A PEOPLE IN A STATE OF DENIAL!

A colleague at work said something recently that started me thinking and recollecting one of the very positive consequences and the opportunity for redemption that my migration, my forced by circumstances immigration to the United States of America, represented.

He said that the American people, if they could be convinced that this were necessary, could be a very potent force for change on Planet Earth, they could be the most potent force for change on this gigantic ball of dirt that we all share.

He was right, and he reminded me that I had reached a similar conclusion twenty two years ago as, heartbroken and bereft, I confronted the sere reality that soon I must leave my beautiful island in the sun, that soon I would no longer awaken to the stately, majestic presence of the Blue Mountains, the green blue ramparts that had been the backdrop for my existence for most of my adult life; and, was consoled by that fact, that if the ideology I was straining with all my intellectual might to develop became popular in the USA, it would have a much greater impact on human affairs than it ever could if it were embraced by the comparatively miniscule population of Jamaica.

Eight years before that realization, in 1976, I had decided that I had no alternative but to dedicate my life to creating ideas that would explain and promote the efficient functioning of modern democratic free labor societies with access to sophisticated burgeoning technologies; I determined that I would spend the rest of my life in the quest for ideas that were adequate to the existing social reality; that I must, if my existence were to have any meaning, attempt to create a world view that could contribute to achieving victory in the war on poverty, that could be the ideational basis for peace on earth and goodwill among men, that could create for human beings the possibility of happiness.

This decision was prompted by my witnessing so many examples of man’s inhumanity to man, so many incidents of savage, brutal crimes against the young, against women and the very old in Jamaica that I concluded that I had no alternative but to devote all my energies to finding a way to change the world.

This decision, I must hasten to add, was not prompted by hubris, arrogance or delusions of grandeur; but was driven by the revulsion created by the horrific scenes of violence I witnessed, and, by my boundless naiveté and by my unrealistic and romantic idealism, I had no idea of true nature and the sheer immensity of the task I had set myself, I believed then in the innate goodness of human beings.

I have found the answer, the simple prescription that needs to be applied to human affairs that would restore order; that would stem the rising tide of chaos that had become the norm in many social systems - that human beings should do the right thing.

I discovered that morality is the bridge between fact and function and that telling is the truth is the basis, the touchstone of morality.

I discovered that in deciding on any course of action, individuals whether they be presidents, prime ministers, or, ordinary men and women, all these individuals confront a fundamental choice between what they wanted, what would be good for them personally, and what would support function; and, that the vast majority of human beings were incapable of making the right choice, they were systemically incapable of a rational appreciation of facts, and, as a consequence they perennially adopted a selfish self centered self interested course of action, one that abstracted from the facts and contributed to the rising tide of chaos that seems likely to completely submerge the legitimate hopes and aspirations of human beings everywhere.

This is as valid a description of social reality today, as it was three decades ago when I began my journey of discovery, if one takes into consideration that the most urgent problem facing the human race is global warming, that if we continue burning fossil fuels at the rate to which we have become accustomed, the ice caps at both poles on Planet Earth will continue to melt rapidly and this will eventually result in the flooding of coastal areas and submerge major metropolitan centers, it will have the consequence in the not too distant future of tourists viewing the Statue of Liberty through the porthole of a submarine.

This is a more urgent problem than war, poverty or hunger, social diseases that have scourged and bedeviled humanity since the beginning of time, simply because there is a time limit, a finite period during which we must take action to reverse the effects of burning fossil fuels on the atmosphere - yet as we rapidly approach mid term elections this problem is on the back burner far behind issues like terrorism, immigration, the war in Iraq, the provision of health care, etc.

I am diametrically opposed to politics driven by the results of opinion polls but in the results of recent polls I perceive a glimmer of hope that humanity may, even at this late hour, avoid the tragedy that threatens the progress, even the very existence of our race.

The widespread disillusionment that these polls indicate with regards to the performance of all American political institutions, of the Congress, of the President, of both of the major political parties; that has prompted voices in the media to state that government in the USA is broken, creates the hope that Americans will belatedly consider my hypothesis that suggests that there is a much more fundamental cause for these abject failures, for the palpable incapacity to confront and resolve social and political problems.

Over the past five decades thousands of the best educated and most competent human beings in the USA have been elected and served in both Houses of Congress, and, as Presidents; but all have failed to chart a course to peace and prosperity, should not these failures by those we have concluded by voting for them to be the best among us, tell us something?

It should tell us that it is human culture that has become dysfunctional.

It is the unconscious and conscious premises for thinking and action that shapes the social system, which creates and perpetuates the status quo that is failing us.

We must accept that all our political leaders for the past five decades, had the desire to solve the social problems that cause existence to be abject misery, a living death for millions of human beings on every continent; if it were possible to create a matrix in which political leaders could fulfill the promises made during the silly season that precede elections is it not clear that this would have happened, that some politician would have found the recipe for successful government?

