Tag Archive | democracy

Atheists Anonymous

Jun19

When I read Jesse Beach’s essay on AAand theism I smiled a big smile.

I smiled not because I am an atheist or agnostic, but because I am an atheist/theist/agnostic spirit-jester who doesn’t give a damn about labels, snapshots or philosophical underpinnings when it comes to the issue of getting sober and staying that way.

I have been sober and dope-free since March 17, 1991. That was about the time my Irish girlfriend informed me that I was too drunk to accompany her and her sister to a Saint Patrick’s Day Party with a crowd of locally well-known, if drunken, fools. I was nearly 30 years old at that time and she was 44. Her sister was almost 40. They were from a blue-blooded Illinois family and I was from a red-blooded American family packed to the gills with drunken nar-do-wells and abuse victims. The schism was fated, certainly, but it was my delusional thinking that caused me to believe that I was actually experiencing a deep and abiding love with a woman who only wanted to get the hell away from an emotionally vacuous 18 year marriage. A marriage to a well-respected executroid who had eaten enough of m’lady’s crap over an 18 year period to float a battleship. Many in recovering circles will suggest that you need to get sober for your self and no other way will work. Bullshit. You can get sober any way the wind blows. Staying sober, however, is a horse of a different color.

And this is where the ardently articulate atheists and I part company.

If you are an alcoholic or an addict, you are powerless over that feeling of blissful abandon that accompanies every significant contact with your drug du jour. A normal person may, in fact, become addicted to a substance known to cause addiction, but, once detoxed, a normal person will never go back to that substance. The thought of repeating the same desperate experience of withdrawal is enough to keep these individuals sober. Not me. Not an alcoholic or an addict. We’re just getting the Party started.

What happens inside my body can be explained in biochemical and psycho-pharmicological terms by addictionologists with advanced medical degrees. What I will tell you is that the experience of spree and remorse seems like the only “normal” possible in a lifetime punctuated at the end by the awareness that all that has ever been considered a luxury, or a dignified entitlement, has been lost, or cruelly taken, by the same anthropomorphic schmuck who granted them in the first place. So the moment where my nervous system is compromised just enough to not give a damn about how I feel about any of this or that, or fear of any of this or that, is a place I would sacrifice any comfort, any pleasure or suffer any indignity to experience. In the end, a split second of the comfort of this place is enough to justify all the misery, depression, alienation and loneliness of what can be decades of suffering. A split second of freedom from the bondage of a nervous system that, for addicts, screams and cries about the indignity of feeling more powerful than a normal human, and yet counting the seconds until I finally discover that my feelings have no actual truth to them, and perhaps never did. I may feel immortal, at times, and yet I am confined to a bag of water consigned to a variety of limitations most of which I will never overcome. Every human must have something like these same kinds of internal experiences, but alcoholics and addicts simply cannot let them go or get past them and onto the business of living a “normal” life.

This dichotomy of human experience, these perceptual boundaries of sensuality, form the basis of human perception. Without dark and light, sweet and sour, pain and pleasure, joy and sadness, there can be no distinction between one moment and the next. For the addict this dichotomy feels like the most polarizing of opposites, one of which makes us desire to have only one and forego having the other. To soar to the highest of heights and beyond, or to locate the lowest of lows and then burrow under it, these are the feelings we obsess over and become compulsive about. In a nutshell, addicts simply feel entirely too much, too fast, to feel of much use to anyone, including themselves. Even years into recovery we take to hiding ourselves from spouses, partners and coworkers out of fear that no one could ever understand what it means to experience life without buffer or moderation. Not autism or Asperger’s, but something sets our teeth on edge whenever we feel this experience of raw, naked life coming on. Ecstacy, perhaps, but what good is an experience that cannot be shared or spoken of, much less controlled?

