By Don Robertson, The American Philosopher
3/1/07
While Napoleon I is seen as an important historic figure, during his ascendance and reign, a tumultuous occurrence in the timeline of human endeavor, he actually killed far fewer people than did the influenza epidemic of 1918 in a shorter period of time. And the Napoleon phenomenon produced far less political change and disruption than did the plague of Justinian.
Contrast this bit of history with a recent psychological study done at New York University that determined a diminished sense of moral outrage allows a view that the world is fair and just. Here, we find a common, if significant, verification of the commonly held view of the fatalists. Perhaps we really have no control of our destinies?
I still don't buy these fatalist existentialisms, however.
The NYU study tells us nothing new or unexpected by any keen observer of human nature. It does however; give us insight into our ability to ward off disaster when this notion is beheld in the light of how we prepare for the varied dimensions of human catastrophe. The important thing is what might be the potential for ameliorating any of a myriad of catastrophic phenomena that are always imminent.
Mankind is possibly ascendant, even if there are many who would paint this ascendance in a light that is somewhat the off-color of an ascendant blind ignorance of fatalism. Who is it that cheers, Hooray! For nihilism? Not I.
The NYU study oddly seems to portray a sense of moral outrage as unfortunate. Those subject to moral outrage might consider and contrast the importance of President Bush's imperial ambitions, the numbers he has killed and the Napoleon-like lies and crimes he has openly committed, with the far more threatening hubris of the scientific hegemony leading our culture toward ever increasing danger. While this boy cries "Wolf!" about terrorism, far worse is steadily gaining ground in our society and the world.
The West is no longer capitalist; at least not so much as it is wholly scientific and wholly imperialist. This is what the war on Iraq has demonstrated to the world, the inhumane and immoral human-grinding scientific calculations being made by our imperial power.
Few should doubt virtually everything about the run-up to, and, the conduct of this war on Iraq has been entirely planned and well calculated in advance.
Every player has been a pawn, and every event has been staged for its desired effect. To say the war on Iraq was poorly planned, is to be used by those who planned it exactly as it has happened. The war on Iraq has been five years of blood and gore, but, keep in mind, the Iraqis still hold onto their oil, at least they still do at this very moment.
It is appalling most because, as noted in the first paragraphs here, the real dangers to our humanity are not the sickening Napoleonic control, but the lack of control over our destiny that has been writ so large in the history of humanity.
Big Brother has been there every step of the way dexterously pulling all the strings with great legions of intellectuals determining exactly how the strings should be pulled at every turn of every event. All has been planned well in advance, and with a precision and cold calculation designed to effect changes forty or fifty moves ahead in this game played with the world. But, there is also an unseen, unanticipated and far more dangerous foe.
It is not terrorism. It is the vile pomposity and ignorance of the string-pullers who must realize the gamble they have embarked upon as they grasp for imperial power no less like Napoleon than Napoleon himself.
Reality is just too complex to rule out every eventuality by logic. And the more complex reality is made, reality affected by hidden agendas, hidden rules, hidden moves and most importantly by embarking into uncharted territory, the greater the chance something far more grave than Napoleon will take us all by storm.
I've almost finished reading the H.G. Wells book, The Outline of History. And, as I expected, it has been a page-turner throughout. In it today I find this real beaut:
The permanently effective task before mankind which had to be done before any new and enduring social and political edifice was possible, the task upon which the human intelligence is, with many interruptions and amidst much anger and turmoil, still engaged, was, and is, the task of working out and applying a Science of Property as a basis for freedom and social justice, a Science of Currency to ensure and preserve an efficient economic medium, a Science of Government and Collective Operations whereby in every community men may learn to pursue their common interests in harmony, a Science of World Politics through which the stark waste and cruelty of warfare between races, peoples, and nations may be brought to an end and the common interests of mankind brought under a common control, and, above all, a worldwide System of Education to sustain the will and interest of men in their common human adventure.