No one has, not a Kennedy, or a Nixon, or a Carter, or a Ginrich, all have contributed in varying degrees to the massive national debt, the low levels of productivity, the dysfunctional family life, the decline in the quality of education, the ever rising tide of poverty, crime and drug abuse; no politician has found a means to stem the rising tide of chaos in American society; is it not clear that there is a massive obstacle to achieving these goals?

Why is our culture failing us - because for all the millennia of human history, it was functional because of one very crucial component that is missing today, that is severely restricted today; we have limited the degree and extent to which coercion, in any form, can be applied to citizens.

That has been the unnoticed and unheralded effect of attempts to create democracies, it has resulted in limiting the application of coercion - without developing an alternative means of motivating the patterns of behavior essential for societal order, function and progress.

We have removed corporal punishment from Public Schools, and, oblivious and unaware sowed the wind; and are now reaping the whirlwind of chaos and disorder in education.

We have become the dropout nation, unable to educate our young to the attitudes and aptitudes which would cause them to be well adjusted, functioning adults capable of making significant and meaningful contributions to society; we witness in horror and disbelief students conspiring, hatching and implementing plots to kill their teachers and their fellow students.

We have extinguished to a very significant degree, coercion from the workplace and become heirs to low levels of production and productivity; to appreciate the truth of this observation we might cast our minds back two centuries, to those halcyon days when human beings were driven by whips to produce the cotton that caused the South to be described by a fictional character as ‘a symmetry to perfection.’

What is the difference between the Chinese economy and the American economy? Why has one economy achieved growth rates of upwards of ten per cent consistently for the past decade, while the other struggles to achieve growth rates of five per cent?

The difference is the level of coercion that is permissible in China and that which is now acceptable in the USA.

I am bringing my readers closer and closer to the crux of the problem, which is not low levels of motivation, but that we are blind to this lack.

To apply coercion, for human being to use force on other human beings, they had to find a way to be oblivious of what they were doing, and this is the problem, an area of experience to which the vast majority of us, cannot apply our higher mental processes.

We became habituated to using coercion in all our social relations during the not less than half a million years when small tribes of human beings subsisted by hunting and gathering, when the human race existed in a ‘state of nature,’ predators competing with gigantic denizens who were physically much better adapted to harvesting the existing energy resources.

We emerged victorious in that competition, because we could learn, but at a terrible cost, we became habituated to relying on coercion in our relations with the other, and when we discovered agriculture and transcended the limitations on our numbers imposed by that mode of predatory existence, the civilizations that we built relied on coercion and Absolutism became the enduring political institution.

Democracy, and every other world view constructed by man has failed to break the habits of predation learned at the beginning of the human story, and these have become little more than window dressing that obscures the sere, brutal, uncivilized reality of human societies despite burgeoning technologies created by sophisticated scientific establishments - but which continue to dominated by the roles of territorial predator and prey.

In the physical environment the flow of human creativity unimpeded and uninhibited by repression has produced great and very efficient machines and artifacts - including weapons of mass destruction that threaten to destroy human civilizations - unless we can learn to apply positive reinforcements and create cooperative societies to replace the competition, unending conflict, poverty and hunger that are the inevitable consequence of coercion based culture.

None of the events that have unfolded subsequent to 911 have been surprising to me, in fact I can document that I have accurately predicted the sequence of events that flowed out of that tragedy; that I have constructed more rational and functional responses that have been ignored as humanity makes its mad rush towards destruction, like lemmings, acting instinctively and emotionally instead of intelligently.

And the source of these predictions and insights have not been magical or miraculous, they have proceeded from the facts, from my ability to appreciate and identify the relevant facts and marshal these facts to create solutions that would produce function.

Perhaps my error has been to cloak these facts and the prescriptions they have produced in the sensationalism and the politics of division that taints the makes impossible a valid and meaningful dialectic.

I have stated that if there were a Richter scale for fools in whom a complete idiot would score one hundred points then President Bush would score a hundred and fifty points.

It is so very difficult to remain silent and not communicate that there is someone he has not fooled, someone he has never bamboozled.

He is now attempting to create the illusion of victory to save the Republican majority in both Houses of Congress.

Even as the death toll climbs in Iraq, he has the effrontery and audacity to attempt to create the appearance, just the appearance mind you, that victory can be snatched from the jaws of ever more certain defeat.

It is very difficult to contain my outrage and righteous indignation as I confront a poor fool who has access to so many masters of illusion and delusion, like Karl Rove, who have had such great, unqualified success foisting gigantic frauds on the American people that they anticipate no end to this charade of complete incompetence and interminable despair.

