Look around you. What do you see? Is your world good? Is it evil? Ask yourself, who is guilty? Who is innocent? What are you? Now look at your neighbour. Look at your neighbour! Be brave enough to see yourself; your own reflection cast back at you, each reflected in each. Look where you stand: in a shining city on a hill, in the land of the free and the brave, standing for Liberty and Justice. How true do those words ring for you? When did you bring Liberty? Where did you cause Justice? I stand at the gate of a nation, a nation where power is not invited. I stand at the gate and I look out upon you. And you look back to me. But all I can do is reflect what I see. If you have come to receive, you will go away poor. If you come here to understand, you will leave here lost. For those who have understood, for those who have received, it is time. Returning to your scripture will not save you. Bending to your knees will not please anyone. That time is passed. This time is now. You are the judged. You are the chosen. I am here to break the mirror so you will see on what side you stand. What you see will be your choosing. – Messiah, episode 6, Netflix [my emphasis].
Propaganda ends where dialogue begins. – Jacques Ellul
Introduction
Jesus failed to persuade most of us. What chance do we ordinary mortals have?
Is an incarnation as a human being on Earth a trial on a training ground where, necessarily, incarnated souls have relatively low wisdom? That is why we incarnate; to grow in wisdom. There is no point incarnating on Earth beyond a certain level of wisdom. Does it follow, then, that things will never improve on Earth if those that incarnate are necessarily low-wisdom souls? It’s a mechanical question.
If this metaphor for what earthly existence is fundamentally about is close to true, must Earth only and always be a place where beginner souls are suckered into hellish suffering, until they finally wise up under the pressure of such weary toil?
Or, assuming incarnation is a soul-level, pre-birth choice, is it fair to ask if earthly existence is a sacrifice taken on by the bravest souls? For example, incarnating as Ukrainian or Russian, as Israeli or Palestinian is not something that would attract most. Incarnating into environments of almost insurmountable challenges, which are likely to cause the most terrible human experiences possible, would be a choice to take on great sacrifice, to risk agonies of every kind, in the faint hope it does some good, or that some success is achieved that is positive for All That Is in some way. The potential for soul-growth , this argument suggests, is directly proportional to the degree of suffering risked.
How horrible this sounds! I am writing airily about the slaughter of men, women and children, about terrible wounds, dismemberment, destroyed lives, the bitterest and most belligerent intergroup hatreds. But this is the exact horror that drives me to try to understand.
Going a little deeper, we turn to contemplate free will as a foundational fact of reality. Because I have free will, I can choose to turn my back on God, on Jesus, or, more simply, on love. If every one of us can fail to persuade the other, just as Jesus failed to persuade most with the full wisdom of God at his disposal, what hope for us immature, unwise humans of lowly relative capacities in persuading others that love is the answer?
The evidence around us suggests that it is very hard for humans to commit to love.
Am I on track with such speculation? Or is Materialism the sounder ontology? Are our efforts on Earth no less the result of mechanical processes than the hot air pumped out from the rear side of a refrigerator?
My own ontology is that everything is God, everything is Consciousness. From this I choose to respect the sanctity of free will and so find myself compelled to ask: Is persuasion the right attitude, the right approach, the right starting point for furthering Right Action and the earthly evolution of wisdom? Does persuasion risk a violation of another’s free will? Direct instruction would be worse of course: Can a man’s wisdom evolve at all while other people make all the difficult decisions for him? Isn’t persuasion also an interference, albeit subtler? What of the subtle influences of NLP, behavioural programming, propaganda, bureaucracy, legislation, mass media? How respectful of free will are these processes and entities?
How respectful of and sensitive to free will is ideological extremism, fervent belief, the desire to help others?
Inversely, isn’t taking on the pains of the world – extreme empathy – an act of inverted hubris? It is a grand delusion to think we are somehow morally obligated to save the world, or to absorb its pain in noble co-suffering. Isn’t the most noble undertaking to strengthen (nourish?) your ability to identify and then nurture your humility?
Perhaps this is what Jihad describes.
But how does all this square with protecting the weak? What happens if we don’t even bother? Perhaps these are misleading questions, just as the goal of persuading others is the wrong way to go about dialogue.