Not to put too fine a point on this state of affairs, but an alcoholic or addict is stuck in this predicament. We can try to medicate it away, but the fact of dependence on a buffering agent is a reality upon which we cannot ignore, or we imperil our survival. We are, in fact, powerless over addictive substances and compulsive thinking. Our lives in this condition, over time, become unmanageable to us. Our bodies can no longer tolerate ingesting our buffering agent over any considerable period of time while the lack of a buffering agent causes us to feel restless, irritable and generally discontent. On occasion, our long suffering spouses confined or imprisoned in relationships with us during a spell of clean-time without benefit of recovery prefer to be around us while we are under the influence, rather than under the lash of the dubious luxury of dry abstinence. “So-dry-ity,” as many of us refer to it.

Addicts get to experience a hopeless place that few humans do, a place where we cannot imagine life with, or life without, our drug of choice. The loneliness and alienation of such a place eventually becomes intolerable. Suicide begins to seem appealing as the ultimate state of oblivion. Meanwhile, we keep trying to regain that first experience with our drug of choice regardless of how many times we have demonstrated to ourselves that we cannot have a better past. Those first days of blissful indulgence are long gone by the time we have had enough to qualify as addicts, yet we cannot stop trying, persevering, or demanding that justice be served to us in a form we can finally approve of. Insanity is one characterization of this DMZ of human contact; mental illness of a sort can be another. Regardless, anyone attempting to scratch out an existence living anywhere near us when we are in this state of being will be driven into a neurotic stupor. Caring for us will be your keys to a frustrating level of despair that no human being should ever inflict on another.

Where is the possibility of hope for recovery in any of this misery and suffering?

It can only come from a belief in a power greater than the addiction problem. Does that power have to come from a belief in a supreme being? In my experience, no. Whether this reality eliminates the possibility of the existence of a supreme being seems a separate issue to me. An unrecovered addict is out of their right mind and right-mindedness seems like a minimum baseline to be achieved before anyone bothers to risk thinking in philosophical terms; the very threads of sanity hang tenuously in the balance.

What I will suggest to the atheists of AA is that it is simple-minded dumbassery to assert that your non-belief in our conjoint belief is both necessary and sufficient proof for the non-existence of a god that you, yourself, create by negating our simple-minded, theistic belief. In the hole left behind by your atheism, you only draw attention to what you seek to ignore. What you attack only makes your belief in that which you would attack, stronger. Serve yourself and be rid of such foolishness.

Agnosticism is the only philosophically defensible position to take in any theistic challenge to religious ideology and dogma. We simply do not know if a supreme being exists or does not; our perceptions report to us the nature of our reality. Omniscience makes perception impossible since there can be no contrasting agent to render a perception to our brain. And, even if by some alchemy we could perceive omniscience, we could never conceptualize it through a limiting definition and so there could never be a word like, “god,” through which we could communicate anything like a true meaning for the experience of omniscience. So not-knowing is an honest appraisal of the god issue and it is one that serves me well in my recovery. Contemplative discussions of the notion of a personal, omnipotent god serve no useful purpose because they must always become what they are, by definition: void of real interpersonal meaning.

I have lived in the Bible belt since 1995 and, let me assure the gentle reader, AA is chalk-full of crazy religious zealots and people-pleasers who fawningly enable the belief in a Christian god of insanity, impossible mystery, magic and religious hokum. In my opinion religion has no place in AA and, if I had my druthers, it would have no place in human experience. Religion has served an important purpose, as has science, and they have both come full-circle and dumped humanity on its collective head. The objective each of these systems of thought had at their outsets was the civilizing of human beings into stable interdependent communities. The only thing our current science and religious practices achieve is the polarizing of each of us into mutually-exclusive thought groups hell-bent on destroying one another for the crime of thinking differently about the nature of human experience. This situation, and in particular its denial, must result in sheer nonsense.

