"People willing to trade their freedom for temporary security deserve neither and will lose both."

What was begun with the Patriot Act has continued and escalated disturbingly. We are the frogs in gradually boiling water, and we have been played. The middle east was a manufactured excuse. Whether 9/11 was allowed to happen or if it was a genuine attack is irrelevant. If it hadn't happened the powers that be would have found another excuse.

In the wake of the ending of the cold war, the ruling classes were terrified of what the people might do without an ominous foreign threat hanging over their heads daily. A decade of peace, prosperity and liberty was as long as they were willing to wait. The taste of power given to them by accident during the cold war, once awoken, has been unstoppable ever since.

The question for those with the greatest power in this world is not "What should we do?" but "What can we do?". They are as children with toys, and they have developed the most advanced toys the world has ever seen. Can we be surprised that they cannot resist the temptation to use them?

The world has thought ever since its invention that nuclear weapons are the greatest, most terrifying threat that could ever be. The father of the bomb, J. Robert Oppenheimer, found the only words appropriate upon witnessing the detonation of the first nuclear weapon, from the Bhagavad Gita.

"Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

At that time it was unthinkable for there to be a power greater than that of the bomb. In its advent we were granted the power to destroy entire planets. What power could be greater? What power more fearsome?

And fear is precisely what it birthed. The atmosphere of perpetual doom in the days of the cold war was palpable, such that governments had to falsely normalize it, consoling us that we could manage this terrible, terrible threat, even issuing bomb drills like fire drills, as if a "duck and cover" order could protect anyone from a nuclear blast.

The historically unmatched immensity of the nuclear threat created an unparalleled chance to perpetuate fear, and by way of fear, control. In dropping the atomic bombs upon Japan, President Truman, by no intention of his own, perfectly destroyed the legacy of his predecessor, who so memorably charged the American public with a duty to ever fight against their baser impulse toward fear.

For the greatest, most terrifying threat to the human race is not the nuclear bomb, but as Roosevelt so eloquently described, fear itself. It was the unpredicted immensity of fear that the bomb created that granted the ruling powers unprecedented power over the people. But that threat was real and therefore truly terrifying, to even those empowered, so it was a poor weapon to be used against the people.

Only today do we know the worst threat humanity has ever faced. It is not the bomb. It is control. The largest threats have been marginalized, for they must be, since they threaten everyone equally. Instead we prop up false threats, threats that are a kind of Goldilocks "just right". Not too fearsome as to upset the ruling class. Not too miniscule as to seem irrelevant.

The empowered have their toys. They have the resources, they have done the research. Now they exercise their control over us with a surgical precision. Overt oppression is a clumsy weapon. Why take control when you can trick people into giving it to you willingly?

The Roman emperors had a phrase. Panem et circenses. Bread and circuses. So long as the masses have bread and entertainment, you will never have revolution. Under the Soviets, ordinary Russians experienced shortages of everyday necessities regularly. Food would become scarce, or too expensive. But regardless, one thing was always affordable. Vodka.

Whatever their bread, whatever their circuses, it remains the same. We the people will be given whatever we need be given to remain placated. We have our iPhones, our laptops, unlimited access to entertainment of every kind. So we will be good children. We will behave. We will sit in our rooms and not bother Daddy and Mommy with the big decisions they have to make. Why would we? They obviously take such very good care of us.

Power

Power is comforting. Those with food don't have to worry about eating. Those with homes don't have to worry about sleeping. Those with wealth don't have to worry about poverty.

But to have power is not to be without worry. For those without it have their own comforts. Those without food don't have to worry about it being stolen. Those without homes don't have to worry about break-ins. And those without wealth don't have to worry about keeping it.

Herein lies the principal difference between the worries of the empowered and the worries of the disenfranchised: the haves fear loss, while the have-nots fear death.

To have power is to live perpetually in fear of powerlessness. This drives the empowered to ever seek the means to further consolidate their possessions, to drive them into a safer and safer state. This is accomplished in a variety of ways.

If you have a throne, you build a castle. Once the castle is built, you dig a moat. Once the moat is built you install cannons. And on, with larger walls, bigger moats, and more fearsome cannons. But these are all the methods of callous brutish lords, and we have come far today from feudalism. Cleverer lords know that if you weaken your enemies, your defenses will never be tested.

