Civilization is the process of harnessing destructive energies for creative ends. War is the process of harnessing creative energy for destructive ends. A leader is a teacher who persuades others to choose civilization over war. An anti-leader is a predator who persuades others to glorify war above civilization. Faced with a choice, your average citizen often chooses someone else’s destruction, and hence, ultimately, his own.
Whatever the creed, there are believers. Wherever believers exist, there is the chance for power of some kind. Whenever power can be scented, predators gather like jackals. That is the human story. What kind of creed? Any at all — religion, politics, ideology, sport, company policy, a book on how to grow petunias… . What of the believers? They crave the idea of a comfort zone, a path already hewn, a promise of future pleasure. Most of all, they fear to be original, and strangely, for the permission to follow, they will suffer any hardship and commit almost any atrocity. What of the predators? They are at all levels of the food chain, some only slightly less enmeshed than the entirely credulous. But in small ways or large, they will break the faith for advantage. At the top of the hierarchy, they are apt to be lifetime hypocrites. Such leaders are certain that public piety and private cynicism is ‘the reality of power’, and despise the candid. By and large, they rule the human world.
This all began with creeds. A creed on growing petunias is less virulent than a creed on eternal salvation. Why? The petunias grow or they don’t grow. Visitors from the dead with an inside story on salvation are not a daily event. Even the rumour of such visits has kept entire religions in business for millenia. For lifetime hypocrites, it is smart to pick a bullet-proof cover. Eternity is the best deal going, when it can turn a profit. Wasn’t it Saint Thomas Aquinas who said, “never trust a man of one book” ?
Managing your body is tougher than managing any business. The competition is out to kill you. Within a few years they will blow you away, whatever you do. Every time you think the operating formula is just right, something breaks, and you have to figure out a whole new mix of rules. When you stop learning new body lore, you start to die. This game ain’t fair.
With the first cooking fire to burn down a grass hut, technology exceeded the human ability to manage it. The balance of technology and wisdom has been precarious ever since. Now technology available to rich states and corporations so far exceeds the understanding of their managers that our survival from day to day can only be considered an accident.
The poet, Rudyard Kipling grasped the terms of this contract over a century ago :
But remember please the Law by which we live,
We are not built to comprehend a lie,
We can neither love nor pity nor forgive.
If you make a slip in handling us you die !
[The Secret of Machines]
Almost everyone admires what they are told to admire, and despises what custom tells them to despise. They believe what they are advised to believe, and doubt what rumour whispers they should doubt. This submission holds regardless of a person’s cleverness or the price of their education. The full weight of every culture, from examinations, to employment prospects, to grandma’s approval is directed at ensuring that the socially approved is seen to be right and good. Democracy’s horrid little secret is that most human beings are paid up subscribers to totalitarian conformity. Heaven help the man or woman who says that the earth is not flat.
The idea that a human spirit is finite in time is extremely unpopular and therefore scarcely believed. Belief is a kind of bed sheet we like to hide under in the dark.
Chasing happiness is like trying to catch leaves falling from a tree on a windy day. Sometimes they touch your face in passing, but it is almost impossible to catch them if you try.