For those readers here who have doubted my continued assertions that over time the degradation of the human condition has been increasingly accelerating downward in the mean, you need only consider the frame of mind of this genius, Wells, as he scribed this wonderfully altruist bit of optimism about the future. Wells knew it all, all that was available to him in his era some twenty years after the turn into the last century.
Wells did not have the hindsight we have today, however. And while many may read his words and come to some quick agreement with Wells, that these new sciences are indeed their own vision of some fond Star Trek future, it is a bucket of tripe that doesn't hold a drop of watered down truth.
What Wells describes for us as the path to a bountiful future, is exactly the path threatening the world today, completely. It threatens us with annihilation as never even envisioned by those of Wells' time, with continued degradation, with endless war, and with increasing poverty and calamity far greater than the world had ever faced or imagined before, and, with the ignorance described by NYU psychologists as a desirable diminished sense of moral outrage.
The readers here on TPC are some of the most intelligent and well informed people on the planet. They have not become so absorbed in the world as it is, that they cannot see the world as it could be. I am honored by this company late in my life.
Frequently I get email from readers who are breaking new ground in human understanding, tolerance and compassion. It is with heartfelt commiseration I in turn write to them, sometimes adding a few pointers where to look for a path toward truth and a better future.
Perhaps the most important thing I tell each of them is to be optimistic. Life is good. Don't forsake your time here on our planet to the imperial charades of all these many Napoleons. Make of the world what you will, or you will let them take it, and crush it for their own devices, even as they try and take it all with them to their death.
There have always been those who lived their lives until the end only to be disappointed they did not live to see the end of the world.
And as I have been spreading the moral imperative I have actually had a few individuals tell me, they do not care about the future! This is surely not what Wells envisioned would come of his new scientific hope for humanity. It is however increasingly coming about as desperate nihilism puts the world in a chokehold.
The perspective of Wells is no less startling for a contemporary reader. It describes a better time hoping for an even better world to follow. It has not evolved as such. Wells would be horrified at what his world has become in so short a period of time.
Were Wells to live again today, he would likely revise his words past what even the most radical and incendiary thinkers are thinking today. He might call for armed insurrection designed to scuttle this new world order. Wells certainly would very quickly arrive at the conclusion that GW Bush is a new criminal Napoleon writ far more dangerous than his presumptive historic inspiration.
But, Wells would be mistaken. It is not the man GW Bush or, any man anywhere in the world we must come to grips with. The danger is what was so amply described when written by Wells. It is not just what GW Bush and his handlers are creating, but the potential disaster their imperial dreams bode for worldwide catastrophe. It is their shared ethic of hubris committed against the logic imparted to us by history that is insidious.
It is the Science of Property, it is the Science of Currency, the Science of Government and Collective Operations, the Science of World Politics, and above all it is the System of Education that is being spread the world over that we need fear and bring to heel, if not destroy entirely.
Wells thought these 19th Century conceptual artifacts of the Enlightenment were important. But in our diminished world we see they are not as important as making a world the better place it can be by other means. None of us can be radical enough here. There is simply no historic precedent for such change as is necessary.
Today in the United States there are three-quarters of a million homeless people, or at least these are the figures the government intellectuals conjure up for our consumption. In reality, if we went door to door in the U.S. and asked every individual, "Are you poor, adrift and homeless?" or, simply made the assessment ourselves. We would have an entirely different number.
Worldwide the condition of humanity is far worse than here in the U.S.
We have a prison population that is simply astounding. Are not they poor, adrift and homeless? Drug addiction is so rampant within our society it is epidemic. Are not they poor, adrift and homeless? 7% of the people in this country are here illegally. Are they too not poor, adrift and homeless?
The government's numbers mean nothing other than what they are intended to impart to our perception, calculably released to reduce our moral outrage, so that we might see the world as just. We are again being drubbed by the propaganda of these Napoleons into charging up over the hill to destroy our fellow men for God, country and the future of humanity. But, what future?