And, if you are still unfortunate enough to believe that religion provides humanity with salvation, let me share with you a bit of lore from the experience of one of my friends in recovery, a thoracic surgeon. A brilliant man in retirement from a long and successful practice, Raymond had carried his religious beliefs on his sleeves as only a charismatic soul can. But it was the opening of Raymond’s skull as a child to the belief in the father, son and holy ghost that, like a bowling ball, allowed Raymond’s mind to be slung down a greased alleyway where a gifted confidence man was able to convince Raymond to spend a significant chunk of his retirement on a scheme to wrest marketable quantities of gold from the raw sewage ponds of New York City. Not quite the whopper of transubstantiation, Raymond’s religious beliefs suggested that “faith, alone” could save any day. Well, Raymond now works as a glorified physician’s assistant in a local doc-in-the-box, a far cry from the dramatic outcomes he had been a party to as a thoracic surgeon. Religion and religious dogma prey on every vulnerable mind regardless of its gifts, turning it into useless goo at precisely the wrong time.

This case contains an important lesson about the power of sheer bullshit to literally stun and paralyze human ingenuity in trying times. There have been, and will be, many others. This the price we pay for going through the motions of belief in the unreasonable propositions of religious myth; these consequences, rather than the imaginary ones posthumously experienced before a disembodied Saint Peter, are the real consequences we need to be concerned about as living, breathing human beings.

I thank my atheist and agnostic friends for coming into sobriety to carry their message to me as I carry my message to them. I smile because both messages are crucial to understanding just how precious this AA phenomenon has been for me and countless others like me. I smile because I relate to the alienation and isolation of human experience, and I smile because I appreciate the fact that I am not, and never have been, alone in that experience. At times the pain can be excruciating.

Of course none of this means that you should burn your Bible and never again darken the doors of your local church. Something should be sacred in everyone’s life and, for me, there is nothing more mysterious and sacred than the relationship I have with my own unconscious mind. I have no direct experience of this place, but I know it exists because I have seen powerful patterns cutting through and through my Fourth and Tenth Step inventories. And I am, in a word, powerless to deal with these patterns in anything like the manner a focused, conscious thought might allow me to toss a rock through a stained glass window. My unconscious mind is my sacred friend guiding and directing me into brick walls, bad relationships, traumas and all of their opposite experiences. And so I begin my spiritual awakening and my belief in a super-ordinant higher power right there.

As it turns out, I do not have to go any farther or make any grand pronouncements requiring your expressed faith in my beliefs about myself in order to feel whole or holy. Those sorts of pronouncements have all already been made, today and every day, for thousands of years, to the effects we see before us. Yet my relationship with myself has been sacred and profound enough to keep me from doing, for over twenty years now, what I used to love doing every day. I do not need to convince you of it and you have your own unconscious drives to become conscious of and contend with. I have found a way of contending constructively with my more self-destructive unconscious drives, a way shown to me long ago now, and you do not have to believe in dead people reanimating or the weekly conversion of water and wine into blood in order for this method to work for you. There is no longer any rational justification to abandon hope in what was once a heartbreaking and hopeless situation for thousands of years.

What is most important to life is that it be permitted to flourish and that it be enjoyed by all creation capable of such an experience. I don’t think life cares a damn if we eat meat on Fridays during Lent and I don’t believe that a loving higher power wants us to invade the wombs of women trapped by an economic system designed to enslave us all. But that’s what I believe today. Tomorrow may be different. For everyone.

Let us hope so.

Resurrection and the Sociopath

Apr24

Last year about this time I found myself steeped in a post-graduate rhetorical analysis of the front pages of the website Stormfront.org and two Patriot Movement sites.  The details of contemporary rhetorical analysis go beyond the mere study of words, so I won’t bore you.   But the “a-ha” moment I received at the end of my qualitative analysis is worth mentioning, at some point, in light of all the ballyhoo surrounding the latest remake of Ayn Rand’s last novel, Atlas Shrugged, and Rand’s many “contributions” to the neo-conservative movement of the post-industrial, post-modern United States of America.

