ on the basis of THC content.”


EMOTION: “Nah! I DON’T BELIEVE IT.”


Thought: “Well, I guess there’s nothing I can do to convince you that THC impairs driving. But I would ask you to inform me when you intend to get behind the wheel. That knowledge will keep me off the roads when you’re zigzagging your way to or from the pot store.”




*Marcotte, thomas D., Anya Unlauf, David J Grelotti, et al. 26 Jan 2022. Driving Performance and Cannabis Users’ Perception of Safety: A Randomized Clinical Trial.  JMA Psychiatry online.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2788264   Accessed February 6, 2022.

This is what Fred Alan Wolf said in his Taking the Quantum Leap with regard to Zeno’s Paradox and Aristotle’s explanation of motion. With regard to a subatomic entity, the Aristotelian philosophy applied:  “Motion was continuous and smooth, provided it was unseen.” From a Zenonic perspective, however: “Motion was discontinuous, whenever it was observed, provided we looked hard enough to see it.” * Wolf is speaking about the wave-particle duality of the quantum world, where electrons and photons, for example, can appear to be both waves and particles, smooth and discrete, continuous and discontinuous. Observing collapses the wave into a particle. The phenomenon of duality might apply to current social trends.


Modern TVs and computer monitors don’t afford the perspective that those older models did. If you rapidly wagged your finger between your eyes and those screens, you would see the finger appear in discrete positions, the product of a stobe-like “painting” of the image on the screen by a cathode ray tube (CRT). To get the same effect, you have to use an actual strobe light in a darkened room. The rapidly flashing light captures the waving finger in discrete positions, erasing the brain’s idea of an uninterrupted smooth motion. To see something similar, you could watch a very old black-and-white film, one that shows motion in a jerky fashion, or you could take a length of film—not easy to come by these digital days—to see that older movies are seen as a sequence of twenty-four frames, or photos, per second, just the right number for a viewer to perceive continuous motion; fewer frames per second show a jerkiness. The “motion” is an illusion created as the brain sees twenty-four still photos of people and objects in progressive positions. The 24 frames per second was a product of experimentation by early film makers who tried to eliminate the “jumps” or “jerks” in the film while still not paying for excess footage.


But what’s this have to do with social trends? And why bring Zeno and Aristotle into the mix?


It might seem paradoxical to say, but in the midst of any social trend, motion largely seems smooth. It’s difficult to observe when one is part of the film of life. Only when we can see from the perspective of history do the discrete changes appear in stop-action, in individual frames. That’s what historians do when they try to discover causes of events and movements; they apply the strobe light of retrospect. They take the film out of the projector and look at it frame by frame. But those who live the causes often see only an uninterrupted smoothness to life.


Let’s keep the analogy light, even skimpy, for example. Consider women’s swimwear. At almost any beach or pool today, one can see bikinis so “kini” that they reveal complete hind ends, a narrow strip of cloth separating the buttocks. But the movement toward the thong was decadal in most places. Now, you might ask what does this have to do with discrete particles or smooth waves and with being observed or not being observed.


The change in swimwear went from the abrupt shock of the first bikinis, which by today’s standard fashion would be modest swimwear to the tiny minimalist string of a thong accepted in “polite society” almost everywhere. A complete revealing of a butt would have been scandalous in the 1940s and 1950s in a more Puritan America. After that original bikini, the increased skimpiness (or decreased coverage) was to those who lived the change a rather unobserved phenomenon, as bikinis had less and less material in successive summers (but seemingly cost more).


Now, you might think this is a rather silly example, but consider the same kind of unobserved movement in the smooth transition from capitalism in America toward increasing socialism and fascism. Consider the compliance of those who said they relished the freedom of capitalism, but gradually began to adopt more government controls over the economy and other aspects of life.


Consider in this context the mandates for vaccines and the arguments many have smoothly accepted. Media’s know-it-all pundits, bureaucrats, and many others have during 2021 claimed that vaccines should be mandated because they protect others. The cry went out: The unvaccinated were “murderers.” Eventually, Big Pharma admitted and experience with increasing infections revealed that vaccines and masks might protect individuals getting jabs and wearing N-95 masks, but that neither did anything to prevent the spread of COVID-19 variants. Yet, as I write this in February, 2022, there are still those who accept the premise that the unvaccinated are murderers and that anyone who speaks against either jabs or masks should be cancelled (censored). They have accepted the smooth transition into a populist fascism in the context of an ever-increasing socialist America. Didn’t millions of us accept those government handouts at the beginning of and during the pandemic’s first 18 months? Didn’t millions accept the closures as they still accept restrictions? (Yet, the “elites” in government party maskless and in close company. Listen to an open mike comment by Pennsylvania’s Governor Wolf as he said to an aide that they should keep their masks on for appearance’s sake as they walked to the podium).


Look at the what the smooth transition has done to the economies of formerly “free enterprise states.” At this time the Canadian government is thinking of using its military against protesting truckers who were driving in a convoy toward Ottawa. In California and New York, restaurants and entertainment venues are required to prohibit the unvaccinated and the maskless from entering. A school district in Virginia is threatening unmasked students with arrests and fines for trespassing. And on and on and on. For many the smoothness of the process occurs because they cannot see the discrete particles, the children and adults who prefer not to be part of a wave, but want, rather, to be considered as discrete individuals.


Of course, like those who gradually accepted that shrinking bikini, those who wear the cloth of socialism and fascism cannot understand why those discrete particles out there exist and why they are not part of the wave. They don’t have a Zenonic philosophy that recognizes in movement a jerkiness that Zeno’s followers see.


The reality is that in any movement, as Zeno pointed out, an object (or person) lies in a specific place for an infinitely small moment and in another place for the next infinitely small moment. To see the particle at rest requires an observation. Those who object to the gradual movement toward socialism and fascism are observers of discrete particles. They see the jerks, the jumps in the film. Those who ride the wave are blind. But then, that’s understandable because “seeing” is really done by the brain and not by the mere lenses of the eyes. So, when the brain is already under an illusion like the smoothness of a social trend, that’s what it “sees.”


*Wolf, Fred Alan. Taking the Quantum Leap: The New Physics for Nonscientists. New York. Harper & Row, 1981. P. 23.