While your life and mine may, or, may not seem tolerable, absolutely nothing other than imperialist wars are being considered as a solution to address the acceleration of the decreasing mean of all our existences. And, more importantly, there is an acceleration of the decrease in potential of existence for those who will follow us into this world. The understanding we hold today will be like that of Wells today as it is viewed in the future. We have it all wrong for all the obvious reasons hindsight will provide for the future.
My God people! There is no where on the planet left where you can go and not smell the exhaust fumes of the internal combustion engine! There is no ocean shore upon which you can walk and not smell the excrement of human waste! Are we all blinded by the ubiquitous spin made in an effort to make everyone less morally outraged so they can somehow see the world as just and fight yet another imperialist battle?
If the world is just, it is just a cesspool of our ignorance shunted by a lack of moral outrage.
It seems as if every invention and every innovation made by humanity, all of what Wells thought would help, instead has turned itself around to make our world more perilous, less sustainable and less habitable. This is a far cry from the world Wells envisioned coming for us in his future.
Looking at the perspective of Wells, we should have long since become wary of any promise of better things to come due to the inventions or innovations of humanity.
And in the mean time, we have witnessed an escalation of the ability of the Napoleons of the present to express their freedoms as ours, and to make the world more a place where they entertain themselves creating obscenely grand imperial emperor-ships. Today, our government describes the harsh life of Middle Easterners who must deal with warlords; all the while our own society is rife with warlords large and small who make life intolerable for all of us all the time.
Lying has become a full time course in human conduct. Even more worrisome, this lying is seen as necessary, just like the run-up and the conduct of the war on Iraq. It's now nothing to catch this or that official in business or government lying to us, to the public and to the world. And the NYU study tells all of us, your lives will be better, if you just ignore all the lies, cheating, stealing, buggery, rape, murder and endless war.
Well, thank you NYU!
Our government would have us all believe the most important thing to be concerned with, is that we are working toward keeping America competitive.
What? When competitiveness equates to false-flagged terror designed to get the country behind spending trillions on a war upon the rest of the world to maintain the dominance of American economic imperialism that impoverishes the rest of the world only slightly faster than it impoverishes America?
I'm sorry, but our ethic, as wide spread as it is, betrays our humanity.
The new paradigm requires us to tear down the old, and reconsider what is important.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of the slow processes necessary to control the population of the planet. Were the world to have half its current population, each of us would be twice as well off, as well as it would double our chances for handing a better world onto the future.
The world simply is unfit for current human population levels.
Every other person on the planet today lives in abject poverty. It is not just a question of survival; it is a question of what kind of world we should expect is best for the future of humanity. Is the world better off with five billion people, than it was with half that number? Whichever side of that question one might arrive upon, the question then arises, "Where then, is the cut-off point when we say, Okay, either that is enough, or, enough is enough?"
Some religious leaders would contend it is immoral to plan the birthing potential of humanity. Where would they then draw the line? When the world is up to its eyebrows in shit and shoulder to shoulder in humanity?
Our culture is geared toward continued growth of populations, and of poverty, and as a byproduct, a wholesale depletion of the habitability of our planet.
Is it just me, or is there something wrong with such a picture?
We owe a great debt to the knowledge that comes to us through religious teachings. Were it not for the ancient Babylonian story of Adam and Eve being passed intact into more Western religions, and giving Christendom the notion the world was created on September 21, 4004 BC, the focus of humanity upon how long the world has been in existence might not occupy more than a few intellectual curiosities.
Similarly, the even greater focus upon the religious notion of the end of the world has given modern thinkers the easy comprehension of this otherwise seemingly incomprehensible idea: that the world could end.
In the more refined philosophic analysis, it is not any diminished sense of moral outrage that will divert our paths from the catastrophe the egos that drive imperial powers seemingly want to impale us upon.
It is time to Arrest This President!
