Chocolate and the social order

When I was a child, I stumbled across a bar of chocolate in my mother's pantry. Greedily I broke a piece off and began to chew it.

It was terrible! Why? Because it was chocolate all right, but baking chocolate. Unsweetened chocolate, also known as bitter, baking chocolate, or cooking chocolate, is pure chocolate liquor mixed with some form of fat to produce a solid substance. The pure, ground, roasted cocoa beans impart a strong, deep chocolate flavor. With the addition of sugar, however, it is used as the base for cakes, brownies, cookies, candies and other delights.Very important words: with the addition of sugar. The pure stuff is bitter, bitter, bitter. 

There are people who will tell you that 100% chocolate liquor -- not Kahlua, by the way, but the ground or melted state of the nib of the cacao bean, containing roughly equal parts cocoa butter and solids -- is healthy for you. There are always people who will tell you things that taste bad are good for you. I do not know  why this is the case, but it is.

Many things in life that are sweet seem to become bitter as they are reduced to their purest essence. Take religions, which offer consolation in times of sorrow, make sense of a confusing world and provide a community connection in times of isolation. Yet look around you and you see that the more pure [in its own valuation] the version of a religion -- and I am sorry to say this, but I am talking about Christianity as much as about Islam or pick any other faith -- the more likely it is to become bitter and brutal, turn to persecution and oppression, first of those who differ from it and eventually even its own adherents. If this shocks you, I suggest your read several good histories of the world and of the religion of your choice. Let me just say: Inquisition, witch trials, crusades, Wars of Religion. Shiites, Sunnis. You get the idea.

Heresy, by the way, is what happens when a member or group of the faithful decides that the entire faith can be reduced to one aspect -- justice, ritual purity, Jesus-was-a-man, Jesus-is-divine --- and all other aspects shrink into virtual nothingness. The orthodox, by the way, can reduce everything to one aspect -- all thinking alike about a circumscribed set of beliefs: form of baptism, understanding of the nature of God, creation of the world. And everyone else is going to hell.

Or look at political parties. The more purely a party comes to represent only its founding principles, the more likely it is to begin to refuse to cooperate with the larger society, to become obstructionist, to become suspicious of its own members and leadership and pretty much work full tilt to cut off its own nose to spite its face. Not to name names, but ...

People, people! Baking chocolate is not fun to eat. You need more than the nub of a cacao bean to make fudge. You need more than opposition to taxes to rule a nation.You need more than ______________ [Fill in the blank] to build a world.

Just sayin'.