Things Worth Dying For by Charles J. Chaput

Author:Charles J. Chaput
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Henry Holt and Co.

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ROD SERLING HAD a gift for storytelling. His genius was dark fantasy. His series The Twilight Zone (1959–64) is still in reruns; many see it as some of the best television ever made. Not so widely known is his follow-up series Night Gallery (1969–73). Serling had less control of the content. But it was Night Gallery that produced Serling’s most memorable story: “The Caterpillar.”

The plot is simple. Steven Macy is a bored colonial civil servant in the jungles of Borneo. Living with him is a British couple, the Warwicks. Macy takes an interest in the young and comely Mrs. Warwick. He wants Mr. Warwick out of the way, but in a manner that will not arouse suspicion. So he hires a local criminal who secures a special caterpillar-like insect, a unique kind of earwig. The man will sneak into the house at night and place the insect to crawl into Mr. Warwick’s ear canal while he’s sleeping. The earwig will burrow into the husband’s brain. When it does, Warwick will go mad and die as his brain is slowly devoured from within, and Macy will console the lovely widow. But there’s a hitch. The criminal gets confused in the dark. He places the insect on the wrong pillow in the wrong bedroom. The earwig burrows into the brain of Macy, not Warwick.

Macy experiences days of horrific pain and hallucinations. But miraculously he survives—only to discover that the earwig was female, and her eggs are about to hatch inside his head.

In real life, of course, there’s no such insect. But “The Caterpillar” is a perfect metaphor for the theories, doctrines, ideas, and ideologies that have consumed the minds and devoured the lives of men and women for the past two hundred years. The result has been madness and suffering.

All of us humans believe in something. It’s a basic instinct of our species. We all worship something. We all give our lives to something, no matter how foolish, how perverse, or how well we disguise what we’re doing from ourselves and from others. The bigger the lie, the more unreal and discarnate the idea or belief, the more it will feed on its followers in order to seem real and alive.

One such system of lies—National Socialism—fed on the Jewish mother of Jean-Marie Lustiger at Auschwitz. Speaking in 1998 as the archbishop of Paris, Lustiger noted that the postwar liberal world, fatigued by utopian extremism, had tried to turn away from the “strong gods” of ideology, race, and similar totems.15 But in doing so, it simply chose different totems. It sought to prevent fanaticism in the future by softening people’s passions with material comforts and distractions. That required a massive stress on scientific and technological progress. And it had great success. But, said Lustiger, the effect of a technology-driven culture has been to cocoon humanity in a fever of appetites and insulate it from reality:

Man is now surrounded, besieged, overwhelmed by innumerable objects that have been manufactured and provided by others to serve their own interests rather than his personal development.

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