said Rafe, “and desire.” He wrote the words in large black ink on the dry erase board, and some of the more dutiful freshmen in the lecture hall jotted them down. Rafe took a moment to smirk at this—would they forget those two words if they didn’t copy them down? Then again, these were college students. With their away-from-home-for-the-first-time overindulgence of alcohol, drugs and sleep deprivation, who knew what condition their recently matured brains were in? He continued his talk. “It’s the dialectic of human psychology. When we say that people ‘push our buttons,’ there are only two buttons and these are they. And as societies can be said to have a collective psychology, we can too list them on this paradigm. To wit—the Roman Republic falls closer to Fear, yes? The xenophobia of the early Romans allowed them not only to be on guard for the elephants of Hannibal but also informed the way they absorbed nearby cultural memes and without exception colored them decidedly Roman.
