When it comes to any bad thing, anything wrong in the world, we look for something. A scapegoat, a source of blame for when things go wrong. With so much time, we’ve given them many names over the years. Swatting them around, using them back and forth like cats with brightly colored toys.
Some will say it’s violence that drives us. That everything can be focused under it, and a way could be shone through the drudgery back to the way that they should. Hurt those around you enough, and the pain drives them to follow what you say.
Others will say that death drives their actions. Everything punctuated by the grit of ending the sparks of life pushes them, warps them, drags them back in time and time again despite wanting to truly be out of it all.
Then there are those that would think Greed would be best. To hold the most wealth, to hoard knowledge and host their superiority over others, and to drive others to take hold of the very top. For if you’re there, there couldn’t be anyone better than you could there?
But it’s none of these things that make for the truth. While we may suffer from the gifts of Pandora’s Box, it is not a single thing in there that caused the world to suffer. No, the thing that doomed us to things like death, violence, and greed come from a much simpler root.
Curiosity.
For no force truly drove Pandora to pry that box open than the gnawing hunger that curiosity gave her. Despite the best of warnings, she succumbed and doomed us all according to the tales. Of all of the flaws of the human condition, we cannot give up our curiosity. It leads to our vices, madness, disease and suffering, following death. There’s an old saying that wraps it up like a bow.
Curiosity killed the cat.
At the end, it’s what binds you together past it all. The need to know everything, the need to find a way out of deals soaked in blood and pain. The need to know how to lead others into something more than just what one can see. Like cats you prowl, hunting around each other in a tango of madness in search of something more than what is given to you.
And with each discovery, you suffer more for it.
You become drawn to something you don’t understand. Bright, shining like a light in the dark firing up the curiosity that drives you to the vices of the box. You get too close, not realizing that the color is not an invitation, but a warning.
For snakes have no need of curiosity.
Coiled, a snake is patient. It waits for the foolish cat to come closer. It lets the natural curiosity overwhelm its prey. The serpent’s motivations remain unknown, the seemingly bright nature playful instead of deadly.
And then it strikes, leaving nothing but dead cats killed by their own curiosity.