“Propaganda ends where dialogue begins.”
I believe a healthier societal vector would be one deeply rooted in robust humility, in the sincere conviction that no one knows, that healthy dialogue – conversation aimed at learning more – is crucial to healthy governance, and that true honour is rooted in the complex and challenging undertaking to become humble. In precisely this vein, respecting free will means not seeking to persuade. Power – in contradistinction to natural authority, which is humble – is the antithesis of such respect, respect being an organic quality that is created and sustained by humility.
This helps us understand why power corrupts. Because power can forestall correction, it can attenuate its dialogue with the rest of reality. True dialogue invites correction. The more power you have, the longer you can forestall unwanted correction: hubris. You end up believing your own propaganda, you end up entangled – invested – in your poor, dialogue-free, propaganda-driven, low-wisdom decisions until it all comes crashing down around your ears. The poor (weak) bear the brunt of this: those who became dependant on and thus addicted to your power. Rulers require ruled just as ruled require rulers.
So, what is the loving, wise response to suffering, victimhood, and power?
If I love x, must I accept all x entails?
If I love the cat, I must accept the agonies of the creatures that suffer on its claws. If I love humanity, I must accept the suffering it is doomed to create in the wake of its low wisdom. If I truly love humanity, in other words, I must honour its free will: its right to act in accordance with its wisdom. I am required to accept the truth of this as graciously as I can.
Is this a callous position, no matter how it is intended?
Love entails acceptance. What we are challenged to accept upon a commitment to love and humility can be truly horrific at times. Obviously, it can be very hard to handle this truth, to pay the price such a commitment exacts.
One way or the other, decisions are investments in the future, and each decision is made with a specific quality of wisdom. Wisdom is something we enrich or degrade by our decisions. Feedback from the quality of our decisions can educate us on the current quality of our wisdom. With dedication and humility, feedback advances our wisdom. So goes the argument I’m borrowing for this article.
To interrupt that decision<->wisdom spiral – which I see as synonymous with evolution –, to puppet or nudge, in other words, a fellow human using your ‘superior’, ‘elite-level’ wisdom, is an interference that dishonours love and risks downstream unravelling of the best-laid plans of mice and men, an unravelling that can, at epochal junctures, become catastrophic. Indeed, the very idea of measuring one person’s wisdom against another’s is a low-wisdom folly, a contradiction, an exercise in futility.
This is my sense of it, a growing awareness that increasingly informs my reactions to my world and my sense of what could be constructive ways of responding to the great suffering and horror that comes to my attention. I experience this continuous process of reassessment as an evolving attempt to understand the pragmatics of love.
I am not against justice, nor am I against atonement. Wrongs happen and must be wisely remedied to the best of our wisdom; societal health depends on it. But enmities embed and compound. Divisions emerge and deepen and are far harder to handle than wrongs committed. Perhaps the most famous division today is that between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’.
As lovers of humanity, is this division, like all divisions, something we are required to accept? Yes, which means “do not hate it”. If our wisdom sees it as a cause of unnecessary suffering, our healthiest response must be to learn deeply why it exists and whether it is avoidable, or how best to handle it. My guess is that such a response is broadly appropriate with all such divisions.
The ‘elites’ are products of their world, just as ‘non-elites’ are products of theirs. Each one of us is an organic expression of our world, where “our world” includes our biology, history, culture, environment, psychology, memories, soul, etc. Indeed, the vague dichotomy I’m using – ‘elite’ versus ‘non-elite’ – is a lazy platitude from my world I use rhetorically, even though it misleads. In other words, what and how I communicate is necessarily determined by my world.
Why is this banal observation important?
Because changing one side of the ‘elite’-‘non-elite’ divide, as perhaps with all others of its like – Russian-Ukrainian, Israeli-Palestinian, etc. – , requires changing the other side. For the ‘elite’ to not be elite-like and to not do elite-like things requires that the ‘non-elite’ no longer be non-elite and no longer do non-elite things. Each is one half of a unified whole; each co-creates the other. This is an unwanted but necessary correlate of enmity itself; enmity requires enemy. Money requires scarcity. These truths are systemic and thus organic.
