System Building

All the world lives under one guiding system or another. These systems may be religious or political, cultural or familial. Regardless, they determine the course of our lives and the constitution of our spirits. For many born in our cross-cultural world, these guiding systems seem senseless and arbitrary. It looks as if we could easily be something or someone entirely different from who we are, if we were just born somewhere else, with a different family, culture and community. Learning that our beliefs are determined by our environment, we become disillusioned and search for something higher, more reliable and more concrete – something, namely true. We come to see all guiding systems as systems of control, borne of the will to dominate. We despair that there is not even one system that can be trusted. But though all systems systematize, very few were created to stifle and oppress. Most were guided by a more innocent intent.

True creators do not wish to harm others with their creation, but rather to free them from something else by way of their creation. Such systems are best seen not as an invention and something essentially new, but rather as the re-imagining and newborn manifestation of that good spirit which has grown hungry through long neglect and suppression. And that good spirit had been there all along, though it dwelt quietly unexpressed, obstructed by the inadequacy of a system which had lived past its usefulness. Living within such a dying system, one is presented with the unique opportunity to do good by doing ill. Here, to create one must first tear down. Here, one must destroy to make free.

These good destroyers are liberators. They free captives from the oppression of dying systems, thought they fall short for they offer no alternative. They release the captives from constraint and comfort into a boundless anarchy. They destroy the jail, but whence go the captives?

It is here that the captives, freed, become captors, building safe havens that shall become the prisons of their children. Confronted with true boundlessness, they discover that freedom is less a promise than a challenge, less a consolation than a difficulty. So they set out to build strongholds against the radical violence of liberty, the harsh reality that once was their only hope.

But he who builds well does not safeguard against jailbreaks. Rather he promotes the creation of a prosperous utopia in which the captives may live free, should they come to escape their prisons, should they find the utopia more alluring than the desert of anarchy. The good creator does not constrain but rather frees. He frees the spirit and mind to a world of its own choosing. He opens the space to a chosen world, a world that is both revelation and necessity, a free world both chosen and true.