So they have concocted a program to replace Operation Together Push and the numerous failed operations over too many years of failed strategies - but they will not reveal the new tactic until after the election.

They have so much contempt for those Americans who have supported them long after it became palpably obvious that they were completely incompetent idiots that they think it is enough to inflict on voters a blitzkrieg of Presidential television appearances, combine these with the empty promise of a new approach and believe this will be enough to save their political futures - with the wonderful added fillip and incentive of a report by a bipartisan team headed by former Secretary of State James Baker which again will be published, dare I say it, after the election.

As I said from the beginning, when it could have made a difference, this war is an excise in futility; it was completely apparent then, to anyone whose intellect was not lamed by repression that it would result in a civil war with American troops trapped in the middle of this conflict, attacked and besieged on all sides by both Sunni and Shia forces not to mention Al Queda fighters attracted to vulnerable Allied Forces like scavengers to a rotting corpse.

There could be no other outcome to this naked act of aggression, in which the justifications that prompted it were wholly and completely contrived, containing no more than grains of truth; in which while it was being planned the counsel and advice of the professional soldiers was
scorned, treated with utter contempt and ignored; in which the lessons, the hard lessons of recent history had no impact whatsoever.

What is happening in Iraq is very similar to the unfolding of events in the Balkan States when Soviet power was withdrawn, that cauldron of ethnic and religious differences promptly boiled over precipitating horrific crimes as racial cleansing proceeded apace; what is happening in Iraq should not be compared to the debacle in Vietnam, but more accurately to the events in Bosnia and the other satellite States that existed behind the Iron Curtain before it was precipitately and suddenly dismantled.

This war is lost, it is irretrievably and irrevocably lost, and the leaders of the Democratic Party should have the courage and gumption to educate the American people to this inescapable and irreducible reality - if they were not also playing politics, if they not also trapped in traditional, futile continuum of competition which always has resulted in irreparable damage to the common good.

But the time for such indulgencies are long past, the time for mental masturbation no matter how enjoyable, is long past, it is time for human beings to come to the realization that coercion based culture creates personalities that all are to some degree repressed, that all human beings suffer from this malady that lames their intellects; and the outcome of a ever rising tide of anomie and chaos, in the vast majority of societies which have had the temerity to attempt to limit the degree of coercion that can be applied to citizens, proves this hypothesis beyond the shadow of a reasonable doubt.

It is time for human beings in the democracies to realize that romantic and visionary ideals have, for several centuries, been used to obscure and obfuscate the enduring reality of Absolutism, in the USA and wherever else human beings have dreamed and struggled hopelessly in the futile quest to create governments of the people, by the people, for the people.

This election will be as meaningless as all the others that have preceded it have been, its only result will be a sterile exchange of elites, it will transport to power ostensibly and superficially different personalities equally incapable of confronting and resolving the urgent problems that confront and challenge humanity - unless human beings become aware of the intrinsic value of the truth, and the invidious damage that can be done by engaging in lies and falsehoods, that telling the truth shall set us free.

I was as blind, as intellectually lamed as the rest of the human race, and for the same reason; until while wallowing in a deep pit of depression occasioned by the imminent loss of my beloved children, I determined to tell the truth whatever the consequences for the rest of my life.

I donned the discipline of truth like a hair shirt in an attempt to expiate the massive burden of guilt I carried because I believed that my contribution to the destruction of my family had been the numerous affairs and infidelities I had engaged in, these indiscretions facilitated by numerous lies and deceits.

The first insight produced by the practice of the discipline of truth was my belated appreciation of the absolute folly of engaging in affairs with younger women while sexually neglecting my wife, the mother of my beloved children; I bemoaned the irresponsibility and stupidity that prompted me to make the jest in her presence that I intended to trade her in for a later and more attractive model of femininity.

Every insight stripped from my consciousness, layer by agonizing layer the illusions, delusions, myths and irrational beliefs to which I had been conditioned while growing up in a backwater, an outpost of western civilization - until at last I saw the world as it was, and myself as I was; that I was incapable of playing any other social role but that of territorial predator or prey.

The last component of my education, a process that has lasted for three decades, was when I voluntarily decided to divest myself of all my material possessions, it was then I realized what it meant to be a territorial predator, the critical importance of these possessions to my existence, and how separating myself from these things precipitated my final emancipation.

I take no joy whatsoever in attempting to communicate to human beings that their higher mental processes are lamed by repression, that their judgments are faulty resulting in the chaos, the rising tide of chaos that threatens to overwhelm us; if I had known thirty years ago that the cause I was dedicating my life to was to attempt to educate and strain to construct the means to demonstrate to human beings the destructive, balefully malefic consequences of their neurotic behavior even my idealism and boundless naiveté would have quailed from this monumental task, this exercise in futility.