First, I think that it is important, perhaps an epoché, to mention that I read Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead during my first attempt at an undergraduate Computer Science degree in 1982.  I found her writing rather dull but her less-than subtle attempt at providing an air of plausibility for the malignant narcissism of her character, Howard Roark, thought-provoking.  It allowed me to make some kind of sense out of the madhatter Libertarian prognosticators who began finding their way onto my high school campus several years prior.  I believe my love affair with the ideas of Libertarian Objectivism lasted about six months due in no small part to the massive quantities of alcohol, marijuana and psilocybin mushrooms I was consuming in a quest to understand the life that I later discovered I did not have.

Rand’s basic problem with altruism, and the phony characters who often people movements known for their well-publicized altruistic intent, was that it represents an unqualified evil to the human species.  When people, especially theologians and philosophers, start pulling out loaded words like “good” and “evil” to describe their pet theoretical constructs, it becomes very easy to get lost in the weeds of side-discussions long before a viable premise of their pet theory can be identified, described and critiqued.

But let’s indulge this tendency for a moment.  It is highly illustrative.

The heroes of Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead and all of Rand’s novels, find their genesis in Rand’s notes and interviews with none other than child murderer William Edward Hickman.  Hickman, by most every psychological analysis of his behavior, was a sociopath of the psychopathic type.  To highlight the conscience-free, malignant narcissism of humanoids like Hickman, we have a description of the crime in the nineteen year old killer’s own words, a crime that resulted in his death, by hanging, in October of 1928.

“It was while I was fixing the blindfold that the urge to murder came upon me,” he continued, “and I just couldn’t help myself. I got a towel and stepped up behind Marion. Then before she could move, I put it around her neck and twisted it tightly. I held on and she made no outcry except to gurgle. I held on for about two minutes, I guess, and then I let go. When I cut loose the fastenings, she fell to the floor. I knew she was dead. Well, after she was dead I carried her body into the bathroom and undressed her, all but the underwear, and cut a hole in her throat with a pocket knife to let the blood out.”

And a description from a different newspaper account of what Hickman did next.

“Hickman packed her body, limbs and entrails into a car, and drove to the drop-off point to pick up his ransom; along his way he tossed out wrapped-up limbs and innards scattering them around Los Angeles. When he arrived at the meeting point, Hickman pulled Miriam’s [sic] head and torso out of a suitcase and propped her up, her torso wrapped tightly, to look like she was alive—he sewed wires into her eyelids to keep them open, so that she’d appear to be awake and alive. When Miriam’s father arrived, Hickman pointed a sawed-off shotgun at him, showed Miriam’s head with the eyes sewn open (it would have been hard to see for certain that she was dead), and then took the ransom money and sped away. As he sped away, he threw Miriam’s head and torso out of the car, and that’s when the father ran up and saw his daughter—and screamed.”

I bring this information to your attention, gentle reader, because most everything put forward by the neo-conservative movement since 1980 has been in service of the ideas espoused by Ayn Rand, pseudonym of Alisa Rosenbaum, a Soviet émigré and, yes, a Jew.  The debauched calumny against the great, unwashed masses who made Rand’s popularity even possible is evident in all the neo-conservative epithets directed at the poor and disadvantaged, all the anti-altruistic legislative agendas and all the malevolence of the nation’s bankers and investors against the “collectivists” who, “don’t get it” – it is all there in stark relief.

A world made safe for sociopaths and psychopaths like Rand’s hero, Hickman, and, arguably, Rand herself – this was the purpose and point of Rand’s “philosophy.”

I know it is a little late to be suggesting this, but, “Houston, we have a problem.”

Freakishly detached from human concerns though they may be, the psychopathic personality is a throw-back, a genetic anomaly and evidence of the continued presence of our ancestors, the dinosaurs, still demanding their day in the “evolutionary court of appeals.”  Their legal representative in this regard is none other than Ayn Rand herself, and the fact that these lizard-brained anomalies also have control of all the levers of governance and justice, species-wide, bears some mention.

