Who’s the Pitohui Now?

Ideologies capable

Of maintaining hordes of people

Cooped in cognitive dissonance—

In other words, close kin, cousins

Of ours as ideas snagged on words—

Share something with poison dart frogs—

And toxin-spraying insects, and

Various venomous reptiles,

And rare toxic mammals or birds—

Immunity to their own slime.

The evolution of systems

Of compartmentalization

Is everywhere, even in guts.

If your innards rupture, you die.

Most likely your contents killed you.

You don’t give it much thought in frogs,

And none at all in your own guts,

So long as they’re not troubling you.

But in the notions of others,

In the group-think of human minds

Like your own, it bemuses you.

Why should it? Is it difficult

To understand the advantage

Of nerve gas in wars of ideas?

Espousing vicious lies works well,

If collectives can wall them off

From their team’s internal functions.

There. Alles klar, Herr Kommissar?

You’ve seen those horror tales, eyes turned

Dead white. Mind over matter, right?