I feel constrained to state clearly and unequivocally that I believe that simply telling the truth and doing the right thing will produce solutions to the gargantuan social problems that we confront during this period of American history.
I believe that these problems had their genesis in the One Hundred Thousand years the human species languished in a ‘state of nature,’ a period during which human beings embraced the wholly irrational ways of thinking that were required for survival in that milieu that produced such powerful habits that they remain with us, veritable shackles of determinism, enduring and immutable up to contemporary times; in fact the major obstacle to our divesting our minds of these shackles is the fact that they are buried in the subconscious compartment of the human psyche and therefore cannot be rationalized or mediated by our higher mental processes.
I believe, based on my own personal experiences, that simply telling the truth can overcome all these impediments and strike from our minds the shackles of determinism; and, precipitate the development of members of our species into rational, moral and civilized beings with capacities for action mediated by intelligence and limited by the dictates of conscience.
What produced this line of reasoning was the conclusion of a colleague at work who described my essays attempting to communicate this hypothesis as political.
The truth is that I did spend some ten years of my life as an aspiring politician and trade union activist in Jamaica, the land of my birth; but this experience ignited in me a healthy aversion to politics, and an intense animus towards all politicians of whatever ideology, persuasion or stripe because I believe that the dictum ‘power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely’ is completely accurate; as a consequence one of the reasons I have not become a citizen of the USA is to ensure that I never again am tempted to enter the political arena for having somehow escaped being corrupted by my first assay into politics I would never voluntarily expose my integrity and fragile morality to the temptations and vicissitudes, the well nigh irresistible temptations and vicissitudes inherent and implicit in the hurly burly of today’s competitive politics.
I have not, nor will I ever support any political party or any politician, I would not accept a job from any politician, and I would not participate in anything in which there was the slightest vestige of political patronage; nor would I become in word or deed one of those porkers with their snouts in the pork barrel.
The situation is that my practice of the discipline of truth has exposed to me things that will not, cannot work; and, without reducing my independence in any way I have attempted to expose the most damaging and destructive policies and conditions that I have become sensible of.
For example, while attending the central campus of the Broward Community College during the decade of the Nineties, I became aware by direct observation that certain Instructors were helping students to cheat by revealing the answers to examinations before that evaluation; and, was made aware that even with this corrupt assistance many students could not attain a passing grade; a situation I did everything in my power to expose, the first exercise in complete futility that I engaged in but by no means the last.
I have always seen these cancers in the American body politic as symptoms of an underlying disease, the failure to simply tell the truth.
What telling the truth does is provide practice in accurately describing the existing reality, the necessary prerequisite to creating adequate workable solutions to social problems.
Our success in solving problems in the physical environment is directly attributable to the fact that in that milieu one plus one is always two, that the square on the hypotenuse of a right angled triangle is always equal to the sum of those on the other sides, that if any of these facts or principles are falsified or disregarded in building a house that house will not only be crooked it will not stand.
In direct contrast to the situation in the social milieu where for the vast majority of human beings ‘beliefs are opportune, they conceal interests,’ where intellects can be lamed by repression and guilt effectively disabling the higher mental processes of individuals, where biases, irrational beliefs, obfuscations, deceits, illusions and outright delusions abound; and become the basis for the spin on circumstances and events that precipitate conflicts like the War on Iraq.
In the physical universe there is an immediate and immutable limitation on propaganda and spin, the loss of function; in the social milieu no such limitation exists - unless that created by the relentless and uncompromising practice of the discipline of truth.
It is this that makes me aware of powerful inhibitions to function in the social milieu; the most palpable such contemporary obstacle is the fact that resuscitation and revitalization of the American economy requires very substantial reductions in government spending which is made impossible by the fact that very significant numbers of functionaries and of the rank and file of BOTH major political parties, very significant numbers of those who form the power bases of both major political parties are employed in local, state or national government; these individuals have thus far been insulated to a significant degree from the loss of jobs, the foreclosures, the hunger, the privation that has been precipitated by decades of overspending of the national budget creating a disconnect; that fiscal discipline urgently required to revitalize the economy would very adversely affect the political hacks and those who shuffle paper and fill out forms, but produce nothing; creating the other disconnect, the alarming disconnect that most of those whose salaries are guaranteed that are not impacted by market forces by the invisible vagaries of supply and demand, produce nothing but a Nine Trillion Dollar National debt that is exponentially growing even as I write.
To save America, to preserve democracy we here today must highly resolve to tell the truth and become capable of seeing through any and every spin, any and every obfuscation, any and every deceit that these our hallowed dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.
I do think Abraham Lincoln will excuse or even support my paraphrasing of his immortal words immemorialzing those who fell at Gettysburg given the clear and present danger this nation faces from the ENEMY WITHIN. And I know as well that I am a professed atheist and I am therefore morally and logically prohibited from using quotes invoking a being whose very existence I question but I do think this situation creates an exception that demands it.
Yes, I hate to report it but I have no reasonable or logical alternative, the US government has become the enemy of the American people, the ENEMY WITHIN, a monumentally inefficient, woefully corrupt, invasively parasitic and arbitrarily tyrannical focus of political hacks and bureaucrats.
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