3/1/07
While Napoleon I is seen as an important historic figure, during his ascendance and reign, a tumultuous occurrence in the timeline of human endeavor, he actually killed far fewer people than did the influenza epidemic of 1918 in a shorter period of time. And the Napoleon phenomenon produced far less political change and disruption than did the plague of Justinian.
Contrast this bit of history with a recent psychological study done at New York University that determined a diminished sense of moral outrage allows a view that the world is fair and just. Here, we find a common, if significant, verification of the commonly held view of the fatalists. Perhaps we really have no control of our destinies?
I still don't buy these fatalist existentialisms, however.
The NYU study tells us nothing new or unexpected by any keen observer of human nature. It does however; give us insight into our ability to ward off disaster when this notion is beheld in the light of how we prepare for the varied dimensions of human catastrophe. The important thing is what might be the potential for ameliorating any of a myriad of catastrophic phenomena that are always imminent.
Mankind is possibly ascendant, even if there are many who would paint this ascendance in a light that is somewhat the off-color of an ascendant blind ignorance of fatalism. Who is it that cheers, Hooray! For nihilism? Not I.
The NYU study oddly seems to portray a sense of moral outrage as unfortunate. Those subject to moral outrage might consider and contrast the importance of President Bush's imperial ambitions, the numbers he has killed and the Napoleon-like lies and crimes he has openly committed, with the far more threatening hubris of the scientific hegemony leading our culture toward ever increasing danger. While this boy cries "Wolf!" about terrorism, far worse is steadily gaining ground in our society and the world.
The West is no longer capitalist; at least not so much as it is wholly scientific and wholly imperialist. This is what the war on Iraq has demonstrated to the world, the inhumane and immoral human-grinding scientific calculations being made by our imperial power.
Few should doubt virtually everything about the run-up to, and, the conduct of this war on Iraq has been entirely planned and well calculated in advance.
Every player has been a pawn, and every event has been staged for its desired effect. To say the war on Iraq was poorly planned, is to be used by those who planned it exactly as it has happened. The war on Iraq has been five years of blood and gore, but, keep in mind, the Iraqis still hold onto their oil, at least they still do at this very moment.
It is appalling most because, as noted in the first paragraphs here, the real dangers to our humanity are not the sickening Napoleonic control, but the lack of control over our destiny that has been writ so large in the history of humanity.
Big Brother has been there every step of the way dexterously pulling all the strings with great legions of intellectuals determining exactly how the strings should be pulled at every turn of every event. All has been planned well in advance, and with a precision and cold calculation designed to effect changes forty or fifty moves ahead in this game played with the world. But, there is also an unseen, unanticipated and far more dangerous foe.
It is not terrorism. It is the vile pomposity and ignorance of the string-pullers who must realize the gamble they have embarked upon as they grasp for imperial power no less like Napoleon than Napoleon himself.
Reality is just too complex to rule out every eventuality by logic. And the more complex reality is made, reality affected by hidden agendas, hidden rules, hidden moves and most importantly by embarking into uncharted territory, the greater the chance something far more grave than Napoleon will take us all by storm.
I've almost finished reading the H.G. Wells book, The Outline of History. And, as I expected, it has been a page-turner throughout. In it today I find this real beaut:
The permanently effective task before mankind which had to be done before any new and enduring social and political edifice was possible, the task upon which the human intelligence is, with many interruptions and amidst much anger and turmoil, still engaged, was, and is, the task of working out and applying a Science of Property as a basis for freedom and social justice, a Science of Currency to ensure and preserve an efficient economic medium, a Science of Government and Collective Operations whereby in every community men may learn to pursue their common interests in harmony, a Science of World Politics through which the stark waste and cruelty of warfare between races, peoples, and nations may be brought to an end and the common interests of mankind brought under a common control, and, above all, a worldwide System of Education to sustain the will and interest of men in their common human adventure.
For those readers here who have doubted my continued assertions that over time the degradation of the human condition has been increasingly accelerating downward in the mean, you need only consider the frame of mind of this genius, Wells, as he scribed this wonderfully altruist bit of optimism about the future. Wells knew it all, all that was available to him in his era some twenty years after the turn into the last century.