Mercifully, Ayn Rand is dead and her legacy has been frozen solid in the minds of those closest to her.  These people knew Rand for what she was, good and bad, and their testimony is available for all to read and see.  Personally, I am neither surprised nor impressed by Rand’s legacy.  She died of lung cancer with only a hired nurse at her bedside, a fitting epitaph for an individual who both sucked the breathable oxygen out of nearly every room she ever walked into while also demanding the slavish devotion of admirers she neither admired nor appreciated.  Every other human being was just an object to Rand and objects have no purpose other than the one the “assigner” assigns to them.

Were it not for the fact that Alan Greenspan, former Chairman of the Federal Reserve from the Reagan Administration to nearly the present day, spent most of his lifetime locked in sadomasochistic “devotion” to his mentor, the life of this sociopath of the psychopathic type, Ayn Rand, would be pitiful and pathetic, rather than the force to be reckoned with that it has become.  Strange, is it not, how the alienation and isolation of profound mental illness drives these creatures together to re-experience the defining moment of mammalian evolution — the moment of “cooperation.”  The moment where two apparently separate and unequal entities came together to harmonize, legitimize and validate their devotion, however warped, to one another, causing a stir in the ethos of an entire civilization.  And, as we have already surmised, this has been a toxic stir, indeed.

Objectivist philosophy requires the presence of slaves and widespread exploitation in order for it to provide the fetid fruit that it has been able to provide thus far.  This is the same problem that all atheists come across as they dig deeply into their rival theistic paradigm.  Objectivism is parasitic and incapable of standing on its own.  If every living, breathing human were capable of adopting objectivism as a lifestyle, the world would become a battleground of bad neighborhoods as each warlord attempted to actualize his or her own will to power.  Sort of like it has become now, only worse.  Think Afghanistan in every subdivision and hamlet around the world.

This prejudice begs the question, however: can cooperative, mammalian-friendly civilization stand on its own without the benefit of the lethal pursuit of sociopaths of the psychopathic type?  Granted that we could certainly use less malignant narcissism at this time in our history, but could we sustain ourselves in a world completely devoid of fear and its exploitation?  Do we truly have more choices available to us than the current objectivist economic repression and the collectivist intellectual repression?

This might be a good time to mention that “a-ha” moment I came upon as I completed my qualitative analysis of the angry fascists, racists and xenophobes who provide the websites for Stormfront.org and the “minuteman” patriot movement.  All of these humanoids, and in fact all of us who regard ourselves in a relatively mundane, milktoast fashion with regard to ethnocentricity, are after just one communal peak experience.  Just one.

Utopia.

That’s it, folks.  Everybody wants to go to heaven, but nobody wants to die to this world we have manufactured together.  Everyone wants to be able to say to themselves of the people they meet on the street every day, “they’re just like me,” but no one wants to fully concede to their innermost selves that they could ever be as dysfunctionally warped as, say, a William Edward Hickman, or an Ayn Rand.  Everyone wants to see themselves in some sort of perfect light, but no one wants to completely release their belief in “sin,” whether they are atheists or theists.  And so we are trapped, imprisoned in the jailhouse of the human mind, completely incapable of loving one another and, by extension, ourselves.

We should strive to refuse to have our regard for each other, and our very selves, to be limited by the machinations of mental illness, neurological impairment or treatable psychological disorders.  No matter how widespread or how often these dysfunctions are taken as standard-operating procedure, we cannot continue to allow psychopaths, or the mentally ill, to dictate the quality of our very lives in any way at any time.  We do this every time we turn our backs on people like Ayn Rand or Alan Greenspan.  These pitiable creatures need to be identified and kept far away from the levers of power, lest the present circumstances be repeated.