So you send ships loaded with plague rats to your enemy's capital. You rally your forces to destroy your enemy from within, and with such subterfuge that by the time your enemy thinks to suspect you are responsible, he has already been defeated. You teach them that hard work earns its just rewards. You elevate the empowered as heroes to the peasants, that they may worship rather than despise them. You make them human, relatable. You tell the peasants, this too may be you one day. The only thing between you and success is yourself. Work hard, and you will be rewarded.

And the mice in the maze scurry excitedly about the maze in hopes for cheese. Except the maze goes nowhere. It has already all been taken and hoarded away in a secret room where the master rat lords over them all. If only he hadn't been such a very, very clever rat. The mice might have raged out at him. They might have taken a look at the maze walls and thought about chewing through.

They might have noticed the enterprising effort of an inspired young mouse and thought, I shall lend a hand to this certainly worthwhile effort. I too will eat away at these walls. They may be thick but my teeth are sharp and only grow sharper as I chew at my bonds. That fat ugly evil master rat may be big and mean but he is small when measured against the force of me and my brethren. And soon, soon, he will wonder how he ever thought he could keep so much to himself, and leave so little for the rest of us.

If only. But the mice cannot see, for the mice cannot think. The empowered have so well developed their means and methods that we are far sunk into their trap and without the will to escape. Many of us have developed Stockholm syndrome, convincing ourselves that we are better off in a cage, that we would not know what to do with ourselves were we to be freed.

Domesticated, we were born into captivity and have never learned to defend ourselves against the wild. Trained, we love only our trainer and trust all too surely in the intent of his methods. Even when the evidence alarmingly indicates the clear truth, that the methods of the empowered serve only themselves, and our training too, has served only to better them. But no matter. We have our chew toys and the affectionate guiding hand of the leading party's ideology to console our battered spirits. What more could we wish for? What more could we want?

Trust, Respect

Trust is not earned. It is given freely as an act of faith.

Respect is not earned. It is taken boldly as an act of will.

Silence

Respect silence. However loud we can be, everyone has their silence. What you see is not all there is. Assume always that there is a dimension of someone entirely invisible to you that would explain what you don't understand about them. You don't need to see that dimension to give them their due respect. Just recognize that silence and respect it.

Contra Plato I

When people are being introduced to western philosophy, it is the common, if not ubiquitous method, to introduce them first to Plato. One reasons that it is best to begin with the beginning. Since tradition states that western philosophy began with Socrates, we must proceed from that ground which he cultivated. We must hearken back to the origin of western civilization if we are to discover how we have become grounded in the past.

What is a classic but something somehow timeless? There is a small group of undisputed classics in the arts: Homer's Odyssey, Shakespeare's Hamlet, Mozart's Don Giovanni. In philosophy too, there are several works that stand out above the rest: Plato's Republic, Augustine's City of God, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. But is timelessness in the arts the same as timelessness in philosophy?

As long as human beings are human, anything that speaks to the truth of humanity will continue to resonate with the present. When we listen to Hamlet's soliloquy on death, we hear not only his voice, but also the silent outcry of our innermost despair. In just this way, literary and musical classics give voice to the intensely complex truth of the human experience. But do we have any analogous experience in reading the so-called classics of philosophy? If Plato's works are classics, in what way do they speak to the truth of humanity?

Considering Plato's exceptional place in western philosophy, we must ask whether or not it is deserved. Is all of western philosophy really just “a series of footnotes to Plato” (Whitehead)? And if so, how is it that Plato managed to get so much, so right – and so quickly? In the posthumously published book of remarks Culture and Value, Wittgenstein ruminated on this very subject. “I read: 'philosophers are no nearer to the meaning of reality than Plato got...'. What a strange situation. How extraordinary that Plato could have got even as far as he did! Or that we could not get any further! Was it because Plato was so extremely clever?” (p. 15e)

There is a long tradition in western philosophy of universal negation. Progress in philosophy has meant more often than not the denial of one's predecessors' beliefs and the negation of their arguments. If we favor the path the past has taken, we could optimistically call this process “dialectical” in the Hegelian sense. But were we not already predisposed to provide validation for the course of western thought, we might wish to discard the whole lot of it after observing how often it contradicts itself. If we are being objective, we must admit that it might just be prejudice which wishes to preserve and vindicate western philosophy. Indeed, if there is anything timeless in the philosophy of Socrates, it would be his rejection of sophistry and the mindless prattle of rhetoricians concerned more about winning an argument than reaching anything that might be called truth. And while western philosophy began with Socrates, how much more of it follows precisely in the footsteps of the sophists!