Wells did not have the hindsight we have today, however. And while many may read his words and come to some quick agreement with Wells, that these new sciences are indeed their own vision of some fond Star Trek future, it is a bucket of tripe that doesn't hold a drop of watered down truth.
What Wells describes for us as the path to a bountiful future, is exactly the path threatening the world today, completely. It threatens us with annihilation as never even envisioned by those of Wells' time, with continued degradation, with endless war, and with increasing poverty and calamity far greater than the world had ever faced or imagined before, and, with the ignorance described by NYU psychologists as a desirable diminished sense of moral outrage.
The readers here on TPC are some of the most intelligent and well informed people on the planet. They have not become so absorbed in the world as it is, that they cannot see the world as it could be. I am honored by this company late in my life.
Frequently I get email from readers who are breaking new ground in human understanding, tolerance and compassion. It is with heartfelt commiseration I in turn write to them, sometimes adding a few pointers where to look for a path toward truth and a better future.
Perhaps the most important thing I tell each of them is to be optimistic. Life is good. Don't forsake your time here on our planet to the imperial charades of all these many Napoleons. Make of the world what you will, or you will let them take it, and crush it for their own devices, even as they try and take it all with them to their death.
There have always been those who lived their lives until the end only to be disappointed they did not live to see the end of the world.
And as I have been spreading the moral imperative I have actually had a few individuals tell me, they do not care about the future! This is surely not what Wells envisioned would come of his new scientific hope for humanity. It is however increasingly coming about as desperate nihilism puts the world in a chokehold.
The perspective of Wells is no less startling for a contemporary reader. It describes a better time hoping for an even better world to follow. It has not evolved as such. Wells would be horrified at what his world has become in so short a period of time.
Were Wells to live again today, he would likely revise his words past what even the most radical and incendiary thinkers are thinking today. He might call for armed insurrection designed to scuttle this new world order. Wells certainly would very quickly arrive at the conclusion that GW Bush is a new criminal Napoleon writ far more dangerous than his presumptive historic inspiration.
But, Wells would be mistaken. It is not the man GW Bush or, any man anywhere in the world we must come to grips with. The danger is what was so amply described when written by Wells. It is not just what GW Bush and his handlers are creating, but the potential disaster their imperial dreams bode for worldwide catastrophe. It is their shared ethic of hubris committed against the logic imparted to us by history that is insidious.
It is the Science of Property, it is the Science of Currency, the Science of Government and Collective Operations, the Science of World Politics, and above all it is the System of Education that is being spread the world over that we need fear and bring to heel, if not destroy entirely.
Wells thought these 19th Century conceptual artifacts of the Enlightenment were important. But in our diminished world we see they are not as important as making a world the better place it can be by other means. None of us can be radical enough here. There is simply no historic precedent for such change as is necessary.
Today in the United States there are three-quarters of a million homeless people, or at least these are the figures the government intellectuals conjure up for our consumption. In reality, if we went door to door in the U.S. and asked every individual, "Are you poor, adrift and homeless?" or, simply made the assessment ourselves. We would have an entirely different number.
Worldwide the condition of humanity is far worse than here in the U.S.
We have a prison population that is simply astounding. Are not they poor, adrift and homeless? Drug addiction is so rampant within our society it is epidemic. Are not they poor, adrift and homeless? 7% of the people in this country are here illegally. Are they too not poor, adrift and homeless?
The government's numbers mean nothing other than what they are intended to impart to our perception, calculably released to reduce our moral outrage, so that we might see the world as just. We are again being drubbed by the propaganda of these Napoleons into charging up over the hill to destroy our fellow men for God, country and the future of humanity. But, what future?
