- It’s like Lenin said, you look for the one who benefits.
Not to split hairs here, but it wasn’t Lenin who said that. It was Cicero (Latin: cui bono). And though the Dude misquotes him, and uses the line to arrive at the wrong deduction about what happened to Bunny (that she kidnapped herself to scam money out of her foolish husband), it actually proves to be the solution to the entire case. The Dude’s fatal flaw is that he, like most of us, tends to place too much trust in the wealthy and powerful. Like your average Pomeranian,[17] we are pack animals who reflexively trust those “bigger” than ourselves.
Had the Dude initially considered “who benefits” from Bunny’s disappearance, he should have suspected the Big Lebowski—spouses are normally the first suspects in criminal investigations. Only, he presumed the old man was on the level and that his tears were genuine. Why? Because “he’s fucking loaded.”
Though the United States was founded on egalitarian principles, the population of this country is more trusting of the wealthy and powerful than people are in just about any other place on earth. No matter how often it happens, every time a tycoon or politician is discovered to be a fraud, the citizens seem genuinely surprised. Noam Chomsky has ranted endlessly about what a good job the U.S. power structure has done in “manufacturing consent”—that is, in maintaining an illusion of democracy so that people feel in control, even as they’re being shepherded slavishly around.
Perhaps we could all benefit a bit more from this healthy distrust of the power structure. Again, this was an idea introduced by the Dude’s generation, conveniently forgotten and whitewashed over soon afterward. It may be time to revisit this a priori operative skepticism: that power and virtue are fundamentally at odds with each other. After all, this was a major contention of the world’s more peaceful religions—Christianity and Buddhism—at least in the original, uncompromised first drafts. Shouldn’t it be part of Dudeism as well?
The truth of reality, is that you are a simple emanation of your core. Your core is the pure energy within. Within, your true self is a singularity of your own consciousness.
Shut The Fuck Up Donnie. Let us all kill the little man inside us questioning all of our great leaps towards happiness