Emotion

Wasps sting because they are afraid or because they are angry. It goes unremarked that in the opening scene of the famous "Romeo and Juliet" Romeo is groaning with love for some unnamed female that is clearly not Juliet. Emotions move creatures in ways that overawe the meager powers of reason. Rage and love are prods to action with value vested in survival and propagation. The violence and the "other vulnerabilities" made inevitable in creatures subject to emotion have Darwinian implications that seem to be completely invisible to humanity at large. Every song is a love song (with the exception of ballads that tell the tale of some emotion charged escapade). We don't know it, but we tend to love our emotions. We feel that our emotions are the essential truth of our being.

Our emotions are as mechanical as a wristwatch. Wristwatches have purpose and that's why we have them. We don't worship our wristwatch. Emotion has a survival purpose that humanity must come to recognize as "not-self" in the same way as an artist appreciates the brush as "not-self". Emotion tells us a truth about ourselves and not much else about what is real.

Truth, Beauty, and Good are emotional values, and the difference between good and evil is in that which truth beauty and good are found. If we are the pawn rather than the conservator of our emotions we will never be able to know the difference.

Political Statement: a modest outlay of fact

Rape and pillage have advanced beyond the cold simple brutal physical realities: rape and pillage have become metaphor. However unfashionable old-school rape and pillage may be in the community of advance nations, hygienic rape and pillage retain their fascination for an amoral class of world wealth. The basic principle is the use of the power of social advantage to extract from the vulnerable their modest possessions and their powers of resistance.

Well-educated nice-people in expensive suits provide the guns and the bullets for the less sophisticated to murder each other over antique stereotypes and mineral rights. Well-educated nice-people in expensive suits provide the contractual paraphernalia for the emergence of the new-slavery in its latest incarnation: debt. Debt of individuals, and debt of nations.

The "newness" of old fashioned Darwinian exploitation is not only predictable: it is inevitable. Innovation is evil's way of keeping everything the same. And for the purpose of this tirade let's define "Evil" as the exploitation of others to their disadvantage.

The canonization of "Growth" as the mantra of progress is simply ridiculous. Growth is the mantra of cancer.

Human enlightenment is the inevitable progress of the awareness which is the substrate of all existence. Enlightenment has no agenda. But the agendas spontaneously rising from enlightenment are humanity's only hope for a decent future, and only the innovations emerging from enlightenment can seize the imagination of humanity in such a way as to make rape and pillage a mere shocking artifact of our savage rise from dumb matter.

Teach your children