While your life and mine may, or, may not seem tolerable, absolutely nothing other than imperialist wars are being considered as a solution to address the acceleration of the decreasing mean of all our existences. And, more importantly, there is an acceleration of the decrease in potential of existence for those who will follow us into this world. The understanding we hold today will be like that of Wells today as it is viewed in the future. We have it all wrong for all the obvious reasons hindsight will provide for the future.
My God people! There is no where on the planet left where you can go and not smell the exhaust fumes of the internal combustion engine! There is no ocean shore upon which you can walk and not smell the excrement of human waste! Are we all blinded by the ubiquitous spin made in an effort to make everyone less morally outraged so they can somehow see the world as just and fight yet another imperialist battle?
If the world is just, it is just a cesspool of our ignorance shunted by a lack of moral outrage.
It seems as if every invention and every innovation made by humanity, all of what Wells thought would help, instead has turned itself around to make our world more perilous, less sustainable and less habitable. This is a far cry from the world Wells envisioned coming for us in his future.
Looking at the perspective of Wells, we should have long since become wary of any promise of better things to come due to the inventions or innovations of humanity.
And in the mean time, we have witnessed an escalation of the ability of the Napoleons of the present to express their freedoms as ours, and to make the world more a place where they entertain themselves creating obscenely grand imperial emperor-ships. Today, our government describes the harsh life of Middle Easterners who must deal with warlords; all the while our own society is rife with warlords large and small who make life intolerable for all of us all the time.
Lying has become a full time course in human conduct. Even more worrisome, this lying is seen as necessary, just like the run-up and the conduct of the war on Iraq. It's now nothing to catch this or that official in business or government lying to us, to the public and to the world. And the NYU study tells all of us, your lives will be better, if you just ignore all the lies, cheating, stealing, buggery, rape, murder and endless war.
Well, thank you NYU!
Our government would have us all believe the most important thing to be concerned with, is that we are working toward keeping America competitive.
What? When competitiveness equates to false-flagged terror designed to get the country behind spending trillions on a war upon the rest of the world to maintain the dominance of American economic imperialism that impoverishes the rest of the world only slightly faster than it impoverishes America?
I'm sorry, but our ethic, as wide spread as it is, betrays our humanity.
The new paradigm requires us to tear down the old, and reconsider what is important.
I cannot emphasize enough the importance of the slow processes necessary to control the population of the planet. Were the world to have half its current population, each of us would be twice as well off, as well as it would double our chances for handing a better world onto the future.
The world simply is unfit for current human population levels.
Every other person on the planet today lives in abject poverty. It is not just a question of survival; it is a question of what kind of world we should expect is best for the future of humanity. Is the world better off with five billion people, than it was with half that number? Whichever side of that question one might arrive upon, the question then arises, "Where then, is the cut-off point when we say, Okay, either that is enough, or, enough is enough?"
Some religious leaders would contend it is immoral to plan the birthing potential of humanity. Where would they then draw the line? When the world is up to its eyebrows in shit and shoulder to shoulder in humanity?
Our culture is geared toward continued growth of populations, and of poverty, and as a byproduct, a wholesale depletion of the habitability of our planet.
Is it just me, or is there something wrong with such a picture?
We owe a great debt to the knowledge that comes to us through religious teachings. Were it not for the ancient Babylonian story of Adam and Eve being passed intact into more Western religions, and giving Christendom the notion the world was created on September 21, 4004 BC, the focus of humanity upon how long the world has been in existence might not occupy more than a few intellectual curiosities.
Similarly, the even greater focus upon the religious notion of the end of the world has given modern thinkers the easy comprehension of this otherwise seemingly incomprehensible idea: that the world could end.
In the more refined philosophic analysis, it is not any diminished sense of moral outrage that will divert our paths from the catastrophe the egos that drive imperial powers seemingly want to impale us upon.
It is time to Arrest This President!
1 comments:
Arrest This President!
Agreed! Perhaps a triple whammy to send a clear message .. Bush, Blair and Olmert. Send them on a Rendition holiday and torture them most vilely until the rats squeal on their nest mates.
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