I have stumbled and bungled on to a treasure of inestimable value to the human race, the means to create a future for humanity, a viable alternative to endless conflict, misery and suffering as we repeat the past over, and over, and over again.

I have discerned the fundamental dichotomy, the ultimate paradox, the merciless and consummate irony implicit in the human condition, that the capacity to learn caused human being to become the dominant race on Planet Earth; that that capacity also created a thus far unbreakable habit of reliance on coercion; that reliance on coercion determined the nature of human culture; that liberty and freedom is impossible until we break the habit of relying on coercion and become capable of applying positive reinforcements in our relations with all other beings with whom we interact.

The evidence suggests that I am the sole repository of this knowledge, that I am the sole guardian of a world view that would create a future for my race, of a body of ideas that I have been trying unsuccessfully to communicate for the past twenty five years.

During that period I have not only become a voice of peace, but because I suffered and perenially experienced poverty, because on at least three separate and discrete occasions I have been separated from all that has been of economic, social or emotional value in my life, I have become the voice of the wretched of this earth, those who experience most keenly and intensely the conflict, misery and suffering that is the inevitable consequence for the majority whom live in social systems shaped and perpetuated by coercion based culture.

It is my dearest hope that one sweet day I will awake released from this burden, this magnificent obsession that has consumed my life.

It is my dearest, my most cherished ambition that one sweet day I will again have some semblance of security, that one sweet day I will not have to guard my morality and honor so carefully, that one sweet day I will not have to so carefully hone my capacity for truth which I am always so desperately afraid I will compromise and so limit or destroy my access to the insight and ideas that create the possibility of happiness for my race.

I hope that one sweet day I will communicate the sere reality of human existence to even one other individual, that someone will see that from the beginning of the journey up the steep incline towards civilization, coercion has been the driving force that created function, that this fact has created a reality that human beings burdened with consciences could not confront; that for eons there was no alternative to coercion and men and women were consigned to the necessary and functional compromise of consigning knowledge of uncivilized, brutal acts to the unconscious and developing rituals and ceremonies to make the burden of guilt they accumulated while they did this, bearable; that there is now the possibility of adopting positive reinforcements as the means relied on to motivate the other and for the human race to transcend the ‘state of nature’ perennially created and recreated by the unwitting, oblivious and unaware agents of coercion based culture.

More and more evidence of the palpable incapacity of governments, of social institutions, of ordinary men and women to achieve function without coercion is obviously meaningless, since this makes no impact whatsoever.

Demonstrating the superiority of a perspective honed by the practice of the discipline of truth has had the effect of convincing me that there is a mechanism, which I have quite aptly named the Cassandra Syndrome, that causes most human beings to totally reject anything even remotely resembling the truth and completely embrace with all their selfish, avaricious little hearts frauds as palpable and disengenuous as the Swift Boat Ads.

Asking human beings to consider the motivating factor on which they rely only produces blank looks of incomprehension, but at this point I am stuck with this exercise in futility, because it is the only way I can think of to avoid the catastrophes and calamities ahead, and contribute to creating a future for the human race.

I challenge every human being to follow the trail I have blazed with my endurance and boundless capacity to be undaunted and undefeated by hunger, poverty and suffering; I challenge every human being to tell the truth until the thus far impenetrable, impermeable cocoon of predation is dissolved and individually ordinary men and women achieve the metamorphosis that will allow them to don the raiment’s of civility and liberty, and become the beautiful, gentle, emancipated butterfly that should be the ultimate goal of every human being.

This election is not about Candidate Harold Ford’s mother or Candidate Bob Corker’s father, nor is it about any of the petty, meaningless squabbles and vile, low, acrimonious bickering between Republicans and Democrats that is now occurring across the length and breadth of this great nation, over just who should control the pork barrel for the next four years; it could be about the future of humanity - if we dare to conceive it in this fashion.

It is time for us to gird up the lions of our will and exert to the fullest extent the sinews of our courage to produce the ultimate effort to change, and create a future for our race to replace the past that we repeat over, and over, and over again.

I cry FREEDOM, and hope with all my heart, that everyone will hear my cry, that it will echo, reecho and loudly resound in the hearts of every human being, everywhere, that it will galvanize a crescendo of voices crying out for simple justice and equity, a undeniable and transcendent chorus towards peace, prosperity and cooperation.

The proposition that I am trying to have Americans consider is really very simple, yet on this depends the future of the human race.

Will a bare majority of Americans continue to use their intelligence to create justifications for creating other human beings as prey, or, will they use this aptitude to address and attempt to resolve the urgent, very dangerous problems that we confront?


Copyright Retained, All Rights Reserved


William E. Virtue
3222 Airways Blvd. # 312
Memphis TN. 38116

Ph :( 901-322-3800)