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All is well that ends well. --John Heywood "All's well that ends well" is one of the key points of the great sham of life. The quote begins by making several base presumptions, namely that there exists an end to things, and that if such things may end, they may end better or worse than each other. These first two presumptions are the beginning of the issue's problem. What truly ends? A flower dies and decays into the ground, but is its existence over? In time a new flower grows out of the death of the old, and so the story continues. A universe implodes on itself, slowly decaying, but may we be so bold to presume that the death of one universe is not the birth of another? And even if we may say that the end of the flower is some point where it ceases to live, and is not the end of its existence, we can find no point where the flower "dies"; we are only given a point where the flower is dead, and one where the flower is alive. But at any rate, the greatest part of the sham lies not on these presumptions, but on the far more errorneous statement that a noble end of one goal justifies the ignoble deeds perpetrated to accomplish it. Heywood's defense is that something based on ignoble premises will always have a dishonorable end. This argument must has some certain validity for me, in that an operation carried out with some poor quality will retain that quality. However, the statement that "All's well that ends well" can be dangerously and easily misconstrued by cutting a corner in the definition of "ends well". In the straight cut definition of "ends well", kidnapping citizens and hiding aliens from the general populus, the dishonorable means, keeps the protection of society from "ending well", since the end cannot end well due to the death of citizens and the concealment of truth. But often one can cut the corner and say that merely protecting society makes the brainwashing citizens "end well", regardless of the fragmented families, coverups, and sequestering of knowledge. This type of corner cutting makes "All's well that ends well" a dangerous catch phrase, and misunderstood use of the aphorism leads to some of the great shams of the world, such as "Since I didn't actually crash the car, my reckless driving is not something to worry about," or, "The pulmonary plight of thousands of industrial workers is of little significance since the use of asbestos and sandblasting has ended with millions of gallons of refined gasoline and steel castings of every shape and size." I suppose I've gone a bit far and should make one reparation--the whole thing about space aliens is a hypothetical thing. Really...
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