Necessarily organic expressions of our worlds, lasting change of expression requires lasting change of world. As you zoom in on this truth, it becomes impossible to separate “expression” from “world”. All that “world” is, ultimately, is a dynamic network or web of evolving “expressions”. There isn’t really anything else. This is a different formulation of the truth “There is nothing but God”.
Similarly, then, it becomes impossible to distinguish between ‘elite’ and ‘non-elite’. I’m going to try to tease this into clearer relief via an example: Mike Benz expounding the corruption of democracy in the US, and thus in the West:
What I’m essentially describing is military rule. What’s happened with the rise of the censorship industry is a total inversion of the idea of democracy itself. Democracy draws its legitimacy from the idea that it is rule by consent of the people being ruled. It’s not really being ruled by an overlord because the government is just our will expressed by our consent with the people we vote for.
The whole push after the 2016 election, and after Brexit, and after other social-media-run elections that went the wrong way from what the State Department wanted – like the 2016 Philippines election – was to completely invert everything we described as being the underpinnings of a democratic society, in order to deal with the threat of free speech on the internet. And what they essentially said is: “We need to redefine democracy from being about the will of the voters to being about the sanctity of the democratic institutions.” And who are the democratic institutions? “Oh, it’s us.” It’s the military, it’s NATO, it’s the IMF and the World Bank, it’s the mainstream media, it is the [largely State-Department- or IC-funded] NGOs. It’s essentially all of the elite establishments that were under threat from the rise of domestic populism, [establishments] that declared their own consensus to be the new definition of democracy. If you define democracy as being the strength of democratic institutions rather than a focus on the will of the voters, then what you’re left with is essentially: Democracy is just the consensus-building architecture within the democratic institutions themselves. And from their perspective, that [consensus building] takes a lot of work!
The amount of work these people do… For example, we mentioned the Atlantic Council, which is one of these big coordinating mechanisms of the oil and gas industry in a region, for the finance of the JP Morgans and the Black Rocks in a region, for the NGOs in a region, for the media in a region. All of these need to reach a consensus. And that process takes a lot of time, a lot of work, a lot of negotiation. From their perspective, that’s democracy! Democracy is getting the NGOs to agree with Black Rock to agree with the Wall Street Journal to agree with the community and activist groups who are onboarded with respect to a particular initiative. That is the difficult vote-building process from their perspective. If, at the end of the day, a bunch of populist groups decide that they like a truck driver who’s popular on TikTok more than the carefully constructed consensus of the NATO military brass, well then from their perspective that is now an attack on democracy.
I sympathise with their perspective and appreciate the various processes by which it emerged into being.
Specialisation is now so advanced – the human mind is endlessly restless and inventive, subdivides its prior subdivisions into ever more complicated subdivisions – only highly trained specialists have a remote chance of knowing what they’re doing in their particular niche. One’s specific combination of specialisations flows organically from one’s past decisions, each made with whatever quality of wisdom was available. Over time, we become more and more invested in – rooted to – our specialisations, our situation, and so become dependent on those who have specialisations we do not, just as they may become dependant on ours. Trust in each other gets harder as effective communication about what is going on is undermined by the generalised lack of mutual expert knowledge.
Societies are held together by trust. Trust is hard in highly specialised societies. This is a problem.
As if to replace the trust that once held hunter-gatherer bands and early tribal societies together, money emerged. Money – in the form of market-based price discovery – could be said to automate trust. As such, it holds societies together. But money also corrupts; it is power accumulated. You can accumulate money indefinitely and grow mighty defensive about your hoard. I’d even argue that money corrupts itself: Where does money end and banking begin? Where does banking end and bankers begin? Bankers corrupt banking corrupts money system corrupts everything else. To repeat, money is one of power’s most effective levers.
The fish rots from the head down, they say. But this hardly matters; it is one organism that is as organically rooted in its environment as any other. Shifting to the particular, when we ponder the mutual antipathies between, say, the proletariat and political class, is it really fruitful to hold one side more guilty than the other? Is not each group as enmeshed in The System as the other? Everyone has a responsibility to wisely handle what he/she is, but blaming others, virtue signalling and playing victim are low-wisdom games.