So, what disposes us to place Plato especially above the rest? What makes his work so timeless, but that it has been preserved and revered thus far? Are we merely “minding the house”, carrying on with the same tasks that our forebears practiced, trusting that someone along the line had good reason to do as they did? Or is there something in Plato that resonates with us, that presents itself as something quite timeless? If philosophy could speak to the truth of the human condition, does Plato's?

Contra Plato II

The oeuvre of Plato is too massive and his influence too vast to give an adequate assessment of it in these few short pages. And unfortunately, everything that we could have to say in defense of the legacy of Plato would be suspect, since western civilization has been so radically influenced by Plato that there is not even one westerner who can be trusted to speak objectively with his regard. Since Plato's death, entire civilizations have risen and fallen, and along with them, tongues have died, grown, and been reborn. What are we, modern men, but aware of our infinite capacity for self-deception, and implicitly distrustful of the languages that speak our lives?

If a man loses consciousness and his memories, upon awakening does he trust first the woman who claims to be his wife, of whom he has no recollection? Or does he distrust all except himself, and his own capacity for judgment? It is this way with our civilization. We are amnesiacs trying to regain a memory of the past, while still comporting ourselves toward the future. Where do we start? And who can we trust? It is this way with our philosophical heritage – with our capacity to think, and how willing we are to trust our thinking. We are amnesiacs trying to remember how to think. But how are we to relearn thinking except by forgetting what we have always known, that knowledge which has always skewed our thought? Having lost the past, we must willfully forget it. We must forget Plato.

Instead, we will begin as everyone does when they are born or awakened, with the present. The worst thing about Plato is that he is so clear, yet so incomprehensible. I read his dialogues and understand that humankind has always wondered what it means to be just, what it means to love, what it means to be beautiful and good. But do I understand anything else? How often does it seem that the lines of argumentation obfuscate more than they clarify? How often does it seem that Socrates is more interested in making other people look like fools than he is interested in reaching the truth? Indeed, Plato frustrates me because he seems so much more a sophist than the sophists themselves.

Yet everything I have just said is still just appearance. There is a clear meaning in every line of Plato – but to see it, one must spend years studying Greek and Greek civilization. The lie is the clarity concealing the truth. For Plato to be read, he must be rewritten. He must be destroyed and reborn, that something of the truth he loved so much could be made to live again. Instead what we have of him naught but a reanimated corpse haunting our universities and minds. He must be summarily destroyed and re-filtered through a brilliantly modern mind. But even this kind of radical salvaging would still be a forgetting.

What is a man without a country? For us, a hero. When Kurt Vonnegut gave the title to his autobiography, though there was an echo of the rogue and scoundrel, it was not a title of dejected remorse. He did not mourn for the country he lost – he rejoiced that he never had one to lose. These are not the sentiments of a Platonist. What did Socrates die for, except Athens? What did Socrates teach for, except Athens? We are, all of us, such scoundrels, rogues and romantics. How can we come to understand the truth of a man who could not conceive of life without his country?

We have absorbed Plato into our every pore. He has made us all – but we have forgotten how. We read him and can't help but admire and agree. But never did accord and admiration make a civilization great. In order to create anew, we must be rid of Plato. Living in his shadow, we can do nothing but recreate. Only if he dies, may we live once again.

Strength and Virtue

Our only consolation is to hope that the will to peace and reconciliation is stronger than the will to divide and dominate. For the will to destroy is essentially negative, and borne from but fear and hate, while the will to create comes from the goodness of spirit that is the heart of all virtue. Nevertheless, this is still just hope and no promise, for experience shows us that strength and virtue do not always coincide. Sometimes the vicious are mightier than the just, and sometimes virtue does naught but weaken.

What then, is strength? True strength is not mere physical ability, but force of will and the capacity to actualize intent. Here, both spirit and psyche are integral, for the power of one's will is a direct reflection of the health of one's spirit. Each of all of us has something of virtue and something of vice, and the portion of each determines our course in life. But the coincidence of virtue and vice in the same soul is divisive, and war is waged daily between these forces. The stake of this contest is nothing less than our very destinies – the destiny of the individual and of humankind itself. For most, this conflict is never settled, and so, much of humanity suffers constantly from despair, confusion, malaise, or some worse spiritual ailment.

That strength of will which is power itself comes as a symptom of spiritual vitality. The power of one's will grows in accord with the consolidation of the spirit. Strength and power are derived from emotional tranquility and peace of mind, when the war becomes settled for better or for worse. Herein lies the power to create or destroy, and the power to direct one's will with intention. Herein lies the possibility to actualize a future.