On this Easter Sunday, pull a rabbit out of your proverbial hat and let your fellows be free to be as dysfunctional or functional as they are without the benefit of your secret need to pass judgment on who you think they are or what you believe it is that they do.  This is the Final Judgment any man or woman can ever make for themselves.

But do not mistake this foolhardy tendency to make dramatic every trivial or dopey aberration in human behavior for a trangression against the beating of your own heart.   Those we have regarded as “evil” or “outside humanness” should be seen only as infirmed.  This “turning of the cheek,” this “shift in perspective” to regard the despicable as only temporarily impaired is the one that opens the gateway to the Utopia we all seem to crave, but have never actually chosen to live in for long at all.

Clinton, Biden Betray Obama Over Egypt; Kerry Likely To Take State Department

Feb14

Washington insiders are chattering about Hillary Clinton’s duplicity in dealing with Obama and Mubarak’s long-time CIA friend, Frank Wisner.  Apparently, Hillary was offering support to Wisner as if the President supported her policy.  However, Obama’s several phone calls to the Middle East explaining his political stand on Egypt suggest otherwise.

Missing from the subtext of Hillary’s duplicity is the power play she has undertaken in what amounts to a vote of “no confidence” for Obama and his policies.  The drubbing the Administration took in the November elections, the President’s ineffective response to Republican aggression in Congress and his rumored issues with depression also galvanized Hillary to support her own ambitions at the expense of the Obama Presidency.

Senator John Kerry has signalled to the Administration that he would accept the nod to take over for Hillary at State.

Before she goes, the President would be wise to weaken her and her husband politically before accepting her resignation.  Most certainly she plans to run against the President in 2012.

What Bertrand Russell May Have Missed

Feb13

A thought occurred to me yesterday just as Father Richard Rohr was reformulating truth in terms of Hellenistic (Greek) Thought versus the kind of thoughts that Jesus of Nazareth was allegedly spinning out of whole cloth with regards to the “holy trinity.”

Here are the three principles of Greek Thought that underpin all of western “civilization”:

1)      A = A (principle of identity)

2)      A != !A (principle of noncontradiction)

3)      A or !A = unary truth (principle of the excluded third)

Russell goes on to suggest that, “nothing can both be and not be,” and “everything must either be or not be.”

Interesting choice of words, “everything,” and “nothing.”

What if “nothing” has some existence, however temporary?  What if “nothing” can both be and not be?   That is, after all, what Russell said, did he not?  And what happens to the unfortunate soul who confuses “nothing” with “everything?”

Welcome to humanity.  In this mindscape, we both confuse everything with nothing and then go on to build gigantic infrastructures designed to sustain our commitment to nothing as being everything anyone could possibly find valuable.  The Greeks might, “want no freaks,” but even their superior cultural will was incapable of sustaining a bivalent, binary, black or white universe of which humans could be a part.  It seems the very act of excluding the possibility of tripartite reality made the Greeks into the freaks they wished to have removed from relevant consideration.

As modern phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl might assert, observation is composed of the observer, the observed and the process of observation.  Or, if one prefers, the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.  All three can be considered inexhaustibly separate, and yet it is only when our understanding of each has been brought together that any human person begins to make meaning out of their human experience.

More plainly, those who would choose to focus on only the godhead, or only on the Creation or only the processes relating godhead to Creation can only manifest their own apriori “arrangement” of tripartite reality.   So if we believe the godhead, Father or the Observer is what manifests reality, we see a reality where a First Cause by some process manifested a universe.  Completely irrelevant to these folks, then, is the possibility that there is no First Cause, there has only been an eternal process grinding out causes and effects.  Even more unlikely, the godists could spare no time for the serious consideration of a universe that has been forever and eternally engaged only in observing itself with no particular guidance or rules of process to obey or hold in abeyance.  And yet, when we say that nothing can both be and not be, the possibilities for arranging a tripartite ontology number at least eight.  And this is because, as human beings, our lack of an eternal pedigree, or stake in the same, renders us homeless and truly free to decide how we might wish to construct our reality for ourselves.