So should we stop specialisation? I don’t think so. That would be like stopping curiosity and inventiveness. If you love the cat, you must accept the agonies of those that suffer on its claws. Excising from humanity that which created specialisation would be to kill humanity, to hate it.
Anecdotally, I’m involved in building grassroots movements and activist companies, an endeavour that entails liaising between a (low) number of likeminded people with a (nonetheless) wide divergence of perspectives. Reaching creative and positive compromise on delicate matters all parties are happy with is a lengthy and energy-intensive process.
When you invest time building such enterprises, you do so because you believe fervently in them, or in something like status, or power, or wealth. They are, then, invariably labours of love of something. When ‘outsiders’ to the process – ‘non-elites’ – threaten one’s fragile progress, say likeminded activists groups who are attracted to the cut of your jib, that influx of new perspectives – aka the addition of larger democratic processes – threatens to break your rhythm and undo all your fine work. What do they know about what we – the ‘elites’ – have achieved! What right to they have to our precious hoard/work/status!
So if we can’t avoid specialisation, might we avoid us-and-them tensions, and thus avoid enmity? Well … yeees … but by learning humility … which is patience … which is wisdom … which is how we learn that avoidance, like oppression and suppression, is futile. The ‘solution’ is patient acceptance that seeks to learn wiser ways through unavoidable tensions and enmity.
There is a deep but banal pragmatics to all this that is as obvious as it is irritating – and now existentially threatening – to a system that simply has no time for it. The Western world is systemically incapable of wanting to embrace the profound value of humility. And yet it is blindingly obvious that what bedevils the ‘elites’ bedevils ‘non-elites’ just the same, at least in essence. The ‘cause’ is how a mix of structural factors in tandem with our value system together determine our cultural relationship with fundamental phenomena like wisdom, love and humility.
If your inner fanatic requires, or even creates one or more bitter enemies by virtue of its nature, these observations might not be what you want to hear. You might be addicted to (invested in) your enmity, your enemies.
Revolution, oppression, resistance, blame, narrative control, democracy, tyranny, are all concepts that belong to all flavours of ‘elite’-versus-‘non-elite’ (us-and-them) divisions, or patternings. These patternings structure us all. If we don’t like the outcome of a particular patterning, we have to change it. This requires profound self-change, in some kind of harmony with each other, with the structuring guidance of some kind of loose-consensus vision regarding why we should take on such an insanely difficult challenge in the first place.
But, sadly, “Netflix and Pizza” is the easier path. Temptation is everywhere. Spies are out to get you. ‘They’ have all the power. It’s all part of The Plan. The MSM is not your friend. Lost in fogs of confusion, tired, cynical, afraid, we will exhaust every easy-looking escape until none are left.
Enmity is the enemy
Love knows no enemy, though hate hates it and fear fears it.
I opened above with “Jesus failed to persuade most of us.” But, in truth, he did not try to persuade at all. He spoke in parables, debated matters of theology and philosophy with the Pharisees, performed miracles and later made the ultimate sacrifice. Through it all, he was clear the choice of interpretation lay entirely with us. What we believe is up to us. (“What you see will be your choosing.”)
I suspect this explicit element of his life, this lived expression of the sanctity of free will, was an epochal departure from what we might term the Old-Testament Way that included vengeance, retribution, a chosen people, and other such elements not wholly appropriate to Jesus’ message, his raison d’être.
In that vein, the chance we have with ourselves and each other is directly proportional to the quality of our humility, of our wisdom. Our human potential to do better, to evolve meaningfully, is directly proportional to how authentically we are not motivated by a desire to persuade. We must be motivated by a truly humble desire to learn. This challenge is precisely the challenge of becoming a truly loving human being.
We need each other’s help in this. This maturation of our humility, of our wisdom, simply cannot happen in splendid isolation. Diversity, then, is as much the cure for, as it is the cause of, what ails us. This is a fundamental paradox of existence. Utopia is dystopia. Escape into idealism can never work as hoped. The world will not listen to us – cannot listen – while we are wild-eyed fanatics speaking hot riddles no one wants to understand. Power monologue is not humble dialogue.
Until we learn how to stop terrifying each other, we will continue to watch on helplessly as we destroy our world, mutually shocked by how ugly and terrifying our enemy has inexplicably become.
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