Left unsocialized or divided against one another, these eight possibilities all form closed systems of sanity that could well exclude the remaining seven possibilities from ever being seriously considered for any merits they might offer our buggered little minds.  Our Greek-infiltrated cerebellums might see choice six of eight as the only possible rational arrangement of tripartite reality, which polarizes the other seven worldviews as decidedly, “insane.”

I mention all of this confusing ontological and epistemological chatter because it forms the basis from which human thought arose in response to a decidedly confusing, decidedly chaotic lived experience, many eons ago.  People killed one another with little provocation save the need to preserve a certain amount of foodstuff for personal survival.  People murdered their fellows because they wanted their mates or any of their other resources.

Into this bubbling cauldron of anxious uncertainty came the precepts of religion and the beginnings of a universal moral code of human behavior.  The hope in this case would be that human beings would no longer have to walk about with one eye over their shoulder peeled on their neighbor’s curiosity or envy.  We would all come to value peace and harmony as principles for good orderly living.

As always happens when geography and human limitations manifest themselves, those who huddled together to form klans or villages became isolated from the rest of their fellows.  And so the defense we erected against our own avaricious natures manifested itself in the distrust and disdain we held for those outside of our klan or our village.  It simply did not matter if we all subscribed to the same texts of moral behavior; the proof could only be found in the putting of observable behavior.

Once the desire to impose volition upon communal hope manifested itself in the form of large concentrations of churchly wealth, institutions of moral authority began serving only themselves and not the greater good of human beings.  Tortured logic and the logic of torture began to remanifest itself in human beings representing institutions whose initial purpose was nothing akin to contemporary behavior.  When nothing can be confused with everything, imaginary crimes can be punished by death and threat of death, all with impunity.

Out of the bubbling cacophony of churches and nonsensical assertions of power and control came the voices for reason, voices who held the contradiction between goal and present behavior up for all to see, offered up a third way to manifest both morality and civilized progress: the scientific method.  Science could somehow superimpose itself atop all of the noise and chaos of civilizations learning to become more civil and humans learning to become more humane.

But old institutions do not die until long after they are buried, and old ways of thinking outlive even the institutions responsible for bringing them to the fore.  So science became as perverse and dogmatic as those religions it claimed to be defending humanity against.   Absent has been the ability of human beings to regard religion and science as tools for social progress; instead, each must be held to the heart of conviction as one holds both sword and shield in an imaginary battle of all or nothing.  Except human beings have long since forgotten their confusion of everything with nothing, nor do they recall their realization that nothing is the ONLY thing that can both be and not be at the same moment of eternity.

You, me and the motility provided by our physical bodies – these things come and go, rise and fall, come to be and just as quickly pass away because no thing cannot last for anything like an eternity.  That which is perfect outlasts all things and there is no thing in this universe of ours that has ever been known to have always been and observed to always be true.

The hope lies with our thoughts on all of these matters both now and into the future.  Our thoughts and ideals transcend the bounds of time and space, defy the laws of conservation of energy, and grow more and more abundant as they are shared one to another over time.  It is in our thoughts that our imaginations are fired and our relevant truths highlighted so as to ensure our future survival.  We may pass away as a species, but the ideas we share with whatever Life turns out to be should preserve what we have learned about what it means to pass this way, to feel as we feel and to do as we must do.

No thing can both be and not be, but nothing can do both.   Even Bertrand Russell said so, without actually realizing it.

Jericho

Dec21

I am responsible for my own behavior.

I am accountable to my closest associates and the state for the consequences of my own behavior.

Thus the basis for the formation of any and all social contracts begins.  Systems of morality and ethics derive their moment from “responsibility for” and “accountability to.”

As Soren Kierkigaard famously noted, “life must be understood backwards; but…it must be lived forward.”  Meaning, of course, that we cannot always know if our choice-making will be faulty or if it will be at least reliably benign; we must, therefore, endeavor to execute choices with reliable consequences if we wish to live in a world that has any sensible meaning to all parties involved.  From the consequences of reliable choices, then, we can more quickly discover those choices that aid us in our quest for species survival and, further, aid us in our fruitful evolution.

These are the propositions of a responsible society lead or mislead by responsible men and women.

One can suggest, or maintain, that our society is a responsible one; however such a proposition forces any sane person to conclude that we have been, at least, mislead.  A stronger argument could certainly be made in favor of an irresponsible society, perhaps one that has been systematically mislead for the purpose of keeping us all in an unstable condition of trust between each other and our designated leaders.  One could posit a variety of reasons for our present state of affairs, but one could never label the society in which we presently live a “responsible” society.  And this means that no one in this society can be reliably considered a responsible actor, and, further, no one can be considered reliably accountable to anyone else for any behavior whatsoever.

In short, there is no social contract in an irresponsible society.  How a society becomes irresponsible, whether through well-intentioned misleading or outright fraud, matters not a whit.

The road to complete breakdown in the social compact began with the rejection by the global banking establishment of the government of the United States of America, circa 1800, plus or minus twenty years.  Dictators, no matter how benevolent, are incompatible with governance of the People, by the People and for the People, so the collision between collective government and feudal dictatorship was inevitable and its consequences substantial to the present day.

Feudal dictatorships did not always result in irresponsible societies, nor was the advent of social democracy in the United States the precipitating event that has lead to our present irresponsible condition.  It was, however, the undeclared war between these two systems of governance that has been both cause and effect of irresponsible leadership and our present state of affairs.  War of any kind cannot help but produce irresponsible behavior and consequences for which no accounting is possible or desired.

So why do we have war in the first place?

We have war because its systematic and controlled presence benefits the global banking establishment.  Chaotic, unpredictable war benefits no one, and yet the global banking establishment continues to insist that its systematic and relentless fight against democratic forms of governance will not one day produce a leviathan of chaotic war that must destroy it and, perhaps, every one of us.  However well-intentioned the global banking establishment was or is towards the human species, the line of reasoning that suborns or selects war as a means of eliminating competitive ideologies is counter to natural law and empirical observations in nature.  Pesticides make for stronger, more resilient pests; antibiotics make for stronger, more resistant diseases; as above, so below; hoodwinking a general population into accepting a false system of valuation (e.g., a fiat currency of any kind) does not guarantee that the truth won’t one day reassert itself, one way or another.  Holding a gun to one’s own head and threatening the truth with self destruction has never stopped the truth from allowing either suicide or redemption.  Threatening one’s fellows with homicide or suffering works for a time, but, eventually, meaningful existence will demand the advent of war.  War can be forged to look like many things, but its internecine nature cannot be refined out regardless of the temperature of the fire.  We are either forced by arguments of location and scale to accept our united fate, or we will share the fate of every species whose perceptions do not match the features of their environment.

War either threatened or suborned by a leadership class or conspiracy makes that class or conspiracy responsible for irresponsible outcomes.  De facto, then, our leadership class or conspiracy has yet to be held to account for their irresponsible behavior.  If accountability is not restored in balance with responsibility, no amount of state-sponsored oppression will restore the social contract.  Civilization will become impossible to sustain.

Allow me to be more clear: the current civilization will be thrown into the 13th century virtually overnight.  The results will make us all scream for the more civilized days of “The Terror” during the French Revolution.

We have no choice.  Either we restore accountability to our civilization or we will become the slaves of an increasingly hostile, cruel and despotic leadership class.

Or conspiracy.

We can circle the town seven times in seven days and then seven times in one day before we proceed to raze the city.  But I believe Joshua would have considered what has happened in the world since the felling of the Twin Towers more than a subtle toot on a ram’s horn.